How To Get Faster and More Powerful without Getting Hurt | Mind Pump 2925

Key Takeaway

Audit your training this week for three gaps: explosive movement, unilateral work, and lateral or rotational strength. Start small: add a few fresh, low-fatigue jumps, one single-leg or single-arm exercise, and a lateral drill such as side sled drags. Stop each set before fatigue changes your speed or form. Building strength in these neglected positions helps your gym strength transfer to everyday movement while reducing the injury risk created by training only straight ahead.

Episode Overview

The hosts explain why conventional strength training can build an impressive physique yet leave people vulnerable to injuries during sports and everyday tasks. They argue that training should include explosive movement, unilateral work, and movement across lateral and rotational planes—without sacrificing aesthetics. The episode emphasizes gradual exposure, quality movement, and continuing to play sports or recreational games throughout adulthood.

Full Transcript

Transcript of How To Get Faster and More Powerful without Getting Hurt | Mind Pump 2925 from Mind Pump Show. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Look, being able to apply the strength you gain in the gym to real life is cool, but sometimes that " gym" strength doesn't translate to real life and can even make you more prone to injury. Today we'll show you how to develop real strength, speed, and power without getting injured. We'll talk about how to become faster and more powerful. Everyone goes to the gym to look better. Well, let's be frank. This is goal number one. But being in good shape when that shape doesn't help in real life is just nonsense.

Moreover, you can train in the gym consistently, improving your results, but at the same time increasing your risk of injury, because the strength you build up does not correspond to how it is used in real conditions. And this can become a real problem . This, by the way, really annoys people. It's like: you're constantly training, and then you go to the park, throw a Frisbee or a ball, and your shoulder hurts. Or you go to play basketball, which you haven't played in a few years, and you damage something, and you think, "What the hell, man?" I constantly train in the gym.

I am strong. I feel like I'm in shape, but it just doesn't work in life. Or worse—I've had clients who would bend over to pick up a bottle of shampoo or pick up a baby, yeah. and broke their backs. And this is a real thing. And it has to do with how you train. There is a way to train that will not only produce great results in your appearance, but will also improve your functionality in real life. This will improve your quality of life because you will be able to move more and do everything you need to do without harming yourself.

Dude, I've been saying this for ages. And in reality, people just don't think about how the way you train affects how you function and where that force is applied. You can have great looks and look cool, but be functionally incompetent, and that will create problems in the future. This will lead to pinching and pain, all of which could be avoided. And you can, uh, you can live in two worlds. You can have that aesthetic physique, which is, you know, quite desirable, but you also have to consider that we need to implement methods where you will properly train your joints so that they receive loads at these angles and become strong in these positions to avoid long-term pain and discomfort.

I feel like this is one of my biggest regrets over the past decade—being so focused on strength and aesthetics that I neglected so much else. And I feel like a lot of this has become quite obvious over the last few years. Because I had so many injuries. I had so many injuries when I was, you know, playing sports. So it wasn't like I was lifting a bottle of shampoo. Yes. But I became so strong in the sagittal plane that I neglected training to strengthen my joints and develop strength in different directions.

And when I go do something I've loved my whole life because I did it as a kid or wakeboarding behind a boat. I was having all these injuries, and I know exactly why. I know, and I, you know, I think it's even worse. I've said this on the podcast before, I almost think that because I have friends my age and we all grew up doing these things, they got injured less doing it, and I'm a " fitness guy," so it's even more unfortunate for me. Although they do nothing for strength training so didn't get very strong in a particular direction and I almost feel like I did more harm than good by getting so strong in just one direction.

This is how I built up so much horsepower in this car, you know, I built the engine. The threshold for exceeding is much higher. But I didn't do enough work to strengthen the suspension, the frame and everything else , and so my brain says, "Oh, I'm strong enough and capable of doing all this," I try to do it, I'm explosive, and that's where it all went wrong. So funny. I had a friend, you just made me remember him, a long time ago . He bought it, it was one of those 80s pickup trucks that people usually tune to make it really fast.

I don't know much about cars, but he bought a pickup truck that is often used for drag racing. And he made it really... He put an engine in there that was very, very powerful. But he didn't reinforce the frame, and the frame twisted. Mhm. He put out all that horsepower, hit the frame, the frame wasn't strong enough to take it, and it literally bent the frame of the car to the point where he had to apply too much torque. spend a lot of money on repairs and then reinforcements.

Um, and you know, we...You mentioned joints. It's not just about the joints, but also the muscles. Something strange is happening here , right? So Yes . Your muscles may become very strong in a certain area, but lack the ability to slow down, relax when needed, or contract quickly , and this can increase the risk of injury, such as sprains or tears. This happened to me. So, um , and like you, Adam, this is a huge regret for me. I think partly because of what I took for granted when I was younger...I wasn't a big sports fan.

I did , you know, judo, wrestling, and stuff like that . But if I wanted to do something, I just went for it when I was younger. And as an adult, you don't have many options unless you go and do it yourself. So I just didn't do anything for a while. Um, but I've been lifting weights this whole time. Um, and I was in Hawaii, and my daughter, my 16-year-old daughter, who plays... she was playing soccer at the time, wanted to race me. And we started, I was ahead of her, but she said, “Let's do it again .

"I'll run even faster." So the second time I said, "I'll run as fast as I can." And I tore my hamstring. Now keep in mind, I'm a guy who could deadlift 600 pounds. This means that my hamstrings are extremely strong, as they are one of the primary muscles in this exercise. This is an exercise for the posterior chain of muscles. And yet, after running less than 50 yards, I tore my hamstring . How is this even possible? Well, it's possible because I'm generating all this force, and when I straighten my leg , my hamstring can't relax fast enough to allow my leg to move forward, and so it stays tight.

I throw my leg forward and the tendon tears. Um , and that's really annoying. Again, this is from who is an " athlete" to who is a " fitness guy." And this is 100% the result of my incorrect training. And now the most interesting thing. If I trained correctly , and I'm already starting to implement it, if I trained correctly , I wouldn't give up anything in aesthetics. I think this is where the problem arises, or where the confusion comes from. People believe that in order for the strength gained in the gym to become useful in real life, you will have to compromise on aesthetics.

Therefore, I have to give up exercises that make me attractive or give me the desired shape, because I have to focus on this, as they say, functional or corrective work. And I'm like: okay, let it be. I will sacrifice aesthetics for productivity. This is not true. Absolutely not true. Of course, you can train solely for performance, but that's not what we're talking about now. We'll talk about how to train in your usual style, but add elements that will make your strength from the gym strength for real life.

This will allow you to do whatever you want in the real world without getting injured and be truly strong in the full sense of the word. There are two, there are two main points, I would say, two or three main keys to such training. And these are exactly the three things that people are missing in their workouts. Traditional strength training typically avoids three things. Some of them they avoid more than others. One of them is explosive training. You will hardly find explosive exercises in traditional strength training programs.

Explosive training aims to teach you to use your strength and apply it quickly. M-hm. By the way, in the real world, force must be used in two ways. The first is a traditional effort, such as lifting a sofa. The second is when a child runs out into the road and needs to be caught quickly. Or something falls off the shelf and you have to pick it up. This type of training doesn't require a lot of weight. This, this, this is speed power. And, you know, from an athlete's point of view, it's speed strength that matters.

This is the most important thing in athletics, but it is also very important in real life. You can now buy MAPS Performance and MAPS Symmetry for the price of one. This is a promotion: buy one, get the second one as a gift. And that goes for the top 10 MAPS programs. Go to mapsbogo.com. This episode was produced with the support of our sponsor, ZBiotics. So, ZBiotics is a genetically modified probiotic, okay? These are live bacteria. This is a probiotic. You drink it. These bacteria were designed, essentially, to break down acetaldehyde.

Okay, what is acetaldehyde? Well, look. When you drink alcohol, one of the negative byproducts is acetaldehyde. Your liver breaks it down without any problems unless you drink too much. But some of the acetaldehyde is released in the intestines. Therefore, the liver cannot neutralize it, and it enters the bloodstream. This makes us feel terrible. We feel extremely bad. ZBiotics is the only pre-drink that works with this. This is the only tool on the market that really does this. A patent application has been filed for it .

There is nothing else like it . Guys, girls, it works. Try it. Drink ZBiotics, go out with friends, and see how you feel the next day. Go to zbiotics.com/mindpump26. This is zbiotics.com/mindpump26. You can get a 15% discount. The second thing that is often overlooked is unilateral training. When you hear about unilateral training, for those who are not familiar with the term, it means training one arm or one leg at a time. Bilateral means both arms or both legs. Unilateral—this is one arm or one leg. An example of a bilateral upper body exercise would be the bench press.

Unilateral— one-arm dumbbell press , okay? When you see unilateral exercises in traditional strength programs, they are always added as something secondary. Ugh. This is not the main focus of the workout. And unilateral training is a great way to identify, isolate, and correct imbalances between the right and left sides. This is a really great, even very simple way to do corrective exercises. You don't even need to know much about corrective exercises, but doing targeted blocks of unilateral training often solves many of these problems. So, you have explosive training, unilateral training , and the third thing that gets neglected is multi- plane training.

Adam mentioned what trainers call the sagittal plane . The sagittal plane is deadlifts, squats, and generally movements in front of you. But there are also forward and backward movements. There are also lateral movements, rotations and twisting, and we do very few exercises to strengthen the body, especially in the lateral plane. Think about how many lateral movement exercises you'll encounter in traditional strength training. Very little. Rotation. Rotation in programs is usually limited to some kind of exercise on the oblique abdominal muscles. Yes. And you do it once a week.

Perhaps. Many people even skip it. And you only do a few sets. Yes. So when you lack these three things, what happens is you become very skilled at one force, but you lose the ability to move quickly. You lack balance between your right and left sides. And you can't move in different planes. And now, when you go out into the real world, okay? Think about the real world. How often do you need to exert force quickly? Well, whenever you play any game with someone, you have to be quick.

Think about when you have to exercise power unilaterally. Constantly. Constantly. One foot in front, one foot behind, or you're holding something with one hand, or whatever—constantly. Now think about all the times you're caught off guard and have to move sideways or turn around— all the time. So what happens is you create a huge gap between these things and traditional strength training, and you become physically developed but prone to injury. This is a terrible situation. Physically developed and prone to injuries. Very disappointing. If you're listening to this, you've probably felt this way when you're just confused.

What happened to me? I thought I was strong. I thought I was in good shape. How could I get injured playing a mindless game of basketball, throwing a baseball with a kid, or, you know, going for a light jog? Like , what's going on here? This is exactly what happens here . Well, that's why, if you listen to us long enough or have heard us answer calls on air, we almost always recommend —at least, I would say, once per episode— to someone... 25% of the time.

Yes, we recommend that anyone perform a symmetry or performance program within rotation at least once a year, regardless of your goal. So, I don't care if you're a powerlifter, if you're a bodybuilder, if you're an athlete, if you're just looking for aesthetics, longevity, all of that—it doesn't matter, everyone should do at least one of these programs a year to maintain that balance, because it's incredibly important for real life. And if you focus too much on one thing in terms of performance, like strength training to get really strong, or just looking great, you neglect those things, and then, again, I'm a perfect example of how you're putting yourself at even greater risk.

Then it only takes a little bit and you get injured doing something so simple that you take it for granted, thinking, " Oh my god, I've wakeboarded behind a boat a thousand times, and I had to get injured on something so small." I didn't do anything crazy. I'll add to that, Adam, you're even starting to feel it, and I'm sure the listeners can relate to it . If you are strong in the gym but lack these skills, you develop a false sense of confidence. No, that's exactly what it is.

This is a huge false sense of confidence. I mean, in terms of endurance and overall strength, because of course there's a strength component there too. If anyone has ever held onto a rope behind a boat, they know that it requires good isometric strength, and the legs need to be slightly bent, so quadriceps strength is also needed. So I'm sure of that, you know, and I look at my colleagues, my friends, who haven't done this as much. I think, "Oh, I can do that." And I've done this, as I said , a thousand times.

So, I get this false confidence in my head: “Oh, I’m strong, stronger than anyone in this group, I’ve done it a bunch of times,” so I’m overconfident . And all it took was one explosive movement that my body couldn't slow down quickly enough in a controlled manner, and—click, my pectoralis minor muscle tore. Well, yes, and I think there's another perspective on this that I'd like to mention. I often try to get this across to regular guys in the gym who just love powerlifting or bodybuilding: it's important to focus on different planes and find unique exercises that will really improve your stability when doing bilateral lifts.

It's incredible what you can achieve and how much power you can generate when your body is as stable as possible. And you will only ensure this if you provide the right stimulus that will overcome the rotational forces. This is overcoming lateral forces. This is becoming irrelevant. So now you can just brace your body and really unleash that maximum amount of force. And that's something I realized, you know, quite late, but it really led to a huge increase in my records, you Oh no. We have a friend.

I won't say too much, I won't mention his name, but we have a friend who is one of the best natural deadlifters in the world. And he suffered from repetitive strain injuries to his back, which is not uncommon when you're lifting, you know, 600-700 pounds off the ground. And he had to do some corrective exercises to solve these problems. And one of the movements he did, one of the main ones, was walking with an expander. Yes. You will see powerlifters walking around with an expander all the time.

Why do they do this? This is walking with light resistance from the tape. Yes. Because they lack lateral stability. Yes. The reason they get injured is related to lateral stability. Now, you could solve this or, I would say, prevent it altogether by training like this from the beginning. including this. That is, let me put it another way. The main thing that prevents fitness fans from achieving their goals. So, someone who is consistent, who never misses a workout . What is the main obstacle? Injuries. Injuries are terrible.

You got injured, oh, I can't train. I can't be consistent. I can't train. Rollback. That's right. And the injury happens because there is a lack of stability. There is a lack of productivity in a direction you are simply not ready for. And that's why trauma occurs. And again , I want to be very clear. Training in the style we're talking about now doesn't hurt aesthetics. If we look at the big picture, it contributes to aesthetics. You reduce the time it takes to recover from injuries, you reduce the time when "I can't go to the gym," that time disappears.

You don't...It doesn't hurt your current workouts . It adds to them, improves them. Improves them. Yes. your current workouts. So, even if your goal is aesthetics, don't neglect it. Now, if your goal is to improve your athletic performance and be as strong in the real world as you are in the gym, you should definitely pay attention to this . 100%, 100%. So, here's the first one. First, complete a full cycle of unilateral training. I don't just add one exercise to one side at the end of a leg or back workout, or insert it somewhere else.

No, no. Make it a priority. Make this a priority for week eight. This is how I train for eight weeks. And if most people did this every year, like you said, Adam, regardless of goal, if you trained one side for 6–8 weeks every year, you would see a significant reduction in injuries and improved results in the gym. Very, very few people, including me, until we wrote about it. Because in the past it seemed like it only appeared intermittently in my program. And exercise. It wasn't until we developed the symmetry program that I started devoting this much time to it.

And the benefits of dedicating a full phase or two exclusively to training one side... Yeah, so you really focus on that. Oh, these are huge benefits. And we see results, I mean, we see results in clients who do DEXA scans before starting the program. It's incredible what we saw. They build more muscle because when you identify symmetrical imbalances in your body and train them, your body actually tries to balance them out faster, definitely faster than if you hadn't identified them. And when your body tries to correct or strengthen the imbalance, you build muscle.

So what we see on DEXA scans: people write, they are fitness fanatics, so they already have good muscles and strength. So these are not beginners, okay? These are people who have been training for a long time. They go through a full MAPS Symmetry cycle, where most of the program is pure one- sided training. And what's cool about DEXA scans is that they show the lean muscle mass of your right and left arms, your right and left legs. And they gain 1.5–2 kg of muscle, which is a lot for an experienced person in 2 months.

But they recruit them exactly where they are needed. So, they gained half a kilogram in their right arm, half a kilogram in their left leg, or something like that. So yes, you build muscle as a result. Next is training in different planes of motion. Are you strengthening your body in the lateral plane ? Do you strengthen your body with rotational movements? If not, be sure to include this in your regular program, because if you don't, it can turn into big problems. Personal... This is, again, a personal story.

Um, I started practicing jiu- jitsu again relatively recently. I haven't done this in almost 20 years. And my left hip just hurt all the time. It just hurt, I was stretching it and it hurt, and you know, I'm a person who does squats, deadlifts and Romanian deadlifts. I do all of this. But I knew it was about lateral stability. I knew this because every time I tried to do a lateral stability exercise, I could see a difference between the right and left sides. And I saw in general that I wasn't very good at working sideways, period.

All I did, and now do on a regular basis, is side sled drags. Nothing crazy, nothing difficult. I just walk sideways across the lawn , pulling the sled back and forth. By the third week, the hip pain was almost completely gone. Mhm. This is just amazing. It was just one thing that almost completely eliminated the pain. You just need to familiarize the body with these movement patterns, and, you know, when the body is not familiar with certain positions, and doesn't know where these forces are coming from, how to respond to them appropriately , it will overreact.

And often, you know, that's when you get a lot of cramps and knots, and, you know, your body is just trying to keep you from going over that limit and, you know, getting injured. Therefore, by gradually introducing these movements and accustoming your body to them, you will become stronger in these movements. Then you can start loading those movements and, you know, watch what happens to your overall muscular development. Well, it's especially acute for someone like you, who can deadlift 500-600 pounds, you know? Because when you think about this lateral force, relative to what a deadlift looks like , this lateral force is keeping the weight from shifting to the left.

These muscles, yes, are responsible for holding everything up well enough for that. Yes, isn't it? So when you're only lifting 100 or 200 pounds in a deadlift, it doesn't take as much strength to stabilize, especially if you have really good technique . When you do four hundred or five hundred, the slightest shift to the left or right wakes up those muscles that are dormant and not getting the attention they need because you're not training them, and that's where all this pain comes from. And this is just an example with the hips and deadlift, because every joint is surrounded by these accessory muscles, and we don't usually move sideways or in a circle.

Um, and so it's important that you take that into account. If you do this, you will see that a lot of the chronic pain that most middle- aged people experience is simply weakness. That's right. I recently made a video about this , regarding lower back pain. And, of course, this sparked criticism on Instagram, as if I was diagnosing Internet users. I replied, "No, I don't diagnose online, it's just that in my experience working with hundreds of people who have chronic low back pain and haven't had an acute injury, it's almost always been related to weakness." Weakness and instability elsewhere, most often in the hips.

The thighs and buttocks were weak. They were weak and unstable, and working those areas through lateral and rotational movements helped, and voila— suddenly the lower back pain was gone, the hip pain was gone. They were weak, and often, especially when it's someone who lifts weights regularly or semi-regularly and deals with chronic pain, that pain indicates weakness and instability somewhere in the body. Typically, weakness and instability are associated with a lack of rotational and lateral movements. Next is the practice of quick movements. So you should add to your training regimen a workout where you learn to move fast.

Now, there's a big difference between people here, and what works for one person might not work for another, you know? If you're not doing it now and want to start, say, for your lower body, the easiest way is to jump in place, try to jump as high as you can. Okay, that would be one option. A more advanced level is jumping onto a box or jumping off a high box with cushioning on the landing, right? Or jumping with some kind of turn, right? But, actually, the goal here is to learn to move quickly.

But here's what happens when you don't. The truth is that if you stop practicing fast movements, you lose this ability. Yes. You can be a fit, muscular, strong person and not be able to jump well at all. Or you can be a fit, strong person, jump off something and get injured because you just don't have the skill. Your body literally gets rid of what you don't exercise. I once thought that explosive or speed training was only for athletes. But as a coach, I quickly realized, particularly after talking to great experts like Joe DeFranco, that "no, no, if you stop practicing, it goes away." "And now you have to jump off the curb for some reason and get injured." And I'm like, "Oh my God, you're 100% right." These things happen all the time in real life, you know?

You come across a slippery surface and must react instantly, gather yourself, and stabilize yourself. And to a large extent, it is not only the ability to accelerate, but also the ability to brake in time . I believe this is a skill that everyone needs and should use. This just happened to me yesterday. I was in my flip-flops in the backyard, and I have an ice maker that leaks water when the ice melts, and I stepped on the tile on my way to the grill, and I can't even tell you how many times that's happened to me.

Now I kind of know it's there, but I still forget, and I have to catch my balance. Yes. And it occurred to me, "Dude, what age will I be when this becomes a real downfall?" With your back, dude. Yes, right? This can lead to serious back injury. This is a great reminder to keep yourself in shape, because that's exactly what happens. Absolutely. The old saying goes: " Use it or lose it." That's where it comes from. By the way, I don't know if you guys have seen this before.

I'm sure you've seen it too. When you see an elderly person start to stumble—it's just a small stumble that turns into a fall. It's like they can't keep their balance, and boom. Or it looks like slow motion. Have you seen this before ? When you see someone fall and it looks like it's in slow motion. And all because their bodies stopped moving quickly. But here are the mistakes people make. When people try to train for speed in the gym, they often turn it into a way to tire themselves out.

Okay, they're turning it into endurance training. This is an endurance goal. But that's not what we're talking about. So I'm not talking about jumping on the spot until you're exhausted, right? The idea is to practice jumping quickly. Practice lifting or throwing something quickly. You should not allow fatigue to occur during this. If you allow fatigue to set in , you are no longer training the speed strength or power we are talking about. Now you're just training endurance. Therefore, the approach should feel relatively easy. The only thing that should be difficult is focusing on the movement itself and trying to perform it as quickly as possible.

Everything else feels like: "it's that simple." I do n't even feel like I'm exercising. That's the idea. And the last thing. Never stop playing. Never stop. One of the easiest ways to maintain functional strength in real life, in parallel with training in the gym, is to play occasionally, but regularly. Play basketball. Playing, you know, running, hiking, swimming, playing baseball. Because if you do it for your whole life, sports are just phenomenal. This is a great way to maintain that same functional strength we're talking about. Problems usually arise when we play games and sports as children.

And then we stop around the age of 20 or something. We become fans of the hall. But when we turn 40, we say, "Oh, cool." " I think I'll go play something over there." And your body no longer moves the way it used to. So just keep playing. Go outside, play, don't overexert yourself, but do it consistently. This is a great way to support what we are talking about . I mean, that's my biggest regret , because if you'd just kept playing... You'd be fine. This covers most of what we talked about.

In any game and sport, there are so many unilateral, rotational, and lateral movements. Every sport requires some of their presence. Yes, some adaptation to all these movements. You may not progress or strengthen them at a high level, but it's enough to keep them at a decent level. Exactly what you said: we make the mistake of taking a long break and then trying to come back, thinking "it's because of the sport I've been doing my whole life." And you're just not trained properly for it. Listen, if you're listening right now and thinking, "Okay, I'm interested in this." What does it look like?

What are these exercises? How do I do them? Sets, repetitions, all that? Here's what we have. We have two programs that are ideal for this . These are Mass Performance and Maps Symmetry. Performance will give you multi-plane movements. It will provide explosive movements and strength . Maps Symmetry are one-sided workouts. When you combine them, you will see a significant improvement in functional strength and the ability to perform in real life, and you will look better too. These are both great programs for body aesthetics. You can get both for the price of one.

There is a "buy one, get one free" promotion going on now. By the way , this applies to all 10 of our Maps apps. Buy one, get the second one as a gift. Go to mapsbogo.com. You can also find us on Instagram. This is mindpumpmedia. See you there. Ugh!

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