Is Cardio Overrated, Mind Pump Media & Importance of Free Weights | Sal Di Stefano DSH #298

You know, a big mistake that we've made just generally across the whole fitness space, we don't look at exercises for what they really are, which are skills.

And like any skill, like imagine if I went to practice free throws, but I didn't practice free throws.

I just said, I'm going to go until my hand gets tired.

I'm not going to develop the skill very well.

Welcome back, guys.

Today I got...

Special guest, founder of Mind Pump Media and fitness expert Sal DiStefano.

How's it going?

I'm doing good, man.

Thanks for having me on.

Absolutely.

Can't wait to dive into this fitness stuff.

I'm getting into my fitness journey right now.

Oh, very cool.

What are you working on?

So I'm trying to gain weight.

Okay.

Yes.

That was me my whole life.

Yeah.

So I can't wait to talk to you because I'm the lowest I've been since high school right now.

Okay.

I'm 169.

I'm six foot six.

Okay.

So I'm like.

pretty underweight, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was me growing up.

So it's, there's some basic steps you can follow that are pretty effective, but most people either overdo it or do the wrong things.

So what were you doing to get that weight up early on?

Well, the most important things are to practice the foundational lifts, not focus too much on the auxiliary type movements.

So squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press, row.

Train the whole body three days a week.

I know a lot of people like to do these body part splits, but full body routines are superior for probably 85% of the people out there.

Wow.

Bump your calories.

You want to definitely need to eat more.

You got to get the nutrients to support the muscle growth and eat a high protein diet and then get good sleep.

And if you do that consistently and you get stronger, because that's what you want, you will build muscle.

Yeah.

And on the weightlifting side, I've seen you recommend people do free weights over machines, right?

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

Why do you recommend that?

Free weight, both of them are effective at building muscle.

But free weights, there's a higher skill component.

So the functionality of getting stronger with free weights tends to carry over to the real world.

Free weights also are exceptional at building general overall muscle mass.

A barbell squat doesn't just work the legs, for example, works the lower back, even the upper back, and holding the bar.

So it just tends to translate to better muscle growth.

Plus, you're a tall guy, okay?

Free weights follow your range of motion and your movement, whereas machines tend to be designed for the average height, average size person.

So tall guy like you is going to go in a machine.

You're going to have to adjust all the...

All the way to the bottom.

Yeah, and it's still probably not going to be ideal for someone like you because you're not 5'9 or 5'10, which is the average.

So free weights just tend to work better across the board, but machines, they do a pretty good job as well.

The real answer is to use both.

Okay.

And you mentioned earlier three full body workouts a day.

So are you working out every muscle group?

Yep.

Yep.

Full body.

So you want to do maybe one exercise per body.

It sounds very basic.

And a lot of people are like, yeah, that's a basic routine.

It's the most effective routine for most people when it comes to building strength and building muscle.

Just across the board, the body part splits that a lot of bodybuilders use, they're using so much volume with their training that it makes sense for someone like them.

But

for most people, you want to practice big lifts frequently and you don't want to do tons of volume in a workout, but you do want to train your whole body frequently.

That'll help maintain that muscle building signal throughout the week.

So for most people, a full body routine translates to better results.

Plus, if you miss a workout, you don't miss an entire body part like you would in a split.

You still hit your whole body.

twice that week.

Yeah, I feel like most people do one body part a day.

That's what they're teaching everyone.

That's true.

And it's, again, if you were to go head-to-head and look at, and here's what they do.

They'll say volume is, when volume is controlled, frequency doesn't matter.

But, you know, good coaches and trainers who have a lot of experience will still disagree with that because 20 sets on a body part once a week, all 20 of those sets are not.

let's say quality, right?

There's a lot of fatigue that's involved.

You end up doing what are called finisher moves, exercises that aren't really as effective.

But let's say instead of doing 20 sets and one workout, you do six sets or seven sets three days a week.

You're more likely to have really good quality sets.

You're more likely to have better power output.

And you're not going to be so fatigued that you can't, that you have to only do the big gross motor movement exercise, the big movers, you know, once in the workout and then move to a bunch of other stuff.

I mean, if you did six sets three days a week or seven sets three days a week, which is right around 20 sets, you could barbell squat every time.

You wouldn't be able to do 20 sets of barbell squats in a single workout.

That would be way too much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you recommend three days a week to work out, basically.

That's right.

That's right.

The foundational workout program that I develop, MAPS Anabolic, is based off of that general kind of breakdown.

By the way, that's the way bodybuilders and strength athletes trained forever until anabolic steroids came into

the fray, which changed things a bit because that maintains a loud muscle building signal.

Whereas if you do traditional strength training and you don't have that exogenous anabolic hormone signal going through your body the muscle building signal lasts for about 48 hours maybe 72 but then it falls down quite rapidly so it just makes sense to send a frequent more frequent muscle building signal than it would to send one loud one and then do nothing for the whole week wow I didn't know it activated for that long yeah yeah they measure it through something called muscle protein synthesis and you'll see it's you know quickly rise post workout it peaks at around 24 48 hours or so but right around 48 72 hours then it starts to drop and if you wait long enough it drops below baseline.

So what happens is a lot of guys and girls will go to the gym, beat up a body part in a day,

rest for a full week, come back to the gym, and notice they've made no progress.

And what they've done is they've gone through the muscle building and then muscle adapting in the opposite direction kind of process.

So it's like you're spinning your tires in the dirt.

Again, people listening right now who think that sounds basic, try it out.

And again, if you talk to strength coaches who've trained lots and lots of people, the consensus probably will be that about 85% of people out there will just get better results with a basic three-day week routine.

Wow.

That's so mind-blowing because I've been lifting for 10 years and no one's ever told me this.

And I've been stagnant too.

Oh, I bet if you switched your routine now, did one exercise per body part, didn't train to failure.

You don't want to lift to failure, but you want to train with good intensity.

So stop a couple reps short and did things like...

you know, barbell deadlift or squat to start with, and then a bench press and then maybe a pull-up or a row and then an overhead press and then maybe an exercise for biceps, triceps, and your core.

If you did something like that, um, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I bet you would see results like you haven't seen in a long time.

I'm gonna try it out because obviously, what I'm doing now is working.

I mean, yeah, I'm at the same like weight limit for five, ten years.

Oh, yeah, yeah, and you'll see, and what you'll see is uh, your strength gains will go up.

You know, a big mistake that we've made just generally across the whole fitness space is we don't look at exercises for what they really are, which are skills, right?

Lifting a barbell overhead, it is a skill.

The skill component is very important.

In other words, the better you are at the skill of the overhead press, the more effective it's going to be.

But we don't treat it like a skill.

We don't go to the gym to practice.

What we do is we say, I'm going to hammer my shoulders.

And like any skill, like imagine if I went to practice free throws, but I didn't practice free throws.

I just said, I'm going to go until my hand gets tired.

I'm not going to develop the skill very well.

Same thing with strength training.

So you get bad technique, bad recruitment patterns, and just not the best results.

olympic lifters powerlifters these are the strength sports the muscle building sports where objective results matter bodybuilding is great too but bodybuilding is very subjective but you look at powerlifting and olympic lifting and you watch and see how they train and they they treat these exercises like skills they practice them frequently right that's where you're going to get a lot of your your better workout programming for sure that makes sense okay so weightlifting three times a week How many times per week for cardio?

Cardio, that's up to you.

Now, if your goal is to really build muscle, um i wouldn't go crazy with the cardio you don't want to send competing signals so endurance and strength tend to compete with each other right a body that adapts for maximum endurance tends to pare muscle down um because it makes you a more efficient endurance machine this is why long distance runners look different than sprinters yeah okay

so um i would do enough cardio to be healthy if the goal is for muscle building.

Now, if the goal is endurance and stamina, well, then it looks a lot different.

But for most people, especially someone like yourself, young man, you want to put on muscle, you probably don't even need to structure or schedule cardio.

You're going to do well if you just made sure to walk 10,000 steps a day, and that would handle that activity portion, the health portion, and then the rest of your energy devoted towards strength training.

Wow, interesting.

I know you used to struggle with low testosterone.

This is a growing issue everywhere.

It seems like the numbers every year are growing.

How are you able to fix the low testosterone?

So that's a big deal.

So we've known this now for about five or six decades, that men's testosterone levels have been declining

pretty consistently.

We don't quite know why.

Most experts would probably point to a combination of factors from lifestyle to

these

disruptive hormone-disrupting chemicals that we're exposed to that we weren't exposed to before.

Xenoestrogens, for example.

These are chemicals that attach to the estrogen receptor and have these kind of estrogenic effects and can cause lowered levels of testosterone.

But we're not quite sure, but we do know across the board, testosterone and fertility are going down.

Now, my story is a little bit different.

In my early 30s, I took designer steroids.

These were over-the-counter at the time.

They call them pro-hormones, but let's make no mistake.

They were designer steroids.

I was, you know, trying to be naive, I think.

But I do think that the use of them in my early 30s for over a certain period of time did permanently, negatively affect my testosterone levels.

Once I hit my late 30s and early 40s,

my testosterone levels were depressed and there was really nothing, I did everything I could to try to raise them and they stayed low.

So I've had to go on testosterone replacement therapy.

But my story is

a unique one.

But young men are seeing, we are seeing some pretty interesting things with testosterone.

To raise testosterone naturally, You want good sleep, you want sun exposure, you don't want nutrient deficiencies.

Common nutrient deficiencies that can cause low testosterone are vitamin D, zinc.

Those are common and lowering testosterone.

You want to strength train.

Strength training is the only form of exercise that will predictably raise testosterone.

It will also increase what's called androgen receptor density.

So these are the receptors that testosterone attaches to.

So it doesn't just raise testosterone.

It also makes the testosterone you have more effective.

And it does that, again, quite reliably.

You want to eat a diet that is not devoid of, definitely not protein protein or fats.

You need to have both to produce the testosterone.

And typically, you don't want to go in a zero carbohydrate diet.

Now,

there are cases where that would be beneficial.

Typically, in my experience, people with autoimmune type issues or who are quite reactive to carbohydrates, usually there's a gut issue that's underlying.

But

you don't want to go too low on anything.

You have a kind of a well-balanced diet.

You want to eat in a caloric surplus for the most part, unless you're quite overweight, in which case losing body fat would help with testosterone.

And then you want to be consistent and you don't want to overstress your body.

But if you're in electrolytes all the time, you don't get any sunlight, if your sleep is always disrupted, and you don't give your body a reason to have that testosterone, then it's going to lower.

Interesting.

So how much sunlight would you say and how many hours of sleep are good levels?

These are general now.

Sunlight is quite individual.

So like I'll use myself as an example.

My family's from Sicily.

We're dark naturally.

In order to produce adequate vitamin D levels, I need a lot of sun just because my skin is dark.

The lighter you are, the more vitamin D you'll produce from less sunlight.

Interesting.

But generally speaking, you want to be in the sun as much as possible in a responsible, healthy way, meaning you don't want to sunburn yourself.

Your skin adapts.

So if you don't go out in the sun much, you can't go out much at first.

But sunlight generally tends to be good for us so long as you don't go past what's appropriate.

But that's so individual, it's hard to answer.

Sleep, we have better answers.

Most people need about seven to nine hours of quality sleep.

Now, the biggest mistake people make with sleep, and this is a big one, by the way, when they look at lifestyle factors that affect things like depression, anxiety, energy, outlook, hormones, if you were to compare sleep to exercise to diet.

By the way, all three of them would be the best, right?

But if you were to compare all of them, sleep has the biggest impact.

That's That's how, yeah, that's how important it is.

Um, the biggest mistakes people make are: here, this is an easy one that people don't realize: go to bed and wake up at the same time every day.

What people end up doing is they go to bed and they wake up at the same time Monday through Thursday.

Friday comes around, I'm gonna go to bed late because I'll sleep in tomorrow.

By the time Monday comes around, I gotta wake up early for work.

What you've done is you've done, you've essentially put yourself through jet lag.

Every single week, people have jet lag, that's why they hate Mondays.

That That little tweak of the circadian rhythm, every single week that you do to yourself, has profound effects on your health.

So just going to bed and waking up at the same time alone makes a big difference.

Then the second thing you would want to do is avoid electronics

and or bright lights about two hours before bed so that your brain,

you know, what we tend to do is we tend to just hit the pillow and expect our brain to

go to sleep.

But when we're in light and we're looking at electronics, our brain doesn't perceive it to be dark.

So then we turn the lights off, hit the pillow.

It's going to take a couple hours before that process.

So you have worse quality sleep.

You don't go to sleep as quickly.

And your REM stages of sleep are not ideal.

So that would be the second thing that I would say.

And the third thing would be to not eat two hours before bed because your digestive system also has a circadian rhythm.

So you don't want to eat right before bed.

You want to wait a couple hours.

And do those things consistently.

Just like exercise, it's not like you do it once once and you'll notice these profound effects.

Do it

consistently and you'll see some pretty impressive effects on everything from mood to energy to creativity.

And then hormones, we can measure your hormones, insulin sensitivity, growth hormone, testosterone, all tend to improve when

we prioritize our sleep.

Man, that's some great advice.

And I don't do any of those three things, so I can't wait to implement those in my life.

Yeah, well,

we do a good job of

getting by.

And I think we do it so often that we we just this is just how we operate.

We operate off of stimulants and depressants, stimulants to wake us up, depressants to calm us down.

And so we don't really know what it really feels like.

This is just like fitness, by the way.

Like someone who's never exercised or hasn't exercised for a long time, they don't quite know what they're missing until they do it right and they do it consistently.

And then they go, oh, wow, I feel so different.

Sleep is like that.

If you were to take 30 days and prioritize this every night,

I mean, just productivity alone would explode.

You'd find yourself being in that

inspired state more often.

Your outlook on things would change.

I mean, look, I mean, studies show this as well.

A large chunk, I believe a majority, if not a sizable minority of people will have mental health issues with just three days of...

really bad sleep.

You'll start to see these, yeah, that they'll start to peak out.

And loss of sleep is so it's such a big deal that it's considered cruel and unusual punishment uh in in war yeah so it's a very i mean think about this way if we could have evolved to not sleep that would have happened by now because uh you know for all intents and purposes you're vulnerable you're not creating shelter you're not hunting you're just there you're like a meal waiting to be eaten But it's so important that we didn't evolve not sleep.

We didn't evolve past it.

And every most animals we know of sleep in some way, shape, or form.

Huge, huge impacts.

And that's, it used to be something I ignored.

Yeah.

But now it's the first thing that I attack when I work with someone.

Wow.

Yeah.

Most people don't even, they put like health and fitness before sleep, but you're saying sleep first.

Sleep is

a huge part of health.

It actually influences it's so important.

It influences everything else.

If you have poor sleep,

your cravings go up.

The types of foods that you want to eat,

you throw off your satiety signals.

Okay, so now your diet is strongly affected.

If you have poor sleep, your workouts are not going to be nearly as effective.

Your ability to adapt and recover is significantly hampered.

Your motivation and drive just to work out decreases.

And the hormones associated with all the positive things that we can get from exercise are also negatively affected.

So poor sleep is like throwing a wrench in the machine.

You screwed everything up.

So you have to focus on that as a primary focus if you want to do well in the other ones.

One thing I wanted to end off with, I've seen you talk about this, you speak against over-prescriptions.

You're not so fond of the Western medical system, right?

Yeah, well, I want to be very clear.

I think it's the best medical system in existence, but it's not perfect.

Just the beast itself or the incentives around Western medicine.

mean it's going to be very good at some things and not so good at other things.

If you look at, for example,

development, right?

It's, I believe on average, it's about a billion dollars of investment to go from conception to market.

Wow.

And a big part of that has to do with our regulatory process.

So a billion dollars.

So let's imagine you and I are pharmaceutical executives and we're sitting down and we want to come up with a new way to treat cancer.

And a scientist pops up and says, well, we could try this extremely different and very innovative pathway that we've never, no one's ever done before, but there could potentially be a breakthrough here.

And then someone else says, well, we we could also develop another form of chemo.

Am I going to risk a billion dollars on an idea that is probably so different that we have no, I mean, it's probably going to fail?

Or am I going to go with a different form of chemo, which chemo's been around for a while and has already passed the regulatory process, right?

So that messes things up a little bit and creates those incentives.

There's also no incentives to study things that you can't patent and profit off of.

Why would a company, why would any company invest millions of dollars to do a study when they couldn't, there's no way for them from that study to recoup some of that investment.

So we're not going to see lots of studies on things that can't be patented or lifestyle types of things.

And also, you got to look at the market.

Trying to get the average person to change their lifestyle is very hard.

It's much more difficult than getting them to take a pill.

So you have to consider all those things.

And so I don't think it's an evil industry, although I do think there's nefarious, there are some nefarious people in every industry, including the the pharmaceutical industry.

But you just got to realize what they're good at and what they're not good at.

They're not good at treating chronic health issues.

They're not good at helping people change their lifestyle.

They're not good at moving in directions that are completely innovative because the risk is just far too high.

So what you should do, the average person should do, is look at Western medicine, but then look at the other practices that have been around for a long time.

Look at Eastern medicine ayurvedic medicine and then look at what simply changing your lifestyle can do for you

and if you look at a comment all those things i think you'll get much closer to the answers that you're looking for yeah sal it's been a great 20 minutes learned a lot in this time period really appreciate it anything you want to promote or close off with no i appreciate you having me on and if anybody wants more information on health and fitness communicated by trainers who have lots of experience and in ways that are understandable, you just find us on Mind Pump.

Love it.

Thanks so much for coming on, man.

Thanks for watching, guys.

As always, hope you learned something, and I'll see you next time.