Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The RAW TRUTH About Fitness, AI, and Influencers (Adam Schafer of Mind Pump) | Ep 394

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The RAW TRUTH About Fitness, AI, and Influencers (Adam Schafer of Mind Pump) | Ep 394 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: Have you ever felt like the more fitness content you consume, the less confident you are about what you actually should do?
• 0:07
  Philip Pape: If you're tracking everything, following the right people, but you still can't quite track the code on your own body.
• 0:13
  Philip Pape: If you wonder whether all these apps and AI tools are helping or adding more noise, this episode is for you.
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: Today, I'm talking with Adam Schaefer, co-founder of Mind Pump, and we're gonna discuss a raw fitness truth.
• 0:26
  Philip Pape: Having access to unlimited information like this podcast doesn't automatically lead to results.
• 0:33
  Philip Pape: In fact, it often makes things harder.
• 0:35
  Philip Pape: Adam's going to walk us through how he filters signals from the noise, where technology generally serves lifters, versus where it falls short, and the core principles that he's never wavered on despite building a massive fitness media empire.
• 0:50
  Philip Pape: You'll learn how to build your own decision-making framework, how to experiment intelligently without falling into dogma, and what the future of fitness might look like.
• 0:59
  Philip Pape: Welcome to Wit and Weight, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering, and efficiency.
• 1:10
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we're talking about how to make sense of all the fitness information out there in an age where more content doesn't necessarily mean better results.
• 1:21
  Philip Pape: My guest is the Adam Schaefer, co-founder and co-host of Mind Pump, which has become one of the world's leading fitness podcasts, scaling it into a platform that reaches millions of lifters every month.
• 1:34
  Philip Pape: It's definitely in my feed, probably in yours.
• 1:36
  Philip Pape: If not, go and hit follow right now.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: Adam has a pro card in men's physique bodybuilding and has managed some of the largest health clubs in the Bay Area.
• 1:43
  Philip Pape: And if you listen to Mind Pump like I do, you'll know he's big on building sustainable habits while staying open to experimentation.
• 1:50
  Philip Pape: He's someone who can tell you exactly what has not changed in effective training over the past decade or two while also sharing what he's currently experimenting with himself.
• 2:00
  Philip Pape: Right now, I see that we're at this inflection point where AI, algorithms, influencer culture, social media are heavily reshaping how people make their fitness decisions.
• 2:10
  Philip Pape: So I think Adam's a perfect guy to help us make sense of it all.
• 2:13
  Philip Pape: And today, you're gonna learn how to develop your own framework to evaluate all this information, where technology can be helpful versus where human connection still matters the most, and some non-negotiables that Adam has maintained while building one of the most trusted voices in fitness.
• 2:29
  Philip Pape: Adam, it is really awesome to have you here on Wits and Weights.
• 2:32
  Philip Pape: I want to welcome you to the show.
• 2:34
  Adam Shafer: Appreciate that, man.
• 2:34
  Adam Shafer: Totally honored, love the intro, man.
• 2:36
  Adam Shafer: I'm excited.
• 2:37
  Philip Pape: Yeah, man.
• 2:38
  Philip Pape: So uh before we started recording, I was talking, you and I were talking about uh Jamie Selzer, who was on the show, right?
• 2:44
  Philip Pape: And he wanted to say, first of all, that hello, and you've been and you've been a huge supporter in his process, and you're one of the nicest guys he's met along the way.
• 2:52
  Philip Pape: Um just want to put that out there.
• 2:53
  Philip Pape: So shout out to you, Jamie.
• 2:55
  Philip Pape: Now so cool.
• 2:57
  Philip Pape: Now, Jamie is um, you know, he found both of us through podcasts.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: So he obviously listens to a lot of different shows, found people he trusted, applied the knowledge, built consistency, got the results.
• 3:09
  Philip Pape: Everyone who's listening right now, the you, the listener listening, I know that's what you're trying to do.
• 3:13
  Philip Pape: But I also know that you have access to more information now than any generation in history.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: And so why, Adam, this is a question for you.
• 3:21
  Philip Pape: Why are people having so much trouble putting all that wonderful knowledge to use and doing it consistently?
• 3:28
  Adam Shafer: Yeah, it's an we're in an interesting time right now where uh, I mean, the the amount of information uh in our phone and access with AI is just it's unbelievable.
• 3:40
  Adam Shafer: I mean, and if I don't know how much you've gotten familiar with Chat GPT and just how amazing of a tool that is and how fast you can get really good answers.
• 3:51
  Adam Shafer: The problem with that is that there's so much information on the internet that how you prompt it really dictates what it spits out.
• 4:02
  Adam Shafer: And it's so it's funny you bring this up because I I was literally just talking with my brother-in-law maybe three, four days ago, and I was venting to the guys.
• 4:11
  Adam Shafer: I he I talked to my brother-in-law the night before I come into work, and uh I go, man, I said, really interesting thing happened to me last night with my brother-in-law.
• 4:21
  Adam Shafer: I said, he he sends me, he's going through a bunch of stuff right now in his life, and uh, you know, he he is Googling me or he's uh it texting me that he was Googling uh TRT that he had started about a year and a half ago or whatever.
• 4:36
  Adam Shafer: And uh he's listing all these things, he's like, and he's he's blaming TRT, you know.
• 4:42
  Adam Shafer: Oh, and I check and he sends me a screenshot of what ChatGPT had sent back to him.
• 4:48
  Adam Shafer: And I tell my buddies, I'm like, man, this is crazy.
• 4:51
  Adam Shafer: I said, This is my brother-in-law who's been in my family for 20 years, very aware of the business.
• 4:56
  Adam Shafer: In fact, his wife works for the company, so very, very familiar with what I do, the content that I have.
• 5:02
  Adam Shafer: Uh knows that I've had some of the most world-renowned doctors and hormone specialists on my shows, uh, been on TRT for 20 years myself, trained hundreds, maybe thousands of people on it.
• 5:14
  Adam Shafer: I have a whole entire forum with a doctor dedicated to hormones.
• 5:19
  Adam Shafer: So I you would think that he'd go directly to a source like that, right?
• 5:24
  Adam Shafer: With that kind of access and experience, and just go, hey, bro, and ask, ask me the question.
• 5:29
  Adam Shafer: But instead, he went to Chat GPT, and then what it spit out to him was uh kind of alarming to me.
• 5:36
  Adam Shafer: And I said, uh, I said, no, bro.
• 5:38
  Adam Shafer: I said, I I don't agree with that.
• 5:40
  Adam Shafer: I said, um, you know, if you prompt and what I think he did was he prompted it like this, where he said, What are all the negative worst things could happen with with taking TRT?
• 5:51
  Adam Shafer: And so it spit off a list because he because he prompted that way.
• 5:54
  Adam Shafer: And I said, Well, what if you were to have prompted it?
• 5:57
  Adam Shafer: What are all the negative effects of having low testosterone as a 45, 50-year-old, or 60-year-old man?
• 6:04
  Adam Shafer: And watch what it spits off to you.
• 6:06
  Adam Shafer: I said, It's gonna send you a bunch of alarming stuff too.
• 6:09
  Adam Shafer: And it, but it was a really interesting moment, it just happened to me.
• 6:12
  Adam Shafer: And I would tell them the guys, I'm like, we're entering this time where here I have somebody close to me who has access to someone like me who's got real-world experience for a very long time with some of the brightest minds in the world in that in that topic.
• 6:28
  Adam Shafer: And he went straight to Chat GPT for whatever reason.
• 6:33
  Adam Shafer: And because of the way he's prompting it, he got kind of a bit of a confirmation bias to what he was already kind of thinking because of the way he prompted it.
• 6:41
  Adam Shafer: And it just kind of hit me like, man, this is gonna be a problem, you know.
• 6:46
  Adam Shafer: Because I I would I would say that I was one of the people that really got excited about Chat GPT, like, man, this is awesome! What a brilliant tool.
• 6:52
  Adam Shafer: This is gonna be mostly all positive things.
• 6:55
  Adam Shafer: But now I start to see where, like, oh, this could be a problem.
• 6:58
  Adam Shafer: And I've heard some crazy stories of uh, I think just recently the news hit where the kid basically committed suicide, and it was because of the conver, and then they had the whole log of the conversation that he was having with AI, and it kind of confirmed his bias on that hey, his life is worth nothing, he shouldn't be in this world, don't bother telling crying out to anybody and basically handle it yourself.
• 7:22
  Adam Shafer: And uh, guy takes his kid takes his life, and so yeah, it's it's a bit uh alarming where we're going and that we're already adopting it that fast.
• 7:32
  Philip Pape: Yeah, totally agree, man.
• 7:33
  Philip Pape: Like there was a South Park episode recently called Sycopancy about that exact topic where the husband was like not even wanting to talk to his wife and and was going to chat GPT to ask all the questions, and it would just keep telling him what he wanted to hear.
• 7:45
  Philip Pape: And I've seen that too, like like you, I love to play around with these things.
• 7:48
  Philip Pape: I was using a different AI the other day to kind of brainstorm business ideas, and someone said, Hey, train your AI to tell it to be honest with you and not do that.
• 7:58
  Philip Pape: And I tried it out and I was like, Oh, it actually started giving me like this brutal feedback, and I can see why people don't want to hear that because it says, it said, uh, it said, Philip, you're still trying to do this, you know, you're you're being emotional about it, you're trying to do this.
• 8:11
  Philip Pape: Here's what you want to do instead.
• 8:12
  Philip Pape: I'm like, oh yeah, this is interesting.
• 8:13
  Philip Pape: It's crazy.
• 8:16
  Adam Shafer: The way you prompt this thing is gonna be uh it's gonna be really, really important.
• 8:21
  Adam Shafer: And I'm I imagine that a lot of the conversations, a lot of the education uh for the kids and the generation coming up will probably be around that because uh this is the stuff that we're starting to see unfold.
• 8:33
  Adam Shafer: I just thought it was so wild because it was so closely connected to me and something like that.
• 8:36
  Adam Shafer: That like, man, I just I I don't know if I would do that still.
• 8:40
  Adam Shafer: Like, and now I had to ask myself, like, if I have direct access to somebody who I have a lot of respect for in a field, I still think I would go to that doctor or would go to that professional before I got on to Chat GPT because I think, and maybe that's because of my own experience of just I uh in the fitness world, I believe that there's a level of importance when it comes to book knowledge, science, and what we've learned from studies.
• 9:05
  Adam Shafer: And then there's a lot of value that comes from just pure application, real-world people, and the variables that come with that, because science has done incredible things for us to steer us in many great directions.
• 9:18
  Adam Shafer: And you know, you can look up a damn near study for anything to get some idea of what maybe you should or shouldn't do, but the human element changes that always.
• 9:28
  Adam Shafer: And I for every uh great science study that I've seen and great rule that I've been told, I've seen the opposite, I've seen it um not play out that way.
• 9:38
  Adam Shafer: And so because of that, I'm I'm always a little cautious of oh, just because the research says this is the best option, it doesn't mean it's uh gonna work a hundred percent of the time.
• 9:47
  Adam Shafer: In fact, we don't have hardly any studies at all that are like that where we could replicate it a a hundred times over and it always gives the same outcome.
• 9:55
  Adam Shafer: And so, because of that, you have to keep keep in mind that you know, this is this answer, this AI tool is giving you, isn't an end-all be-all.
• 10:04
  Adam Shafer: It could possibly help us in the right direction.
• 10:06
  Adam Shafer: But yeah, so I don't know, I I caution people uh because of that, and I think that's it.
• 10:12
  Adam Shafer: We're in this interesting time when there is there's just so much information that even a young kid could get the all the information that a PhD and 20 years experience of of training could get, at least all the all the books and the and the stuff that's put on the internet in regards to that at the in the access of their hand.
• 10:30
  Adam Shafer: But what you do with that, how you prompt that, it's gonna really matter.
• 10:34
  Adam Shafer: And so, yeah, it's I don't know, I think I we're gonna get dumber.
• 10:37
  Adam Shafer: I mean, it another another another example of this, we talk about this on the show.
• 10:42
  Adam Shafer: I'm I'm guilty of this.
• 10:43
  Adam Shafer: Um, when I was a kid, I was uh you know driving at 16, and uh with this was before pre-navigation.
• 10:50
  Adam Shafer: So I'm dating myself a bit here.
• 10:52
  Adam Shafer: Uh and I and that didn't exist.
• 10:54
  Adam Shafer: And I remember uh I lived in a lot of different towns and homes growing up, prided myself on the ability to be some go somewhere one time and I could go back again, no problem, no directions.
• 11:04
  Adam Shafer: I just had a kind of a photographic memory.
• 11:06
  Adam Shafer: I I had the tree to the left, the red house on the right, the blue door two blocks down.
• 11:11
  Adam Shafer: Yeah, I could get there, no problem.
• 11:13
  Adam Shafer: And then also memorized every friend's phone number that I had.
• 11:17
  Adam Shafer: I didn't have to write any of that down.
• 11:18
  Adam Shafer: I just knew them all, still remember friends' numbers from 12, 13 years old.
• 11:23
  Adam Shafer: Yet I don't know my wife's phone number.
• 11:25
  Adam Shafer: You know, and I don't uh I can't get from my house to work that I've driven for 10 years without putting my navigation.
• 11:32
  Adam Shafer: Like, so I have even things like that, I've outsourced those skills so much that I've lost them completely.
• 11:41
  Adam Shafer: Now, it's probably not the end of the world that I'm not the best navigation work because we all have navigation on our phone.
• 11:46
  Adam Shafer: It's pretty simple.
• 11:47
  Adam Shafer: It's not that big of a deal that I don't have all my friends and my wife's phone numbers memorized because we've all got those phone books built into our pockets now.
• 11:56
  Adam Shafer: So maybe not that big of a deal, but I think we got to be careful on how much of these skills that we outsource uh to this AI tool.
• 12:05
  Adam Shafer: And I think this thing is is so powerful.
• 12:08
  Adam Shafer: Like it's not just one thing, it's not just navigation that it's outsourcing, it's outsourcing critical thinking for so many things.
• 12:16
  Adam Shafer: So it's I don't think we've ever seen anything, any technology like this come into play.
• 12:21
  Adam Shafer: And so, yeah, I'd really caution a lot of people that are using it to navigate them through nutrition and exercise and and the end-all be all.
• 12:30
  Adam Shafer: I still think getting a hold of a of somebody who's been training people and in the fitness space for a really long time is gonna be a better option than the internet as a as a end-all be-all.
• 12:41
  Philip Pape: And you know what's cool about it is like when you think of podcasts like yours where you do the the qua, right?
• 12:46
  Philip Pape: The listener questions, you're effectively doing that.
• 12:48
  Philip Pape: You're answering very specific contextual questions.
• 12:50
  Philip Pape: And if you guys listen to enough of that, you can start to learn to think about those for yourself.
• 12:55
  Philip Pape: And then just reach out to these guys you you follow or and trust, like Adam, like me, like anybody.
• 13:00
  Philip Pape: Just send them a note because that's gonna be probably a more accurate response.
• 13:04
  Philip Pape: And they're not always gonna hopefully just try to sell you on a program, right?
• 13:07
  Philip Pape: You don't have to follow those guys who are just immediately like, here's my product, here's my paywall.
• 13:11
  Philip Pape: It's funny you mention like your was it your brother not coming to you or or yeah, it's my brother-in-law, right?
• 13:17
  Philip Pape: And and I don't know if it's partly because people are I've seen a change in generations as well as since the pandemic of people not wanting to just like reach out to people.
• 13:26
  Philip Pape: Maybe they're they're they're kind of nervous to do that for whatever reason, even if it's your own brother.
• 13:30
  Philip Pape: But also, uh, I've talked to my own clients who've said, I looked up on ChatGPT, I said, What would Phillips say about this?
• 13:37
  Philip Pape: And I bet they do that about you, Adam.
• 13:39
  Philip Pape: There's like, what would mind pump say about this?
• 13:42
  Philip Pape: And it's like, you can't even trust that because it'll spit out something.
• 13:46
  Philip Pape: And I'm like, nah, 80% of that is wrong.
• 13:48
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 13:48
  Philip Pape: So it just cobbles together, you know, what it thinks.
• 13:52
  Philip Pape: So, all right, then that that's a so that's good advice about the AI side of things.
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: What about just in general?
• 13:58
  Philip Pape: Like, you guys cover a lot of trends and info that's constantly coming up practically every day, because you publish your episodes every day.
• 14:05
  Philip Pape: How do you even decide should I pay attention to this or talk about it or like what people care about and need to know about?
• 14:12
  Philip Pape: You know what I mean?
• 14:13
  Philip Pape: Like it's current event in fitness, so to speak.
• 14:16
  Adam Shafer: I mean, I think that uh the positive side for us as content creators is it provides endless content for us to talk about.
• 14:23
  Adam Shafer: I think rarely ever do we not cover it.
• 14:27
  Adam Shafer: Like I think that if there's something new, a new trend, a new modality, uh a new tool, a new exercise somebody's doing, uh, we tend to we tend to talk about it.
• 14:36
  Adam Shafer: I think it's it's it's good conversation for us to discuss it.
• 14:39
  Adam Shafer: But then at the end of the day, I think we always go back to the, I mean, things that we've known for a hundred years around training.
• 14:46
  Adam Shafer: And I mean, in fact, we did an episode the other day, I don't know, it was maybe last week or week, two weeks ago, where we were sitting down, we're like, if if someone said you could only do you know six to eight exercises, what would the you know, six to eight be?
• 14:59
  Adam Shafer: Could could we put together something that they could do this just those six to eight exercises for the rest of their life?
• 15:04
  Adam Shafer: And and could we build a good physique and bulletproof their joints?
• 15:08
  Adam Shafer: And we we wrote something down, and we and in there were all the basic movements.
• 15:12
  Adam Shafer: It was the overhead press, it was the squad, it was the deadlift, it was a row, there was a rotational movement, like a windmill in there, there was an and then like a full sit up.
• 15:20
  Adam Shafer: Like so, I mean, we basically went, okay, well, multi-planar exercise, some sort of rotational, right, some sort of ab exercise, and then the big, the big four lifts.
• 15:29
  Adam Shafer: And if you did those movements for the rest of your life, and only those movements, you could build an incredibly fit-looking and moving physique uh forever.
• 15:41
  Adam Shafer: And yet we have so many different exercises and so many different ways to organize them and debate over what's better for hypertrophy and what's better for this.
• 15:52
  Adam Shafer: And I just think that we've overcomplicated a lot of that.
• 15:55
  Adam Shafer: And I think what we try, and we don't just dismiss people, I think, that are asking that or talking about that.
• 16:00
  Adam Shafer: I think we what we really try to do is distill it down to what makes this new thing good, you know, or what is interesting about this new thing, but then reminding people that, you know, aside from the novelty of this exercise, it doesn't trump these movements that we've known about for a really long time.
• 16:19
  Adam Shafer: Get good at those movements, uh, and it will serve you far more than this new thing or new modality or new technique or new study that just came out and said, oh, this burns more body fat.
• 16:31
  Adam Shafer: So uh yeah, I think that that's that's what we've that that's the core of the show.
• 16:36
  Adam Shafer: It's been, you know, here's all these neat things that we're always learning about and we're watching, but there's some really fundamental things that we've known for a really long time that if you stick to those basics and you master those, you'll be far better off than you know, figuring out a million other.
• 16:52
  Adam Shafer: I mean, what's the it's the Bruce Lee quote, right?
• 16:55
  Adam Shafer: Master one one punch.
• 16:57
  Adam Shafer: I I fear the man who knows who's done one punch a million times than a man who knows a million different punches.
• 17:03
  Adam Shafer: It's just like it's the same thing.
• 17:04
  Adam Shafer: It's like nail those, nail those four or five things down, really get good at them because it takes time.
• 17:09
  Adam Shafer: Like, I mean, I've been squatting for 20 something years.
• 17:12
  Adam Shafer: I still don't consider myself a perfect or a great squatter.
• 17:15
  Adam Shafer: So it's like it's a movement and that you you have a very long window to get really good at.
• 17:22
  Adam Shafer: And what's great about that, that it's challenging, is that it provides a lot of novel stimulus to you and a lot of opportunity to get gains from it versus something that's very basic and simple, a machine or a new tool, a new tool that came out.
• 17:37
  Adam Shafer: That's okay, cool.
• 17:38
  Adam Shafer: This is a great novel stimulus, get some cool benefit from it, but then uh then what?
• 17:42
  Adam Shafer: Then then there the benefits start to diminish, and then again, you're back to the core movements that are really moving the needle.
• 17:48
  Adam Shafer: So, I mean, that's that's kind of how I look at it.
• 17:51
  Adam Shafer: That's how we talk about it, I feel like.
• 17:53
  Adam Shafer: I think, but it's interesting to discuss.
• 17:54
  Adam Shafer: I mean, I have been in the space for a long time, so I enjoy the conversation around these tools, these ideas, but at the end of the day, we know what it takes to build a really healthy, strong body.
• 18:05
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and I think that's that's like the dichotomy is all the all these cool things at the top, and then you end up steering the conversation slowly back to the principles.
• 18:13
  Philip Pape: And I like the way how you put it.
• 18:15
  Philip Pape: If you realize that there are a core set of bedrock principles in the choice space, isn't that big, you can focus in and develop depth in those, treat them like the skills they are and master them over time, which means you don't have to be uh hopping all over the place with different techniques and tools and uh the latest gadgets.
• 18:32
  Philip Pape: And it's funny because like I know he's controversial, Lyle McDonald, but recently he posted somebody, somebody said, So how do I build muscle?
• 18:38
  Philip Pape: And he's like, You train and you do a surplus, and that's all there's ever been to it, right?
• 18:42
  Philip Pape: Like, you know, people are looking for the complicated answer.
• 18:45
  Philip Pape: And I hear it too.
• 18:46
  Philip Pape: Like, people are always when you do the Q ⁇ A's, you want to kind of fill up the podcast episode with some decent thoughts and content.
• 18:52
  Philip Pape: And also keeping in mind people are new to this, to them, it is very confusing, right?
• 18:57
  Philip Pape: Because there's so what do they trust?
• 18:59
  Philip Pape: So yeah, I guess that's the next that's a good segue to like um, all right, let's say they're listening to Mind Pump, they're hearing you guys come talk about this.
• 19:07
  Philip Pape: They're gonna hear the themes start to solidify over time.
• 19:10
  Philip Pape: They will.
• 19:10
  Philip Pape: You'll hear squatting mentioned, you'll hear compound lifts, you'll hear, you know, energy balance, right?
• 19:15
  Philip Pape: The evidence.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: But somebody needs to take action on that.
• 19:18
  Philip Pape: Like the people want, you know, the listener right now wants to do something about it.
• 19:22
  Philip Pape: How do they like get unstuck?
• 19:23
  Philip Pape: What's how did they start moving the needle and take that next step?
• 19:27
  Adam Shafer: I I love that question because I think this is the part.
• 19:30
  Adam Shafer: I mean, if there was anything controversial about mind pump or that we talk about, I would say it's it's our approach.
• 19:38
  Adam Shafer: And I it's not, it's not sexy, it's not even a lot.
• 19:42
  Adam Shafer: What we've learned over decades of training so many people is you really have to meet people where they're currently at if you're gonna be successful, you're gonna have success with them being consistent.
• 19:53
  Adam Shafer: Sure, I could sit down, take your measurements, do your body fat, track your steps, figure out, take a metabolic test to figure out where your calories are supposed to be, and write you up the perfect diet and exercise plan that will get you jacked.
• 20:09
  Adam Shafer: I mean, I could do that, I could do that with anybody, but that's not the real art of training somebody or getting somebody to be very successful and consistent.
• 20:16
  Adam Shafer: The real art is figuring out that individual where they're at in their life and building something that kind of complements their life that they can do for the rest of their life.
• 20:28
  Adam Shafer: And that is so unique because now other than just their physiology, now the psychological psychology is being played into this equation.
• 20:38
  Adam Shafer: And that part is a massive part because if I have all those breakdowns of your numbers of what you should do, but then you look at me and you go, Man, Adam, I just I hate going to the gym.
• 20:50
  Adam Shafer: It's awful.
• 20:50
  Adam Shafer: It's I every time I go, I dread it.
• 20:53
  Adam Shafer: I don't like being there.
• 20:54
  Adam Shafer: I feel insecure about the place.
• 20:56
  Adam Shafer: I feel like everyone's staring at me.
• 20:58
  Adam Shafer: I always go for a couple weeks and then I quit after a while, or it's just, I can't believe, you know, I can't commit to going five days, whatever.
• 21:06
  Adam Shafer: You're telling me all this information.
• 21:07
  Adam Shafer: And then what if what if my perfect plan for you includes some of these things that you're telling me?
• 21:14
  Adam Shafer: You just don't like to like and and an experienced trainer will hear that and go, like, okay, I've got to find another way to move this person in in the right direction.
• 21:24
  Adam Shafer: Or maybe you're telling me you're a really busy dad and you've got three businesses and you got four kids and you travel all over the place.
• 21:33
  Adam Shafer: And again, I've got all your physiology down, and I know the macros and the perfect program to get you jacked, and you're telling me you want to get jacked, but then you're also telling me you've got all these other priorities in your life, and you really don't care that much about getting the gym, and you also travel a lot.
• 21:49
  Adam Shafer: So being really consistent with your nutrition has been really difficult.
• 21:52
  Adam Shafer: So, you know, then I then I have to go, okay, well, maybe he's not ready for a meal plan this constrained and this strict.
• 22:00
  Adam Shafer: It sounds like he's never even gone two weeks of consistently hitting his protein targets.
• 22:05
  Adam Shafer: So, you know, I'm gonna figure out this individual, and then I'm I'm gonna listen to where they're at, what they've had troubles with, how they've been challenged in the past, what they really want.
• 22:16
  Adam Shafer: And then I'm gonna go, okay, what are a couple things, really simple things that I can add into this person's life that doesn't completely flip it upside down.
• 22:26
  Adam Shafer: Now, granted, if they follow the exact plan that I know is perfect for them, they would get to the set goal faster.
• 22:34
  Adam Shafer: But what we what I understand, because I've been doing this so long, is they're not gonna do it.
• 22:38
  Adam Shafer: They're not gonna follow.
• 22:40
  Adam Shafer: And so that, and to me, that's the real art of what we do is the ability to know the perfect plan for this person to get to their exact goal, but then recognize that that path is different for every individual, no matter how much their physiology matches the other person that said the same exact goal.
• 23:01
  Adam Shafer: It's oh, this individual, these are our obstacles.
• 23:05
  Adam Shafer: This is and and also their commitment level to that, and going like, okay, like I I sometimes will hear somebody who has been trying to get into fitness for so long and they've never been consistent.
• 23:17
  Adam Shafer: But every time they've attempted, they they get into these four to five weeks, five to day week type of programs to go, and it's like, hey, and and they'll tell me, all right, I'm I'm I'm motivated again, I'm I'm I'm ready, my calendar's clear, I'm gonna go do this, and they're like, I can do five days a week, and you'll hear me or you'll hear us on the show talk somebody out of that.
• 23:36
  Adam Shafer: No, why don't you why don't you start with one?
• 23:38
  Adam Shafer: Let's go one day, and they're no, no, no, I'm I'm ready, I'm ready to go now.
• 23:42
  Adam Shafer: It's like, well, no, you've done that a hundred times before, and it's it hasn't worked out.
• 23:47
  Adam Shafer: Maybe we try something a little bit, maybe we commit less to and so that comes off a bit controversial.
• 23:53
  Adam Shafer: In fact, I we've had you know uh people critique us and say, oh, they're the the podcast just for beginners, or you know, oh, they're the the low intensity guys, or oh, they're the guys that that hate on cardio and they don't want it's like no, is what what it is is that we've trained a lot of fucking people between the three of us for a really long time, and we understand human psychology, behavior psychology really well, and we also understand physiology, understand macros, nutrition really well, and how to marry those uh for most people.
• 24:25
  Adam Shafer: And it doesn't mean that we get it right a hundred percent of the time, but I'd say we're pretty good at it, and I can hear somebody tell me their goals, tell me about their history, and I can know what I think is the perfect path to get them there the fastest, but then also understand that that path is probably not gonna work for that person based off of the information they've told me.
• 24:47
  Adam Shafer: And so I've got to find a different way to get that outcome, and that looks different for every individual.
• 24:52
  Adam Shafer: And so I'd say that's probably the most like, and that's where these like arguments or debates that people have online where they're debating who's who's more right, or my study that just came out contradicts your study, and this is what the science says, and it's just like, well, that's great.
• 25:08
  Adam Shafer: I mean, I could I can have, for example, if if if the science said that waking up at 5 a.m.
• 25:15
  Adam Shafer: burned you 20% more body fat if you just exercise at 5 a.m., well, then would we all work out at 5 a.m.?
• 25:21
  Adam Shafer: We still wouldn't.
• 25:22
  Adam Shafer: Some of us hate to work out at that time.
• 25:24
  Adam Shafer: And so just because the studies say that that client could burn 20% more body fat, which I know that's not true, but it lets us say it was, doesn't mean that I would still would tell every client to work out at 5 a.m.
• 25:36
  Adam Shafer: Because after I get to know somebody and I hear somebody tell me something like, oh yeah, I stay up till one in the morning every morning.
• 25:41
  Adam Shafer: I I've I never get up before seven o'clock.
• 25:43
  Adam Shafer: But yeah, okay, if I can burn 20% more fat, I'll get up at five.
• 25:46
  Adam Shafer: I'm like, no, I'm not even gonna do that because I know you're not gonna follow that.
• 25:49
  Adam Shafer: And even if you do follow it for a short period of time, it's not gonna become a lifestyle for you.
• 25:53
  Adam Shafer: It's not gonna become something you do for the rest of your life.
• 25:55
  Adam Shafer: And that's my goal.
• 25:56
  Adam Shafer: My goal is to not only get you to whatever said fitness goal you have, but it's also to make this a part of your life for the rest of your life.
• 26:04
  Adam Shafer: And that can come off, I think, controversial sometimes because sometimes the decisions that we make with callers or when we help people flies in the face of the science sometimes.
• 26:15
  Adam Shafer: And boy, science guys just don't like that.
• 26:18
  Adam Shafer: That they just chomp at the bit to try and tear that apart or talk shit about that.
• 26:22
  Adam Shafer: But it's just like, but that always tells me when someone critiques what maybe we say about uh you know exercise or nutrition or cardio or walking or whatever the the commentary is, that they probably have a lot of book knowledge, but they haven't probably trained a lot of real people in real life.
• 26:42
  Adam Shafer: And fortunately for us, we've got both.
• 26:44
  Adam Shafer: We've got a lot of a lot of studies, a lot of science, a lot of national certifications.
• 26:50
  Adam Shafer: Uh, and then we've trained a lot of people for a very long time.
• 26:54
  Adam Shafer: And the combination of that has, you know, forced my hand to not always go in the direction of what the research tells me.
• 27:02
  Adam Shafer: Uh, sometimes, sometimes my heart, my mind, and what I'm hearing tells me something else.
• 27:07
  Adam Shafer: It says, hey, you know, I know what the science says I should do right here, but I'm listening to this person and I know what the behavioral psychology is around what this person is saying.
• 27:17
  Adam Shafer: Yeah, I'm gonna go this direction because I think that's the best.
• 27:20
  Adam Shafer: Learning to discern from that.
• 27:21
  Adam Shafer: And if you're a listener right now and you're interested in like finding good advice, like you're looking for somebody that has that.
• 27:28
  Adam Shafer: You're looking for somebody who has got not only the science, and so they can they can communicate the questions that you have around physiology and nutrition and exercise science, but then also tell you, but this is what I've seen work really well with a lot of my clients, or I've trained a lot of people just like you, and this works really well.
• 27:47
  Adam Shafer: Like, you want to hear a blend of both of those, I think, to get yourself a really good coach or a really good guide in your journey.
• 27:54
  Adam Shafer: And I think that's going to trump these AI bots and tools that we're gonna have.
• 27:58
  Adam Shafer: And I think that's I think that's I don't think uh because everybody has the answer and the knowledge in their hand, we're gonna have all of a sudden way fitter people.
• 28:06
  Adam Shafer: Because I don't think it's a I don't think it's a lack of knowledge that has kept all these people from getting in shape.
• 28:12
  Adam Shafer: I I think it has more to do with the behavioral psychology side, is that people have a lot of insecurities that are driving a lot of people are exercising because they hate their body.
• 28:22
  Adam Shafer: They're exercising working out because they don't like the way they look.
• 28:25
  Adam Shafer: And if you do it, if you work out in because you resent yourself, that'll never last.
• 28:32
  Adam Shafer: That'll even even if it's it's a motivator in a short period of time to maybe get you to lose a few pounds, or you can muscle your way through it for a season to get in shape, but you're not gonna make it a part of your life if you're doing it because you don't love yourself, because you resent the way you look or you're insecure.
• 28:48
  Adam Shafer: And until you fix those psychological things, those hurdles that you have, you're you're gonna keep, you're gonna be on the hamster wheel of gaining weight, losing weight, gaining weight, losing weight, or being in shape, falling out of shape, being in shape, falling out of shape.
• 29:01
  Adam Shafer: And uh I, you know, we just know that from training so many people that you you've got to find, you've got to get to the bottom of both.
• 29:07
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and if you're listening, like the wisdom Adam's sharing is gold because I've only been in the coaching space about five years, and it it only took a few months before I realized this is not about information at all, like you suggested.
• 29:17
  Philip Pape: There's the classic quote, I know what to do, I'm just not doing it.
• 29:20
  Philip Pape: And you realize, well, it's not the problem, isn't it you know, that it's uh the psychology.
• 29:25
  Philip Pape: And that begs the question like, shouldn't psychology be the foundational science and not nutrition physiology, for example, because that's just nuts and bolts like gravity, you know?
• 29:36
  Adam Shafer: Like I tell you what, I whenever I meet a trainer, um, you know, of course, obviously we've met a lot of trainers that listen to the show so I doubt, and they have a psychology background.
• 29:45
  Adam Shafer: I always encourage them, go down, you're gonna be great.
• 29:48
  Adam Shafer: Because I think I I got into that later, not realizing what an important so it wasn't like uh somebody told me, Go learn psych read.
• 29:57
  Adam Shafer: Like I got into reading behavioral psychology, psychology.
• 29:59
  Adam Shafer: Books in my mid-20s, uh, out of a necessity of realizing, like, man, I'm starting to pick up that a lot of my job is I feel like a kind of a counselor, you know, like a lot of these conversations I'm having with people is a lot less to do with the X's and O's about nutrition and exercise, and a lot more about what's going on in their head.
• 30:19
  Adam Shafer: I'm like, I'm not really qualified for this.
• 30:22
  Adam Shafer: And so that's what really sent me down the path.
• 30:24
  Adam Shafer: And so when I meet somebody who's get just getting into training, or maybe they had a background in psychology, I always go, oh man, you'll probably make a great trainer because so much of our job is getting down to a lot of these behaviors that drive us, because you can know what foods are right for you to eat.
• 30:42
  Adam Shafer: But if you have past traumas and behaviors built around these poor decisions that you've been making forever, just because somebody tells you you can only eat these foods for the next six weeks, and maybe you could adhere to that for six weeks, doesn't mean you fixed the root cause of what drove you to those behaviors in the first place.
• 31:03
  Adam Shafer: And they're they'll rear their heads and you'll eventually go back.
• 31:06
  Adam Shafer: And this is what happens to people is they don't address the root cause of what got them out of shape.
• 31:12
  Adam Shafer: They think it's an X's and O's thing.
• 31:14
  Adam Shafer: They go hire somebody or they search Chat GBT, get the X's and O's.
• 31:18
  Adam Shafer: Maybe you have good discipline, and so you have the ability to like white knuckle your way through the next six months or whatever through discipline.
• 31:25
  Adam Shafer: But then eventually that fails because you never address the root cause.
• 31:30
  Adam Shafer: Uh, and so it's like we got to get to that and how you got here uh first and understand those behaviors so we can unpack them, we can work on them.
• 31:41
  Adam Shafer: And then along the way, we're gonna start adding some of these great tips that I know about nutrition and exercise along the way, and that's the path.
• 31:49
  Adam Shafer: And so I do think that uh psychology, behavioral science should be a big piece of the training that trainers, and it's just not.
• 31:57
  Adam Shafer: I mean, we it's uh none of none of us that get a certification get taught any of that stuff, but I think it's it's paramount to being a good a good trainer.
• 32:05
  Philip Pape: Yeah, man, it's true.
• 32:06
  Philip Pape: I I think there are probably four or five fields that get neglected in this space.
• 32:10
  Philip Pape: Like one of them is behavioral economics, which is a good understanding of why people make decisions, you know, and how you incentivize people.
• 32:17
  Philip Pape: And another is positive psychology, which is a field that I got exposed to through through someone else a couple of years back, but it's the idea of having uh separating positive and negative as two different spaces.
• 32:28
  Philip Pape: Like a lot of people think negative is the opposite of positive, but really you can add in positive to your life and it tends to spiral up and crowd out negative.
• 32:35
  Philip Pape: And I hear you guys talking about a lot of that yourselves, of this kind of what let me focus on the approach and the process and adding in, like you said, the two simple things I need, and that's gonna nudge you in the right direction for you in the most low friction way, least resistance because it's built to you for your life.
• 32:51
  Philip Pape: And it's funny that that's controversial still, Adam.
• 32:54
  Philip Pape: I mean, those people can pat and sand, honestly, because if anything you've done, like listen, think about yourself, listener, like um anything you've gotten good at, you didn't go hog wild and like 100% put on the pedal on day one on that.
• 33:08
  Philip Pape: Like learn a musical instrument.
• 33:10
  Philip Pape: Oh man, you gotta learn that note of C.
• 33:12
  Philip Pape: You gotta learn how to like get your weed right, read what.
• 33:14
  Philip Pape: You know what I mean?
• 33:15
  Philip Pape: It's like these little things that move it forward.
• 33:17
  Philip Pape: So if you were to say to someone listening, hey, we, Adam, with my experience and mind pump and everything else, most people have these five things that are like usually the big roadblocks for most people's lifestyle.
• 33:30
  Philip Pape: And I know I'm asking you to generalize a little bit and you just said it's not general, but still, there are certain things a lot of people do struggle with.
• 33:37
  Philip Pape: What's that like short list that the listener can kind of think about intentionally and then take that step?
• 33:44
  Adam Shafer: Well, I'll I'll address one that I think that you you kind of just pointed at right now that I think is a really important topic.
• 33:50
  Adam Shafer: The thing that's interesting about um exercise science is it is so unlike anything else that we do in life.
• 33:59
  Adam Shafer: Meaning, if I read more books and and and work harder at that, um I'm gonna get more information, I'm gonna be smarter.
• 34:08
  Adam Shafer: If I work harder at my job, I'm probably gonna get better at my job and make more money.
• 34:13
  Adam Shafer: If I study for that thing, I'm gonna have a better, like real hard, stay up late all night, three nights, like I'm gonna get, I'm gonna learn.
• 34:19
  Adam Shafer: It serves us a lot of times to overapply intensity towards a goal.
• 34:25
  Adam Shafer: Almost everything else you will get better at if you do it harder and more.
• 34:29
  Adam Shafer: Uh working out is not that way.
• 34:32
  Adam Shafer: Uh, there's a there is an optimal amount of intensity and application towards exercise and nutrition that will garner the most results.
• 34:43
  Adam Shafer: And then there's things that you can do that will give you the opposite of your results.
• 34:48
  Adam Shafer: And so understanding that sweet spot is probably where a lot of people miss and they tend to swing from one extreme to the other, meaning I'm in a place in my life right now where I'm just I'm too busy, I'm stressed, I'm not going to the gym, I'm not looking at my food, I don't give a shit right now, and I'm just I'm eating when I eat, I'm taking whatever, I'm not taking care of myself.
• 35:08
  Adam Shafer: And then it piles up.
• 35:10
  Adam Shafer: And then one morning we go, oh my God, or somebody says something to us, or we show up to the doctor, and the doctor says, You've got high blood pressure now, or your cholesterol's through the roof, or whatever, and then it scares us into or light or wakes us up in that moment, goes, Oh my God, I need to do something about it.
• 35:27
  Adam Shafer: And so then you go from doing nothing to oh my god, I gotta change this.
• 35:32
  Adam Shafer: And so you're like, Well, the harder I go, the more I do, the faster I'm gonna get to to said goal.
• 35:38
  Adam Shafer: It's not true with fitness.
• 35:41
  Adam Shafer: You can absolutely overapply the intensity and do too much that will result in less results or no results.
• 35:50
  Adam Shafer: And why that's difficult is initially it doesn't look like that.
• 35:55
  Adam Shafer: So this is a really common pattern that I just described the average person enter and insert whatever reason got you to start the gym, but that's kind of what happens is we're so busy, we're not working out, we're not tracking food, we're not doing any of that stuff.
• 36:08
  Adam Shafer: Then all of a sudden something happens, wakes us up, and we go, or a birthday or a wedding, or whatever, and we go, now we're gonna go do this.
• 36:15
  Adam Shafer: And then you go from here to all the way over here instantly overnight.
• 36:20
  Adam Shafer: And what here to over here means, not only does it mean going, you weren't going to the gym at all to now you're going four, five, six days a week, it also means you're also adding in probably cardio in some of those days or on off days.
• 36:33
  Adam Shafer: And then in addition to that, you went from eating all this crappy food to now I'm doing chicken and salad, you know, and that's what I'm that's what I'm eating, or I'm doing now, or I'm doing fasting and I'm intermittent fasting all the way till six o'clock at night, and I'm only eating in this little four-hour window or whatever.
• 36:47
  Adam Shafer: And so you went, and what what happens when you do that is you send a signal to the body that you're training all these weights and you're doing stuff that the body goes, Oh wow, we're lifting weights now.
• 36:58
  Adam Shafer: We need to adapt, we need to build.
• 36:59
  Adam Shafer: But then it goes over to the nutrition side and goes, Oh, but he or she's starving me compared to what I was eating just two weeks ago, and there's not enough material to do anything with all this signal that I'm getting.
• 37:11
  Adam Shafer: So I'm getting this loud signal because my body's getting hammered in the gym every day, but then my nutrition doesn't align with the way I'm training.
• 37:20
  Adam Shafer: And so, yeah, I burn a bunch of calories because I'm moving, which ends up sending the wrong signal to somebody who probably wants to lose body fat or lose weight, because that's what most people motivate the majority of people to get back in the gym.
• 37:32
  Adam Shafer: So, what happens is that person in the first two weeks sees the scale go down.
• 37:37
  Adam Shafer: Why?
• 37:38
  Adam Shafer: Well, because you reduced your calories by a thousand to two thousand calories a day because you went from not tracking, eating like shit, to all of a sudden salads or a small eating window.
• 37:47
  Adam Shafer: And so your calories got cut in half.
• 37:49
  Adam Shafer: You were doing no physical activity, now you're doing activity every single day, whether that's running or all the gym or your favorite, you know, orange theory type of class.
• 37:57
  Adam Shafer: So, yeah, you did this with the calorie balance game.
• 38:00
  Adam Shafer: And so, what does that result in?
• 38:02
  Adam Shafer: Well, you probably pulled out a bunch of water weight and you definitely burned some calories, and so the scale does this, and so you get this false signal of doing the right thing in the first two weeks.
• 38:14
  Adam Shafer: You go, Oh, hell yeah, I'm down 10, 15 pounds already in the first two weeks.
• 38:19
  Adam Shafer: Let's keep it rolling, and then the next week you see about five pounds more, and you're like, all right, all right, man, I gotta get a little bit harder, you know.
• 38:27
  Adam Shafer: And so then you get to like week three or four, and you're starting to hit this hard plateau.
• 38:33
  Adam Shafer: And you're like, whoa, I'm not, I'm not even halfway to my goal yet of where I'm trying to be, but I'm training five days a week.
• 38:40
  Adam Shafer: I'm eating four in four-hour windows, I'm only eating this many calories, I'm kicking my ass in the gym.
• 38:47
  Adam Shafer: Where do I go from here?
• 38:49
  Adam Shafer: And that plays out unique and different for every individual, but it kind of looks a lot like that in a lot of different ways, as far as insert the different types of cardio, insert different types of training modalities, insert different diets restrictions that they went to, but similar approach and similar type of results.
• 39:10
  Adam Shafer: And the that lever that they pulled, the eating less and just moving more, you can only pull that so many times.
• 39:18
  Adam Shafer: And so maybe somebody got longer than the three or four weeks I said, maybe they got to seven or eight weeks because they were they started at three days a week and then they went to four and then they went to five, or maybe they didn't start with running yet, and then now they've added running every single day.
• 39:31
  Adam Shafer: But that's what it looks like.
• 39:32
  Adam Shafer: And so it either happens at week three or it happens at week 13, but it's gonna happen somewhere in those first few months where pulling just that lever doesn't result in any more weight loss, and the body adapts.
• 39:45
  Adam Shafer: The body goes, Oh, okay, she's gonna beat me up like this every day, make me run, and only give me salads and chicken.
• 39:52
  Adam Shafer: I'm gonna learn to survive.
• 39:54
  Adam Shafer: Our bodies are incredible and resilient, and it goes, I'm gonna learn to survive off of all that she's giving me and how much I'm training, and then it adapts, and then it no longer sees any more results.
• 40:06
  Adam Shafer: And this is the point where people end up going, well, fuck this.
• 40:10
  Adam Shafer: I'm training seven days a week, I'm running, I'm barely eating everything, and I'm only 15 or 20 pounds lighter than what I was when I was eating everything I wanted, wasn't going to the gym at all.
• 40:21
  Adam Shafer: And it's very logical reason to quit.
• 40:24
  Adam Shafer: I would quit.
• 40:24
  Adam Shafer: I'd go, uh, all this work for a little bit lighter.
• 40:29
  Adam Shafer: I mean, nobody's even really saying anything to me yet.
• 40:32
  Adam Shafer: I can barely tell that I look different or feel different.
• 40:35
  Adam Shafer: And no, I'll go back to Fat Me.
• 40:39
  Adam Shafer: Fat me was happier eating Doritos and sitting on the couch, and I wasn't doing all this extra activity, and it's like, and I'm it was a trade for 15 pounds.
• 40:47
  Adam Shafer: That's not worth it.
• 40:49
  Adam Shafer: And that's where they throw their hands up, and or they throw even more crazy stuff, which what we see when people throw more crazy stuff and more restriction and more movement is eventually a hormonal dysfunction and then the the really doing a lot of metabolic damage that we have to unpack later on.
• 41:04
  Adam Shafer: That's a really common pattern for a lot of people is to go from one extreme to the other and then get a little bit of false hope because initially that does move the scale down.
• 41:16
  Adam Shafer: But if they actually were, if if we had uh an ability to do a real-time body fat analysis on that person of what happened and those 10 to 15 pounds, what you would see is the 10 to 15 pounds they lost, half of it was muscle and half of it was fat.
• 41:34
  Adam Shafer: So from a body fat percentage, that person didn't get any healthier and in fact might have gone the opposite direction, even though the scale showed them that they dropped 50-15 pounds.
• 41:44
  Adam Shafer: And so this is what happens to these people is they don't even realize that the the what they thought was good results were not good results at all.
• 41:54
  Adam Shafer: In fact, they were already early signs that you're losing muscle along with this with this body fat, and you're not getting any healthier, all you're doing is slowing the metabolism down and getting your body to adapt.
• 42:05
  Adam Shafer: That happens to so many people when they first get inside the gym.
• 42:10
  Adam Shafer: And so understanding that probably an a second huge mistake that I see that I think I we speak to so much is I don't think I trained a client.
• 42:20
  Adam Shafer: I mean, maybe maybe under five percent, definitely under five percent of all the people I've ever trained, when I first do a diet assessment.
• 42:30
  Adam Shafer: And the way it looks like for me is what it used to look like when I was a young trainer was I would do what I told you before, where I figure out your your physiology, your steps, your movement, your age, all the calculations have a calculation of this is your macros, and then I'd write a diet out for you to follow.
• 42:44
  Adam Shafer: It was a terrible idea.
• 42:45
  Adam Shafer: What it looks like today, or what I've been helping people for decades now, looks like is like I would tell you, I'd say, All right, Philip, here's the deal.
• 42:53
  Adam Shafer: I want you to just track what you eat for the next week to two weeks, 10 days typically is what I do.
• 42:59
  Adam Shafer: Um don't try and impress me.
• 43:01
  Adam Shafer: What I want to do is I want to learn about you.
• 43:03
  Adam Shafer: I want to learn about your eating patterns.
• 43:05
  Adam Shafer: So if you eat a Snickers bar at lunch every day and it's pretty consistent for you, I want you to actually do that.
• 43:09
  Adam Shafer: I want you to eat how you eat so I can see your eating patterns, and then I can then I from there I can make minor adjustments and they're and get us moving in the right direction.
• 43:20
  Adam Shafer: What has happened when I've learned to go about this approach is I see I one of the things I see always is the under-eating of protein, especially for somebody who's going to be strength training.
• 43:30
  Adam Shafer: So maybe they're not under-eating essential protein, and so I so people need to understand this.
• 43:35
  Adam Shafer: There's a big difference between your RDA, your recommended daily allowance, right?
• 43:39
  Adam Shafer: So you what you just which your body just needs to survive protein, versus I want to build as much muscle as I possibly can on my body, optimal protein, huge difference.
• 43:50
  Adam Shafer: So a lot of people get close to their essential protein, what they just need to survive and be okay.
• 43:56
  Adam Shafer: But the goal when we introduce strength training is to build muscle.
• 44:00
  Adam Shafer: That's what it's the most protective thing that we can do for not only your joints, your heart, your metabolism.
• 44:07
  Adam Shafer: So building muscle is paramount to your long-term success.
• 44:11
  Adam Shafer: Well, if we lift weights, that's only part of the equation.
• 44:16
  Adam Shafer: That's the the the part that sends the signal to the body to then go build this muscle.
• 44:21
  Adam Shafer: It feels the working out is just a stress.
• 44:23
  Adam Shafer: So it feels us lifting weights, and it goes, okay, uh, he's gonna, Adam's gonna make me do this thing every day.
• 44:29
  Adam Shafer: This is this is tough on my muscles.
• 44:31
  Adam Shafer: I need more muscle to do that.
• 44:32
  Adam Shafer: So there's the signal telling my body to build it.
• 44:35
  Adam Shafer: But then if I don't give it the nutrients, I don't give it the protein, the additional calories, not under calories, the additional calories and what I need to just maintain, it's not gonna build any muscle.
• 44:46
  Adam Shafer: So all I'm doing is burning.
• 44:48
  Adam Shafer: So the movements that I'm doing become almost irrelevant and don't really get the benefits of what they should because we're not giving it the material to build the muscle, to then protect the bones, to then speed the metabolism up, to then make fat loss much easier down the road.
• 45:04
  Adam Shafer: And so I'd say those are two of the biggest rocks or things that somebody can focus on when they're getting started that I think we do wrong is we go throw the whole kitchen sink at it, we undereat what the body needs to build muscle, and then we don't hit enough protein intake.
• 45:21
  Adam Shafer: That the two of those tend to be the kind of the first two things that I look at with anybody any goal.
• 45:28
  Adam Shafer: So I don't care if you're a skinny kid trying to build muscle, the borderline osteoporosis, 80-year-old woman, or the uh obese 400-pound guy who's trying to lose 100 pounds.
• 45:39
  Adam Shafer: Uh, what I do is I focus on building muscle, doing it slowly, hitting your protein tank.
• 45:45
  Adam Shafer: And I'm sure with you interviewed uh Jamie, this is one of the this is why it works so well from here.
• 45:50
  Adam Shafer: You have this huge overweight guy who's listening to our podcast and he's hearing this information, going like, okay, this is counterintuitive of what I've heard, but I'm gonna I'm gonna do it.
• 46:00
  Adam Shafer: I mean, and and look and look at how much weight this dude lost without ever doing any cardio.
• 46:06
  Adam Shafer: Yeah, and so that that would probably be the third thing that people do is they the the the amount of cardio people do it with the it the intentions of burning fat.
• 46:15
  Adam Shafer: When we preach that cardio is a terrible tool for fat loss, but it's been taught to us and told to us by even the medical field and doctors saying, Oh, get on the treadmill or go run because you're obese, it's like it is a terrible strategy for long-term fat loss, short term in the in a quick window, and somebody might go, Well, that's fine.
• 46:35
  Adam Shafer: I just want to do it short, and then I'll keep it off.
• 46:36
  Adam Shafer: It's like, no, that's the problem, is if you lose fat through cardio in the short term, what that does to you metabolically makes it very difficult to keep it off because on your way of reducing the calories and increasing all the cardio to burn that, say, 10 pounds of fat, you also reduced your metabolic rate by 500 calories a day.
• 46:56
  Adam Shafer: So you can now eat 500 less than even when you started this journey, which that's even worse, and that's even harder to stay in shape.
• 47:04
  Adam Shafer: You just made it harder for yourself.
• 47:05
  Adam Shafer: So, yeah, understanding that um and and and approaching the the gym a little bit different is probably the main things I'd focus on for most people, no matter what the goal.
• 47:15
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and I like how you brought it back to, I mean, it all comes back to the principle of hey, this is a systematic, you know, methodical, patient process.
• 47:24
  Philip Pape: If you want, if you want quick weight loss or quick fat loss, you can get it, but you're gonna sacrifice a lot and you're gonna you're gonna gain the weight back and you're not gonna have learned the skills that you need long term.
• 47:33
  Philip Pape: So you've got to make that uh, I would argue, really great trade-off of spend the next few months doing the two things you talked about, which is first of all, tracking, or not first of all, the second thing you mentioned was just tracking to get your baseline.
• 47:46
  Philip Pape: People, a lot of people don't want to do that, right?
• 47:48
  Philip Pape: They just want to jump in and take action.
• 47:50
  Philip Pape: Uh, but if you're doing, if you're changing 10 variables at once, you have no idea what's causing what, and then you reinforce this negative uh feedback loop of, like you said, I lost 15 pounds.
• 47:59
  Philip Pape: So of course what I did equals the result, and it's not the case.
• 48:02
  Philip Pape: So I mean, you're preaching the choir, obviously, here, and hopefully people who listen to this show understand that, like, you know, I don't, I I want you to take a good three months, six months, sometimes two years.
• 48:14
  Philip Pape: It's gonna be the process to like slowly build that muscle and change your body composition.
• 48:18
  Philip Pape: The cool thing is though, and and Adam, you can chime in on this, you can get wins along the way.
• 48:22
  Philip Pape: You can get this sense of internal motivation from what you're doing along the way, right?
• 48:26
  Philip Pape: Oh, yeah.
• 48:27
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 48:27
  Philip Pape: So I think people want a win, and they may not even know the right win, but what is it, what are those things people then get when they do this to know that it's working right?
• 48:37
  Adam Shafer: Yeah.
• 48:37
  Adam Shafer: So so let's talk about what they get, and then let's also talk about why that's difficult psychologically.
• 48:43
  Adam Shafer: So, what you get when you feed the body properly, you hit protein intake, you strength train properly, you apply the right amount of intensity two, three times a week, full body, moderate intensity, and you hit protein, is you get you build muscle and you get strong.
• 49:01
  Adam Shafer: And this is really exciting.
• 49:03
  Adam Shafer: Now, what happens and why what what why people struggle with this psychologically is because they don't see huge movement on the scale and or maybe even the mirror, because it takes a while.
• 49:16
  Adam Shafer: When you stare at yourself in the mirror multiple times a day, it's really difficult for you to see the movement, like somebody who hasn't seen you in two or three weeks, who probably comments, like, Oh man, Philip, you look really good.
• 49:27
  Adam Shafer: You've been lifting weights, and you're like, Really?
• 49:28
  Adam Shafer: You notice I feel like I haven't seen any change because that's how we are.
• 49:31
  Adam Shafer: We're our worst critics, and we're looking at ourselves every day.
• 49:34
  Adam Shafer: So it's hard for us to see that incremental change that's happening.
• 49:37
  Adam Shafer: So you don't see a lot of change in the mirror, you don't see a lot of movement on the scale, even though you're doing really well.
• 49:44
  Adam Shafer: And so, one of the things you can see, and why we tend to let tell people to focus on strength as such an incredible metric, is that if you're getting stronger in the gym, it is very, very likely you are building muscle.
• 49:59
  Adam Shafer: And if you are building muscle, we know we're moving in the right direction metabolically for this long-term health journey that we that we've we've put you on.
• 50:09
  Adam Shafer: And so what you can see and feel, if and again, this is other things to focus on because we focus so much on the mirror on the scale is you know, energy goes up, libido goes up, better sleep.
• 50:22
  Adam Shafer: You notice your skin is better, your hair feels better, your stool looks better, your mood gets better.
• 50:30
  Adam Shafer: Like there's a lot of these other metrics that are being impacted from this feeding your body properly, strength training properly, just a few days a week, will start to garner right away.
• 50:43
  Adam Shafer: But we ignore it because we've been taught to care just about the mirror and the scale.
• 50:48
  Adam Shafer: That we go two weeks go by and the scale stays the same, and you don't really see a difference in the mirror, and you go, I'm not seeing any results, or this trainer's terrible, fire him.
• 50:57
  Adam Shafer: When in reality, you've built some muscle, you've lost a little bit of body fat.
• 51:02
  Adam Shafer: So you say just say hypothetically in those two weeks, you built one pound of muscle and you lost one pound of fat, which means you've actually made a big dent right there.
• 51:10
  Adam Shafer: You've actually added a pound of muscle on your body, you actually burned a pound, but then the scale says zero change.
• 51:15
  Adam Shafer: So you go, Oh, I haven't really changed.
• 51:17
  Adam Shafer: Like, no, absolutely, you built a pound of muscle and you lost a pound of fat.
• 51:20
  Adam Shafer: That's incredible, it's a perfect place to be.
• 51:22
  Adam Shafer: And all those other markers I'm talking about has probably improved.
• 51:25
  Adam Shafer: You just weren't looking at them because all you cared about was the scale in the mirror, and because that's not moving fast enough for you, you actually think you're not seeing as good of results as you're actually really seeing.
• 51:36
  Adam Shafer: And so when I get a client, especially, and here it just goes back to how this whole conversation started with its psychology and listening to the things they're saying.
• 51:43
  Adam Shafer: If I have if I I can hear from a client how much they are married to the scale, and many times, even with a weight loss client, I will not allow them to use a scale.
• 51:54
  Adam Shafer: And a lot of times that's difficult for them because that's their met way of measuring what they think is success.
• 52:00
  Adam Shafer: And I have to train them and teach them that.
• 52:02
  Adam Shafer: No, it's not.
• 52:03
  Adam Shafer: And in fact, it's been sending you the wrong message for a really long time.
• 52:07
  Adam Shafer: This is why I'm not gonna let you use it.
• 52:09
  Adam Shafer: You cannot get on it.
• 52:10
  Adam Shafer: You got to throw it away.
• 52:11
  Adam Shafer: We got to get rid of it, and you got to trust me as your guide to take you through this journey.
• 52:16
  Adam Shafer: And that's really difficult for some people to do, but they have to do it, they have to move away from that because they're interpreting the information incorrectly.
• 52:24
  Adam Shafer: And I've got to get them to look at the other information that their body is already telling them.
• 52:29
  Adam Shafer: And then when I can help them make that connection, and what that used to look like when I was a personal trainer is you know, you see your client two, three times a week, you wouldn't see them a couple days between, and then they see you and you see them and you say, Hey, Susan, how'd you sleep last night?
• 52:41
  Adam Shafer: You know, how was your productivity at work?
• 52:44
  Adam Shafer: How's the libido doing?
• 52:45
  Adam Shafer: You notice a difference in your stool?
• 52:47
  Adam Shafer: Notice any difference with your hair or your skin?
• 52:49
  Adam Shafer: Like, so I have to be, I'd have to be prompting and asking these questions all the time to get them thinking about a lot of times when you first do that, they're like, I don't, I don't know.
• 52:57
  Adam Shafer: I don't know.
• 52:57
  Adam Shafer: Well, well, pay attention to that.
• 52:58
  Adam Shafer: I want you, okay, now between today and when I see you on Monday, really pay attention to those things they're talking about and see if you notice a difference.
• 53:06
  Adam Shafer: And then they're starting then they start looking, right?
• 53:08
  Adam Shafer: And then they go, Hey, you know what?
• 53:09
  Adam Shafer: Actually, now that I think about it, I haven't I haven't had a bad bathroom experience in the last two weeks.
• 53:14
  Adam Shafer: I'm like, yeah, that's your your body is thanking you.
• 53:17
  Adam Shafer: It's your digestive system is working better and your stool is better because of your eating properly, your exercise properly.
• 53:24
  Adam Shafer: You know what's crazy too?
• 53:25
  Adam Shafer: I've had some really good nights of sleep, and I noticed my energy through the day.
• 53:28
  Adam Shafer: I used to crash at two or three in the afternoon, and I've been able to have sustained energy throughout the entire day.
• 53:34
  Adam Shafer: And yeah, you know what?
• 53:35
  Adam Shafer: My sex drive is up.
• 53:36
  Adam Shafer: Oh, my husband and I are, you know, you start hearing and you're you're letting them know like this is all these signs are signs that your body is telling you you are moving in the right direction, the right way, the fastest way, the best way.
• 53:50
  Adam Shafer: Um, and so if we can get people to focus more on those those other metrics, uh, it would serve them in their long-term pursuit.
• 54:00
  Adam Shafer: Even if your goal is crazy goals, like you want to get shredded and get on a stage and be a bikini athlete or a bodybuilder, or you want to have six percent, like I don't have the most extreme goal, you still approach it in that manner of learning to listen to your body, guide you through this, these decisions of making healthier choices for your body versus only the mirror and the scale, because that will steer you in the wrong direction.
• 54:25
  Adam Shafer: Because many times when I'm doing the perfect diet, the perfect training routine, the scale doesn't give me the feedback that maybe I want.
• 54:34
  Adam Shafer: A lot of times, sometimes it even goes the opposite direction a little bit because I'm holding a little bit of water.
• 54:39
  Adam Shafer: You know, that day I'm a little inflamed.
• 54:42
  Adam Shafer: Maybe I ate something that was uh didn't agree with my gut, and so my body retains water.
• 54:46
  Adam Shafer: Maybe I over-reached my training a little bit, so I caused a little inflammation in the body, which then retains some water and held on to it, which then made me look a little puffy and bloated and added one pound more on the scale.
• 54:57
  Adam Shafer: And I go, Oh my god, I'm getting fat.
• 54:59
  Adam Shafer: No, I'm not.
• 55:00
  Adam Shafer: I'm holding a little bit of water.
• 55:01
  Adam Shafer: I over-trained a little bit or didn't sleep so well last night, or I ate that thing that even though the calories were okay, it didn't agree with my gut, and my body, my body got inflamed for that.
• 55:11
  Adam Shafer: And that makes me look different in the mirror.
• 55:13
  Adam Shafer: That makes my scale go up a tiny bit because I'm inflamed.
• 55:16
  Adam Shafer: And now I, even though I'm I'm on a perfect routine, I'm reading those signs thinking I'm doing the wrong thing, and then I overcorrect.
• 55:24
  Adam Shafer: And I go, Oh shit, I gotta, I gotta cut some.
• 55:27
  Adam Shafer: I I got I got fatter.
• 55:28
  Adam Shafer: The pound went up on the scale.
• 55:30
  Adam Shafer: I need to cut my calories more, or I need to add cardio now and burn more.
• 55:33
  Adam Shafer: And you and then you start to over and people do this all the time when they're actually doing really well and they don't interpret the signs correctly, and then they overcorrect, which is also why I think people like you and I have a job.
• 55:47
  Adam Shafer: I mean, I think that the a lot of what we're talking about is easy, I think, to understand.
• 55:53
  Adam Shafer: It's hard to apply and read in real time.
• 55:56
  Adam Shafer: And I think it takes somebody with experience and professional people to kind of help somebody learn that about this.
• 56:02
  Adam Shafer: But then once you like it, like education, once you learn it and you figure it out and you understand this, it's so invaluable because you'll have this for the rest of your life.
• 56:10
  Adam Shafer: You'll go, oh, this this life, you'll go, I get I get it now.
• 56:14
  Adam Shafer: I know what I need to do.
• 56:15
  Adam Shafer: Uh, and that is very empowering and life-changing for most people.
• 56:19
  Philip Pape: Yeah, that's super empowering.
• 56:20
  Philip Pape: I mean, you're creating a system that you've never had before.
• 56:24
  Philip Pape: And the confidence that comes from that, I know from personal experience, because I'm 44, didn't figure it out until I was like 40.
• 56:29
  Philip Pape: And once you do, you're like, whoa, this is life changing.
• 56:32
  Philip Pape: It's, I mean, it's like having a financial planner or having, you know, a professor or whatever kind of teach you the ropes and the system.
• 56:38
  Philip Pape: And I I got two really good takeaways here I want to reinforce for the listener.
• 56:42
  Philip Pape: The first, the idea of paying attention cannot be understated because what I hear you saying, it's not just this casual listen to your body.
• 56:50
  Philip Pape: It is more of an objective, like specific things you should be paying attention to, potentially documenting, tracking, whatever that makes sense for you, where it becomes objective, even your biofeedback, your stool, you know, I have my stool's gotten firmer over the next the week, you know, whatever.
• 57:05
  Philip Pape: And then combining that with like a hierarchy of the things, you know, the metrics, a dashboard, I think of it, where you have the PRs and the strength at the top.
• 57:14
  Philip Pape: Maybe then you have biofeedback, maybe your blood labs are in there if you care about health or whatever.
• 57:19
  Philip Pape: And then maybe body comps at the bottom, because it's kind of measuring the lagging output of all this stuff.
• 57:24
  Philip Pape: But then you also mention physique competitors, which is interesting because there's a lot of misunderstanding there.
• 57:31
  Philip Pape: If you go through all this, you do it well, you're eating right, you're feeling great, and then you get shredded, which is gonna take a fat loss phase to do that.
• 57:39
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 57:39
  Philip Pape: I know you've said that some of the most insecure people you've met are, you know, physique competitors and coaches and whatever.
• 57:45
  Philip Pape: And so let's reconcile that thought for people that it's not like, okay, you got shredded, so you've won the game and life is over, right?
• 57:52
  Philip Pape: You could just die the next day and you're happy.
• 57:55
  Adam Shafer: So I was lucky to get introduced to the um it's funny too.
• 57:59
  Adam Shafer: I'm sitting in it.
• 58:00
  Adam Shafer: This is my wife's office.
• 58:01
  Adam Shafer: So for the people that are thinking that I'm not narcissistic, that I have a picture of myself.
• 58:05
  Adam Shafer: And this is not my office.
• 58:06
  Adam Shafer: I'm in my wife's office this morning, but I'm looking back at a picture of when I was when I was competing.
• 58:12
  Adam Shafer: And uh I was lucky I was introduced to that at 30 years old.
• 58:16
  Adam Shafer: So I'd already been a personal trainer for over a decade and had a lot of experience, had worked on my own insecurities around fitness and had a really good grasp of nutrition, exercise science.
• 58:26
  Adam Shafer: Uh, and so I went into it.
• 58:28
  Adam Shafer: Uh, and the whole purpose of why I got into it was it to actually build uh mind pump, was to build, I didn't know what mind pump would look like at that time, but I knew I was trying to build an online e-commerce fitness business.
• 58:41
  Adam Shafer: Didn't know Sal and those guys at that time, but I I knew I was moving in that direction.
• 58:47
  Adam Shafer: I had already started my YouTube channel and I had started Instagram and I was moving in that direction.
• 58:51
  Adam Shafer: And I thought, okay, maybe in my little town, I'm a very popular trainer, but to the world, I'm nobody.
• 58:58
  Adam Shafer: So how can I get known?
• 59:00
  Adam Shafer: Um, well, uh, I've never competed, um, but I I think I have the knowledge and the discipline to do it.
• 59:08
  Adam Shafer: Um, what if I document the journey of getting shredded for people and show them how to do it?
• 59:14
  Adam Shafer: And I don't hire a coach, I don't hire a trainer, I do it all myself, so I get the credit for it, right?
• 59:18
  Adam Shafer: So people are like, oh wow, this guy knows what he's doing, right?
• 59:20
  Adam Shafer: And so that was the whole purpose of it for me was to do that.
• 59:24
  Adam Shafer: And uh, and of course, I I and I was one so when I would I got on Instagram back in 2014, so early days when when if you had 10,000 followers, you were kind of a big deal.
• 59:36
  Adam Shafer: And so when I got on there, what I saw, at least from my perspective right away, was oh, the the handful of people that were really famous in this space were just these good looking people that were super ripped, that had all these professional photos taken of themselves, or they were taking, they had, I mean, they had the professional lighting, they would take get a pump, then they were in a good studio.
• 59:59
  Adam Shafer: And I'm like, this doesn't really look like real life to me.
• 1:00:03
  Adam Shafer: Like, I know what it's like to try and get in shape, get people in shape.
• 1:00:06
  Adam Shafer: And this is doctored, this is you know produced to look way better than what it is.
• 1:00:10
  Adam Shafer: I don't, I don't look like that first thing in the morning.
• 1:00:13
  Adam Shafer: And and so my plan was I'm gonna be very authentic, transparent.
• 1:00:18
  Adam Shafer: I'm gonna wake up first thing in the morning in my terrible lighting in my bathroom mirror and take a picture of myself, not flexing, not pumped, just this is what I look like, and then tell you what I'm doing to get in shape.
• 1:00:31
  Adam Shafer: And that actually got a lot of a lot of traction and a lot of attention.
• 1:00:34
  Adam Shafer: It grew me to over 10,000 followers back when 10,000 followers was a lot of people.
• 1:00:40
  Adam Shafer: And I got a lot of attention for that.
• 1:00:42
  Adam Shafer: And that was the the reason for doing the training.
• 1:00:45
  Adam Shafer: It was like, oh wow, if I just did this first transformation of getting down to 7% body fat, if I take this all the way to the competing level, maybe I'll get more attention from more people.
• 1:00:54
  Adam Shafer: This will help build the business.
• 1:00:56
  Adam Shafer: I also was a bit excited because at this point I've actually never I didn't follow bodybuilding, I didn't know much about it.
• 1:01:03
  Adam Shafer: I knew there was a men's physique category, which I thought my body type fit.
• 1:01:07
  Adam Shafer: I'm six foot three, long wingspan, small waist, very skinny kind of build.
• 1:01:13
  Adam Shafer: I thought, okay, I could do that.
• 1:01:14
  Adam Shafer: I'm not gonna, I couldn't do bodybuilding.
• 1:01:16
  Adam Shafer: Uh I didn't want to take the amount of steroids I would need to take to even come close to competing with that.
• 1:01:22
  Adam Shafer: And so I was like, men's physique, I could, I could probably do.
• 1:01:25
  Adam Shafer: Uh and uh I thought, well, this will also be cool because I'll get to meet probably some of the brightest, smartest people in the world because these are the best physiques in the world.
• 1:01:35
  Adam Shafer: And so I was really intrigued.
• 1:01:36
  Adam Shafer: And I remember getting backstage, my first show, I was completely shredded.
• 1:01:40
  Adam Shafer: I got down to like 3% body fat.
• 1:01:42
  Adam Shafer: Um, in fact, I was too shredded.
• 1:01:43
  Adam Shafer: That was the feedback I got um from the judges.
• 1:01:46
  Adam Shafer: Was like, oh my God, you were like bodybuilder shredded.
• 1:01:48
  Adam Shafer: Uh, that's not what we're back early on days.
• 1:01:51
  Adam Shafer: If you look at the journey of men's physique, it used to have a little bit of a uh board short model look more than it had like a heart.
• 1:01:59
  Adam Shafer: I that I was a part of that evolution of it getting really hard.
• 1:02:02
  Adam Shafer: And so I came in really hard, and they were like, Yeah, no, that's that's too much.
• 1:02:07
  Adam Shafer: Um, and then I got backstage with all these amateurs and I'm talking to them.
• 1:02:12
  Adam Shafer: Now I'm a trainer for over a decade, and I'm meeting these incredible bodies, and I'm talking to them, and I'm listening to their training protocol, and I'm listening to their diet, and I'm going, like, that is not, that's not an ideal.
• 1:02:25
  Adam Shafer: And I started helping a lot of them, like, you know, maybe do this.
• 1:02:28
  Adam Shafer: And I, because I looked so good so quick, I got a lot of respect from my peers who didn't know who I was, and and they're and I'm and I'm explaining kind of the science of like, yeah, this is probably a better approach to do diet this way, or probably you know, scale your exercising this way.
• 1:02:42
  Adam Shafer: And when you're in that much of a calorie deficit, you should probably modify the intensity here.
• 1:02:46
  Adam Shafer: So I'm kind of like teaching them in the background, and I'm and I'm like, wow, I got these amateurs really, even though their bodies look great, they really don't know what they're doing.
• 1:02:54
  Adam Shafer: They just have some crazy discipline to eat hardly anything and train like a monster for a year straight, you know.
• 1:03:00
  Adam Shafer: And so I thought, well, maybe when I get to the national level, you know, that's where the like the where the smart guys are at, you know.
• 1:03:07
  Adam Shafer: I made my way, I won my first show, make my way to the USA's, get backstage there, same thing.
• 1:03:13
  Adam Shafer: I'm like, okay, well, this has got to be the difference between professional league and just the people that don't don't make it there.
• 1:03:20
  Adam Shafer: And I'm so, and I win, I win USA's, I go pro, and I get at the professional, and I find the same thing.
• 1:03:26
  Adam Shafer: And what I find is that these are some of the most disciplined people I've ever met in my life.
• 1:03:32
  Adam Shafer: So disciplined that they have gotten in shape in spite of what the science says, and in spite of a healthy relationship with exercise and nutrition.
• 1:03:42
  Adam Shafer: These are not the brightest, smartest, balanced, healthy people.
• 1:03:47
  Adam Shafer: In fact, most of them had crippling insecurities.
• 1:03:50
  Adam Shafer: Most, most of these people I was backstage with that were 3% body fat and looked better than 99.9% of the world were insecure about the way they looked and thought they were fat or their arms were too small or their chest, like they were massively insecure about the way they looked.
• 1:04:08
  Adam Shafer: And this is what drove them to train so hard and restrict so hard and to be so consistent for so long is because they had these crippling insecurities about how they looked.
• 1:04:18
  Adam Shafer: And I went, Whoa, this is crazy.
• 1:04:21
  Adam Shafer: It was super enlightening to me.
• 1:04:24
  Adam Shafer: Um that and I'm talking all of them.
• 1:04:27
  Adam Shafer: This isn't like me, and I'm I I I may sound like I'm overgeneralizing, and I'm sure somebody listening who competes that would would argue with me that they have a healthy.
• 1:04:36
  Adam Shafer: Okay, I'll give you five percent that I I were was unaware of or I didn't get a chance to meet, might have had a healthy.
• 1:04:43
  Adam Shafer: I I'm sure I wasn't the only guy who was mature and and and got into it and passed after he'd worked through his insecurity.
• 1:04:51
  Adam Shafer: So I'm sure there's a percentage that are so I'm I'm overgeneralizing a bit, but I everybody I met and talked to, massively insecure.
• 1:04:59
  Adam Shafer: And I found that in the podcasting spaces, I got to meet a lot of famous people online, that some of the people that we all look up to and aspire to be like and revere is like, oh my God, the most healthiest people are some of the most unhealthy people, not from a body fat percentage, but from an internal, yeah, mentally and psychological.
• 1:05:21
  Adam Shafer: They were crippled and by these these either traumas they had early or insecurities around body, they had body dysmorphia just from a different, a different level.
• 1:05:31
  Adam Shafer: A lot of times we think body dysmorphia, it's these people that do weird things to their body or allow themselves to get super obese, but there's you know the opposite.
• 1:05:39
  Adam Shafer: You know, you have these people that uh think they're fat when they're not, and they have to they they they're orthorexics, and that's what bodybuilding was full of.
• 1:05:48
  Adam Shafer: And you hear more people like friends of mine like Ben Pikolski and uh Phil Heath, they're coming out now talking about it, and it's it's become you know in vogue to come forward, be authentic, share your insecurities now.
• 1:06:02
  Adam Shafer: But that wasn't a popular thing when I was going through it.
• 1:06:05
  Adam Shafer: Nobody was authentic like that, nobody was being honest with how insecure they were about their bodies because they were being told how amazing they were, and they were getting all this publicity and all this fame and attention for how amazing they were.
• 1:06:18
  Adam Shafer: So it was just feeding that ego and feeding that insecurity.
• 1:06:22
  Jorge: Hello everyone.
• 1:06:22
  Jorge: Um, my name is Jorge, and I just kind of want to share a little bit about my experience uh with Wits and Weights.
• 1:06:30
  Jorge: So I've been blown away from day one, honestly.
• 1:06:32
  Jorge: The best thing about uh Wits and Weights University is that Coach Phillip has everything that we need all in one place.
• 1:06:39
  Jorge: It's easy to follow, it's easy to understand, it didn't give you like an introduction course at the beginning so you can know exactly what to do.
• 1:06:46
  Jorge: It kind of made me very conscious of my nutrition and it's kind of set me in the right path in the right direction.
• 1:06:52
  Jorge: So honestly, I cannot recommend it enough.
• 1:06:56
  Jorge: One of the best things is that whenever you have any type of question, it's answered within 15-30 minutes.
• 1:07:03
  Jorge: You feel welcome, you feel good, and like somebody's helping you.
• 1:07:06
  Jorge: Everything you need is there, all you have to do is basically come and join us.
• 1:07:10
  Jorge: See you there.
• 1:07:11
  Adam Shafer: And so it's a very dangerous thing that we use that as the main metric of what we think is success and what are the best, the smartest, or the brightest people in the space is well, you know, and and you you could you take me for an example.
• 1:07:25
  Adam Shafer: Like I don't carry myself ripped year-round at all.
• 1:07:28
  Adam Shafer: I have a very average body fat percentage, somewhere that hovers between 11 and 15 percent, 90% of the year.
• 1:07:35
  Adam Shafer: Every once in a while, probably once a year, I get a kick where I'm like, oh, I'm gonna get lean and I drop down to single digits for a short period of time.
• 1:07:42
  Adam Shafer: But for the most part, I look like a pretty average-looking guy who works out.
• 1:07:45
  Adam Shafer: Now, I don't look uh so average that you wouldn't look at me and you think I work, I've been working out for two and a half decades, so I've definitely got some muscle on me.
• 1:07:53
  Adam Shafer: But I'm I don't look impressive to my peers on Instagram.
• 1:07:56
  Adam Shafer: I mean, there's a lot of fitness people that look shredded year round.
• 1:08:00
  Adam Shafer: And I'll tell you right now, they look if you carry yourself shredded and buff and perfect body year round, you've got something going on.
• 1:08:07
  Adam Shafer: You have dysfunction.
• 1:08:08
  Adam Shafer: Yeah, you've got this, you have dysfunction going on.
• 1:08:10
  Adam Shafer: And if you as a consumer are following that person for it advice, buyer beware.
• 1:08:17
  Adam Shafer: That person that you think is so healthy or you admire so much because the way they look, I'm telling you right now, from experience of hanging out with all of them, because I've been around all of them, is they are as unhealthy as you are.
• 1:08:32
  Adam Shafer: The difference is your body fat unhealthy.
• 1:08:35
  Adam Shafer: You've you're you're at 20, 30 percent body fat and you need to lean out a little bit.
• 1:08:38
  Adam Shafer: They're psychologically trauma and security broken inside.
• 1:08:43
  Adam Shafer: And that is they've used that to discipline them to keep their body fat a certain way for some personal.
• 1:08:50
  Adam Shafer: And we live in a world now where these people are idolized because of a platform like Instagram or YouTube, and it's unfortunate because you have a lot of people that these people are leading, and sure, they understand macros and exercise uh decent, but they're leading them down a path that is probably not gonna serve them.
• 1:09:13
  Adam Shafer: And this is super common in our space in bodybuilding, in women's bikini, men's physique, bodybuilding, and these Instagram people that we follow that are ripped year-round.
• 1:09:27
  Philip Pape: And that's why I wanted to bring it up with you because that is what a lot of people's content is coming from, you know.
• 1:09:32
  Philip Pape: And it's funny because I'm not shredded, ripped, or anything.
• 1:09:36
  Philip Pape: I started in my 40s.
• 1:09:37
  Philip Pape: I feel like I have good things to say and I want to help people.
• 1:09:39
  Philip Pape: And I don't know if it's a benefit or not that I'm not at that level because I don't claim to be and like I have to lean on the way I've improved personally and help people improve as opposed to that.
• 1:09:50
  Philip Pape: But like there is a lot of messaging around uh the best fitness coaches are the ones that look the best, you know, that kind of fit of messaging we hear.
• 1:09:57
  Philip Pape: And also your mess, your message here that a poor relationship with your body that gets fed, that feeds this uh obsession to get shredded just gets worse and worse once you get there.
• 1:10:08
  Philip Pape: And so having said that, when someone, if someone's listening, kind of thinking that way, I'm no, we're not gonna solve everyone's like deep mental struggles on this podcast, but how do we either reframe or redirect those motivations?
• 1:10:22
  Philip Pape: Like what is what is the exercise or is the or the tip to redirect that?
• 1:10:26
  Adam Shafer: Sal, Sal said something on our pocket.
• 1:10:28
  Adam Shafer: My co-host Sal said something on the podcast that went viral a long time ago.
• 1:10:31
  Adam Shafer: And uh, we made t-shirts out of it, and and uh it's something we bring up all the time, which was chase health and aesthetics will follow.
• 1:10:40
  Adam Shafer: Chase aesthetics, and you will most certainly lose aesthetics efficiently.
• 1:10:45
  Adam Shafer: So you chasing health will actually lead to that body that you really want, focusing on health.
• 1:10:52
  Adam Shafer: If you use all those markers that I was talking about, always trying to get better sleep, always trying to improve your libido, always working on better skin, better digestion, better stools.
• 1:11:04
  Adam Shafer: Like if you are using those better strength, like if you are better stamina, you are using all those metrics as the things that you are always focused on, and you're incrementally getting a little bit better at all those over time, and they just keep getting better, better, better, better.
• 1:11:18
  Adam Shafer: Well, when you look back after a year or two years of chasing that, you're gonna be ripped.
• 1:11:24
  Adam Shafer: You're gonna look amazing.
• 1:11:25
  Adam Shafer: You're gonna you're gonna have achieved that thing that's driving you.
• 1:11:29
  Adam Shafer: If you do anything and everything you could to achieve aesthetics, and that's all you care about, and you ignore all the other signals, then it will lead you down a path of hormone dysfunction, um, cortisol junkie, like it'll cause a whole host of problems, of health problems in your life eventually.
• 1:11:49
  Adam Shafer: Maybe not at first, maybe taking the steroids, doing all the things will serve you initially, but over time, a lot of those things will have adverse effects, and you'll eventually lose the aesthetics, even if you got them by chasing them at first.
• 1:12:04
  Adam Shafer: Yeah, so chase health, aesthetics will follow.
• 1:12:07
  Adam Shafer: And I think that it's it's a way better guiding principle for people, and you will, you'll get what you want.
• 1:12:13
  Adam Shafer: Because I get I get too, yeah.
• 1:12:14
  Adam Shafer: I was a young kid who said, I used to say, I'll show, no go, all I care about is the way I look.
• 1:12:20
  Adam Shafer: And I used to I used to tell people when they asked me, like, oh, what do you?
• 1:12:23
  Adam Shafer: I was a trainer for years, never did a PR, never cared about how much I bench press.
• 1:12:28
  Adam Shafer: And somebody would ask me, How much do you bench press?
• 1:12:30
  Adam Shafer: And I'd say some line, like, Listen, I've never taken my shirt off, and a girl asked me how much I bench press, so all I care about is what it looks like.
• 1:12:37
  Adam Shafer: Does she does her jaw drop?
• 1:12:38
  Adam Shafer: Does she go, oh, he's good looking?
• 1:12:39
  Adam Shafer: Like, and so I that's how I train.
• 1:12:42
  Adam Shafer: Like, so I don't care.
• 1:12:43
  Adam Shafer: And so I get it.
• 1:12:44
  Adam Shafer: I get what it's like to have that mindset of like, I don't care, I just care about how I look.
• 1:12:49
  Adam Shafer: But if you chase the health, you will get the look thing.
• 1:12:53
  Adam Shafer: You will get the body you want, and you'll do it in a way that is healthy and maintainable.
• 1:12:58
  Adam Shafer: So if you want that aesthetic look and you want to keep it for the rest of your life, then chase health and you'll get it.
• 1:13:05
  Adam Shafer: You will only get it temporarily if you chase aesthetics.
• 1:13:09
  Philip Pape: Long-term aesthetics are an expression of long-term health.
• 1:13:12
  Philip Pape: So love it.
• 1:13:13
  Philip Pape: That's perfect.
• 1:13:13
  Philip Pape: And it ties exactly to what we were talking about with the metrics.
• 1:13:16
  Philip Pape: So pivoting just a little bit because you personally are at the at the point now where I know you're experimenting with lots of things and you talk about it on the show, and and I can't keep track of the whole list of things you've done, but I know you've experimented with very long fasts.
• 1:13:30
  Philip Pape: Uh, I know you've experimented like strange macros, like really high fat macros or something.
• 1:13:35
  Philip Pape: Like, is there any one of those that's that you're testing right now or something or and or something you've learned?
• 1:13:40
  Philip Pape: Hey, my my body responds very differently from what the science might suggest as a default.
• 1:13:45
  Philip Pape: And that was what I learned through the experimentation, or something like that.
• 1:13:49
  Adam Shafer: Yeah, no, that's an interesting question.
• 1:13:51
  Adam Shafer: Uh current currently, right now, I'm not doing anything in particular nutrition diet.
• 1:13:56
  Adam Shafer: Um, I'm very intuitive eating right now.
• 1:13:58
  Adam Shafer: Um but you're right.
• 1:13:59
  Adam Shafer: I've I have literally I've ran every popular diet you can think of.
• 1:14:04
  Adam Shafer: I've messed with peptides, I've messed with GLP ones, been on hormone therapy since I was 30 years old.
• 1:14:11
  Adam Shafer: There's a lot of things that um I've tested.
• 1:14:14
  Adam Shafer: And what I have found is that there's different there's different ways of eating, there's different ways of training that serves different versions of me, even.
• 1:14:22
  Adam Shafer: And so it really depends on uh the the period of like life that I'm in at the moment.
• 1:14:28
  Adam Shafer: Right now, I'm in a in a stretch where I'm heavily focused on business and my son.
• 1:14:35
  Adam Shafer: So a lot of my attention outside of the actual workout of the work is working on more work because I'm trying to build another business and I'm scaling and we're hiring, and that requires a lot of my attention.
• 1:14:48
  Adam Shafer: And I have a six-year-old son that I'm absolutely uh addicted to and want to be so much of his life, and so those two things tend to take a lot of priority, and so my training and diet right now look very minimalistic.
• 1:15:01
  Adam Shafer: I'm lucky to get two days of lifting in a week right now.
• 1:15:04
  Adam Shafer: Um, sometimes they're a little 15, 20 minutes.
• 1:15:07
  Adam Shafer: Sometimes, I mean, yesterday, all I did was I squatted five sets and left.
• 1:15:11
  Adam Shafer: That's all I did.
• 1:15:12
  Adam Shafer: And my diet, I'm not weighing, chasing macros.
• 1:15:16
  Adam Shafer: I do, we do, we're really good in my family about targeting uh whole foods.
• 1:15:20
  Adam Shafer: I I eat we eat a lot of meat um and I eat protein.
• 1:15:24
  Adam Shafer: So I do follow a lot of the things that I I coach on the podcast of like for somebody who's trying to stay healthy and fit.
• 1:15:30
  Adam Shafer: And I find when I prioritize healthy foods, whole foods, and I just eat the protein first, I can really I can play this game of telling myself, like I have ice cream in my freezer, and that's ice cream is one of my my total uh kryptonite, right?
• 1:15:47
  Adam Shafer: To staying in shape.
• 1:15:48
  Adam Shafer: Likewise.
• 1:15:49
  Adam Shafer: But I find I find if I stick to like my, if I'm training two, three times a week, I am going after whole foods, hitting protein first, then I can enjoy uh a bowl of ice cream here and there, a couple times a week, no problem, and enjoy that and still maintain a very healthy fit physique, maintaining that 11 to 15% range that I'm talking about uh while only training that much.
• 1:16:14
  Adam Shafer: And so I'm in that phase right now of very, very minimalist around my diet, very minimalist around my training, really heavy focused on my son and my business right now.
• 1:16:24
  Adam Shafer: But that that always flips.
• 1:16:25
  Adam Shafer: I mean, there they're all like just last year, I did a series uh on YouTube where I documented me getting in really good shape again.
• 1:16:34
  Adam Shafer: I I think I was up, I think I got all the way up to uh 17% body fat or something like that, which is would be considered high for me at this point in my life, and uh documented me coming all the way down to single digits and uh and showed people actually how little I did so uh to to get there.
• 1:16:53
  Adam Shafer: So it was, I mean, I would go in two exercises, that's it.
• 1:16:56
  Adam Shafer: I just do two exercises, moderate intensity, and then I would just like we talked about that we started this podcast, I would make little adjustments every week.
• 1:17:05
  Adam Shafer: I wouldn't go throw the whole kitchen sink at once, I wouldn't go hard strict diet.
• 1:17:08
  Adam Shafer: I would tell it, I would talk to the camera, like, all right, this week I'm just gonna do these things and focus on that.
• 1:17:14
  Adam Shafer: And then next week I'm gonna tweak this and I just turn the night and then I showed this progression, and you know, then I was in shape for a while, then I was a little bit more into tracking and paying attention.
• 1:17:24
  Adam Shafer: So I think it's important that you find things that that like I know uh if I want to be on a podcast like this, I do much better in a fasted state or on a ketogenic diet.
• 1:17:37
  Adam Shafer: I just have better mental clarity.
• 1:17:39
  Adam Shafer: If I were to get up, if I would have got up before you and had a stack of pancakes, um, and then I I would feel a difference in my conversational skills with you.
• 1:17:49
  Adam Shafer: And so I'm just I'm way sharper when I eat that way.
• 1:17:53
  Adam Shafer: And so that's a classic example of how I'll modify something day to day based off of something that I don't do a lot of podcasts at eight o'clock in the morning.
• 1:18:03
  Adam Shafer: And so if I'm gonna do something like that, I'm gonna pay attention to what I ate last night or what I eat in the morning.
• 1:18:09
  Adam Shafer: Where if I wasn't podcasting with you today, then maybe I wouldn't care.
• 1:18:12
  Adam Shafer: Maybe I'd get up and I'd have the normal breakfast or whatever.
• 1:18:15
  Adam Shafer: And so I think one of the most awesome things about playing with different diets, always using the those metrics that I talked about, scan, hair, libido, all those things as like the movers, is you can start to tell, like, oh, I noticed when I I eat this way, for example, I have a better libido and sex drive when I actually have carbs in the diet.
• 1:18:37
  Adam Shafer: So even though ketogenic diet and low carb serves me really well for maintaining body fat or staying kind of on the leaner side, like when I eat high fats, low carb, it's really easy to keep calories down for me.
• 1:18:50
  Adam Shafer: It's really easy for me to kind of stay in shape and not put body fat on.
• 1:18:54
  Adam Shafer: But I also notice my energy levels kind of dip and my libido kind of dips.
• 1:18:59
  Adam Shafer: Well, you know, I'm married to a beautiful woman that I don't want my libido dipping.
• 1:19:04
  Adam Shafer: So I'm gonna modify that and I'm gonna introduce that.
• 1:19:08
  Adam Shafer: Now, maybe there's a week where her and I are in different places of the country and I don't need a I don't need a strong libido.
• 1:19:15
  Adam Shafer: I'm not traveling and I just want to stay fit.
• 1:19:16
  Adam Shafer: I don't want to make bad choices, so maybe I'll go ketogenic.
• 1:19:19
  Adam Shafer: And so what's so fun about this journey that we're all kind of on is trying different things and then paying attention to those metrics that we're talking about and seeing how all of them, all the different diets, all the different ways of eating, all the different peptides, all the different supplements, all these things affect that, and knowing that I can kind of pull from each of them depending on what part of my life or phase I'm in.
• 1:19:45
  Adam Shafer: And I personally, and this is my opinion, that I think that's a very healthy relationship with exercise and nutrition.
• 1:19:52
  Adam Shafer: I don't uh you probably get somebody else on this show you'll interview, and they'll be like, I work out these days, eat this way, I train these, and it's like that.
• 1:20:00
  Adam Shafer: That's not me.
• 1:20:00
  Adam Shafer: Like, I I uh I want to be healthy, and healthy for me is typically somewhere between 11 and 15% body fat, training a few times a week to where I maintain strength.
• 1:20:13
  Adam Shafer: I will I always want to be able to deadlift north of 300 pounds, squat north of 300 pounds, bench press 200 plus pounds, and rotate, move, sit down in an Astograss squat, play with my kid and his Legos in a squat position comfortably and not hurt.
• 1:20:29
  Adam Shafer: These are the these are the metrics that I pay attention to, and I want to do as very little in the gym to maintain those.
• 1:20:37
  Adam Shafer: And so, and that way I can allocate that extra time to the other priorities of my life that I think fulfill me way more than being two more percent leaner or five percent stronger.
• 1:20:49
  Adam Shafer: Like that's it.
• 1:20:50
  Adam Shafer: Like, if I can deadlift, squat that way, get down like that, rotate and move like that.
• 1:20:54
  Adam Shafer: Uh, one, I can kick most dads' asses that my son goes to school with.
• 1:20:58
  Adam Shafer: I can do all the things in my life that I want to.
• 1:21:00
  Adam Shafer: I feel healthy, I'm not gonna have health problems, my blood markers didn't come back good, and I'm applying very little effort towards it.
• 1:21:08
  Adam Shafer: Like that's the ultimate goal for myself.
• 1:21:11
  Adam Shafer: And so, yeah, it looks different and it ebbs and flows based off of what's currently going on in my life.
• 1:21:17
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and that connects perfectly to what you started saying with the matching the initial part of the journey to someone's lifestyle.
• 1:21:23
  Philip Pape: And then as you track the things, as you care about metrics that aren't weight on the scale, as you learn what works, this flexible approach means it's sustainable, right?
• 1:21:33
  Philip Pape: It means that you can go with the flow of what's happening in your life, even day to day, week to week.
• 1:21:38
  Philip Pape: And then it's, I'm glad you mentioned maintenance because obviously a lot of people are trying to get to a place, but then what's after that?
• 1:21:44
  Philip Pape: And I know you guys talk on Mind Pump all the time about how much less training is required to maintain your muscle mass, for example, you know, like as little as maybe an eighth or whatever the studies say.
• 1:21:54
  Philip Pape: And it's a good metric to see that this isn't like chasing all out everything across the board.
• 1:21:59
  Philip Pape: Fitness is your number one priority for the rest to the day you die.
• 1:22:02
  Philip Pape: It's you know, ebbing and flowing, which is a great message of flexibility and sustainability.
• 1:22:07
  Adam Shafer: So that's one of my favorite studies that we, I mean, I found that study while we were podcasting.
• 1:22:12
  Adam Shafer: So I wasn't even aware of that.
• 1:22:14
  Adam Shafer: Uh and Sal brought it up I don't know how many years ago.
• 1:22:17
  Adam Shafer: And I don't, I mean, I didn't know it was that little.
• 1:22:20
  Adam Shafer: It's if you worked out one time every two weeks, you could maintain your muscle.
• 1:22:25
  Adam Shafer: That is so little.
• 1:22:27
  Adam Shafer: And what I love about that study is it gave someone like me who probably earlier in my years, not probably for certainly in my earlier years, was all or nothing.
• 1:22:36
  Adam Shafer: I either was on the diet, training hard, or I was off, letting myself go until I get to a certain point, then I would be on again.
• 1:22:43
  Adam Shafer: Versus now where I don't really ever have an all-off or really an all-on either.
• 1:22:48
  Adam Shafer: It's like I have moments or weeks or maybe months where I have very low training volume.
• 1:22:55
  Adam Shafer: But what I realized, and I've been able to give myself permission, is like nothing wrong with going to the gym yesterday and just doing five sets of squats.
• 1:23:02
  Adam Shafer: Like just that, lifting that right there is gonna send a signal to my body like, hey, we still need muscle in them legs, don't lose it.
• 1:23:09
  Adam Shafer: And I may not hit those legs again for another week or two, but I'm okay.
• 1:23:13
  Adam Shafer: Like, I'm not gonna atrophy, go way backwards because and so since now that I have given myself that permission that hey, sometimes my training looks very minimal because that's all I want to go there and do, and it's not a focus, but I can do that and I can be okay.
• 1:23:27
  Adam Shafer: I'm not gonna be the most jacked version of me, but I also will still be able to maintain a lot of muscle and stay pretty healthy and stay pretty strong, even doing that little.
• 1:23:35
  Adam Shafer: And so I love uh that study, and I think it's so important that people realize that you're doing it more than just trying to look like the shredded version of yourself all the time.
• 1:23:45
  Adam Shafer: Like, and if you can get in there and do one or two things, it is absolutely better than doing nothing at all.
• 1:23:51
  Adam Shafer: And I for me, at least for me, and maybe people who are listening that resonate with the all or all or nothing type of mentality, moving away from that was a game changer for me.
• 1:24:01
  Adam Shafer: And and uh allowing myself the permission to just go do a couple exercises every now and then, or maybe the diet isn't perfect, but I I'll make a couple better choices than what I did the day before.
• 1:24:12
  Adam Shafer: That uh that gave me a lot of freedom, and uh it has allowed me to stay healthier and maintain a fitter physique longer by having that attitude.
• 1:24:21
  Adam Shafer: And so uh hopefully somebody who's listening who is like me that resonates with is giving yourself that permission to do less because it doesn't take a lot to maintain the muscle that you've built in the past.
• 1:24:32
  Philip Pape: Yeah, yeah, super important.
• 1:24:33
  Philip Pape: I mean, I remember with the one of my fat loss phases where I was just wiped and I had so many other priorities with business and family.
• 1:24:40
  Philip Pape: And I'm like, you know, I don't have to train four or five days a week.
• 1:24:43
  Philip Pape: Let me try two, let me try three.
• 1:24:44
  Philip Pape: Hey, now I could get extra sleep on those other two days, and all of a sudden you start feeling better and training better.
• 1:24:49
  Philip Pape: And so it's kind of interesting.
• 1:24:51
  Philip Pape: All right, so as we wrap up, man, looking ahead to the future, I'm an optimistic guy.
• 1:24:55
  Philip Pape: I get the sense that you are as well.
• 1:24:57
  Philip Pape: Even though we talked about the dangers of AI and all of that and social media, everything that's happening, I know you're trying to scale your business, you're always doing something.
• 1:25:04
  Philip Pape: What really excites you the most right now about where this industry is heading in the future?
• 1:25:09
  Adam Shafer: Um, so I do think we're moving back to a connection.
• 1:25:13
  Adam Shafer: So this is also why we pivoted our business to now we actually train people, right?
• 1:25:20
  Adam Shafer: So we were not training clients.
• 1:25:22
  Adam Shafer: Um, what we did was digital products online.
• 1:25:25
  Adam Shafer: It was far more scalable and we could reach millions of people that way.
• 1:25:29
  Adam Shafer: And so it served us for the first decade.
• 1:25:31
  Adam Shafer: But what we all agree and we recognize is that, and I think COVID really pushed us over that edge to realize how important human connection and interaction is to us as a species.
• 1:25:42
  Adam Shafer: And we've become so digital and disconnected uh because of technology for and not to demonize it, but it's because it's done a lot of great things.
• 1:25:52
  Adam Shafer: I mean, the fact that you and I can be across the country and get on a Zoom call like this or a uh uh you know rest stream is is incredible, right?
• 1:26:00
  Adam Shafer: So technology is awesome.
• 1:26:02
  Adam Shafer: But if this was the only way I ever connected to people, which I think some people do, I think they can be really unhealthy for you.
• 1:26:09
  Adam Shafer: And and we we don't get that oxytocin until you get in the same room as another human being.
• 1:26:14
  Adam Shafer: And that's a very important hormone for health for us.
• 1:26:18
  Adam Shafer: And so I think what the future looks like optimistically is the resurgence of in-person and getting back to human connection.
• 1:26:27
  Adam Shafer: Uh again, that's why we moved to personal training in studio, having clients come in.
• 1:26:32
  Adam Shafer: We're gonna hold more live events.
• 1:26:34
  Adam Shafer: So it excites me.
• 1:26:35
  Adam Shafer: I like that.
• 1:26:35
  Adam Shafer: I like, I mean, what got me into personal training, why I loved it so much.
• 1:26:39
  Adam Shafer: I did not have the vision that, you know, when I was in my 40s, I'd have the biggest health and fitness podcast in the world, and I'd sit on a mic and I'd talk about it, and that's how I would make my living.
• 1:26:49
  Adam Shafer: I did not think that at all.
• 1:26:50
  Adam Shafer: In fact, I got into it because I love people.
• 1:26:52
  Adam Shafer: I have a genuine passion for helping others, and I'm I curiosity about humans, and I like people that have different ideologies and ways of living than I do, and I like connecting with those people that shatter my paradigm, and I love that.
• 1:27:07
  Adam Shafer: And so I'm excited that I think that the industry and our society in general is moving back to human connection and getting back to people.
• 1:27:18
  Adam Shafer: That's what you'll see in my business, and I think that's what we're gonna see across the board.
• 1:27:22
  Adam Shafer: And so if you're a business operator uh in the fitness space or any business for that matter, and there's opportunity for you to do things that help people connect.
• 1:27:30
  Adam Shafer: I don't know if you recently saw one of the one of the viral apps that's making the news and going all over the place right now is this app.
• 1:27:37
  Adam Shafer: It's like a, you remember, I think Wags is the dog app where you could look for a person to walk your dog for a fee.
• 1:27:44
  Adam Shafer: You know, there's a human walking app that has become super popular now.
• 1:27:48
  Adam Shafer: So people are getting onto an app, looking up people that they can pay to walk with them as a service in a business.
• 1:27:56
  Adam Shafer: I think it's hilarious.
• 1:27:57
  Adam Shafer: I don't have a I don't have a dog on the fight if I think it's bad or good.
• 1:28:00
  Adam Shafer: But what I think it more and more importantly, what it highlights is how thirsty we are for human connection that an app like that would go viral and people would sign up for it right away because we want that.
• 1:28:11
  Adam Shafer: We crave that.
• 1:28:12
  Adam Shafer: Um we've been deprived of, I think, a bit in the last five years, maybe even eight, 10.
• 1:28:17
  Adam Shafer: And I think that is the future.
• 1:28:19
  Adam Shafer: I think going moving back to that, we've gone so digital and all these great things have complimented our businesses, but I think the future in fitness, the future in this business is getting back to uh getting in front of people in real life.
• 1:28:33
  Philip Pape: Human connection.
• 1:28:34
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I wasn't aware of that app.
• 1:28:35
  Philip Pape: I know there's the apps in Japan that let you like hire a family member uh you know for a funeral or something like that, but I hadn't heard of the walking one.
• 1:28:43
  Philip Pape: It's funny, you know, for a guy like you who has this, you know, big business and like you talk scaling and you talk about the maps products all the time, to say that obviously is very powerful, right?
• 1:28:53
  Philip Pape: Because people are always thinking as entrepreneurs, okay, we need to reach as many people as we can, but then you lose that.
• 1:28:59
  Philip Pape: So I if you have any live events, I would love to come to one of those.
• 1:29:02
  Philip Pape: I'm curious to hear when the when you guys start announcing something like that.
• 1:29:05
  Philip Pape: But we want to hook people up with you and and mind pump and everything you guys are doing.
• 1:29:09
  Philip Pape: So where do you want them to reach you?
• 1:29:12
  Philip Pape: Obviously, they're gonna they're gonna hit up Mind Pump.
• 1:29:13
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna throw that in the show notes.
• 1:29:15
  Philip Pape: You go to witsandweights.com slash mind pump, get access to all the maps products, which we just said uh probably go really well when you have human connection tied to it, which you know, um, where else do you want people to reach out to you, Adam?
• 1:29:26
  Adam Shafer: Yeah, uh, you know, I tell everybody if it's the first time you've ever heard me, don't go buy anything from me.
• 1:29:31
  Adam Shafer: Go consume all the free content that we've created on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes.
• 1:29:36
  Adam Shafer: Uh, you could literally Google uh Mind Pump, Mind Pump Media, and uh everything you see connected to that is us and the stuff and the content that we've created.
• 1:29:45
  Adam Shafer: We have a website called mindpumpfree.com, which is a ton of free guides to help people uh that you can download for absolutely free.
• 1:29:53
  Adam Shafer: Then we have uh we actually have an AI tool called Askmindpump.com, where it's uh we built An AI tool probably four years ago, and it's incredible.
• 1:30:03
  Adam Shafer: So if you have literally any question related to health, fitness, hormones, anything, anything related to your health journey, you can literally go to askmindpump.com, pose the question to us, and you'll get an answer from one of us hosts.
• 1:30:18
  Adam Shafer: And then you'll also get links to show notes and content that we've created around that specific topic.
• 1:30:23
  Adam Shafer: So incredible tool.
• 1:30:25
  Adam Shafer: Go use all the free stuff, uh, enjoy it, and then uh hopefully uh become a listener.
• 1:30:30
  Adam Shafer: All right.
• 1:30:30
  Philip Pape: We'll throw throw all that at the show notes, Adam.
• 1:30:31
  Philip Pape: And this has been a pleasure.
• 1:30:32
  Philip Pape: Uh, I've been following you for years, and it was great that we could connect.
• 1:30:35
  Philip Pape: And you can come on Wits and Weights and share all of your wisdom with my audience, listeners.
• 1:30:39
  Philip Pape: Reach out to Adam, say hello, check out Mind Pump, and thanks again, man, for taking the time to come on the show.
• 1:30:44
  Adam Shafer: Appreciate it, Bill.
• 1:30:45
  Adam Shafer: Thank you, bro.