 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 DeSimon's presentation last year, there's certain biomechanics of every joint, of every muscle, and muscles are patently ignored in the gym. There's thought of as a suggestion rather than, you know, you've seen guys doing a behind the neck military press. They prop up, and they grab the bar here. They're going, yeah, awesome. I'm really feeling my deltoid. What they're actually feeling is ligament binding and impingement at the joint. Because your arms come into your scapula. 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. It comes into your shoulder blade, attaches to the AC joint, which then attaches here to the clavicle. Okay, so it comes in at 30 degrees off of the, what's called the frontal plane, which cuts you from the 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 AC joint as 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 as 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 resting heart rate. Blood panels are good. Your testosterone's still up 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 aromatase you have. The more aromatase you have, the more of the testosterone that you are producing gets turned into estrogen. And the more this ratio gets out of whack. 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 cocksure. 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 and their testosterone to estrogen ratio gets a little smaller. They have a little bit less testosterone to their estrogen. They become a little calmer. They become a little less manlike. Because testosterone has two functions. Truly two functions. I'm getting crass and you all better laugh. Ready? Bucket 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 and out 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 at the 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, busing his ass, and the rest of the 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? And so on and so forth. So I've got some examples. I'm fortunate enough that I've trained people 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 they're patient. Their demands from training is that their bones get stronger. And strangely enough that they have someone to talk to. Personal training is not unlike hairdressing. I mean, you are dealing 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 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 and yet they're still here to work out in the morning and maybe you should go easy on me. 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. 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 power lifter and you could tell he had a barrel chest. He had short legs, short arms. He trained three exercises once a week. He came in. He did a pull down. He did 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. Ben, at a height of about 5'7", had over 16.5 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. 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. And he ran an IT company. Austin's got a lot of those. 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 it because business demands. He had travel, he had kids, he had so on. 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. But he understood that. Most guys who are big and strong don't understand that it's not that you aren't as big and strong as me because you work less hard. 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? 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. I have one right now person. She's in her early 60s. Shredded to the bone. She and her, she's a physical therapist. And she, a number of years ago, decided to compete in Primal Quest. Now, Primal Quest is interesting in that 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. 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. 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. 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 of the competitors were in their mid-30s. Some were in their late teens, but they were usually like a fourth man on a team. 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. I know that when I was younger, I had this idea that being in your 50s and 60s meant that the slowdown was inevitably going to happen. That's probably because of Western aging, the people we see. 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. Who are breaking that mold? 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 I'm not going to do anything after that. 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 he sends me lots of jokes. And he always does 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, grandpas, 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 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, Mom, 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 a grandmaster under the sheets. Grandmaster, they wear sheets. Guys, 80. Guys, 80. Clearly his testosterone ratio is still good.