How To Get Faster and More Powerful without Getting Hurt | Mind Pump 2925

Look, being able to use your gym strength in the real world makes life awesome, but sometimes gym strength doesn't translate and may actually make you more prone to injury. Today, we're going to show you how to have real-world strength, speed, and power without hurting yourself. We're going to talk about how to get faster and more powerful. Everybody goes to the gym to look better. That's just to be honest. That's the number one goal. But being more fit without that fitness really translating to the real world is a travesty. To take it a step further, you can train yourself in the gym in a way to where you're consistent, you're improving in the gym, but you actually increase your risk of injury because the kind of strength that you're building doesn't translate to how strength tends to get applied in the real world. This can be a real problem. It's really frustrating, by the way, for people. This is like you work out all the time, then you go to the park, you throw a Frisbee or a baseball, shoulder hurts, or you go play a pickup game of basketball. You haven't played basketball in a few years and you hurt something. It's like, what the heck, man? I work out in the gym all the time. I'm strong. I feel like I'm fit, but it's just not translating. Or worse, I've had clients like this where they go reach down to pick up a shampoo bottle or they grab their kid and they throw their back out. And this is a real thing. Really, this has to do with how you train. There is a way to train that will not just give you great results in terms of how you look, but it'll improve your real world fitness. It'll improve your quality of life because you can play more and do all those things in the real world without hurting yourself. This has been like my soapbox forever. It's mainly just people don't really consider the fact that how you train does affect how you function and where that strength applies. You can look great and you can look awesome, but be dysfunctional. It's going to be problematic down the road. It's going to increase in terms of tightness and pain. It all can be avoided. You can live in both worlds. You can have that aesthetic physique that's something desirable, but also, too, you just have to consider we have to implement ways where you're going to train your joints correctly so that way they get exposure to these angles and you get strong in these angles and you're able to avoid long-term pain discomfort. I feel like this is one of my biggest regrets in the last decade is being so hyper-focused on strength and aesthetics that I've neglected so much of this. I feel like a lot of that was made really obvious in the last couple years because I've had so many injuries. I was doing sport, so it wasn't like I was picking up a shampoo bottle, but I'd gotten so strong in the sagittal plane that I had neglected a lot of my training to bulletproof those joints and get strong in multiple directions. Then when I go do something that I've loved to do my whole life because I played that sport as a kid or wakeboarded behind a boat, I had all these injuries and I know exactly why. I know. I think this is even worse. I've made this case in the podcast before that I almost think because I have buddies of mine that we're all the same age and we all grew up doing these things and they have gotten hurt less doing some of this stuff and I'm the fitness guy. It's extra frustrating for me. They don't do anything for strength training, so they didn't get really strong in a certain direction. I almost feel like I've done more harm than good in some areas by getting so strong in one direction. It's like I built up all this horsepower in this car. I built the engine. Potential to exceed the threshold is a lot higher. But I didn't do enough work on reinforcing the suspension and the frame and everything else. My brain says, oh, I'm strong enough and capable to do all these things and I go to do it and I'm explosive and then that's where stuff went wrong. It's so funny. I had a buddy, you just made me remember this a long time ago. It was one of those pickup trucks from the eighties that people tend to soup up to make really fast. I'm not super familiar with cars, but he bought a truck that oftentimes people will use to drag race. What he did is he put an engine in there that was really, really powerful, but he didn't reinforce the frame and he twisted the frame. He took off all that horsepower, hit the frame. The frame wasn't strong enough to support it and it literally twisted the frame of the car to the point where he had to go in and spend all this money on repairing and then reinforcing. You mentioned joints. It's not just your joints, it's also your muscles. This is where it gets really weird. Your muscles can get really strong in a particular way, but not have the ability to decelerate or relax when they need to or contract quickly. And this can increase your risk of injury for like pulls and strains or tears that happened to me. So, uh, and like you Adam, this is a huge regret for me. I think part of it is I took for granted when I was younger. Um, I wasn't a big sports guy. I did, you know, judo wrestling, that kind of stuff. But if I ever wanted to do something, I just kind of pick it up when I was younger. And then as an adult, you don't really have tons of opportunities unless you go out and do it. So I just didn't do it for a while. Um, but I've been lifting weight this whole time. Um, and I was in Hawaii and my daughter, my 16 year old daughter who plays, uh, she was playing soccer at the time, wanted to race me. And we took off once and I beat her, but she's like, let's go. I'll go even faster. So the second time around, I said, I'm going to go as fast as I can. And I tore my hamstring. Now keep in mind, I'm a guy that could deadlift 600 pounds, meaning my hamstrings are tremendously strong because hamstrings are one of the main muscles in a deadlift. It's a posterior chain exercise. And yet running for less than 50 yards, I tore my hamstring. How is that even possible? Well, it's possible because I'm generating all this force. And when I extend my leg, my hamstring doesn't know how to relax fast enough to allow my leg to come forward. And so it would remain tight. I kick my leg forward, hamstring tore. Um, and this is really frustrating again, coming from someone who's the gym guy, who's the fitness guy. And it's 100% a result of my lack of training properly. And now here's the kicker. Had I trained properly, which now I'm starting to incorporate, but had I trained properly, I would have compromised zero aesthetics. This is where I think the challenge or where the confusion comes from. People think that in order to train for the, you know, for your gym strength to translate into the real world, well, now I'm going to compromise aesthetics. So I got to move away from the exercises that make me look good or give me the shape I want because I had to focus on this quote unquote functional correctional stuff. And so, okay, fine. I'm going to sacrifice some aesthetics for, uh, performance. Not true, not true at all. Now you could train pure performance, which is not even what we're talking about. What we're going to talk about is how you could train the way you train, but inject, uh, and implement, uh, styles of training that'll make your gym strength real world strength. That'll make it so that when you go in the real world, um, you can do the things, uh, that you want to be able to do and not hurt yourself, uh, where you're actually strong in the real sense. Um, there's two, there's two main pieces. Uh, I'll say two or three main keys to training this way. And these are the three things that people lack in their training. Traditional strength training traditionally, uh, stays away from three things. Uh, some of them, they stay away from more than others. One of them is explosive training. You find almost no explosive style training in traditional strength training routines, explosive straining training. All it's trying to do is get you to take your strength and be able to move it quickly, which by the way, in the real world, there's two ways you're gonna use your strength. One is the traditional kind of grinding. I'm picking up the couch. The other one is, Oh, my kid's running across the street. I got to grab him real fast, right? Or something's falling off the shelf. I got to grab it. I don't need a lot of load to produce that type of tree. So it's, it's, it's speed strength. And then, you know, from an athlete's perspective, speed strength is what it really matters, matters the most, um, in athletics, but it also matters a lot in the real world. Right now you could buy maps performance and map symmetry for the price of one. It's a BOGO buy one, get one free. And this is true for the top 10 maps programs. Go to maps BOGO.com. Now this episode is brought to you by a sponsor Z biotics. So Z biotics is a genetically modified probiotic. Okay. So it's live bacteria. It's a probiotic. You drink it. Now these bacteria were designed essentially to break down acetaldehyde. All right. What's acetaldehyde. We'll check it out. When you drink alcohol, one of the negative by-products of alcohol is acetaldehyde. Now your liver has no problem breaking this down unless you drink way too much, but some acetaldehyde gets released in the gut. So the liver can't detoxify it and it gets in your bloodstream. And this makes us feel like crap makes us feel terrible. Well, Z biotics is the only pre alcohol drink that works on this. It's the only one on the market that actually does this. It's patent pending. There's nothing else like it. Guys, girls, it works. Try it. Drink a Z biotics. Go out with your friends. See how you feel the next day. Go to zbiotics.com slash mindpump26. That's zbiotics.com slash mindpump26. Use the code mindpump26 and get 15% off. The second thing that is often neglected is unilateral training. When you see unilateral training, so unilateral training for people aren't familiar is where I'm training one arm or one leg at a time. So bilateral is both arms or both legs. Unilateral is one arm or one leg. So an example of bilateral would be for upper body would be like a bench press. Unilateral would be like a one arm dumbbell chest press. Okay. When you see unilateral training in traditional strength training, it's always thrown in as an afterthought. It's not really a focus of training. And unilateral training is a remarkable way of identifying, isolating, and correcting imbalances between the right and left side. It's a really, it's an awesome way. Actually, it's a very easy way to do some, to do correctional exercise. You don't even need to know much about correctional exercise, but doing focused, you know, blocks of training on unilateral training will oftentimes solve many of those issues. And then, so you have explosive training, unilateral training. And then the third thing that is neglected are, is training in different planes. So Adam mentioned something that, you know, coaches and trainers refer to as a sagittal plane. Sagittal plane is like your deadlift, your squat, you know, things in front of you. But there's also- Forward and back. There's also, you know, moving laterally. There's rotating and twisting. And very few exercises that we do strengthen our bodies, especially laterally. Like think about how many lateral exercises that you'll find in traditional strength training workouts. Very little. Not a lot. Rotation. Rotation is often, the extent of rotation in programs is typically like an oblique exercise. And you'll do it once a week, maybe. A lot of people even skip that. And you're doing a couple sets. So when you, when you're, those three things, when you lack those three things, what happens is you, you become really good at this one expression of strength, but you lack being able to move quickly. You lack a balance between the right and left side, and you lack being able to move in different planes. And so when you go in the real world, okay? Think about the real world. How many times do you need to express strength quickly? Well, anytime you play any kind of a game with anyone, you're going to have to express speed. Think about when you have to express strength unilaterally. All the time. All the time. One leg is forward while one leg is back, or you're holding something with one hand or whatever. All the time. Now think about all the times you're caught off guard and you have to move laterally or rotate all the time. So what happens is you create this huge gap between those things and your traditional strength training, and you become fit and prone to injury. This is a terrible place to be. Fit and prone to injury. It's very frustrating. If you're listening to this, you've probably experienced this where you're just befuddled. What happened to me? I thought I was strong. I thought it was fit. How did I hurt myself playing a super, a silly game of basketball or throwing the baseball with my kid or going for a light jog? What is going on here? What's happening here is that discrepancy. Well, this is why if you've listened long enough or listened to when we answer live callers, we almost always, at least I'd say once a batch to- 25% of the time. Yeah. We are recommending that somebody, at least once a year, you are running a symmetry or a performance type of a program within the rotation of whatever your goal is. I don't care if you're a power lifter. I don't care if you're a bodybuilder. If you're an athlete, if you're just looking for aesthetics, longevity, the whole array, it doesn't matter that everybody should be running at least one of those programs per year just to keep that imbalance. Totally. Because it's that important to real life. And if you go so hard in one direction, performance-wise as far as strength, just getting really strong, or you just want to look really good, you neglect this stuff. And then again, a perfect example of then you are at even a greater risk. Then it doesn't take much and you get hurt doing something so simple that you take for granted. It's just like, oh man, I've done this, gotten behind a boat and wakeboard thousands of times. And to get hurt at such a simple thing, I wasn't doing anything crazy. To add to that, Adam, you even start to get, and I'm sure people listening can identify with this, if you're gym strong, but you lack in those areas, you have a false sense of confidence. No, that's exactly what it is. It's a huge false sense of confidence. I'm like, because from an endurance perspective and just an overall strength, because obviously there's a strength component there too. Just if anyone's ever just held onto a rope behind the boat, that takes good isometric strength to do that. And your legs are in a slight bend, so it takes some quad strength to do it. So I'm good there. And so I look at my peers, my buddies who haven't been doing that much. I'm like, oh, I can do this. And I've done it, like I said, a thousand times. So in my head, I have this false confidence of, oh, I'm strong, more strong than the group that's with me, done this a bunch of times, so I'm overly confident. And then that's all. What it took was just an explosive movement that my body wasn't able to decelerate fast enough and controlled, and then pop, there goes my pec minor. Yeah. I guess even another angle to this, and I will just bring this up. A lot of times I'm trying to sell this to regular gym goers who just love powerlifting or they love bodybuilding, but to really focus on multiple planes and to find these unique exercises that will actually enhance your stability within those bilateral lifts. It's unbelievable what kind of performance output and how much more force you can produce when your body is super stable. And you're only going to provide that if you give it the right stimulus where it's overcoming rotational forces, it's overcoming lateral forces, that becomes obsolete. So now you can just anchor your body, really express that ultimate amount of force. And this is something I learned late in the game that really translated to these enormous PR bumps. Oh no. We have a friend, I won't say too much, I won't say his name, but we have a friend who's one of the world's best lifetime natural deadlifters and had suffered from repeated back injuries, which not uncommon when you're pulling 600, 700 pounds off the ground. And he had to do some correctional exercise to solve some of the issues. And one of the movements that he did, one of the staple movements was tube walking. You'll see power lifters tube walk all the time. Why are they tube walking? It's a light resistance. Because they lack lateral stability. The reason why they're hurting themselves has to do with lateral stability. Now you could solve that or never have that happen, I should say, by training that way right off the gate. Meaning, I'll put it differently, the number one thing that gets in the way of a fitness fanatic's fitness goals. So somebody who's consistent, somebody who never misses the gym. What's the number one thing that gets in the way? Injury. Injury sucks. You hurt yourself. Ah, I can't work out. I can't be consistent. I can't train. The ultimate setback. That's right. And the injury happens because there's a lack in stability. There's a lack in performance in a direction that you just don't have. And so injury is there. And again, I want to be very clear. Training in the way that we're about to talk about does not take away from aesthetics. If we actually look at the big picture, it contributes to aesthetics. Now you've reduced injury time. You've reduced, I can't go to the gym. That time goes away. It's not compromising your current training. It's adding to enhancing your current training. So even if your goal is aesthetics, don't neglect this. Now if your goal is to improve your athletic performance and your goal is to go out and be strong out in the world, just like you in the gym, you're definitely going to live here. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. So here's the first thing. First things first, do a full cycle of unilateral training. Not I throw in a unilateral exercise at the end of my leg workout or the end of my back workout, or I throw it in here and there. No, no. Make it a focus. Make it a focus for like eight weeks. For eight weeks, this is how I'm training. And if most people, if people did this every single year, like you said, Adam, regardless of the goal, if you did unilateral training for six to eight weeks, every single year, you would see a dramatic decrease in injury and an improvement in performance in the gym. Very few people, including myself until we wrote that, because in the past, that's what it looked like, was it would intermittently make it into my routine. It wasn't until we had programmed symmetry before I actually spent that kind of time. And the benefits of dedicating a full phase or two to nothing but unilateral is massive. And I mean, we see the results. I mean, we see the results on these clients that do these DEXA scans before they go into it. It's incredible what we've seen. They build more muscle because when you expose symmetrical imbalances in the body and you train them, your body really tries to balance them out faster, definitely faster than had you not exposed those. And when your body is trying to patch up or, or strengthen an imbalance, you build muscle. So what we see on the DEXA scans are people are writing in fitness fanatics. So already have good muscle and strength. So these aren't beginners. Okay. These are people who've been working out for a while. They do a whole cycle of map symmetry where the vast majority of the program is pure unilateral. And what's cool about DEXA scans is it'll show you lean body mass in your right arm and in your left arm and your right leg and your left leg. And they're gaining three, four pounds of muscle, which is a lot of muscle to gain in two months for somebody who's experienced, but where they're gaining it is in the area that they needed it. So they gained a pound and a half in the right arm and a pound and a half the left, left leg or whatever. So you do, you build muscle as a result. Next is to train in different planes of motion. Are you strengthening your body laterally? Are you strengthening your body with rotation? If not, make sure you put that in your regular programming. Because if you don't then those can become big problems. This is another, again, personal story. I started going back to jujitsu relatively recently. I hadn't done it for almost 20 years and my left hip was just, it just kept hurting. It just, it would just hurt and I'd stretch it and it would hurt. And, you know, I'm a guy that squats and deadlifts and I do Romanians, I do all that stuff. But I knew it was lateral stability. I knew it was because every time I would go try a little lateral stability exercise, I could see a difference between my right and left. And I could just see overall, I'm not good laterally, period. All I did, was on a regular basis now, I do lateral sled drags. Nothing crazy, nothing heavy. I'm just walking across the turf sideways, dragging a sled back and forth. By week three, the hip pain is almost completely gone. It's wild. It was just one thing almost completely took away the pain. Just have to familiarize the body to these movement patterns and, you know, the body, when it's unfamiliar with certain positions and then, you know, where these forces are coming from, how to react appropriately, it's going to overreact. And a lot of times, you know, that's where you're going to get like a lot of the cramps and the knots and, you know, your body's just trying to prevent you from exceeding that limit and, you know, injuring yourself. And so to gradually progressively introduce these movements and familiarize the body to it, you're going to be stronger in those movements. Then you can start loading those movements and then, you know, watch what happens to your overall muscular development. Well, this is especially, you know, exacerbated with somebody like you who can deadlift five, 600 pounds, you know, because when you think about that lateral strength in, you know, relative to what a deadlift looks like is that lateral strength is keeping that weight from shifting left. Those muscles, right, are responsible for keeping- It's just good enough to do that. Yeah, right? And so when you're only doing 100 pounds or 200 pounds deadlifting, it doesn't take that much strength to help stabilize that, especially if you have really beautiful technique for them. You start getting 400 or 500 and just the slightest bit of shift left or right wakes those muscles up that are dormant and that don't get a lot of attention because you're not strength training them. And then that's where all this pain comes from. And that's just an example with the hips and deadlifting. And every joint has got these supporting muscles all the way around them and we tend not to move laterally or rotationally. And so it's important that you include that. If you do that, a lot of the chronic pain that most of your middle-aged people are feeling is weakness. I did a video just recently about that with low back pain. And of course, it gets, you know, Instagram criticism around it like I'm diagnosing the internet. It's like, no, I'm not diagnosing the internet. Just in my experience of working with, you know, hundreds of people that have had chronic low back pain that wasn't suffering from an acute injury, almost always was related to weakness. Weakness and instability somewhere else and more often than not in the hips. Hips and glutes were weak. They were weak and unstable and addressing that stuff, lateral rotational movement supported that and voila, all of a sudden low back pain gone, hip pain gone. They were weak. And that's a lot of times, especially when it's somebody who actually does lift weights on a regular or semi-regular basis and they're dealing with this chronic pain. A lot of times that chronic pain is pointing to weakness and instability somewhere. And normally weakness and instability has a lot to do with the lack of rotation, lack of lateral type movements. Next is to practice moving quickly. So you want to incorporate some kind of training in your regimen where you practice moving quickly. Now, this is, there's a huge, there's a big difference between individuals and what is considered appropriate from person to person. If you're not doing this now and you want to start incorporating some of this, let's say for your lower body, a very simple way to do this would be to jump in to try to jump as high as you can in place. Okay. That would be like one way to do it. More advanced would be to try to jump up on top of a box or jump down from a high box and catch yourself. Right. Or jump with some kind of a twist. Right. But essentially the goal here is to practice moving quickly. Now here's what happens when you don't. The truth is if you stop practicing moving quickly, you lose the ability to do so. You could be a fit, muscular, strong person and not be able to jump very well. Or you'd be a fit, muscular, strong person, jump down from something and injure yourself because you just don't have the ability to do so. Your body literally prunes away what you don't train. I used to, I used to think that explosive training or speed training was only for athletes. Uh, and then I quickly learned, uh, as a trainer and also through talking to some really, really good trainers like Joe DeFranco, he's like, no, no, you stop practicing that. It goes away. Next thing you know, you got to jump off a curb for whatever reason and you hurt yourself. Yeah. And I'm like, oh my gosh, you're a hundred percent right. These things present themselves all the time in real life. You know, you'll, you'll hit a slick surface, but now you have to like quickly be able to react and, um, you know, gather yourself and, and stabilize. And, and a lot of it too is, is not just the ability to generate that acceleration, but to be able to decelerate. Uh, and I think that's such a skill that everybody needs and could, you know, utilize. I always just, this just happened to me yesterday. I was in my flip flops in my backyard and I have a, I have an ice machine in the backyard that, uh, it dumps, uh, water that melts and I get on the tile and it's on my way to my, my grill. And I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me now. It's like, I know it's there. And I still, this still happens to me where it just slips my mind that it's there and, and just have to catch myself. Yeah. And it, and it just like crossed my mind. It's like, man, what age am I going to be when that is like a fall out your whole back? Yes. Like, right. That's a throw and break your back thing. Like that's just such a reminder of state staying on that stuff because that's how it happens right there. The old saying, use it or lose it. That's where it comes from. By the way, you know, look, we will, I don't know if you guys, I've seen this before. I'm sure you guys have too. Where you'll see somebody who's an advanced age start to trip and it's a small trip and it, and it turns into a fall. It's like, they can't catch themselves and boom. Can't quite get it back. Oh, it looks like it's in slow motion. I've seen that before where you see someone go down and it's like, it looks like it's in slow motion. And it's because their bodies, uh, they stopped moving quickly. But here's, here's the mistakes people make with this, by the way, when people try to practice moving quickly in the gym, oftentimes they turn it into a way to get tired. Okay. They turn it into a fatigue, a stamina goal. It's a stamina goal. That's not what we're talking about. So I'm not talking about jumping in place until you're tired, right? The idea is to practice being able to jump quickly, uh, to practice being able to lift something quickly or throw something quick land really softly. You have, and you, and you, and you don't let fatigue come into play. If you allow fatigue to start to set in, you're no longer training this, uh, strength speed that we're talking about with this power. You're now just training stamina. So the set actually feels relatively easy. The only thing that should feel hard is we're actually practicing the movement and trying to move quickly. Everything else is like, this feels easy. I don't even feel like I'm working out. That's the idea behind it. And here's the last one. Uh, never stop playing. Never stop. One of the easiest ways to maintain a level of functional strength in the real world while you're working on the gym is to occasionally, but regularly play, play basketball, play, you know, run, hike, uh, swim, play baseball. Uh, because if you do that throughout your entire life, uh, sports are phenomenal. They're great ways to maintain that kind of, uh, you know, functional strength that we're talking about where we tend to run into problems is we play games and sports. When we're kids, we stop sometime in our twenties, we become gym rats. But then by the time we're 40, we're like, okay, cool. I think I'm gonna and your body doesn't move like that anymore. So just continue to play, go outside, play, take it easy, but do that consistently. It's a great way to maintain, uh, what we're talking. I mean, this is my other biggest regret because that when you, if you just continued playing, uh, it covers so much of this. There's so much unilateral rotational lateral stuff going on in all play, all sports, like every sport requires some exposures there. Yeah. Some sort of exposure to all those movements. And you may, you may not be progressing it and strengthening real high levels, but it's enough to maintain it to where you're probably going to be pretty good. It's exactly what you said, where we go wrong is we break from it from a really long time. And then we try and come back and you assume that, oh, it's because this sport I played my and you aren't, you aren't properly trained for it. Now, look, if you're listening to this and you're like, okay, I'm interested. What does that look like? What are the exercises look like? How do I apply them sets reps, the whole deal. Here's what we have. We have two programs that are perfect for this. We have mass performance and map symmetry performance. We'll give you the, the, uh, multi-planar movements. It's going to give you explosive movements and strength map. Symmetry is unilateral training. You do those together. You'll have a dramatic improvement in your functional strength and your ability to express this in the real world. And you're going to look better. These are both great programs for aesthetics. You can get them both for the price of one it's it's buy one, get one free right now, by the way, this is true for all 10 of our maps programs, buy one, get one free, go to maps, bogo.com. You can also find us on Instagram. It's my pump media. We'll see you there.