Train To Become A Better Athlete | Mind Pump 2397

all right so you have a favorite athlete you want to look like them you want to move like them so that means you just got to train like them right not necessarily that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode how you should work out if you want to be like your favorite athlete this uh one of my I always wanted to be like Bo Jackson yeah oh greatest athlete one of the greatest athletes should just train like that yeah I think um first I think we should talk about the misconceptions around athletic training um number one training like somebody is not a guarantee at all uh that you'll look like them or it's actually almost a guarantee you won't very that's more true than what I then think you will yes 100% you know not to interrupt your but Justin just said something that actually just made me kind of think like what are the most iconic uh pictures or covers of magazines of athletes that cause that like you said one right now the Bo Jackson behind yes see remember that double Bice he had the bat behind him with the shoulder pads regie Bush one so the Reggie Bush Sports Illustrated cover um trying to think of another one like that where L Cool J but he's an Entertainer that's a good that's a fair one yeah I'm thinking of like a right who's not technically an athlete but there's there's definitely been I like Muhammad Ali but uh as a kid the one where he's doing this and he just knocked down SNY Liston that was especially for the time I don't remember so that goes too far back for me to I definitely don't remember people talking about like his body and I'm thinking of pictures like that Bo jackon picture was so famous that people wanted a train to look like that the Reggie Bush uh Sports Illustrated article people wanted to train so they could look like him was it Terrell Owens I mean he had like there was a football one where he's like yeah there was one like an iconic picture of him I know there's the who did the naked one where he has got a football covering himself and he looks all shredded there's there's definitely like a there's got to be someone's got to had made something on the Internet that's like the top 10 a athletic body photos that everybody like aspired to be like but every time one of those comes out you get everybody wants to know how they work we did one one time and again back to the actor it wasn't an athlete what was the guy who did the the the movie the young kid uh Zack Efron when he did the when he did the bayat there's there's that one right there no I mean it's like action heroes now too that's the big thing with like your Marvel superheroes and like people really see them get in incredible shape like your Thor it's important to understand with with sports espe at this level especially at professional level um they don't work out to look good at all they could care less yeah it's a side effect they work out for maximum performance in fact they work out uh so much for maximum performance or that's such a a singular goal that they compromise their Health and Longevity and and they would compromise their Aesthetics if that were the case as well often times their bodies reflect um their their Fitness um and their athletic performance but how they look look is not something they even care about it's really about performing and one athlete I can think about that does not look like someone that works out would be fedar Milenko yeah U one of the greatest MMA fighters of all time this guy looked like a kind of a chubby dude that looked like he drank beer every day and yet here he was you know beating the crap out of everybody or our incredible Fitness our local guy from um Kane Velasquez uh no not even worse than Kane uh what's his name uh it's uh UFC heavyweight no UFC heavyweight uh only person give Jon Jones a run for his money why can't I not think of his name right now isn't that Rashad Evans no no no heal I know you're talking about he's local too why can't think he's an announcer now too s s he's like looks so out of shape and but he has had some of the best cardio these guys work out like crazy yes yes so it's it's a terrible it's a terrible way to gauge somebody working out effectively because first of all genetics play a massive role these are genetic anomalies when you're looking at that level of athletic performance what you have is a unique combination of extremely rare genetics extremely rare athletic genetics to the point where these Pros would be better than you at a sport that they never played or practiced they could pick up almost any sport and would probably dominate 99% I remember the story you guys tell of those 49ers who or football players who played pickup basketball with all you guys and just were dunking um even though none of them really played basketball yeah they're genetic anomalies so their bodies react and respond to uh workouts very differently than our do ours do how rare are their their genetics I mean as rare as it is to see someone that's over 7 foot tall for example so you don't want to copy the routine of a genetic anomaly because you don't you're not anywhere in the same universe uh as that individual and so their workouts not only are going to be wrong for you they're going to be so wrong yeah that they'll probably cause you to injure yourself uh or what you say it was DC thank you there Daniel Cormier like why can I I'm so mad at you guys for not being able to get that answer no i' I've actually trained in a gym where he he's a local guy he's from around here favor and he's very fit very athletic and he looks like a mean mean bad he's a bad dude yes but there but the the type of genetics that these athletes have are special and unique for their specific sport so this is why highle swimmers look very different from highlevel um sprinters or why professional football players look very different from professional baseball players or from other or or a tennis player right um they're they were literally born to be excellent at that particular Sport and then you combine that with hard work um and you combine that with the right training and then you have this kind of like perfect uh storm today's giveaway on YouTube Maps anabolic to enter to win leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it subscribe to this Channel and turn on notifications if you win we'll let you know in the comment section now this episode is brought to you by one of our sponsors ate sleep this is the most advanced sleep system in the world it sits on your bed controls the temperature of your bed but it also reads your sleep cycles and uses AI technology to individualize how it operates on your bed to maximize your sleep if you want the best sleep of your life eight sleep nothing comes close go check them out go to 8sleep.com Pump and on that link you can use the code mind pump and get yourself $350 off the Pod 4 ultra also this episode's all about training like an athlete so here's what we did Maps performance Advanced this is for athletes this is a workout that'll make you move like one it's 50% off for this episode if you're interested click on the link at the top of the description below all right back to the show their training is also extremely individualized so forget professional athletes for a second if you took a kid all the way up through Elementary School junior high high school college and pro level if you started like that the training doesn't get specific to that person or it it's it starts off somewhat specific but the higher level they train the more that they train the the more experience they get the more specific their training gets if you look at a pro athletes uh Correctional exercise and training training regimen it's very specific to that person if you take an eighth grader I'm just trying to get you stronger you know we're just going to squat we're going to deadlift a lot of fundamentals you got to work through yes so their routine is their routine literally it would be like saying if I put on their shoes they're going to fit and I'm going to move like that it's like no don't they don't fit you well to to add to that point great example of this I don't know if you guys watch I know you don't but maybe you watch the did you watch the quarterback uh there's now a wide receiver one on Netflix as a Series M so they did they did breakdown of uh Patrick Mahomes and it was like really fascinating to see his trainer uh train his like the stuff that he's doing and when you get to that level you are doing something that is so specific to a movement a a movement pattern that he does specifically all the time he unconventional side throwing all that yeah and so now none of that matters or you never even get there if you didn't first lay a really solid foundation of the fundamentals first and so you have these young kids and even adults that see these athletes that look a certain way that train a certain way and they want to model that and they skip the all the foundational stuff like they have poor Mobility they have a poor connection to certain muscles they don't even squat properly they don't do all these things which there's there is a whole host of years of gains and progress to be made just by doing the fundamentals and getting good at the fundamentals and because they were marketed to in a magazine article or TV commercial and that's their favorite athlete and they aspire to be like their favorite athlete one day they want to jump to that athlete's current workout but not realizing that there's been decades before that of a lot of foundational things that they laid first before they piled that on yes and it's not just individualized to that individual and they have a very unique um you know goal and body type and all that stuff it's also individualized to the time of year whether they're offse season or in season very different the training is very different when you're in season versus offseason it's also individualized to whether or not the person has had previous injuries their energy levels the position on the team that they play the things that they need to work specifically on so even if you do get a workout in a magazine or online that says this is so and so's workout program okay is first of all if is it their workout program often times it's not their real workout program and then when is this their workout program in season off season was this how old were they when they did it that's right so it's individualized to such an extreme level that it doesn't it's not even the best workout for that athlete at the wrong time not just you know barring whether or not it's a good workout for you or I or anybody else so it's so extremely individualized and because their genetics are at such a an extreme level they can do things or they they utilize things or they benefit from things that you might not necessarily benefit from in fact often times things that they would do that would benefit them would only injure you or set you back that's the example I'm giving if you saw that you would understand if you saw the Patrick Mahomes say the stuff he's doing seems a little ridiculous almost like they are teaching him to do like this spinal rotation and explosively and St like that it's just like dude there's only one person in the world probably that's really really beneficial to and it's that guy right there because he's actually I heard it I think it Joe Rogan was was kind of describing like it being an art in terms of like like so your top tier Fighter for instance like being able to train at a level in a threshold where you can you can squeeze out maximum potential and you know get that optimal uh Force established and that the the physique and everything to go with it and that temporary period of time to be at the absolute Peak it's unsustainable and this is but the portrayal of it uh in the media is like oh my God this guy's in such great shape it's like you just get the visual of it you don't actually understand the context of this is like absolute Peak it's unsustainable uh and immediately after that it's all going to crumble yeah and there's there's also the fact that these are professionals meaning they don't do anything else they're not they're paid this is their thing they're paid to eat sleep you know recover to to train hard to like stre to to be redlining all the time like like they're paid to perform uh they can take naps they can do things to enhance recovery they can work out out at any time of the day they have people making their food planning the workouts um giving them peptides or whatever uh they this is their job uh so it would be like if you had this job if this is all you did then your workout would very look very different for you as well right so that also puts it in a category of probably and almost definitely not for anybody else but for this uh particular individual and that makes a huge difference think about what it was like working out uh before you had kids right just that alone right that that you you had more time you had more sleep your body recovered differently you felt differently uh think about what it's like to work out um and worry about working out when you have certain bills to pay or whatever so um they're paid to do this and that means that they can do and tweak and and and train in ways that uh they wouldn't even be able to do if they had to get a regular job you know it's I'm thinking about a study that uh we talked about one time that you're making me think too like what else makes them so unique that they have the ability and you have to think this plays a factor in their ability to perform better and be able to recover better and get better results from their training too is you know that study where I talked about they they did the free throws with the athletes and they they found that the athlete that didn't even do it they just thought about it visualized they visualized it that many times in the day like that they improved their their performance just as much as the athlete that actually went out and shot the 100 or thousand shot thousand free throws I don't remember what it was or a th000 something like that and so to the point you're making about like these people are paid like they don't just train and and and then stop thinking about the training and they're like they they think about it and I bet you guys have been in this SP space before I definitely was when competing I was so in the the that mindset it was 247 like I when I ate was about it like I was sleeping the night before thinking about how I was going to train what I was going to eat the next day and like you got to think that that also plays a massive factor in the results that I'm getting out of that and cuz I can I can my whole mind is wrapped around guard reads and in in uh the backfield like I all I could do all day long was like visualize like what that all indicated for me and where I needed to be on the field and it was just repetition constantly just I couldn't get it out of my mind because it was the most important thing for me to not it leveled or to make a play or to be effective and you just have to think in that direction if you're a top tier athlete like all you can do is like obsess over like visualizing look look if you took 100 fit people 100 fit regular people and you had them follow the exact workout routine of a highlevel athlete those 100 fit people would get terrible results they would get better results with a routine that was individualized for them far better results and I'm talking about fit healthy people let alone average person who's just getting into working out if I took a 100 average people and had them follow the routines of a pro athlete I would I would we would get a 90% probably injury rate you know right right so the bottom line with this is if you train like your favorite athlete you're going to get uh terrible results now this leaves us with the question of like well what do I do then right like I don't I mean I feel like this whole time we're like completely just like [ __ ] on somebody's dreams who wants to train to be like an athlete one day it's like hang on it's not that it's not that bad and by the way it uh it's it's easier it's you'll get better results and I think that's the that's the the desired outcome of an episode like this is to communicate to the aspiring uh athlete or the athlete who's trying to Aspire to be like the pro athlete is like listen there there are proper steps to train like that that athlete or to get to that level but it's not emulating exactly what they're doing it's figuring out what is best for your body assessing where your current level is addressing your current needs and laying a good found and then learning to build on top of that and again as you've heard us say many times on the show like the goal is to do as little as possible to elicit the most change not jump all the way to this level that a professional very specialized athlete is training that's the opposite of what's going to get you there the fastest or get you the most results and so there is a way to do that yes now the first thing you want to do as an athlete is uh find if you have any imbalances or issues with stability or strength or flexibility and work on those because your per performance often times is limited by your weakest link right you're only as strong as the weakest muscle or you can only move as fast as the the slowest muscle that you have you can only move laterally as fast as your stability will allow you to move so imbalances are very important to identify for the average person who wants to train like an athlete so they can bolster their joints and improve their ability to perform better there's no leaks in strength power or speed when you don't have imbalances I want to give an example of this for the young athletes that are listening to like an example of that okay we we have talked about before how much power is generated in the hips and it's really uh common for trainers to train somebody who has uh weak in stable hips especially discrepancies from left to right so here's an example of we know that so much of your your power and force is generated from the power that comes from the hips and the hip complex and we also know that many times when I assess somebody there is a major discrepancy from left to right or they're so weak they don't even have good mobility in that and so if I have that and I jump that client to training like Reggie Bush or Bo Jackson with these crazy exercises and I don't address this person's total instability and weakness in their hips it's like literally throwing a th000 horsepower engine in somebody who has like you know has no traction on tires no good suspension and a flat tire like it makes no sense like other than to say that you could do the Thousand hor it doesn't you're not going to get the full having cardboard axles and you're going to rip right through it and so but what you'll get tremendous value from is is figuring that out is figuring out oh wow I have I didn't know that I have really weak hips or I have a really weak left side where I I can't do full internal rotation on that side and addressing the weak in instability on that side and balancing that out lays a good foundation so that I can then layer on the power and strength to those hips and then also I get compounding results from that this is an example of that yeah yeah I immediately think of and this is this is a bit more I guess for your uh your older seasoned uh kind of athlete um when when I actually decided Well you know I'm going to go ahead and do full contact football again and this is just something that like I haven't done it for well over a decade um I'm I'm meeting with these other guys who I know haven't been keeping their body in the kind of shape where it's like we could move this quickly we could we could be explosive and we could take on this type of uh collision and impact um and the first thing I knew just based off of what I've understood about training clients and the importance of what you're talking about with with imbalances and dysfunction um and how much that impedes on performance you know that became gospel for me and this is what I was bringing into mine pump it's it's it's about assessing that it's about finding those opportunities uh to strengthen and stabilize around the joints because your whole body moves so much more effectively and you avoid injury and so that was our main focus and guess what we didn't have the same number of practices going into that uh game as as the other team and the emphasis was completely different there was was all about you know strength training and then like you know practice and practicing which you know to their credit in terms of like practicing the game is probably a better idea uh but at least that was like the ground Focus for us which kept our team healthy and also we were all moving at a at a pretty quick pace and so this was essential for us uh you know to to focus on that first yeah I mean one way to do this to maintain um uh strength where you don't have many imbalances is to make sure you train in different planes of motion make sure you press uh horizontally and vertically and you row and you pull down and you rotate and you move laterally you move front to back you do split stance exercises bilateral exercises you do unilateral exercise for your upper body and bilateral like if you train in different planes of motion if your goal is to have good athletic performance this is key because one thing a lot of people do too is they especially for people working out for a long time is they get really strong uh in one plane emotion and then when they go to play their sport they're challenged outside of that and they get injured because they don't have a good balance yeah they don't have a good good balance of strength now next is sounds simple but a sometimes people forget this is to practice your sport and practice it often workouts you should never do more workouts than practicing your sport unless it's offseason which is totally different practice is the most playing your sport is going to make you better at your sport than anything okay back in the day in fact this is all people did people didn't do workouts they just played whatever they were going competing in more often I've seen far too many times people who are really into a sport work out more than actually practice the sport so like oh I do Jiu-Jitsu twice week skill sport yeah I do Jiu-Jitsu twice a week but I like to lift I lift weights four days a week okay well what's your goal is it to be a bodybuilder no what's your goal I want to be a great Jiu-Jitsu guy all right drop three of those weight training days and go do Jiu-Jitsu four days a week and we'll get far better this has to be the most common piece of advice that we give because a very very common question that we get is uh athletes calling in um that play sport but also want to lift weights or want to look a certain way and we almost always follow that up with a question of like what's more important to you are you trying to look Jack like a bodybuilder do you care more about that or do you care about your Jiu-Jitsu football soccer insert whatever sport more often than not they say like oh I I mean I my sport that's my most important thing to me it ISS okay well then cut way back on the the training oh yeah but I want to be stronger and more explosive and better at my sport yeah okay well play your sport more nothing is going to make you better better at that than doing that more and in fact you training too much you're more likely to overdo it and impede on both so not only get not get stronger because you're training three four days a week but also not be better at your sport you're you're shooting yourself in the foot even more than you think and you're doing all this work it would serve you to scale way back on on the training and if you're going to add anything more to your routine add another day of Jiu-Jitsu or another day of playing baseball or basketball and that is going to make you better to Sport and you're more likely to probably build more strength and muscle that way right now there are times when you do work out a little more than your sport and that would be your off season if your goal is to gain more size and the next Point strength strength is the foundational physical Pursuit for all the other physical Pursuits meaning if you get stronger everything else will improve some improve more than others but everything gets better if you get stronger you also get faster if you get stronger you also get more stamina if you get stronger you tend to become more stable if you get stronger you're more powerful so as an athlete when you're doing your strength training like strength is the key can I get stronger forget about how you look it's all about what you can do because obviously you're competing in a sport and that's all about what you can do all right here's where a lot of young athletes go wrong as they see some again uh pro athlete they see a Patrick Mahomes who's doing this really unique exercise uh that he does to be able to throw the ball and whip it sidearm the way he does and they go oh man I want to be able to do that and then but yet they can't even perform a proper barbell back squat very well and they and and they're spending this time doing this very specific exercise to improve something not realizing that the the benefits the gains in their sport the gains in overall strength that they're going to get by just learning how to perform a squat better and getting stronger from that movement is going to serve them 10 times better than keep doing this exercise that they saw on TV or read in a magazine some athlete doing and that is probably one of the biggest mistakes that young athletes make is they they jump past these foundational movements that that give us back so much Roi on our time of training and they skip to these movements that are like splitting hair make a difference better for you while you're leaving so much on the table by not perfecting that so I find myself when I'm talking to a young man or woman under 20 who's trying to be get be stronger be a better athlete and they're like oh you know my coach told me to this exercise and try this and I saw so and so doing these explosive ice skater jump to rings and do all stuff and it's like okay well let me see your your your barbell back squat real quick and they let they go do it and it's like they have terrible form they're weak and it's like oh my God I mean I guess we could do this exercise or we could spend some time really improving this movement right here and you're going to get so much more on the only way you're going to go f faster with speed uh have more snap you know get a higher vertical jump you know a lot of these like very specific attributes that a lot of uh athletes want you have to have that strength foundation for you to to pull from you have to have that ability to summon and recruit uh muscles and engage those muscles uh at the time that you want them in a louder signal you can produce you know the more powerful and explosive you're going to be but that's all resting on the fact of you know you had this strong base already established and built but you have to build it first totally now finally Mobility for athletes is Key Mobility is your ability to move through a full range of motion with strength and stability Mobility is key because it allows you to apply your strength in wider ranges of motion in different directions it means you're stable so you don't injure yourself it means you don't have to get in the perfect position to exert the most Force as you know with sports you things don't often look perfect you often have to throw or catch or run or get hit or whatever from weird angles and Mobility allows you to be able to express strength and stability in all those different angles and if you're training to be to be like an athlete your strength training needs to involve by the way this is true for everybody I'll say everybody should have a Mobility component in their training because you just get better results you just get better gains better results across the board but this is especially true for anybody who's athletically minded you want to have mobility in your shoulders and your spine and your hips and your ankles in your entire body your wrist so that you can do more with the strength that you've built in the gym you can do more on the field or on the court and the only way to do that is to practice your Mobility to work on your Mobility work in different planes of motion it's key yeah I mean if you really want to bulletproof your joints and and get to the position where it's like you can you can actually find yourself in an awkward position but you have the strength to support and stabilize you with that and then also you have the strength to move you out of that position uh and it it's crucial for an athlete to go through that and make sure that they're reinforcing a lot of these angles uh and in introducing that so you're familiar with that placement of your leg you're familiar with your arm in that position uh and you can stabilize support it uh because now you're going to be a lot more effective you're going to avoid injury but really too whatever movement you're you're doing you're going to be more effective at that whether it's slowing down or speeding up you guys what comes to mind um for you when you think about most common uh areas where athletes lack good mobility and are there are there uh common things or is it so individualized that every athlete has something because I mean I think right away like with uh the most limiting factor to a good squat is 80% time ankles right like ankle Mobility uh is probably one of the the biggest key factors to a poor squat almost always when I correct uh that or I Elevate their heels I already see a dramatically improved Squat and I know if I can improve that then I can improve power and strength power and strength then translates into the field or or Court whatever they're playing and so that's an easy one for me to to address are there other areas when you think uh when you look back to all the athletic uh athletes that you guys train that was like common common mistakes or misconceptions or areas that they didn't they didn't focus on I think for most sports not all right some sports don't involve the lower body quite as much but most sports involve some kind of running or jumping M so ankle and hip mobility is key yeah hip was probably the second one I say this is why you see a lot of knee injuries yep knee injury because the knee you know it flexes and it extends right it just bends and straightens out it doesn't really rotate there's very little rotation in the knee there's no muscles that rotate it just has a little bit of give um and it doesn't Bend latal Al it just flexes and extends but the ankle it rotates it bends laterally it flexes and it extends the foot itself has some mobility and then the hip is very mobile y if one of those if the ankle or the hip lacks mobility and strength and stability and in a particular movement the ligaments of the knee got to hold the knee together so it doesn't fly apart and so what ends up happening often times you see like if I I could I can name one injury in sports that most people have heard of what am I going to say ACL te ACL tear ACL us ligaments yeah typically the knee and I would say ankle foot and hip have got to be the most common far more common and then pulled muscles as as a result of compensating for the this lack of stability in the hips a lot of times uh that I found with athletes so it's like it they're dropping like flies during season cuz you know this is just an area of focus that they didn't place because two like uh even within the training Cycles a lot of times like old school every every body's just doing sagittal plane only and we're we're never really reinforcing these these lateral movements or these rotational movements and so again to the unfamiliar uh portion the body wants to compensate wants to tighten muscles to protect and and so you know athletes were fighting that a lot and so mobilizing the hips was tremendously effective is it fair to say that any injury that is self-inflicted meaning that it wasn't acute from another athlete running into to me falling on me banging into me so something I did to myself I took off or i t torn Achilles torn ACL rotated and something snapped like is all of my relation to uh a a reflection of my training and lack of of strength and mobility and control in an area right yeah cuz you're moving your own body and so you lacked something to be able to stabilize your own body when you did something it's different if someone runin obviously like I so when I tore my ACL it was actually going for a rebound and a guy fell on my knee right like literally landed on it in a position and and it went sometimes what you going to do right right and so there's obviously injuries in sports many times that that happens but there's also a lot of injuries that happen when a wide receiver is going to catch a ball and a hamstring tears right or is is turning to rotate a direction and they blow their AC like so there are uh the and when that happens when self-inflicted right that that is a direct reflection of your training or lack of training in an area and I I don't think that's talked about enough I think we see that and we go good coaches talk about especially strength conditioning coaches can point out you know um highlevel athletes that usually get knocked out like preseason and it's like oh my god what happened but it's like you could tell right away what they didn't put into their training that led up to that result yeah also reminds me of the great uh interview that we did with Brian koua who said that he knew Christian mcaffrey was going to have the career season that he had before he even had it how did he that what he put in did he have telepathy no it's that he did all the work with him of training and so he knew how bulletproof he was that year and most now of course something you know rare random could have possibly happened to him but barring that he was positioning his body to be in the most optimal position to break a record Rec or do have the best seas and of course he did right so perfect example of that too 100% now if you want to follow a program that is athletically minded a workout routine that is for those of you that want to move like an athlete look like an athlete perform like an athlete we have a program called Maps performance Advanced within that our scheduled skills day this we can play your sport and then you have your workouts or strength training and more and because we're doing this episode it's 50% off it's half off its normal price just for this episode so if you're interested you go to Maps performance advanced.com and then you use the code athlete 50 for the discount also you can find us on Instagram Justin is at mind pump Justin I'm at mind pump to Stephano and Adam is at mind pump Adam [Music]