 Hey guys, welcome back. Up next we have Skyler Tanner. He is one of the top high intensity trainers in the country currently. He is also the youngest super slow certified personal trainer in history and he's currently one of the general managers at Efficient Exercise in Austin, Texas. His speech today will be called Great Expectations Training Over a Lifetime and here he is. Thanks a bunch. Now normally if y'all have been sitting here for an incredibly long time I would have pulled the priest and asked y'all to sit up shake hands with your neighbor talk to someone stretch your legs out but y'all just came in so we'll get right over that to the good stuff. I'm going to start off with a story. Anthony as you know or maybe if you follow his blog last summer he was couch surfing across America and he came through Austin and he had a couple workouts one with myself and one with Keith our genetic freak whom y'all will listen to later on over the course of this weekend and he came through for a couple workouts and Austin in the summer is like Orlando super humid plus about 10 degrees and he goes through a workout and having met Anthony he always kind of has a look of kind of staring off slightly squinty eyes a little bit on his face and so imagine after a workout in which he effectively got sucker punched metabolically he's really looking like this he's going I'm going to walk to Whole Foods from your studio no no no that's like seven miles in the heat there's no shade there's no sidewalks in my in the town in which I train that rooms for big trucks we're in Texas so I put him in my car and we go to Whole Foods now in Austin you go to Whole Foods because it's 88,000 square feet of grocery store it would be like if you cared so much about Publix to take people there for events for wine tastings for cheese tastings 88,000 feet of all sorts of wonderful things hippie girls possibly wearing bras or maybe not in the salad section it's sleeve tattoos of all sorts crazy hair that makes Fuji's look tame um and you have to you park in a parking garage you go up three flights of escalator so we're going towards the grilled meats area and Anthony's kind of walk in and we're talking about something and he goes stops full stop and he goes wait are you libertarian and I'm like I'm taking it back and going we're just talking about fitness women Austin yeah yeah yeah okay and he went boom right back into what he was talking about before to get his whole chicken that's what he was really there for that he's going to eat with his bare hand so that that's the first time I ever met Anthony and here we are a year later at this event so he asked me to speak after I did a blog post that I called the six-year itch was it all a waste I'm a personal trainer and as introduced I've been a personal trainer since I was 16 years old that's the first time I took money for training I was certified a year later as the super the youngest super slow instructor in the known universe at the time as my old boss used to say and I've been doing it ever since something I kind of fell into and now I'm working on a on a master's degree in exercise science maybe I'll go get a PhD I don't know if that's just for my ego calling myself doctor I really don't know I'm just being honest there but the point is I really like the stuff and so I've tried everything and you're seeing me here I'm tall I'm lanky I'm not muscular what am I going to tell you all about proper exercise I think I got a few things to tell you about but mostly I'm going to be a buzzkill I'm going to tell you that there are limits and I'm going to ask you to explore personally what you are going to do when you reach them the blog post I wrote was sort of a long-form version of that what have I done over the course of my training career I've done super slow I've done high hypertrophy specific to training I've done conjugate periodization I've done wave loading techniques I've done pendulase hormonal manipulation technique in which you bring yourself to the verge of breaking you back off and you hope your testosterone ends up a little higher than when you started I've done in German volume training I've done super brief heavy-duty training everything in between and at my heaviest I was much fatter and I was 220 I was bull strong I could pull 455 on a deadlift for five repetitions and I felt awful it was just too heavy for my body and so now as I stand here I'm about 180 pounds and so the question is if you're my goal was to get supremely muscular super hero muscular I grew up drawing superheroes that was my shtick comics and superheroes and I could never achieve that well hell what the hell are you supposed to do after that if if if you can't quite get to your goal if all the puritanical work ethic in the world isn't going to get you there what the hell else are you supposed to do that was kind of an exploration of that and as it turns out as it turns out there are limits and there's some good science behind those limits that play out again and again and again no matter how intense and advanced our training techniques become these limits are structural they're biological and that's the extent of what I'm going to talk about first in this talk hmm and so in going through every one of those routines you very quickly learn that the people who are genetically gifted to gain muscle mass don't ask how to gain muscle mass in other words if you were naturally talented at something you are not on the internet trying to find out more and more about how to accentuate that talent um these are the guys who get to the college level playing football or crew they have a talent for it they keep doing what they're coached to do and they keep advancing they never reach a wall well there is a wall as far as muscular development is concerned in weight which is to say gravity imposes a certain amount of weight on all of us right of course so one pound of my muscle weighs as much as one pound of your muscle and so two people of average height at roughly the same weight will roughly have the same arm measurement assuming roughly similar body fat percentage we call this the fat free mass index and scientists determined that it's like a more advanced version of the body mass index everybody's heard about that right bmi bmi bmi the problem with bmi is it's just height to weight plus some funny math and if you're 230 pound bodybuilder you're as obese as someone who is 35 percent body fat and on the verge of a heart attack so fat free mass index meant to spread that out a little bit and separate the two and the number the maximum number that they came up with was 25 it's lean mass and kilograms divided by height in centimeters squared you don't really get over that number only the people with the largest structures get there okay and that's the next step is that what determines how big you can possibly be your bones your bones we everybody's heard about big bone or small bone and some people use big bone as an excuse for their gluttonous ways and the fact that they really like the big cake but there's some truth to this and we want to talk about structure you build a building a large building you need a sufficiently sized foundation our foundations are our bones and they're set at birth we can make them stronger we can make them denser but a man who has smaller bones say seven and three quarter inch wrist at a certain height compared to someone of the same height with eight inch wrists will have greater muscular potential across the board and in fact that person with an eight inch wrist on train will likely be larger than the person with the six and three quarter inch wrist as far as bicep is concerned right because that's what we care about for men biceps chest abs I'm being I'm joking here of course but if you go to a college gym boy biceps bench press Monday Wednesday Friday and maybe it may be an extra session on Saturday if you've got a date so that's but that's that's the way it is you have limits and that's one of the limits and so the guy who came up with this actually is not a bodybuilder who sort of put all these equations together his name is Casey but and he is a phd in artificial intelligence right which is pretty cool and so he has no nothing to gain or lose from doing all these maths and figuring this out and he comes up with these equations and this is not I don't get any money from this but he's wrote a booklet on it you can go and get these equations and very quickly punch in your numbers and figure out that if you train really really really hard what you can get to on a muscular level and then it becomes a problem because you're sure that that's lying to you that if your goal is to be a big strong muscular athlete or just have big muscles uh and that's not going to be satisfying to you knowing that there's a limit and not only knowing that there's a limit but having a having a nicely defined ceiling who starts a job or a business as an entrepreneur with the intent of going I only want this business to make $150,000 a year I want that to be all incapable of no you set out with these really really super high goals hopes aspirations and the great thing about capitalism and about businesses is that you can make changes that change your ceiling you can make changes on the fly that improve what you do in biology physiology doesn't allow for that unfortunately so this is a hard pill to swallow it's a bitter pill to swallow and I saw Patrick just walked in I've never met you Patrick but I might as well have did we meet at the conference five years ago I'm sorry I don't remember it you might not remember me I had long hair again I made I made Fuji's hair look normal it was like long and frizzy and kind of out to here and I was about 50 pounds heavier this is when I was dead lifting a car um and eating a whole pizza and one sitting uh nothing that I recommend anyone does um but Patrick and I are kind of of that lighter boned sort of naturally lean I walk around no problem in all 10 body fat or less year round it's just is not a problem I don't ask how to get lean I'm just like the bodybuilder who doesn't ask how to get bigger anyway so there's the fat free mass and only the tallest individuals tend to move beyond these numbers anyone familiar with world strongest man competition sure they're on some sort of beautiful Mediterranean island getting great tans and they happen to be lifting heavy things pulling heavy things tearing muscles um Bill Kazmire is frequently a host of this and he has a neck that is unbelievably large and you'll find some some genetic freaks out there one in a million genetic freaks the same way a man with a 200 IQ is a freak the same way a man who is seven feet tall is a freak um these guys are freaks and Bill's neck is one of those sorts of things and you know it when you have it and if you have to it it's like the meal if you have to ask how much it costs you can't afford it if you have to ask how he got it you can't have it right okay so however most people are not trained enough to be anywhere near that genetic potential and if you want to know how to train well Drew will be happy to talk your ear off next year or you can go online and watch him go on and on or you can listen to McGuff talk last year all fantastic presentations that's beyond the scope of my presentation today um but the point is is that knowing that there's a genetic limit is no excuse for not working hard this is the argument against the term hard gainer there since the mid 80s there's been a term well probably since the early 50s reg park was the original publisher of iron man magazine and he possibly invented the term um and what it meant is that lighter-boned individuals who don't gain muscle as quickly as someone who's genetically elite okay so that's everybody else so this is the normal people and how fast you're capable of gaining with hard work the majority which is to say don't hold yourself up against an nfl linebacker who has 15 years of conditioning weight work and a good genetic hand as to what you can be physically because their bodies break down in 30 years because of all that abuse you have to set yourself to a different standard but in your 20s you've got great hormones your testosterone is through the roof all sorts of growth factors are spiked and right now is the time where you're going to put on if you want to work out you're going to set the table for the rest of your life as far as how you're going to be physically you all have heard the term muscle memory right sure everybody has it used to have no basis in science but more recently they figured out that there's there's a code kind of like kanami up up down down left right left right ba start it's a it's a gene code that that encodes in the muscles it sort of says here is the ceiling you were previously at and this ties in kind of uniquely the body fat set point theory as well if you previously when you were younger hung out in a certain area of of lean body mass resting heart rate body fat and you veer away from that for a period of time it's much easier to get back there so that's why the talk is training over a lifetime and what I want to impress upon you early on is that right now regardless of what your genetic potential is is the time that you can make the most change and set yourself up for health well-being strength for the rest of your life but most people in their most guys in their 20s don't train with that intent and what you're learning here and what I'm going to tell you is kind of adjunct to what all of these gentlemen are talking to you about about finding confidence when approaching women and that it's not about your hangups and it's not about what you think about yourself the negatives you think about yourself because it's a client of mine said the other day I just put him through a workout and they're all really excited about this talk and he leaves and he sticks his head back and he goes remind yourself that they all wipe their asses just like you which is to say everybody has a thing even the woman you're approaching which I'm sure you've heard a million times and the same thing goes here with with training you shouldn't I'm not going to say you shouldn't train with the intent of being muscular and healthy to approach women but they decided long before they ever saw your ripped abs if they were going to sleep with you when I was most successful dating I'm married now I have three dogs in a house I I was not in my best shape I was I was tubby I didn't have a good haircut but I didn't care to when approaching women it was about I felt good about myself I felt good about my accomplishments in that point in my life and I had a good social circle and so if I didn't get their phone number I was never going to see them again right it had nothing to do with the fact that my exterior internal bleak or my internal external bleak start looking extra sharp today my lats are popping boy I'm going to pick up this phone number you'll get married someday and your wife will complain that you're too hard and that you should put some body fat on so that you suffice so that you are a nice surrogate self-warmed pillow for her in the evening right this is true this is true and Rick Fox he was a NFL player married to Vanessa Williams who because of her pictures in playboy she lost her Miss America crown and also appeared in that wonderful film with Arnold Schwarzenegger called a race and she and and so Rick was complaining that she was complaining that he was too ripped and here's a professional athlete you tend to think you tend to associate these pretty people with coming together but at the end of the day they're still human and this tends to be what ends up happening it's more than just the body so if you're just training to pick up women you've lost the plot and you won't sustain it okay you'll train five days a week you'll get to where you want to be in the short term and then you pick up the woman and then what you do okay so then hopefully you get some perspective and you find out that there's a middle way you find out that you can train two or three days a week you don't need more than 90 minutes and then eventually you find out you don't even need that much if you're doing it right but then you start to get lingering creeping doubt and you start to think I should be gaining muscle faster because when I first started training I gained muscle really really quickly well there's a reason for that too when you are a novice you are super sensitive this is no different to learning curve than in any activity you do the closer you get to your limit the slower the rate of gains and in my experience and in the experience of exercise physiologists like Lyle McDonald and Alan Aragon people who train a lot of clients and have seen a lot of people going your first year if you do everything right if you've never trained before in your life never done sport never done weightlifting never done anything you can put on somewhere between a pound and a half to two pounds a month of dry muscle tissue now understand that when you're gaining this weight not all of it is going to be muscle you'll see the scale weight go up three four five pounds you're thinking hell yeah I'm getting cock strong now some of that's water some of that is glycogen human starch it's our form of sugar stored in the muscle tissues for use on site to power these muscle contractions when you start training muscles they want more of that because they need to have that fuel on site to meet the demands that you're asking of it so after that first year you can expect again if you're training consistently you're training of a sufficient intensity and you're getting adequate nutrition you might gain half of that amount okay so suddenly the first year you gain say 17 pounds the next year you gain eight or nine pounds you're going man my program is not working anymore I must be doing something wrong my diet's off I know what I I know what I need I need creatine actually creatine is a fine supplement it's got 20 plus years of research it does everything from increase increase a glucose sensitivity to help the brains of old people and I'm not kidding I need this new supplement I need this mass gainer I need this I need that I need that and then that's where supplement companies make all their money from those people who expect newbie gains to last forever I've done this my first four months of training I put on 16 pounds I say first four months of training I mean first four months of training after high school I was severely underweight from doing two plus hours a day of basketball and I very quickly put on 16 pounds women who friends who hadn't seen me were shocked at how much weight I had put on I did that in four months the over the course of the next two years I managed to put on another 14 and I felt like I was doing everything wrong so I'm here to tell you now for some reason you decide to take up strength training what hopefully not to pick up a woman this peters off the third year it cuts in half again and then the fourth year and so on you're you're lucky to get a pound and a half a year out of it so you have to start finding reasons to continue training if all you went into it for was to be a bodybuilder which looking out I don't think anyone here is is chasing that goal um and I'm it's not making fun you might you might some day decide you want to be a bodybuilder because it's not just about being huge most of the bodybuilders are middle weights which means they show up on stage at around 160 to 165 pounds that's not a lot but when your bone dry and super thin low on body fat you show muscle real well and that's why bodybuilding is a it's not a quantitative sport it's not biking where you're going to complete a course the next amount of time it's qualitative how well you can how well you can create the illusion of size how well you can uh accentuate your positives and take away from your negatives hide those if you will um but most people aren't going to do that so then the question becomes why also you're training are you training for health sometimes people don't in my experience if they're in their 20s into their 30s it tends to take a backseat to the rest of your life you're going yeah I know I need to train I got exercise is great diet exercise it's wonderful but I got kids I got a mortgage um and I don't believe that I can just do it in an hour a week 30 minutes a week what have you um and so that's why people between the age of 30 and 40 tend to lose about 10 pounds of muscle and put on a whole bunch of fat to the tune of two to three pounds a year about a pound and a half to two pounds a year when you first start halving that every year after until you're in your fourth year and it becomes pittance um but you can keep this up for a long time I have three good examples one is Clarence Bass anybody familiar with Clarence Bass if anybody at all okay oh we got we got two in the back ding ding ding Clarence Bass is known as old man ripped he's an interesting case he's a lawyer a retired lawyer who lives in Albuquerque New Mexico and in 1978 he decides that he is going to get freaky lean after Arthur Jones tells him that he's too fat at 12% body fat and he says the reason why is that if you're going to gain muscle mass from your weight you're going to put on equal amount of fat and muscle and then when you strip off all that fat you'll in the front back where you started and sure enough there is some science to back this up and aside if you are lean and you overeat you tend to put on about 70% of that weight as lean body mass this includes bone tissue water uh connective tissue and muscle tissue uh if you are over fat over 20% mirroring obesity and you overeat you put on mostly fat this does not mean your metabolism is broken this does not mean you violate the laws of thermodynamics or whatever other woo ha ha some fitness individuals trying to sell this month because this industry is built on fads it has to be because if you tell someone lift heavy gradually increase the amount of weight you lift which just happens to be pittance per week once you're out of the novice stage we're talking half pound to a pound a week of strength on most exercises maybe um and do it enough time to see results this the cat's out of the bag and there's no mystery anymore so building it on fads p90x 10 years ago was power 90 and they were selling the same thing only they weren't selling it with x's which they stole from uh wwe for anybody who watched who used to watch wrestling i'm not proud to say i did um but manhole kamania andre the giant those are the genetic freaks i was talking about and they end up as wrestlers they don't end up as accountants and they don't end up here um so we we exclude them from who i'm talking about so you gain that amount of weight and that amount of time uh clarence bass decides he's going to get freaky lean and so from the age of 38 on up until now he's 73 years old he's maintained under 10 body fat and by the measures he's using he's actually maintained under 7 body fat for 25 years and in that time in that time uh it's traditionally thought that if you're lean you can't put on muscle tissue or it's hard because you only need a little bit of calories to keep gaining but when you're that lean your body thinks you're starved your body thinks you are dachau your body thinks you're about to die and so you have all these feedback mechanisms that are telling you hormonally you need to eat something or you're going to die in fact he's maintained it this long and between the age of 38 and 46 he put on 11 pounds of muscle that's not very much at all it's about an inch on his arm um and so then i started looking around to see if other bodybuilders experienced this in austin we have a guy named dav gooden he is known as the texas shredder which is a bad b movie title if there ever was one um but he's possibly the most talented in winning this natural bodybuilder of all time in an interview he did about four years ago he said that he's gained 30 pounds in 20 years that's a pound and a half a year would you get excited waking up a year from now for all of your working out and going i basically look the same all right that was really worth it we deal so much in external cues especially with fitness and especially if you're coming from a sport background right shoot the three-pointer make the three-pointer get three points score the touchdown an event is externally reinforcing what you've done or if your training was worth it bodybuilders much slowing it's a marathon health training is much slower it's a marathon another bodybuilder josh trantini he's was mr usa he trains in hit fashion um he says he's put on 24 pounds in 18 years of of lifting not a whole lot not a whole lot of muscle mass but it's enough to totally change his body and so you have to be wary of what people say when they say ah i put on put on 15 pounds of lean mass in this new program i've got in this new diet i've got the only way you can be sure of your body fat percentage is to be dead as a doorknob and be cut on with a scalpel every other method has an amount of of inaccuracy built into it so yeah they gained 15 pounds a lot of that because water some of that's fat maybe some of that's muscle there's really no way to tell and so if you look at bodybuilders over the course of time over the course of their career on stage when they're super lean you can tell how effective their training program was and a more recent example is someone by the name of lane norton he is a phd in nutrition sciences uh he took time off after becoming a pro to be a powerlifter so he proceeds to squat over 500 pounds and deadlift close to 700 pounds and he walks around at about 235 pounds at the height of about 5 10 and a half four five years later right of doing this powerlifting thing he comes back to the bodybuilding stage and gets freaky lean and he comes in four pounds heavier than when he last competed one pound a year for all that eating and training and all those sorts of things okay so once you get past your first couple of years of training you've gained really most of them also you're going to train those pounds a year aren't going to sustain you so what's the next step where do you go from there life's long you got to find new challenges and things you might be good at and use the training as an adjunct to that um i guess i'm getting close to that there you got to use the adjunct to that finding things you might be better at because this is meant to make your life better it's not meant to be your life but the way people tend to do it they make it their life they obsess about it they read bodybuilding magazines they read nutrition magazines they scour the scientific journals they go to grad school for it and they don't have balance in their life and then reality hits and they have to move on and so often a false dilemma is made if i can't train five days a week and five days a week is always what got me results well why train it all it's very black and white thinking right but there are some guys out there who do it if i can't do bicep three days a week my arms are going to shrivel why train it all well i put in any effort because i believe i believe that anything less than five days a week is not going to get me the results i need it's patently false as you get stronger and you get bigger you become better at recruiting the what are called high threshold motor units uh fast switch muscle fibers they are your biggest strongest muscle fibers and when you are a novice you are in fact unable to unable to recruit them voluntarily uh you can have them recruited for you if you happen to select a weight that is much too heavy but then you have inhibit inhibitory mechanisms from your nervous system to keep you from hurting yourself trying to sling that weight around so eventually as you train and get stronger you get better at using all of these muscle fibers and the thing about those muscle fibers is they require a lot of time to recover so if you're able to train five days a week you can't do it intensely you're not really recruiting those high threshold motor units if you train intensely you recruit those high threshold motor units then you have to back off and rest and in fact really interesting about backing off and resting understanding that these are the biggest muscle fibers and bodybuilders who are really large or athletes who are really strong you've seen bolts of the world they tend to have a lot of these muscle fibers explosive sports um there are studies that have been done where they have people train and the training actually reduces their high threshold motor units seems strange but there is a certain amount of aerobic um in any sort of training you're doing unless you're doing heavy singles you are to a certain extent up regulating these intermediate fibers and then they had to take time off three months after they ceased training they had more than doubled their fast twitch muscle fibers from doing nothing and in reality you see the same thing in spinal cord injured individuals and individuals who have broken bones and have been forced to cast muscles that anaerobic environment is the environment in which these big strong motor units best express themselves so if you're sufficiently strong and a normal human being you have to balance rest with effort your effort has gotten up so much higher that you can readily recruit these and fatigue them you need to rest that they actually recover and get stronger and periodically take more time off than than you think is necessary um a week two weeks at least so you get into your 30s you get over the false dilemma and you decide all right i can do something i can train i can train at least full body twice a week and i can work really hard and i can make steady gains and i can balance this with my family with my work demands with the demands of my children i'm feeling pretty good compared to my peers i still look really fit my arms are still bulging i still fit in my jeans i don't have my gut hanging over my belt and fooling myself in the thinking i have a 36 inch waist or whatever reasonably small waist they think they have because they take the pant the belt line and they tilt it like this so it sits on the lumbar spine and wraps underneath the globe of their stomach and think all right i've still got it i'm walking around like this if you've been training not five days a week two days a week working hard eating real food only occasionally going down to the bar and putting down a bunch of pints and pints and hot wings with sporting events you're going to maintain a good leanness and you'll find yourself capable of playing any sport you want to play you're not going to play it really well because you have to practice the sport to be really good at it uh it's just like you can take a basketball player and try and have them play tennis they're going to be suck in wind they're going to be feeling like total novices but they'll very quickly get better at playing tennis at least from a metabolic aerobic standpoint because they had this global metabolic conditioning this base with which to build upon and you'll be in that position and really the demands of your life will dictate that unless you're a professional athlete that that's what you're going to do you're going to be the weekend warrior it's not so bad if you can do it and you don't hurt yourself and you especially don't want to be hurting yourself in the gym and if anybody saw bill de samon's presentation last year there's certain biomechanics of every joint of every muscle and muscles are patently ignored in the gym there there's thought of as a suggestion rather than uh you know uh you see guys doing a behind the neck military press they prop up and they they grab the bar here they're going yeah awesome i'm really feeling my deltoid they're actually feeling his ligament binding and impingement at the joint because your because your arms come into your scapula here's here's a little anatomy guys how does your arm attach to the rest of your torso it's not at the shoulder it's here at your collarbone comes into your shoulder blade attaches to the ac joint which then attaches here to the clavicle okay so comes in at 30 degrees off of the what's called the frontal plane which country front to back that's why a normal military press isn't terrible because it's at least in that plane but the moment you rock back here you're getting extension at the joint and compression at the joint at the same time and you want to think about this this ac joint is kind of being like football pads right it extends way over your shoulders way out to here if you've seen these guys think of the bone is that over your humerus over the glenohumeral joint which is your shoulder as you think about it it's not here it's moving down here so you've got this distance that you're all everything underneath is going to run into that bone and since this is its most protruded point you're getting the most impingement right here but i'm feeling those deltoids so there's a lot of trade there's a lot of lore built into this and you're going to want to be informed by biomechanics by kinesiology and you're going to get a lot of that just watching bill's presentation last year if you want to make your joints last because it's like pulling rope over a boulder when you flex those tendons ligaments they are moving over bone bone is not the smoothest thing in the world they do wear down if you're not careful training five days a week is a sure way to expedite this process if you're looking to have crappy joints train five days a week if that's your goal that's an easy one to achieve but you're not you're training for health and you shouldn't be getting injured in the gym the whole point is to make you better at doing things away from the gym right that's what you're training for so you get past that false dilemma and you keep your gains you keep getting stronger and you get bigger and then you get to 50 and you're way better off than everybody else ever was and you've invested maybe an hour a week you've got lower body fat percentage you've got low low resting heart rate blood panels are good your testosterone's still up uh as opposed to what happens when you get fat or even a little fat you basically start producing hormones like a woman the more body fat you have the more aroma taste you have the more aroma taste you have the more of the testosterone that you are producing gets turned into estrogen and the more this ratio gets out of whack um the flip side of that is that have you ever noticed how when your grandmothers or mothers or aunts they go through menopause and after all the hot flashes and all that wonderfulness happens they sort of become a little bit like cock shore they really have this reduced fear and sort of aggressiveness that they suddenly have or at least that we don't associate with all women it's because their ratio of testosterone to estrogen has changed simultaneously when men go through what we colloquially term manopause um and their testosterone to estrogen ratio gets a little smaller they have a little bit of less testosterone to their estrogen uh they become a little calmer they become a little less manlike right because testosterone has two functions truly two functions i'm getting crass and you all better laugh ready fuck it or kill it that's all testosterone is for that's all it does and if you're training if you're training you maintain some of that if you get in fat amount of shape and not training you're losing that you're really losing that edge and you can maintain this on the smallest amount of effort well your effort to gym is going to be high but you're only investing an hour a week maybe depending on how good you are i mean if you've watched patrick's videos he's training like 30 minutes a week busting his ass and the rest of time he enjoys time on the bike because he'd rather be riding the bike than in a gym on a machine making weight go up and down you know uh and so on and so forth so i've got some examples i'm fortunate enough that i've trained people every from the age of 10 all the way up to the age of 92 and everything in between my joke is that i charm women between the age of 50 and 70 on a daily basis because they can afford my fee and their patient their demands from training is that their bones get stronger um and strangely enough that they have someone to talk to personal training is not unlike hairdressing uh i mean you're you are dealing with with very fragile people and you're not wielding sharp instruments but it's the same thing people come to you with all sorts of they tell you about uh their daughter's divorce they tell you about someone's drug rehab they tell you about the sexual problems that they and their husband are having they tell you about how they had 12 drinks last night yet they're still here to work out in the morning and maybe you should go easy on me uh they do all these things it's a relationship and that's part of the reason why i enjoy it so much and so i have some examples of this people who have managed at different points in their life to keep perspective to make this a part of their life without making it their life to make their life better every aspect of their life so i start off after talking about all these people who are genetic freaks with two genetic freaks um when i first moved to austin there was a gentleman who was working for us his name was ben or working out with us his name was ben he used to be a powerlifter uh and you could tell he had a barrel chest he had short legs short arms uh he trained three exercises once a week he came in he did a pull down he did a um what's called a ventral chest which is kind of a combination dip and chest press and he did a leg press they were all done very slowly to momentary muscular fatigue uh ben at a height of about five seven had over 16 and a half inch arms lean and he could still pull close to 500 pounds in the deadlift with minimal amount of training and his total time investment exercising per week was 10 minutes now he's a freak that's why i'm starting off with him because they're impressive but they're also not the norm uh and the next guy we had his name was andrew andrew looked like he played rugby like a college rugby player he had calves that were super thick he had a yoked neck and he had actually strangely reasonably small joints um and he ran an it company austin's got a lot of those um and he would sporadically train he'd come in and maybe train for two months and then fall off the face of the earth for eight but in those two months time without fail he'd come in looking like he's been constantly training bigger than anybody in this room and he'd train once a week again 10 minutes and he'd put on 10 11 pounds and then he'd stop training for the rest of because business demands he had travel he had kids he had so on um but he was able to focus and get the most out of those workouts and maximize the genetic card that mommy and daddy handed him him but he understood that most guys who are big and strong don't understand that there is not that you aren't as big and strong as me because you work less hard they don't there's not an understanding it's the same way someone who's a genius can sometimes have a hard time grasping why don't you get this concept why don't you understand it immediately um there's something unseen it can't be told and it can't be given they've already got it so those are the freaks now most of my clients are not freaks they own insurance companies they're lawyers um i have two i have one right now person she's in her early 60s shredded to the bone she and her she's a physical therapist uh and she a number of years ago decided to compete in primal quest now primal quest is interesting in that it you pay a lot of money work your ass off to get dropped off in the middle of nowhere and effectively be told figure your way back to civilization by all means possible have fun uh since a 10 day race they drop you off in moab utah although they changed the location you never quite know where you're getting dropped off so you can't scout it and you and three other individuals are a team you're going to bike you're going to row you're going to climb you're going to walk you're going to crap in baggies along the way because you're not going to crap all over nature um and occasionally one of the pit stops will put you at a denny's and after about five days suddenly that grand slam seems like gourmet cooking when all you've been having is like power bars and granola um their group was the oldest they all averaged age 56 57 they trained with us 21 minutes twice a week and you know what they did the rest of the time biking climbing running all the stuff that they'd actually be doing at this event most the competitors were in their mid 30s some were in their late teens but they were usually like a fourth man on a team um this group finished in the middle of the pack which comparatively speaking you got people 25 years younger than you and you're beating them even if you don't win the thing that's a victory and they came back and they were like yeah we were tired none of us got hurt we were able to do it we're really proud of ourselves um i know that when i was younger i had this idea that being in your 50s and 60s meant you know that the slowdown was inevitably going to happen that's probably because of western aging the people we see um fortunately we have these examples like i talked about clarence bass earlier who's still under 77 body fat at 73 and he still competes in rowing um who are breaking that mold it's so you have to think over the long term you don't have to think i'm going to train until i'm 50 and then what and then i'm not going to do anything after that um and i've had some really old clients i have one currently his name is jim jim sends me all sorts of chain letter jokes do your grandparents ever send you chain letter jokes do your grandparents have your email address are your grandparents republican because if they fit these things this is jim so uh it sends me lots of jokes and he always has a joke when he comes in and he always likes it when i have a lady fill in for me on my workouts because he gets a hug out of them right because grandparents grand uh grand paul's especially are seen as non-threatening but this is one of the jokes he told me one day he comes in he goes you know skylar my uh my mother once she never trusted me she never understood anything at all that i did in fact she thought i was in the kkk she comes to me and she goes jim i think you're in the kkk he goes ma why would you think that why would you think that and she said i heard a couple of little girls down the street saying you were grand master under the sheets grand master they wear sheets guys 80 guys 80 clearly his testosterone ratio is still good um and i asked him i go jim why do you train i'm gonna be talking 20 something so why do you train he goes well hell i still want to be able to carry my golf clubs on the course when i play i still want to occasionally slice it long and i want to be able to get out of my king size waterbed and this was the point he made he said if i'm not strong i can't get out of the thing but that's a victory for him right the king size waterbed all right um he'd care about big biceps you know he tells his cholesterol is good and he's way stronger than any other 80 year olds i see around under most circumstances and i asked him i go jim if you're lucky how will you die he goes i'll play golf i'll come home have dinner i'll fall asleep and i'll never wake up again that'd be a pretty good way to go i'm not saying that training in a good diet is going to keep you from getting cancer or heart disease or diabetes or any of those things but it stacks the deck in your favor and if you've got a genetic disposition to get them you're probably going to get them later and it's probably going to be much more minor um and if you're training correctly the way in which you train between the ages 30 and 70 it's probably going to look pretty similar if you look at the bodybuilders of the golden era the arnold era most of those guys are training nothing like they used to train to wit ken o'neill is a 67 year old writer for iron man magazine he was there during arnold's era frank zane's era all of those guys and i was talking to him the other day and he's telling me about frank zane now does anyone here familiar with frank zane frank zane won the mr olympia a number of times which is the zenith of bodybuilding and he wanted us one of the smallest competitors to win it his arms never measured more than 17 and a quarter inches against these guys who had 19 or 20 inch arms but he did it because he could show muscle really well he could make his waist look incredibly tiny he could flare his rib cage out do this thing like back in the 60s 70s and even before guys used to practice rib cage expansion because all the connective tissue at your ribs doesn't fully set until your late teens so they'd they practice getting this as big as possible and then it became the solution they could make this big they could make their stomachs small and they look like they could fly but frank zane recently had his shoulders replaced and he says ken if i would have known now i would have trained lighter i would have trained less often i would have paid attention to my form more and the point i'm making is that if you pay attention to all of that now it might delay a little bit getting to as big as you are going to be or your athletic goals but if it means 10 20 years down the road you're still walking and the joints you own are still the ones you were born with you've done all right um and this means making sure your goals are your goals and that they're not someone else's goals because these you go to a gym and someone says why aren't you deadlifting or why are you deadlifting sumo you should be deadlifting normal and there's this macho pressure that's going on there and you have to be able to separate what someone else might want for you for what you want for yourself and if you're in this for the long haul that perspective is necessary um and not only should the way you train at 30 be the way you train at 70 they should look fairly similar anyway um it shouldn't look any different if you have a terminal disease uh april 10th 2009 my mother passed away from stage complications from stage four uh colon cancer less than a year after she had been diagnosed my mother was in fantastic health she was a model when she was in her 20s um she was one of my early clients if you will basically when i didn't know what the hell i was doing because looking back now i've been at this for 12 years i look back when i first got trained i go why the hell are these people paying me like and but this is how you should be in your life right every year you look back and you go boy i was an idiot last year boy i wasn't an idiot last year and when you stop doing that you should be worried you should always be trying to strive and get better so i look back and she was kind of my guinea pig going letting me really try and refine my abilities as an instructor hmm so uh she trained really hard five nine and after two kids in her mid 40s uh size four 130 pounds strong you know all those things clearly i think very highly of my mother honestly i was a momless boy now uh she is diagnosed with cancer and every other week she is subjected to 55 straight hours of chemotherapy and every other week when she wasn't on chemotherapy she was back as an executive assistant at the Chapman automotive group in uh in the phoenix area it's a big big dealership group uh so that was that was the way she was and she couldn't train and she missed it so terribly she used to put train twice a week for 30 minutes and now that she had cancer she couldn't train at all and then a move for normal normalcy that's what she wanted she missed her training so much um on christmas eve 2008 i was back home and i was able to put her through one last session i didn't know it was going to be the last session but one last session of a workout uh down at the old gym i used to work at put her through uh medx leg press overhead press dip pull down compound row she's we used about half the weight she had previously used she worked her tail off and she sat there drinking water huff and heaving if you do a high intensity workout properly you are sufficiently winded because you cranked your anaerobic system so hard that your aerobic system has to deal with all that substrate it just doesn't disappear your aerobic system gets a superior workout she's sitting there and she goes that feels like it used to feel even though she was much weaker and shaky um and so on my head i'm thinking all right well she's starting to turn the corner because her pet scan numbers were down her tumor count numbers were down they had removed the primary tumor uh but when they she was diagnosed it had already moved into her liver it already necessitized and the next step was going to be uh direct radiation and through the liver uh so i gave her a yoga dvd i said well try and ease into this see if you can do this because i'm not there to train you and who knows when you're going to feel like training so a week and a half later she does yoga and hurts herself you don't you want to avoid hurting yourself and but boy people think yoga is safe compared to lifting weights if you lift weights properly they tell you very quickly if they're too heavy and they're going to hurt you if you're paying attention yoga you're trying to bend yourself like a pretzel you're not going to know when you've gone too far until it's too late um she never got the train again she passed away she had complications from the radiation treatments uh effectively her liver started to fall apart and on april 10th uh she passed away in scott still arizona so i didn't know it'd be her last workout but i think it's kind of poignant that if you do this correctly whether you're young or you're old sick or in health and you're doing it in a way that is sustainable it's not going to matter it's going to look very similar it's going to resemble um regardless of what it is and so i want that's what i really want to take away yes there's limits all men are created equal some are created more equal than others um but if you're going to be doing this over the course of your life you got to find something you like keep it safe keep it brief and remind yourself it's there to make the rest of your life better it shouldn't be your life uh that's all i've got unless y'all have any questions yeah oh we got we got a mic yeah him what's your name man uh my name is andy and i'm actually a reporter with the ucf student newspaper yeah yeah for sure um well basically i i think i had i had read somewhere is that um uh that it's been said that uh two 30 minute workouts in a day are better than doing one one hour workout in a day because you're revving up your your system twice you know what would you say about that uh the first question would be how is the workout being defined and i say this because for so long aerobics was seen as the de facto workout because the crude instruments we had at the time that is what could be tracked um exercise science is only about 60 years old i mean really your first physical education courses come about turn of the century um and they start to figure out about the 1940s that wait they're science specific to this and we need to be testing for these variables but our instruments are not fine enough to track necessarily what happened with weight training it's very easy to stick a person on a bike with a trainer keep them in place have them pedaling and measure their vo2 max their oxygen and consumption their metabolic output and so on and so forth so that's that's the tough question this is also where the carb drink type stuff comes into play they say if you have carbs after your workout and a lot of them you're going to replenish your glycogen faster well weight training doesn't suffice doesn't decrease glycogen in the muscle tons most if you're doing it right if you did long two hour sessions yes it would um but most of those studies that were done were done on cyclists doing long distances even though they're stuck in place so yeah they're going to burn a lot of glycogen um that's that's what they're there for so gotcha uh so two thirty minute workouts a week or in a day what are the workouts and then i can answer your question better so if it's someone who is competitively cycling oh go ahead um you're not burning many calories walking and the interesting thing about walking is that it's like any skill if you've never done it before and you even picking hilly walking let's use that example you start it and you're a little over fat it's kicking your butt right you're just puffing and puffing and then you lose 10 pounds and you do the same route again and again and again it's not burning nearly as many calories there's less body mass which you're lugging around and you you increase uh the um the economy of your locomotion you the economy of your movement you get better at doing what you're doing that's why we wrote lines as kids right we practice a thousand times so we can do it without looking at it uh there's an element of that we traditionally the shorthand is called muscle memory that's crap your muscles either turn on or turn off neuromuscular memory might be better you have a map buried in your head of a movement of a movement pattern and the more you do it the better you get at doing it this is why and is the confusing part olympic lifting olympic lifting is a sport it's done with a barbell but a romanian deadlift is an exercise done to build your hamstrings your glutes and your lower back it too is done with a barbell this is confusing to the average person do you do you pick up a football and do anything else with it but play football no do you do anything with a basketball to play basketball no but you have at least three different two different sports and an activity that you use a barbell for this is why it gets confusing for the layperson uh when we talk about science and that's a that's the distinguishing point you need to make that exercise there are things that produce an exercise like effect walking walking is great for a lot of things it keeps the gray matter in your head as you get older like and it keeps your uh a hippocampus at size which is your librarian of your brain takes the information that comes in files that so you can go get it again people who walk regularly especially as we get older tend to have a larger hippocampus and more gray matter walking is good for a lot of things weight loss is not one of them unless you've got your calories tanked um and I wouldn't even recommend doing traditional cardiovascular activity unless you'd like it um people traditionally do it because they've assumed this aerobics it's all about training your heart and your lungs um you have to go through your muscles to get at the heart and the lungs the most aerobic thing you do is sleep you'll need your heart and your lungs are cranking along your muscles are as relaxed as they're ever going to be um and again I referenced Doug's presentation on the website last year because he explains he explains uh you've heard of the Krebs cycle this is like 10th grade biology right and I'm not saying this like to dumb it down or anything but your body's going to use ATP that's the muscles currency and it's going to use that to power contractions okay and then when that runs out and it's going to run out quick you're going to then have to start taking the sugar that's in the muscles and uh running it through glycolysis to make more ATP and then the byproduct of that is going to run through the Krebs cycle and then it's going to go through the electron transport chain all this is to make more ATP and you can think of it as a funnel each step producing x amount of byproduct and so you do your weight workout and you're and you're left with a whole lot of this byproduct that's all stacked up at the mitochondria which is what deals with uh lactic acid or lactate as we call it um that is going to have to be used for energy and the aerobic metabolism is when the mitochondria is producing the energy demands of the muscle tissue whether it's in real time or whether it's dealing with it post-hoc doing it after you've done your workout because the substrates have to be dealt with there's a certain environment the cell likes to keep and that environment is not a whole lot of lactic acid built up inside of it it has to be dealt with um so I like walking because I've got a nice park near my house I've got three dogs they demand it so I walk about two miles a day in addition to all the pacing I do with my clients I'm up typically at five training people six done by one then it's napping in xbox that's what it is but that uh but I don't I do not recommend people take it up take up traditional aerobics unless it's something they like you like riding your bike in Austin tons of people like riding their bike we talk to them about balancing their effort and balancing their volume of biking with their weight training so that their weight training makes their biking better I'm not in there to make them good weight trainers I'm in there to make them better bikers so they bike farther with less effort but if you're just trying to get lean and you might get freaky lean then then aerobics might be necessary because you can run out of calories real quick and then doing some aerobics might increase your will increase your caloric burn and you're back losing again but most people if you train intensely and you know you don't need to add additional aerobics if you're doing it right in the gym like said unless you have a sport that you have to train for then you've got to do it I mean that's the way that skill conditioning though that's that's very specific mm-hmm that's correct but you know you can go in between because the if you're new to the gym your 15 minutes are not the same as my 15 minutes partly because you don't know how to get this high threshold motor units quite yet you can I can have you hold a real heavy weight but that's not gonna last very long and it's not you're trying to sidestep your biology in in that sense so as you get stronger you better recruiting those muscle fibers you achieve a more complete exhaustion which is saying my 15 minutes is different than your 15 minutes so early on you might need more time to achieve a good exhaustion but the intent is that you're able to gradually increase the intensity over time sometimes that's weight sometimes it's how you're handling the weight moving slower moving segments there's a lot that can go into it but generally yes if the more intense the sort of the workout has to be what's your name man max and I have nice meet you likewise so I have I have three questions okay one what are your long-term goals two how did you determine them and three how do you suggest that we come up good great questions long-term goals okay so I mentioned Casey butz calculator for maximum muscular potential minus to get back to that because when I was at my biggest and my strongest and my heaviest I was hitting the nail on the head I'd like to do that at a lighter weight at a lower body fat percentage and I understand that this is going to take a while part of being the problem with reading all this stuff is that you get program OCD like you understand that there are all these variables that are very easy to to implement and they all have something to do with your end result but the tricky part is focusing on just getting stronger because that's a slow process anytime you go to a new routine because of the of the initial skill acquisition period which comes real quick you feel like man this is great I'm going to gain like this forever and then reality sets in and you you start gaining at a realistic rate and that could again be a little disheartening so it's that moving towards that number taking what I'm learning an exercise science and keeping it intellectual rather than letting it totally inform my routines inform it in the sense of do am I doing it biomechanically correct am I exhausting the fast twitch motor units making sure that I'm not changing routines every month which in the past is one of the things I did as part of that there's got to be a magic routine so that the first question is what are my long-term goals second was how did I come to them was that okay part of the the coming to it was seeing individuals who had been training for a really long time and and done really well by being patient it reminds me of a sort of a what I'm what I've tried to get at here is guy walks in off the streets to marshal art studio and he goes master man I love what you're doing I want to be a master just like you master goes the first thing you must learn is patience the guy scoffs how long is that going to take right and that's the problem is that these that's the point I was making these gains are very small once you're no longer new so you have to find something about the training you're doing that you inherently find enjoyable regardless of the external result you want it going in a positive direction it's just happening so slow that after you're not going to have these like ah my pecs an inch bigger or some sort of external feedback you it starts to come slower and slower so you have to start to like the process and reminding myself that I have all these other things going on in my life right even though I'm a grad student I'm juggling a full workload I've got a house and three dogs that we're doing a lot of training with right now and having those issues in your life makes it easier having other interests other than working out makes it easier to stick to what matters which is gradual weight increases over a long term with big basic exercises because if you have time to sit and think about it if you get all this grist for the mill and you'll think yourself in all sorts of weird routines so how would I suggest you come to it I would suggest you pick up a book called brawn from Stuart McRoberts it's about this thick and Stuart tells you how to uh tells you how to train he tells you the whys of training he reminds you to err on the side of caution having a little temperance and patience if you could think of about a 450 page version of what I've tried to explain with a little bit less science because it's about 10 years old and some of the more recent sort of limit science has come out um then then that would be kind of what it is ignore the fact that the cover is awful it's bright orange and it has this like skeletal guy hitting a bicep pose and it's a bicep that as far as I can tell the radial tuberosity which is where your bicep connects into your form is down here somewhere so he's like flexing and it's it's it looks ridiculous it's a horrible cover it's a fantastic book however that would be my suggestion to start there and also I I keep referencing it just because it's a good talk go back and watch what Doug McGuff said last year on the youtube um because when you have an understanding of of uh how long this stuff takes then you can kind of temper your training routines right because gosh five pounds a year you know or say you get 10 pounds per second year it's less than a pound a month but that's enough to put an inch on your arm and that's very visible it just took a year to get there so those would be my suggestions um and maybe find someone who's kind of detached from you to keep you accountable in other words like some sort of wise old mentor or someone you can go to and say i'm thinking about changing my routine they go small poundage increases over the long period of time cut that crap out you know like keep you on track um because coaches are terrible training themselves I say this as a coach right when you spend your entire day telling people basically looking I say okay you're doing this well your form's good on this um yeah you shouldn't be doing that with your diet you have a hard time maintaining objectivity to the situation at hand partly because you've got so much information you're working with and partly because if you've been dishing out information all day and correcting people you start to kind of think you're special so you need someone else to kind of slap you upside the head and go you're getting off on the wrong foot keep doing what you're doing hey what's your name Ben Ben nice to meet you um so you mentioned the false belief that the body just naturally breaks down over a certain time and you get examples of 50 year olds that are extremely fit um but I've encountered this belief repeatedly in my friends and family and no matter how much I try to explain the benefits of paleo nutrition and body by science sure exercise things like that they always just rationalized away with well I'm just going to get fat anyway you're gonna get fat anyway you know so yeah how do you go about explaining people explaining to people the benefits of eating right and putting in their 15 minutes of exercise a week I'm crumb I'm fortunate and then I have a captive audience at their appointments when they come in because I have people who are who are there because they they understand rationally that they need to be working out but emotionally they sort of waiver they wouldn't be working out if they didn't have an appointment so they're a captive audience I try to explain and show examples because the great thing about YouTube is that you can go on there and go like 74 year old bodybuilder boom and you've got examples or you can go you know there's a great one in the New York Times I think back in March of a woman named Olga who's 91 years old 91 she picked up track and field at the age of 77 and her records which you know you're gonna say ah doesn't sound that impressive her records are better than the 80 year olds at the and she's at the age of 91 so two age classes down her records are better than theirs now having trained all the way up to 90 year olds I can tell you that even that under most circumstances you think ah just 10 years no no no no no octogenarian the nanogenarian it's a chasm it's an enormous difference if even if they've been just moderately active and so you can show them who aren't bodybuilders because most people don't want to look like a bodybuilder but you have to train in a similar fashion and not necessarily two hours a six days a week you have to train with the intent of getting stronger getting more muscular um you just you just pull the reins on that horse a little sooner but also understand that your ceiling's probably set so you can show them and then you can explain um you can then reference uh get that get out your national geographic on the old netflix and look at these individuals who are 70 80 and these indigenous tribes and they're still climbing the trees and they're still hunting because their world yesterday is about the same as their world today and is about the same as it's going to be tomorrow and the more you can live today like yesterday the more you're going to live tomorrow in a similar fashion and if you've been doing that for 50 years some things are breaking down we are decaying your tissue producing machine at 10 you're not turning over tissue nearly as quickly at 50 or at 70 or 80 but you you still you still respond in a predictable way exercise is still a stimulus even if your response isn't as great because of a different hormone environment um also remind them that they when we say ah your genetic hand is set which which genes do you get from your parents you don't know do you get all of the genes from your parents no you only get 50 of each parent's genes to come together so that's why it's a risk of heart disease if your dad died of a heart attack it's not a fact of heart disease and i've noticed people tend to focus on the good i have a client who her dad died at 52 of a heart attack she's 71 but she only talks about the fact that her mother did nothing and lived to 91 i go yeah but your dad did nothing and died at 52 and you don't know which genes you got there's a whole lot in the ether that you can't control what you can control is put in a little work and reminding them it's like medicine right we uh strength training is like a flu shot it's it was just to say one flu shot protects you from the flu five flu shots gives you the flu right but people should do strength training like i train today i've built up and i got to train tomorrow to keep building up like it's this constant building on top of when it's a constant response to response to response to and if they don't want to hear it in spite of your best intentions save your breath and if they do want to hear it they'll come back to you they will i'm roman hey roman hi uh obviously you're very knowledgeable so i appreciate the information um i just started uh a new workout and diet um from tim ferris his four-hour body book mm-hmm where he claims that he uh with testing had gained 34 pounds of muscle mass within 28 days ockham's razor protocol ockham's razor protocol indeed yeah um so you based on what you said uh one and a half pounds a month for the first year um so what is your take on that on to sure he's he regained he regained if you go back through his old blog uh he talks about this if you search geek to freak tim ferris he has a blog post on this some five years ago he talks about he goes to Buenos Aires to learn the tango and in doing so he gets light he loses a bunch of weight uh and then tim ferris is notoriously good at uh manipulating his weight and this is why he's a this is why he's a martial arts champion he found out that the wayans were 24 hours in advance and and he dehydrates down loses 30 pounds puts on all that weight and more and he comes in 10 to 15 pounds larger than the nearest competitor pushes them out of the ring that's a dq yeah you're a national champ that way um and it's not cheating even if you don't agree with it um so he was regaining and he references the colorado experiment in that book in which kasey vader who was one of arthur jones like he the kid wins mr america 19 200 iq seven feet tall he's one of those freaks um in which he kasey working i don't remember if he's in louisiana or actually here in florida he's working at a machine shop gets his pinky cut off in an accident okay and then he has an adverse reaction to the penicillin injection he loses a bunch of weight and arthur says we're going to get you back in the gym and we're going to put this weight on you as quickly as we can so kasey comes in and his before photo and he looks like i would like to look like him in his before photo he looks like he's ripped he's in shape he's got big arms he's got cap deltoids he's got a full chest very little body fat and then he proceeds to gain 64 pounds in a month holy crap and it's mostly muscle well he had been he had been that big before in fact he had been bigger at the end of that month i think it was 207 or 208 pounds kasey was he had been as heavy as i think 219 so he this is the muscle memory component if you've been there before it's easy to get back to tim ferris is an example of that kasey viders an example of that now in my case when i started training like i said i gained 16 pounds in four months i did it on a minimalist routine i would be dry heaving at the end of it i was working so hard um and uh but after that is where it slows down so if you had been that big previously if you'd been 34 30 pounds of muscle heavier than you are now yeah you could put it back on in a month if that was the only thing you focused on um and he's he's he doesn't put that disclaimer up every time but he's always said that too i was regaining weight i was regaining weight uh and that matters that really matters so um i don't it's not something you're gonna see even in guys who take steroids like people think steroids steroids are like if you feel you have to take steroids whatever the next level is you're gonna be at you're gonna be mediocre in in other words if you were a high school football player and you're like i i got to take steroids to play in college you're gonna be like a backup in college right if if you need to get to the pros you're gonna be maybe an average pro um and i think this is from either dav tate or jim winler these are enormous power lifters who don't hide the fact that at some point or another in their careers they view steroids but if you look at someone who surely was on steroids dorian yates uh he is a he was i think seven times in a row mr olympia from england over the course of his training career with steroids he puts on 75 pounds in 15 years five pound a month on average no at no point is he gaining 30 pounds of muscle in three months or what have you uh even with anabolic assistance so it's you can regain it but if it's new muscle it's extremely unlikely that it's going to happen uh unless you were just so run down from an endurance of sport and even in that you would have been somewhere near that anyway had you not been doing the sport hi i'm bill hey bill nice to meet you i'm on um so i used to be quite fat like i weigh 42 pounds less now than i did then cool great job um you were talking about like muscle memory sure so if you used to be bigger you can get bigger doesn't work the same way with fat and there is some some there's some research done and this seems to be kind of a point of contention among scientists about the body fat set point um that people will diet and then they'll gravitate back towards kind of an equilibrium uh i think that if you that if you i don't think the paleo diet is magic what i think it does is that it ends up you end up eating a whole lot of nutrient dense foods and lots of very filling foods so you're satisfied on less um there's nothing magical about that there just isn't but what it can do is keep you from re-achieving that set point because it just becomes so impossible to keep the food down and you're doing that by picking more dense foods the bbc did kind of an opposite of that um talking about set point and i'll get back to exactly what you're saying you'll see why i'm talking about this why are thin people not fat why are thin people not fat um they took these kids in england who had always been fairly lean they're in their mid 20s they were never shredded but they were certainly not fat and they said like i'm on the seafood diet i see food i eat it so on and they had them double their caloric intake and this is a much more modern version with much better instruments of what was called the vermont experiment which was done back in the 50s early 60s i don't recall in which they fed inmates overfed them saw how fat they could make them in a certain period of time uh in in exchange for like lesser prison sentences right that homicide we'll we'll let that slide if you just fatten up a little bit tony um by the end of the experiment they had guys who could not push their weight more than 20 percent above where they were at to start in spite eating 10 000 plus calories a day they start fidgeting it off and and this is what that kind of came out of this newer study because they had fine instruments the body fights back in a number of ways um some of the people couldn't keep the food down they would literally vomit they could not eat enough to double their caloric intake in this more recent version um some they uh they became uh very fidgety like i said they sort of shook the weight off um and there was one guy who he put on something like 22 pounds he really didn't look all that different they get him in the bod pod his metabolic rate has gone up 30 and he's put on uh three quarters of that weight his muscle tissue right and he sees a computer science guy right he's just sitting there he's kind of pushed up his glasses he's like yeah this that's really interesting you know just this is not a care in the world i would kill and rob a bank and carry some women across the border until you have that sort of reaction like that's the zenith and those are people who are genetically elite and some people are genetically elite the onion made a joke the other day world-class violinist dies without ever having played right the thing that we're talented at is typically not the thing that we're obsessed with um as i was saying before in high school i had a 39 inch vertical leap i could smack my elbow on a regulation backboard i could touch three quarters up the of the way up the bank shot square um it came relatively if i was playing basketball and i was jumping i could push it up and i've got video on my blog of me box jumping jumping on a 55 inch box um basically rocking back planting and going it's no big deal i can do it so i'm not obsessed with it right it's it's something i'm talented at i rock climb really really easily bouldering no big deal i'm obsessed with this and so coming all the way back around to what you're saying the body fights back when you've lost a lot of weight too and so this is why i tell people to ride the plateaus if you just go on a hard diet and you just tank you go on a hard diet and you tank what happens is you haven't changed really any habits um and you haven't let the body acclimate to your to a newer weight um so what i try and get people to do you seem like you're maintaining 42 pounds lost and how old are you you're 19 yeah i mean i hesitate to say baby fat but you're in a position right now where you've got this hormonal environment in your body to where you can maintain that leanness for the rest of your life if you set the ground work now but yes there is you see people do it all the time they'll just die it and they won't change any other habits they'll do it as a goal i'm going to lose x amount of weight they get there and they go right back to the shitty way they were eating before or they're they just totally drop exercising and that's no different than some guy who says i'm going to work out i'm going to get more muscular and i'm going to get this woman or i'm going to do this event and they stop working out and doing that event because they got what they want and they're out of shape both have to be sustainable and they have to be something that you uh you want to do so you want to ride those plateaus because if you can stick it that way it's easier when you can refocus yourself again to drop even more but in your case if you put in a little bit of work i don't think you'd ever get back to that fat just paying the a motocrome of attention so yeah there's a set point but i don't think you'll go back to it yeah it's one minute yeah man last one my question is pretty basic what's uh for someone who's just looking just straight just burn fat you know what would you say is the most effective workout i got i got i got two exercises for you i'll demonstrate them someone offers you something that you know is high in calories i want you to practice the head shake and when you're eating i want you to practice table pushaways when you're satisfied and walk away it's calories i mean there's these are dependent variables exercise doesn't burn many calories boy it burns crappy amount of calories it really 30 minutes might get you 200 calories burned at a moderate intensity on a treadmill 45 minutes might get you 300 i can put down 300 calories in 30 seconds i could put down way more than that in a minute it's a disproportion amount of effort to reward it's much easier to train regularly and eat a little bit less or pick foods that are that fill you up a little bit more and be flexible with that right don't have the i have a cookie syndrome which is you're going well on a diet you've lost some weight in a moment of weakness you have a cookie and you think i've ruined everything give me the bag because now you've ruined everything but that's how people fall off the way like 100 calories of cookie just ruin the fact that that let's say i lost 10 pounds of fat that's 35 000 calories worth of energy you've lost 100 calories of cookie is going to ruin it no that's the flexibility you need to have to keep it up over the long term find something you like doing get the calories down a little bit eat real food as close to as natural packaging as possible and be patient that's it guys thanks a lot