 All right, our first question is from Andrew Kan one. How do you bulk without gaining extra fat tissue when the fat cells already exist in your body? All right, so I'm gonna reword this question. How do you bulk gain muscle without gaining any extra body fat? All right, so it's virtually possible. Well, here's a couple of things here, okay? Number one, it doesn't take that many extra calories to build muscle. You're not gonna gain muscle anything faster than a couple pounds a month. Maybe faster if you're a new person, you got crazy genetics or whatever. But even at three pounds a month, which would be amazing. If you gain three pounds of muscle in a month, that'd be phenomenal. If you did the math on how many calories it took to produce that, it's not much at all. It's like an extra 50 calories a day. So on the one hand, you wanna bulk in a way where you're eating minimal extra calories to build muscle. By the way, you also wanna have a very strong muscle building signal along with that. So you wanna have a good workout program that's telling your body to build muscle. But here's the other side of that, because I know people listening are like, it doesn't work for me. I gotta eat way more calories to build any muscle at all. Well, the reason behind that is because eating extra calories also sends a muscle building signal. Believe it or not, if you bumped your calories by 500 calories above maintenance or even 1,000 above maintenance, if there's an anabolic part to it, right? It does send a muscle building signal. So this is where we get into this kind of gray area. Now, I know you said, Adam, for example, that it's impossible or whatever. If the signal is strong enough, the body will build muscle. And all I have to do is point to studies where men are given injections of testosterone, so they're given steroids, and their body weight oftentimes doesn't change, but they lose fat and build muscle at the same time. Now, of course, they have a very loud hormonal signal, but that just highlights that the signal is the most important thing. If you're really telling your body to build muscle effectively, you're getting good sleep, obviously you're eating healthy, and you're following a workout, this is the most important part, you're following a workout that is appropriately intense, has the appropriate amount of volume, is utilizing the best exercises, you're seeing strength gains. If that is sending a very, very good muscle building signal, it doesn't take that many more calories to build muscle. I think you kind of have to be a black belt to do this, right? And it's really genetic freak. Well, it's less to, and even if you are a genetic freak, it's still the mental discipline that you have to have, because you have to understand that you could very well be building muscle at the perfect rate, and not see the scale move whatsoever. And so if you're somebody that's trying to build, and you know you're eating, or you think you're eating extra calories, and you don't see the scale going up anyway, it really messes with your head, it really makes you think. You don't want to ramp it up. Yeah, or you might even see the scale go down to your point, you could lose body fat. I mean, if you eat more calories, you speed up the metabolism, you build some more muscle, which speeds up the metabolism, and so there's a chance that you could add a pound of muscle, but then also maybe lost a pound and a half of fat along your two or three week journey, and then go, oh my God, I'm definitely not doing this right, I'm losing weight. You're right. But in reality, you could actually be just in per, so the hardest part about this is the mental discipline to just stay the course, to believe that, okay, I've figured this out, I've got enough calories, I know I'm eating well, I've got, I'm following a good program, I'm training consistently, and I'm seeing strength go up, and just staying the course. There's no way around it, like it's gonna, if you were to try to really nail this down, it's gonna take a really long time, and spread out, and really managing your calories at a level that is just barely noticeably in a surplus. Like you just have to very much be meticulous about it, and I just don't know that a lot of people have that kind of discipline. No, I sucked at this for years, right, because I was the skinny kid that wanted to gain weight, and so the scale was so important to me. If the scale went up, well, I'm crushing, and I'm doing a good job, but the reality is that doesn't always tell you everything. So there's a few tips that I'll give you that I think can help a lot, and this is just based on my own experience. Number one, are you getting stronger? Okay, so if your strength is going up, you're definitely not losing muscle, or it's very unlikely that you're losing muscle, and you're probably gaining muscle, or at least going in that direction. So are you getting stronger? Number two, also use either body fat test, or circumference measurements. Now for me, when I gain body fat, it's typically around my waist. So if I measure my waist, I can tell if I'm getting leaner or gaining body fat. If the scale goes up and my waist doesn't go up, it's muscle, or if the scale goes up and my waist goes down, holy cow, I'm doing the holy grail. The only reason why I don't like that one is because of like, inflammation in the gut, water retention, and a lot of things. Yeah, you can't take one measurement to heart. You gotta do it kind of as a friend. I like the body fat one, and if you follow me since the beginning, this is actually how I built my Instagram. So when I came out and I measured my body fat percentage, and it was at 20% body fat, which at that time in my life, I'd never been that high before, I was 212 pounds. And when I showed the journey, I actually, my goal was to stay at 212. And that's where, so when I came all the way down to 7%, I was 212 still. And the goal was to show people that I didn't need to have this huge swing one way or the other. I didn't need to add on 20 pounds of muscle to then lose 30 pounds total of body fat. It was like, I'm gonna hover right around this 212. Now mind you, week to week, I had some 214s, the 211s, and but the goal was to kind of, that my home base was 212. And the way I looked at it was if I ever went, if I started to creep up, I would kind of back off calories a little bit. If I started to really dip down, I would increase a little bit, but I was really trying to stay, because I knew I had plenty of body fat to trim off. I knew that I was consistent with training, which I wasn't before that. I was sending a signal to build muscle. If I could keep my calories at a place, that my body was kind of hovering around that weight, I was training correctly and consistently, and I was eating good, that I'm probably having a nice little exchange. Yeah, and then here's the other part of it too, and this took me a long time to understand, is that building muscle is a slow ass process. So if you're bulking, and you're like, oh hell yeah, I gained 10 pounds this month. It's probably not all muscle. It's actually probably mostly not muscle. You just, nobody builds muscle that fast, unless it's muscle memory. So unless you were super buff before, and you stop working out, lost a lot of muscle and started working again, or you're like the one in a million or a billion. But muscle building is a slow process. So if you're inching up on the scale, ever so slowly, where every couple months, you go up a couple pounds or a pound and it sticks, and you're getting stronger, and you're noticing in the mirror that you see more definition, you're probably gaining muscle. But boy, does it take a ridiculous amount of patience, because I know what you're talking about your journey that you did, Adam, where you did that weight transfer, that was after years of you working out, knowing your body for a long time. I would have never been able to do that as a kid, because I was so impatient. Oh yeah, no, I didn't have the discipline as a kid to do that. I'm glad you brought that up though. What was I just gonna say? You just brought up, no, no, no, no, talking about the muscle memory. So I get tagged on this a lot. So this is a good time to bring this point up. So we get tagged a lot on people that show like these crazy transformations, and people want me to like point out how fake it has to be. And being truthful, they're not always that, some of them are fake. A lot of people Photoshop, a lot of people do that. But for me to come in and accuse somebody and say just because they showed this ridiculous transformation in 60 to 90 days is fake, that's no. If you've been training for as long as we have, I can whip my, I can really make a huge difference. Because of how much muscle I've built over the years, if I let myself really go for like six months and fall out of shape, I can shred body fat and build muscle really quick and show a major change in 60 to 90 days. So those don't always mean that they're fake. It might mean that somebody has been training for a really long time. They know their body, they know their shit, they know what they need to do calorie-wise. They probably were inconsistent. They just have to tighten it all up. Yeah, and they just gotta tighten it up and they tighten it up and they actually make a massive change. When I had shoulder surgery years ago, I remember, you know, if you've ever had a cast on and you take it off, it's always frightening. You take it off, they're like, whoa. I remember my- Stick arm. Yeah, like there was like nothing. My shoulder was non-existent. And I don't remember how it was like a couple of months when I was finally able to work out. And I measured my arm, I lost like two inches or two and a half inches or more in terms of muscle and it didn't look like my arm at all. And it came back so fast. It was literally weeks where it was right back to where it was before. So muscle memory is a real thing. Yeah.