How To Safely Increase Your Summer Workouts Intensity | Mind Pump 2355

this is mind po right today's episode we talk about how to safely increase the intensity of your summer workouts to get better results we actually give you six things to focus on with this by the way because of this episode and we're talking about intensity we're talking about getting results in a short period of time Maps hit it's one of our most popular high-intensity programs actually hit stands for high-intensity interval training maps hit will be 50% off with this episode we also put our Prime Pro bundle 50% off to help you warm up properly prime your body properly so you don't hurt yourself so you can find those both at Maps Fitness products.com but you have to use the code safety 50 now this episode is brought to you by sponsor vori vori makes athleisure wear that is comfortable it looks good it lasts a long time you already know who they are right they're all over the place now incredible stuff some of the best looking athle Weare you'll find anywhere and if you use our link you'll get 20% off go to VOR cl.com that's v r io.com M pump all right here comes the show all right it's common knowledge that one of the ways to ramp up results get faster fat loss see more results in the mirror is to work out harder this is true however you can definitely do it wrong and go backwards that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode how to ramp up the intensity the right way to get the best results yeah I mean this is definitely the goto for anybody on Instagram promoting Fitness and getting uh a lot of awesome results which you can get awesome results but there's definitely caveats to ramping up your intensity yeah so it's one of the components of workout programming so a lot of people might not understand like what programming entails but programming is literally all of the components that make your workout your workout so it's like the exercises the Reps the sets the tempo the intensity the frequency and then there's there's other factors to look into we don't have to get into all of the complexities cuz workout programming can be intensity is the sexiest though so it's well it's it's the button everybody wants to hit right it's the I'll just do what I'm doing and do it harder now it's true that increasing intensity is one of the fastest if done properly it's one of the fastest ways to get faster results it's one of the easiest ways I should say or simplest ways to get fast results totally true it's also however one of the easiest ways to overtrain um when you look at frequency meaning how often you work out volume how long you work out and intensity which is how hard you work out intensity will overtrain you the fastest I mean I could take somebody and I can overtrain them in 10 minutes by making them do something so intense um that they can't move anymore volume and frequency not so much so intensity although it's a it's one of those factors that you can you know you can manipulate to maximize results it's also one you need to be very careful for and it's the one that's most likely I would say in my experience I love your opinion on this Justin it's it's the one that's most likely overdone yeah I would say it's it's overdone the most just because I think it's so easy to um and quick in terms of like if I want to add more load that's going to be more intense if I want to move faster that's going to be more intense it's and it doesn't really take a lot to like increase that intensity whereas volume's something like you know is you're going to take a little bit longer to get through the sets get through the Reps um and it it's not something that creeps up on you quite as fast as as intensity does uh and also two with intensity there's just that fine line of where uh you know it could really get away from you to to where you could get injured and there's all these other sort of risks uh involved with cranking the intensity up versus some of the other metrics yeah and you know just a side not if you do more than is necessary to to set the wheels in motion uh to get your to adapt right adaptation meaning building muscle burning body fat getting stronger more stamina endurance right if you do more than is necessary to get that to move forward what starts to happen is you start to compromise your body's ability to recover and adapt meaning even if there is a 2% increase in let's say the signal that your body gets to build muscle with a 10% increase in intensity it may and it typically does come alongside a 15% reduction and recover or whatever so then that 2% increase in the signal is not only not effective it's actually a negative when you count the fact that you can't recovers fast so so that's what we're talking about when we're talking about overtraining it's doing more than is necessary to elicit the maximum results anything over that and now you're slowing things down and if you go even too far you actually start to go backwards well I also think it's it's elusive I think that um people have this misconception about what they're capable of doing going into the workout in terms of what they've been able to do in the past but let's say now there's been months in between there's been years in between um your your body is at a different state in terms of what it can tolerate and I think that this is where it gets um it gets away from you pretty quickly when you start to realize that oh wow my my body's not performing quite like it used to uh and you feel like you should be able to do this and so you kind of power through it but uh in a sense you should have gone a lot less and scaled back uh going into that workout yeah you know what's interesting too Justin is especially when you look at highlevel uh strength coaches where you know I would I would say the best workout programming um you got to give it to strength coaches right because their their pay or if they succeed or not is determined by performance improvements not just looking better in the mirror because you can kind of mess around with that with diet and stuff but rather are my athletes faster or stronger is my powerlifting athlete lifting more my Olympic a athlete lifting more if they are then my programming is on point if they're not then I got to look at my programming when you look at highlevel strength coaches they are experts at managing intensity MH now there's of course the exercises and again the frequency and the sets and the Reps but really the the magic is in this really powerful Factor called intensity which if you manipulate it right you can get exceptional results if you misuse intensity though um it's like a it's like a nuke like you place in the wrong place you blow everything up and you start going backwards so how you manipulate intensity is so so important and uh this is an important conversation because especially now that summer is here essentially this is what people tend to do they tend to say oh no I'm going to take my shirt off or I'm going to be a bikini let's just ramp up intensity and let's just do it across the board and then their body actually starts to regress starts to plateau and they can't figure out what's going on and then what they do is reach for intensity again well maybe I need to work out even harder and then you start spinning your tires in the dirt and then you either quit or you hurt yourself which tends to be case I I do do you want to go ahead and do the quote Adam's quote uh for him do the least amount of work to elicit the most amount of change yeah and this is why he says that all the time and why that holds true is you know especially looking at intensity um it's better to have that Minds and approach going into it because we have to find that right dose we have to find the right intensity uh and if you do that uh with the intention of really like squeezing that threshold like you're a lot more likely to overe exceed that threshold uh than you are to build upon that and have um you know something to uh to gauge that going into the next workout you might have actually like got to the point where uh you have to actually recover even more so it affects your next workout substantially yeah now you're looking at your whole program and you're now going backwards or you're doing more work for the same results which in my um you know my opinion is also going backwards today's giveaway on YouTube is Maps anabolic advanc to enter to win leave a comment below this video in the first 24 hours that we drop it subscribe to this Channel and turn on notifications and then if you win we'll let you know in the comment section now this episode was brought to you by a sponsor vori vori makes at leisure wear that is comfortable it looks good it lasts a long time you already know who they are right they're all over the place now incredible stuff some of the best looking ath leaderware you'll find anywhere and if you use our link you'll get 20% off go to VOR cl.com that's V rico.com pump also for this episode because of this episode we are putting uh two things on sale 50% off so in today's episode we talk about intensity had to ramp it up the right way so we're putting our high-intensity interval training on on salale 50% off so Maps hit half off and our Prime Pro bundle which teaches you how to prime your body so you don't hurt yourself for these intense workouts we're going to make that also 50% off if you're interested just click on the link at the top of the description below all right here comes the show I'd say the first thing to focus on when you're looking at increasing the intensity because again I want to be very clear if you do this right it's the fastest way to get results in a short period of time is to manipulate intensity it's not a forever thing you can't keep doing this forever but in a short period of time you'll get great results if you do this right and the first thing to focus on is on in increasing intensity judiciously meaning here's what people tend to do let's say you work out four days a week and you train with a certain level of intensity let's say on a scale of 1 to 10 you train at a seven okay meaning your your your your perceived exertion or perceived intensity to seven and then you're like oh my God summer's coming up so then you make every workout of 10 every workout you don't take that like some workouts and say you know I'm always at a seven on everything so what I'm going to do is once a week I'm going to be at a 10 once a week I'm going to be at eight and then the other two days a week I'm going to be back at a seven it's like no everything hard all the time now because they don't uh increase it judiciously they take it and they hammer it towards everything there's nothing that'll get you to overtrain faster than jacking up your intensity across the board all the way across um and without doing it judiciously it's like a very quick way to get your body to Plateau so you want to look at your routine your workout and if you increase the intensity in one workout over what you did before in that one workout then you've done it you've already increased the intensity incremental incremental just just small steps uh and then reassess that uh going into your next workout but yeah there's there's also other ways to to manipulate that so it's not always based around load which I think that a lot of people kind of get stuck with that idea that the only way to increase these exercises uh intensi is to just add more weight where you know we can mess with the tempo we can mess uh with the velocity we can mess you know with other factors rest periods that uh we can shorten that yeah so now uh the demand's a little more intense and um you know it's also a safer way to approach it yeah and I mean to take it another step further I can even go back and regress as much as this I work out four days a week seven is the intensity on a scale of 1 to 10 I'm just going to go two exercises in my workouts up to a 10 and then the rest is a seven so let's say typically do five exercises in your workout and you stop you know two or three reps short of failure um with those typically you could say you know what with this one exercise I'm going to go to failure with this one set and so you're in other words judiciously meaning you imply you increase the intensity very carefully in one or two parts and then wait and see what happens doing it all all at once is again it's a fast track to no Gainsville it's a fast track towards getting no results so be very judicious with that increase uh in intensity the next point is that these these increases in intensity should be done for short periods of time um and I this took me so long to learn with my body because what what I would always do is I would get I start to feel good I'm getting good sleep I'm on a good diet Everything feels good and I'd be like you know what I'm going to go for it and then I would do that I would jack up the intensity of my workout and I'd get faster results I'd get stronger oh my God this is working but then what would happen is rather than doing it for two or three weeks and then backing off as I would do it until it was obvious that I was going backwards it's like I I I got stronger for two to three weeks in a row and I kept going uh oh I didn't get stronger this week all right I'm going to try again real hard uh oh not getting stronger keep going real hard now I'm going backwards what the hell's happening right I didn't I didn't cut it short I went way past its expiration well it's hard cuz it's it's somewhat addictive cuz you're like wow I just cranked up the intensity and it's working you know and I am getting stronger and um but there is that that moment where it it it fades like you're not going to have that same awesome result uh you know if you extend that out uh past that sort of window and so to to be ahead of that uh is to be smarter in your training and to to realize that um it this is a major factor in terms of like gaining results but we have to be smart about planning ahead and then moving on uh in order to maintain those effects you just received you know what this made me think of I got an analogy I hope this works Justin hope you hope this works you appreciate this but it's like you're playing a racing game a video game with a car and you're on a track and you have three boosts that you could do right where you hit a special button you get a boost of power a turbo but don't use them all up at once because then you run out and use it at the right time when you're on the track in other words don't use it on the turn or you'll just go off the track you wait till you're on the straightaway to use the Boost and then when you're doing the turns you slow down and then you got the straightaway and you so this is how you should use intensity if you look at your whole Year's worth of training most of it is going around those turns and you're cruising and then you get those straightaways and that's when you hit the intensity button that's why it should be for short periods of time so typically I'll recommend and I used to recommend to clients and this is now what I do with myself when I ramp up the intensity it's typically for 2 to four weeks at a time and then I back off for a good 2 to four weeks and then do it again that stepladder approach produces far better results in both the short term and the long term than hitting the intensity until the signs are so obvious that I need to break that I actually have to take uh a week off the next point is when you're ramping up anything in your workout especially intensity make sure your sleep and diet are on point because your body's ability to tolerate stress is greatly greatly dictated by the overall stress in your life in your life which includes things like sleep diet stress lifestyle in other words if I'm working out so you know this hard I have to make sure that the rest of my life is going to allow me to work out this hard or this much harder so what you don't want to do is I'm going to ramp up the intensity during a period of time when my sleep is bad or during a period of time just got a new job yes yes or my diet's bad not doing well at school yeah or I'm cutting so much that my calories are so low now I'm going to beat myself up so you what you want to do when you do something like this is you want to make sure everything is lined up so that that increased intensity doesn't become overwhelming um on the body um and you see this now with even with with athletes you're starting to see this with athletes where coaches are training athletes and they're like okay this is this is when the workouts are getting the hardest get good sleep get good diet I know you coached your athletes around this as well where you really made sure that they ate and got oh such a priority yeah especially if you are in that point where we're we're testing we're we're pressing we're cranking that intensity up like all the other emphasis outside of training has to be on rest recovery sleep uh eating proper like whole foods that are going to nourish and also help to rebuild and restore uh energy going into you know the workouts coming up because we have to plan it going into not just this workout that we're trying to accomplish for the day but it's it's this whole cycle of intensity that we have to maintain and manage and the only way to do that is to to to make sure we we really emphasize sleep and Recovery yeah the way I like to look at it is um the harder you your workouts go the harder or more Focus you need to put on your ability to recover so if I'm placing a lot of focus on the intensity of my workouts that will only work if I can place an equal amount of intensity and focus on my ability to recover on my sleep and my diet if I don't do that then what happens is I overwhelm my body's ability to deal with this additional intensity and then again I go backwards and there's almost nothing more frustrating in the world than working out harder and getting worse results right that's like uh not only is it a waste of time it feels like a waste of time it's disheartening and I would argue it's one of the number one reasons why people stop working out because they start to feel like their investment is not giving them any returns it's like oh my God I'm I'm training so hard what's the point I'm working so hard and I'm not like I'm not receiving those type of gains I was hoping for right now something else to consider when you're doing especially with strength training when you're increasing the intensity is that the recovery demands uh of different exercises and methods or or tools of resistance uh increasing the intensity on those each one of those has a different Demand on the body's ability to recover okay so to give an example generally speaking harder workouts with free weights will require more recovery than harder workouts with machines okay so to give an example if I were to go to failure on barbell squats that would equal failure on probably two lower body exercises combined in other words I can handle more intensity with machines than they can with free weights and that has to do with just the fact that free weights require stability and balance they tend to beat up the body more um so you do less of them to get the same result type of deal this is why you tend to hear us talk about how we favor free weights same thing for compound lifts versus isolation lifts right uh reverse grip pull-ups or supernat grip pull-ups um if I go to failure on that that is going to hammer my body more than going to failure on curls so compound lifts are just damage the body more require more recovery than isolation lifts so consider this when you look at your workout and you're saying okay I'm going to apply more so for example if I'm looking at my workout and I'm going to do three compound lifts two of them are free weights one is machine then I'm going to do you know three isolation lifts and I'm like okay um I'm going to up my intensity well here's my choices one of my compound free weight lifts I can make harder or I can make two of the isolation lifts harder or I could make the machine one a compound lift and one of the is you have to consider uh the exercises themselves and what they do to the body when you bump on poeny they're not created it's almost like where you allocate that intensified energy you know and yeah so there the the central nervous system is going to get taxed a lot more with free weights especially compound lifts and free weights and so to which but they're so beneficial and you get so much bang for your buck with those lifts that you do want to consider that but uh the rest of your workout should reflect maybe a little bit less of the intense uh energy in that direction but if you structure your workout where it's like okay well there's other ones single joint lifts and and some machines in there we can crank that intensity can add um you know more exercises that we intensify because you know overall we're not going to get quite as taxed totally uh the next thing to consider is that you intensity and volume so intensity is how hard remember you work out volume is the total amount of work that you do in your workout they should be inversely related in other words the harder I work out the the longer I can't work out okay I think that makes sense right think about running right the harder you sprint the the the shorter the distance you can run the the if I run at a low intensity Pace I can run much further the same thing should be true with your strength training when you ramp up the intensity you probably should start to bring the volume down or to put differently the most intense freee sorry the most intense strength training workouts tend to be the shortest and the less the least intense strength training workouts tend to be the longest what you don't want to do and here's where everybody screws up is they people r ramp up the intensity and the volume at the same time yeah Summer's here I'm not going to just work out harder do all at once I'm also going to work out much longer and this is again this is a a fast track towards uh no results so you got to look at those frequency I would put in the volume Camp as well um especially if you look at like if you count it towards your total volume uh for the week although I will say with frequency frequency is pretty interesting because when you bring the intensity down low enough you could work out very very frequ this by the way just highlights M just how impactful intensity is um on the body I remember as a trainer when this first occurred to me where it really started to make sense cuz when I was an early trainer I over applied intensity I think most trainers do right you just you just beat everybody up right and then I started to realize like man I could if I drop the intensity I can train people a lot more appropriately and they'll get better results and then I remember this one trainer gave me this great example and he said he said you know over intensity overt trins people faster than anything and I looked at I said what are you talking about he goes if I took someone off the street right now I could make them work out too hard really really quickly faster than I can make them work out too long and faster than I can do too much frequency that'll overwhelm the body and I thought holy cow that's totally true so yeah when you ramp when you bring that intensity up bring the volume down and I tend to you know uh when I do this I like failure for me is typically onethird of the total volume is what I'll end up doing if I start to go to failure I cut out two-thirds of the volume well it's intering we you know you kind of brought up uh even with um strength athletes and um you know like old Soviet kind of studies we refer to every now and then like how they used to train and frequency is a major part of that like because it's it's a high skill like so these Olympic lifts are very high skill uh so you need a lot of practice and so you need to add frequencies a major factor there however intensity you know to be used would interrupt that process and they'll be able to test themselves out and see how strong they're actually getting and so you want to be able to press on intensity but it's again even in that situation it's even shorter window of intensity because of the fact that you know frequency is such uh like intensity really doesn't match well with frequency no especially not with volume and lastly I'll say this is that the harder a workout is the more likely you are or should I say the risk of injury um uh goes up with the intensity okay why is that well if you have trouble maintaining good form with low intensity you could basically throw your form out the window when things get really hard form breaks down under fatigue this is just a fact everybody knows this any technique that you do uh you could write with a pencil if I fatigue your hand enough your handwriting goes out the window fatigue is the enemy of form that's right so when your intensity goes through the roof then your deviations of form and technique and stability start to become more and more of a challenge and injury starts to go up this is one of the biggest I would say factors to consider when you're ramping up the intensity besides recovery which is what we've been talking about is risk of injury this is why priming is so if you're going to do a really hard workout or you're going to really exert yourself priming becomes absolutely crucial because priming will help ensure proper connection to to ranges of motion that you're going to be in it's going to ensure stability it's going to ensure or help ensure better recruitment patterns while while you're doing those exercises because it's you you want to have a higher level of care going into an intense workout than you would and I don't think I need to make this case too much right it's like you know go go for a Leisure Leisure stroll or go sprinting as hard as you can which one is more likely to hurt you yeah right so Prime properly yeah and I mean this this kind of also points back to you know the also ramping up recovery ramping up you know the the good quality food that you're eating in between well we need to also like overemphasize the fact that yeah we we have to set ourselves up for the best quality recruitment patterns we can apply uh into the workout because uh the margin of error is definitely decreased once we crank our intensity level up and so we don't want any leak in performance even if it's just a performance perspective but also too uh whenever we fatigue sets in uh form starts to to crumble and to to be able to maintain that and maintain that uh uh good postural positions and biomechanics it starts with the setup and and priming yourself appropriately yeah so to give like a like a very simple example um a bench press we'll use a bench press as an example it's very important for shoulder Health in a bench press to keep your shoulder blades uh pressed down and back so you want to have kind of your shoulder blades pinned back and you want them depressed this is like the the the bench press position you want a nice strong chest out slight arch in the low back hips stay on the bench and you want to maintain this shoulder this tight shoulder position as you bench well if you're somebody that lacks a little shoulder stability let's say you have forward shoulder um priming would you know priming for that particular individual would involve some shoulder Mobility maybe some prone Cobra or some basic rows just to get the feel of what the shoulders should feel like when they're pinned down and back now what happens when I'm in that bench prep press position I'm much better connected to that proper and stable position and now what I can do is I can push intensity within good form because when I deviate out of it it becomes apparent that's what priming does priming makes bad technique or bad movement more apparent so you could stop the set or correct that's what prime so a lot of people confuse priming they say oh well what do you mean it it warms up or reconnects all your muscles are connected or what no no no it's literally like getting getting used to the movement it's like doing a dance move sequencing it properly that's right and so then then when you move outside of it a couple degrees you could tell like uhuh no my shoulder's supposed to be right here this is how because I've primed properly and so now your risk of injury goes down versus just jumping under the bar not getting that prime or that warmup or even doing a general warmup right a generic General warm-up where you can't I mean how many times have you trained a client where you go up to them and go okay your left shoulder's raised up or here tilt your hips away they don't even know they don't even know that they're outside of proper form they're just pushing and it's the priming that helps helps put them in that position helps the position or moving outside of that position become apparent and that lowers the risk of injury so it's extremely important that you prime properly before hard uh workouts look because of this episode because we're talking about doing this for summer here's what we did we took one of our most intense workout programs Maps hit hit stands for high-intensity interval training and we made it 50% off for this episode we also made our Prime Pro bundle that includes two of our priming programs that teach you how to prime different areas of your body uh based on how your body moves that's also 50% off so you can find those both at Maps Fitness products.com but you have to use this code this code is only for this episode safety 50 so safety 50 at Maps Fitness products.com will get you $50 off again Maps hit or the prime Pro bundle [Music] he [Music]