 And the other, and this is where already, at your young age, you guys are at a big disadvantage. The other component of health is an appropriate balance between a catabolic and an anabolic state. A catabolic state is anything that results in tissue breakdown or destruction or turnover. And an anabolic state is anything that results from energy, input, and construction or building. Now the vast majority of people in our society are suffering from an imbalance of the anabolic state relative to the catabolic state. They are in a continuous process of energy consumption and a continued process of trying to drive growth. And that produces several very unhealthy states that we'll talk about. But one is by having a continual input of energy, your DNA makes assessments on how best to propagate itself into the future. If you are very replete with energy, then your DNA's assessment is there is enough bounty or plenty around that we can propagate ourselves into the future effectively by reproduction. So sexual maturation occurs quickly, reproduction occurs quickly. Women reach menarchy in their first menses, nowadays as early as age nine. Whereas 20 or 30 years ago, most women didn't reach menarchy until about age 15. Hence the kinsen year and all the fertility rituals in most cultures that sent around the 15th birthday. The problem is, is that also results in accelerated disease processes and accelerated aging. Now during the catabolic state, what your DNA looks at it says, we're energy replete. Everything's depleted, there's not much energy. The best way that I can propagate myself into the future is not offspring. Because offspring require more energy and there is not an abundance of energy now. The way I propagate myself into the future is to undergo DNA repair processes. And that balance between the anabolic and catabolic state is what keeps you healthy. If you get out of balance with it, then that's when you start having health problems and your body composition goes to crap. Now, that's a problem for anyone that's going through that process in their life. In terms of this imbalance between an anabolic state and a catabolic state, and the completely wrong foodstuffs that Mark Sisson educated you guys about yesterday, your generation is the first generation that has been poisoned in this way beginning in utero. This year is the first year that we've had an epidemic of what used to be called adult onset diabetes. We're having an epidemic of type 2 diabetes in nine month olds. Because yours was the first generation that really got loaded down with this and we'll talk more about it in the biochem part. But you have been poisoned starting in utero. Most of you guys are about at the age where if I would have had kids at the normal time, any one of y'all could be of age to be my kid. And I can tell you this, all my friends back in the 80s, the first time their kid had a diarrhea poop or any colic, they went to the pediatrician, they changed their formula, they put them on soy formula. Well, it happened to a lot of you guys and that is the hormonal equivalent of putting your baby on birth control pills. It wreaked hormonal havoc on your body and set the stage for you to have problems with your weight, your insulin control, the ability to gain muscle and to respond to exercise. So you guys are already starting from a dugout hole. Now, let's say you get the exercise bug and you really get hooked with it because you're getting positive results. Well, the natural thought with that, particularly in our command and control society where we like to make sure everything's regimented and we're driving the process and we're in control of it, is to do more and more and more. Well, the problem is that you can get more and more fitness, but in the process of doing so, instead of it being too much anabolic, too little catabolic, all of a sudden you flip the table. And now you have an excess catabolic state relative to that anabolic state and then you're over-trained and producing a lot of systemic inflammation from that. So your fitness can actually undermine your health. And the vast majority of people that follow conventional fitness wisdom end up doing a form of exercise of insufficient intensity to actually stimulate a good adaptive response. And as a consequence, try to make up for that by doing a higher volume of work. And it's that higher volume of work that creates this catabolic-antibolic imbalance. So let's define fitness. If fitness is what we're after, what the hell is it? Well, Arthur DeVaney, one of the fathers of the evolutionary fitness lifestyle that Marxists and champions, coined the term physiologic headroom. And I like to think of fitness as that. It is the difference between the most you can do and the least you can do. And most people in our contemporary society, as they age, their physiologic headroom gradually does this. And on the day when the most you can do equals the least you can do, that's called dead. And that's the way the vast majority of people in our society are living. You guys started off in the whole in utero. So even though many of you are very young, you're already halfway down this sliding decline of functional ability. What you want and what is easy to accomplish with the appropriate stimulus is to preserve that physiologic headroom, make it as high as possible, gradually progress it over time so it's even higher, and keep this high level of physiologic headroom all the way through your entire life until the day you die. And it just drops all of a sudden. It's like the old one horse sheath. It's healthy all of its life, pulls the plow forever and then just without warning, heals over. Doesn't feel sick, doesn't feel bad, just dies. That's the way to live your life and that's the way to live it over time. Now, discussing the concept of the workout itself, I want to discuss the underlying biology of it. And what you've got to understand is that it's not a matter of doing a certain amount of work or a certain amount of sets or any sort of recipe that you can follow. Your body does not work that way. Your body responds to signals in the hormonal environment. Anyone with a girlfriend knows that. Hormones rule everything. Signaling rules everything in biology. So what you're wanting to do with your workouts to get the most results from them is to produce the appropriate signal. And that signal is going to act on your body which we'll call an organism. And if that organism has the appropriate resources, it will make an adaptive response. But make no mistake, the signal is a threatful and negative thing. So you have to dose it out appropriately. And what the signal is, is fatigue or weakening. You think, well, I'm going in the gym to get stronger. Well, in the long term, yes. In the short term, no. What you're really trying to do is produce a momentary fatigue of your musculature that's very weak. That's very significant. If you do that, everything else will track along naturally. But let's say we take you into the gym on any given movement. And at the beginning of that movement, you have 100 units of force capability. You can put out 100 units at maximal effort. Well, I'm not going to pick 100 units as your resistance on whatever piece of equipment we're using because as soon as you start pushing and you fatigue down to 99, you'd be done. And it wouldn't last very long. So if you've got 100 units of capability, we'll select a resistance of 70 units. And we will have you very slowly and smoothly lift that weight and lower that weight. And lift it and lower it. But what's happening here is if we've selected that resistance appropriately, you're going to be aggressively recruiting muscle, which is organized in little packets called motor units. And you're going to aggressively recruit them in a particular order that goes from the weakest and smallest to the strongest and biggest. And you're going to go through that order. And if we fatigue you aggressively enough with enough weight, you will sequentially fatigue out those motor units so that you become progressively weaker with every second that you're working out. And what's going to happen is you will keep going up and down and up and down. And somewhere along in here, you'll start to feel really panicky because your body instinctually feels the window between your capability and the resistance selected closing. And it produces an intense panic because that intense panic came out of millions of years of evolution where you were wrestling or fighting with a rival or an animal and you were very equally matched. And when that fatigue starts to close the window between the two of you, you know you're about to die. That's encoded into your GNA and you will feel that panic here and you will want to stop. But if you're appropriately motivated and or appropriately instructed, you can keep pushing until you get to the point where your maximal effort is now producing 69 units of force. 69 units of force cannot lift 70 units of weight and you have now reached muscular fatigue or muscular failure. Try as hard as you may to continue any additional movement and it won't go because your force output does not exceed the weight selected. You really want to quit now, but if you're appropriately motivated or appropriately instructed you will continue to try to produce movement for an additional 5 or 10 seconds which will drive your level of fatigue down even further. So what's happened in this single set of exercise that took 90 seconds is a rate and depth of fatigue that calls to you from your evolutionary past and says you nearly died and you need to adapt to this. So the next time you're ever faced with a struggle like this, you will have some reserves left over. This is a strong stimulus to synthesize new muscle and the metabolic systems that support it. So not just the muscle but the conditioning to support it. So what happens is over the course of several days you will synthesize that new muscle and you will then become with that much capability. Well if you go to Patrick's gym or you go have Drew train you, he'll look at your workout card and he'll go, hmm, really? Okay, there we go. And they'll repeat the whole process again. And do that in a sequential step-wise fashion over time. You become stronger and more capable. But here's the key. This signal that responded on your body is a negative thing. So once you invoke it, you want to allow your body the opportunity to synthesize the adaptive response. Let's say you want to put on a pound of muscle. Doesn't sound like much. But go down to your grocery store and pick up a pound of ground around and make the realization that my body has to synthesize that de novo out of the blue. Just out of the nutrients and whatever you have hanging around in your body. And you realize that that process is going to take time. And what we've come to find out, what the big aha was that I wish I had known when I was 21, that I didn't figure out until I was about 40, was that this amount of time is much longer than we originally realized.