 Welcome to the 21 convention Miami, Florida. This next speaker is a long time alumni from 2009 on. He's been a part of the 21 convention influenced many, many men's lives. And when I was doing the interviews for the 21 convention, he was one of the most requested guys to interview. I am talking about high intensity trainer Drew bait. Come up on stage. It took me some time to decide what I wanted to talk about because I have been doing these so long and probably covered almost all the basics of high intensity training. I was wondering what would be the most beneficial things to people to hear. And I thought back, I've been doing this about 20 years now. Most of that time doing one-on-one personal training and then for the past couple of years doing more consulting. And it occurred to me that there are some common issues with the people that come to me, problems that are preventing them from getting what they want out of their workouts. And I'd say most of the people who come to me for personal training, who have come to me for consulting or advice, are not people who are just starting out and wondering, you know, where do I begin. Unfortunately, there are people who have been training for a while, who have been following programs from magazines or websites or their high school coaches or other personal trainers that they began with and were not getting what they wanted out of it. In fact, in some cases they ended up getting things they didn't want out of it. Injuries, joint conditions, lots and lots of wasted time. So what I want to talk about is the common factors. What is it that all these people that came to me were doing wrong that prevented them from getting what they wanted out of their workouts or that caused them to get things that they didn't want? Now, if you've heard my high intensity training talks before, you've heard me talk about the importance of training intensely, training briefly, training infrequently. So I'm going to make that part of it real short. The biggest mistake that most of these people make is they're not training hard enough. They're doing too much exercise and they're doing it too often. Most people make the assumption that when they're going into a gym, if they just go through the motions, if they make the weight go up and down the number of times somebody told them to and as many sets as somebody told them to, they're doing the repetitions a specific way and they do the right exercises with the right frequency that they are going to get bigger and stronger, leaner if they're following whatever diet has been prescribed. But regardless of the program, regardless of what exercises you do or your set and rep scheme, regardless of any particular repetition cadence or method, if an exercise is not done intensely enough, none of that stuff makes any difference at all. When you're exercising, what you are trying to do is send a message to your body that your environment is placing a demand on it that exceeds its current capabilities so that it is a threat to your ability to move. You can't move. You can't obtain food. You can't prevent yourself from becoming something else's food. Movement is absolutely essential for survival and as a result, our bodies have adapted, revolved mechanisms for adapting to any kind of stress that threatens our ability to move, starting with the muscles and then with all the sporting systems. But adaptations cost energy. Adaptations cost resources. And your body is not going to expend resources. It's not going to expend energy to produce an adaptive response unless it is threatened because having that extra tissue is costly. Expending the energy could be costly if food is not readily available in the environment. Again, all these adaptations are things that we would have evolved during a period of time where energy was very valuable. Not like now you just walk down the street to the supermarket and grab food whenever you want it. Your body is not going to produce a costly adaptation unless the long-term benefit of that adaptation is worth more than the expense of producing it. If you are trying to send that message to your body, then what you are doing during the exercise has to be demanding enough that it is a threat to your ability to move. It has to fatigue your muscles to the point where you are momentarily incapable of further movement. Most people don't get close to this point during exercise. If you watch most people in the gym, they'll pick up a barbell or they'll get in a machine and they'll start doing the movement. And when it begins to burn, when they start breathing heavy, when it starts to get uncomfortable, they stop and they think, that's fine, I'll move on to the next machine or they'll rest a couple minutes and do another set. If you stop when it starts to get uncomfortable, you're not asking your body to do anything that it can't already do. If you stop and then you're able to do it again after a short period of time, then you haven't done it hard enough that you're really threatening your body's ability to move afterwards. Now you don't have to go to that point, but the closer you get to it, the better your results are going to be from exercise. So when you are doing an exercise, again regardless of the specific exercise, regardless of your reps or anything else, the one factor that is more important than any other in determining whether or not you send a message to your body to produce the improvements is how hard you're pushing yourself, how close you're getting to that point where no matter how hard you're contracting, you cannot continue the exercise in good form. It is going to hurt if you're doing it correctly. You're going to experience burning. If you're doing it right, you should be breathing pretty heavily. It is going to be extremely uncomfortable. If it isn't, you're not doing it correctly. But all of this is temporary. It is ultimately harmless if you're doing the exercise correctly. You shouldn't be injuring yourself either. And if you really want to improve badly enough, then you will suck it up and push through that and just deal with the momentary pain. But that's the biggest thing. When you are doing an exercise, you start to feel that discomfort and your muscles and your heart and everything else are screaming at you to quit. You keep going anyways. And you keep going not until you don't want to do it anymore, not until you think this is enough. You do it until you absolutely cannot do another repetition. Provided that there's no other pain or indication of another injury or anything occurring. Obviously, you don't want to work through it if you think you're being damaged. Now, if you are training intensely enough that you are going to effectively stimulate an adaptive response, then you also have to be very conservative with the amount of exercise that you do. One of the biggest mistakes most people make, second biggest in addition to not training intensely enough, is that people do way too much exercise. They do too many exercises, they do too many sets, and they work out too frequently, which is the next part, under the belief that more is better. Somehow, if one set is good, if I do another one, I'm going to get even better results. If a third will get even better results than that. It doesn't work that way. It's like doing a second set or even a third set of an exercise if the first set was done correctly is like walking up to the elevator, pressing the button, and then pressing it a bunch more times, thinking that maybe the second or third time will get it to come faster. It doesn't. You very, very quickly reach a point of diminishing returns as the volume of exercise increases. And the debate has been going back on this since actually about the 1950s. A lot of people think that it started with Arthur Jones and Nautilus, the recommendation of single set training, but it's actually been going... DeLorm and Watkins was 1953. David should remember this. 51. They started this. They actually started it with their progressive resistance exercise book, and they were talking about three sets, 50 and 75, and then 100% of your 10 rep maximum. And it caught on, but a lot of people looked at the recommendation without really carefully looking at what they were recommending. The whole thing was based on a rehabilitation protocol. They'd been doing work with soldiers coming back from the war. And then Berger, who fudged his results in his studies, but it got popular. And like a lot of things, once enough people think this is the way to do it and it catches on, they'll keep doing it regardless of any evidence to the contrary. But... Yeah, well, Weeder stole pretty much everybody's principles. Well, that's a whole other thing. But here's the thing. If you have a demanding enough stress on the body, there's going to be a limit to the amount that your body can tolerate. And the limit is going to be inversely proportional to how demanding that stress is. After your training, the more conservative you have to be with the volume of training to avoid overstressing your body. You have a certain amount of energy, you have a certain amount of resources over any period of time that your body can devote to recovering from the stress of the workout and then producing the adaptation stimulated by it. Now, like I mentioned before, you very quickly hit a point of diminishing returns. If you're training intensely enough, you will very quickly reach the point, if you're training again, going as hard as you possibly can where the stimulus, the message to your body to produce the adaptive response is maximal. Any additional work beyond that point is not going to make things happen any faster. It's not going to make things happen to any greater degree. What it is going to do, though, is contribute even more stress, even more damage, microtrauma, that your body has to expend energy and resources recovering from. So rather than getting better and better results as you do more exercise, you level off and then at some point, you go past leveling off and you actually start to get worse results because energy that could have gone to adaptation is going to just trying to recover from that effect. Now, the third mistake is people do too many workouts over a period of time without allowing their body adequate time to fully recover and produce the adaptation stimulated by the workouts. You don't just, you know, recover from a workout like that. There are certain things, damage to the muscle tissue in particular that take some amount of time for your body to completely repair and it's like digging a hole. Or actually an even better example, getting a callus. If you were to take a file and draw it across the back of your arm, that would cause damage to your skin that your body would respond to by repairing it and then compensating even a little bit more by thickening it. Now, if you apply that stress and then you give your body a little bit of time to recover and then produce a little bit of a callus and then you do it again. Over a long enough period of time you will develop a relatively thick callus as an adaptation to that stress. But if you don't wait for that skin to recover before you apply that stress again if you just keep doing it over and over and over not only are you not going to get that callus but you are going to end up eventually going right through the skin into the connective tissue and bone. Now it's not a perfect analogy it's a little bit of a gross oversimplification but the principle is the same. If you are training very, very intensely imposing a significant stress on the body your body has to be allowed time to adequately recover from and produce an adaptation before you impose the stress again or you are just going to eventually reach what is considered an over-trained state. Rather than improve you will plateau keep doing it anyways after plateauing eventually you can actually start losing strength and negatively affecting your health depending on the degree to which you go. So the three biggest problems most people have starting out they are not training very hard they are just going through the motions they tend to do way more than they need to and they tend to do way more workouts more frequently than is beneficial. Now in terms of the specifics because this is usually after talking about these things people ask exactly how much should I do and this is where people make another big mistake is expecting there to be a single answer that works well for everybody. If anybody tells you that there is a best exercise for this muscle group if anybody tells you there is a perfect repetition range an ideal repetition speed a best workout a best program they are full of shit and you should turn around and walk away because any more time spent talking to them is a waste. Imagine that you went into a clothing store and you saw a mannequin and had a pair of jeans and a shirt on and looked great on the mannequin looked perfect and the person said that looks great I want that shirt and I want those pants and they said go and find something that fits you I want that that looks great in the mannequin I'm going to take it similar thing happens when people see people in the gym doing something and they say what are you doing you see the big guy back in the corner benching that guy looks awesome and it says follow these five points to add two inches to your arms or something people look at what other people are doing and they assume that that particular person's results can be duplicated if they follow the program that they espouse or that they are supposedly following actually a lot of these magazine programs they make up the people that you see in the pictures have probably never done these workouts and those of them doing the exercise they match them to an article which was probably thrown together over the period of a couple days and tailored to whichever advertisements it was going to be put with but here's the thing there is a general set of principles and these principles apply equally to everybody any normal healthy functioning human being is going to be able to get results if they apply the principles correctly the problem is that there is huge variability in how individuals respond to exercise there's variability not just in genetics but also lifestyle factors and variability in goals and to follow a particular person's program just because they got good results with it does not necessarily mean that it's a good fit for you and it's like if you were to succeed in a particular business you wanted to start a company and you went and looked at somebody else's company who was very successful and how they went about it and tried to copy their exact plan but if you failed to consider that that individual's success in that particular business or any other endeavor might have had to do with factors other than the plan might have even had to do with factors that allowed them to succeed in spite of a bad plan personal connections being in the right place at the right time having specific character traits that allowed them to excel in that particular endeavor and the same thing is true with workouts because there's differences in how much exercise a person can tolerate because there's differences in how quickly some people are able to recover and adapt because there's differences even within some muscle groups between people and sometimes within individuals in whether a higher or maybe a little bit lower repetition range will work better if you try to copy somebody else's plan exactly now depending on how well the plan matches what you need it may work to some extent but unless you dissect it get rid of the specifics look at the principles and apply the principles in accordance with how your body responds you are not going to get the same results and this is a problem because a lot of times what people do is they don't even consider the principles they think that there is a plan a specific workout a program that is going to do the trick for them and they try a program and it doesn't work instead of asking what about this doesn't work what could I change to make it better they just drop it and they jump to a completely different program they don't bother to look at any of the specifics of what they're doing they just toss it wholesale and do something else sometimes eventually they'll find something if they're lucky that does match them but this introduces another problem in that they will often make the assumption that they have found the program suddenly after failing at all these other things they find something that appears to be working for them and they figure this is it and then they become obnoxious like crossfitters and they start telling everybody else this is how you've got to train I did all these other things and it didn't work for me and then I discovered this is a way to do it same with diet same with a lot of other things but then you've got somebody with a different set of genetics who's done something completely differently and they tried the program that that guy did and they didn't get any results from it so that guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about he's clueless they did this thing and this is what worked for them and they completely missed the point because it isn't that it was anything about the specific program that makes it better than every other program out there but just that the way the principles were applied in that particular program was a better fit for them and the strategy that I like to use is getting a sun tan if you want to get a sun tan it doesn't matter if you're a little darker skin my wife is a Filipino she can tan very easily or you guys from ethnicity okay so if you wanted to get a tan you could hand a lot more sun exposure than me and you probably get darker easier I can't tan for crap if I'm outside I burn before anything else a little bit Irish and Dutch, German all that European stuff now if you want to get a tan though regardless of what your skin tone is the same exact stress is required you have to expose yourself to intense sunlight it's going to threaten your skin's ability to do its job just to protect your insides from that radiation and it will respond by producing an increase in melanin and that's the same for everybody same general principle but not everybody can tolerate the same amount of exposure not everybody is going to recover from the stresses produced an adaptation as quickly and in exercise the people who are capable of recovering and adapting and who are very responsive to training are typically the ones that people look to for advice again you see the big guy in the gym and you go and say what did you do for your program because he looks phenomenal and you want to look like that guy problem is that is the same as the average person going and asking somebody who is darker skin and naturally tans you've got an incredible tan what do I need to do to get that exact same tan and if you follow his schedule and if you're as pale as I am you are going to end up getting burned a bunch of times it's not going to work very well for you and again if it worked for them it is at all and there's another tangent related to that but assuming that it worked for them at all it worked for them not because of the specific program but because of those principles training intensely enough not doing too much volume and allowing adequate time to recovery as well as some other things were there again what is too much what is too often is going to be different for somebody who has more general genetics than for most people the problem is when the average person which is most of us tries to copy the people who are several standard deviations away from us on the bell curve and then we assume that we're doing things wrong because we're not looking we don't look like that person you know it's the wrong program it's not the wrong program it's you're applying the principles incorrectly so second the big mistake is looking at people who appear to be successful and assuming that you can copy their success by matching their program specifically instead of looking at what are the principles under the program and how can I apply those to me same thing goes with diet has anybody done presentations on diet okay I won't go off on a big tangent on that though but it's the same thing with training there's no perfect macronutrient ratio there's no perfect you got to get this much protein there's no perfect calories there's no perfect anything there is principles that apply to everybody they're the exact same principles apply to everybody but you have to apply them in accordance with how your body responds and this is the part where people get frustrated because usually when they ask a question how many reps should I do for this exercise which exercise should I do for my thighs how often should I work out they expect me to say you need to give them another a number you tell them exactly this or exactly that there aren't any there are starting places that work well on average but then you have to experiment you have to keep track of what you're doing and you have to keep track of what is important to you that you want to compare what you're doing and what you're getting out of it and if you're not getting what you want out of it you have to change something if you understand the principles you can kind of identify okay maybe I'm not doing this right maybe I'm not training hard enough maybe I'm doing too much and I need to cut back maybe I need a little bit more recovery but what you need to do to determine whether or not what you are doing is going to work in the long run and whether or not you need to change something is to track these things make small changes one variable at a time so that you know what is responsible for a change if the result improves then you know you're moving in the right direction if not then you make a change and you go another way but this is what's necessary to answer most people's questions about what what exercises you know how many reps how often I don't know depends on how your body responds to exercise and it depends on how well you're doing these things in the gym but you have to again look at it from a standpoint not of programs you're never doing a program you are following a set of principles and the application of those principles has to be flexible nothing is set in stone everything is a starting point from which to make adjustments based on how your body is responding to exercise you literally have to treat it like a lifelong experiment keep track of what you're doing keep track of the outcome that you're after make changes note the difference if it's moving you closer to where you want to be you're moving in the right direction if not you moved in the wrong direction you got to move it the other way just to recap you have to train intensely if you're not pushing yourself as hard as your stomach during your workouts you are not going to get the best results that you can if you are training intensely enough then you need to keep your workouts relatively brief I can give you a starting point but it would have to be adjusted most people minimally you need to work all your muscle groups you don't want to ignore your legs or even smaller muscle groups like neck and calves and forearms minimally you need to do at least one exercise for every major muscle group but how much you do during a workout that you can tolerate and recover from maybe you'll do all of them in a workout maybe you'll do two different exercises for a muscle group in a workout or maybe you'll split it up over several you have to work everything that's a minimal you don't have to do it all in the same workout but you don't want to ignore any muscle groups and you have to get enough rest in between workouts again how much I can give you a starting point but what works well for you is that you don't train very hard it takes a while for some people to train intensely so when you're starting out you can train more you can do three, four workouts a week but eventually once you learn to train intensely enough you're going to have to give yourself at least a day in between and some people actually do better with even more rest time in between unfortunately for some people they're way off on the opposite end of the bell curve and they might have to do as little as five or six exercises a week or less because they just have really crappy genetics for being able to tolerate and recover from exercise again there's no program though there is a set of principles and if you want the best possible results you can't just follow a specific thing without looking at how your body is responding and continuing to make adjustments to move the results closer to what you want to get out of it so any questions and if you get questions about specifics then I can help make suggestions for getting closer to the best application yes I had a question in terms of I guess you could say rep ranges and different exercises and growth rates if everything is I guess dependent on how your body responds to it how do you find what's optimal to you until you've literally done every rep range of every exercise because there's no way to really tell like I don't know if it's possible to find what's optimal because it's going to be a moving target age is going to affect it as you get older there's going to be changes depending on how you do the exercise interestingly the repetition range is something that people do have more of a general response to there are going to be some on average most people will respond well to a variety of repetitions some people do respond a little bit better to lower or higher repetitions but most people over a long enough period of time the repetition range that is effective is pretty broad in fact interesting things that have been coming out over the past decade or so there have been studies that have compared the effects on muscular strength with different loads and repetition ranges including one that just came out recently and they found that regardless of whether or not a person uses a very heavy weight and lower repetitions or a shorter rest sorry set duration or if they use a lighter weight and a longer set duration or higher repetitions the end results are the same now that's on average if you take a study and you divide two groups up you might have some people on either side again due to individual variability that are going to do a little better with one or the other now if you wanted to determine this over a long period of time what I tend to see with people if they tend to do better with lower repetitions is a pattern where they will have difficulty getting past some number but if you increase the weight slightly when they get to that number they're able to match it going the other way an indication that somebody might do a little bit better with a higher repetition range is if they get to their upper rep count and then when you add weight they have difficulty getting any repetition sometimes you have to increase the reps more before you add the weight so it's again something that would need to be experimented with you can't just do a test and say well this person is going to respond better to lower or higher actually can't do a test in the gym there's some research suggesting a relationship between ideal repetition range and the genotype for angiotensin converting enzyme but unless you're going to go and get gene tests and have that looked at look at basically patterns and exercise performance if you're aiming for say 6 to 10 and you're constantly stuck at 7 or 8 try adding a little bit weight if you can consistently increase the weight while still hitting that 7 or 8 then you might do well with that on the other hand if you get to 10 you add a little bit weight and then your reps drop significantly the next time you just have a hard time with weight increases go back to the previous weight wait until you get more repetitions before adding a little bit weight and this tends to work better with people who do a little bit better with higher repetitions but in general the majority of people it doesn't seem to make as much of a difference again you're going to have some people either way a little better, a little worse with higher or lower but a broad range seems to be effective hey Drew, thanks for your talk I was wondering if you can improve speed and agility with kind of calisthenic training or can you do it with a slower movement training too you can improve your speed and agility in any particular movement just by getting stronger regardless of how you get stronger you could do so with fast movements you could do so with slow movements you could do so moving isometrically and not moving at all and that is because a big component to speed well speed we're just talking about how fast you're getting from point A to point B to be able to get from point A to point B you have to generate force to propel your body agility is your ability to change direction we're looking at the ability to exert force against your environment now there's other factors, there's skill factors and those skill factors require very specific training the best way to improve your skill in a particular activity is to practice that activity if you want to be a faster runner getting stronger without any change in skill will make you faster but you won't get as fast as you can unless you also practice the same thing with agility in performing different movements but strength is not speed specific if you were to perform an exercise at a slow speed the strength you gain from that exercise is not limited to movements that are done at the same speed regardless of the speed of exercise if a muscle is stronger it will be able to exert more force if it can exert more force it will accelerate you more quickly in different activities an example suppose that in the barbell press you've got a 100 pound barbell and it's the most weight that you can lift if it's the most weight that you can lift then you're not going to be able to lift it very slow or very quickly, it's going to go relatively slow but if you were to take 50 pounds you could lift it relatively quickly several times in succession but remember to increase your strength so that instead of your maximum being 100 pounds it was 200 pounds that 200 pounds would move relatively slowly still wouldn't be able to do that fast if it's your maximum but if you can lift 200 pounds that 100 pounds you could then lift as quickly as you could lift the 50 when 100 pounds was your max so you go from being able to barely lift it and having it move slowly to move it very quickly multiple times in succession regardless of whether you've ever attempted to move it quickly before having the additional strength because ultimately what we're talking about when we're talking about muscular strength is the ability of the muscle to produce force is going to improve that now there are neurological factors that are specific to the activity if you want to become as explosive or as fast as possible in a specific movement you have to also practice that movement and the same thing happens with lifting and this is where a lot of people get confused if you want to be as explosive in an exercise as possible you can get stronger and you can improve explosiveness in the exercise by training slowly but if you want to be as explosive as possible in the specific exercise then you also have to practice the skill of the exercise in an explosive manner the problem is when people extrapolate this to other things and make the erroneous assumption that you have to do weight training explosively to improve the explosiveness in other things it doesn't carry over now you can strength train at any speed and you're going to get stronger and get it more explosive the reason that you want to air on the side of caution with repetition speed is that regardless of the speed of lifting you're going to get stronger but the faster you move the harder it is to maintain correct path of movement and body position and to reverse direction smoothly the greater your risk of injury in the long run fast slow isometric it's all effective but airing on the slow side is going to save your joints can I get just a quick I guess down and dirty sort of definition of strength training versus power strength is your muscles ability to produce force power is the ability to perform a certain amount of work over time the stronger a muscle is the easier it is to accelerate a particular against a particular level of resistance and the more powerful you will be the two are directly related if you improve the muscles ability to produce force you are going to increase the power as a result and this is important and this is another area where a lot of people get things completely wrong when it comes to exercise is when they start thinking of exercise in terms of mechanical work and power crossfit in particular gets this wrong the idea that you have to perform something very rapidly very quickly at a high level of power output to improve your ability to do general activities at a high power output is completely backwards if you improve muscular strength regardless of the speed that you are doing the exercises at the muscles will be stronger if they are stronger they can exert more force and they can accelerate either your body more quickly if you are trying to move your body to accelerate another object more quickly if they are moving another object the stronger a muscle is the greater your potential power production now you have to practice a specific activity to be as skilled as possible in that activity and the more skilled you are in a particular movement the more efficiently you perform that the less energy is wasted the more you will be able to do that without fatigue the higher your power output will be for the specific activity practice that you are doing your power output in general it is primarily a matter of increasing muscular force and the same goes for things like metabolic conditioning there is this assumption that to improve the demand an exercise on the heart on the cardiovascular system on its ability to support muscular work that you have to do these things at high power output there is no direct relationship physical power output and exercise and the metabolic demand metabolic work and mechanical work there is no relationship if I were to have somebody come up here right now and I hand them a heavy barbell and just have them hold it perfectly motionless you are not performing any mechanical work if you don't attempt to lift it you are not performing work on the barbell muscles are performing work they are performing metabolic work energy is being able to is used to be able to maintain the tension to hold that barbell in place you could have somebody perform a workout that placed a huge demand on their cardiovascular system without moving their body other than just changing positions if you had them do a series of very demanding isometric exercises it is possible to produce a significant metabolic demand without any significant mechanical work you don't need to have a lot of physical power output a lot of mechanical work to place a demand on your muscles energy use I have heard you mentioned before that you don't have to do like abdominal exercises to get abs but when I do do sit ups and leg raises it feels really sore there is it doing anything or is it just direct abdominal work is not at all necessary to get well defined abdominal muscles the appearance has more to do with body fat level than anything else if you do work for the abdominal muscles and you thicken the muscles you have greater I guess a relief would be the term the difference in height between the thickest portion of the muscles and the connective tissue that is separating the segments of it so there is a role to exercise in improving the appearance of the abdominal muscles but regardless of how strong and well developed they are if you don't have low body fat they are not going to be visible on the other hand it is possible for somebody that doesn't have very good abdominal strength or development to have well defined abs if their body fat is low enough ideally you want both what are some signs or responses that the body gives you for fatigue or over working out the easiest thing is you will start to see that people's workouts will stagnate they will fail to improve or even worse they will start performing worse workout to workout basis easiest thing to track is what you are doing in terms of repetitions and sets if you are recovering and your body is able to produce the adaptation stimulated then you should see relatively steady improvement over time now that improvement is not going to go at the same rate for a very advanced training as it is for a beginner that has to be kept into account I know a lot of people who make the assumption of thinking that because they were able to go up at a particular rate when they started they should continue and then as they become more advanced and progress levels off they assume they are over training when they are not because of that there are a lot of people who are familiar with these principles who have actually cut their training back too much too soon they go in the opposite direction because they have unrealistic expectations of progress but if you are stimulating your body to produce an adaptive response and if you are allowing it adequate time if you are eating well resting well if you are doing everything else you should see steady improvement over time that would be a first indication if you are not improving then if you know you are training intensely enough you know you are not doing too much in the workouts and you are probably not giving yourself enough time between you could end up being tired some people will notice a lack of motivation to train and if you are severe you can even end up with flu-like symptoms and you just generally feel like crap all the time some people even have difficulty sleeping but usually first indication that you are doing too much is you are going to start to level off in your workouts you are going to stop seeing improvement my question is there it is not something that I think I heard touched on too much but I was hoping you could provide me some insight is there a specific type or way of exercising that I can do to improve my ability to recruit the muscle I can in the shortest amount of time and move more explosively basically no just get stronger anything that will get you stronger will do that you have to get stronger now general explosiveness just the ability to very rapidly move in any movement is going to improve just by getting stronger and you can do that a lot of different ways any again there is no specific program you have to take the principles and apply them modify them so that it is working for you a lot of different ways you can do that you can do it with a lot of different equipment as long as you are getting stronger you are going to improve that explosiveness now if you want to become more explosive in a specific activity then you need to also practice that activity you need to learn and practice the correct mechanics of the activity and then once you have those mechanics down you have to attempt to progressively increase the explosiveness of the activity during practice take something like a jab or a cross in boxing now if you get stronger even if you don't practice if you just get stronger you are going to be able to throw that more explosively the more you produce the more rapidly it is going to be able to accelerate your body in any movement if you want to do that as well as possible you have to learn the proper body mechanics for it and practice to ingrain those and then you have to practice trying to do it while maintaining those correct mechanics faster and faster so that you are improving the skill component of it but for any general activity if you get stronger regardless of how you strengthen if your strength increases you are going to be more explosive if you want to be more explosive in a very specific activity then you have to also practice the activity and practice it explosively no amount of slow punching is going to improve your ability to do a fast explosive punch get the mechanics down and then work on improving the speed while maintaining correct mechanics so to clarify strength training will never slow you down as long as you are practicing the movement there is this idea that if you have too much muscle mass it can be a negative in some things and that may be the case in extreme events if we are talking about long distance running if you wanted to run marathons you probably don't want to put on about 50 more pounds of muscle unless it is all in your legs there are going to be some exceptions but in general the more muscle you have the stronger you are the faster the more explosively you are going to be able to produce any particular movement and something to keep in mind is that again like I talked about earlier the whole point of increasing the muscle mass is to improve your body's ability to move to be able to cope with whatever threat in your environment the body thinks it is going to have to handle you would not add tissue add weight if the benefit in terms of movement didn't exceed the additional weight you would never for example gain so much mass on your thighs that the additional mass was more than you could lift with those muscles there is a huge huge difference in the amount of force that the tissue can add relative to the weight that it adds that you are working against moving your body so yeah you would never become so muscular in general that the added muscle weight would result in a net loss of strength any more questions alright let's give it up for Drew Bay thank you