 First question is from Tyler Hagan fit is progressive overload as important for hypertrophy or is stressing the muscle as hard as you can each workout sufficient. All right. So before I answer this, uh, let's, let's talk about what progressive overload means for the listeners who might not be familiar with that term. Essentially what that means is adding more weight or adding more exercises or more reps gradually essentially doing more. As you progress in your workout. So is that important for in hypertrophy means building muscle? Is it important that you eventually progress to where you could do more exercises, more reps or lift more weight, um, in order to build muscle? Yes, it's very important. That being said, don't take that to being the only thing you need to do to build muscle, because I've had many occasions with clients where I reduced their volume of working out. I've reduced the amount of reps or exercises and then they built muscle. So progressive overload is an important thing to, uh, to, to factor in, but it can be overdone. And when it's overdone, it actually results in reduced or less, uh, progress. Now I want to, I want to challenge that a little bit, not because I disagree, but I think that that's less often the case. Um, more people, I think, don't progressively overload consistently enough to see progress week over week, month over month, year over year, uh, correctly, or, uh, consistently in order to reap the benefits. It's more rare to get the case that you're talking about, which does happen, uh, where, and that's, that typically falls in the same category as the people that we talk about that abused the protein that are the hardcore people that never take days off the fitness fanatics. So if you're listening and you're part of the fitness community, I agree with what you're saying. And I, and I do think that the, those people I have, I too have seen that and myself reap the benefits of going from training six, seven days a week, reducing the volume tremendously. And I saw huge benefits from it, but I think that the average person, and I, and I like to talk about, uh, progressive overload or volume in general to clients. Like, so the way I kind of talk about, uh, progressive overload is in relation to how I talk about, uh, volume in general to, to clients. Now, what I have found from being the guy who tracks all the time for a long time is that we have this tendency to, uh, always kind of find homeostasis and even with our, like our training. So like, we'll have like this great week or two or even three weeks in a row of like consistently training a little harder and kind of pushing the weight up. And then we have a rough week where busy something happens and you still get to the gym and you think you're doing well. But what you didn't realize was just that little bit of being off that week, you, you, you stopped a set early, you, you didn't quite lift as much weight and the volume kind of comes back down. And a lot of times this is the cause of people's plateaus and me teaching somebody to track their volume and actually pay attention, which is sets times reps times weight gives you total volume and then tell them like, listen, your goal week over week, when we're training is to make sure you at least hit your total volume for that workout compared to the one the week before, or slightly increase that just to let, and it doesn't take much, just that little bit of increase week over week. This is what I had to do when I was competing, because when I was competing, everything was on, on the clock. Uh, there was, I can't have a week of setback. I've got to be making progress. If I'm going to make my way up the amateur ladder and into the pros, I've got to be progressing and improving all the time. And so there was not room for taking 10 steps back or getting lazy for a week or two or falling off consistency. So I was diligently tracking and volume was one of the, the number one things that guided me through my progress during that journey. And that's what I found was this natural inconsistency that most people fall into. Well, there's something I want to add to that two things. One, uh, one of the problems with understanding this is people think that progressive overload is consistent and linear. It's not, uh, if you track your progress, you don't progress every single week. Your body doesn't do that. Just doesn't work that way. No, but you can, you can progressively overload without just strength, right? So it's not, you can, but it's, there are going to be weeks where whatever reason lack of sleep, uh, you've pushed your body hard the previous week and not only that, but the formula that you're talking about, which is a common formula that we use and it has value, well, sets times reps times weight, there's a, there's a fault with it in the sense that lightweight high reps disproportionately calculates volume over a heavy weight and low reps. So in other words, in order to equate the volume of 10 sets of squats at a hundred pounds with 10 reps, or let's just forget the sets for a second. Let's say they're equal 10 reps at a hundred pounds. That means you have to squat a thousand pounds once. Now that doesn't, that doesn't equate doesn't work that way. So when you're cycling your reps, as we recommend, sometimes it looks like you're doing less volume, but that's not because you're doing less volume. It's because the formula isn't perfect. So if you like, if you do again, if I, if I take somebody could use 10 reps with a hundred pounds on a squat and I put 200 pounds on the bar, they might be able to only do four reps. The volume looks like it went way down, but the intensity is part of the fact that part of the formula that doesn't often get factored in. And when you go heavy, it looks like you're doing way less volume, but it does place a pretty high demand and stress. Well, I think, I think that's again, why I, I think it is, it's not flawless, nothing is right. And then there's such an individual variance in everybody and anything we talk about, right? There's too many things that are, that are, you have to take into consideration, but following something like this and then understanding the benefits like you're saying of intensity, you know, if I'm tracking volume and I'm just my goal is to add a little, and I'm talking little start small, which is why maps and a bulk is where we push everyone to start, which is a two to three day a week type of a program, which gives me lots of room to scale, scale up and progressively overload with other days and longer workouts, whatever in the future. So I think that you slowly overloading volume by adding a tiny bit week over week and then manipulating intensity based off of the points that you're making right now. So if I had a really rough rest, I didn't, I didn't sleep very well that day, but I'm consistent with my training and I'm competing so I don't, I'm not missing very much at all. So that's the day where I'm going to hit my volume target, but I'm going to back off the intensity. I'm not going to do the single rep for a thousand pounds. I'm going to do lightweight, get a pump, get the volume up there. So I keep my volume, I keep my body used to training that much so that we, so atrophy doesn't set in at all or start to set in. So I want to keep the volume up there, but I back off the intensity because I know that my body is stressed today or I didn't get adequate rest or my nutrition isn't where it's supposed to be. And then the next day when I'm feeling great or two, three days later of good consistent sleep and good food, now when I go back and I hit that leg day again this time, now the intensity goes up. That's why I think this is a good concept and principle to understand, but I don't think it's a good idea to take it to heart because there's a lot of other factors that can determine whether or not you're going to build muscle or not. And if you take this to heart, it's not going to always lead you in the right direction, but it's something that you can get you hurt. It can get you hurt. If all you're concerned about is progressively overloading, adding weight, adding weight, adding weight. Or over train. And exactly. And you're not paying attention to your stress, your sleep, your nutrition, then you absolutely, this could head down a bad path, right? Well, this has always been the criticism I've had of a lot of these apps that track that progress and that gets you so fixated on exactly the numbers moving forward or not. And so there are so many other variables that interrupt that process that you have to account for, but it is a good baseline, I think. I think it's something that I want to achieve this and to be able to then keep perpetuating forward. This is a measure I can look into. It reminds me of how I feel about tracking nutrition. I mean, the goal is not to, it's not like something you should do for the rest of your life. But when I think about some foundational principles that I think everybody should go through, if you really want to learn about building muscle, tracking volume and understanding progressive overload is by far one of the core principles, in my opinion. Does that mean that you should live and die by that principle? Absolutely not. There's too many other variables that come into play that I agree with you guys. But when I think of some of the most pivotable things in my fitness journey personally and with clients, when I taught this principle and they understood it, it really opened up their eyes to why probably they were stuck in a lot of plateaus because, like I said, people that aren't tracking, aren't paying attention to it. It's really amazing how your body just kind of naturally goes to this place where you feel comfortable. You might have one or two days where you really stretch yourself volume-wise and maybe intensity-wise and then you kind of naturally back off. And then when you pull back and you look at the entire month, you go, oh shit, I pretty much average the same every single week. The job is to make things more efficient. It's one of the tools. And again, you can actually reduce your volume, reduce the weight, reduce the sets, and then all of a sudden see your body progress. So it's not a rule. It's just something to look at and consider. And of course at the end of the day, the answer that we always say is it depends. It depends. On a lot of different things. But I want to point out to the last part of this, which is or stressing the muscle as hard as you can in each workout sufficient. That's a terrible idea. Totally. So we didn't really address that. We were going to, you know, debating back and forth on the importance. No, the progress can be, can be incremental. It can be tiny. You know, let's if I did 10 reps last week with a weight for bench press. In fact, I recommend it to be incremental. If I did 10 reps last week and then this week I did 11 reps, I'm probably better off just doing one extra rep than pushing to see if I could do another two or three reps. The more incremental I make my progress, the more consistent my progress will be week over week. This is just something I've noticed for myself. If I'm stronger today than I was last week, rather than pushing to see how much stronger I am, I'm just going to be a five pounds or a rep. And then next week we'll see what happens. And what I found when I have that approach is that I progress for longer and more consistently and I end up having greater overall progress versus pushing the limit and saying just how far I can go every single time I work out is a great way to hit a plateau. Yeah, I think you I think we should spend most of our time optimizing and then every once in a while you're stretching yourself outside of that. And so doing it every single workout is an awful idea. I just that is not it's not only not as a beginner mistake. It is a big mistake. It's a big and it's and it's part of the culture that I don't like, you know, that this the beast mode all out training to failure, having a partner squat or spot you. Come on push one more, one more, you got one more. Do it training like that. Every workout is stupid. It's it's and the only people that get like truly get away with it or the people that are hopped up on all kinds of antibiotics. And so they get away with it and it's even for them. It's not the most optimal way they would do better if they didn't do it right.