 Alright guys, that's got done. I went a little bit over. I apologize to Drew, but Do what I had to do But this guy is awesome This guy is way very well known personal trainer Orlando and internationally to actually he runs a great blog at Bay comm It's one of the best blogs. I believe ever written on exercise I think it's kind of a long stretch, but I really believe it to be true I've read through like every single post multiple times So without further ado on it, I just want to give him a lot of time. So kick-ass Drew. Well, thank you very much Thank you I'm gonna go over a lot of the stuff that Anthony did I'm gonna break it down into a little bit more about practical application more of the How-to than the theory I just want to start out there saying that Physique is Not nearly as important as game obviously. Yeah, there are people out there who are in not very good shape But if they've got game They're gonna outdo somebody who doesn't thing is if everything else is equally get two people who get the same game The one with the better physique is most likely to end up bringing the woman home So anything that you can do to improve you should now as far as physique development I'm not talking about bodybuilding in the sense that most people think up a lot of people think bodybuilding and they think about the I like to call freak pageants that you see in the bodybuilding magazines Most women look at these guys and they do not find them attractive if anything they're disgusted by them It's an unnatural level of development. It's not something that's healthy. It's not something It's normal and it's not something that's going to get you anywhere with most women Outside of maybe a couple freaks that are really into that kind of thing So we're not talking about developing Massive physics also not talking about getting down to you know low single-digit body fat levels having abs is nice, but Ultimately, it doesn't make that huge of a difference as long as you have a low enough body fat level that you look reasonably good Used to be obsessed with it used to be Ridiculously strict with my diet to the point where most of the time Everything I ate was weight everything I it was measured out and I maintained Right around a six or seven percent all the way through college until I was out with a couple of my co-workers and our boss one day We went to a restaurant and of course Given the weight of the hard time about have to have a chicken have to know how many ounces is this how many ounces of vegetables all This other stuff and he finally got sick of he stopped me. He said you know what get some fucking fries And I said well I you know, I need to keep and I started into the whole body fat thing and he stopped me and said Most women have decided whether they're gonna fuck you or not long before they've seen your abs and after that I didn't worry about it too much and Honestly, it didn't make quite that much of a difference Obviously you want to have some muscle on you. You want to be relatively lean, but there's no need There's really no benefit into going to kind of extremes that a competitive bodybuilder would now Gonna break it down into two different topics building muscle and losing fat and Starting with the building muscle You've got a couple basic principles and most of this comes down to stress physiology If trying to build muscle what you're trying to do is send a message to your body That the amount of muscle it currently has is inadequate to meet the demands that your environment is placing on it And we do that by exposing your muscles to a stress Attention that is greater than what they're accustomed to during day-to-day activity We're trying to say to the body this amount of muscles inadequate to do the job that it has to do You know Anthony talked about intensity the Difficulty level and I mentioned going to failure earlier. Well If you are working your muscles against the level of resistance working them against Something that is not so difficult Something that they're accustomed to you're not sending a message to your body that it needs to produce any adaptation if it is a stress That is not greater than what the body normally encounters There's no benefit. There's no reason to Improve the body's capability to adapt or capability to handle that stress in a lot of ways It's like getting a suntan if you were to go outside On a cloudy day It's a middle of January and you had a typical level of sunlight not too intense Not you know really low either not enough that's going to stress your skin enough that it's going to stimulate any kind of production of a tan Same kind of thing is the case when you lift weights or do something that's Moderately challenging but not harder than what your muscles are accustomed to and this is what you see most people doing when they go Into the gym They'll kind of go through the motions and do a couple sets a couple different exercises for biceps chest a couple things But they never really work anywhere near hard enough to produce anything near a meaningful level of difficulty where their body is going to say This is something that we need to change to be able to handle in the future Generally Well, how many people here are familiar with the pre-op principle or the 80-20 rule Okay Generally about 80 percent of your results come down to about 20 percent of the things that you do with training Of those 20 percent the absolute most important thing and the thing that everything else is going to be based on is that Intensity if you do not have a high enough intensity a high enough level of effort in the training Then nothing else you do is going to make any difference the exercise selection won't make any difference the number of exercises how often you train Nothing else will matter if you don't have a very very high level of intensity and by a high level of intensity I'm talking about working the muscle to the point where it is beyond Significantly beyond anything that your body encounters on a day-to-day basis For example If a person could lift a hundred pounds easily 10 times 15 times 20 times or so in a particular exercise if they continually do that same weight for that same number Over and over again. They're not challenging their body to do something that is significantly beyond its current capability however, if they attempt to lift Say 150 pounds in that particular exercise and it was so difficult that after Say seven or eight strict repetitions. They got to point Where it became began to become difficult to lift The muscles started burning their breathing having and yet they continued to attempt to lift it Let's say they got one or two more repetitions And then it started to slow down and they continued to try but they could barely move it and they still attempted They completed another repetition say they got to 11 or so and it got to the point where no matter How hard they were contracting if you were to put a gun to their head and say do another repetition And they could not continue beyond that point That is the point that you want to get to in an exercise and going to that point You are essentially telling your body that this is absolutely Essential that we are able to adapt to this so that in the future when we're exposed to the same level of difficulty We are able to handle it better See your body has no idea that what you're doing is lifting a barbell or working against a machine Going back to what Anthony discussed about you know evolution Anything in biology exercise included only really makes sense if you look at it in an evolutionary standpoint for a few million years The only time that we worked that hard is if something was trying to eat us or if we were trying to kill Something else to eat it From a survival standpoint those two things are absolutely essential obviously something eats you you're dead and if you can't eat other things and Mainly again getting protein getting fats by killing other things to eat them You're dead, so Anything that is extremely challenging that is that difficult is perceived by your body to be a life-or-death situation And your body is only going to produce an adaptation like an increase in muscle size if it sees it as absolutely necessary Because more muscle mass is expensive Metabolically for your body to be able to maintain now if you're training hard enough Then there's going to be a limit to how much your body can tolerate The two biggest mistakes most people make with their workouts are to do way too much exercise too often and That's possible because they don't train hard enough if most people were to train as hard as they ought to They would have to cut their volume at least in half and in some cases much much more than that Again going back to getting a suntan If you're lifting hard enough if you're exposing your body to a significant amount of stress specifically your muscles ability to Produce force to move against that resistance You're going to be stimulating an adaptive response You're exposing it to a very very intense stress if you're going out and getting a suntan if you're laying out You know noon and August on a clear day you're exposing your skin to a stress It is stressing the skin's ability to protect your body against that radiation Up to a point very hard training is going to stimulate an adaptive response up to a point Laying out an intense sunlight is going to stimulate an adaptive response but beyond some point You're not stimulating any further improvements You're starting to cause damage that your body is going to require more energy to recover from and if you expose your Body to too much too often you're going to end up with rather than an improvement and in terms of an adaptive response You're going to end up with a breakdown or degradation of the tissue in the case of exercise Too much too often rather than getting stronger eventually get to the point where you get weaker become more fatigued In case of a sun a sunlight eventually instead of tanning you just end up burning yourself long term End up with skin cancer just wrinkly leather-like skin Well if a person is training hard enough, and if they're not training hard enough again That's the main thing if you take away nothing else you have to train extremely hard if a person is not training hard enough Then there's not going to be any Significant benefit, but if they are they have to be very very careful with the amount of exercise They do so that they don't go beyond the point where they're stimulating improvements into the point where they're just breaking things down Now in addition to being careful about the amount It's important that a person allow adequate time for their body afterwards to recover from that stress and be able to produce the Adaptive the adaptation to it again coming back to the suntan, but it's the same with pretty much any stress Up to a point your body is able to tolerate and adapt to a stress But with any stress if you're exposed to it now too long too often Eventually the exposure to that stress is going to overcome your body's capabilities for dealing with it You're going to end up with damage to whatever tissue or whatever system is being stressed again Suntan over time you end up with burns You end up with all sorts of skin problems in the case of exercise and specifically if we're talking about muscle over time You just break down not only the muscle tissue, but you have an inflammatory response that Causes problems with the nervous system a bunch of other problems Eventually if you over train enough instead of getting stronger again, you will get weaker and you will have a loss of muscle mass Now in practical terms as far as how much exercise and how often it varies completely from person to person And again suntan is easiest example someone who has say you know Mediterranean or Say you know African background is going to be able to tolerate a lot higher intensity of sunlight and for a longer period of time and more Frequently than somebody from Norway or somebody Irish My wife is Filipino. She can be outside all day long on You know middle August, you know clear skies She's never had a son or in her life. She responds very quickly. She gets very very dark, but never burns I'm about a quarter Irish quarter Dutch quarter German quarter French I don't have anything you know in my background that would allow me to better tolerate You know a lot of sun exposure if I were to try to do the same thing that she was as far as tanning I would end up burned and same with exercise and varies from person to person What is too much for one person might not be it for another now on average? The majority of people are not going to benefit from training for more than maybe 25 30 minutes at a time doing typically one set per exercise of one exercise for all the major muscle groups That's right in the middle to the extremes You do have some people who can train for five days a week and make progress Even training an hour hour and a half at a time, but these people are not normal on the other hand You have some people who actually require up to two even three weeks between workouts to make any kind of progress at all And that's with very very limited amount of exercise. These people are pretty rare, too They are one far into the spectrum. Most people are right about in between The important thing for any individual though and to be able to tell if you're doing too much Too often is keeping accurate records of your workouts accurate records your progress Again, if you're training hard enough You have to make sure you overdo it. You have to not do too much. You have to not do too often Practically to know whether you're doing too much or too often You have to know whether you're improving on a regular basis as far as muscular size increases are concerned Even at very very good rate of progress. You're not going to see changes on a daily or a weekly basis at best rate You might gain you know starting out few pounds of muscle a month some people more some people less But that's not something that's really easy to measure so that you can make adjustments on a weekly basis if you're waiting You know weeks months at a time to make measurements and adjust You're wasting time getting to a point where you can make a change where if you're paying attention to how your body's Funding on a workout to workout basis. You can make a little shorter if you're getting stronger on a workout to workout basis You know, you're training hard enough. You know You're not overdoing it where you're over stressing the body and preventing the adaptation from being produced And you know that you're allowing adequate time in between for the body to completely recover and produce that adaptive response Starting out Every exercise you do you should write down the exercise the amount of weight used amount of repetitions performed The following workout same thing you write all that down and you compare if you're getting stronger You know that you're not doing too much. You know you're training hard enough You know you're allowing adequate rest in between if not one of those things is missing you're either not stimulating the improvement You're doing too much and overstressing your body and not allowing it to produce the improvement Or you're not allowing it adequate time to recover from the effects of the workout and produce that improvement Now in practical terms a lot of people are wondering well, where do we start with us? You know how much to do starting out to be able to compare Most people starting out do best with a few exercises and then gradually increasing that Up to the point where they start seeing that they're not making any improvements and then they know that that's about the top That's about as much volume as they can tolerate and then from there cutting back Minimally obviously you have to do enough exercise that you're working all the major muscle groups If you're not working a muscle, it's not improving. So that sets our absolute baseline You need to have at least a certain number of exercises. This is actually a lot less than what most people would assume though You could actually work all the major muscle groups in your body with a small handful of exercises effectively minimally if you did one heavy compound Basically multi-joint hip and thigh movement a squat or a deadlift You would have your glutes your hamstrings your quadriceps and most people don't think about it But when you're doing any kind of squatting or pressing movement, it's not just the hips and knees bending But also the ankles you're involving your calves if you're doing a pressing movement in both a horizontal and a vertical plane You're working your chest. You're working your shoulders You're working your triceps and doing so if you're doing and say a standing press with a barbell You're also working the abdominal muscles and other muscles that are helping you maintain posture if you're doing two pulling movements Also in a horizontal and a vertical plane a row of some sort in a pull-down You're going to work Everything in your upper back the back of your shoulders your topes Yes, if we go from top to bottom if we just say barbell squat or a leg press a Chest press and shoulder press either a barbell bench press and You know standing press of the barbell or if you use a chest press and shoulder press machine then if you're doing a rowing movement a machine or a cable row a barbell row and a Vertical pulling movement either a chin up a pull-up a pull-down machine Between those you get pretty much everything from your traps all the way down to your calves The pulling movements between just those two are going to get everything your biceps Your forearms are involved anytime you're doing any pulling movement between just those two pushing movements You've got your triceps twice. You've got the front the top of the shoulder Rear deltoids are covered anytime you do any pulling movement as well as you know If you're doing the pressing movement and the pulling movement you've got pretty much your entire traps So that would be your absolute minimum starting out a push and a pull in both horizontal and vertical planes And a compound pressing movement for the legs After that after a few weeks getting those down Then you can start adding in other exercises Based on your body now some people are going to find that certain muscle groups develop a little faster than others Typically people can be divided into two categories. You've got your people who have Great torso development. They have an easy time developing their chest easy time developing their lats But very very difficult time with their arms Sometimes shoulders forearms and then you have some people who have a really easy time developing their arms Very very much difficulty developing the chest the back Whether or not the exercises that you add focus on any specific muscle group should depend on how it seems to be developing In proportion to the others now the benefit to adding in an isolation movement for these exercises is not adding more Exercise in most cases adding more exercise is not a positive thing The benefit of an isolation exercise is that you can make the exercise Harder for the specific muscle being worked again if you're doing a pulling movement Chest or like a row or a pull down a chin up anything like that your biceps your upper back your rear delts Traps rhombus bunch of stuff is involved, but not all those muscles are being worked Absolutely Maximally and it's going to be a little different depending on the person depending on bodily proportions depending on how specifically you're performing the exercise They're all going to be worked hard enough that you're going to be able to see improvements in all those muscles But if you happen to have a particular muscle group say in one person's case It's their biceps in the other person case. It's their lats You might benefit from adding an additional isolated exercise for that muscle group again Not because it's the extra exercise that is improving it It's because an isolation exercise allows you to work that particular muscle harder But you have to be careful again adding exercise over time that you're keeping track making sure you're progressing on that With the legs If person is adding in exercises, I generally don't recommend performing more than one heavy Compound movement if you're doing leg press or squat in a workout. You wouldn't want to add deadlifts on top of that Maybe doing now leg extension a leg curl depending on where you're seeing and not as much progress So let's say we start out. We've got our compound pressing movement for the legs We've got a push and a pull and a horizontal and a vertical plane You want to start adding to that? Let's say you know in the case of particular person that biceps triceps aren't coming along as much they would add in Bicep a curl for the bicep tricep any extension You don't need to be picky about you know wide grip narrow grip hammer curls or any of that stuff We'll go into why that's not important later on as far as the legs adding and isolating exercises if you want to do something specific for the quadriceps a leg extension machine and for the hamstrings either a leg curl machine or Possibly a stiff-legged deadlift which isn't going to be as demanding as a regular deadlift It's a little bit more of an isolation exercise with glutes and hamstrings But still you gotta gotta watch with the volume with that now over time So over a period of two to three months you're gradually adding volume and you get to a point where suddenly you start noted Noticing on your charts. Okay. We're not making that much strength increase anymore Well, that's when you need to start backing it down a little bit if you're stopping improvement again You're either not training hard enough. You're doing too much or you're not allowing adequate recovery time Now we've gradually built up the volume a little bit over time to the point where say you're doing Maybe at the most about ten exercises again. We started with our five You got compound leg movement pushing pull in a horizontal plane comes to five So we had another bicep exercise a tricep exercise Maybe you're doing something specific for the quadriceps and hamstrings and then maybe calves forearm whatever and after a while You start to see a slowdown in progress then we start to go in the other direction and Cut back How you cut back would depend again Let's say a particular exercise is not progressing if you're seeing that you're not progressing in a bicep exercise then Now assuming you're training hard enough The problem is that you're either doing too much for or not allowing adequate time to recover for that specific muscle group In which case that would be where you would cut back and there's different ways that you could cut back You could drop the exercise from the workout You could drop it to every other workout or this is where you can start dividing things up between two workouts Now I would recommend still doing full-body workouts But in dividing it up you would move one of the compound pushing movements one of the compound pulling movements to one workout and Do the other and the other so let's say One workout we've got our compound leg movement. We've got our press and our pull So you're doing both in a horizontal plane other workout doing the press and the pull in a vertical plane And then you have you know still some room to do biceps and triceps along with that quadriceps You know hamstrings specifically, but you're bringing down the total amount of volume of work that you're doing per workout So does everybody following everything so far? So three calf again, it's got to be as hard as possible The workouts should be brutally hard if somebody were standing there with a gun to your head During the workout telling you you have to get another rep You want to go until you get to the point where even if they're doing that you could not get another repetition in good form though You never want to sacrifice form for the sake of the repetition you want to do enough That you're working all the major muscle groups, and this does not mean doing a single exercise for every single one But doing exercises in the workout that address all of them again If you're doing compound movements, you're addressing a lot of different muscles simultaneously and then making sure you're getting adequate recovery time between workouts Now for recovery time starting out three times a week is fine for people If you get to the point where after working out for again a couple months You start to see a slowdown and you start to cut you know divide the routines up Let's hear it's going between an A and a B routine and just to throw an example of something like that out there say one routine we've got our squat and a Chest press and a row for the three compound movements on top of that you might do a bicep curl Might do a tricep extension and since the squats if you're doing a more upright posture tend to be a little bit more quadricep heavy Maybe throw in a hamstring exercise along with that. Let's say you know you can tolerate that volume the other workout Deadlift say a standing press a weighted chin up or pull down or something like that And since you're doing the direct bicep and tricep exercise the other workout Maybe do something for forearms in this workout a lot of people neglect forearms But as far as how much of your body is visible most of the time people are going to see your forearms more often They're gonna see your ab or anything else and it pays to work on them so that you have an overall well Balanced appearance of the arms. So anyway, let's say we do curls and extensions for forearms in that workout Since doing a deadlift to be a little bit more gluten hamstring heavy You're gonna throw an isolation exercise in it should be more a quadricep exercise And then let's say we throw in again calves or something like that Anyways, you've got a little bit less volume You've got to the point where you found how much volume you can tolerate and then again you start to slow down a little bit It's usually when it's time to start adding extra days of rest in between This is where most people have a real hard time people start to think I've got to be in the gym If I'm not in there exercising, I'm not going to be improving but again You have to allow time between workouts for your body to recover from and then produce an adaptation To the stress of the workout the workout itself does not actually cause any kind of improvements directly The workout is something that your body perceives as a negative event. It's a Extreme stress not only on the muscles ability to do their job But on all the other systems supporting your cardiovascular system your nervous system Even your liver is being stressed when you're going through a workout your bones pretty much Yeah, pretty much everything it is a negative thing as far as your body is concerned The workout does not directly cause any improvements. The workout is just a messenger. It's a stimulus It's a way of telling your body the environment is placing a demand on it that if it does not Respond to if it does not improve its ability to handle Eventually is going to kill it and again back to the evolutionary standpoint your body has no idea you're lifting a barbell or machine It thinks you're trying to kill something else, which is Essential if you're going to obtain food or I think something else is trying to kill you now It's the time in between It's the rest it's the recovery is where your body is producing those improvements And you're better off having more clean workouts for your body to fully recover and produce the improvements Work out too often and not have that happen again with the suntan Suppose that after a bit of experimentation you found that if you were to lay out about 12 minutes per side and Get out of the Sun that that's about as much as you can tolerate before you start to burn And you tanned pretty good pace after that you wouldn't go out lay out 12 minutes flip over 12 minutes Come back inside and then go out five minutes later and do it all over again If you were to attempt to do that you would even though you only did it for 12 minutes on each side at a time You would still end up being burned because you wouldn't have allowed your body adequate time to recover from that stress and produce an adaptation to it Now if you work out you're producing Microtrauma damage tears in the muscle and Without getting a hold on to the physiology of it. These are what start the adaptive response But as part of that process your body has to repair that damage that requires a certain amount of time as A result of that damage you have inflammation The inflammation has an effect on your immune system actually involves an immune system That has an effect on your nervous system and all of these things are things that it takes your body a certain amount of time to recover from if you work out and Then say your body needs two or three days, but you work out again, you know a day later Your body is still trying to recover from all those effects of the previous workout It hasn't even gotten to the point where it's fully produced any kind of improvement You are digging a hole deeper and deeper placing more and more of a stress on your body for it to recover from and Never letting it get to the point where it's able to produce the adaptations that you're trying to stimulate in the first place again If you're training as hard as possible You have to be careful about the amount because if you're training hard enough It's placing a significant stress on your body that it has to recover from if you do not allow your body to recover from that stress Then you're spinning your wheels. You're not going to see any improvement and the worst-case scenario too much too often You could actually make yourself weaker over time now If any of you have read any bodybuilding magazines, this is gonna sound like here sites You're gonna sound like absolutely ridiculous. Well Arnold or this guy or that guy has been working out for years And they're doing two hours a day and working out six days a week. Some of these guys are doing split routines Again, like I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of variations Some individuals can do more and they can do it more often some individuals can't do as much in General though, you're better off doing less and doing it less often than doing more If you're doing less less often the worst thing is you might have a little slower rate of progress Because you're not taking advantage of your recovery time say that you could recover after a day and work out again If you add an extra day in between well your overall rate of progress might be a little bit slower because You know, you're not training as frequently as your recovery ability will allow But suppose you're somebody that needs three days between workouts for your body is completely recovered and produced that Adaptation but you are working out with only a day or two in between You're not gonna get any improvements at all. So you're better off with a little extra recovery time Training a little bit less often and a little bit less than your body could tolerate Then trying to do too much Because we're not really looking to find and I can't remember if it's Mike Mencer Arthur Jones I don't even know if these names sound familiar to anybody The goal as and again, it's either Mike or Arthur's probably Mike saying it after Arthur said it But the goal is not to find out how much exercise we can tolerate But to find out the minimum amount We need to be able to produce and Patrick's out with the the triangle same thing that the minimal amount We need to be able to produce the desired result Oh Arthur. Oh, okay, I think yeah, well And again a little inside stuff here pretty much everything Mike said he got from from Arthur now speaking which does anybody know who Arthur Jones is raise your hand if you know who Arthur is you got one two three four five How many people here have heard of Joe Weeder? Okay, surprise not as many yet. Well Very very few people Would be able to tell you who Arthur Jones is most people who do bodybuilding can tell you who Joe Weeder is and Joe Weeder is a big part of the reason that about 99% of what people believe about bodybuilding is bullshit Most of what I've said again goes completely against almost anything that everybody has read in a muscle magazine almost anything that a person has heard from a competitive bodybuilder and Pretty much anything that you'll read in any of the bodybuilding books about 99% of the bodybuilding books that you'll buy anyways And there is a reason for this actually there's a couple reasons first and foremost Most of the bodybuilding magazines do not exist to provide Valid scientific information on exercise there. They're pretty much to sell you supplements and that's about it The other reason is most of these people have absolutely no idea What they're talking about and a lot of that has to do with something that's called selection bias Now if you were to go and watch a basketball game See all these people running up and down the court dribbling the ball and notice they're extremely tall Most of you would have the sense not to say well I bet that running up and down a court dribbling a basketball makes people taller But that's exactly what people are doing when they look at somebody like Schwarzenegger Dorian Yates if anybody knows who that is or any of the current crop of bodybuilding champions and saying You know, I bet he looks that way because of all this training that he's doing These guys look the way they do because of genetics first and foremost and steroids on top of that The training that they do is Not appropriate for about 99% of the population Now in most areas if you want to succeed in something if you want to succeed in a particular business Particular endeavor it makes sense to look at people who are successful and try and pattern what you're doing after What they've done that worked for them must be a good way to train Arnold got his physique training two hours a day six days a week That must be a good way to build a lot of muscle the difference in exercise is that genetics is such a huge factor And that these people are a very very very small percentage of the total population and then on top of that steroids Now if you were to take a typical bodybuilder and apply the exact same Principles that we're talking about now training extremely hard Doing only enough that they're stimulating improvements in all the major muscle groups But not over stressing their bodies and then allowing adequate time for recovery in between They would also get the best possible rate of progress Thing is you would find that how hard how much and how often for them even without steroids Is higher than the average person? Again back to the tanning if I were to try to lay out and follow a tanning program Program that would be appropriate for my wife is Filipino. I would end up burned. I Simply do not have the same genetics I don't have the same tolerance for or the ability to recover from or respond to the same exposure sunlight She does and about 99% of the population Do not have the tolerance for do not have the ability to handle the volumes or the ability to recover as quickly as that small Very very small percentage of the population that you see in the bodybuilding magazines for most people it's too much it's too often and For most people to train that much that often They're not going to be able to train hard enough and again going back to the very beginning if you're not training Extremely hard none of the rest of it makes any difference at all now if we had the steroids on top of that which? You don't read a lot about in the bodybuilding magazines or it hasn't been you know as open until maybe just the past couple of years And only a few of them steroids make a huge huge difference The bodybuilders that are using steroids are capable of training at Volumes and frequencies that would make the average person sick after a very short period of time I have worked with people in the past Prior to their using steroids and then stayed in communication I didn't train them after they started but stayed in communication with them after they started using steroids now a typical example One particular individual that I trained we found that if he were to do about six exercises Once every five six days or so he made pretty good progress if he were to train more often than that He would if he were to train maybe once every three to four days He'd stagnate he'd stay about the same or if we were to add too many more exercises And if we were to train even more frequently than that he'd actually start to go down a little bit about once every five six days or so is good frequency for him and Naturally no steroids we got him up to a weight of about 210 lean and he's about 510 Now after he started using steroids within a year. He was competing in Contests at a weight of 220 ripped condition 10 pounds heavier than we had him at a fairly lean condition within a few years after that he was about 280 290 pounds in just lean condition the rest of the year and he had increased his training to about Four days a week doing about an hour hour and a half at a time Which still wasn't as extreme as a lot of bodybuilders, but a lot higher much much higher than what he could tolerate without the steroids It's been a few years but He's forgotten a lot and now he's giving exercise advice to people and when people ask him well How often do you work out how often you know? What do you do all these things? He's telling people well? I do you know this exercise that exercise Generally amounting to a program that goes to about Hour and a half or so four days a week He usually doesn't mention to people the multiple steroids that he's taking the growth hormone or any of the other drugs and He also fails to mention the people that prior to taking the growth hormone and all the different steroids and all these things that He would not progress unless he allowed at least about four or five days between recovery Not going into any of this and giving this about people you got people who probably don't have the same genetics as he does Who aren't taking the steroids, but they're taking that advice and trying to apply it And that's what you get following the bodybuilding magazine advice to none of these people that you see in these magazines Are natural competitors? None of these people are training in a way that would be suitable for somebody who is not on steroids and to take Advice from them about training again would be the last thing that anybody would want to do you would again very quickly end up over-trained and Possibly instead of making any improvements. You would end up weaker. You'd end up with smaller muscles over time Any questions on Anything so far Yeah, I'm just going to jump into the questions after different sections here, so All right, so you talked about when you stop seeing improvement in a certain part of body like for instance Your biceps to stop training and cut back on the amount you're working on your biceps But when you hit that plateau, what's the way that you actually get past it and keep making them bigger rather than Just cutting them back and giving them all right usually it usually it's cutting it back because if you've got again There are three things you have to have you have to stimulate the improvement to be produced and that requires that you're training hard enough You have to make sure that you're not over stressing the body and preventing it from being able to produce the improvement So not doing too much volume Which is where the cutting back comes in and then you have to make sure you're allowing adequate time for full recovery and adaptation Now the only way that you might be able to pass that plateau without either cutting back the volume or adding more rest Would be to train harder Which for most people Requires doing some little bit higher intensity training techniques things like negatives things like rest pause Usually it's not that if a person is training hard enough to begin with But if you you do find that you're not progressing on a muscle group if cutting back Either on volume or frequency doesn't help occasionally doing something that increases the intensity will This is getting into a bit more advanced territory though Most people if they're training very very hard with normal repetitions You lift the weight you lower the weight you repeat Nothing fancy as far as you know assistance from a partner or timing or anything most people they just train hard regular repetitions be able to go for months before they get to a point where they would need to do anything like that but If you were to make it harder and this is jumping way way way ahead here But there are some techniques that you can do negative only rest pause and I'll get into those a little bit but again the three things and I'm coming back to the you know Preto principle the 8 20 rule these three things will make more of a difference than anything else that you do first That just training as brutally hard as possible Not overdoing it adding enough recovery time Now talked a little bit about the exercise selection and I mentioned before about you know If you add in something for biceps and not being really that important if you're doing you know curls hammer curls You know cable curls reverse curls all this other stuff a lot of people get carried away With the number of exercises that they do per muscle group and all sorts of different variations Part of this again comes back to the muscle magazines every month in a muscle magazine You'll see a new arm article You'll see a new chest article or some article about some bodybuilder claiming that they used a particular routine to bring up some body Part and most of this is bullshit They make it up so they've got an article to put the supplement advertisements and sometimes they work it right into the Articles sometimes just between the pages a lot of times it's not even the bodybuilders that are writing these things But they've got to come up with different stuff every month to be able to keep selling them Which is a big part of the reason for new exercises for new combinations new repetition and set schemes If you want to know the best way to work any particular muscle You look at its function and you perform an exercise that addresses that particular function of the muscle or More importantly the group people think about biceps as if it's an isolated muscle But your biceps work in conjunction with a whole lot of other muscles to flex the arm Now you could get picky and look at different things like well if you change hand position This arm flexor is more involved in this one Or if you change shoulder position a lot of different things will have an effect on the involvement of those different muscles but It makes almost no difference at all as long as the weight is heavy enough They'll tell you you've got to do wide grip curls to work your outer biceps head or narrow grip to work the inner head You got to you know have a neutral grip to work your broccoli radialis more or you've got to have a pronated grip to You know bring the broccoli alice all this stuff is bullshit frankly if the weight is heavy enough Every single muscle that is involved in a particular movement is going to be Significantly stimulated to improve and it is highly unlikely with an exercise like a bicep curl Or you know any variation in curl that you're going to find one of those muscles that you need to work just a little harder than the other most people if you asked them Couldn't point out any specific one of the muscles that flex your arm and say well You know my biceps are coming up really well But I got to work my broccoli alice or broccoli radialis heart now if you are doing a straight Barbell curl a movement that involves flexion of the elbow you are doing Everything that you need everything you could possibly benefit from for your biceps and the same goes with almost everything else And we'll just we'll just go right you know top down as far as exercise selection Main muscle groups top the bottom say your traps There's a lot of people ignore But it makes up a big part of the shape of the shoulders if you're doing anything involving an upward movement of the shoulders or Somewhat backward movement you're involving the traps now if you're doing deadlifts If you're doing a standing press if you're doing a row the traps are already being worked very very heavily by the Exercises if for some reason a person doesn't have the same trap development or the traps aren't keeping up with other muscle groups They feel it needs a little bit more direct work the function of the trapezius the upper part what most people you know Think of when they say traps is simply to elevate the shoulders all you need is a shoulder shrug You'll see articles where people talk about you know five dozen variations a different You know exercise for a particular muscle group, but in case of the traps a shrug You're done one simple exercise a little bit further down deltoids Almost everybody overwork their shoulders You don't need a lot of different exercise for the shoulders In fact if you're already doing those couple of compound exercises if you're doing a push and a pull in a horizontal plane You've got your front deltoids doing the push You've got the rear deltoids the back of the shoulder muscles when you're doing the pull if you're doing an overhead pressing movement You've got the front you've got the immediate middle and a little bit of the back just doing that standing press And then doing a pull down you've got the back again The only time that a person would really need to add in any additional shoulder movement would be if maybe their shoulders Were really lagging behind despite all that and again the benefit of the additional shoulder movement is not more volume for the muscle Usually increasing volume is a mistake the benefit of doing the direct exercise for the shoulders would be that you can make it harder for that specific muscle best exercise for that purpose of a person's Shoulders are lagging behind would simply be a lateral raise function of the shoulders Specifically the deltoids is to bring your upper arm from here to about here actually from here on up It's no longer your shoulders They're just holding the arm in place while your trapezius and some other muscles continue the movement But if you hold dumbbells in the arms just do a lateral raise you're covered Muscle magazine articles on shoulders will have you do on front raises. Have you doing bent raises? Have you doing you know side raises? Have you doing all sorts of ridiculous stuff again? If you've got those two compound pressing movements and a lateral raise you're set And moving down a little bit further the lats biggest muscle group in the upper back Now second would probably be the trapezius or trapezius actually kind of and can I write on this? Okay Unclip that or just flip it over. Yes Okay, let's tear all this shit off here. Yeah, that's all I wasn't planning on using it This will make it should have done a power point Make sure that it's Camera there Yep, all right, I guess you got everything in frame cool. All right So going back we'll start the top It was a go neck down. We'll talk about specifics later traps a shrug Doesn't need to be anything fancy a little bit further down deltoids and this covers Everything you don't need separate exercises for your front your side your rear deltoids You're already hitting those during those compound movements best single exercise for the deltoids is Lateral and I'm just gonna abbreviate that lap raise Going a little bit further down your lats Major muscle in the upper back it functions to pull the arms down and back if you were doing a rowing movement And if you're doing any kind of vertical pulling movement doesn't matter chin up pull down You know anything where you're pulling downwards you're more than adequately working the lats now if you need though To do something direct again some people you'll see faster arm development not as good development in the torso again the function The primary function a lot of muscles have multiple functions primary function The lats is to pull your arms from any position away from the torso down and back Addressing that function most effectively would be a pull-over machine I know any of you familiar with not let's pull over machine Okay Typically pull over machine You're seated there are pads you place the elbows back of the upper arms against you drive it forward down and back Barring that there's an exercise called a dumbbell pullover that you could do or even what's called a cable pullover if you've got Now a cable machine with a high pulley and hold on to the bar move it down and back But again what we're doing is we're taking the muscle we're looking at what is its function in the case of the lats Bringing the elbows down and back so pull over And staying roughly in the same area the lower part of the traps now your traps actually form a big Diamond cross your back coming from the neck out to the end of the the spines of the scapula and then coming back down to a Point about there about the bottom of your thoracic vertebrae The lower part of it assists in pulling the shoulder blades back and downward somewhat and again We've got that if you're doing the rowing movement. It's it's covered You really don't need much additional for that most people aren't going to say well I need to still you know thicken up the mid-back. I need to do something isolated for it, but If a person needed to do something for that again Depressing the shoulders is the main function of that if you're doing any kind of downward movement or anything coming back Anything where the shoulders are moving back or being depressed you've got that involved and if you were to do again Pulling the shoulders back to bring the shoulders back and down if you were to do a bent row Or if you were to do a shrug and again This is not for the top traps but it but the lower traps just from a bent position where you're holding on to bar Holding on to a cable and just retracting the shoulders You're pretty much covered with that so I'm going to put lower traps and a rear Shrugging movement Going down actually going up to the arms again biceps if you've got a curl you're set You don't need to get fancy with it. You don't need to do hammer curls and you know reverse curls or any of this stuff biceps if you're doing Just regular right here Regular curls Cross it out You're covered and the same goes for the triceps people talk about Now your triceps muscle in the back of the upper arm made of three different parts You've got the outer the medial and then the long head the one that runs down the back and you'll have people saying Oh well You got to do this movement for your outer head and this movement for your inner head and this movement for the long head Which is again bullshit your triceps is three muscles But they all attach to the same tendon that one tendon that just attaches to the bones the back of the ulna and Your hand position if you've got palms up neutral palms down Changes with changing the the radius Your ulna the bone that the triceps attached to is Not affected at all by hand position hands down neutral grip underhand grip makes absolutely no difference Anybody tells you got to use this grip or that grip for this head or that head of the triceps has absolutely no idea What the fuck they're talking about it is Just elbow extension and that's it now. There is an exception Shoulder position has a little bit of an effect on it because one of the heads of the triceps crosses the back of the shoulder And if you have a different shoulder position that affects the length of the tricep Any effect on the length of muscles going to have a little bit of an effect on how strong it is in different positions but as Long as the weight you're using during the exercise is heavy enough It's not going to make any difference if you're doing a single movement involving extension straightening of the elbows You're working all three heads of the triceps about as effectively as you need to Now years ago Actually, I should say decades ago Earlier part a last century and if you get to the 1920s yet all these strong men circus Performers who had physiques that would rival a lot of the drug-free bodybuilders today Phenomenal development in all the major muscle groups and a lot of them If they read the magazines that you get today would laugh they they were doing very very simple routines in some cases You know a handful of exercises Usually consisting of and very similar to what we talked about starting out a few very simple basic Pressing and pulling movements a lot of times incorporating some gymnastic type movements Not gymnastic in the sense of the flips and things like that, but parallel bar dips Now handstand presses things like that, but again very simple pushing or pulling movements Any on triceps any kind of extension doesn't make that big of a difference Going a little further down forearms And again, you don't want to neglect the forearm But you have to be careful not to overdo them too if you're doing any pulling movement your grip is involved But again if we want to if you get to say the forearms aren't coming up as quickly as you'd like them to you want to focus on them Specifically we're not adding exercises to add volume We're adding an exercise to do something direct to make it as hard as possible for those muscles The majority of the mass of your forearms can be worked by just doing a flexion or a risk curl movement and an extension movement You get this is kind of a weird subculture and strength training right now You've got this whole group of people who are obsessed with hand and grip training Actually have meets where these people get together and compete in different feats of strength tearing telephone books and Bending nails and all sorts of stuff like that and a lot of these guys have books and courses and all sorts of crap They'll they'll sell online. I know one in particular not going to name names or anything But probably has you know two or three books just on Hand training just on grip training and forearm training and sells probably You know a couple dozen overpriced products if you do curls and if you do extensions with the forearms you're going to get better development than if you did all the Dozens of different exercises with now all the different possible movements with a bunch of different crap in his books And it's going to take you a whole lot less time Again look at the function of the muscles. You're trying to work you take an exercise that simply addresses that function forearms Run out of space and not even really put that on there But again the curl you extend the wrist you've got pretty much everything there moving a little bit further down hips and thighs whole ton of muscle from the waist down and a lot of people avoid leg training because when done properly it is Painful it is brutally hard if you have ever done a set of squats properly Afterwards you should feel like you have just been hit by a truck and you should have a hard time standing up afterwards If you can walk normally after doing a set of squats You have not done it hard enough if you're doing just that one compound exercise or if you're doing a deadlift again You are doing pretty much everything you can for all the major muscles in that area But again if a particular muscle say the quadriceps say the hamstrings is not coming up as much as you would like it to Put a direct exercise in there again not to add volume, but to be able to work that specific muscle harder quadriceps Main function extending the knee real simple leg extension. You really don't need anything fancy There's a bunch of different things you could do but I'm getting quads I'm just going to put ex for extension here and then the same with the hamstrings the hamstrings a little bit more involved they Flex the knee, but they also flex the hip. You could work them equally. Well or extend the hip Sorry, you could work them equally well from either direction either doing a leg curl or doing what's called a stiff leg A deadlift difference between a regular and stiff leg a deadlift is simply the amount of movement around the waist or hips relative to the knees regular deadlift You'd be coming down To about borrowed usually be about mid shin and not so you got a lot of knee and a lot of hip movement difference between that and a Stiff-legged deadlift with a stiff-legged deadlift You'd actually have a lot of hip movement would have very very little movement around the knees mostly glutes hamstrings so hamstrings stiff-legged deadlift and It's going to abbreviate that hams and SL DL. That's a lot of shit to write Going a little bit further down calves And you'll hear a lot of people talking about Gotta do seated calves for your soleus and standing calves for your gastrocnemius and all this different crap If you're doing a seated calf it takes the gastrocnemius the bigger outer part of the calf out of it a little bit Which is why people recommend the seated calf to work the soleus Thing is if you're doing the standing calf raise You're working the soleus and the gastrocnemius the bigger outside part both relatively equally hard Doing one you take the other exercise or the other muscle group out but doing the other standing you've got them both in anyway So there's no reason to do both if for calves you do a standing calf raise Or if you got a machine that you can do to press with the just moving around the ankle You're covered Now probably noticed I left out the low back in the abs now most people Get weird about abs thinking I got to do all these crunches leg raises, you know torso rotation and Just a ridiculous number of exercise for the abdominal muscles if you never did a single abdominal exercise in your life If you never did a crunch a leg raise a knee raise or any of these things But you reduced your body fat level low enough you would have great-looking abs The appearance of your abs has almost nothing to do with abdominal exercise The abdominal muscles are a very very small muscle group because there's not a lot of muscle mass there They have very little effect on your overall metabolic rate Direct work for the abdominal muscles does nothing to selectively burn fat over that area the Appearance of a six pack of having those separate blocks of muscle is the result of the formation You got connective tissue the formation the abs well You've got a couple blocks of muscle with lines of connective tissue in between if your body fat is low enough That will be obvious now having a little bit better abdominal development in terms of muscular size will affect that a little bit But if you don't have low enough body fat to begin with it still would not be apparent you could spend years Working your abs and develop them to about The largest that you could possibly develop those muscles and if you didn't have sufficiently low body fat It would still make absolutely no difference at all But again if you never did a single directive down all exercise in your life, but you were lean enough You would have great abs you go around You know watch you there is like skinny skateboarder kids who've never touched a barbell who have good abs Simply because they barely eat. They're just really really thin They have very very low level of body fat if you again never did a single abdominal exercise in your life You could have ripped abs. I did a competition in June of 95 and part of the reason I did this one specifically to prove a couple points that being one of them Leading up to the competition for about six months prior to it. I did not do a single crunch I did no directive down all exercise. In fact, I only did six exercises once a week the entire time a Stiff-legged barbell deadlift a leg press a chest press a seated row a pull-down and A calf raise and that was it for the entire time No other exercise no directive down all exercise pretty much nothing place five out of twelve in my weight class and that was at a National competition, so not too bad Had better abs than most people in my weight class and that was without having done No directive down all exercise leading up to it the body fat was low enough and that was what made all the difference in the world Now as far as abdominal exercise There is really only one reason to do it and again It has absolutely nothing to do with appearance and is simply for the health of the back If you were to do a direct abdominal exercise Which would balance if you're doing deadlifts you're already working the low back muscles relative effect relatively effectively If you're doing a back extension machine You've got those covered but back and abdominal exercises are more for the health of the low back than anything else Since we're talking about look since we're talking about bodybuilding Not going to get into all that but again You really don't need to worry a lot about doing direct abdominal exercise from the standpoint of appearances It is one of the most overrated Oversold things and exercise every bodybuilding every fitness every physique magazine You'll pick up is going to have something on abs and it is all Wasted ink wasted paper if you don't have low enough body fat None of it makes any difference at all and even if you do have low enough body fat It doesn't make that big of a difference on the appearance of your abdominal muscles I'm going to take a step back here a little bit and cover the Basics or what Doug MacGuff if you read body by science then Anthony Anthony mentioned earlier covers the big five The specific exercises again don't matter a lot of different exercises will work for this purpose but generally what you need is a Compound and by compound just mean multi-joint compound Leg movement something that involves the hips and thighs two and three now you need a push and a pull that are horizontal and four and five you need to push again and a pull that are Vertical and with just that hitting all the major muscle groups then going back if you again over time find that any particular Muscle group is not developing as quickly as you'd like or along with the rest of the body You can add an isolation exercises for that again not because the additional volume is of benefit But because the direct exercise allow you to work those muscles hard actually just realize I forgot one thing Yes, I don't emphasize it too much because most people Overdo it chest a lot of people think chest and biceps skip that chest Again, if you're doing a pushing movement and most people again way overdo this chest shoulders and biceps are probably some of the most overworked muscles Now next to abs Chest simple function brings the arms from any position out back or away from the body down and across All you need is one What's called a horizontal adduction movement movement bringing the arms down and across the body? It can be a dumbbell fly it can be a cable fly it can be a machine fly But that's it one of those you don't need to have a whole bunch of different exercises and doing a lot of different Exercises from a lot of different angles isn't going to make a huge difference You'll see some articles bodybuilding magazines where they might have you doing a dozen different variations on chest flies You know all at different angles different positions all the stuff makes absolutely no difference for that matter You see all sorts of debates between people About doing incline for upper chest versus doing you know flat bench press versus decline bench press and all this the incline bench press Involves you know the upper portion. Let's call the clavicular portion of the chest Slightly more than a flat bench press But it involves the rest of the chest a lot less if you're doing a flat bench You're doing you know a decline bench even you're getting the larger portion of the chest and still a significant involvement in that upper portion There's really no significant benefit to anybody for adding an additional Incline movement on top of that and it's more likely to be a negative than a positive again because it's adding volume But not really making that big of a difference and working the upper part of the chest So again, if we're going to add chest to this We'll just throw it up on top here chest Any kind of a fly? All right, any any questions about in this stuff so far. Okay, we're going to go on to a little bit more So about practical performance. See I got a kind of idea you got to train hard You got to make sure you overdo it do enough exercise you're working all the major muscle groups But no more than you need to get adequate rest and keep records of it So you know you're improving know if you need to adjust any of that. Well, how do you go about doing the exercises? There is more debate about this than almost anything else You got people saying you got to do extremely fast reps You got people saying you got to do extremely slow reps some people saying you got to do this isometrics Some people saying you got to do partial range other people saying you got to do full range People talking about all sorts of different repetition that ranges different Timing between sets a bunch of stuff most of it is complete and utter bullshit Generally the most important thing that we're looking at in doing any exercise is Exposing the muscles to a high enough level of tension that you're able to stimulate an adaptive response but not so much that you're going to cause an injury and Generally, you want to do that over the greatest range of motion that you can Without going into a position where you might end up wrecking something. Yeah, there's a couple different factors There's also fatigue and the duration has an effect on that There's also microtrauma which I mentioned before so tearing the tissue But the most important factor more important than anything else is the tension on the muscle and that tension is affected by a Bunch of different things most importantly the weight that you're using you need to use a heavy enough weight and for most People heavy enough means a weight that is minimally Absolute minimally about 60% of what you could lift one time Maximally for most people again about maybe 85 Really pushing it if you get up to about 90% now there's different ways to determine this Most of them not very practical likely to cause an injury a Lot of times people simply do a one rep max test do a strength test to find out how much weight they need to be using but More practical if you look at the averages most people can do about 10 repetitions or so with 75 80% Of their one repetition maximum if you start with a moderate weight And you should at first you want to focus on your form before you start going real heavy but if you start with a moderate weight and Gradually build up to the point where using something that is so heavy That you can just barely complete a tenth repetition. You're probably going to be right around that 80% range Now as far as specific number of repetitions That's really not as important as the time if you look at a bunch of different research There is a broad range of repetition ranges There's a broad range of times that work for most people and we're shooting for the middle And we're also taking some other things into account You don't want to have the weight so heavy that you cannot do at least a few repetitions One because if it's very very heavy your form is likely to fall apart earlier You're more likely to pull or strain something not because the weight's heavy, but because if it's really heavy people tend to Sacrifice form to try and get the repetitions if it's too light You're just not going to get much of a response out of it now again too heavy for most people If you cannot do at least you know four or five repetitions in good form Weights probably too heavy now by in good form slow strict control movement I'll get into that a little bit later now if you can do a lot more than 12 15 repetitions or so the weight is most likely too light Using a moderate repetition speed about a three second lifting movement about a three second lowering movement a person that is doing between Again a minimal of around five repetitions or so maxing around 10 repetitions is Going to be using and a heavy enough weight that they're going to stimulate a significant improvement But it's not going to be so heavy that they're likely to have their form fall apart and end up tearing something else To be on the safe side I would go just a little bit higher with that repetition range and make it about seven to ten repetitions now The time is also an important factor Most people most of these repetition ranges represent a time frame of about 30 to 90 seconds If the weight's heavy enough that you can't go for at least about 30 seconds in good form Again form tends to start falling apart if you can go for a lot longer than 90 seconds Which lifting and lowering in about three seconds. We're looking at about 15 reps It's probably too light to where you're not going to get as much of a response as possible If you're taking in about three second movement looks like about that It's not really slow, but it's not fast either It's slow enough that you are in control of how you're moving over the full range of motion And that is the most important thing you want to be in control of the barbell and control the machine and control of your posture Control more than anything else is the most important aspect of form If you're going too fast to where you cannot maintain strict control You're more likely to injure something more likely to end up, you know Kind of cheating through parts of the range of motion missing out some of the benefit of the exercise You don't want to go any faster than you can control the weight Another benefit to going a little bit more slowly is you're going to be able to focus more on the muscles that you're using during the exercise When people and you typically see people just kind of swinging the weights up and down when they do that Not only do they tend to cheat involve a lot of extra body movement in there which takes stress up the muscles They're trying to work and put it on other muscles but when you're going that quickly it makes it very difficult to focus on and Deliberately and intensely contract the muscles that you're trying to work when you're doing and we'll just use a bicep curl For an example, you're not just trying to lift the weight lifting the weight is not the end Not the goal of the exercise that movement is being done Specifically for the working your biceps as hard as you possibly can Watch most people though and they really don't seem to be working their biceps, but working their back You'll see people You know swinging there their back way back and you know doing all sorts of stuff to cheat it up Even sometimes you'll see people getting a little bit of a knee bend in there Makes it easier to throw heavy weights up, but they're not really working their biceps that hard if you took these people You walk up to anybody at the gym that's doing curls that way until okay stop have them back up against a wall So their back is flat Maybe their feet out just a little bit and ask them to try and do it properly once They will not be able to most people the way that they curl are Able to use the weight that they're using because they're using a lot bigger and stronger muscles in their biceps to lift it They are doing almost what's called a reverse clean with it Power clean being a movement where which involves a you know lifting at a barbell using mostly momentum Now if you are slowing it down, you're going to be aware of your body position You're going to be able to better feel if there's anything moving that shouldn't be and you're going to be able to better Feel and focus on the muscles that you're trying to contract during the exercise Again, you're not just trying to lift the weight for the sake of lifting the weight We're lifting the weight for the sake of placing as much demand as much tension on the biceps in this case as possible and Slowing down makes that a lot easier to do now There's another benefit to slowing down that a lot of people don't talk about Actually, it's not you know a little bit more of a physiology geek type thing There's something that's called the force velocity curve and this mainly applies To lifting movements When your muscles contract you've got fibers inside the muscles that are being pulled Across each other by these little attachments that grab and pull grab and pull grab and pull are called cross bridges The faster a muscle shortens The less you're able to form these cross bridges the slower a muscle shortens the more cross bridges are able to be formed and The more of these cross bridges you have pulling the muscle fibers along each other the higher the force They can produce the higher the force they can produce the heavier the weight You can handle and the more tension you can put on your muscles if we were to have a graph and say this was zero this was Perfectly motionless just holding a barbell Not even trying to lift it just holding it there and this was 100 percent as fast as you could possibly Shorten your muscles and we were to measure the amount of force your muscles could produce At these different speeds you'd see a curve that looked Well would start over there of course, but the curve would generally look like that the faster your muscles are contracting The less force they can produce The greatest force your muscles can produce in a shortening or lifting movement is at the slowest speed possible Now why not just barely move them? Why not just go real real real slow? Well There are some reasons to avoid that too. There is actually a group Called super slow Guild that for a long time advocated a 10 second lifting and a 10 second lowering movement extremely extremely slow movement speeds Claiming that by going that slowly you're able to minimize the force the muscles are exposed or more specifically the joints Minimize momentum and everything else, which is true up to a point the problem is By going that slow. You're also performing many fewer repetitions over a period of time And for example if you're a lift in 10 second or in 10 seconds you'd perform about three repetitions per minute if you were to lift in about three seconds lower in about three seconds you'd end up performing about 10 repetitions per minute and When you do the repetition? as the muscles are lowering Specifically in that lowering movement is where you have those little tears in the fiber that I mentioned earlier the microtrauma Occurring and that microtrauma occurs as a result of those fibers being pulled or stressed Or actually lengthening against tension the cross bridges those same attachments that pulled a shortening it Act as breaks when the muscles lengthening if you could imagine as They're attaching and bending and releasing and attaching and bending and releasing to shorten the muscle It would be like a person grabbing a rung on a ladder pulling grabbing another one letting go pulling going up Now as the muscles lengthening against tension. It's not the opposite It wouldn't be like going back down a ladder It would be like you're holding on well Somebody's pulling on your feet until you can't hold on and you let go when you grip again you let go in your grip again except if you had Hundreds of arms and instead of letting go they were just tearing off as you're coming down During that negative during that lowering movement you have the microtrauma the little tears in the muscle fire But that contribute to an increase in muscle size So you don't want to go too slow Slow enough that you're in control slow enough that you're unlikely to pull strain or tear something Slow enough that you're lower on this force velocity curve so that you're able to handle a heavier weight in Strict form you can use heavier weight in an exercise slower because of that force velocity curve The reason that a faster weight allows you to move an even heavier weight isn't because the target muscles are doing that much more work But because the faster movements typically involve the in you know a lot of other muscles an extra body movement to get it moving So there's a difference We don't again We want to slow enough that you're in control slow enough that you reduce the likelihood of pulls of tears slow enough that you can handle A heavier weight because of this force velocity curve But not so slow that we're not doing more repetitions over a period of time so you have more of that microtrauma It is a balance between the two of those so anyways Most movements we're talking about a three-second lifting about a three-second lowering movement if you're doing a compound movement where you lock out 20 minutes, okay, you're doing a compound movement where you're locking out If you're doing a press either with the arms and legs when you're locked out the bones are supporting most of the resistance You don't really have much tension on the muscles there You don't want to spend a lot of time there you get to lock out your reverse direction start letting the weight back down But if you're doing a pulling movement or if you're doing an isolation movement where you do have resistance in the finished position You hold it there. You squeeze as long as you can versus as sorry as hard as you can for a second or two before letting it back down now Moving on from from the speed and everything else we talked about again We're looking at about seven to ten repetitions at about a three-second lifting three-second lowering pace Which you're actually looking at is about 40 to 60 seconds of continuous work during the exercise If the exercise is hard enough by the time that you finish with that you're going to be pretty wiped out even from just a single exercise Going from that to the next exercise right away Has some benefits, but there's also some problems with it You don't want to rush You don't want to go from one of the next to the next to the next with no rest in between If your goal is getting as much muscular size as possible But you don't want to hang around and rest for five ten minutes in between either You want to allow enough rest that you're able to catch your breath Enough rest that you feel you can put a hundred percent effort into the next exercise But you don't want to sit around for a long time in between if you get too little rest Then you're going to end up performing You know fewer and fewer repetitions or performing worse and worse on subsequent exercises because of overall systemic fatigue just Fatigue of the entire body in general if you allow too much rest in between exercises You're not going to take advantage of an increase in growth hormone or testosterone that you get with moving a little bit more quickly So again like a lot of things it's a balance between the two Unless your goal is just to increase your capacity for work, which again here We're just talking about looking better just more muscle You want to allow enough time that you feel you can handle a reasonably heavy weight in the next exercise But you don't want to allow a lot of rest. You shouldn't be a hundred percent recovery You shouldn't feel like you haven't done anything you should still be breathing pretty you know breathing somewhat heavily just not completely gassed and This varies from person to person starting out. It might be a little bit longer as your conditioning improves It might be a little bit shorter, but again Enough that you feel you're covered enough to put a fourth of a good effort But not so much that you feel completely rested in between any questions about anything as far as the form or repetitions set intervals any sort of thing like that so far Okay, next thing I'm going to talk about is the order of the exercises Typically, you know when a person writes up a workout They'll go in and they'll do this exercise in the next exercise in the exercise after that and people typically do the same Exercise in the same order all the time Generally mistake for this reason if you are really training as hard as possible Then every exercise is going to take enough energy that even if you get a little bit of rest It's going to negatively affect your ability to perform every exercise that follows You're always going to do better on the first exercise in the workout than in the last And if you always do all the exercises in the exact same order Then the ones that you do earlier those muscle groups are going to progress a little bit faster Every time you work out you want to look at how you did on that workout the previous time Whatever exercises you did the worst on previously should be the ones that you start with and Then down the line from the ones you did the worst on to the ones you did the best on This is going to result in a change in exercise order over time now Some people would criticize this as making it difficult to keep accurate records How do you know that you didn't improve on an exercise because of the change in order versus being a little bit stronger? Short term that is a problem But over a long enough period of time if you're really over training if you're doing too much or too often Then that exercise is just going to stop improving totally by changing the order You're going to allow Focus where you need it most on a workout to workout basis and now this is not just theory There was a guy named Joe Mullin used to work for Nautilus years back And he has been doing this stuff since the 1950s And he has actually conducted studies with groups of bodybuilders and groups of trainees where he has compared people doing Same workout. They did the same workout same method of repetitions The only thing that varied is the order the one group did the same exercises Same order every time the other group varied their exercises based on their previous performance The difference was significant the bodybuilders that changed the order so that they were always working the Exercise they did the worst on the previous workout first in the current workout made significantly better progress So when you're keeping track your workouts, you're not just writing down the exercise You know the weight and the repetitions But you want to write down the order you perform them in so that the next time you work out You can look at that and you can see Okay, you know this is what I did last time and you also might want to switch it if everything is going up Really well, even if you don't have significant differences. It helps to change these things around. There are a couple exceptions, however Some exercises have to be done after others because performing them will make it difficult or impossible to do the other ones correctly Forearm exercises should almost always be done at the end of a routine If you're working your forearms before you do a chin up before you do a row or anything like that you're just not going to be able to hold on as well and If you include any abdominal exercise the abdominal exercise should be held off until the end Especially if you're doing barbell exercises if you're doing any kind of standing exercise Your abdominal muscles are often involved to some degree in stabilizing the body Especially if you're doing any kind of overhead pressing movements abdominal exercises forearm exercises kept towards the end of the workout Now again getting a little bit ahead of things here, but If you are not keeping track of all these things Then you're not going to be able to identify patterns as far as you know whether or not a particular exercise is or isn't improving So you have to absolutely again going back to the whole recording make sure that you don't just have the exercises and everything written down, but you have the order that they're written in and Now who here works out on a regular basis Okay, how many of you bring a chart or a journal every time you work out? Good. Yeah, most people don't go to a gym a lot of times. You'll see almost everybody there without one Now do you keep track of the order of the exercises? anybody Good, okay When you're writing it down Easiest way to do this is instead of having a journal format is to have a chart printed out with Distinct rows distinct columns and in every column the date. I'm going to just draw this up Get the chart thing wrapped up Summarize here because the chart stuff is absolutely important Again what we're looking for to be able to determine if you're training hard enough not overdoing it and getting enough rest Is progress if you are not progressing if you are not stronger every single time you work out Either able to use a little bit more weight You know maybe about you know two and a half five more pounds depending on the exercise If you are not able to perform at least one more repetition in good form Something is wrong. You're not either not training hard enough or you're doing too much or you're not giving enough recovery between ten okay You have to absolutely Make sure that you are keeping accurate records without accurate records You have no idea if what you're doing is working or not It'd be like if you were training for a race But you never kept track of your time if you were not Recording your time on a regular basis you would not know if your training was Improving you or making you slower and it's the same with the workouts now Ideally you would want to see you know muscle increases and reduction in body fat over time But if you waited long enough to see that change before you you know looked at things and made adjustments Then you would not be able to Detect and correct problems at the workout quickly enough that you could take advantage of that time by keeping track of things by keeping accurate records you're going to be able to see and Improve on or correct problems to your workouts You know right then and there rather than wasting months spinning your wheels before they say you know what I'm not really getting any bigger here I'm not getting any stronger. I need to do something about it This allows you to immediately Identify and correct any problems with that so again with every single act every single workout You got to have your row for the exercises and you have to have the columns now We're just doing one set per exercise so all you need is one column per workout you've got the date and then exercise name and just One square for that exercise with a triangle and your weight is here The amount of pounds you know whatever plate on the machine whatever you're using The number of repetitions that you perform in good form goes here and I usually just put the Sequence right up in the corner there if we if I You know don't have a chart that's already pre-printed with a block for it, but you have to absolutely Absolutely keep track of everything because that's the only way that you're gonna know if you're doing everything else, right? If you don't have records then there's no way I mean even somebody with a good memory How many people can remember exactly you know what exercises they did and what order the number of reps and the weight Three weeks ago Very few people unless they've been doing the same stuff over and over and over and over again in which case they're not going forward anyway So again, I'm gonna recap all this real quick and we'll go to questions first and foremost Absolutely more important than anything else because if this is not there Nothing else is gonna make any difference at all. You have to have Intensity if you are not training as hard as possible Then none of the rest of it is gonna make any difference If you are training as hard as possible There's gonna be a limit to how much you can do up to a point You're stimulating improvements beyond some point You're just spinning your wheels and if you do too much you can actually prevent your body from producing some of those improvements So after intensity we have low volume Or you know keeping the workouts brief Only enough that you're hitting all the major muscle groups, but no more one hard set per exercise We'll do that and for most people seven to ten repetitions is a reasonable repetition range It'll keep you in a time frame where you were using an adequately heavy weight But it's not so low that you are you know risking pulling or tearing something not again The weight is not the issue with injuries, but the form but it really heavy weight tends to contribute to bad form with people Now if you are working hard enough to stimulate the improvements and you are being careful about your volume You're not overdoing it. You're not over stressing the body Afterwards you need to have the recovery time again the workout does not Does not directly produce any improvements in your body just like laying out in the sun does not tan you It's a stress. It's a negative thing your body perceives it as a threat and it produces that adaptive response more muscle response to strength training at tan as a response To to a sun exposure at the protective mechanism against it the workout does not increase your muscle size Your body increases your muscle size in response to as a protective mechanism against the workout But only if you're able to completely recover from that stress and then give your body enough time to produce of that an adaptive response then on top of that the charts Because if you're training hard enough if you're not overdoing it and you're allowing adequate recovery You are going to be stronger on every single exercise every single time you train if you're not then you're not doing something Correctly the only way to know if that's the case is if you're keeping records of it If you're not keeping records of it, then you're just guessing that you're going to end up spinning your wheels Those charts will allow you to look at what you're doing objectively to look at some numbers some meaningful measurement of progress and to make Decisions about how to train about how to adjust that based on how your body is responding That will allow you to improve your progress rather than just guessing or going by fetal saying you know I know maybe I'm not getting results Maybe you know if I try this or try that this will allow you as you're progressing to see exactly how the workouts How the amount how the frequency how all these things are affecting your body so that you can Adapt the workout to how your body responds like I mentioned earlier and again with a suntan with you know poisons With abrasion with exercise with any kind of physical stress There's a variation between people one of you Might be somebody who requires two or three weeks between workouts to completely recover and see an adaptive response highly unlikely Very very highly one of you might be able to work out our hour and a half couple days a week and still make really good progress also unlikely most people Very very quickly start to hit point of diminishing returns When they get to about three times a week and most people there's not much of a difference between two and three times a week Going more than three times a week is almost always a mistake now going the other direction For most you guys are younger. I don't see anybody here's like 40 50 anything like that So it's not too much of an issue with age But usually you know unless you're a lot older you don't need to worry about going too far in the other end until you're a lot more advanced as you progress most people make the mistake of adding more exercise continuously and Training more frequently they hit a point where they can't get any stronger and they think well I need to do more more often But again when a person typically hits the point where they cannot continue to improve it's not because they need more exercise It's not because they need to you know exercise more frequently But that's usually an indication that they've hit a point where they're training hard enough that they need to back Off a little or give their body more recovery in between but again The only way that you can possibly know that is if you're keeping accurate records of your workouts so in order of Excuse me order of importance Intensity first and foremost keeping the workouts brief making sure you got adequate time for recovery and then keeping track of all of it so that you know that All of the rest of it is being done correctly okay, and a little bit long time here, so Start taking questions if I have any ways down Pat Yeah, and only put the website up here There are charts on the website. Let's put this up here And it's Bay comm and that's a b-a-y-e That you can download there in PDF format So if you need you know something just to print out that's convenient. There are charts if you go there You go to the download section just print them out Right from there Yeah, I just wanted to confirm if I'm understanding it correctly You're saying that you increase the time between the workouts to recover fully as you keep increasing the weight is Basically, does that mean at a certain point? You'll just be at the peak of your strength that you because you can't add more time between the workouts eventually Yeah, most people Follow a curve now this assumes that a person is training properly a lot of times Again, if a person isn't keeping track or if they're doing anything correctly, they'll see a very gradual linear progression over time The typical person working out if they're doing things even halfway right from their first year to maybe their second Maybe up to 10 maybe up to 30 is going to see a progression that looks now sort of Like that If they were to do things correctly, they would see much much more rapid improvement But because there's a limit to how much anybody can improve tends to drop off after about two years now I've been in contact since The mid 90s with instructors all over the United States Canada all over the place who do similar type of training and most of them see a pattern And if we say this is a zero. This is six months. This is say One year, and this is say two years Most people if they're really training hard and if they're doing things correctly are going to see a curve That looks like that They're going to see the most rapid progress over about the first six months of their training It's going to start to gradually taper off Until it gets to about the two-year point from the two-year point on it is a constant Fight to add a pound or two to the exercise to add a few reps here and there You should still see progression, but it's going to slow down a bit if you can maintain the kind of progress that you could Training properly Over the first year for all the rest of the years you guys that end up looking like gorillas after a while There's only so much muscle that anybody can add At my own case when I started Actually when I started exercising I started lifting weights I was about 13 14 years old had no idea what I was doing and Just so turned to what everybody else is doing and typically following the body building magazines And then in high school followed what the football coaches recommended most of it was complete and utter bullshit There was very little emphasis on very high-intensity training. The routines were typically Multi-set, you know hour and a half two-hour workouts spun my wheels for years doing this I was at the end of high school maybe about a hundred and forty eight pounds or so and Beginning of college right about the same After years of following typical body building routines about 1993 I read an article in Ironman magazine by a guy named Mike Menser Mike Menser is a former mr. Olympia And at the time he was training Dorian Yates who was The mr. Olympia at the time now What he was recommending was a radical departure from everything else that I had read up to that point But he stated it very very well and he made some strong arguments for basically cutting back the volume Cutting back the frequency a lot of things very similar to what we talked about and so I cut back pretty drastically Previously I've been working about hour and a half two hours or so four or five nights a week with very little to show for it and pretty much and I'll send Anthony this who wants to post on site pretty much with like a stick figure I had You know pretty much no muscle on me at all I'm about five seven and a half not real tall, but even on five seven and a half hundred and forty eight pounds Hundred and fifty pounds is not much Within about the first six months of doing this type of training Increasing my protein intake increasing calories in general. I was able to get up to a hundred and eighty two hundred and eighty three Pounds while keeping my body fat levels right about the same still had abs at that This is actually what got me involved in training to begin with Seeing what I did other people started asking questions Spent a lot of time talking to other people other people start working out with me doing the stuff They want to know what I was doing one thing to it led to another and now I'm doing this, but now that was over the first Yeah, six months or so now since that time It has taken until just you know within the past couple of years to get to the point where I was in the 190s so we're looking at a curve that went like this or about the first six months Gradually dropped off and then it's been pretty much a fight for every pound since them And at one point I was able to go up over two hundred pounds a little bit But some of that increased was body fat too. So that wouldn't count too much in there But typically we see with people who are doing high-intensity training if they're doing it correctly Fastest progress is going to occur over the first six months or gradually taper off and then after that It's you know a little bit of improvement here a little bit there. It's steady, but it definitely slows down a lot There's no way that a person could maintain that kind of rate forever unless And they've got just ridiculous potential for muscular size and strength. Oh, sorry Hey, so I'm just getting started with this stuff I want to know how you pace the days between workouts relative to muscle soreness after the workout Well starting out. I don't recommend person goes all out 100% for the first couple weeks Initially the weight that you use should feel moderate Lunging the tenth repetitions should start to feel hard the first couple times you work out You want to be more focused on getting the form down Moving smoothly moving in control and then gradually increasing the weight And if you do this over the first two to three weeks You're not going to have that much soreness starting out Usually when a person has a lot of soreness is if they jump into it a hundred percent right off the bat now as far as the muscle soreness As it gets a little bit more intense You're gradually going to see a little bit of an increase in soreness at first and then that will gradually drop off Right now. I barely ever have any soreness after a workout unless I do an exercise that I haven't done for a while Usually starting out with clients There's not but not very much soreness initially and then they start to get a little bit more after the first few weeks when it starts To get a little bit harder and then that gradually drops off too So if you start out with more moderate weight gradually build up to that high level of intensity It shouldn't be a problem. Now if you do have a workout where you're extremely sore You don't want to extend your recovery time until the soreness is gone a lot of people do that That there is really not You know much of a benefit to going that much longer the soreness typically is not that much of an indication of recovery needs in fact in some cases if a person is extremely sore to the point where it's you know Interfering with their ability to function perform their job do something Working out a little bit earlier will help alleviate that soreness. I have no idea why only that That usually does it from a recovery standpoint not ideal But if your soreness is interfering with something like work or sport or something like that then it Sometimes could be beneficial to do that and I think At what point Are you putting too much recovery time on is that is it difficult to add too much recovery time or? Probably not a very some person a person But you are less likely to have too much recovery time than too little Usually what we'll see with clients that go away for a period of time You know even sometimes people who are gone a month or two is when they come back They are just as strong or stronger Your body is very very resistant to putting on muscle mass if you are training even extremely hard The body is reluctant to add tissue unless it absolutely needs it and the reason for this is that muscle is metabolically expensive More muscle mass costs more in protein costs more in calories for your body to maintain and from a survival standpoint Your body doesn't want to be you know fuel inefficient Your body is not going to maintain tissue that it doesn't see as an absolute necessity It's very very reluctant to add it even with very very hard training now at the same time as hard as it is to improve Once it has it it is reluctant to let it go Unless you're inactive for a long period of time if you were to work out You know really hard for several weeks build up to a certain amount of strength and then stop working out for Four six even sometimes eight weeks if you were to start working out again after that You could usually pick up right where you left off and in some cases even be stronger Because after that last workout your body recovers it produces that increase in strength and then that stays there unless you're completely immobile After a long period of time it's going to eventually start going down But usually a lot longer than what most people think if you don't work out You know after a week or so you're not going to start to suddenly get weaker If you don't work out after a month You're not going to suddenly start to get weaker if you start to wait a while Or if you're completely inactive if you're sitting around doing absolutely nothing Like if any of you have had a cast for any period of time you notice significant after fate That's an extreme case and most people aren't just going to sit there and do nothing, but I was asking about the shoes Yeah with the shoes Shoes do a similar thing if a person wears shoes It's almost like wearing a cast without getting too far off track Part of the reason that people when they start wearing like the Vibram five fingers have sore feet at first is because their body is so Accustomed to being supported by the shoe the shoe kind of acts as a brace for it and does the work that those muscles should be doing Anyways getting a little bit off track with it But similar thing if your body is completely immobilized for a time You'll have some atrophy, but typically what we find though is people are a lot more winded now cardiovascular or Metabolic adaptations come very quickly. We can very very quickly improve somebody's conditioning their work capacity They're cardiovascular metabolic condition with this type of training a couple weeks We will produce an improvement or this type of training will produce an improvement in your cardiovascular Efficiency your ability to perform work that you couldn't match with the same number of months of traditional endurance training If done with a high level of intensity However, when you stop doing it if you were to stop for a couple weeks Your wind would drop off relatively quickly when you came back You would be just as strong if not stronger, but you would get a lot more winded a lot more quickly thing is After starting that picks right back up after a few weeks again So typically we find that if people take an extended period of time off They don't lose a lot of strength a lot of times they come back stronger What tends to go first is the cardiovascular slash metabolic conditioning That's where you get the biggest hit if you're not training for a while But even that comes right back after a few workouts. So again with the frequency you're better off Doing less training than your body can tolerate than more and you're better off getting an extra day or two recovery than not getting enough recovery time and Say somebody could ideally say your body needed two days of recovery between workouts before you were completely recovered Produced the maximum response If you were to wait an extra day before working out again, it's not gonna hurt you still gonna improve If you were to wait real long, you might not improve as quickly as you could but you would still improve but if you were to Abraid that skin and then apply that same abrasion again before it had completely recovered and kept doing it at that Frequency instead of gradually producing the callus again Just your body's way of adapting to protecting itself against that stress You would just wear the skin down eventually to the point where you're going right through the muscle and other tissue Same with exercise up to a point if you're training hard enough You're stimulating an adaptive response beyond some point or if you don't allow for that recovery and adaptation in between You're just gonna overstress it the stress the volume of the stress exceeds the body's capability to handle it And eventually whatever tissue or system is being stressed starts to break down Okay He asked about meal frequency whether there's any benefit to eating more frequently for example There's a lot of articles and bodybuilding magazines and websites about different frequency of meals It depends on the goal from the bodybuilding standpoint You need to take in adequate protein over a period of day to not just replace what's being excreted But also to allow your body to have a little bit extra to build new tissue tissue with now Your body can only handle an influx of so much at any one particular time It's a little bit more than what people assume though It's not really necessary to eat you know every two or three hours like some bodybuilders do and in fact There are some people and this is a little bit more on the extreme end who only eat one or two times per day I mean what's called intermittent fasting, but they're taking in massive amounts protein in that one meal massive amounts of fat if you're eating adequate amounts of protein and Adequate calories to support an increase in size over time It's not going to make that big of a difference if you're eating three meals a day versus if you're eating five six meals a day or more I have not seen any research that shows any significant Benefit to more frequent meals even from the standpoint of metabolism There have been you know a lot of the talk about meal frequency also Deals with effects on insulin well if you take in you know fewer very very large meals You're more likely to have a significant increase in insulin, but even if you Have say just two or three meals a day if you're not eating too many refined carbohydrates or too much simple sugars during those meals You're unlikely to get either too high of an insulin response or have it up too long to where it's going to cause any problems So either from a standpoint of protein intake or a standpoint of keeping the insulin levels from being elevated There's no need to go super frequent like five six or more times per day again If you're doing even if you're doing this two or three Which again is going towards the other extreme as long as it bounces out overall as far as you meeting your calorie meeting your protein requirements You're fine Do we have time to wrap it up? Yeah. Oh, I'll hang out and answer questions