How To Bulk Then Cut The Right Way (Reveal Your Abs) | Mind Pump 2942

Key Takeaway

Start by building, not cutting: for the next 8–10 weeks, eat roughly 300 calories above maintenance, prioritize protein, and progressively get stronger on a focused strength routine. Track your lifts, waist/hip measurements, progress photos, and how clothes fit—not just scale weight. A small, controlled surplus supports muscle growth; later, use a conservative calorie deficit while keeping protein high and strength training to reveal the shape you built.

Episode Overview

Mind Pump argues that people seeking a lean, sculpted physique—including those with substantial fat-loss goals—often benefit from building muscle before beginning a cut. The hosts explain how controlled calorie surpluses, adequate protein, progressive strength training, and less fixation on scale weight can build glutes, abs, and a higher-calorie-burning body. They also outline a glute-and-core-focused four-day training approach and a gradual cutting phase.

Full Transcript

Transcript of How To Bulk Then Cut The Right Way (Reveal Your Abs) | Mind Pump 2942 from Mind Pump Show. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

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This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, we talk about how to bulk and then cut the right way to reveal your abs and a round butt. Look, this episode comes with a new program launch. We have a new MAPS program. MAPS Abs and Butt. This program focuses on, you guessed it, your abs and your butt. You want to develop those areas. You want round glutes, nice-looking abs. This is the program for you. It's also 40% off because it's a brand-new program. We're going to throw in a free MAPS program, Muscle Mommy 15 or Muscle Mommy.

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So head over to Seed.com slash MindPump. Use the code 25MindPump. Get 25% off. Back to the show. According to CDC data, at any given moment, about 55% of American women are attempting weight loss, and only about 1% are trying to gain any weight. This is backwards, you guys. Even if you want to get leaner, you want to build first. Getting people to want to go in a calorie surplus or to bulk, it can be difficult, especially if they're afraid of getting body fat. But this is especially true for women.

I had this one woman that I trained, and it was very difficult to coach her on nutrition because she was so afraid of gaining body weight. She went on a bulk with the goal being not to gain any body fat. Her surplus was, I'm not joking, to the calories, like 50 calories. It didn't work, of course, because it's so difficult to figure out exactly how many calories you're burning on a given day. She tried that for a while, and it was difficult to see the results that she was looking for to build the muscle, to get the sculpt and the shape.

And after her trying that for a while, it was months. It was months of her, and I had to kind of not touch it. We'll just focus on the workout with me. Eventually, I convinced her to just try going in a 300 to 400-calorie surplus for a week. And I said, let's just do it for a week. Worst case scenario, we go back. No big deal. And within days, she saw huge strength gains, which encouraged her. And then we stayed on course. And through an actual bulk, she built muscle and got leaner.

I feel like I've always got the two extremes. Either that what you're telling, which is the client that is so afraid to eat more, that even though she thinks she's eating more, she's having days where she's eating less. And so it averaged out the same. And so then we're seeing no progress as far as strength gains or building any muscle or building the butt that we want. Or I have the other extreme where it's like, oh, coach is giving me the green light to bulk and do what I want.

It's not calling pizza. And so then it's like, I'm not really tracking in detail. I'm just eating it all the time and eating a lot of calories because I'm told to be on a bulk. And then we get our body fat test back. And we might have put on a little bit of muscle, but we also put on as much or more body fat. And so then I get this fear and resistance to trusting that process when it's like, one, it doesn't take a ton of calories, but it does take more calories.

And then I think with my clients, it's understanding which one are you? Are you the type of person who is like afraid to put on any sort of weight? And so you're going to be that like barely any extra calories or a lot of times under calorie. And so it ends up being the average. Or are you the 10 that will just fly off the handle and eat whatever and knowing yourself going into it? I was the one. So for myself, speaking for myself, I was the client who overdid it.

All right. When I did bolts as a kid, up until my early twenties, I didn't really figure this out. I remember I was a trainer since I was 18. So I've been training people as well, but because I grew up and feeling insecure about being skinny, my insecurity was in the opposite direction. So when I went on a bulk, which I was always trying to be on a bowl, but when I don't want an aggressive bowl, it was just, it was calories. I don't care where they're coming from.

And I remember one time myself, I was managing the club on Santa Teresa and my fitness manager, Ryan, you guys know who he is. Him and I had a contest on who could do the most successful bulk and, you know, we worked out together, uh, and we weighed ourselves, uh, every single week. Now I just ate horrible cow. I just ate calories, many calories that possibly could. I got my body weight up to 200 and a little over 240 pounds, which for me is very heavy.

I don't have a huge, I'm six foot tall, but two 40 for me is a lot of weight on my frame. And then we did a body fat test. So I, so we both, uh, I don't remember who won the contest, but he got up to two 50 something else too. He started heavier than I was. And, but I remember we got a body fat test at the end. And, uh, to my shock, I gained almost zero muscle. It was almost all body fat, a tiny bit of lean body masking, which could have been water.

So it might've been zero muscle and again, almost all body fat. And it was very disheartening to go through that process. I had the same exact mistake was I was, it was so difficult for me to eat enough calories in order to bulk that I felt that I needed to do what, you know, what you call a dirty book where you eat just everything in sight. You know, and the biggest thing that I realized after I had similar terrible results where I just put on a ton of body fat was when I went back and I started actually tracking the macros when I, when I bolt, I realized that I was eating enough calories to, to build muscle problem is I wasn't getting enough protein.

I was eating too high a saturated fat carbs and sugar and stuff like that. Not enough of like my, of my protein. So my body would build muscle. So what ended up happening was not getting enough protein to build the muscle, eating enough excess calories to put on body fat. And so it ended up being terrible for me. Yes. And then on the other side with the cut, uh, I, you know, managing gyms, you see people do this all the time where they, again, looking at the scale and the scale is one metric you can use to measure, you know, which direction you're going, but by itself, it just measures body mass.

So it doesn't tell you fat or lean body mass. It just says weight. Um, and I would have people who would come into my gym who would do these extreme cuts where they'd significantly reduce their calories. They dramatically increased their cardio. Uh, some of them twice a day were coming in to try to lose weight. They would lose a bunch of weight on the scale, but when you would do a body composition change, this is what this, this part was really hard for some of these people.

Some of their body fat percentages didn't even go down. In fact, I had a couple of people where the body fat percentage went up and I remember this because, uh, they got so upset. They thought the body fat test, something was wrong with it. We had several people test them, but at that time we were using calipers and calipers are relatively accurate. They're definitely better than electronic impedance. Like four of us tested this person, body fat, and they were so upset. They couldn't believe this. And I had to explain to them, you can lose weight on the scale, but if you lose a lot of muscle, your body fat percentage can go up because your current body fat, the amount of body fat you have on your frame is now a greater percentage of your body weight.

Yeah. And once I showed them the math, they were so disheartened and it was like, okay, well, what, what did you do? I was eating, you know, 1300 calories a day. I was doing cardio twice a day. I'm like, that's a recipe for muscle loss. Yeah. I remember as a young trainer, it was even, it was difficult for me to, um, I had, this is the first time I actually trained Courtney and she was a client of mine initially. And, um, it was funny because like I would give her a meal plan and it was really because she needed more protein.

She needed to kind of, uh, you know, stick with something that gave her that bit of, uh, uh, you know, of a deficit. And so, uh, not tracking initially now to tracking now to like, you know, shave down a bit, but then, you know, I was just giving her this generic kind of meal plan and like, that's a huge jump to get them to try. And so I, I remember just getting a text message, uh, and it was like tongue in cheek. It was really funny.

She's just like ice cream, alcohol, fuck it all. She's like, I abandoned this. I'm like, Oh no. Like I, and so I had to figure out like really, you know, adherence is everything. And then also to like, um, you know, making it so it's not so alien, you know, this, this, this transition to be able to, uh, you know, stick with something that's like consistent. Well, I've seen this at the professional bodybuilding world and in personal trainers. This is far more common than the average person realizes.

If your programming isn't dialed in and it isn't balanced appropriately with diet, I can't tell you how often I've seen even professionals and trainers do this incorrectly. If you are training too intensely or too much volume paired with too low of calories, it's a recipe for losing muscle too. And so what you would see sometimes is these, these athletes put on this muscle in the bulk in the off season and actually built some muscle. But then when they go to the cut and I've seen trainers at a competition, Justin was a part of that competition.

We had all these personal trainers run a competition where who could get the leanest, the fastest and everybody did it so fast and so aggressively that a lot of them didn't aggressive, didn't even lose that much body fat percentage. Some even stayed the same or went up because they lost as much muscle, if not more muscle, uh, in the cut because they cut too aggressively. It was a challenge. What people understand about that, because I've heard people say this, like you'll burn muscle. That's not what's happening.

You're not burning muscle because you're eating too little where your body needs to find calories. So it kind of devours muscle that actually requires extreme starvation. That's not what's happening. What's happening is your body's adapting to the low calories by learning how to burn less calories. And it does this in many, many different ways. But one of the ways it does this is it pairs muscle down because muscle is so active. So if you're eating, you know, very low calorie and you're doing activity that burns a lot of calorie, but also simultaneously doesn't say we need the muscle.

So what kind of activity does that? Lots of cardio, lots and lots of cardio burns, lots of calories, but it doesn't send a signal that says we need strength, right? Cause you don't need strength to be on elliptical or run or whatever. You just need stamina. Uh, those two combined your body pairs muscle down and you'll see this by the way, the data supports this, a calorie deficit plus cardio. You're looking at half of the weight loss coming from muscle, if not more. Um, now the difference, uh, the difference maker will be the strength training.

Um, and the difference maker is not going too hard in a cut, um, and eating adequate protein. Here's the other mistake a lot of people make, uh, is rather than, than if someone says, I want to build this great body, they think cut first, they think lose weight first. And, uh, it's better to start with the game. It's better to start with the building of the muscle. It's going to set you up for an easier cut later on. Because when you cut, you run the risk of losing muscle.

When you bulk, you build the muscle. And now when you cut, you've got a faster metabolic rate and you've got a higher starting point with muscle. And the cut becomes much more successful. That's one of the big mistakes. It's like, okay, I want to build, I want to have this incredible body. Where do I start? Build. Then cut. Don't start with the cut. This is less friction when you're really trying to build momentum. And I feel like, you know, if you're really focused on the bill, you're, um, you're eating adequately, your energy's high, you're getting good sleep.

You know, you're, you're getting stronger. And so there's a lot of, um, you know, positives in the momentum. And then, you know, two, you're building up your metabolism, which makes, you know, that flexibility a lot more achievable. You're also taking advantage of the novelty stimulus. Many times when people decide to get on a kick or start a program or, you know, get a new way, I'm going to start doing this thing, set a goal. A lot of it is off of a layoff. You haven't been training for months or whatever like that.

And so this person getting back in the gym or getting back to being consistent or setting a new goal or starting a new program, there's, it's a novel stimulus when it's a novel stimulus like that. And you feed the body in a bulk extra calories. It's much easier for it to build muscle versus the person who's been training consistently never takes a day off and they're kind of following the same routine. They're not getting that novel stimulus. And so there's not a loud signal that tells the body we need to build muscle.

In fact, their body's adapted to a lot of the stuff they're doing. So that's a terrible time when you're first getting started to start off in a cut when you're priming the body to build muscle already. This is a novel stimulus. You're doing movements you weren't doing before. You're training period you weren't training before. Let's feed the body why it's in that state. Let it grow. It's more likely to grow muscle at that time. So we keep talking about muscle. We keep talking about building. I think it's important for someone listening right now who's like, look, I just want to get lean.

I want to have this nice shapely sculpted body. You guys keep talking about building muscle. I'm not trying to be a bodybuilder. Someone may be thinking this, but here's the deal with that. So I remember when this first occurred to me. So I started training clients in the late nineties. So I've been doing this for a long time. At that time, the movie Terminator 2 had come out. You guys remember that? And I remember Sarah Connor in that movie. She, at that point, so Terminator 1, you know, she helps fight the Terminator.

Terminator 2, she's like in a mental asylum. And just doing pull-ups. And she's working out in. this mental aside. So the scenes in Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor is doing pull-ups and stuff, and I remember at that time, and that was the late 90s, that movie was in the late 90s, I remember women saying, I want arms like hers. I want to be sculpted and I want to look just like she does. And I remember women thinking the way that they would accomplish that was by doing tons of aerobics classes, tons of cardio, uh, you know, picking up a one pound dumbbell, doing 50,000 reps in a class.

And I was like, you guys don't realize, if you want to look like that, you have to, you have to lift weights to build muscle. And so the body that women are looking for, forget bodybuilders, I want, I want to be clear here, in order to look like a female bodybuilder, there's two things that need to happen, three things that need to happen. One, you need to have the kind of genetics that are so rare that you're probably the most muscular, strongest person around always. And you've known this since you were a child.

So you're in class, you're in fifth grade, you're stronger than every boy, you're jacked. Like you've got those rare, it's like as rare as being seven foot tall. Okay. You got those genetics. That's number one. Number two, you take a lot of anabolic steroids. You're you've got more testosterone than the average 18 year old man, because the amount of steroids that you're taking. And number three, you live and breathe it for years and years and years. Okay. So none of those are you, you can lift weights as hard as you want.

You'll never look like a bodybuilder. What will happen is you'll get the kind of body that you think you're going to get by doing all the classes. You'll get the shape and the sculpt, the round butt, the tight legs, the shoulders that look a little defined. When you look at your midsection, you'll see the outline of your abs and obliques. You're going to look firm and sculpted. That's the body you get from building muscle with strength training. It doesn't happen from doing tons, 5,000 reps of other exercises from doing tons and tons of cardio that causes muscle loss with fat loss, but it doesn't give you this strong sculpted look that you're looking for.

So I want to communicate that because we talk about building muscle and someone's like, I just want to look lean. No, you want to actually build muscle. By the way, that makes getting lean a lot easier. No, if you want round shoulders around, but that's muscle, you got to build the muscle. And like you said, when we started this off, it's like you, you first build it and then you reveal it. And so you, you spend the beginning time building up the metabolism, building up the butt, building up the shoulders, building the muscle, and then you carve away and you reveal the sculpt, the tone look that everybody talks about.

Do you think it was a Terminator or do you think it was G I J was the other one? Those are the, I think around the same time. I don't know. G I J was before. Okay. Yeah. G I J was to say G I J to me was the, the one where I remember really like that was my, for as a personal trainer. The first time I started hearing women like say like, I want, I want muscle up before that. It like, remember we go away, we all go back 25 years of personal training.

So when we first started, it was like, I want to be skinny. I mean, literally like people would hire you and say things like, I want to be skinny. And they, we had, they still had that look where that people thought that looked good, where it wasn't till like G I J time where people are going, okay, that looks pretty good. I think, I think again, it, when I ask, uh, when I asked my female clients, what's like an ideal female shape, by the way, we're not saying you should compare yourself with that.

You're going to look like, uh, you know, people on social media, but the picture that I'm trying to paint is when you look at the physiques that you look at and you say, wow, that's a per, that's a really fit, strong, sculpted looking physique that happens from strength training and from building. It does not come from severe restriction and tons and tons of cardio. Uh, and by the way, uh, it happens faster than you think. If you do things right, you still got to be consistent, but if you do them right, uh, it'll happen.

If you do things wrong, it'll never happen. That's the point here. Now, one of the fears, uh, especially around eating in a surplus is, uh, man, am I going to get bulky? I used to hear that all the time. I'm afraid of getting bulky. I'm afraid of getting too big. Like if I do this, if I eat in a surplus and I lift weights, you know, I'm gonna look like Justin. I'm gonna look like, like I could move five. It's not going to happen ladies. No.

Yeah. Well, this describes the person that we talked about that either one ends up not eating enough extra calories in order to build muscle. And so they're, they're constantly teetering on just a little bit of a calorie surplus or a deficit most times. So then they never see muscle being built or they think they have tried to bulk in the past before, but they did it incorrectly and they just put body fat on. So they're like, I've tried this before. I don't want to do this.

I know what, I know what I look like. If I eat extra calories, it's not the look that I want. There's, there's a difference between just eating extra calories and bulking versus actually eating the proper macros that your body needs to build muscle in a calorie surplus. Even though a calorie surplus is a bulk, there's a, there's a way to do it and there's, there's a right way to do it and there's a wrong way to do it. And the wrong way to do it is when you just eat a bunch of extra calories and they're not the right calories you need to build muscle.

And I also want to share this because, uh, we've become so obsessed with the scale that the scale weight can oftentimes intimidate us because it's not what we think we should weigh or, you know, I'm trying to get fit. The scale knows go down. It hasn't gone down, even though body composition has changed. I'm going to tell a story I've told many times on older episodes, but it's one of my favorite examples. I used to have this trainer that worked for me, female trainer. So I had men and, you know, men and women that worked for me.

And this female trainer was very fit. Okay. You guys know who she is. You know who she is. I've talked to you about her before, Adam. She's very fit, very sculpted, uh, you know, had a physique that a lot of the female members that came in the gym would point to. And when I would do tours, this was a general manager. So sometimes I would do tours of the gym, people interested in signing up. And when I tour the gym, if I'm showing a woman around, when I would go to the freeweight area, sometimes I'd hear them say, well, I'm not interested in this.

I don't want to get bulky. I said, well, what's your goals? Well, I want to get lean and sculpted. I said, well, you want to spend a lot of time in here. This is where you get that kind of physique. And they'd give me a little pushback and I'd try to educate them and we'd walk through the gym. And then we would come into my office. And I used to love doing this. I did it at least a dozen times. I'd say, I tell you what, would you like a free membership here for a month?

And they'd say, well, yes. All you got to do is guess my trainer's body weight within 10 pounds. If you can guess within 10 pounds of her body weight, uh, then I'll give you a free month. And they'd say, okay, let's do this. So I bring her in, bring in my trainer and my trainer would come in. She was petite. She was like five, two. Again, she looked really fit. And I had a scale in my office and I'd say, okay, how much do you think she weighs?

Everybody guessed a hundred pounds. So it was like a hundred pounds, 110 pounds, something like that. I'd ever step on the scale. She was like 145 pounds or something like that. And it would blow their minds. Cause here was this female trainer who was petite, obviously has muscle. She's got the glutes and the hamstrings tight way. She's lean. I think her body fat was probably 18% body fat. It would blow their mind so much that they thought the scale was off. And I'd say here, step on the scale.

And I would test it. I said, no, it works. And my point with that was she has a lot of muscle on her body. You think she weighs, it looks so different. Look, if you, if somebody were to pause this right now and go online and look up a six foot, six foot tall man, 200 pounds at 20% body fat, six foot tall man, 200 pounds at 10% body fat. Look at the pictures next to each other pretty radically. They do not look like the same person at all.

You can do this with a woman to 150 pounds, you know, at 20% body fat between 150 pounds and let's say 32% body fat, same height. Very, very different. And so what happens if you do this right in your building muscle is the scale oftentimes doesn't move down the way you think it should, or it doesn't at all. However, what may start happening and I used to get clients like this all the time is people would point things out to them. You look like you lost weight.

I haven't lost any weight on the scale or my clothes feel looser. Why am I weighing the same? You've lost muscle, you've lost body fat, you've gained muscle and you look a lot leaner. And your metabolism is a lot faster. You know, this was the challenge with like hyper obsessing over numbers, especially the scale. This is where, you know, if you can convince your client to, you know, set that aside through this process and not really fixate on that, then we can start, you know, figuring out all these other benefits that are happening.

And two, the clothes are going to fit a little differently. When you grow muscle, you know, it's going to stretch out your pants, you know, a little bit from the back, you know, you're going to have a little more shoulder. And so these are just different changes to contend with. And it doesn't mean we're getting bulky. We're actually starting to get that shape and everything's starting to kind of transform along the process. So yeah, to really, you know, kind of sit back from really obsessing over those numbers on the scale is huge.

Well, how many times do we have live callers calling the podcast? There's somewhere in the low to mid twenties and body 20 something percent body fat and they break down their entire weight, how long they've been training, what mass program they're following. And they're like, I want to get leaner. I want to cut, I want what, and they want us to put together a diet for them to cut down into this. And how many times do we end up advising you build into the body you want?

It just is, it's, it's make when you, when you're sitting at like a percent that you think is too high of a body fat percentage, the idea that you need to gain is such a hard concept. But yet every time we assess these diets and we see where they're at, and it's like, you understand if you just put five pounds of muscle on your frame, you would get this look that you're looking for this idea that you need, you need to cut down to attain this look that you want is not, is, is not realistic, not sustainable.

And you're actually not even going to be that happy with it. And also, let's say you do have a lot of body fat that you want to lose building first makes that easier. Okay. So when you build muscle, what typically happens is you get a faster or hotter metabolic rate. So now you're burning more calories at rest because you've gained a little bit of muscle because you've gone through the process of eating in a inappropriate calorie surplus. You're hitting your protein, your strength train. You've got a lot stronger.

So now you've built some muscle. Now that your metabolism is faster, it is easier to lose body fat. Now you can eat more than you would have and lose more body fat. In other words, if your body's burning 2000 calories a day, you need to eat less than 2000 calories to lose any weight. If your body's burning 3000 calories a day, well, now you can eat anything less than 3000 calories and lose weight. And so building first sets that up. And so there's some studies I'd like to quote around this and why it's a good idea to try to build first.

There was one study that was from, it was at a journal of nutrition and it shows that a moderate calorie deficit, so a small calorie deficit dropped muscle building by about 20%. In other words, trying to build while being in a calorie deficit is almost a complete waste of time. You need to be in a surplus. The perfect routine is going to be completely hampered without a good, without at least a modest calorie surplus. They also show in the New England Journal of Medicine, there was a study that showed that after losing 10% of body weight, people burned hundreds fewer calories a day than they expected.

So when you, so in other words, if you cut first, you're going to slow your metabolism down. It's so much better to start with a faster metabolism when you do that. By the way, you can't, it's really, there's almost nothing you can do to prevent some metabolic slowdown when you lose weight. That's just how the body adapts. But one of the best things you could do besides strength training while in a deficit, because that'll help you keep the muscle, is go into it with a faster metabolism.

So at least when you go in higher and it comes down, you're in a better place than had you gone in low and then it comes down. By the way, to make this clear, as I know we've talked about this on the podcast so many times before, because we say this and then I always get these messages in my DMs afterwards, like, yeah, but I need to lose 30 pounds or I also need to lose 50 pounds. I can't be that person you're talking about, right?

You guys are talking about somebody who's kind of in that, like, no, this is everybody. Towards the end of my career training people, I realized that I don't care how overweight or deconditioned a client of mine was, we were always better off starting in a calorie surplus and a bulk and building muscle first, even if they needed to lose 100 pounds. So I just want to make that clear, because there's always somebody who's listening who thinks that we're not talking about them, that we're talking about, oh, this must be already skinny or really lean people that you're talking about that need a bulk first.

No, even if you have a lot of weight that you think you need to, or you do need to lose, it's still more advantageous to build muscle, build the metabolism, then cut down and reveal. Yep, yep, 100%. And so, and by the way, when you go in the cut with that faster metabolism, you continue to strength train properly, keep your protein intake high, and that helps you keep the muscle, okay? Without the strength training, without the high protein, just going to calorie deficit is a pretty quick road to muscle loss.

So here's the formula essentially, the order. You build first, first try to build, eat enough to do so, lift heavy, get strong, build the muscle, then do the cut, and this is what, when you start to reveal what you've built. By the way, the cut should not be super aggressive, okay? So I'm not trying to put you in this crazy low calorie diet, because no matter how much, I don't care how much strength training you do, calories are low enough, you'll lose muscle. So you want to be in a conservative caloric deficit, maintain the strength training, and because you've built that muscle before, now it's easier, and you start to reveal it, and it looks great.

Let's talk about the exercise a little bit. In the episode I opened talking about kind of building your butt and your abs, let's talk about the butt for a second. There are some exercises that are really effective at building the butt, and there's other exercises that are not so effective at building the butt. Now, we coach people and train people for years and years and years, so we saw firsthand which exercises were the best. Now we have studies supporting what we already knew, which is always funny to me when they come out with a study.

We just discovered that hip thrusts and squats are the best for glutes. I'm like, well, yeah. I've been doing that for 20 years with my clients, but the data supports this, and so does our experience. Deep barbell squats and barbell hip thrusts are king and king of the butt building exercises. Get strong with both of those, and you will build your butt. So long as your technique is good, obviously don't hurt yourself, but good form and get stronger. Strength is a wonderful metric that predicts muscle building.

So if you continue to get stronger over time, it's pretty much guaranteed that you're going to be building muscle. And the only reserve is it takes a bit of technique and a bit of a learning curve to get through that, but once you get through that, it's going to maximize your potential to a degree you wouldn't get just doing machines alone. I can't stress the strength portion of what you just said. Progressive overload is the key, and getting stronger trumps feeling my butt burn. That used to be the strategy or the thought process when training for building your butt and building your abs was this, I want the this burning sensation and you think that that's working more or that's better.

It is not. Those lifts you're talking about, deep squats, hip thrusts, I don't care if it doesn't burn at all in there as long as you get stronger there. If you get stronger in those lifts, in those movements, you will build an ass. That is the key. And the same is true for core exercises. Somehow, years ago, people believed that to train your abs and to get really nice sculpted looking abs, you need to do 5,000 reps and no rest periods. No, you build the abs just like you build any body part.

It's heavy, it's with good tension, controlled full range of motion. If you get stronger with ab exercises, your abs will also develop and they'll be more visible at higher body fat percentage. So good full range of motion and get strong at them. And when we say strong, we're talking about reps anywhere between, you know, five to let's say 15 or 20. More than that, it starts to become more endurance style training. We created a program kind of around this and I'm just going to give people kind of an idea of what this looks like.

If someone's healthy, they want to get into this, they want to build their butt and their abs. What this probably would look like for most people would be a four day a week routine. The glutes and the abs would be the focus of the routine. So that doesn't mean you're not training the whole body, okay? We are trainers at the end of the day and I would never train somebody to just work out one body part. You do, but 90% of the volume in the training program, meaning the sets and the reps and the exercise are focused on the glutes and on the core.

The other 10% allows us to train the rest of the body minimally because we're trying to place most of the volume on those two areas if this is the focus. But those areas are also getting strengthened so they're not left far behind. And that would be a four day a week routine and you're probably going to do one workout that's heavier and one workout that's more moderate with the intensity. Two really hard heavy workouts a week, especially with those big lifts, is typically too much for most people and just causes burnout.

So you're looking at heavy and kind of a moderate day. I can't stress enough how important the way that is programmed is because so many people when they have an area they want to focus on, like the glutes and abs, just pile more of that on a already complete program. And so when you're communicating that 90% of the focus is around the glutes and abs and then we still do the rest of the body, it's so minimal. Someone else might be thinking, well why don't I just do a full everything and every workout all the time then?

And it's not ideal like that. You've got to understand that working out is still a stress. It's a good stress because it causes an adaptation for you to want to build muscle, but if it's too much stress and it's not applied appropriately, you won't recover, you won't build. And so we have to take volume somewhere. So we're taking it away in some of the other body parts and applying more of that focus on the glutes and the abs, but you have to do that for the programming to work.

If you just pile on more of the exercises that build the butt and abs on top of an already complete program, it's too much. You end up building nothing. I'm glad you said that, Adam. That's one of the biggest mistakes. You're focusing on a specific body part, then you take volume away from other body parts and place it towards that, otherwise you get nowhere. It's just overwhelming for the body and the body can't adapt. So what this kind of looks like, if you're following this, is let's say you're listening.

You're like, cool, I'm going to follow that routine. Maybe I'll get your program, MAPS Abs and Butts, so it's four days a week. I'm going to go into calorie surplus, so I'm going to eat, let's say, 300 calories above what I believe to be maintenance, meaning high protein. What can I expect? Well, here's what you can expect. First off, give it eight to 10 weeks. So don't freak out at week two or three and stop. Eight to 10 weeks is what we need to see and get at least some significant muscle and strength gain, because muscle, even if you do everything right, is a slow process.

Muscle doesn't come on super quickly. Even if everything's perfect, it takes a little bit of time. So give it eight to 10 weeks. What it typically will look like is this. The scale will either stay the same or go up a little bit. Don't freak out, because you're probably going to get compliments from people like your butt looks rounder, you look tighter. Expect it to go up a little bit if you're getting muscle. Also know if you're getting stronger while this is happening, my metabolism is getting faster.

And also know that you're setting yourself up for a cut later on. So don't freak out over the scale. You are in a bulk. It's going to probably go up a little bit. If you're getting stronger, like a lot stronger, and that's happening, you're doing everything right, we're perfect. That's a good sign. And we're going to set ourselves up for a nice cut later on. Now, questions that we always get are like, how long do I run this bulk for? Do I run it through half the program, all the program?

What would you recommend that somebody who is trying to build their butt and abs, how would they run? Ideally, if you did maps, abs, and butt, you would follow it first in a bulk, and then you follow it again in a cut. So you do the whole program in a bulk, then do the whole program again in a cut, and you've got yourself like this really nice cycle of metabolism boosting and building, and then the reveal process, which is super fun and really, really awesome. So run it in a bulk first.

Because it's a new program launch, we're giving away Muscle Mommy 15 or Muscle Mommy. So you actually get another maps program. So the other thing you could do is you could do maps, abs, and butt in a bulk, and then run Muscle Mommy in a cut. And Muscle Mommy is also glute-focused, but not quite as glute-focused. It's a full body, it's really a full body routine. So you can go from focusing on building the areas you want to focus on, and then cut by focusing on the whole body in the cut.

That's actually even better, I think, for most people. Yeah, no, I'm excited for this. This has probably been one of the most asked questions that we get about building your butt, building your abs. And so creating a program that is specifically focused on that. We've done a lot of things like Muscle Mommy where we put some emphasis on it, but actually writing a program that is designed specifically to focus on that. The goal was this, like if somebody comes to us and says, I want to see big changes in these two areas, my abs and my butt, like really big changes, what would that programming look like?

So that's MAPS Abs and Butt. So here's what we're doing with this new launch. So you get the program at a massive discount, so it's 40% off. So it's 40% off what it's going to be later on at retail. We're going to throw in Muscle Mommy 15 or Muscle Mommy, your choice. We also have a Build Your Butt Diet Guide. So that's going to help you with the calorie surplus, the bulk, the reverse diet, whatever you want to label it. It's going to help you with that part.

And then we have a supplement guide that's coming with this as well. Supplements don't make a huge difference. I know people in the fitness space love to sell you supplements, tell you that they do all these awesome things. They do a little bit. Nonetheless, we also include a supplement guide. So you get the program, MAPS Abs and Butt for 40% off, Muscle Mommy 15 or Muscle Mommy included. You get the Build Your Butt Diet Guide that's going to help you with the bulk part. And then you get a supplement guide included for free.

So all of that you can find at mapsabsandbutt.com. All right, so look, I have a challenge for you. If you want to double your odds of success, the data shows this clearly. Invite a friend. Accountability doubles someone's odds of success for weight loss, fat loss, muscle gain. Doesn't matter the fitness goal. So here's what you do. Here's the challenge. Share this episode with someone. Do it together, two times the success rate. Let's go. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted free trial.

The RGB Super Bundle includes MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, and MAPS Aesthetic, nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam, and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs, with detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos. The RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam, and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now, plus other valuable free resources, at mindpumpmedia.com.

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