Ep. #734: Sal Di Stefano on the Resistance Training Revolution

Mike: Hello, and welcome to a new episode of Muscle for Life. I’m Mike Matthews, your host. Thanks for joining me today. And before we get started, a quick little covid commentary because as I shared a few episodes ago, I finally got the cove. I got it from one of the guys I work with and we were doing some yearly planning stuff, and he didn’t know at the time that he had it and blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, so I got it and my experience was basically exactly what the data predicted. It was almost nothing. I was modelly congested for. A couple of days and that’s it. I didn’t even feel sick. It didn’t even register as much as a cold. And so anyway, a few days of mild congestion, some mucus in my throat, that’s it.

And I did my quarantine like a good citizen. I waited 10 days from the onset of the first symptom before reentering society, and so now I am back to living my life. I’m back in the gym with a. Antibodies, which unfortunately don’t make me stronger. So now I have to work on getting my baseline strength back because in my training, uh, I’m following the Beyond bigger, leaner, stronger program, which you can learn about in my book Beyond Bigger, leaner, stronger, which is for intermediates and advanced weightlifters in the program, each 16 week macro cycle.

That’s the biggest training cycle. And then those macro cycles are broken down into meso cycles and even micro cycles and meso cycles last four weeks. Micro cycles are just one week each. And so at the end of this four month training block, you do some amrap, as many reps as possible, work with some of the big exercises to see if you have gained strength throughout the course of the macro cycle.

Now, you are already going to know if you have or have not based on the programming, but. The AMRAP week where you do some AM wraps on a squat, for example, a deadlift, a bench press, and an overhead press are where you really get to push yourself and you get to see just how much strength you have gained.

And that, of course, would indicate also muscle gain over the previous four months of training. And so right before I got the rona, I was, I believe I finished my week of sets of two with 90% of one rep max. And then that was supposed to be followed with the AM wraps. And so I was right there. I was supposed to do my twos and then go on a ski trip and then come back and do my AM wraps or maybe one week of like fours or twos and then an AM amrap.

So I go on the ski trip and then I get back and then I promptly get rona, and then I’m outta the gym for basically two weeks, and it’s now I’m back and just doing some sets of four and trying to get my weights back to where they were before. I went skiing and got infected with the plague, and so I will just see how it goes.

My pressing took the biggest hit, which is not surprising, smaller muscles than the lower body muscles, the power of the squat and powered the deadlift. And also when I was skiing, I was of course using, I was demanding a lot of my lower body muscles. 

I was skiing hours every. I basically would just ski until my quads were clearly not able to keep up anymore until I was struggling just to maintain good form, at which point it is time to go home.

Because not only is it a lot less fun when you can’t really do what you want to do because your muscles won’t muscle the way that you want them to, but then there’s also the point of safety because that’s also when the risk of injury goes up, and especially during spring conditions, which that was my first time.

Spring skiing and winter skiing is way better, in my opinion. Yeah, it’s colder weather, but that doesn’t bother me. You just dress for it, but way better snow. Anyway, that’s it for today’s mini memoir. I thought I would share. Briefly in case uh, anyone was wondering how things panned out for me and the terrifying coronavirus.

So anyway, what is today’s episode about? Well, it is an interview with my good friend Sal DeStefano from the Super popular Fitness podcast, mind Pump, and it’s him talking 

about his book. Sal wrote a book. This is. First book, and I’m excited to spread the word about this book because Sal’s a good guy. He’s a good friend, but it’s also a very good book.It has a lot of very good information, which is of course what you would expect from someone like Sal. But I’m also excited to have someone like him who is an effective educator, who is an effective communicator and who has a lot of experience working with everyday people and helping them get into great shape.

I’m excited to have somebody like him publishing a book. I hope he publishes more books because there aren’t that many of us in the fitness space publishing these types of books. There’s a lot of bullshit. There’s a lot of marketing, puffy. There are a lot of gimmicks and one weird tricks out there.Different types of fad diets, different types of fad training programs. A lot of that, not a lot of good, 

solid evidence-based information that is a lot more steak than sizzle. And that’s why I’m always working on my next book. At least one of the reasons why, I mean, I really do enjoy it. That’s the work that I enjoy the most.

But I also am trying to build a bigger and better collection of material and give more and more people different ways to find me and find my work. But I’m only one dude and I can only do so much. And I wish there were many other dudes like me and like Sal, who care too and are able to write good books and market those books, sell those books, get those books into people’s hands.

Before those hands get filled with bullshit. And so what is Sal’s book, the Resistance Training revolution all about? Well, of course that’s what this interview is all about. And it’s not just a pitch for his book. Of course, he shares a lot of information from the book practical stuff that you can start using right away.

And of course, if you like this interview, you are definitely going to like the book. So you should pick up a copy. And if you know Sal and you know Adam, and you know Justin, you know Mind Pump, I should mention Doug too. If you know them, you know that this book is not promising Quick fixes. It’s not a biohacking book.

It’s also not written for hardcore bodybuilders. It’s really just the ground truths, the practical know-how that’s required to help normal people who have a couple of hours per week to give to their fitness, get healthy. Get lean, get some muscle definition, and enjoy the process and develop a lifestyle that they can maintain for the rest of their lives.

So if you’d like to hear about Sal’s mission, to shift the fitness paradigm toward resistance train, to make resistance train the most popular and most prescribed, the most recommended form of exercise that people can do. And if you’d also like to learn a bit about how you can more effectively educate friends and family on the benefits of resistance training, maybe you are sold and you are doing a lot of resistance training, but you’re having trouble convincing loved ones to do it with you, then I think you’re gonna like this.

Also, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you, is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world, and we’re on top. Because every ingredient and dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research.

Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends, for example, and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. So that means no artificial sweeteners, no artificial food dyes, which may not be as dangerous as some people would have you believe. But there is good evidence to suggest that having many servings of artificial sweeteners, in particular every day for long periods of time may not be the best for your health.

So while you don’t need pills, powders, and potions to get into great shape, and frankly, most of them are. Useless. There are natural ingredients that can help you lose fat, build muscle, and get healthy faster. And you will find the best of them in Legion products to check out everything we have to offer, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout, post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more.

Head over to www.buylegion.com, b u y legion.com, and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code M F L at checkout and you will save 20% on your entire first order. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, and if you also want all natural evidence-based supplements that work, please do consider supporting Legion so I can keep doing what I love, like producing more podcasts like this. Sal Sal, you’re back on the show. It’s been a while.

Sal: Yeah, it has, man. Good to hear from you, Mike. Yeah. 

Mike: Always, always love talking to you. Yeah, same. I’m looking forward to today’s discussion, which, uh, is particularly exciting for me because you released a book and I understand what that means. I understand the work that goes into that, and that’s still researching and writing is still the work that I enjoy the most.

So whenever a friend, or really I like to see anyone in the industry release a book because. Readers read widely. Books are not a zero sum game. I welcome the quote unquote competition. I don’t even view it that way. Especially when somebody like you and who’s knowledgeable and who has a big following, does this, writes a book and releases a book because you are gonna bring more readers into the ecosystem, so to speak. So exciting. 

Sal: Yeah. No, it’s e exactly. Uh, how I feel when I see other good people in our space. I think that the health and fitness space is so crowded with just terrible information. E either just not true stuff, blatant lies or communicated in ways that aren’t really gonna help people. But there are a few, there’s a small percentage of the information that’s actually really good and the more good information that’s out there, stuff like you put out, the more I guess, awareness we bring to it and the, and the better.

And so I’m with you a hundred percent. I love. Good stuff. So I appreciate you saying that about 

Mike: me. Tell us about the book. So let’s start with the title for people who already want to go check it out. And then what’s the premise and why did you write it? Like what opportunity did you see? What gap did you see in the marketplace that you felt you could fill?

Sal: So the book is called the Resistance Training Revolution, and I was actually approached by a publisher, uh, to write a book, you know, representing Mind Pump. Now this idea is one that I’ve had for a very, very long time. It’s just something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. The opportunity presented itself and I thought, okay, this is a good, a good time to do this.

Now the, as far as what’s in the book or the, or the, the premise or what’s motivating, you know, me to, to write that book or what motivated me to write it really has to do with a lot of the stuff that I saw when I trained people for so long as, you know. Before we ever started Mind Pump, I was a trainer and I trained people for a long time.

I did it for over two decades and I had a deep passion I still do for helping people improve their health and their fitness in real fundamental ways and long-term forever ways. You know, we have a, a problem in the fitness industry where we do a good job getting people to their goals. We do a terrible job helping them stay to their goals, you know, getting their goals or stay in shape or stay healthy.

And this was a problem that I worked on again for over two decades as a personal trainer. Now the book focuses mainly on the exercise portion of the health problem, but I do cover some nutrition stuff in there as well. And essentially it boils all down to this. When you look at the main. Problem. The main health problems that we’re dealing with in modern societies, obesity’s gotta be near the top, if not at the top, especially if you, and you can link many of the common issues that we suffer from to obesity.

In other words, diabetes is a big problem. Obesity definitely leads to diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer’s, obesity increases the risk of those. Cancer, uh, is another problem. Obesity is kind of at the top. And if we can solve that problem in a good way, then we really can do a good job of solving a lot of our chronic health problems.

Obesity is a huge problem. It actually threatens to bankrupt modern societies, not just from the cost of the medical, uh, cost of dealing with it, but the loss of productivity and innovation. So, huge problem. How do we solve it? And the way that we’ve viewed. Exercise in this equation, uh, has really been wrong for a long time.

So just some, you know, basic, I guess science around weight loss, and I, I know you talk about this all the times, is in order to lose weight, you have to create an energy imbalance. And a lot of people know that now, right? You need to burn more calories and you take in or to put it differently, take in less calories, then you burn that results in weight loss.

And that’s very true. Okay? That’s, that has to happen regardless of, you know, anything else. Your, your macro breakdown, regardless of your activity and exercise, you gotta burn more calories you take in, in order to lose weight. And if you wanna stay the same weight, then they need to be equal. You need have energy equaling energy in versus energy out.

Now when we look at that, the way we viewed exercise for a long time was that the activity itself burns calories. So let’s. The form of exercise that burns the most calories, that’ll be the most effective form of exercise. And on its face, this makes sense, right? We know we need to burn more calories into, we take in so logically on its surface, why don’t we pick the forms of exercise that, that just burn the most calories that makes the most sense.

Now that is a terrible approach to weight loss. It doesn’t work. We know it doesn’t work. Studies show it’s a terrible approach. And obviously we’ve been now dealing with the obesity EM epidemic for a few decades, and obviously that approach isn’t working. 

Mike: Just, uh, to quickly jump in there, so what is that approach or what has that approach been?

Sal: Well, the highest burning calorie forms of exercise typically revolve around cardiovascular activity. So an hour of running. We’ll burn more calories than most other forms of exercise. Yeah. 

Mike: Then like an hour long strength training workout, for example. Because you know, for example, you have to rest a couple of minutes in between sets when you’re strength training, you can’t just get in there and go from one thing to the next for an hour straight,  right?

Sal: So the paradigm that we’ve created around exercise is burn calories through this activity. Now this is a terrible approach for a few different reasons. Number one, even if you did an hour of intense cardiovascular activity every single day, the average person might burn maybe an additional four or 500 calories.

Now, I know people’s cardio machines say that they’re burning 800 calories or 900 calories. That’s total baloney. They lie to sell their equipment. Most people will burn about four to 500 calories, and that sounds like a lot. It’s not much. You can eat four or 500 calories very, very quickly. I could drink it in five minutes.

And then the other part of this that we don’t ever consider is, are the adaptations that exercise induces in the body. . And what do those adaptations mean? So the paradigm, the current paradigm is burn calories. But the paradigm we need to shift to is what are the adaptations that this exercise is inducing my body?

How is this particular workout getting my body to change and adapt? And then what does that mean? Now with cardiovascular activity, the adaptation that you’re asking your body to the adaptation processes you’re asking your body to engage in are revolve around endurance, right? So if you run a lot, your body’s going to try to improve its endurance.

This doesn’t require a lot of muscle. In fact, it requires very little muscle because it requires very little strength, and your body also starts to try to become efficient at the activity that you’re performing. So it’s not unlike if you had some kind of a advanced AI car that you drove for, you know, at slow speeds for long distances that adapted to what you were doing.

That car would obviously adapt to a one cylinder. Engine to try to conserve energy. Well, this is what your body ends up doing through lots of cardiovascular activity. You start to actually lose muscle. Studies support this. You know, people who do cardio plus diet end up losing something like 50% of the weight comes from muscle, sometimes more, and you actually res end up with a slower metabolism over time.

Um, and this is why the cardio approach or the calorie burn approach through exercise results in initial results. We’ve all, a lot of people have experienced this, right? They’re trying to lose 30 pounds, at least 10 pounds real fast by doing lots of cardio. And then they get this really hard plateau and I can’t figure out what the hell’s going on.

And then they’re left with the options of cutting their calories more or adding more exercise to burn more calories or both. And this is obviously not sustainable. The typical person in my experience, you know, Mike, I train a lot of average people. You know, I had some athletes, I had some fanatical people, but the vast majority of people that I trained.

We’re everyday average people, most people are gonna stay consistent with exercise about two or three days a week. You’re not gonna get any more than that. That’s about average and that’s doing a damn good job. So to you know, have your body plateau with doing all this cardio, metabolism slows down, throw more exercise on top of it, cut calories even more, not sustainable.

And so we get this cycle of losing some weight, plateauing. Some people go even harder, other people give up. But eventually everybody gives up. They gain the weight back and they have less muscle than they did when they started and now it’s more difficult and sometimes they gain even more body fat. So what I try to do with this book is change the paradigm around exercise a little bit.

So forget the calories that you burn during exercise. Let’s focus on what adaptations this form of exercise is causing in the body resistance training. In this particular case, in this context that we’re talking about is superior because resistance training, although it doesn’t burn a lot of calories while you do it, it does tell the body to get stronger, and it does tell the body to build muscle, which results in a faster metabolism.

A metabolism that burns more calories. Especially when you combine this with a high protein diet over time. This is a great long-term approach. You know, if you’re burning 200, 300, 400 and I’ve had clients that whose metabolism’s gone up as much as a thousand calories a day, you’re burning that many more calories every single day, not doing anything extra.

You don’t have to burn those calories. I don’t have to go move to cause that to happen. I just have a faster metabolism. And what ends up happening when you take that approach, that exercise approach to weight losses, although the weight loss initially starts off slower, you get this snowball effect in a much more permanent.

Or at least a, a better long-term approach. There’s more to this, right? Resistance training. Effective resistance training for most people. I’m not talking about, you know, hardcore bodybuilders or people who really want to take their body to the next level. I’m talking about the average person two days a week of, you know, a full body routine or three days a week is plenty to elicit these types of adaptations.

It’s plenty to get. A strong physique with a sufficient, or, you know, more than sufficient amount of muscle. And then you have lots of other side effects from resistance training. You have the hormone balancing effects. No form of exercise has pre, can predictably raise testosterone, like resistance training.

It just does this in man in women resistance training done appropriately can balance out progesterone and estrogen. It’s also by far the best form of exercise for, you know, stopping bone loss, reversing osteopenia, improving functional flexibility and mobility, um, which is, you know, a big problem as we get older doesn’t require a lot of time.

My goal in the book is to communicate this in a very effective way because resistance training still is stigmatized. And I, I’m sure you know this, right? The average person, you know, if my aunt. Goes to the doctor and gets a, you know, their, their checkup and the doctor says, you know, your blood pressure’s a little high, your blood lipids are not great.

I’m gonna recommend that you start exercising. You know, the first or second or even third option that my aunt will probably think about is not resistance training. That she’s not gonna think to herself, I’m gonna go grab a pair of dumbbells and do some shoulder presses. She’s probably gonna choose the form of exercise we’ve been advertised forever, which is cardio.

So, oh, I’m gonna go run. I’m gonna do a walk, I’m gonna go swim. She doesn’t think, or the average person doesn’t think to do resistance training, and that’s because the stigma that surrounds it. People don’t understand it super well. They don’t understand that, especially for women, right? They’re afraid of getting bulky and looking like their bodybuilders are like they’re men, which is totally incorrect.

Women who lift weights, even like bodybuilders, who stay natural, end up with a very. Sculpted lean, uh, feminine looking physique with curves, right? Curves come from, you know, muscle. So that’s really the goal. The goal of the book is to really break that down. Talk about how that stigma started, why we view resistance training, the way we view it now, and why resistance training is the part of the modern, it’s part of the formula, the modern formula to fight obesity.

Of course, there’s more than just exercise, but the exercise portion, it’s gotta be resistance training. Now, I’m not saying other forms of exercise don’t have value, they do, but most people are only gonna find time to do one form of exercise. Make it that, that will give you far better results. Actually, regardless of your goals than any other form of exercise, but especially for, you know, losing body fat.

Mike: Completely agree. And I think part of the problem also with resistance with resistance training is it’s more difficult to do correctly than just going out for a run or riding your bike, right? You actually do need to know some things to do resistance training effectively, whereas you can just hop on a bike and ride around and cool, your heart got pumping and as you just said, there are health benefits associated with that.

And I’m not anti cardio by any means, but of course it’s, it’s not the same if you just go to the gym and you don’t really know what to do. I, I mean, I remember back in the beginning of when I got into weightlifting, It can be a bit confusing because there is so much bad information out there. So if you do try to start educating yourself, you’re like, okay, I guess I’ll just grab a workout off the internet or something.

And it’s just not that helpful to know that I’m supposed to do this exercise. It says, all right, let me watch a video. All right, fine. Fair enough. That’s how you do that exercise. It says, do three sets of 10 reps. Okay. What weight should I use? Uh, I don’t know. It doesn’t say, I guess I’ll just grab those, you know, and I’ll do the 10, the 10 uh, reps.

And then how long am I supposed to wait in between, you know what I mean? Just to make resistance training work. It requires more of a system, and I’m sure you provide that. And so I’m curious as to like how you break that down.

Sal: I do. And you know what you’re saying? There’s some truth to it, but there’s also a little bit of untruth in that.

Okay. Because our percept. Is that cardiovascular activity is easy, and resistance training is complex. The truth is cardiovascular exercise is also extremely complex. Let me tell you a story to kind of illustrate what I’m talking about. You know, years ago, I remember I was up early one morning and I went hiking up in the hills near my house here in San Jose.

And as I’m hiking, I’m getting passed up by the occasional runner and now I’m a trainer, right? So it’s very, very hard for me to not notice people’s biomechanics when they’re doing something. It’s just automatic for me, right? So as people are running by me, I am seeing feet pronating and souping and posture issues, and I’m just like, oh my gosh, this is, I just see all this terrible running and I haven’t, I didn’t see a single person running well.

And then it dawned on me, most people run terribly. And the reason why they run terribly is nobody. Everybody stops running when they’re kids and they don’t pick it up again until they’re much older. And then when they do, They don’t view running like a skill. They go out to run in order to get fatigued.

Now, although we did as humans evolve to run, I mean we’re actually built to run. It’s a skill. And like any skill, if you stop practicing, you forget how to do it. And when people go out to go just run, they end up with terrible biomechanics. And this is why running is actually the number one form of exercise for injuries.

When people go into the surgeon for knee surgery or hip surgery, or they have a problem, if it’s a related to exercise, it’s almost . It’s like, I don’t remember what the odds are, but the big odds are that it was probably because the person was running a lot. So running is very complex. Uh, it, it’s very repetitive on top of it, right?

So if. Bad biomechanics and you’re pounding on the pavement over and over again, you’re gonna end up with a lot of problems. Now, of course, resistance training is also complex, but that’s true of of any kind of physical activity, especially when you first get started. Now, I do talk about this in the book, and I do provide people with exercises, and I do help teach people how to do it properly, and I do tell people to treat exercise any.

Like practice rather than a workout. And the difference really is this is, you know, if I go, and we’ll use resistance training now, right? If I go to the gym to do squats in order to work out my legs, I’m gonna keep going until my legs get real tired or burn and then I’m fatigued. If I go to the gym to practice squats like it’s a skill, well now I’m looking at my form and my technique and I’m really trying to perfect the way that I move.

Now, which one is gonna result in better results in the moderate and in the long term? The person who practices the exercises, and I do talk about this in the book, treat your Workout like you’re learning these skills and you’ll get better at them and then they’ll deliver to you better and better. But yeah, there is that perception, right, that, oh, you know, I’m just gonna run cuz it’s easy.

I’ll just put some running shoes on him. I tell you what, go outside right now. Take a hundred people, put some running shoes on. I have them run and observe their, their mechanics. It’s uh, absolutely terrible. And all of them will get hurt if they continue doing things that way. So, you know, that is definitely one of the misperceptions or one of the, you know, the, the stigmas around resistance training, that’s kind of not true.

Yes, there’s some complexity to it, but all exercise needs to be treated like a skill because they’re all based off of movements. You are training yourself and if you don’t do any type of a workout with good technique and good skill, your risk of injury goes up and it continues to go up, is the longer you do it.

A good point, 

Mike: a good point for sure. I guess just as a, a follow up little bit of commentary is it’s still. I would say easier to quote unquote get results with something like running. If you’re just looking to burn some extra calories, create that calorie deficit and lose some weight. And so I understand the perception of, well, it’s easier to go running or go swimming or just go hop on a bike.

I don’t need to know that much in terms of abstract theory to go out and do that and to quote unquote see results. Uh, whereas when I step in the gym, I see all this equipment, uh, I see machines, I see dumbbells, I see barbells, and I hear people talking about all different ways of laying out workouts, doing these exercises first versus those first doing heavier weights on these lighter weights, on those fewer sets on those.

You know what I mean? So, oh 

Sal: yeah, no, no, a hundred percent. And yes, the results that you get with cardio being your exercise form when it comes to weight loss is initially you see faster weight loss. By the way, the weight loss is almost always. Partially muscle, if not at least half muscle. And the studies, again, confirm this, and by the way, if you lose 10 pounds and five pounds is muscle, and five pounds is body fat, you are a smaller, sane, body fat percentage version of yourself.

Yeah. 

Mike: That’s the road to skinny fat, 

Sal: right? Yeah. You’re just a smaller, flabby version of yourself. Body. You know, I’ve actually had, this is very sad, this happens all the time when I would manage gyms and they wouldn’t listen to me, of course. And they do tons of cardio, and then I’d test their body fat and they’re like, oh, I.

12 pounds and I test their body fat, like your body fat percentage went up. Like, how’s that possible? I lost 12 pounds. Like, well, it’s a percentage of your overall body weight, so if you lost eight pounds of muscle and four pounds of fat, your body fat percentage went up because now you have your body fat.

Your total body fat is a larger percentage of your overall body weight. So it’s like a, you know, a 100 pound person with 10 pounds of body fat, that’s 10% body fat. A 200 pound person with 10 pounds of body fat is obviously half of that. So that’s what happens with that cardio part is you lose some initially, but then you plateau really hard and then the weight gain comes back and usually you don’t gain back the muscle.

You replace it all with body fat. Now what you’re explaining with resistance training I is actually one of its highlights. The reason why you see so much equipment and so many different ways of training with resistance training is actually one of the most amazing aspects of resistance training.

There’s no form of exercise that is customizable, that can be as personalized as resistance training. There is none, nothing compares. I could train a paraplegic with resistance training and I could train an advanced athlete with resistance training. It’s the primary form of exercise that physical therapists use when they rehab people.

You can’t do that. With other forms of exercise. That’s one of the main reasons, especially when we’re talking about the average person. You see so many different ways of applying resistance training. You know, if I have someone who’s tall versus someone who’s short, and someone’s very strong, someone’s very weak, their mobility could be different.

They might have different movement patterns. I can apply resistance training appropriately to every single person that I’m in front of. You can’t do. With other forms of exercise. So in that case, yes, there’s a huge, like, there’s a tremendous amount of variety and ways to apply resistance strength. But now let’s bring it down to, again, I’m talking to the average person, the average person who is looking to improve their health, improve their hormone profile, uh, become leaner, more resilient, stronger, improve their functional mobility, which we can get into and improve 

Mike: muscle definition as well.

Right? Improve what they see in the mirror, you know, feel their clothes fitting better. 

Sal: Absolutely. I mean that, I mean, let’s be honest, that’s the main reason why people will ever work out to begin with. I mean, that’s at 

Mike: least half of the reason why I still do it. I have no shame 

in admitting that.

If you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you, is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world. 

Sal: So let’s talk about the average person who’s gonna, again, dedicate maybe on a long-term basis, two or three days a week to exercise.

It’s very basic for them. They don’t need to know 99.9% of everything that’s out there. If they just went to the gym and practiced squats, some kind of an overhead press, some kind of a horizontal press, some kind of a row, some kind of a core stabilization exercise. That’s it. They’re good, they’re done.

Now, if they wanna go to the next level, if they wanna look like Mike Matthews, then yeah, they’re gonna need to, you know, apply more techniques and learn a little bit more about the, you know, the science behind resistance training. And, and let’s be real, I mean, there’s 

Mike: only one Mike Matthews, you know, 

Sal: there.

That’s true. Like, good luck not gonna look like that guy. You know, it doesn’t require a whole lot. Like I said, Mike, I trained everyday average people forever. And the beauty of it is this, here’s the wonderful thing about this is that resistance training, because of the way it produces results, because of the way it changes your body so that it’s better suited to fight the, the ills of modern life.

And because you don’t need to do it a lot in order to get those goals, the consistency is way higher. People stay with it much longer when it’s done properly. It’s got that stickiness that most forms of exercise don’t have. And you know, here’s another wonderful part about resistance training. When you don’t do it, if you take a couple weeks off, you don’t gain body fat as fast and don’t go backwards as fast as you do if you do other forms of exercise.

You know, if you’re doing exercise, if you’re running on a treadmill to burn an extra three to 400 calories every single day, no matter what, the minute you stop it, that is. Now you’re, uh, 300, 400 calories that your burning is on with resistance training in studies. Again, they support the hell out of this.

In fact, there was a study that came out that showed that people who worked out e for three weeks and took a week off, so literally out of every month, they took a one week off and compared them to another group that worked out every week at the end of the three month. Test, they found that they all had similar strength and muscle gains.

It’s much more permanent resistance training causes much more permanent results. You develop muscle memory, you don’t lose muscle as fast as you lose other kind of physical attributes. So again, it’s such a perfectly suited form of exercise for the things that were, we’re dealing with in modern societies.

And again, my goal is to, to get this book into the average person’s hands and have them read it and go, oh shit. This is the way I need to work out. I need to start doing this. I need to stop trying to do these Zumba classes or all this other crap because this form of exercise is exactly what I’m looking for.

And 

Mike: what does, uh, a resistance training revolution, r t R, you mentioned full body workout. What does that look like for people wondering they’re, they’re fired up. They want to go to the gym right now and do something and experience this for the. 

Sal: Yeah, no, and the reason why I named it that was, you know, there was a book that was published in the seventies, I believe, and I can’t believe I forgot the name of it.

Anyways, a running book, there’s a picture of the on, on the cover of a, of a guy, like a red, you know, tennis shoe or whatever. And it started the running trend that happened in America and we’re still kind of in it right now. Right after that book was published. People were lacing up their shoes and going out to run.

It was called the, the Complete book of running. That’s right. And so I thought, God, I would love to make a book that did that for resistance training. So that’s why I named it the resistance training revolution. Now you’re asking what does that look like? For most people, it’s a two day a week, or three day a week routine for most people.

For most average people, it’s a routine that lasts 30 to 45 minutes done appropriately and done properly, where you’re training the entire body. There’s a little bit of correctional exercise in there, and then there’s a focus on some of these fundamental movements that we know to be the most effective.

Resistance training exercises, like for example, a barbell squat by itself will give you more results than almost any other three or four combined leg exercises. Uh, all other things being equal volume and all that stuff. A deadlift or an over, like an overhead press or a deadlift or a row, like these are all exercises that just have a lot of bang and a lot of carryover.

But I don’t just talk about this. In the book, you know, I really wrote this book for all the clients that I had trained over those couple decades, and so I do also focus on the mental aspect, which, to be honest, Mike is the most important aspect when we’re dealing with keeping people consistent in getting them to, you know, not just embark on a health journey, but rather stay on that health journey.

It’s that mental piece and I’ll, I’ll give you one example, and I do talk about this in. In the book, but part of this fitness paradigm that I’m talking about, the false fitness paradigm, also, one of the pieces of that formula revolves around motivation and the fitness industry advertises and markets to this, uh, very effectively.

In fact, if you look at all the fitness trends, it’s very heavy on motivation, like, you know, orange theories real popular. Why is that real popular right now? Because it’s exciting, it’s fun, it’s motivating. It’ll also at some point fail just like the other trends do because motivation is a fleeting state of mind.

It’s a state of mind that is not permanent. And if you sell yourself or sell others or are working out and focusing on being motivated to do it, you are setting yourself. For failure because once the motivation’s gone, everything stops. This is one of the reasons why we see the, the trend with exercise or nutrition, you know, with diet is to where people are motivated, they’re very consistent and they lose motivation and then they stop.

And there’s just kind of this on the wagon, off the wagon type of behavior. What I talk about in the book is how to develop the skill of discipline and, and discipline is a skill which you could develop. And because it’s a skill, you can use this skill regardless of your state of mind. And it becomes most valuable when you lack motivation.

Because when you’re motivated, you don’t need to be talked into working out, you’re going to eat right. You know, while my clients were motivated, it was very easy to get them to do what I wanted. It was when they weren’t motivated. And so I talk about that development of skill. I talk about how to set goals in ways that are actually realistic.

What that looks like and how to approach this in a way that makes it effective long-term and forever, not the way that most fitness companies are. You know, the fitness marketing focuses on, which is, oh, you’re motivated right now. Cool. Give me your money. Let’s get you hyped and let’s go crazy because that just doesn’t last and it doesn’t work.

You know, when I talk about nutrition, my approach is also around that psychological, mental piece. We know for the most part what we need to do in order to lose weight with diet. Okay, I need to eat less calories. Macronutrients are probably important, so I need to maybe eat this much protein, this much carbs.

Okay? People know that for the most part, or you know, at least a lot of people know that still doesn’t work. What the hell is going on? Why can’t I stay consistent? Why is this a problem? And so I talk about that. I talk about how to focus on behaviors more than just the mechanics of nutrition. Well, I’ll give you a couple examples from the book.

If we’re looking at foods. It’s probably wise to avoid foods that have been designed to make you overeat. So in other words, if the problem is that you’re eating too much, then let’s try to avoid heavily processed foods. That alone will probably result in a reduction by itself automatically a reduction of calories by about 500 calories a day.

And studies are very, there’s very, very good studies on this that show that this works really well. So, in fact, I did this towards the back half of my career as a. I stopped giving people meal plans and telling ’em to count macros, and I just said, Hey, let’s do this. Eat as much as you want. Just don’t eat heavily processed foods.

And they’d say, are you sure? And I’d say, absolutely. And then they would do that and they’d come in and boom, they’d lose, you know, 10 pounds and a body fat percentage would go down and they couldn’t believe it. And they’d be like, this is so weird. I’m like full all the time. I feel like I’m eating more.

And it’s like actually, Those heavily processed foods are actually engineered to make you overeat. So your, your systems of satiety, if you will, are just kind of being hijacked. Just to 

Mike: quickly jump in there just for people, if you want to get a sense of that. I did an interview sometime ago with the author of a book, I believe it was called, sugar, salt, fat, and I could pull it up maybe while you’re talking.

I forget his name. Nice guy. Good book. Brought him on the food scientist. Yeah, exactly. And if anybody wants to know more about the science of food engineering and just how much work goes into finding what, I guess the technical term is bliss points, to finding just these perfect combinations of, you have chemical, like compositional things like sugar, salt, and fat, but then you also have mouth feel and just the experience of eating it is very much a science.

I mean, rigorous trials, rigorous experiments, in some case, hundreds and hundreds. Of variations of individual foods to get the perfect chip. For example, like the, it didn’t surprise me when I learned the information because that kind of studious approach to anything is the way to become excellent. So if you’re gonna get.

Excellent at creating foods that are delicious and that you can just eat an entire bag of without even noticing it, then yeah, that’s like the level of effort that it requires. Uh, but that is the level of effort that is put into it. I we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars per year, if not billions of dollars a year across the big food companies and very, very smart people.

Food scientists whose entire mission is to make these foods as delicious as possible and they’re very good at it. 

Sal: As addicting as po. Michael Moss is the one that Correct. There you go. I wrote that book and the vast majority of the research and development that goes into food is actually spent on exactly that.

And, and they’ve actually gotten to the point now that we’re looking at now decades. Right. So heavily processed foods have been with us now for. They’ve now got to the point where they can produce drug-like effects in the brain with food. And this is confirmed through F M R I tests. So, and, and the studies on this are actually very well made.

These are very controlled studies where they’ll take groups of people and they’ll take one group and they’ll let them have unlimited access to whole natural foods. And then they’ll take another group and they’ll give them unlimited access to heavily processed foods. And they even make sure that the macros are similar, right?

So they even make sure that the macros of the foods in each group are similar. They leave them alone and the researchers just kind of count the calories that they’re eating. Then they take the same groups and they switch rooms. So the group that was in the heavily processed room goes into the whole natural room and vice versa.

And they find consistently people eat about 500, maybe 600 more calories a day just from eating those foods. Simply avoiding those, your behaviors naturally change and you start to eat less. And so that’s one strategy that I kind of go into depth with. I also talk about when it comes to how we view food, the things that we revolve around food that make us want to eat it, how to create barriers between you and impulsive.

Type behavior so that, I’ll focus on that for a second cuz that’s an easy one to explain. But if you’re somebody that you love to have, I don’t know, chocolate chocolate’s your thing. Oh, I love chocolate Sal. I do really good with my diet, but then I go crazy with chocolate. And so what I would do as a trainer is rather than saying don’t eat it or make it fit your macros, is, I would say, okay, you can have chocolate, just don’t have it in your house.

Give yourself permission to go to get chocolate, but you gotta go in your car, drive the store and buy yourself a single serving of chocolate. And what that barrier did, or what that barrier does is it gives a person long enough time to pause and to realize what they’re doing. Because oftentimes the foods that we grab that you know make the difference, we tend to be quite impulsive.

With. And so when you can create a barrier, that impulse is interrupted and the person doesn’t always not eat the chocolate, but more often than not, they don’t, or they at least are more aware of their behaviors around it. And so in the book, I also talk about nutrition, but I talk about behaviors more than, you know, the mechanisms of diet because we, we’ve been.

Preach to with the mechanisms forever just doesn’t work. It’s all about the behaviors. Most people have a bad relationship with food, you know, to add to that, even with activity and if you change those behaviors or things that drive those behaviors, you’ll find that eating in a way that produces a relatively lean, healthy body.

Now granted, you won’t get shredded doing this. You wanna get shredded. You’re probably gonna have to count macros, but for most people, working with your behaviors will result in a body that’s relatively lean, which again, most people are looking to get to that point. Yeah. They just wanna look fit. That’s it.

When we first started Mind Pump, I remember people would ask us, you know, after a few years, what are some of the keys to the podcast’s success? How did you guys, you know, how come your, your podcast has grown and doing all that? Whatever. And, you know, really none of us had any media experience. Actually, we had zero media experience, but what you heard on the podcast was decades of experience communicating health and nutrition to everyday average people.

And that’s what I do in the book. And so what I mean by that is, you know, I’m not necessarily communicating different information today than I did when I first became a trainer, but I’ve learned how to do it in ways that are effective. Because when you train people long enough, especially if you really wanna help people, at some point you start to ask yourself, am I effective?

Why is this not working? And is it the way that I’m saying what I’m saying? Or am I doing things in a way that works? And eventually you learn how to do that. Now I’ll give you a simple example. This is silly, but it’s a, it’s a pretty good one. As an early trainer, if I had a potential. Approached me and we started talking about working out and I said, you know, and I would say, how many days a week do you think you could work out?

And then the person would reply and say, you know, I’m really busy. I’ve got kids, I’ve got a job. I think honestly, realistically, long term, maybe one day a week, the young trainer would say, you know, something along the lines of, well, you know, the more time you put into exercise, the more time you get back, it makes you more productive.

It’ll make you a better parent. Yeah. 

Mike: Try to convince him to make it three days. Four, well, 

Sal: five would even be better. I gotta motivate you because health is everything, right? Without good health, you can’t do good at your job, you’re not gonna be a good parent, blah, blah, blah. And sometimes I’d be successful at doing that, but regardless, even if I was, they would always fall off.

Well, the older, more experienced trainer, when that person would say to me, you know, I don’t have much time. I have kids. I have a. I can only do this once a week. The more experienced trainer would say, okay, cool. Let’s start with one day a week. Now, the reason why I’d say that is because I know that number one, they themselves are convinced that one day a week is maybe realistic or the most realistic.

They’re gonna probably stick to it, especially if I do a good job and if I do a good job. That person on their own inevitably starts to add more days of exercise to their, their routine. Almost always like I’d get someone who’d say that and I’d train them and we’d do a good job and then six months later, Hey Sal, I’d like to work out one more day a week.

Do you have any recommendations? And over the course of a year, two years, three years, this person ends up working out three days a week and is. Is quite consistent and, and it’s a 

Mike: good example of, of also the effective way to build good habits is to start with something that you can do easily, that you can commit to easily and just get the flywheel turning.

And then once you’ve built up momentum, it’s much easier to augment and make it bigger and make it better. And it’s a lot easier, I think, to change any aspect of our life for the better. In that way, in just starting with something positive that we can do and that we can do consistently, and then getting results with it and getting that established until we feel like, okay, we’ve mastered that habit, so to speak.

That one’s not gonna fall out. And then humans, The way that we are wired, which is we always are looking to get better and to achieve more, then we naturally start to think like, like you just said, where, all right, I’ve been really good with my one workout a week, and I naturally, now I’m, I wanna do two.

Yeah. Because I’m seeing results and I really like how I feel after I work out. You know, sometimes I enjoy the workouts, sometimes I don’t, but I always feel good after, and I’m noticing that that puts me in a better mood. And now I, I can see that. Am a better father and a better husband, and a better worker because I have a little bit more mental clarity.

I have more energy. My body doesn’t hurt so I can play sports with my kids, you know? And of course you, having worked with so many people over the years, you’ve heard and you’ve seen all of these things and I’ve heard and seen them, or at least I’ve mostly virtually, I’ve worked with a lot of people virtually over the years, and it’s a cool process to to witness.

That’s how you 

Sal: develop the skill of discipline. That’s part of the process is you ask yourself, first off, if you’re starting a workout program now, you’re probably in a motivated state of mind. So you’ve probably thought about it for a while now you’re motivated. So you need to take yourself out of that state of mind for a second and ask yourself, what is a realistic forever?

Use the the parameters of forever. What is realistic for me forever that I could start with right now that I know I could stick to forever? Now you want it to be challenging because otherwise it doesn’t mean anything. It has to be a little bit of challenge, otherwise it has no meaning, but it needs to be realistic forever.

And then you start there and then don’t even worry about the fact that you’re going to later add more. Just stick with that and don’t worry about what 

other 

Mike: people are doing. Don’t worry about what you see on social media, what you see in 

Sal: the gym, right? And it, and what happens is it you naturally progress and it might take you five months, six months, maybe one month, but you naturally slowly start to develop the skill of discipline to the point where if you’re not motivated, if you’re motivated, it doesn’t matter.

You know that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays you do at 9:00 AM or whatever, that you do your workout routine and now becomes. A part of your life. And that’s the way that you build consistency. That’s part of the way you build consistency. So of course, there’s more to it, right? You wanna, you wanna also train yourself with the right intensity, the right exercises.

You wanna have, uh, an approach that has long-term benefits like resistance training, at least in comparison to other forms of exercise from the context of, you know, maybe fat loss. But once you do that, your odds of success long term are far higher. Now, if you do, you know what a lot of people do, which is, all right, that’s it.

I’m gonna get in shape, I’m motivated, and I’m gonna go to the gym five days a week, and I’m gonna run on the treadmill. I’m gonna burn all these couch. Your odds of long-term success are like, I think it’s like 10% the last time I checked. But I would argue it’s probably less than that. You’re gonna fail a hundred percent, you’re going to fail at some point.

Uh, and then you’re gonna be stuck right back where you were before and it’s gonna be even more difficult because now you have that failure, especially if you have multiple failure. So it is a slow approach. It is the skill of discipline that you wanna focus on. You wanna focus on your behaviors and that’s the way to get where you want to go.

And nobody in our space, I don’t wanna say nobody, most people in our space, especially mainstream, nobody really communicates that way. Resistance training, still stigmatized. Every mainstream big workout program that’s released, even if they do have weights in it, it’s all cardio. It’s cardio with weights or you know, it’s some weird, you know, new video workout class, you know, urban cowboy, hip hop, whatever, to, to motivate and get people excited, oh, it’s this cool new dance class or whatever.

You know, resistance training is still stigmatized. You know, people still think. It’s gonna make you look like a bodybuilder. Um, even men, you know, even Mike, even when I talk to men who are, like I said, the average guy, not the average fitness fanatic, but just the average man who’s like, yeah, I just wanna lose a little weight and get in shape.

You know, and you tell ’em, oh, why don’t you go lift weight? Oh, I don’t wanna get big. I don’t care about that. I just wanna lose weight. And so I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to change that, that conversation. I think the time is right. The data now is, and you know, resistance for a long time resistance training didn’t have very many studies around it except for maybe performance.

Like if you were trying to look up resistance training studies on health and fat loss. You know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, you’d be very hard pressed to find much. You would see studies for Olympic lifter, 

Mike: especially when a lot of the conversation was about weight loss. And resistance training is actually pretty bad for weight loss , because of course, if you’re gaining muscle and losing fat, you can go through a couple peer, a couple months of a, of a cutting phase and you can gain quite a bit of muscle, lose quite a bit of fat, really change your body composition for the better and not see a big change in your body weight.

So I know that threw people off, uh, because a lot of the conversation revolved just around weight, like that number on the scale. You just need to see that thing going down, ideally every single day. 

Sal: Right? I mean, you can cut your leg off right? And lose 20 pounds, you know, that’s not the weight you wanna lose, right?

But when it comes to fat loss, resistance training is amazing. But now it’s, the studies are starting to catch up. You know, they’re showing. For example, a strength test, a simple strength test where you squeeze a device that measures your, your grip strength is actually a very good single predictor of all cause mortality.

There’s a couple studies that are done on this now, so in other words, by itself it’s actually pretty damn good. And it’s actually better than most other single metrics. Most of ’em. If you compare to blood lipid levels, the strength test actually is a better predictor of all caused mortality. So your loss of strength, this is a big one.

There’s been studies now done on fat that’s surrounds the organs and the heart. They actually compared resistance, strength to cardiovascular activity. Guess which one did better? Resistance training did. So I know there’s that myth about, or you know, I wanna say the myth about cardio’s better for your heart.

It’s actually not. Resistance training is actually as good or better for your heart. Now what cardio does very well is it gives you lots of endurance and stamina, which is fine if that’s what you’re looking for, but you could also build some of that with resistance training. When you look at, again, I, I said this, oh, how about this functional flexibility, there’s the stigma that resistance training makes you tighter, right?

That you lose flexibility when you do resistance training. They just compared resistance training to stretching. There was a study that came out and they showed that resistance training was at least as good. Now, I make the argument that resistance training’s better than other forms of activity for improving functional flexibility.

Because resistance training gets you stronger in new, throughout the entire ranges of motion. That’s right. Whereas other forms of exercise might give you more range of motion, but now you’re actually more unstable because you don’t have strength. In that range of motion. You know, if you do full range of motion squats and presses and rows and rotation exercises, you’ve got a really good base of functional flexibility.

When you’re just stretching, you’re getting more range of motion. You might be able to get into bottom of a squat, but if you can’t have any load at that bottom of the squat, you’re in a dangerous position with resistance training. You get functional, real world functional flexibility. I used to love training people in advanced age because of that, and they would always trip out.

They’d be like, oh my God, I can’t believe how much more. Mobile I am, you know, mobility. We have lots of mobility issues these days with aging population. The number one reason why people lose mobility is lack of strength. In fact, lack of strength is the number one reason why people hurt themselves. I know people will think, oh, it’s because I’m too tight.

No, you were tighter than you were strong. In other words, your strength didn’t support your. Movement, your range of motion, your mobility weakness is kind of at the root of a lot of the reasons why we hurt ourselves. There was even a study done on Alzheimer’s where they were comparing forms of exercise, and they found that resistance training was the only form of exercise.

So far, it’s the only form of exercise that’s been shown to. Stop the progression of Alzheimer’s and the researchers even at the end of it said, could potentially reverse it. Now, why is that one of the best ways to increase your insulin sensitivity? One of the best ways to get your body to respond to insulin better is to have more muscle.

It’s one of the best ways diabetics should all build muscle and lift weights, and we know that Alzheimer’s and dementia, at least in part, has to do with our brain’s dysfunction in the way that utilizes glucose. In fact, some researchers call those brain disorders Type three diabetes, build muscle. When you build muscle, your body uses sugar in response to insulin.

Much better. I mean, muscle stores some of that quite a bit, 

Mike: right? And your liver as well, and uh, in the form of glycogen, right? 

Sal: Right. So we really need to change this stigma around resistance training That’s been, look at movies, Mike. You watch movies and when there’s an action hero working out or woman, it’s almost never resistance training unless there’s some like freaky bodybuilder.

And that’s, again, that has to do with that stigma. So we need to change that because if we don’t, people are not gonna utilize the most effective form of exercise for the, the things that they wanna accomplish. They’re not gonna do the thing that is. Superior to other things to get their body to improve its health.

All music to 

Mike: my ears, and it’s all top of mind for me because I just wrapped up the final draft. You know, you went through the process, you go through draft after draft and working with editors and so forth of the book that I have. My next book is, I’m doing it with Simon and Schuster. It’s coming out q.

Next year and it’s called Muscle for Life and it’s specifically for the 40 plus crowd. And it’s very similar in its basic message or everything we’re talking about here. I go over a lot of the same things and talk about a lot of the research and really do my best to try to sell strength training is the, is the term that I’m using in the book, but to try to sell that as the go-to.

So just as you had said, you know, I, I start off with the assumption having worked with many people over the years, that the average person reading the book is gonna have three hours a week to give to this. Maybe it’s two, uh, maybe it’s as much as five depending on the person. And when that’s the case, I advocate heavily for using most of that time with strength training to give most of that time over to strength training.

I do talk a a bit about cardiovascular and talk a bit about. Extra additive benefits that you can get from adding some endurance training, some cardiovascular training into your program. It’s not part of the program, per se. It’s kind of ancillary. It’s kind of supplementary. But I do talk about it for those who, even if it’s just getting out for a walk every day or every other day, I think there’s 

Sal: some value.

Yeah. That’s what I focus on, is that the other strategy or the other thing to add is just to, again, we’re gonna look at behaviors, right? If you look at the societies that are most active, like what are they doing right? And one of the things that they do right, is that their, their towns and their cities are designed oftentimes because they’re old towns and old cities, they’re designed in ways to where walking is more convenient than driving.

And so this is why people are more active. And so, okay. Knowing that, knowing people’s behaviors, knowing that people, if it’s a structured workout, they’re less likely to do it than if it’s just a part of their day. You know, one of the pieces of advice I give people is to add walking to something you already do.

So rather than getting, you know, doing 30 minutes on a treadmill every day, what if you walked for 10 minutes after breakfast, lunch, and dinner? You know, it’s, it’s part of that routine that you already do, and you are, you’re more likely, you know, to be consistent. But I’m so happy that you’re doing a book that’s kind of focusing on a similar message, Mike, because, you know, my dream is that, you know, you know, women get together on Sunday fun day and then decide that they wanna work out.

And they all say, you know what? Let’s go do some squats. Let’s go do some presses, , let’s go bank some weights. That’s my, you know, that’s my dream. I know, I know what it can do for people. And just people don’t do it. They don’t understand it. Again, it’s got that stigma and we need to change that stigma. And the only way we can do that is if we do a better job of communicating our message than the, the crappy advertisers are advertis.

Their message. Really. That’s the only way we’re gonna do it. 

Mike: Totally agree. Yeah. I’m, I’m, again, I’m excited that, that you put this book out there. I’m excited to see another person who is putting out good information and obviously a, a personal friend of mine join the, the literati, uh, , the fitness 

Sal: litera. I won’t put myself in your category at all.

You’re, you’ve been doing this for a while and you’re very, very good at what you do. This is my first time, you know, I do really have a deep passion for, for this subject, and I do really wanna see people do the right stuff for themselves in terms of, uh, fitness. And I do hope it makes an impact. You know, if, if you’re listening to this and you’re a fitness fanatic, the value you’ll get from this book for yourself is it’ll arm you with ways to communicate this to friends and family who’ve probably ignored you, telling them that they need to lift weights.

It’s an excellent book for friends and family. You know, love to read. I 

Mike: like that. I like that. Using it as a bridge, because sometimes, I mean, I’ve run into this where people, they see me and I’m in pretty good shape and they immediately assume that they couldn’t do what I do, and they actually assume that I do a lot more than I actually do.

I do obviously spend a fair amount of time in the gym. I spend probably five to six hours a week in the gym, and I do a bit of cardio outside of that. But there’s a, a bit of a, a barrier sometimes with, I’m thinking of personal people in my personal life who I meet, and again, their initial assumption is like, all right, whatever this dude is gonna tell me just is not for me because he’s a freak.

And I don’t agree with that, but I understand the 

Sal: perception. Right. Right. Or you’re just telling your, you know, you’re trying to tell your mom or your dad or your aunt or your uncle or your cousin, Hey, you know, I know you, you said you wanna lose. , you really should start doing resistance training or strength training, or you should lift weights and, oh, but I don’t want to get big now.

I know I’m just gonna do, I’m just gonna start running, or I’m gonna do this. 

Mike: Or they’re afraid to get hurt. I know that’s something we didn’t talk about, but I’m sure you talk about that in the book, that resistance training when done properly, is a very safe activity. Actually. 

Sal: It’s actually one of the safest, especially again, if you, like we said earlier in the podcast, if you treat it, uh, like practice, if you treat it like you’re developing a skill rather than going to work out, which is how I’ve always, not always, it’s how I started to train people as I become, became a much better trainer and it was way more effective.

Like, I can’t, it’s not even in the same universe in terms of, uh, how much more effective it is when you view your workouts, like practicing a skill versus like, I need to go sweat, get sore, you know, and work out. So, and it’s, and again, it’s, it’s a great book for people who, you know, who read every fad fitness and nutrition book, slip this to them, tell ’em it’s the newest fa.

And this will get them moving in the right direction. You know, get them to view things differently. Dr. Oz loves this. Just check it up. Yes, I got some great feedback from people here. I, I had some friends and family members read it, let me know what they thought. And these are people who just didn’t refuse to listen to me for years.

I, I gave up on them and I got great feedback, you know, afterwards they were like, you know what Sal, I think I’m gonna start lifting weights. I was like, holy shit, working. 

Mike: Why didn’t you 

Sal: just say this like years ago, man. Yeah, I know. It’s like, you know, but I think if it’s in a book, it’s a little bit more , maybe it’s a little more effective.

So it’s a great book to buy for those people, for those friends and family. If you’re a trainer, it’s a great book because you’re constantly trying to own your skills of communication, to getting your clients to understand why they’re doing what they’re, why you’re having them, you know, do what they’re doing.

So it’s really a, it’s, it’s a book for all those people. Love it, love it. 

Mike: So, resistance training revolution. And so recording this on April 14th, is it still in Preor? Sal? 

Sal: Or is it Yeah, pre-order. It’ll be out at the end of the month, I believe. The 27th. Okay, cool. 

Mike: So that’s probably about when this will go live, maybe even a little bit after.

So by the time people are listening, it should be ready to ship overnight to their doorstep. Well, uh, hey, this was, this was great as usual. Thanks for coming on and sharing a bunch, a bunch of great information. And, uh, everybody definitely check out Sal’s book and reach out to him. Give him feedback. I know that.

I can say as, as an author myself, I’ve always valued the good and the critical feedback that I’ve gotten over the years. And in some ways I’ve actually appreciated the negative feedback a little bit more in that the good feedback made me feel good, but the, the quote unquote bad feedback has helped me improve my work a lot over the years because in some cases it was kind of just like nonsensical, uh, ranting and that’s not useful.

But in other cases, people brought up great points, they asked good questions, they pointed out things that just didn’t occur to me. So I’m sure Sal, that you’re the same way and that you appreciate any and all feedback. Yeah, 

Sal: totally. And I, I’ll say this, man, it’s challenged me more than anything I’ve ever done.

And, you know, I’ve tried to think about why. I think part of it is I definitely want to do well for my partners. I’m representing, you know, the mind pump brand. I, I mean, I talk on video and on audio for a living, but it’s weird when you put something in writing and it’s out there. Definitely challenges, at least for me, it challenged my, I don’t know what you wanna call it, my ego, uh, maybe more than anything else.

Like, oh crap, it’s gonna be out there. People are gonna read it. I hope, you know, people enjoy it. I hope it it does well or whatever. More so than, and 

Mike: maybe you expect more of a above book than a podcast episode, right? Because they’re just inherently different. The podcast episode is meant to be a casual conversation, and maybe you’re more likely to forgive lapses or mistakes or whatever.

Whereas in a book, you just have high standards that you were working toward. Oh, yeah. 

Sal: So I, I hope it does well. But yeah, I do appreciate any and all feedback, so I appreciate you saying that. Awesome, man.

Mike: Thanks again, and I look forward to our next talk. 

Sal: Thanks, brother. Always a good. 

Mike: All right. Well, that’s it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don’t mind doing me a favor, 

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relating to anything that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email.That is the best way to get ahold of me, Mike, at multiple life.com. And that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.