How to BOOST YOUR METABOLISM & Burn More Fat While You Sleep | Mind Pump 1915

What's up everybody? Today's episode is about boosting the metabolism. We teach you how to get a faster metabolism. Here's what's going on right now. We're putting together a bundle of two workout programs plus the reverse dieting guide that can help you out. So MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Powerlift, and Reverse Dieting 101. All of that together right now for $99.99. That's a savings of over $220. So you can go to mapsoctober.com, get yourself signed up. By the way, I'm going to give one of those away for free. Here's how you can win. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. Do all those things. If we like your comment, we pick you. We'll give you this metabolism boosting bundle for free. For everybody else, it's only $99.99 again at mapsoctober.com. All right, here comes the show. One of the most effective things you could do for sustainable fat loss and health in the modern world is to speed up your metabolism. And yes, you can affect your metabolism through lifestyle, exercise, nutrition, and habits. So do that. It's one of the most effective strategies. One of my favorite things about doing this episode is that I think a lot of things that we're going to cover seem a little counterintuitive. And it took me a while to get to this point. To where I think this is the most concise bits of information that I would provide for a client who comes in with a quote-unquote slow metabolism or struggled with weight loss for a really long time. And then we begin to list out all the things that we're going to focus on in the next, say, six months to a year. And it just looks so different than what it used to look like when I was an early trainer. And so I think this is a really not only valuable episode, but also one that I think I've had to say over and over and over to really drill it home and for people to actually take the advice. This is the winning strategy. I think most people's ideas of burning calories and raising your metabolism are all through manual means and don't really realize there's a way to build your metabolism to where it's an automatic thing where you end up getting more calories just burning through building and building muscle. Well, I think that a lot of people don't realize exactly what's going on when you reduce calories and you increase cardiovascular activity. I think the general consensus is that that's healthy and good for you. Most people eat too much food. Most people don't get enough exercise. And there's truth to that. Hey, cutting back food and doing cardio is good. And anybody that says otherwise just sounds ridiculous. And so I think that's why this information seems a little counterintuitive and why I feel like I have to repeat it all the time. But it is the things that will cover are so true and so important to the person who is struggling with fat loss or just overall weight loss. And they've gone through the yo-yo dieting in the past and they can't seem to figure it out. But yet they're not picking up on this very important point we're trying to make right now. Well, we have to start with this. First off, metabolism. It's a series of processes that control how your body creates and uses energy. It's very complex. It's actually a very complex system. It's one of the most complex things that we've identified. And one that we don't fully understand. You talk about the brain, the metabolism, the universe are like the three most complicated things that we've studied. How it adapts, how it works, how it gets affected. So it is quite complex. But for the sake of this particular episode, we're referring to just how many calories your body burns. So we don't need to go into the details specifically on what's going on. We're talking about how many calories your body burns on a regular basis. Now, it is true that generally eating less and moving more is healthy for you. But we got to break that down a little bit. Okay. Eating less than what? Right. Eating less. What does that mean? It means eating less or eating around the amount that you're burning. Eating more than you're burning is not healthy in the long term. Definitely not. This is what causes obesity. This is what causes lots of problems. So you have this equation here where you have how many calories you can burn, how many calories you can eat. If you raise the calories burned, that means you can raise the amount of calories that you eat and you're going to still have health benefits. In other words, if a person's body burns 4,000 calories a day and they eat 3,500 calories, they're going to have very different effects than somebody whose body burns 2,000 calories who also eats 3,500 calories, right? Very different health effects. And so when we look at this, we have to look at this in the context of what's going on right now. I want to add to that point too, because that example you just gave, right away someone's thinking, oh, someone who's got all this muscle. You could actually have two people that weigh the same on the scale and have that scenario. I think that's the part that's so fascinating is that you automatically assume, I think the visual that someone gets, oh, someone burns 3,500 calories, they see this athletic, muscular body. And then, oh, somebody's only burning, say, 1,500 calories, oh, they must be this really out of shape, deconditioned person. It's like, you could actually have two people, let's say that they stood on the scale and actually weighed exactly the same, say 205 pounds. And a 205 pound person, that person, there's potential for a 205 pound person to be burning 4,000 calories, their metabolism, burning 4,000 calories a day. And that same 205 person has potential of only being able to burn like 1,500 or 1,200. Yeah. So this is important to understand because when we talk about the process of boosting metabolism, we're always going to talk about building muscle. And then you'll get the people that'll come on and say, well, studies show that a pound of muscle only burns X amount more calories. It's not a huge impact. Okay. Now that's true. However, what Adam's talking about is true. And we need to account for that, which is your current metabolism with your current lean body mass. Okay. So gain muscle, lose muscle, none of that. It's the same. You have a potential and your body can adapt within a range, meaning it can become more or less efficient. Now, building muscle does speed up the metabolism just because it's more active tissue, requiring more calories to maintain. So that's the most important part here. However, there's also that the efficiency factor that we need to consider. And there's other factors that will make your body or behaviors, I should say, that will make your body more or less efficient. What we're looking for in modern societies is a less efficient metabolism, one that just burns lots of energy. Now, this is different than what we might've wanted 10,000 years ago when food was scarce. When food was scarce, you don't want a fast metabolism. You just can't find food. You want a metabolism that's thrifty, right? Well, today, if you live in America, you want a fast metabolism. It's a buffer. It's a buffer against easily accessible, hyperpalatable food. It's a buffer against inactivity. It's a buffer against all these different things. So somebody today with the fast metabolism is much more likely to be healthy than someone with a slow metabolism versus 10,000 years ago when it was the reverse. And there are things you could do to impact your body's natural ability. And that's what we're talking about here. Your body's natural ability to burn calories. In other words, how many calories your body burns on its own, not just you having to move. Well, that's why we don't call it like a broken metabolism, right? Because it's really doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's just a way that we're trying to kind of hack into that to benefit us in this environment versus what you're describing before where food was scarce and we had to keep all the reserves of energy that we possibly could. I also want to reiterate too that we don't know everything about it yet. I mean, there's something that we've all talked about, both on air and off air, that we've seen firsthand and experienced through the three of us, hundreds of clients, maybe thousands of clients that we've combined, we've trained, right? And how many times have you got that client who felt like they were gaining weight on 12 to 1300 calories and you put just five to eight pounds of muscle on her and now she's eating 2500 calories. Like this dramatic swing that doesn't make complete sense. At least we don't have the science yet to support it because what the science says is like it shouldn't be that many more calories. But I know for a fact I've seen it change hundreds of lives by doing that and it doesn't quite add up to what the science says on far as what the metabolism should do. Also consider this, even small boosts in your metabolism make a big difference, right? If you could right now speed up your metabolism by 150 calories a day, it doesn't sound like much, 150 calories, like what is that? But you add that up over the course of a month, two months, a year, two, three years, you're looking at 10, 15, 20, 30 pounds of potential body fat over the course of that period of time. So even small boosts in metabolism can have profound effects. I mean, 150 calories, that's like a 40-minute walk, right? So it'd be like walking 40 minutes extra every single day but you boost your metabolism. Now, I'm using a small number. Now, what I've done with people is minimum I could get people's metabolism to go up by at least a few hundred and oftentimes as much as 800. I've seen people's metabolism boost by a thousand. It can be pretty profound and it just makes fat loss and health and fitness much more sustainable. A lot more flexibility. Yeah, like how great would it be if you could eat more and be leaner, right? That allows you the ability to live in the world and to eat and to enjoy yourself sometimes and not have to be so strict. Now, you can be super strict if you want and be crazy about counting calories, but the approach that I've seen that works is let's give somebody a larger buffer. Let's get their metabolism to burn more calories because I know that they're going to have the occasional meal that's high in calories. They're going to have that dinner on the weekend or they're going to go on vacation and I don't want to see them rebound. I want to see them be able to burn it off just on their own and there is a predictable way to do this and that's what we're going to go over right now. It's literally if you follow these steps and you're patient with it, you will get a metabolism that burns more calories. Now, the exact amount of more calories you'll burn, that's up to a lot of different factors including genetics, body size, and so on, but you will see a boost in your body's metabolic rate if you do the following. So, let's start with the first one which is your exercise regime. So, when you look at like your whole health regime, right? And you're like, okay, I want to lose weight. I want to be healthy. I want to be fit and we're talking about boosting metabolism. The exercise portion should be primarily focused on building muscle. That should be the foundation of your routine because nothing will boost your metabolism more on its own than having more active muscle. Muscle is expensive. It costs a lot of energy. Now, the brain burns more calories than muscle on a pound-for-pound basis, but you can't build your brain necessarily, right? But you can build muscle. So, building muscle is one of the most effective strategies to boost your metabolism. So, if you look at your workout, look at what you're doing and say, is this workout muscle building or is it endurance building or is it flexibility building or is it… So, the cornerstone, the focus should be on muscle building if you want a faster metabolism. So, not circuit training. Correct. Not signing up for a race, not some athletic class. Not running, not cycling, not Orange Theory, not any of that stuff. It's literally strength training. It's lifting weights, right? The stuff that builds muscle. Longer rest periods, yeah. It builds muscle and strength. So, it's going to look a lot differently than what you're marketed to the most for burning calories. Yes. And by the way, this would be the recommendation regardless of what you knew about this person's history. Almost always, right? So, no matter what. But what's interesting about this is the people that tend to fall in this trap of having struggling with the yo-yo dieting and losing the weight and being stuck here all the time happen to be the people that tend to not train this way too. So, you kind of get a double benefit. You get the benefit of this is what they should be doing anyways to help speed the metabolism up. You also get the novelty benefit of, oh, I'm the type of person that loves the circuit class or I love to train like an athlete or I love to sign up for a marathon when I try and get in shape. And so, you not only get a benefit of like this is one of the ideal ways for you to train to build a faster metabolism, but you also get the benefits of it because it's so novel for that person. Yeah. So, think of it this way. Now, someone may be listening, like, God, circuit training burns so many calories though. Running burns so many calories. It's true. If you run for an hour, you're going to burn a lot more calories than if you lift weights to build muscle. Okay. That's a fact. However, lifting weights to build muscle is like taking money and investing it and then allowing that money to make money for you. So, think of it this way. You could take a job where you make a lot per hour or you could take a job where you make a little less per hour. However, you also get stock options and you know for a fact that this company is growing and go public. That's the difference. The difference is we're taking our training and we're gearing it towards investment. Can I get my metabolism to boost more so it burns more on its own versus let me try and burn this on my own. By the way, if you're not trying to train to build muscle and you're just burning a lot of calories, your body does a phenomenal way of adapting to that because your body's always trying to conserve energy. So, if I just burn a lot of calories without a signal to build muscle, I will burn a lot of calories initially, but over time, my body's going to figure out ways to slow its own metabolism down to make me more efficient. And one of the main ways it does this is to actually get you to lose muscle. This is why studies will show diet. So, people cut their calories plus lots of cardio, which is not strength training, right? It's not muscle building, but it is a lot of calorie burning. They'll see weight loss, but a chunk of that weight loss is muscle. How did that happen? Your body didn't burn the muscle off. Your body said, hey, we're burning a lot of calories. We don't need a lot of strength. So, let's become better at this activity by burning less calories. And so, it actually starts to adapt. Efficiency. Yes. When you train for muscle, your body is saying, well, we're not burning a lot of calories. We're not even worried about that. In fact, what we need is more strength. We need more muscle. Keep packing it on. And when you combine it with the rest of what we're going to talk about, that's how you get the faster metabolism. Let's talk about the exercises, right? So, building muscle, training for muscle building is traditional strength training for the most part, like bodybuilders or powerlifters or strength athletes. That's how you want to work out. But what about the exercises? What exercises are going to give you the most bang for your buck, especially if you're somebody that's only going to work out two or three days a week? Well, the evidence is clear. It's the big compound lifts. It's the big gross motor movements, the barbell exercises, a barbell squat, a barbell bench press, a deadlift, a row, overhead press. These exercises, just for the time spent doing them, gives you the most in terms of metabolism boosting, the most in terms of muscle building. It would require a lot of exercises combined to equal the muscle building effect of just one of those exercises. And when it comes in terms of time and recovery ability and all that stuff, it just makes sense to do the exercises that give you the most bang for your buck. Yeah, because they're multi-joint compound lifts, it's going to require so much more output. And your body's going to have to work that much harder to produce strength for these types of lifts. And so, the demand of those alone, it's going to move you so much further than a lot of these other exercises out there that may be promoted a lot as hypertrophy or building muscle. Really, the most demanding, the largest signal you can produce through those barbell lifts where it's heavy emphasis on all these muscle groups having to work together, that's really what it's about. Well, we also said that manual burn is less important, but what's nice about building a routine that's around these compound lifts is you actually burn a ton of calories. So, even though it's less of a priority to burn a bunch of calories in your workout, now you're talking about a weight training routine that actually rivals running and some of these circuit training classes. You put somebody in an Orange Theory circuit class or somebody who just is running a circuit or athletic training with plyometrics and stuff, and you give me somebody and I do a bunch of squats, deadlifts, overhead pressing, bench press for an hour with tight on my rest periods, being sticking to the actual true rest periods and going all the way through, you'd be surprised how close the calorie burn is. It won't be that crazy significant of a difference. Well, the way I like to look at it like this, just to really simplify it, I could do a curl for my biceps and I'll build my biceps, right? And the biceps are a muscle on the top of my arm, it's kind of a small muscle, or I could do a pull-up. A pull-up is also working the biceps, but it's also working all my back muscles, right? My lats, my rhomboids, there's a little bit of trapezius activity. So, I'm working more muscles in that same period of time. You do three sets of curls, I do three sets of pull-ups, we both worked our biceps, but I also worked all this other stuff. And so, it's just an efficient, effective way to train to send the loudest muscle building signal. The other person doing just the curls would have to add other exercises to hit all those other muscles, which is fine if you want to spend... It requires a lot more volume. It does, it requires a lot more volume. And then you run into, this is more complex getting into the weeds, but you run into more adaptation issues. Is it too much volume? How much training am I doing? Strength training really is about sending the signal and then leaving it alone. It's like giving the body a reason to build muscle and then that's it because what you get out of it is not while you do it. Unlike calorie burning type workouts like cardio, the value is in the cardio itself unless you're trying to build endurance, which here we're talking about boosting metabolism. When it comes to metabolism boosting, it doesn't happen in the workout with strength training, it happens after through the adaptation. And so, these big compound lifts just do the most. I mean, how many exercises would it take, single joint exercises would take to really have the same effect as a barbell squat? I'd have to put together like five... Five or six, yeah. Six different exercises. At least. Calf, hamstring, quad, low back. Yeah. Upper back, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, core. Yeah, no way. Right. So, basically what you want to do is you want to, your routine should be centered around these big compound lifts, getting strong at them. And then if you want to add other extra stuff, you could definitely do that. But again, the foundation should be building muscle and the foundation within that foundation should be these compound lifts. And the next point is to focus on getting strong in those lifts. That's the best metric for this. I'm just, get strong, get good at them. That's all I'm thinking about. I'm training this person, we're trying to... And that's what's crazy about this when you think about it is you also got to picture this client. This client is really overweight, they've struggled with weight loss their whole life. They come to you and they're like, Adam, I just want to lose as much weight as I possibly can. Can you please help me? I've struggled my whole life. And I'm like, all right, we're going to get strong. That's a hard conversation. It's a tough conversation to with someone that's in that place. That's not how they're thinking. They're thinking, we got to burn this off. We got to melt this off. I got to sacrifice. I got to cut back calories. And you're like, no, you know what? I'm going to keep you fed and we're going to get strong right now. Just trust me, that's what we want to do. So I just want to make that point that I understand if this resonates with you, that you've struggled with weight loss in the past, you've yo-yoed back and forth and you can't seem to get to that goal weight or whatever you have. This is the major mental hurdle piece right here. This part where it doesn't seem- Yeah, because you don't see what does strength have to do with fat loss? Right. You don't realize that. But the reason why it's such an incredible metric is if you're getting stronger relatively consistently over time, you can pretty much guarantee that your metabolism is probably boosting at the same time. It's one of those physical pursuits that as it improves, it probably means the metabolism boosting as well. This is not true of other physical pursuits. If you increase your flexibility or your stamina over time, that does not mean your metabolism is getting faster or hotter, right? But strength typically means that. So the best metric when it comes to boosting metabolism to measure, if you just use a single metric of strength, am I getting stronger? Yes, I'm going in the right direction. What's the best metric for realizing that you have everything in the right direction in terms of hormones being balanced, in terms of recovery, and in terms of you being able to have and see real progression because everything else doesn't really work. If you have any of those components out of order, out of balance, you're not going to see a lot of strength gains as a result. Well, it also goes hand in hand with the next point, which is making sure that you feed the body what it needs in order to build this muscle. Yes. Because if I ever see anybody fall short here, they figure it out. They're like, okay, okay, I get it. We need to build metabolism. We need to build some muscle, so we need to lift heavy. Okay, Adam, I'm with you. But then they actually struggle with the nutrition piece. They're still like, I was eating jack in the box. Also, I'm cutting all that out. Now they're eating chicken salads and they're eating twice a day. So they cut their calories low. So yes, they reduce their calories and then they're not seeing the strength gains like we want to see inside the gym. And then I come back and I find out later on, it's like, oh, well, it's because you took our calories from 4,000 calories to 1,200 calories because you're afraid to eat when I need you to eat. You're not going to build tissue out of nowhere. Those building materials aren't there. No, you have to fuel the body. So there's two things that are happening. One is the strength training is sending a signal to build muscle and build strength. Two, the way that you eat also sends a signal. And that signal can say, we can build this muscle. We can afford to build this muscle. We can afford to have a fast metabolism because we have the food. Or it can say, I know you're trying to get stronger, but we don't got enough calories. We don't got enough food. So we're not going to do that. We're not going to build muscle. We're not going to build strength. We're going to keep things as efficient as possible because the calories are too low. So you have to do both. You have to not only build strength and build muscle, but you also have to feed yourself at least enough to allow that to happen. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean you go crazy with your food intake, but you got to fuel those things. So if you send the signal to build muscle, imagine a bunch of workers. You got a bunch of workers and you're like, here's the instructions, build the house. And they're like, all right, where's the bricks? Oh, there's no bricks. Can't build a house. So you got to provide the materials as well by feeding your body. Because if you cut your calories too low while strength training, it's not going to work. It's just not going to work. They're conflicting signals and the boost in the metabolism that you're expecting, even though your strength training is just simply not going to happen. So feed your body to fuel muscle and strength. And I think we can get a little deeper into that, right? Yeah. So the next thing is to slowly increase calories as the body adapts. So we're feeding the body. So you may be wondering, well, what does that look like? How many calories? What am I going to do here? One of the best things to do is to first off, figure out how many calories you were eating just to maintain your body weight. Easy way to do this is to track. So take your normal food intake over the next couple of weeks, write it down or enter it into an app. They make wonderful, super convenient apps now. And once you figure out how many calories you're generally eating and, you know, to maintain your body weight, that's your starting point. Then you start the strength training. And then what you do is you slowly, very slowly bump those calories up just a little bit. And I, at first, I like to not bump the calories. I like to wait for the strength things to happen a little bit. And then I bump the calories. But what I don't do is cut the calories with the strength training. I keep them the same at first. And then I start to bump them. Yeah. I normally don't have to do much of adjusting calorie-wise at first. It's really just kind of switching the macros when I assess a diet first. So let's take the example. I know I use an extreme analogy of somebody who's eating fast food all day, but typically there's some unhealthy or poor choices in our nutrition when we're way overweight, right? So I literally look at just their average caloric intake for a week. And then I just make sure that we're hitting protein targets and we're making better food choices, but we're keeping the calories about the same. I don't really want to cut. I don't really need to add anything quite yet. I'm just going to say, because what I find almost always is they're lacking a macronutrient. We're not getting enough healthy fats. We're not getting enough protein. We're eating too much sugar. We're not getting enough fiber. Yeah. We never eat vegetables. So there's always a handful of things that I know that we could be adding to the diet or making better. And so I just simply go like, okay, let's keep your calories about the same. But then instead of this meal and this meal that you normally would do here, I'd prefer you eat this instead. So let's add this in here. Let's add that in there. And then watch how the body responds. And many times you will see the client get a little stronger, lean out a little bit, and you're not even having to adjust calories in any direction. What that usually looks like is I'm stronger in the gym. So I'm lifting 10 or 15 or 20 pounds more on some of those big lifts that we talked about. My weight hasn't moved on the scale, but I do notice that my clothes are starting to fit differently. Now, when I would have clients, I could do body fat tests so I could tell them exactly what was happening. And usually what I would see during this initial period of time was a transfer or a change in body composition, I should say, right? Body fat went down, muscle went up. And it usually is about the same. In other words, they gained two pounds of muscle, lost two pounds of body fat, something along those lines. So the scale hasn't changed, although we have more muscle, less body fat, meaning they have a faster metabolism, they're stronger, and they're smaller. This is another important point to make here, is that muscle is dense in comparison to fat. It takes up a little bit more than three-fourths the space that body fat will take up. So if you lost 15 pounds of body fat and replaced it with 15 pounds of muscle, you would weigh the same, but you would lose almost a quarter of the size on your body. So you'd look significantly smaller, even though the scale said exactly the same. You'd be smaller. And so what you should expect if you're not doing body fat tests and stuff is I'm stronger, my weight's the same, but I feel different. My body feels tighter, and my clothes fit a little differently. In men, it usually looks like the waist is a little looser. In women, same thing. You also may notice, as a woman, that around the butt might feel a little tighter. Don't freak out. It's because your butt is probably building. I want to say that because sometimes people freak out. Like, I thought you said I was going to get smaller. Well, the butt's a muscle. It tends to lift and build a little bit. And then you may get comments. This was my favorite part. When clients would do this and they wouldn't change on the scale, so their weight would stay the same for the first couple months, they'd come to me like, you know what's weird, Sal? People keep asking me how much weight I've lost. Do you guys ever have clients? Not only that, but I'm so glad you said this because this is an area that is really challenging also to overcome. You tell a client to increase calories, you tell them to focus on building strength, and not only maybe does the scale not move in the direction they want, but then they also start filling out their clothes and their clothes look tighter. But I promise it'll look better on you. And so that's the part that's really tough because we associate where we're at, if we look good or we don't look good, sometimes how our clothes is fitting. And it's like you get a girl who all of a sudden her thighs and her butt and her jeans is filling out and it's tighter and she was asking you to lose weight and she might start freaking out. It's hard to pull them all the way up. Yeah, but now her butt's sitting up two more inches and she has defined hamstrings, which she didn't have before coming in here. So you have to understand there is this kind of sculpting process that happens and it's a slow gradual process. And just because the pants are fitting tighter doesn't necessarily mean you're going the wrong direction. In fact, that may mean you're doing incredible right now, especially if you can be objective and go, you know what, actually, if I compared this picture of me today versus the picture just two weeks ago, I know the scale is staying the same or even I'm up two pounds, but I think I do look a little bit better here than I did two weeks ago. And you should be able to see that, especially in a two weeks time. Oh, yeah. I mean, I used to love it. Clients would come to me and say that they're like, oh, it's weird. People are asking me how much weight I've lost and I've only lost a pound on the scale. And it's really weird. Before I'd lose 10 pounds and nobody noticed. Like, well, you look different. Your body is holding less body fat. It's got more muscle. Muscle looks very good. I mean, a 150 pound female at 20% body fat versus a 150 pound female at 32% body fat, same height and everything. If you saw them stand next to each other would look dramatically different, dramatically different. You could do this with a 200 pound male as well. They would look dramatically different. So unless your weight is important to some extent, but nobody walks around with a scale. Nobody really cares. It's really about how you feel, of course, how you look, your health and body fat just takes up a lot of space. And you know, unless it's once it gets past a certain point, it doesn't look good. Muscle looks really good. It's tight and sculpted. And so in this initial stages of boosting metabolism, I want everybody, I want to be very clear in the initial stages, you should expect to not lose any weight. You should expect to look and feel different, but you should not expect to lose any weight. You should expect to be stronger and start to see the initial effects of the metabolism boosting. Now, what would you say the difference would be between that and like a reverse diet where somebody is trying to come out of like a quote unquote broken metabolism or they went on this extreme diet. It's pretty much the same protocol. It's the same protocol. And we would in fact, uh, although we would keep the calories roughly the same to start with, we would reverse them at some point, meaning slowly increase. That's what I mentioned early. You slowly increase the calories to fuel the metabolism. So someone may be wondering, how do I know when to stop? Like, when do I stop this reverse diet period? When do I, when do I start to really focus on the fat loss? Well, it's different from person to person, but typically I tell someone when you get to the point where you feel like you're eating a lot of food and you feel really good and you feel like you could cut your food and be okay at that point, then we cut the calories. You've got the muscle, you've got the metabolism and the fat loss happens. And I'll say this, I've seen this happen. I mean, a lot of times, many times, I would say at least half the times I've trained people where they'll lose 20, 30 pounds. And at the end of the process eat as much or more at the end of that weight loss process than they did going into it. You can't say that about traditional, just cutting the calories and trying to build calories. I remember I did this even with somebody who's healthy and in shape. So this doesn't apply just to a broken metabolism or just someone trying to lose weight. I mean, I remember when I was training Melissa for her bikini competition. And when I first got her, her calories were around 1800 or 1900 to keep herself relatively, she looked great. She was in good shape. She wasn't bikini ready, but she was in good shape. And I said, I first want to, I want to ramp your metabolism up before we get into prep. So we trained for the three to four months before. And the goal was to just get her caloric intake as high as we possibly could maintaining her weight and body about where it's at. So that when we decided to go into a cut, we have all this room. And what ended up happening was we ramped her all the way up to, I think, 27 or 2,100 calories. So when she was in peak week, she was eating at what she was when I first got her. So think about that. And that's extreme dieting. Yeah, that was our peak week, extreme, the lowest of low weeks and hardest for most people is that final week going to stage. And that's what she was eating on a normal week when I got hold of her when we first started. So this, this idea and concept isn't only for someone who has a broken metabolism or someone who has yo-yo dieted back and forth, or someone who just wants to lose 50 to a hundred pounds. I mean, you could take this, this really for me, it's at, do you want more metabolic flexibility? Do you want the ability to have a burger and fries every once in a while and not feel like it sticks right to you to feel like you can, you can enjoy a night with a glass of wine and eating out and not feel like all that gets stuck to you. And so that's why to your point, Sal, there is such a huge variant and that's exactly how I ask clients. I go, well, where would you like to be? You know, I, it's not, it's not for me to decide just because you are so tall and so, and you weigh so much that, oh, you should have a metabolism that burns X amount of calories. It's like, listen, if you feel very satisfied and you like the amount of calories you eat, and it gives you some freedom to, you know, eat, eat out every once in a while and maintain your, then you're fine. But if you go, man, Adam, I feel like I can't get away with anything. I eat so tight and clean. And if I eat one bad thing, well, then that's the case. Then this is, this is for you, even if you are considered a quote unquote fit person. Yes. Now the next point, and this has to do with nutrition also is to prioritize protein. So protein, number one, a high protein diet. When I say high protein, it's about 0.6 to a gram of protein per pound of body weight in normal weight individuals. So take your body weight and a little more than half your body weight up to your body weight in grams of protein is what you're aiming for. The higher amount tends to work better. So I said 0.6 to one, closer to one tends to work better in my experience, but it builds more muscle, which boosts the metabolism. It also on its own has more of what's called a thermogenic effect, meaning a gram of protein actually burns more calories than a gram of carbs or a gram of fat. So protein also has this effect where it burns more calories. It's nominal. It's not a huge effect, but over time it makes a difference. And then here's the third reason why I like prioritizing protein. It's very satiating. It's very, very satiating. So when you're eating a high protein diet, especially at the end, when you've lost the weight and everything, high protein tends to make you feel more satisfied, more balanced energy. You maintain more of the muscle. So when you're doing this kind of reverse diet process through strength and combined with strength training, prioritize protein. What does that look like? Every meal, make sure you eat the protein first, figure out how much protein you need for the day, divide it by your meals, eat that first, then eat everything else. And the rest typically takes care of itself. I find this even more important than the whole calorie thing, even though I understand if we're in a deficit, we're going to lose. If we're in a surplus, we're going to gain, and we're not breaking those laws of physics. But I definitely think that for the average person, just learning how to focus on hitting what your daily protein intake should be in order to build muscle, that by itself and just focusing on that, it kind of takes care of a lot of things. It does. If it's whole foods, you'll typically get the calories. It really is. For most people, it is hard to consistently get enough protein in day in and day out for the optimal amount, so ideal amount of protein that you are to build muscle, consistently do that. And if you do that, I feel like the other things kind of take care of themselves. Well, it's interesting because it's so satiating, it's easier to eat less. But if you're not seeking protein, because it's so satisfying, it's easy to not eat it if you're eating everything else with it, if that makes sense. Right. Yeah. No, no. If you eat the protein first, you're going to build more muscle, you're going to get more of what you need, and you're going to feel better from a satiety standpoint, especially at the end when you finally do cut your calories after this process of boosting your metabolism. We say this a lot, and I want to add to this because I think this is important, is that to me, it's not only do you eat protein first, but it has to be protein in there. In other words, I brought up the other day when we were talking, had a similar conversation. And so let's say, oh, they guys say eat protein first, they have their breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and they always make sure to eat their protein in that order. But then they have these snacks in between, oh, grapes here and some almonds there. And it's like, what ends up happening is they tend to mostly snack on carbs or fat, like an almond or what that, and you end up hitting your calorie budget for the day and still don't hit your protein intake because your three small meals only had 30 grams a piece, which is 90 total grams of protein, and your body needs, let's say, for argument's sake, 180, and then you fill the rest of your calories up with the grapes, the almonds, and some what we would call healthy snacks. But because you weren't protein-focused, you ended up still hitting your calorie intake and not getting enough protein. So it's like everything needs to be protein-focused. If you're going to have a snack, then I'm thinking, okay, I need to get a majority of protein first, and then I can have those almonds with it, or I can have those grapes with it, not them by themselves, or else what ends up happening is you kind of graze all day, and you end up hitting your caloric intake, you can't do any more, and then you're short on protein. That's super common. Yep. All right. So this next one, this is probably the more controversial part of this, which is to use cardio for health during this period, but not for the calorie burn. Okay, so what do I mean by that? Well, movement's good for you, and cardiovascular activity does have health benefits. And studies will show that the best health benefits you'll get out of exercise is a combination of strength training and cardiovascular training. Now, if you had to pick one over the other, strength training beats out cardio. We've done many episodes on this. But ideally, you want to do a little bit of both. And in this particular scenario, with boosting metabolism, the focus should be strength training, and cardio should be kind of like this added part, and really just for health. And ideally, if we're doing it for health, it's walking. Really, it's about going for walks during the day. Now, if you want more stamina, you could push the stamina a little bit. But the problem with using cardio for the calorie burn is when I push cardio to burn calories, I'm telling my body to become more efficient with calories. I'm telling my body I don't want a lot of muscle because I don't want to burn a lot of calories. I want endurance. I don't need so much strength. And so what will happen is you'll get less of that muscle building. So if you're training to build muscle, and you're also training hard to burn lots of calories with cardio, you'll get less muscle as a result of that, and less of a It's always walking for me, unless the only exception to the rule for me is if that's a client who has some sort of a routine that they've always done. I'll give you an example. My brother in law is a diehard downhill mountain biker. It's very intense, burns a ton of calories, very endurance, stamina-based, and he rides twice on the weekends. So two days of these three-hour rides. But he does that year-round, non-stop, doesn't matter if he's fat, skinny, on his workout program, not on his workout program. It's a passion for him. Yeah. So I'm going to build that. So insert paddleboarding, insert running for an hour on the weekends, insert your favorite class. You always do. If it is something you love to do, regardless of your body composition, and it's a pickup basketball three times a week or like that, then I'm going to tell them they can't do that, because that's something that they love to do, and then it's got other benefits just besides calorie and even the health benefits of what it does for your heart. So those people, everybody else, if we're starting on this routine, I do not want any of that type of, all I want is walking. You feel like you normally wouldn't get out, and you feel good on your diet, and you're happy you're doing this new weight routine, and you don't want to just sit around and watch TV, okay, go for a walk, go for a hike, go move around, go to a park, go to a zoo, go walk around for a while. I'm all for that. Don't go get on a treadmill and kick ass for an hour, because that is not going to help us in our pursuit, even though you may think that. Yeah, because that whole math thing's a trap, especially when you start associating those calories with a meal that you just had, and you start looking at how many calories you can then transfer over on the treadmill to sort of absolve you of those calories. That's just a war you're never going to win. Yeah, think of it this way. I'm going to oversimplify it, so I know it's not this simple, so everybody relax, but let's say you're looking at, you're doing this, and you're like, wow, my body now is burning 2,300 calories a day. If I just got on that treadmill and ran as hard as I could for an hour, I could make it like 2,600 calories a day, so that's what I'm going to do, and initially that's what will happen. You'll burn an extra, whatever, 300 calories or so, but then what happens, your body starts to adapt towards stamina and endurance, and it starts to slow its metabolism down. Eventually, you're back down to burning 2,300 calories or less with doing the extra running on the treadmill, so now you're doing more work to get the same or worse results, so if you want to boost your metabolism, don't do cardio for the calorie burn. Do it for health, which is totally fine, but don't worry about the calorie burn. Our goal is to boost your metabolism. Our goal is not to get you to burn more calories manually and do a lot more work. Remember, we're looking at sustainability. We're looking at fat loss forever, not just in the short term. All right, the last one, and this one's very important because this could definitely throw a wrench in the whole machine, which is to prioritize good sleep. So poor sleep is a tremendous stress on the body, and just because of the way we evolved, when we were under chronic stress, it was probably due to the fact that we couldn't find calories, so the two types of stress that we'll typically encounter is acute. Something happened right now. A car almost hit me. It's gone. Oh, let me calm down now. I'm safe. The other one's this kind of chronic stress, you know, stuff that kind of sticks with you and stays with you. Poor sleep wears on your body, and it's chronic. It causes stress to happen throughout the day, changes hormone profiles. It's just this chronic level of stress, and what your body tends to do under chronic stress is it tends to try to protect itself, and the way it protects itself is it says, hey, let's burn less calories. Got to keep it safe. We don't know what could happen. Food might not be here. Hey, let's store more body fat. Hey, let's lower these hormones that tend to speed up the metabolism, like testosterone and growth hormone. Let's raise these other hormones that'll help us store more body fat and kind of give us temporary energy, things like cortisol, and let's not have a faster metabolism. So good sleep is important, because bad sleep will ruin everything that we just talked about. Yeah, I'm glad you added this one in the list, because if there's ever somebody who I feel like is doing all the things you're telling them, and then they're still not seeing the results, this has been the culprit. They're like, I'm doing this. I'm dieting. I'm training. And we're both scratching our heads, because at this point, they haven't admitted to me, like, I have terrible sleep at night, or I stress all night long, or I have this terrible... Like, that hasn't came up yet, right? We're thinking about all the things we can do about it, and this person's just piling more onto their already super stressful and non-sleeping nights that I'm not aware of at this point yet, and this is normally when this comes out. It's like, are you sure you're doing this? You're doing that. You're doing this. You're doing that, and then it's normally like, well, then how's your sleep been? Oh, well, that's fucked up. Then you're like, oh, okay. Well, there might be the problem. You just never fully recover. I mean, your body's just never in that place. I used to have clients, this was like that one last piece that actually turned out to be a massive piece in the whole puzzle, like nutrition dialed, like workouts are on point, everything, but was getting woken up many times in the middle of the night for phone calls and things overseas, and it's just like battling that and carrying that same stress all day long, it just affected a snowball effect to everything else. Yeah, and I mean, it affects behaviors too. It affects cravings. It affects your moods. It affects muscle building. It makes the other things all harder. Not only does it not help them and potentially hinder them. It'll make it impossible. I had a client once that, like you were saying, Adam was doing everything right. Finally, we tackled his sleep. When he really took sleep seriously and we really got, and it took us a little while. It took us a few months to really figure this out. He did a sleep study and worked with a doctor and we figured it out. He lost, I mean, 10 pounds of body fat and gained 10 pounds of muscle. It was crazy. We were doing all the same stuff. The only difference was he finally got a sleep down and it made such, and I remember he was going to this doctor. They were also looking at his hormone. Like everything changed just from sleep. So I had to include this because if this is off, you could strength train with the best programs. You could eat great protein. You can have the right cardio for health. You could feed your body appropriately, do all the right stuff. This is going to, it'll just, yeah, we cut the workouts in half with, with my client after we had realized that was the biggest culprit and then just focus on sleep. And it was like this completely transformative thing just unlocked, you know? And I, and I know it's sleep that we're pointing right now, but I mean, I think that this could almost include like your, your overall just stress bucket, right? So maybe you get okay sleep or it's not the worst sleep ever. And so you don't think that's a culprit, but then you have this like, you know, crazy marriage. You're you hate your boss. Like you just got all this other stress going on in your life that a lot of times in my experience, when I, when a client is doing most, if not all the things you're telling them to do and their body still is not responding. A lot of times that is just, we are over the body is just feeling attacked from it. It was, you got to remember that even this working out and dieting stuff is a stress on the body. So if, if your bucket was already full when you came to me and then I added to it, even if it's things that are quote unquote healthy for you, right? Exercise, right? Eating better. It, it will sometimes completely stall your progress because your body is just, is too overwhelmed and reducing and cutting back on a lot of things is actually the simplest thing. Well, think of it this way, right? If you, um, if you, if the economy looks like it's going terrible, what are people going to do? Save their money, not spend a lot, cut their bills, right? It's what your body does with calories. If it starts to feel lots of stress, it'll try to save calories, right? I'll try to store more of them and it'll reduce how many calories you put out. So it'll actually slow your metabolism down. In fact, losing sleep from the fastest way to slow your metabolism down. So it's a very important one. Now we just went over exercise, nutrition, how to kind of do a reverse diet. Um, but you may be wondering, how do I do those things more specifically? What does the specific workout look like? What does reverse dieting look like specifically for someone like myself? So here's what we did. Um, we put together a metabolism boosting bundle that includes maps, anabolic maps, power lift, and the reverse dieting guide. Okay. So reverse dieting one-on-one. So everything's in there for you. All you have to do is follow it and you do all of the things, uh, you'll be able to accomplish all the things that we talked about. Now, all of them together, all of them together right now is $99 and 99 cents, which is going to save you over $220. And that is just for, uh, for what's going on right now. And you can find that at maps, october.com. Also, if you like our podcast and you want more free stuff, you want to get more free stuff from us, go to maps, excuse me, mindpump free.com. That's where we have all of our free guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal. You can also find us on social media. Justin is on Instagram at mindpump. Justin Adam is on Instagram at mindpump Adam. And you can find me on Twitter at mindpump south. This one's really important. And that is to phase your training. If somebody trains for a full year doing a bench press, and they're always aiming for five reps. If you compared that person to a person who did bench press where they did three or four weeks of five reps, but then they did three or four weeks of 12 reps and then three or four weeks of let's say 15 to 20 reps. And then they'll throw in some supersets. At the end of that year, you're going to see more consistent progress from the person who's moving in and out and less injury. That's another thing. You'll see less injury as well.