A Guide To The Best Advice From Mind Pump: A Podcast Notes Collection

Get A Proper Assessment

• It’s important to get a proper assessment before starting a routine because everyone has different imbalances and needs
  • You don’t want to follow a workout or nutrition routine that will actually be detrimental to you
• Step 1) Find out your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE)
  • That’s how many calories your body burns daily. People are terrible at predicting how many calories they need so it’s important to figure out your TDEE.
  • Mind Pump has a free TDEE calculator
  • If you want to gain weight, you need to eat more than your TDEE. If you want to lose weight, you need to eat less than that.
• Step 2) Get your hormone and nutrient levels tested
  • Your hormones can actually tell you if your diet and exercise routine are working for you
  • If you aren’t meeting your body’s nutrient demand, it’s not going to function and you aren’t going to make progress
• Step 3) Assess your movement with proper priming
  • To get the most out of an exercise, you need to do proper priming
  • Mind Pump has a free webinar on proper priming

3 Steps To The Ideal Workout

• Step 1) Build the foundation of strength
  • Strength is the foundation of every exercise 
    • “Build the base, strength and muscle is the most important thing” – Sal Di Stefano
  • Having muscle helps protect your body
    • “More muscle means you’re more sensitive to sugar and your insulin responds better. More muscle means your hormones balance out.”
• Step 2) Focus on performance training
  • “Just having muscle isn’t enough, you need to be able to move well” – Sal Di Stefano
    • Performance training will help you build mobility and stability which will help you avoid common injuries
• Step 3) Sculpt and shape your body
  • Once you’ve built a foundation of strength and have worked on your performance training, then you can focus on sculpting your body
    • “We want to lay that good foundation, good movement pattern, before you start trying to sculpt and shape the body” – Adam Schafer 
      • This is where you get to do isolation exercises and focus on the details of your body

How To Maintain Muscle With Workouts at Home 

• Use or buy:
  • Home gym equipment: Barbells, dumbbells, adjustable bench 
  • Resistance bands
  • A pull-up bar
• Perform body-weight exercises
  • If those are too easy, move to one-leg or arm exercises (single leg squats, one-arm pushups, pistol squats)
• If you don’t have weights, increase the frequency of your workouts (ex. You used to go the gym 3x a week, now workout from home 5x a week)

8 Exercises You Should Be Doing

• 1) Turkish Get-up
  • The Turkish Get-uplooks like a dance move but it takes you through multiple planes of movement making it a great exercise
• 2) The Windmill
  • The Windmill, like the Turkish get-up, doesn’t train a specific body part but it does improve overall performance
• 3) The Farmer Walk
  • The Farmer Walk is just holding dumbbells or a trap bar in your arms and walk in a straight line
• 4) Bulgarian Split-Squat
  • The Bulgarian Split-squat looks like a lunge but it’s not, it requires more balance and an elevated surface
• 5) The Z Press
  • The Z Press is when you sit on the floor, spread your legs in a V-shape, and press weight upwards
• 6) The Zercher Squat
  • The Zercher Squat is when you do a front squat with a bar in the crooks of your elbow
• 7) Snatch Grip Deadlift
  • The Snatch Grip Deadlift is when you deadlift the bar but with a wider grip  
• 8) Single-Leg Deadlift
  • The Single-leg Deadlift is when you bend your hips and lift one leg up while lowering your torso as low as possible

How to Increase Your Squat Load

• Try changing your workout programming – rep count, number of sets
• Lifting heavy indicates you probably know how to squat but your body could lack stability and mobility
• Breakdown components of lift and focus on where you feel your sticking point
• Work on unilateral exercises to gain stability (e.g., lunges, split squat, etc.)
• Assess programming first before nutrition
  • If you are trying to lean out and simultaneously lift heavy, your body will reach a point where you are generating as much output as possible and you need to build more muscle to get stronger
  • Try increasing calories for two weeks and monitor progress