avoid cardio until it's necessary there you go save that tool first of all it's a short-lived tool okay lots of cardio to get really shredded doesn't work very in fact a lot of people get shredded in spite of the fact that doing tons of cardio for 12 weeks or whatever save it do everything with diet and strength training and then the last couple weeks if you want to throw it in you can and you can squeeze off a little bit of body fat but if you make this part of your long-term routine what you're doing is you're countering that muscle building signal that we're trying to do with strength training through this i need endurance uh type of a signal which really only encourages the muscle pare down process so what you want to do is you want to save it until absolutely and i remember you adam when you competed i think you did the last two weeks yeah was it the longest i've ever done cardio is four weeks and most often it was two so it's uh if you have a coach and they have you doing cardio for 12 weeks leading into a show you should fire your coach all right you're all here because you want to get super shredded we're going to get to the episode in just a second but first i'm going to give away a program maps power lift okay that's the program i'm giving away in today's episode here's how you can win leave a comment in the first 24 hours that we dropped this episode subscribe to this channel turn on notifications do all those things if we like your comment we'll notify you and you'll get free access to mass powerlift one more thing we're running a sale right now on a maps program bundle and on a maps program okay so an individual program and a bundle of programs here's what they are the bundle is called the shredded summer bundle this is maps aesthetic maps hit maps prime the intuitive nutrition guide all those things discounted and then we took an additional 50 off the individual program that's on sale is maps hit hit of course is high intensity interval training that program by itself is 50 off so if you're interested go to mapsfitnessproducts.com and then use the code june 50 for that 50 off discount all right here comes the show sal you uh you were doing something we were getting ready um to start podcasting the other day and i saw you eating in the front and i've watched you over the last like few months in some of the best shape you've ever been you're getting ready to get shredded right now because getting ready to shoot uh some video and i got to thinking you know what like you were you were talking about the the level that you're at right now as far as where you're at in the diet and i'm like you know this would be a really i hope cool episode or people will appreciate because there is a difference uh with kind of getting in shape and being healthy and even losing some body fat and then taking it to an extreme level of single digit single digit body fat yes so there's some different rules that apply and i think there's just a different mindset that you have to have to take it to where you're kind of going right now and it's very different it's very different like being lean is healthy being shredded is not so it's a different mindset it's a different approach of course there's a there's a genetic variance some people could be much leaner than other people and still maintain good health but um what you have to do at least for me and i can be very specific because as an individual i can give you more more exact numbers but what you have to do to get lean and what you have to do to get shredded or get down to single digit body fat for a man and for women it's typically the low teens or you know maybe 10 even it's a it's a it's so psychologically different and it feels so different um that uh it warrants a an episode i think yeah i think you're right well you've been going now for you know a while now really consistent it's probably the most consistent i've seen you on diet and training for a while you've been in great shape at what point did that did you start to notice because you obviously like again you're in good shape right now but i know you made the mental switch like okay i'm gonna get really shredded for this this video shoot that we're gonna do what when did that kind of tip you like oh man i forgot you know like what it's like to go here yeah i've been below like seven percent body fat a couple times before and each time i remember it's like for me once i hit about i want to say eight percent and then it starts to feel kind of different and i noticed that my hot and cold tolerance change so like i'll i'll sweat you know sometimes sometimes i'm cold so it kind of throws it off my sleep is a little different the cravings are a whole nother level so and i remember this from before like the leaner i get like the closer i get down to five or four percent even i'll start to have dreams about food and it's like really weird right you remember those i do i do i have never in my life yeah when you drink dreamt about food until until i dieted that hard and it's like i'm dreaming about like fruit yeah you know what i mean anything yeah like just so weird right um it's it's unhealthy psychologically and physically for especially for long periods of time because it's um it's there's you know consistency is great obsession not so much but when you get to this when you're getting to this type of level you have to be obsessive about it because it's so we don't talk about this a lot because i think that we highlight that it's it's not a healthy place for most people to be that being said do you recognize that there are some positive healthy benefits from pushing yourself to that extreme yeah i mean if you go into it the right mindset um because i don't think it's great for everybody but i think when you do it and you've talked about this too you really figure things out you really you become more in tune with your body you know how it reacts to certain things and when you do a certain level of of heart or challenge then the easier levels feel much easier right so like maintaining 10 body fat which is a good lean for a man i mean you have kind of visible abs and you can maintain that healthy way with good consistency that becomes a lot easier when you've played the game of getting down to five percent body fat which is like a whole nother ball what do you do you think that is it like is it almost like you this like your your muscles and your receptors like they're just so over saturated with food and calories and the over consumption that most of us do and you just ring everything out and so you're like ultra sensitive what is it that you think that makes us become so in tune when you when you get down that way yeah that's a good question you know what it is um i remember when you were competing you would talk about this too if you go from like if you're a guy and let's say you're sitting at 12 body fat which is a good athletic body fat percentage like you're not shredded you're lean you're fit you probably have good strength good performance like 12 to 15 is a good athletic body fat percentage some people can carry leaner but that's pretty good if you go from 12 to 13 you can't tell like you can't tell in the mirror right you go from five to six percent it's a big difference because that one percent is five percent of your body fat right so i think the changes are so visible like i can tell from day to day if i do one thing that's a little different just by the way i look and feel versus before or i know if i have a burger that's not gonna show up doesn't make that bigger now if i go off a little bit i could tell you know and so it just makes you very sensitive i think yeah i think it makes you sensitive to the things that you can see visually and then also and how you feel like that was something that surprised me that i i wasn't anticipating going into it um is that i would once you started getting down to the low single digits i would eat a meal and it it i could see the difference in the body i could feel the way my body responded to the food like it was really really weird what was your line like you know once you got down when did you start to feel like oh okay here we go like what percentage six seven percent yeah right around there yeah and uh obviously becomes more dramatic as i got lower right so you know the lowest i ever dunked or checked my body fat percentage was two weeks before a show um it was going into the national show uh i was i was 3.2 that's crazy with two weeks ago and the final two weeks is a pretty hard cut so i imagine i i got another percent down or so maybe more uh the final two weeks and so everything is you know you feel every little thing that you do drink eat all that um when you get that low but i actually started yeah oh yeah even you missed a little sleep and you're like oh that's great it looks like i gained another half percent body fat which you can tell when you're that lean it's really weird i think it's important too before we get into this that um this isn't like something you should pursue if you're still dealing with and most people are relationship issues with food relationship issues with exercise um because you'll create a crazy rebound even if you are even if you do accomplish this and you don't have those things dialed in you're going to rebound in a very nice well this is why we don't recommend competing for most people i mean i get so many people that ask me question performance driven totally i just it's it you you need to have that i mean i'm lucky that i got into this the the sport of you know bodybuilding when i was 30 and i'd already been a trainer for 10 years oh good point and yeah so i had already worked through a lot of my insecurities around food and exercise and the way i look my body image issues like so i think that's so important that you've kind of worked through all that stuff before you go do something at the competitor even if you're not getting on stage i think dieting to this level is competitive yes so you know i know there's a lot of controversy around involving bodybuilding a sport or not but the i when i think of it as a sport i think of just the competitive nature of what you're doing you're pushing your body beyond healthy limits which is kind of all sports right yes you you are always you're pushing those boundaries of what can my what can my body do when i push it to the ultimate level totally healthy is is balanced uh extreme is never balanced i don't care what category that you you come up with extreme anything you're trading in longevity and health and balance for extreme performance and i think there's value in that in many cases but you've got to identify if it's right for you and if it's going to result in way worse outcomes you know one of the first things i think that's important to understand when you do this is that you have to go into it recognizing that it's temporary now why is this important because if you don't because i've seen this many times people get will get shredded and then they're obsessively shredded forever or they try to stay there forever if that's you you will suffer the consequences the negative health consequences can be quite nasty in men and women from hormonal issues to immune issues you can start to see some really really bad health issues from trying to maintain a shredded physique so you have to go into it saying my goal is to get this lean but it's going to be temporary and then what that does is also allows you to come up with a back out plan how do i back out of that that's the part that i think is so that that is something i learned the hard way so i was so obsessed with the competitive side of getting lean in the show and everything that i actually wasn't thinking about a backup plan like okay when the show was over like wasn't even thinking about that yet and even i when i got out of the show knowing better um binged that first time the first time like you know because i did it right i made the show and i'm like oh i got down celebrate yeah celebrating and i was so low calorie i was so lean it was easy to justify all the junk and all the calories that i was taking on after and it's it's uh it can be deceiving because i mean i'm eating garbage the next 24 to 48 hours and i'm looking better by the hour because i was so depleted and so you start to kind of play this game like oh i can get away with this like it's okay and then before you know it you've you've done a week or two of eating like this and the body fat and we did an episode with lane norton a couple years ago where we talked about when you do this this is when your your body adds fat cells at like a rapid rate it's really dangerous to do that this is a very important point to make so and i by the way i've witnessed female competitors gain 20 pounds in under a month these are tiny girls i've seen guys gain 30 pounds in a month from this rebound so your body doesn't add the number of fat cells except for a few times in your life puberty uh i believe the third trimester of pregnancy can do this but otherwise generally you get this number of fat cells and then they stick around and then what happens is the fat cells either grow or shrink depending on if you eat more calories in your burn and or you eat less calories than you burn however it's been observed and this is the way you're what you're referring to when people do extreme dieting where their body is like because make no mistake you get down to single-digit body fat it's starving your body's like we're starving right now okay you get down that lean your body turns into something different and then when you refeed so much with excessive calories your body has to it adapts by improving its ability to capture calories right and the way it does so and we've observed this now in studies is it adds the number of fat cells what does that mean that means the next time you try to get lean it's harder so in the only like community i think we could point to where we can see this happening is the extreme bodybuilding and physique competitor um category of athletes where you'll see them competing and then they'll talk about how it's harder for them to get sharp like i can't get sharp like i used to and you know i used to be able to get you know this worked for me before but it's not working again and why is my body not responding the way it used to your your body's literally learning how to capture energy more efficiently and by adding fat cells so you can cause yourself a lot of problems by doing this not to mention um just the health issues because the first time i did that where i got down to like four percent i think it was and then i did the same thing oh it wrecked me my gut it really wrecked my god i wouldn't need a bunch of food and i was like sick and i imagine the same thing happened to you just instead of it being on the the physical like or visual side you probably felt okay you probably were so depleted that you probably were eating foods that normally would bother you and you're like oh i'm okay right after my gut healed i was like oh i think i'm and i kept pushing it and then it just it's not good so you have to have that back out plan but part of that is recognizing this is temporary so you know for me i like to walk around if i'm gonna stay lean around ten percent okay so if i get down to four percent then what i'll do is i'll give myself a month or two to allow myself to creep back up to to ten percent so it's kind of a slow crawl instead of being like let's see how fast i can get this weight back on my body now knowing you guys have both kind of gone through this process i know this isn't on the list or anything but in terms of like getting down as low as you possibly can like have the first attempt that you did uh did you notice that um i mean you lost a good amount of muscle with it like you just were just dieting as hard as possible just mentally like you're you're trying your your best to just like really cut calories but maybe didn't do as good a job at preserving that the name of the game is uh is keeping muscle it's not burning body fat because you know what happens to a lot of people is they'll get down to like you'll get a female that'll get down to 18 or 17 successfully a guy gets down to 9 but then they keep pushing they lose weight on the scale but their body fat percentage doesn't budge anymore they're like what's going on i've lost another five pounds it's because you lost muscle and fat uh because right now what you're happening is you're just making yourself smaller you see this happen at higher body fat percentages too but when you get lean the leaner you get the more your body is trying to figure out a way to survive off these fewer calories and one of the ways to find that energy yeah and one of the ways it does is it pairs muscle down so the name of the game is can i i got to keep this muscle at all costs otherwise it's uh forget it that's a really good question justin because um i'm guilty of that even though i knew better right so i would i was so so going into my very first show i was so nervous to show up with extra body fat that i was like willing to sacrifice potentially the muscle which i'm sure some people get that in their head also like i i wanted to be so lean that uh and i didn't want the the day to come or even the week leading up and go oh my god i i haven't leaned out enough and everybody was telling me up to that point that when you get on stage like that like what will be what will be more important than me having five or ten more pounds of muscle that is that i'm two to three percent lower in body fat so i probably took that and went too obsessive in the cutting the very first show which i mean i did okay i placed in the top five but i didn't that wasn't my first show that i won it wasn't until i started to kind of calm down a little bit and and it took that first time of really dieting that stream to know what i could do i mean i had never i'd never dieted like that and so part of this too is like learning the timing and like oh when i move these levers my body does this or it takes this long to react and so that was a bit challenging for me the very first time but i think after that first show um i learned a lot of lessons one was the reversing out one two what you're saying right now with like pushing that hard when i really didn't need to and probably sacrificing muscle when i didn't need to you know so which probably fed into the bad rebound so bad too i mean i i cut so hard that i pushed calories lower than i needed to i probably lost some muscle so i inevitably slowed my metabolism down and then i went to reverse and went you know gangbusters on food afterwards and then put on a lot of body fat i would say one of the biggest differences and here's how here's a you know one of the ways that this can be unhealthy long term is when you're getting to single digit body fat uh you're not just consistent you're obsessively consistent so you know most people you know most guys can get down to you know 10 body fat most women can get down to 18 body fat which both are lean both look great by the way uh most people want to look that way and that's still very lean but most people can do that by being consistent i don't know 85 percent of the time right 85 of time you're consistent the other 15 percent of time you're not going way off the rails but you're have some balance in your life okay to get down to single digit body fat you got to be consistent 100 of time yeah like not one meal full-time commitment not one bag of chips not two cookies like i mean and yes you could try to make up for it with other things but good luck trying to play that game you have to be obsessively ridiculously consistent and i remember this the first time i did this where i was trying to get below six percent and i couldn't i couldn't figure out what was going on and really it was just oh i have to do i have to be perfect all the time and then the extra one two no flexibility at all none and it's psychologically not a great place well think of it like a like an you know archery target and the outside is like 15 plus percent body fat then it goes to 10 body fat and then it goes to you know sub 7 body fat then sub 5 body fat and then 3 or lowers the bullseye and then think of you trying to shoot at that you know if you're if you just needed to be you land your body fat percentage around 15 to 20 you could be a little a little off yeah and and still land somewhere on the target but if you're trying to hit that that single digit body fat the smallest degree this yeah the tiniest bit you being off and you're you're going to be and that's what it's like dieting for that is you have to be so down which is i always have that conversation with clients that say they want this look and it's like do you really because the the sacrifice the relentless commitment that it's going to take to get to that you know and it's unfortunate because we we use this for advertising and we celebrate these things you said this we glorify this unhealthy unbalanced that's right and it's it is unfortunate and it's and it's appealing right it looks amazing it looks cool right so so many people think they want that but they don't recognize the obsessiveness that it takes to kind of get to that level and the amount of sacrifice that you you have to you have to do to get there yeah and really if you do the math to go from five percent to six percent body fat is less body fat than to go from 10 to 11 percent okay it's less pounds of body fat so to go from five percent to six percent it's just a little bit it's just a little bit off a little bit of a surplus that then that you didn't have oh i went up a percent like you could get away with way more higher body fat percentages uh with that and in the reverse too you get a man at 20 body fat he goes to 19 body fat you can't tell you go from five to four and it looks really different you know so you have to be obsessively obsessively consistent and that is just not healthy long-term you don't want to live there but in the short term understand that all right this is my goal i want to do this i have to and i think there's benefit again for the right people to learn to have that kind of discipline regardless of what if whether it's business or fitness or sports to be able to be you know that kind of dogged consistency well that's i mean that's another one of my favorite parts about doing that is i think that there's a lot of parallels in other aspects of your life and i think a lot of reasons why people fail at business i think a lot of reasons why people fail at reaching certain goals is they just don't have the tenacity and consistency in what they do a lot of people attempting almost anything that's hard do it for a while you know fall down a couple times and then that's it and this is one of those examples of you just have to be you know just relentless and consistent and just most people don't have the gumption they stick with it now i know there's people out there the iifym crowd right the if it fits your macros crowd says no no you don't have to be obsessive um you can be flexible with your diet no no you're still obsessive with your calories your proteins fats and carbs even in that so if you're getting down to single digit body fat even if you do an i f y m approach which i don't which i don't um encourage even for this i don't encourage because good luck swinging and having these different foods and not messing with your hunger and your mess of your cravings ramping everything up oh forget it like if i could fit a pop-tart into my diet and make the macros count i still wouldn't because that pop-tart would literally screw me up for two days and that's another thing too if i eat something that is palatable in that way my cravings are ramped up for 24 hours at least and it makes it much more challenging but but even that crowd you still have to be obsessively consistent they still have to hit their perfect numbers of macros every single day um all right here's the next one you'll notice a lot of bodybuilders and competitors will do carb cycling with their diet now on the on its face if your calories are the same and your protein is good and consistent you know do you need to cycle carbs no you don't necessarily but here's why it works psychologically first off proteins and fats are essential meaning you have to consume them in order to survive and because your calories are so low i don't like cutting the ones out that are essential i like to cut the ones out that are non-essential because i can get away with being too low on them i can't get away with being too low on protein or fat then my health really starts to decline and then forget everything right so that's why i like cycling carbs also psychologically when you get really lean carb cycling allows you to have periods of more energy and better pumps because otherwise you just feel like crack crap all the time so i give myself and i i'll balance out the calories with this but i give myself some days where my carbohydrates are higher and that's gives me those better workouts and he keeps me in the game otherwise it's like this grueling uh why am i doing this and my workouts uh you know kind of suck i i never carb cycle until until it came time to get ready for a show that was the first time i ever even messed with that and i actually fell in love with the the process of of utilizing that as a tool um i think for a couple reasons uh one the energy going into a workout right i can manipulate like oh i've got a leg day tomorrow so i'm gonna try and time it with loading my carbs up also the psychological part of not every day being exactly the same it's like i have some days where oh wow i get to you start to look forward to it you just based on your movement for the most part with your uh carb intake well you know more like on a calorie really all you're really manipulating is calories like salsa it's like so over the course of a a week i let's say my goal is to have my calories at 2 200 calories but i'm gonna have some days where i am having 2 700 calories yeah so and and really the way i'm manipulating those calories is through carbohydrate intake and the other reason why i really like it is because when you when you get really consistent with figuring out what your body needs protein and fat wise like it's a little bit harder to come by and to get after that than it is carbohydrates there's carbohydrates are so easy to come by and find it's also really easy to manipulate up and down so i like being very consistent with my fat and protein sources and staying dialed in on that making sure okay this meal has got this many ounces okay i'm good there and then the only thing that i'm really messing with and a lot of times it's okay so it's either white rice sweet potato yams quinoa these are like the go-to staple carbs that i'm using and all i'm doing is going like oh on these days i'm getting every meal is getting a cup of rice on these other deals other days i'm getting two cups of rice on other days i'm skipping every meal and getting no carb in that meal you know so i can easily keep it very consistent and just play with something that's very measurable like like rice or sweet potato and it just made it made the dieting aspect really consistent and easy for me and then also not so you know laborious of the same thing it's all psychological it really is because it does that for me too and then i go into my work like if i know okay tomorrow i'm gonna i'm gonna try and hit it a little harder i've been feeling kind of flat let me have a higher carb day today so that tomorrow i go into it have a better workout psychologically that helps me out carbs also for me at least um well actually studies show this for most people they're just the least satiety inducing macronutrient meaning proteins and fats will will make you feel more satisfied for longer than carbohydrates will so um you know bumping my carbs even though my calories go up i notice my appetite goes up even though it's a higher calorie day i'm like oh my gosh i'm starting to go hungry and going low calorie all the time you know or being consistent like you said feels laborious it's psychologically laborious having these ups and downs like oh today's a low calorie day i could deal with that knowing that in two days i have a higher calorie day with with more carbohydrates um the next one is you got to keep your protein intake high like high protein is important for most goals it helps with fat loss it helps with muscle building it's great for satiety this becomes really important when you're playing this game because the game is don't lose muscle and studies will show this muscle as much as possible they control calories protein intakes high even though the calories the same you lose less muscle it also helps a lot with satiety a lot like if my protein intake if i eat 2 000 calories on this day and 2 000 calories on this day but this day's 220 grams of protein this day is 120 grams of protein i guarantee you even though the cow's the same the 120 gram protein damn way hungrier well the extreme version uh being the carnivore diet i experienced that in terms of like the calories being so much lower and it was easy for me to maintain for the most part so uh you know that strategy of like in taking a lot more protein will help i'm assuming in this big direction well i just think too that in general like most clients uh under-consume protein not talking about the bodybuilders and the people that like over-consume which is a very small percentage of people most people don't consume enough protein as this and then they're going into a diet where they're trying to get shredded and they're just cutting calories what ends up happening is they go super low on protein also imagine we just had this conversation last night katrina and i i told you guys she's she's kind of dialing everything in the very first thing i told her to do was to pick up her intensity on her training and make sure you're tracking your protein protein we're sitting there okay last night we're watching a movie she decided to have a one of those like you know 100 calorie popcorn snacks or whatever and she's snacking on it and she's inputting her food and she's like [ __ ] she's like i miss my protein intake by 20 grams so what you should have done is not had that bowl of of that popcorn you should have got one of our protein bars that we have in the closet that has 20 grams of protein and that should have been your snack and choice now from a calorie perspective same she's okay yeah she's not going to put on body fat from there and it may help her drop a little bit on the scale still but then she also missed her protein she starts to string enough of those days together and your body will start to pare down muscle because it's not being fed what it needs to sustain it this is very common when people are cutting yes so is making this mistake of not being dialed in and tracking their protein while they're also in a deficit and then at the end of their oh i lost my 20 pounds and they find out that 10 of it was muscle and 10 of it was fat they're like what the [ __ ] well that's why because you were so concentrated on cutting that you weren't paying attention to your approach yeah i mean along those lines like i just had breakfast right now what did i have steak and eggs and nothing else right why because that keeps me satisfied otherwise i'm sitting here podcasting and i'm thinking about food and miserable yeah so it really is satiating now if i had the same amount of calories but less protein and i had you know sourdough bread and fruit well no i love that you brought that up because what most people would do right there is okay so and that was probably i don't know a 400 500 calorie deal for you okay somebody oh and you're big so it's just not a good example but let's say you you have half of that for a female right 200 something calories but it's all coming from eggs and steak the common choice for somebody at breakfast is like a thing of oatmeal yeah which is you know lean and it's got lots of fiber and so we just talk about all the benefits of it but it's all carbohydrate and then now the rest of the day you're trying to play ketchup on the protein so i that that's why i love a meal like that like one of my favorite things to recommend to people for you know especially in this case where we're dieting and we're is saving the because everybody seems to do fine with making uh meat as the primary you know part of your dinner yeah is saving that to carry over into breakfast and i don't know if that's where you got yours or not but that's like a staple move from your scramble yeah like last night we had we had bison and brussels sprouts like i'm not dieting right now if i was dieting though that would be the start breakfast it would be like bison and eggs yes i would just take some of the bison and then i would have one or two eggs with it and now that becomes my breakfast now i kick-start my day with 40 grams of protein right out the gates and it's low carbohydrate and not a lot of calories so i'm in my staying low on my calories but i'm also being mindful of making sure my protein is also working with nutrasense right so this is a gluco a continual glucose monitor company you you wear this device it measures your glucose levels throughout the day you work with the nutrition it's the whole deal see how your body responds the number one way that you control your blood glucose from spiking and dropping by and you don't want that right because when it spikes and then drops that typically triggers hunger right away because your body's like oh blood sugar's low get hungry one of the number one ways that they see in all people helping to flatten that out is to eat your protein first you're gonna have your meal fine eat your protein wait 10 minutes and then eat something else it flattens it out so high protein meal controls hunger through many different mechanisms one of them is controlling that that glucose you know those ups and downs all right so the next one um this one i think is really important because when people get into this like i gotta get shredded phase they start to turn all their workouts into calorie burning workout at least that's the mentality yeah they want to burn everything now on top of also like cutting down instead of like you know really preserving uh what muscle they have by by strength training which is a completely different uh protocol yeah lift weights and your goal is still to try to build muscle now are you going to build muscle going from nine percent to six percent body fat no you're not you're probably not going to go down get stronger and build muscle but the better you train in that direction the less likely you are to lose muscle which again that's the name of the game so you want to lift weights for strength and for muscle that's the goal and remember weights are phenomenal at doing that now you use weights you can do conditioning you do performance that's totally fine but we're talking about getting shredded you want that muscle building signal to be effective because the more your body believes that it needs the muscle the less likely it is to pare it down because what right now what your body's doing is it's weighing things out like um energy intake is very low we're running out of fat stores that's your body's insurance okay we need imagine if your brain your body had like these you know workers in there like all right everybody you're having a meeting look energy's low stores are low just like if you lose your job and you have very little money in your savings account what do you do we need to spend less money so your body's like we need to pair muscle down we need to make sure that we're not burning as many calories but then someone speaks up and says hey hold on a second but we need this muscle really bad just like if you're cutting your bills down and you're like listen you tell your wife listen we got to cut our expenses and your wife goes these are tommy's medical bills like we can't cut these right now we need this really bad you're like okay well let's let's keep going so you have to send that signal effectively so you have to lift weights and tell your body build muscle build strength it takes it takes a lot of mental discipline though this is something katrina and i were also having a conversation about i said you know we want to uh diet like we're trying to lose but i want you to lift as if we were trying to gain right so i want the intensity there i want us to be focused on strength you're trying to get stronger but the reality is i know that i have you in a caloric deficit and you're probably not going to get stronger in fact you may see your your strength decrease so here's where the mental challenge is is that you you know you're going into the workouts with the attitude of i'm trying to get stronger so the lifting intensity is there you're trying to push the weight you're trying to be strong but i also know that i'm not fueling my body you know adequate calories to gain so then what ends up happening a lot of times is you see the bench press decrease you see the deadlift go down you see the squat go down and that tends to [ __ ] with people mentally but you just gotta know that and accept it it's okay it's it's okay that i'm not gonna be at my peak strength but this is what's good for optimal results for me this sending that signal to your point sal is going to hang on to all that muscle that i worked so hard to build but i don't want to get caught in the trap of expecting that oh i'm lifting this way therefore i should feel like i'm getting or get stronger every year so i'll give you a little bit of my strategy just because i think this help this will help right so what i try to do is i try to to time all my best muscle building you know techniques right when i'm hitting this point with my diet and nutrition because i'm really trying to be as effective as possible at preventing muscle loss so what do i do this is when i change the phase of my training because i know that that novelty sends a better muscle building signal also i time it so that the phase that i go into the changing of my workout signaling also coincides with the kind the phase of training that i know my body tends to respond to best anyway so for me personally if you have any of our mass programs maps anabolic phase one okay that's a strength low rep you know you're doing fewer exercises lots of sets per exercise you're really focusing on these gross motor movements for me if all things being equal okay all phases being novel all that stuff i build the most in that face now for you it may be you know eight to 12 reps it may be super sets whatever save that phase for when you go into this for me i literally waited and now what am i doing right now three full body workouts i'm going my reps are five four six longer rest periods because that's my best phase and i saved it i saved it to keep it novel to maximize muscle or to minimize muscle loss so that's one tip you can do so so that's part of what i'm saying when i say lift weights for strength and muscle change your face so that you have something novel and save that style of training the one that you respond best to for this period i love that and i'll take it a step further right so i i typically train like a maps aesthetic maps anabolic uh maps ped but all the other bodybuilder stuff right right that's what i fall in love with the most like on the op justin's more functional performance that that direction i'm gonna go the body sculpting type of direction i know that's my mo so when i switch to like a diet where i know this is i'm playing this mental game not only do i like to change the phase i'll change the whole programming like to something like strong which is something that is super novel it's very different from me or even performance right these it's got so many different exercises like a uh the the reverse lunge to a mind press like i have no i don't have a pr on that because i never did it long enough consistently to like get really really strong in it so i don't have this this preconceived number in my head that oh i'm weaker here i don't know like i have no idea what my my reverse lunge to a press on a on a land mine is i have no idea what my max zercher squat is i have no idea what my max circus press is so i love switching to a program that is so different than has so many exercises that i just normally don't really do that when so when i'm doing it and i'm probably weak because i'm low calorie i don't recognize it i don't go oh man my circus press is normally 120 dumbbells and now i'm doing 60s this sucks it's like i don't even know what my best circus press is so i love to not only change the phase but i love to even switch the programming up when i go into a really strict diet because then i don't have all these numbers what you'll notice is there's a theme here which is we're managing the psychological effects of this more than anything because that's the part that'll screw you up to me that's so and that's what inspired this episode was that there yes when we we are like trying to lose 50 pounds of body fat uh there's a lot of mental mental games involved but there's a lot of fundamental like you know macros and strength training and make sure you do this make sure that when you start to get really really shredded i think that like 90 of it becomes mental well do you think that that's probably why your typical person when they're cutting down is drawn more towards doing weights like a cardio version of weights like a like a more circuit style training because it's like you get in sort of these rhythms when you're doing cardio where your lot is you're doing a lot of reps but you're just having to get through it and sweat and so it's like it's less mentally taxing as you're going i think that's not what draws people to that i think what draws most people to that is they we are still so hung up on the calorie burns yes well yeah maximizing everything at once sweating equals fat loss yeah so and i and i think that what most people do is they they okay i've made this shift i'm cutting calories i want to burn and move and so they take that mindset into their weight training and so all of a sudden the pace picks up and they want to do circuits and they're i don't think they're thinking that logical like what you're alluding to i think it's just straight up i'm going to try and burn as much as i can and now they're doing longer workouts they're adding things afterwards they're doing the battle ropes i'm melting fast yeah no that's i we i think that's something that we get and you know we promote that stuff through all these fitness tools and trackers and you know orange theories we get you know bonus points for hitting the zone like i just think that that's we've we've we've ingrained that in most people's minds that like oh you gotta burn eat less burn more you know the irony is that that those kind of workouts are effective for like two or three weeks that's it right yeah two or three in fact that takes us to the next one which is avoid cardio until it's necessary there you go save that tool first of all it's a short-lived tool okay lots of cardio to get really shredded doesn't work very in fact a lot of people get shredded in spite of the fact that doing just tons of cardio for 12 weeks or whatever save it do everything with diet and strength training and then the last couple weeks if you want to throw it in you can and you can squeeze off a little bit of body fat but if you make this part of your long-term routine what you're doing is you're countering that muscle building signal that we're trying to do with strength training through this i need endurance uh type of a signal which really only encourages the muscle pare down process so what you want to do is you want to save it until absolutely and i remember you adam when you competed i think you did the last two weeks yeah was it the longest i've ever done cardio is four weeks and most often it was two so it's uh if you have a coach and they have you doing cardio for 12 weeks leading into a show you should fire your coach and that's going to piss off a lot of people oh boys well most coaches most coaches do that and it's just a it's a terrible yeah they typically go from 30 minutes a day to 60 minutes today to 90. yeah they just keep ramping it up and wrapping it up wrapping up and by the way it goes all the way back to the very first point that you made about having a plan when you come out of it talk about [ __ ] your person completely god yeah you've now got this person adapted to doing you know five to seven hours of this cardio on the stair master every single day and starving their body to 1500 calories they're not going to maintain that unless you absolutely love the stairmaster it'll take you three months to back out of the cardio yeah no not to mention the calories exactly so and not only that too like i want to teach my client so if we're getting shredded right and i i want to teach them how can we manipulate your your calories to lean out without us messing with any additional calorie burn like cardio first that doesn't mean we won't use it but let's first figure that out can we manipulate that and here's the thing if you're at a place metabolism wise where reducing your calories by 200 to 500 calories it puts you in an unhealthy place calorie wise you have no business trying to get you oh what a great point what a great point no business yeah i will not so like you know i'm a right now i weigh about i don't know 210 maybe i'm i wouldn't do this if my calories ended up below you know 2 300 calories 24 hour i wouldn't do this that's going to be way too low for me first i've seen women at 800 calories as on top of all the training that they're doing well i've seen guys at 1500 and the reason why that is is because they they make this decision whether it be getting ready for a show or they just want to get shredded for the summer that they want to get shredded and they haven't first built a healthy metabolism and their metabolism is in a place where 1800 calories maintains where they're at and then they want to get shredded and the move for that person is not start cutting ad cardio right there it's we need to build the metabolism up so that when we do start to calorie restrict you're still in a healthy place halfway through this cut so that i mean and i get these dms all the time for people that you know wanted oh this is what my coaches got me doing and it's like man if you're if you're 12 weeks out from your show do the math and you're already sub 2 000 calories already you have no business doing a show you should first work on building a healthy metabolism before you even and show our body fat i know i keep saying show because i know there's a lot of people are listening that don't care about a show or get shredded you have no business trying to get shredded single digit body fat or get ready for a show if you're at a place where you're 12 weeks or more out and you're already having to cut less than 2 1800 calories that's way too [ __ ] long you're going way too soon you're setting yourself up for some really really bad failure later on yeah a nasty rebound at the the the best you could hope for is a nasty rebound but you could end up [ __ ] [ __ ] you up hormonally or really slowing the metabolism down and screwing yourself long-term yeah i've worked with people where it's taken us six months a year to get them to recover from this process like you know you don't want to put yourself in that situation so you could look shredded for a week right it's not it's not worth it um and that's if you can get to that point of looking shredded a lot of people end up doing this and end up just getting smaller losing muscle along the process so all right here's the next one and this one is an interesting one because all of us deal with cravings okay so cravings are usually motivated or driven by emotion or context you know i'm out my friends or i'm happy or i'm anxious or i'm sad so i crave or i'm bored right so i have these cravings and then there's hunger hunger is totally different and hunger feels it's much more it's with you all the time it's much stronger it's a more primitive driving feeling and if you've ever done a fast for like 48 or 72 hours you know what that feels like it's very different from cravings like here's the difference cravings is this justin and i are about to go to lunch justin's like hey what do you want to have for lunch uh you know mexican food no i'm not really in the mood for me oh what about pizza yeah let's get pizza here's what hunger feels what hunger looks like celery sticks i don't have a good i don't care that's there's food that's how i describe it like you're not hungry if you're if you want a certain food oh yeah yeah when you're hungry everything sounds anything yeah anything that's there most people haven't ever experienced i agree with hunger and it's yeah and it's just because of that point like if you haven't gone 48 hours 72 hours without food it's it's really hard to uh compare the two yeah if you say i'm hungry i really want this it's like nah if you're hungry i'll take anything anything even foods you don't traditionally like that's so true so here's what i'm about to say when you start to get down to single digit body fat you got to learn to accept that you're going to live with hunger it's going to be it's literally this thing that's with you all day long to the point where you know and i'm not quite there i could feel it right now but i know in the next couple weeks i'm going to feel it where you got to leave the room when there's certain kinds of foods or you get mad at your partner why did you open that in front of me don't eat that next to me like it's really weird and it's very again it's an unhealthy uh place to be that's why you don't want to live in this space but you have to accept that you're going to kind of feel uncomfortable um most the time like when you're sleeping i don't okay cravings well maybe people have cravings like this it never happened to me where i wake up in the middle like to go to the bathroom i don't think oh man i want to go downstairs and get it never happens to me until i get down to like seven six percent body fat i'll literally wake up go to the bathroom and be like man i want to eat an apple right now you know eat an apple right now but you have to kind of learn to live with it and there's a there's a mental switch that has to occur well talking about hunger uh or and or cravings um one of the things that i didn't realize until pushing myself to this level was how much my sleep uh impacted this oh yeah so i i didn't i never uh drew that conclusion of oh wow it's fuel to the fire anytime i have like a really bad night's rest whether it be restless all night or we like this would happen early on in mind pump because i was competing during mind pump times and then we were also doing stuff like we'd do like a live event or something and my my freaking energy was like on fire all day i couldn't sleep so two three in the morning before i finally fall asleep and then back of the day so terrible sleep man the next day oh the i just wanted everything bad like junk food just sounded so good to me and it took a few times of having those nights that were really bad sleep followed by those days and what made me realize is because i was being so consistent during those times this is again another one of the benefits of being so dialed and so consistent you start to pick up on these things that if my if my diet was like this all the time it would be really hard to measure that and be like oh was it because of my bad night's sleep or am i just wanting the ice cream because i had ice cream yesterday and now i'm craving it again or it's like or is it because i have some sort of correlation with what i'm doing and so it's really tough when you're inconsistent but when you're so consistent with your diet you start to pick up on these little subtle things this was something that i had never noticed in my life until i got really consistent with the diet and i was like all of a sudden have a night like that and be like that's so weird i've had no problem eating these same meals for the last month but now all of a sudden i want all this bad stuff i was like oh [ __ ] totally it was the night's rest and again uh you know you're you're you're living with hunger all the time and these things will just ramp it up and so now you got to really white knuckle it you know even more but here's the other part of that when you're getting to this when you're getting this lean you are stressing your body out this is this is another level of stress and so if you if your sleep is off and your stress levels are high your body you you can very easily reach a point where your body can't deal with it and then it'll backfire and this is where you see people on their quest to getting shredded for either a competition or a photo shoot maybe they're going to vegas who knows and on their que and they get sick yeah it's like oh my god i always get sick once i start to get lean in fact it's so common for people when they start to get to this point where they they get a cold or they get whatever so you have to have your sleep and your stress levels also be very well managed and consistent because you already are at that line you don't have any room for any additional stress to tip your body over it's way better to be anti-social at this point and just just really consider all those factors uh that you need to be as low stress as possible you need to get that sleep so if this is your priority you have to create almost this bubble uh that you have to just just stay in front yeah and this is why i'm like don't you don't want to live here i don't understand how people i don't know it's i don't get it it's such a dysfunctional way of living all the time and it's just you literally have no room yeah you know who wants to live their life without having any room for any additional stress like life doesn't work that way right so unless you structure and plan your life to this bubble like you said in which case now what are you doing you're cutting out social events you're cutting out conversations you need to have with your spouse and your disconnect that's what it takes yeah so get there but yeah you need to keep stress and sleep totally consistent and in check all right here's the next one and i remember like in the first time i got down to really lean body fat percentage just used to mess with me which was uh water water retention like if you hold a couple pounds of water and you're 11 body fat nobody can tell you get down to five percent body fat you gain you hold two or three pounds of water it looks like you gained one two percent of body fat and that can really mess with your head you know i'm gonna i'm gonna even challenge that what you said about it being 11 or 15 hold it i this is the the single i love this point of all the points we've made so far this one i think made me a better coach from competing uh to uh took me to another level that um i didn't see coming either and that was being able to communicate this to my clients that are even twenty five thirty percent oh because of the scale because of this because of the scale and even the mirror right like you you you get you know bloated from a meal that your body reacts to or you intake you know x amount more sodium or you know x amount more carbohydrates for every three ounces of carbohydrates you take in your body holds three ounces of water so if you had a day where you're higher carb and you had a couple extra glasses of water i mean you could really look different in the mirror your scale could go up one or two pounds and yet be perfect i mean you could be literally dialed the way i want you to be eating and training but yet see this go in the opposite direction than you think you wanted to and what happens is you you you pivot and you change you over correct so the and the only reason why i figured this all out and can communicate was because i was so dialed i was tracking it i was doing the math so i like i know i'm sitting here going like okay i'm moving the water yes yeah i'm tracking everything so i know that like i should be getting better and better and better every single day yeah sure you have some slow down a little bit of plateaus but i definitely shouldn't go worse go the other direction it just mathematically is impossible i know what i'm doing and i would actually have these days where all of a sudden i go up and then i'd be like what scratching my head and the only thing that made sense was like and that's how i that's how i learned like how many how much water pairs with carbohydrates and sodium like i started like going in and like figuring out like why is this why is this happening to me i'm dialed this shouldn't be happening to me but then it opened my eyes like oh my god how often does this happen i wish i had this information when i was a trainer in my 20s because how many times did i put a client on a diet and then them following it supposedly to a tee and then them come back to me and they freak out because the scale went up a couple pounds and then me going even as a trainer going oh [ __ ] it shouldn't be going up okay well then let's uh let's cut this out then or let's let's pick up some cardio 30 minutes and actually being a bad coach and adjusting because i see this little bit of a water fluctuation not knowing better so this of all the things that i learned going through competing like this was one of my favorite things that i took away from it because it has given me the tools to communicate that to clients even at a higher body fat percentage that may not and to your point i know what you're making like it's not a huge difference it's a huge difference at five five percent you're five percent body fat and you hold a pound or two i mean that's the reason you look so different yeah you look different i mean you could lose a show because of that yeah if i don't go in with just the right amount of water in my body right enough to fill the muscle bellies up but not enough to like get in the subcutaneous and make me look all puffy looking like that will lose a show i'll lose places in a show so it's that it'll be that dial but somebody at 13 14 maybe not so much but even them will see a little bit of a difference or see this yes yes and speak speaking of scale remember the scale lies because when you're trying to get leaner obviously the goal is to get the scale number to go down but i've gotten leaner with the scale number going up in the past like where i was over dieting over training i changed things a little bit i saw myself go up two or three pounds on the scale over the course of three four weeks do my i look in the mirror i'm like man i look way leaner how the hell am i heavier get a body fat test and i'm like i did get leaner why because i gained a couple pounds of muscle you know gaining muscle and keeping the total pounds of body fat on your body the same means your body fat percentage went down right if you gained 10 pounds of muscle and on your body you always had 30 pounds of body fat so and that didn't change that stayed 30 pounds of body fat but you gained 10 pounds of muscle that 30 pounds of body fat is a smaller percentage of your total body weight i also think it's one of the the healthiest and best places you can be metabolically when you're in a when you're trying to lose body fat if i can which is is always the goal for me for somebody who's trying to lose weight whether we're trying to lose 30 to 40 pounds or just trying to shred down the last five or ten i would love to see us kind of stay the same on the scale for as long as we can like so obviously at some point yeah somebody has to lose 50 100 pounds the scale is eventually going to come down but to be honest i actually don't want to see that initially i want to see us kind of hover around the scale weight but i know that if we're feeding ourselves properly we're strength training we're a little bit in a caloric deficit hopefully i'm having this beautiful exchange right your body's got this new stimulus so maybe it is stimulating a little bit of muscle growth and then we're also in a calorie deficit so i know we're losing body fat so we have this nice little even exchange it's a really good place to be metabolically versus you know cutting the calories like crazy moving the movement like crazy and then also the scale goes down 10 pounds you think because your ultimate goal is to lose 30 that's a good sign but metabolically it's not a good sign yeah so i i the scale is a tool but you have to combine it with all the other metrics so scale performance strength photos by the way we didn't include this but i like photos because uh if well for me personally because the reason why i'm doing this is because i'm going to be on camera so it really doesn't matter what the numbers say if i look better i look better and when you do that make sure you take your pictures the same place same lighting same food same time of day whatever same thing in the mirror so you can see these subtle differences i didn't this wasn't on the list but i think that's an important you know one way to track kind of how you're doing so you can put things kind of side to side circumference you know that be another one but you want to add all the stuff to give yourself more of a complete picture the scale by itself just tells you body weight and you know if you got your leg amputated your weight went down but that's not the kind of weight you'd want to lose right yeah um all right lastly here's where supplements supplements are not super important depending on the context or situation they're never really that important whole natural foods is will do everything that you need however when you reduce your calories you're also reducing your nutrient intake when you're increasing your strength you may actually be increasing your nutrient requirements how do we make that work i'm eating less calories which means i'm getting less nutrients but my nutrient required requirements may be going up because i'm training more and i have a higher stress on my body supplements this is where supplements can come and play a vital role right if i'm not getting enough of my b vitamins and you know my minerals because my food intake is so low and it's hard for me to manage everything on top of those micronutrients well now i could take a supplement and make up the difference creatine love creatine all the time i really love it when my calories are down because my calories down my meat intake is down too even though my protein's high it's still lower than it is when i'm eating more calories which means i'm getting less creatine from food so then i introduce that creatine um so this is where supplements i think can play an important role and this is where i like to supplement with you know micronutrients make sure oh yeah this is i mean what i need i'm the most consistent with we talked to the other day i don't know if there's off air on it or not but i was joking about how like i have to add the pill bottle right that i have to have now just to do all the dr cabral supplements and everything i'm really i'm actually really bad about being consistent about taking supplements the most consistent i am is when i'm on like a really dramatic cut like this because i just know i'm like obviously i'm cutting a ton of stuff out of my diet the likelihood that i'm hitting all my micronutrient targets is probably not likely and that's just one more thing that i think can benefit me and help me and then the other thing that we just don't talk about as a supplement but it is a supplement is a protein powder oh yeah putting about on bars like this is where convenience yeah i mean i was just talking about how katrina like this is an example of where i mean of course it would be great for her to go cook you know four and a half ounces of steak yeah but at 10 o'clock at night we're watching tv and stuff like that she's under on her protein intake she's snacking on 100 calorie popcorn instead of that you should have had the protein bar or should have a quick whey shake or something so here's where i use that's where i really start to use that is when i'm cutting calories i notice i already have a hard time hitting protein intake as it is when i'm cutting calories it's even harder i look at the end of my my day and that's kind of what decides what i'm going to do is my final meal slash snack whatever you want to call that last thing that i consume before i go to bed is me adding up everything and going oh wow you know today either today i hit everything so i'm cool i don't have to eat anything or maybe i'll snack on some some nuts to give me a little bit of satiety and feel better before i go to bed or oh [ __ ] i'm low on protein here i'm gonna blend up a shake yeah because in uh with whole natural foods it's it's hard to get just protein without other macronutrients i mean you can do with egg whites and chicken breasts but then the convenience becomes an issue and also maybe it's not palatable protein shakes can be i mean they can be pretty at this point they're tasty uh when you're dieting like this at this point a shake is like a treat very easy protein um so i i totally agree with you i like what i like to do is i like to have uh lean sources of protein saved in the fridge so like chicken breast shredded in the fridge and what i do i can throw salsa on it which adds negligible amount of calories and i can snack on that but a shake is like exactly at the end of the day is for me too it's like okay it's you know eight to eat o'clock before bed that's going to take more time to dige i'll just throw in the shake and there's my extra 20 grams of protein and it's got almost no carbohydrates and no fats now i know we didn't go into specifics about how to cut you know how many calories covered the rules that apply to somebody who is going from a man who's going from 20 body fat to 15 so 20 is kind of high 15 percent is pretty healthy the rules that apply to that person are the same as all the same that go from 10 to 5 the difference is everything that we talked about no the the reason why i think we did this episode it was to highlight that the real thing that happens that's different right here is the mental game yes the mental game gets way tougher in my opinion because there's a lot of things that are deceiving there's a lot of things that take a lot more consistency and discipline sacrifice like that's really the only difference between getting to 10 and then getting down to like three percent totally the same like you said the all the same rule apply for the person who is morbidly obese trying to get down as the person who is ten percent getting down like the only difference is the psychological discipline and the ridiculous unhealthy consistent obsessive consistency with the whole thing look if you like mind pump go to mindpumpfree.com and check out our guides we have guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal you can also find all of us on social media so justin is on instagram at mindpumpjustin you can find adam on instagram at my pump adam and you can find me on twitter at my pumps out [Music] so you