2930: Why More Time Working Out Doesn't Build Muscle (Do This Instead)

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MindPump. MindPump. With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast in the history of the world. This is MindPump. Today's episode, we talk about why more time working out doesn't build more muscle. You're going to love this episode. Now, according to this episode, or because of this episode, we have something cool for you. We have a program called MAPS 15 Minutes. It's 15 minutes a day. And in the episode, we talk about why this is such an effective way to work out for most people. So here's what we're going to do. You buy MAPS 15 Minutes. You get another program for free called MAPS Anywhere, which is an at-home or anywhere training program. So it's buy one, get one free. It's at mapsbogo.com. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Legion Supplements. So these are high-performance supplements. These are great supplements for those of you who are serious about your fitness. They have protein powders. They have creatine. They have multivitamins, fish oil, and more. Their pre-workout pulse is one of my favorites, one of the best pre-workouts I've ever used. So Legion has third-party testing. Everything that is on the bottle is in the bottle. So what you see on the label has been tested to be in the bottle. And they list the doses of every ingredient. And they only use data-backed ingredients. They don't pixie dust or use weird things just because they're cool. They only use stuff that has been shown in data to have efficacy. Legion is one of the best supplement companies in the world. We're very proud to be working with them. And if you go through our link, you get yourself a discount. Go to buylegion.com/mindpump, use the code mindpump, and you can buy one, get one 50% off if you're a new customer. And if you're a returning customer, you get 20% cash back. All right, real quick, if you love us like we love you, why not show up by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstore.com? I'm talking right now. Hit pause. Head on over to mindpumpstore.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. You might think that working out more will build more muscle, will give you a faster metabolism, will give you better results, but this isn't always true. In fact, oftentimes, in our experience, the opposite is true. Today, we're going to talk about why more time working out doesn't build more muscle and, in fact, can oftentimes do the opposite. We're going to get to it. Let's go. Yeah, good conversation. I feel like this is one we talk about often. It's because it's so common for people to – first off, it's surprising to people when they hear us discuss this. It's a big paradigm-shifting equation for people. 100%. I also think it's because we are communicating to a bit of a self-selection bias of people, right? You have an audience who chooses to listen to a fitness and workout podcast. Yeah. So you typically attract a majority of our listeners. I think our listeners, I think, are into or at least wanting to really get into working out if they're not already really into working out. And so this conversation, I find, is far more common with our audience than probably the general population. Yeah, I'd say there's probably two kinds of people that do too much. By the way, too much doesn't get you there faster. In fact, it doesn't get you there the same speed either. It gets you there slower. And we're going to discuss a little as to why. This occurs in the body. But there's two kinds of people that fall into this category. One of them is like what you're saying, Adam, which is people who are consistent with working out. And so over time, they love working out. They're consistent. And little by little, they do more and more and more. And they plateau or they stop seeing results or progress. And they add more work to what they're already doing and still see that plateau. It's a very frustrating place to be. In fact, that's one of the most frustrating places you could be. The other is the beginner who is roaring to go. He was ready to get in shape. Super motivated. They finally got themselves. The hardest lift in the gym. I heard this said the other day, and I loved it. The hardest lift in the gym is pulling the front door open, right? The first time, right? So it's this beginner who's like ready to rock and roll. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to get in shape. I'm sick of whatever. And they jump in with both feet, and they do too much. They do more than is necessary, which is a formula for disaster. It's a formula for frustration. Burnout. Burnout. Injury. It's just unsustainable. A lot of people experience this. I'd say quite a few people experience this, where you place so much effort into your workouts. You're not getting what you think you should get. Or worse, you feel like you're going backwards. It's got to be one of the most frustrating places to be because if you're not working out, you expect to get no results. If I'm doing nothing, if I'm doing what I've always done, and I get no body change, in a positive way, I'm not going to get mad. It's not going to be frustrating because I would expect to get no results from doing nothing. But here I am working my butt off. Here I am putting in a lot, and I don't feel like I look like I work out as much as I do, or I'm not getting any results, or the results are so slow and so difficult that I don't feel like it's worth it. And the truth is, when you work out right, first off, it is always difficult, right? You're doing a lifestyle change. You're adding something into your lifestyle. You're adding something into your life that wasn't there before that you're going to do on a consistent basis, okay? So that part's difficult. But a lot of people, when they train properly, consistently properly for the first time, it's shocking because they get results that don't match their effort but in the reverse. So when I would train clients, and you guys have had similar experiences, I know you've expressed this, when I'm doing everything right and we're hitting it the right way, they come to me and they go, it feels like I'm barely putting any effort in for the results I'm getting. Yeah. It's really weird. Why is my body changing? I actually had clients sit me down and go, okay, what's going on here? I know. Why am I progressing the way I am where I used to work so much harder and it feels like I'm doing barely anything? Like, what's going on? It'd be like the end of the workout and my client would just look at me and be like, okay, what's next? Yeah, we're done. What else? What else? No, that's it. That's all we're doing today. And you feel great and they feel energetic and they want to do more. But no, guess what? You're going to come back and we're going to do it again. Well, this, the smallest, the largest amount of novelty and stress will cause an adaptation. So you don't need the, and, and, and the larger, the stress, the stress and novelty does not equal more results. No. And so if I can, if I can reap some benefits from very minimal stress and novelty, then that's the goal should be just to do a little bit of that and to keep doing a little bit more and a little bit more so I can continue versus. The way people come into it especially when they're riding that high of motivation because they need to make change and they're just getting started. It's a new year's resolution. They got a goal in six months, whatever the thing is, and so they're highly motivated and it causes them to swing too hard and, and, and versus trying to make a good connection and see the ball. It's like they just grip it, rip it as hard as they can and end up not making contact, not seeing the results. They want to see and it's because they're overreaching and they're applying too much novelty, too much stress for their body to adapt. So we need to clarify because if you're listening to this, you've never heard us explain this before. It's going to sound very confusing. You're probably really confused right now. It doesn't make any sense. So I'm going to kind of illustrate what's happening here. So there's two, two things. There's two types of activity or exercise or two general categories. Now there's more than this, but generally speaking, it is good to move and be active every day. Okay. So we're not talking, what we're not saying is you, you move minimally. That's not what we're saying. Okay. Movement is good. Not sitting down all day long is good. What we're talking about is a workout. Okay. A workout is not supposed to be all your activity. A workout is designed to send a signal to get your body to adapt in a way that you're trying to get it to adapt. Okay. So when I do a workout, I'm like, I'm trying to get stronger or I'm trying to improve my stamina. I'm trying to build muscle. I'm trying to, uh, get my metabolic rate in a better position so I could burn more body fat. So that's the goal with a workout is to, to send a signal to get my body to adapt. Activity is just activity. Activity is just moving. And if you look at the data on activity, moving throughout the day, uh, in a moderate to low intensity way is very good for you in comparison to not moving. Okay. So you should definitely move every single day, but when it comes to working out, people do too much. And here's why. So when you exercise, when you work out, okay. When you're trying to send a signal, that signal is sent because there's a stress. That's the signal that's being sent. I'm training my body. My body becomes stressed by the training. So I go lift heavy weights. I go train with a heavy weight. My body says, okay, we need to adapt and get stronger because we need to be able to handle the stress a little bit better. Or I go challenge myself with running. Let's say I want stamina. My body says, okay, we need to adapt in a way so that this is no longer. Stressful. I need to get better at this stress so that it's no longer a stress later on. Now, what happens over time is you get stronger. You don't stick with the same way you add weight, right? And you, you send that stress signal again, so your body can continue to adapt. And this is why over time you build muscle, get stronger, boost your metabolism, get stamina, all those amazing things. But there's another side to this, which is we have to balance that with your body's ability to recover. Okay. Uh, if we, if we go too far. We don't adapt. heal. In fact, if you go too far, you don't even heal. If you go real far and you go too hard, like extreme too hard, your body doesn't even have a chance to heal and you can really hurt yourself and get sick. I don't think a lot of people are going that far, although fitness fanatics can definitely step into this place. What's happening with most people is that what they're really doing is they're sending a stress, they're creating some damage, they're allowing their body to heal, but it was too much for their body to adapt from. This is called the breakdown recovery trap. Breakdown recovery trap looks like this. I go to the gym, I train really hard, I get really sore, soreness goes away, I go back to the gym, I cause a stress, I get really sore, I go back to the gym after the soreness goes away and I do it again, but I never improve. All that happens, I get sore, I sweat, and then I heal. We'll call recovery healing. Then I come back and I'm in the same place. Adaptation is above and beyond recovery. Now, to not get too complex, there's some crossover, but really adaptation is above and beyond. Healing gets you back to where you were before. Let's say I'm at a 10, I go to the gym, and I beat the crap out of myself. Now I'm an eight in terms of my strength and movement because I'm sore. Healing gets me back up to a 10. Adaptation gets me up to a 10 and a half or 11. It's the adaptation process that we're after, and most people do too much. By the way, it doesn't just have to be the breakdown recovery trap. Maybe I do too much and I still adapt, but I don't adapt as much as I could have because I still did too much. This is maximizing that sweet spot. That's right. That's 100%. I think this is difficult for the average person because how to gauge that because it's a bit of a moving target because there's also other variables that could cause this to be too much. One week, maybe it's the right amount or the right dose. Then the following week, something happens at work. I have two nights of bad rest, had a day or two in a row where I missed macros and protein. Now that context is different. It changes. Now too much can be less than what the previous week was. This is the part I think that can be challenging people. This is why I know I'm sure people are so tired of hearing me say my goal is to do as little as possible to elicit the most change. In my opinion, you are always better with practicing consistency and weighing towards doing too little than you are trying to do as much as you possibly can. As long as you're consistent, you're showing up to the gym. I would rather you show up, just go through the movements at moderate intensity, moderate volume, than go and feel like you need to crush it every single time because that person actually will end up with lesser results than the person who's doing it. I think we're fooled by a lot of the results that we see by these bodies on social media, and I think we're fooled by a lot of the results that we see by these bodies on social media, in fact, this is what got, you know, started Mind Pump. Doug thought it was so mind-blowing, he said, we got to do something about this, and create a program around this, because this is wild, I can't believe I'm getting so fit and strong doing so little, but that's how it feels when you do it right, but again, I want to be clear, it doesn't mean it's easy, you still need to be consistent, it's just a lot easier than doing it wrong. Doing it wrong is really tough. It sucks. The crazy part, though, it's actually a lot easier to be consistent when you don't beat yourself up with that. One of the hardest, still to this day, one of the hardest things for me to motivate myself to go get up and go to the gym the next day, is when I overreach the day before, and I'm like, I'm feeling it, I'm fried, I'm sore, and achy, and I'm like, I went too hard too much, and like going back and doing it again, it makes it that, versus leaving the gym, feeling like I got a nice pump, a nice workout, feeling like the next day, feel good like I worked out the day before, but not feeling like it's impeding my movement, and so, once you kind of figure out this sweet spot, it's, it's, it feels so much more like this, this beautiful, delicate dance, than it is like this, this thing that you're going to muscle. The sledgehammer. Yeah, the sledgehammer, or this thing you're going to muscle your way, or force your way to your goal, and when, when people figure this out, and they unlock this, the working out part becomes far more therapeutic, and enjoyable, and much easier to be consistent lifelong. You want to show up. 100%. So, all right, let's talk about this. Let's talk about this. Let's talk a little bit about what this looks like. So, I'm going to go through the data on strength training. So, the workout part we're going to talk about today is strength training. And now, the reason why we're going to talk about strength training, and not other forms of working out, is because when it comes to minimal dose, maximum effort, strength training fits that perfectly. So, other forms of adaptation, stamina, endurance, flexibility, skills training, it actually requires a larger dose to, to reap those benefits. Strength training is remarkable. You really don't need a lot at all to get your body to really start to, to build strength and build muscle. The other reason why we're going to talk about strength training is because of all the forms of exercise, it's the one that produces the most aesthetic changes. Okay. So, most people listening, okay, yes, you want to get healthy, you want to move better, you want to feel better, but not at the top, if you're being honest with yourself, is I want to look good. I want to look like I work out. Strength training is the aesthetic form of exercise. It's the one that produces visible changes to the body, through the building of muscle, through the boosting metabolism and through the fat loss that occurs through strength training. So here's what the data shows for the average person. So the average person, to reap the vast majority of benefits from strength training, you're looking at about two days a week. Okay. About two days a week in the gym will produce the vast majority of all the benefits you could ever enjoy from strength training. Now notice I didn't say two days a week gets you almost as fast to your goals. That's not what I meant. That's not what I said. What I said was it'll get you the vast majority of benefits. In other words, you'll get so far with two days a week, you're probably going to be very satisfied. And some of you are going to want to take it to the next 5% level and then you can add a third day or maybe a four day. But most people are like, look, I just want to look sculpted. I want to have some muscle. I want to feel good. Two days a week does that, but there's a better way to do this. Rather than doing two, let's say 45 minute workouts a week, what we found that's even better is instead of doing two 45 minute workouts a week to do a little bit every day. So instead of 45 minutes or an hour twice a week, you do 15 minutes a day. Now, why is that so much better? Let's talk about that for a second, fellas. Why is 15 minutes a day better than two longer workouts? What is it about doing a little every day versus- Habits. You're creating a habit. It's like brushing your teeth or doing something else. It's something that ends up being, it's a smaller commitment, right? So it's a smaller time commitment that you build consistency around doing every single day. And then it just becomes a thing that you do, just like brushing your teeth or combing your hair or whatever the things that you do every single day. And getting someone to work out for an hour, at a time, whether it be every single day or twice a week, becomes a larger commitment and leap for most people. And not only that, but I think it's a more appropriate way for the average person to actually manage the stress too. It's a 30 minute or I mean a 60 minute workout, 45, 60 minute workout, sometimes can easily tip somebody over with that stress bucket that we were talking about earlier. Versus if they're just doing two exercises a day, it tends to manage that a lot easier for them. Because you could get, you can get after kind of two work, two exercises and be done and still not really overdo the intensity because it's just two exercises. And then that way too, you get that same amount of volume because you spread it out throughout the week. So it's not like you're missing out on, you know, the volume aspect of it, but you're allowing your body that amount of time extra to recover between. So when you go to approach the next workout, it's like you got more energy, you got more focus. And yeah, it removes a lot of barriers in terms of time restraints. For our, from our experience, it's easier for the average person to find 15 minutes a day than it is for them to find 45 minutes or 60 minutes twice a week. It's just easier. So that's number one. Number two, you're going to miss workouts. Okay, everybody. Fact. You're going to miss workouts. You're not going to be perfect. If you do two workouts a week and you miss one workout, 50% of your workouts is gone. If you're doing 15 minutes a day and you miss two workouts, you've still done a majority of those workouts. So it's not workouts. You've still done more than had you missed one of the other workouts. Then you guys are talking about fatigue and stress. So there is a total stress throughout the week, but then there's cumulative within the workout. So when I'm doing two exercises, I don't get that cumulative stress like I would if I did all of it or most of it in a single workout. So in our experience, what we're finding is when people do like our maps 15 program, which is 15 minutes a day, they get better results than even when they were doing the same amount of volume in two workouts. They get better results, the more consistent, more effectively, they're stronger, better fat loss, everything works a lot better. So a little bit every day. Here's the other thing I like about it. You talked about the habit building. Working out does make the rest of the day better. Okay. In the short term, you get a little energy boost. You feel good if it's appropriate. It makes you happier. When I, when I, we've observed with people who do 15 minutes a day is that the rest of the behaviors later on tend to reflect the fact that they feel better. And the fact that they worked out. So what tends to happen naturally is diet gets a little bit better. They have more energy and they move more on those days as well, which of course contributes to the fact that to, to their goals, which is, which is great. Yeah. And I, this can come off like we are speaking to the audience that is just trying to get started or just start to build consistency, uh, and beginner, but this is how I train. I mean, this, I, I typically, even though I, I dip in and out of all the different types of like ways that we practice, I'm not going to program, I find myself more consistently training in this kind of 15-minute style. It's so conducive for my lifestyle. It's easy to commit to. And I'm so blown away by how well my body, even as an advanced, consistent type of lifter, whatever category you would throw me in. And so I just want to make that clear because I think sometimes people hear this message, because we've been labeled as this, oh, those guys are great for beginners. You know what I'm saying? It's like, no, even if you're somebody who's been training for a really long time, this is incredible. Here's how this would work. The same protocol would work fine for a beginner. It would also work fine for someone who's advanced. Here's what it would look like. So we'll take, imagine a guy who's totally deconditioned, right? He hasn't worked out for years, works at a desk job. And today's workout calls for squats and bench press, let's say, squats and bench press. So when he goes to do squats, look, he's doing 100 pounds. 100 pounds is all he could do. Because he's just getting started. And when he's bench pressing, maybe he can bench press 60 pounds or something like that. He's just getting started. Here's the advanced version of that guy. Same workout. He's squatting 300 pounds, but he's bench pressing 200 pounds. That's the difference. The workout's the same. He's just lifting more weight. So the progress is built in by how you scale the weights that you're using. It's not that he needs to work out longer. It's that he's lifting more weight. So when you see someone who's training this way and who's advanced, they're just a lot stronger. That's all. When you see a beginner who's trained this way, they're just not as strong. That's right. And that's how this workout works for both categories. Here's a second point with this. So you're like, okay, I'm doing two lifts a day. Which exercises do I do? The ones that matter. Yeah. You do the exercises that matter. By the way, this is another thing. Speaking of my own personal experience that I have found that's interesting is that it forces me to choose those ones. When I would go to the gym for an hour, I'm guilty of this. I'm guilty of starting my workout with one or two compound lifts, and then the rest of the hour, or like machines I like to do, or kind of these other exercises. Does it feel a little better? Some, yeah, isolation exercises. But really when I were to, if I were to, to criticize my own programming and workout, you know, the, the real heavy lifting or the real movers in body composition change that I'm doing is really in the first couple lifts. And the rest are kind of fillers for the rest of that time there. And so when you distill a workout to just two exercises a day, you're, you, it's, you're forced in a way. And obviously we programmed it. So you would be, if you were following our program, we did it for you. But I mean, even as somebody who was choosing my exercise, I just choose the two best lifts, which are compound lifts. And so I have found that I like that for that reason too, is I kind of cut out all the fluff in my workouts. And I'm literally doing the things that are the biggest bang for your buck. A hundred percent. So compound lifts, compound lifts are exercises that require two, that are moving two joints. They're called big gross motor movements. Most bang for your buck. So an example is like, I want to work out my quads. I could do leg extensions or barbell squats. Well, barbell squats for the same time spent, you know, same amount of sets, way more effective at not just building my quads, but my hamstrings and my glutes. Whereas the leg extension will do a little bit to my quads, nothing for my hamstrings and my glutes. So pick compound lifts when you're working out this way. Here's the third thing. Don't train to failure. Lifting to failure. So if people aren't familiar, lifting to failure is you lift a weight until you can't lift it anymore. So if you lift a weight until you can't lift it anymore, you're going to have to train to failure. So I do 10 reps and that's it. I can't do an 11th rep. So I have to train to failure. This is one of the, uh, and by the way, the data now we've got great studies and data on failure training versus, uh, what we call leaving two in the tank, right? So the comparison would be 10 reps would be failure versus just doing eight reps. So eight reps with the same rate that I could wait, that I could do 10 reps versus doing all 10. Okay. So one of them, I'm doing two more reps, but I go to failure. Then when I do eight and I stopped two reps short, here's what we find in the data and the short term, no difference. And the short term, same amount of muscle, same progress. As you extend that out, the going to fail your crowd, their body starts to get fried, uh, and they start to overreach. So failure is too much intensity for most people, most of the time, and it doesn't produce better results. So the third point here with this is you don't train to failure. Now you train hard, but you, you stop all of your sets, two reps short of failure, and you'll get better results, far better results that way. It took me a long time for me to figure this piece out. Cause there's this, there is this almost addiction to somebody who's trained this way, uh, to want to push that way. Cause you, you feel the pump, you feel the soreness. You feel like I can do more. It took a lot of discipline to go back off of that, but the results were so much better when I, when I learned to do this. And that doesn't mean there's never a place for that. It's never a place for that. So you're going to see strength gains, uh, pretty continually for a while just by getting good at the, the, the exercises, eating what you're supposed to eat, focusing on rest. And then even the advanced lifter, if you're scaling down to something like this, like pulling back on those failure training days makes a massive difference. So here's what we did. We have a maps 15 program. It's 15 minutes a day, by the way, in that program, there's a version that requires almost no equipment. And then there's a version we're using free weights. So you could do either one free weights or the one that requires almost no equipment. And then there's a version that requires almost no equipment. I believe it's a suspension trainer in it. And then we have another program called maps anywhere. which can be done anywhere, which requires almost no equipment as well. So here's what we're doing because of this episode. If you get one, you get the other one for free. So buy one, get one free. You get MAPS 15. It's an everyday program, almost every day, six days a week, 15 minutes a day. After you're done, you have MAPS anywhere to follow. It's this wonderful combination of programs that for most people is going to produce some of the best results that they've ever had. You go to MAPSbogo.com to get that. You can also find MindPump on Instagram. If you want to talk to us, go to MindPump Media. We'll see you there. Thank you for listening to MindPump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Super Bundle includes MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, and MAPS Aesthetic. Nine months of Facebook. Based expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. 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