 But if you find that particular body parts are not progressing while others are, then you can try cutting the routine in half and seeing if they respond to that. Again, it sounds like very little exercise, but you don't want it. It's better to get a little bit more recovery or better to do a little bit less exercise than your body can tolerate than to do too much, too often, in which case rather than having a little bit slower progress, you'll short cut it completely. Could you talk a little bit about breathing and set? About what? Breathing technique? Breathing. Actually, the best breathing technique is none. Most people try to set a pattern to the breathing, exhaling while lifting, lifting, inhaling while lowering, but it's best to just breathe as relaxed as naturally as possible during the exercise. If you start to time your breathing with the movement, one, it tends to cause people to perform what's called a vulcellus maneuver or to attempt to exhale. They're tightening up, but closing their glottis, so it increases the pressure in the thorax and abdomen, and that pressure can cause an increase in blood pressure that in some people can lead to what's called an exercise-induced headache. Two, three times as bad as a migraine, they can last from a couple days to a couple weeks. They definitely don't want to get one of those. Also, if you're moving at a controlled pace, suppose, just for the sake of example, taking about three to four seconds in both directions, doing a chest press or a pulling movement, if you're training hard enough, it's going to actually be difficult to slow your breathing down to the point where you're keeping track with that. If you're really, really pushing your muscles, the cardiovascular system is going to be working extremely hard to keep up with that demand, and you're going to end up breathing pretty heavily. So the best thing is just breathe as relaxed as naturally as possible, better to breathe through the mouth so that you're able to get in and out as much air as you can. And some people find actually helps if they almost try to over-breathe. I have a question. I heard you talking about direct work earlier, I think, to the calves. I was in and out of the room. Do you have any comments on direct work to the lower back, like with machines, if you have access to them, or like Doug showed in a video, I'm pretty sure you saw it, maybe two months ago, where he was able to do lower back work directly pretty close without machines? You know what I'm talking about? I haven't seen it, but it depends on the equipment. If you're doing a barbell squat, or even if you're doing barbell rows, you're going to get a good amount of back work there. If you work up to where you're lifting a very, very heavy weight in either squats or doing a barbell row, you're going to get about as much back work as you need from that. If you are using a leg press, it's more effective for the legs because, like Doug mentioned earlier, with the skill aspect of things. The more you can focus on the muscles that are working and the less on the skill of performing the exercise, the more you're going to get out of it. With a leg press in particular, as opposed to a squat, the resistance is directly applied through the hips. Either you're pushing a seat back or you're pushing a pedal away from the seat. The low back is not an issue. Balancing a weight isn't an issue. You can focus entirely on the pushing movement with the legs. If you've got a good leg press, it's actually a better option than a squat, as far as hip and thigh development. I believe Bill's going to talk a bit more about the specifics of that tomorrow, so I won't go too much into mechanics of the squat and leg press. If you're doing the leg press and if you're doing a machine row where your chest is supported and you don't need the low back muscles, then an isolated back movement might be beneficial if it's really an isolated back movement. The reason I say that is because a lot of machines that are labeled low back machines are not back machines so much as hip extension machines. If you have access to a nautilus low back machine, access to a med-ex low back machine, both of those are excellent. Otherwise, you're working your glutes and hamstrings more than the low back in those other exercises. Now, if you're doing a pull-down exercise and if you're doing it correctly to where you're leaning back slightly, your low back is going to be involved in that too. So even if you're using machines, it's really actually very difficult to do any exercise without the trunk muscles being involved. The idea that there's actually any such thing as isolation and exercise is somewhat incorrect. There's no such thing as a pure isolation exercise. Any time you're doing an exercise, you have two things that you're doing. You're producing the desired exercise movement and your body is working to prevent all of the undesired movements that would either take you out of proper positioning or alignment. For example, if you're doing a barbell curl, the entire time you're doing the curl, you're focusing on your biceps. Everybody would say that a curl is a bicep movement, but if your glutes, your hamstrings were not contracting, your calves and your low back, your entire body would just flop forward. To be able to perform a barbell curl, you have to work every muscle from the back of your heel up to the back of your neck to maintain proper position. And you're also working muscles in the shoulders, chest and everything to maintain proper bar position. Your chest and your shoulders are working when you're doing a barbell curl. As you approach the mid-range of the exercise, your biceps are holding the weight with your elbows at a 90-degree angle. Your chest and shoulder muscles are preventing that weight from wanting to push them back. So something like a bicep curl, an exercise that most people think only works just that little amount of muscle in the upper arms, is involving a large amount of the body. It's just that you don't think about it because that's not the part that's moving and you kind of automatically do everything else while you're focusing on that. So a lot of the, you know, wondering, should I do this exercise for this muscle, this exercise for this muscle? If you first look at how much they're involved in just those couple of movements that Doug mentioned earlier, I mean it really, really hits all the major stuff there. Again, the only, the only stuff that might really benefit from supplemental work is the neck. If you've got access to a good machine or somebody who really knows what they're doing, grip and, you know, if you're doing any kind of grappling, if you're doing, you know, football, some things like that, racket sports, grip, some grip work tends to help. But other than that, everything else pretty much is being hit by just those couple movements. Is this loud? I can hear you a little bit. I have a few questions. I'm actually training for like competition powerlifting and a lot of people I know who have actually gotten really good like state records and not state champions. They train like at a minimum of five days a week, but they separate their workouts to like upper body or lower body and things like that. I'm wondering like, do you have any differences or advice on powerlifting because it's not a lot of reps. You're just trying to get your one rep maximum a lot higher. With a power lifting, there's additionally the specific skill of performing the exercises that you're being tested on. There is actually a guy, his name is a Doug Holland, who does same type of training that Doug does in his studio, same type of training I use with my clients. He's out of Shreveport, Louisiana. He's, I think, in his either earlier or mid fifties now. He is a regional power lifting champion and does this exact same type of training. He pretty much, as far as the big lifts, he'll do a workout like this once a week and then once a week he'll do one workout where he focuses on one of those big lifts, but not very much. The main thing if you're doing a sport, like now again powerlifting or if you're doing Olympic lifting, is that you have to look at the specific practice of the movements as a workout in itself as well as a practice session. You would, wouldn't need to do a lot of volume from an exercise standpoint, but you would have to make sure that you practice those specific movements on a regular basis. If you were to do, you know, all bench in one workout, you might take a workout again, it's for powerlifting competition specifically, where you just focused on doing heavy triples or doubles, very occasionally singles, but that would be a workout in itself bench. You do a regular workout. Later on, you do a workout just focused on the deadlift. Again, with a relationship between intensity and volume, when you're doing very, very heavy work and very, very low reps like that, just doing that one exercise for a couple very low rep sets, that could be a workout in itself if you're really, really pushing. And also I should mention a lot of people when they think of volume, they think of in terms of sets and reps and everything, but it actually comes down to the total volume of physical work performed. For example, if you did a set of 12 repetitions or if you did two sets of six repetitions, four sets of three repetitions, three sets of four repetitions or whatsoever, you're doing roughly the same amount of physical work. So doing a powerlifting workout, you could take the bench and you could do a bunch of sets of doubles or triples, and that would still be okay even though you're doing a bunch of sets, the total volume of work is low, and even if you were to combine the benching with a squat, although I wouldn't do bench and squat and deadlift in the same workout. Possibly, and again, this is from somebody who doesn't powerlift, a full body workout alternated with either a squatting and benching workout or with a deadlift workout. Again, the principle is the intensity needs to be high, but you have to balance that against the volume, and you have to balance the total work between a full body workout and the specific powerlifting workouts so that you're not doing them too frequently to where you're over-training. One last question. Do you have any advice on supplements because I've heard a lot of conflicting things on what supplements to take? Most of them are a complete waste of money. If a person is eating properly to begin with, a lot of the supplements aren't going to make much of a difference. For example, there's something really basic like a multivitamin. If you're getting adequate amounts of vegetables and fruits, eating a lot of meat, you're probably getting everything that you need right there. Creatine monohydrate is one that is kind of iffy with people. I think if a person's eating enough meat to begin with, they probably won't benefit much from the creatine. That's also one that, depending on the person, some people get some gastrointestinal distress from it. That's one that you have to be careful with. Fish oil is probably one of the only things that I really would recommend that people take. Other than that, I'm not a big fan of supplements. I think most of them are over-hyped, over-priced, and really don't make nearly as much of a difference as just eating and training properly well. Quick question. What do you recommend for your range, for your time under tension, before you move up on weight? Varies completely between individuals, and rather than focus specifically on the time or the