 Hey guys, it's Mary Lee Johnson here at the 21 Convention 2014 in Tampa and you just gave your talk and you went over a lot of exercise and one of the first things that you said that I love that I had to write down was that exercise doesn't produce results, it facilitates it. Stimulates it. Stimulates it. The act of going through a workout doesn't directly produce any improvements in your body. Exercise serves as a stimulus that your body responds to by producing the desired results. So you want to be in the gym only long enough to provide that stimulus, but for your body to then produce the results you have to allow adequate time in between workouts to recover and adapt. Okay, and then you were talking about the example of moving a truck. What is that? The point of the example of trying to lift a truck was mainly to get across that the weight used is not so much a factor in the injury risk as how you attempt to move it. Again, if you were to try and go in the parking lot and lift a truck, you're not going to lift it, it's not going to go. It's much heavier weight than you would even think of using for an exercise, but you could attempt to do it and not get hurt in the process if you applied force gradually and then gradually eased off, as opposed to just grabbing a bumper and yanking as hard and fast as you can. The difference between the two is in applying force gradually and easing off gradually, you're thinking not about trying to move it, because that's not going to be as effective as moving it as yanking it, you're thinking about just using it to place a demand on the muscles. If you were really trying to move it, then you would attempt to yank it if it's a weight that heavy, but that's not what you're trying to do during a workout. When you're working out, you're not trying to make a barbell go up and down, you're not trying to move the handles or the pedals or pad on a machine back and forth. You are using the resistance that those things provide to place as much of a demand on the muscles being targeted as possible, and you want to do that while minimizing your risk of injury. Good, that was a great answer. And if people have a stigma, like they don't work out as hard as maybe they could because either they just, they haven't pushed themselves or maybe they're afraid of being sore the next day, how do they get over that? Well, if a person isn't training, and this is almost everybody has this problem, very few people, even people who think they're training really hard, usually aren't training anywhere near as hard as they're actually physically capable of training, and part of being able to do that is understanding that your physical limitations are usually pretty far beyond the psychological limitations you set for yourself. A lot of people stop an exercise when it becomes uncomfortable rather than when they are physically incapable of continuing the exercise in the correct form. You have to get used to it. You have to make a commitment to push yourself to work through that discomfort, and the more you do it, the better you'll get at it and the higher your tolerance for it becomes. Is that where a trainer comes in? A good trainer, a trainer who actually knows what he's talking about. Unfortunately, they're the minority, but one of the things that is very helpful in doing that is when you're working out, the workout is a means goal. You're trying to produce some type of an improvement in the body, but the improvement is not what you're after. What you're after is all of the life benefits that come from the improvement stimulated by the workout, the end goal. I get a lot of guys, the older guys, they're divorced, they're back on the market, they've let themselves go and they're married and now they want to get back in shape, they're not getting in shape to get in shape, they're getting in shape so that they're more attractive, so that they're more confident. When you're going through a workout, if you think about these things, what am I trying to do and why, and is that more important to me than the relief from what is a momentary discomfort? Usually, the answer is going to be no, this is more important to me than stopping my muscles from burning right now and you just have to keep that in mind and again, the more you do it, the more tolerance you build up for it and the better you become at pushing yourself through that, but it starts with realizing that your physical limitations are usually pretty far beyond the psychological limitations you set for yourself. Yeah, I think they are. I think a lot of us set it a little bit, a little bit too low, make it too easy and then go down. So, when it comes to physique, what is more important, the exercise or the diet, because you talk mostly about exercise. Genetics, more than anything else, but quite frankly, nutrition is going to make a bigger difference. My focus is exercise, but if somebody were to come to me and they've never worked out and they have a horrible diet and they were only willing to do one or the other, start working out or start eating correctly, I would have them focus on the diet because it's going to make a much, much bigger difference in their health and their appearance. Now, if you take somebody who's out of shape and has a horrible diet, you will make much greater improvements in their health and appearance by getting them to eat properly than you would by having them start working out and part of that is because you can't work out effectively and you can't effectively recover from and adapt to those workouts or actually, I shouldn't say effectively, you can't optimally work out or recover from and adapt to the workouts if you're not feeling your body for that purpose. If you were to take somebody and have them start a workout program, they could do everything perfectly in their workouts, but if they were eating like crap, their body, they wouldn't be able to work as hard. They wouldn't produce as much of a stimulus for improvement and their body would have more difficulty recovering from the workout and producing the adaptations. On the other hand, if you took somebody who had a horrible diet and never worked out and you had them clean up their diet, that alone, it's not going to build any muscle on them, but it's going to reduce their body fat so they have a better overall body composition. And quite frankly, as many physical benefits, many health benefits as exercise has, the best program in the world will not make up for somebody following a horrible, horrible diet. So you want both, ideally, but if a person was only willing to do one or the other, the diet actually makes a bigger difference in their health and appearance. And if somebody's working out and they're not getting the results they want from their workout, assuming that they're already following sane a program, then a lot of times the diet is where they need to look to find the problem. We used to, when I was in college, I worked for GNC briefly earlier on. We used to get these kids that'd come in and they wanted to build muscle. And we asked them, well, what are you doing for a workout? Well, I'm not working out. I just want to take a powder or something. Well, what are you eating? And most of them are barely eating anything. Almost everybody that I've trained who's previously had a difficult time building muscle mass wasn't eating nearly enough to do that. And likewise, a lot of people that I've trained that have been trying to lose body fat were trying to out-exercise a bad diet. They thought that if they were more active, if they were working out more and longer, that they would lose the fat. But the, and... So if I spend an extra hour at the gym, I can have that whole pizza. Yeah, which is just nonsense. The calories that are claimed to be burned by a lot of these group classes and different activities are grossly exaggerated. People are not going to burn like 1,000 calories in an hour doing any kind of cardio kickboxing or anything like that. It's a marketing hype, a few hundred maybe, if you are able to maintain a high level of effort for that duration. But people aren't burning 1,000 calories doing that. But the people who were trying to lose weight through exercise but weren't changing their diet didn't happen. The only time that people started losing fat and seeing really good improvements in body composition is when they also tightened up their diet. So, yeah, they're both important, but diet is going to have the bigger impact on overall health and appearance. So this is your third time speaking at the 21 Convention. How's your experience been here so far? Oh, it's been great. I enjoy speaking at the 21 Convention. It's a smart audience. And so the quality of the questions are a lot better. Usually get more thoughtful questions on par with some of the other high intensity training events. Whereas I've spoke to the general public and certain things. And there's no such thing as a stupid question. But there are questions that if people had been paying attention and maybe given what I was talking about a little bit of thought, they wouldn't have asked. So it's nice to have a thoughtful, intelligent group to speak to that asks, well, questions that I like answering. Yeah, it's really important. And yeah, it's nice not to get the same questions over and over again in the same exact way. It's been nice talking to you. We loved having you here. If the people want to see you and they want to see where you're at and you're writing, where do they go? Bay.com, it's B-A-Y-E.com. Okay, God, that's really super simple. Go to Bay.com. Bye, guys.