 We were right before we got on air, we were getting caught up with you Brett and you were starting to kind of share your story and I actually don't know this part of you. I've followed your content for quite some time. I know you're good friends with Lane, Lane's a good buddy of ours, but I didn't know kind of how you got into this space and you were starting to tell me that you were a math teacher. So how do you transition from being a math teacher to one plus one equals glutes? To shaping asses for the rest of your life. How did that happen? So, I was, all right, while I was a teacher, I was so productive, like the students would make fun of me for how fast I walked, but I, and I would have like, if I could have, I'd always go to the counselor, I'd go, can you give me as many TAs as possible? I'd have two TAs for every period. So they were my helpers, because I wanted to spend every spare minute I had reading about fitness, that was my hobby. I would read TNation and all the websites. Well, back then the website, like the web, like before that I read all muscle mags, and I read all of them every month, but I never had this, when the internet came around, then you had all this new information, like all I knew was bodybuilding. So now I'm learning from strength coaches and power lifters and people that I didn't learn from before. So I would spend my whole prep period and lunch period reading about strength and conditioning, but it was just as a lifter. I never planned on doing anything with it. How old are you right now, this time in your life? I'm 43 right now. Back then I was 24 when I first started teaching. Yeah, because you went to school, you got your masters, then you start off teaching. Meanwhile, you're reading all this stuff as a hobby. As a hobby and doing some personal training on the side, but not really making a lot of money from it. And then I got, during my master's program, I turned in a project. The professor let us do it on anything we wanted. So I picked exercise science. I didn't have to do it on math. And she's, anyway, I turn it in. She says, Brett, I need to, she called me, like what professor ever calls you on the phone, she called me up. She says, life is too short to waste. You have to pursue your passion. I have no doubt you're a good math teacher, but you really need to go into strength and conditioning. You can have your master's degree soon. I can hook you up with community college if you want to be a professor, but you really need to do this. And then I couldn't stop thinking about this. And then around that same time, teacher friend of mine, we were really close. And she comes into my room after school and she's like, she's like, hey, Brett, would you go to this wedding with me, this guy I have a crush on, I want to make him jealous. And you're the perfect guy to do so. And I'm like, why is that? She's like, well, you know, you're tall, you're athletic, you're a decent looking guy, you're funny, you're smart. Come to think about your only flaw is you don't make any money. And Arizona is like 50, back then it was, I don't know if it still is, but it was like 50th out of 50 states in state funding for education. I mean, I only made back then 29,000 I started out at. Then after six years of teaching and a master's plus 24 credits, I was making 36,000. And if you worked 30 years and got your PhD, you topped out at 59,000 in Scottsdale School District back then. And I'm like, the most I can hope for is not even to make 60 grand. I need to do something. So the wheels started turning. And then my mom had watched that field of dreams movie with Kevin Costner many times. And she's like, kept telling me if you build it, they will come. So I decided, and here's the thing. Which applies to glutes. Yeah, absolutely. You build them and then they come. I'm still very frugal. Like I don't spend much. And because the only things I ever want are I don't care about cars. I don't wear fancy clothes. I don't need to eat at fancy restaurants, but I love strength training equipment. You're salad be best friends then. Sounds just like him. Yeah, so I had saved up. So I didn't, even making such low money, I still had saved up like 20 grand. So I put in this big order with EliteFTS and bought like all this cool stuff from my garage gym. But it was so cluttered. I actually had room for a whole gym if I expanded. So I opened up a gym in Scottsdale. And at that same time, that's when I invented the barbell hip thrust. And I was watching UFC fights. This was October 10th, 2006. It was Tito Ortiz versus Ken Shamrock. Great fight. There was their third fight. And I didn't care who won. I just wanted, I didn't want it to end so quickly. I didn't want one person just to be embarrassed. And Tito quickly gets in Ken's guard and is just ground impounding him. And I'm like, man, you should be trying to do something. Like buck your hips, trying to escape. I'm like, I wonder if there'd be an exercise that could strengthen that motion. And I'm like, you can't, I can't be like, hey, Sal, can you straddle me? I'm gonna bust out 50 reps. I mean, you can say that, but I'll say no. I'll film it if you guys want to do it. Don't lie. You would consider it. I don't know. It's a viral potential there. And what if we were alone? Yeah. I'm not the bucky, I'm the bucker. Oh, is that true? I don't know about that. So I was like, well, you need to add load and then, but also it's a, I'd done, glute bridges were popular at the time. Like all the T nation guys were doing it. You know, Eric Cressy, Mike Robertson, Mike Boyle, Mark Verstegen, Martin Rooney was doing glute activation with his pro football players. Everyone was talking about it and I would do them, but I'm more of a bodybuilder at heart. I'm like, why would I just do 10 of these when I could do a hundred? You know, I want it to be hard. I want it to be heavy or rep to failure, but I don't want to do, I hate high reps. So wait a second. At that time, all the names that you just dropped, which are all incredible coaches, they're using it more like a glute activation to kind of prime the glutes. They're not heavy loading. They're doing just glute bridges basically so that the science or the guys that are on it understand the value of it, but not to the point of loading it. Like we're using it more of an accessory lift. It's no, it's low load glute activation. And the point, because if you fatigue the muscles, then you perform worse. So let's say you could do a hundred, like all of us could probably do 100 glute bridges. Right, they're using it as a primer, right? You do it for sets of 10 or something before the workout to prime the muscle and theoretically get more performance. The research is kind of mixed on that. I think it depends on the situation. But anyway, a lot of people swear by it, especially power lifters, they swear, their hips feel better when they do some glute activation before they squat, but anyway, I had tried those movements and I liked them. Just like cable pull-throughs. I remember trying those, but I'd put on the stack and I'm like, God, I could do 30 of these. I need more weight, but then I tried pinning an extra plate on there and I'm leaning forward so much and it just didn't feel right. But I'm like, I like that in-range glute squeeze that you get. So, and let me backtrack. The reason I got obsessed with glute training was because I had none. Like my back went right into my legs and so... Like a frog in suspenders. Like a frog in suspenders. Were people making funny or something? Yeah, so in high school, you're going through puberty and you're getting interested in women and I remember seeing these three girls I had a crush on, they're like, let's go watch football practice. I love watching the guys in their football uniforms. I love staring at their butts and I'm like, oh, great. If that's important to girls, then yeah. So instead of... I was the same way, bro. I still you. So instead of making a lot of money, you developed your glutes. I got some bad news for you. They weren't talking about money in high school. They're not quite gold diggers yet. But yeah, I'm like, great. I'm gonna be a virgin for life unless I figure out how to... And I remember going, it was funny because I remember thinking, okay, I do push-ups for my pecs and bench press and I have those lines that started. I do curls for my biceps. I wish there were something for my glutes that I could do because no one talked about glutes back then. Like bodybuilders don't have a glute day. You're right. And it was just... In fact, Vince Gironde popularized it where you didn't want your glutes to grow. To curate, he would say because it helps with the v-taper. In fact, he banned squats in his gym. Yeah, and they do frog squats. They do like narrow stance duck type. That's all quads, though. Yeah, like trying to make it more like hack squats and stuff like that. Heels elevated and up on your toes and stuff. So I think a lot of bodybuilders, it's just some weird tradition. They don't talk about glutes much. So I knew that like squats and deadlifts build your glutes, but I didn't feel them as a 16, 17, 18-year-old kid. I just folded like an aqua... I mean, I'm tall. I didn't have good... Were you lanky at the time? Lanky. And I didn't feel them working that well and had hip thrust bent around. I think I could have fast forwarded my glute development a lot. But I remember thinking like I wish there was an exercise that really focused on glutes, that I could do like a push-up where I really felt my glutes working. But anyway, that and then also I was playing golf and my sister's boyfriend, we're on the ninth hole, I'm about to swing and he's like, you know, Brett, I'm looking at you and your back goes right into your legs. It's like you're missing the gluteal muscles and he got all scientific, it's funny. He was not a scientific man. He's like, most people have a protuberance there and you have nothing. It's just like a stick man. No, but Brett. He's just hitting you. He's just fucking hitting you in your soft spot. That's what I was like. Especially scientifically, a science guy. You wouldn't do that like... You wouldn't do that with, I don't know. I'm like, you know, if someone had a small penis, would you be like, that is crazy. I'm looking at it. I'm like trying to see it, but I don't. It's so minuscule, it's crazy. It's barely protruding away from you. They probably lit the fire though, I guess. That was all it took. Do you send them like glute shots and stuff? Because now you get a big ass now. That was the first thing I noticed when you walked in the door. Do you send pictures of your ass now? Hey, take a look at this. Actually, thank you. What's the post for that? So that's why I became really into glutes. And so then when I ordered all the lead FTS equipment, because I was following my big influencers back then were Louis Simmons, Dave Tate, Jim Wendler, Jota Franco, Jason Frugia, all these Zach Gevinach, all these guys who had gyms and were like badasses themselves, like lifted heavy and trained a lot of people. There's more guys too. Yeah, and so the equipment that I bought was all like this Power Act slash platform with every bell and whistle that you could ever want, like all the attachments and then all these specialty bars and a 45 degree hyper or reverse hyper, a glute ham developer, a prowler. So I had all this awesome glute training equipment. When I thought up the hip thrust, I didn't think of putting a barbell in your lap right away. I thought of putting a dip belt underneath you, suspended with weights and putting your feet way up high. Sure. And it took a while to go, oh God, you could just do that off a bench. Yeah. It seems so obvious, but here's another side note. Nowadays, whenever I say I invented the barbell hip thrust, it's so weird. It's the same thing as like later today, I'll have 800,000 followers on Instagram. I have 799 right now. And if I post on my feed, thank you guys so much. 800,000, this is so amazing. I'm so humbled, like whatever you know. I will lose like 2,000 followers. So then it's awkward because I'm like, thank you for 800 and then it's like you look and it's Thanks. Oh no. Yeah. I'll be back. So I don't post that anymore. It's weird. It's like, if you draw attention to it, people unfollow you. And if I say I invented the barbell hip thrust, all these people go crazy and they're, I mean, I just, Like they disagree with you? Like they want to claim it or? So they say it's been done since the 60s. My dad's been doing this since the 1960s. And I always say, that's amazing. I'm actually a strength and conditioning historian. I study the history. So if this was being done, I want to tell people about it. Do you have any picture or any video from prior to 2006? Cause I want to spread the word. I'll tell all my platforms and they always go, no, we weren't carrying around cameras. And I'm like, but you can find any black and white picture of dips, bench press, incline press, military press. At the very least, at the very, very, very least. You popularized it. Nobody talked about it. Nobody popularized it at the very, very least. But look, I'm a historian when it comes to fitness too. And you're right. I never saw anybody do a hip thrust with the barbell for hypertrophy. They were doing lots of hip bridges. Oh, you see it everywhere now. Now it's all over the place. Yeah, now you see it all over the place. I don't know if you knew this, but I invented curls. Yeah, I was the first guy. Nobody did curls before, shit. No, I'm just kidding. I would love to, I mean, I wouldn't feel bad being like no way they were actually doing this in, you know, India in the 1920s or whatever. Cause I'd still be credited for popularizing it, but I'm pretty confident that no one will find a picture of video because before I ever started writing articles for like teenagers. You probably were searching and researching, I would have been. No, I searched for, okay, it doesn't sound like a lot, but a whole week of my life, but like 12 hours a day, I searched Google, I searched, I read through every, one of my, you know, like Zastjorsky and Sif and Verkoshansky and all those Russian texts and Google, like I'd go on forums. Even Olympic lifters and power lifters, you found no evidence. No, I found no evidence. So I'm pretty confident. Maybe they did it, but they just don't want to tell anybody. They're embarrassed. Yeah. Hip thrust. I was just the first guy comfortable with secure with yourself. Fuck it, I would have put this out, it's too good. Do you find now that when you like walk around and stuff, people just stare at your butt because you're the glue guy? Do you feel a little bit like, oh shit. Well here's the thing, I don't have, I mean, here's what I try to convey to people, like so much of this is genetics and you know, some of these girls with the greatest butts, you never know, maybe they have the Brazilian butt lift or something, but also some of them just. Had it. Don't even have to do much. Yeah. You know, when I give seminars, I always show Jen Selter and I show her workout that was like on bodybuilding.com, like they tagged her, so if it was wrong. What was it, dog peas and like, I mean it's like, well, when I do it, it's hilarious because like two of the exercises are hip flexion, they're like kicks, like squat and kick, and like chair kicks, like that's hip flexion, not hip extension, but it's like 10 reps, like one set of 10 with like eight Xs, it's basically a low load glute activation workout. So do you have a girlfriend now, wife? No. Nothing, I was gonna say because. I have a girlfriend, but not a wife. Okay, so you have a girlfriend. So is it awkward that you have like probably 10,000 ass pictures on your phone? I'm sure that your athletes send you their ass pics all the time. Yeah, well, I think it takes a strong woman to date me because, well, I think it takes a strong woman to date any trainer, I've always said that. If you're a trainer and you're around, you're gonna be around women all the time. But I can just imagine this guy's phone getting lit up with a gray. Look at my progress. Look at my progress, yeah. It's an it's a thong, you know what I mean or whatever. But what's funny is, I mean, even people will, you know, especially like, like there's certain countries where it just has a lot of creepy dudes that write you that are like, how do you not have an erection all day long at your glute lab or how do you? Yeah, and like, I imagine if you were a bouncer at a strip club, you just become immune to it. Yeah, numb to it. I see this all day long. I've been training the best butts for a lot of years now and it doesn't even phase me. And honestly, you start seeing a lot of the top, like a lot of influencers who have a huge followings, men and women, they're so egotistical and it's so, there's no substance to them. It's such a turn off. I just assume, you know, and then I meet someone, for example, Lauren Simpson, I follow her. She's from Australia, I met her. She's so smiling and so happy and genuine and real and it's like, oh, this breath of fresh air. But I assume that they're... Isn't that interesting? Yeah. That was one of the things that we found when we first got into the space because by no means were any of us in any sort of celebrities or in big on any other platforms. Like it just kind of organically grew for us. And as the show grew, we started to get more and more of these people that came on that had a million followers or 400,000. And I remember when we first started, we were so excited to meet some of these people, that much influence and they've grown their page and their network that much. And a lot of times, well, that's one way to put it. A lot of times there are nothing like what's being presented. And we actually started, you know, talking about stay authentic. We actually trademarked that a couple of years back because we thought that that would be something that you're gonna hear more and more of over the course of the next four or five years because we're learning this ourselves just the last couple of years. And I think that we're gonna see this kind of pendulum swing of these people that get so much respect and credibility just because they have 400,000 followers because their bodies, people are starting to figure out that they're not all what they present online. And I think that's gonna be an interesting swing that we're going to see because when we first got in the space, man, the people that are reaching the millions of people aren't the best communicating the best information out there, which is a lot of the motivation that we had to start this podcast was to highlight people like yourself, like the Lane Norton's, a lot of the names that you were name dropping earlier. Joda Franco. Yeah, Joda Franco's, Jay's, like people putting out really good information, but nobody knows because they're not the best at Instagram. You know, they're the best at posting photos to get attention, you know? I mean, I've seen, it's kind of sad. Like I've seen all my, like the people I kind of idolized and they didn't embrace Instagram. And when it first came out, I didn't want to do Instagram. I mean, I waited a while, but it was my twin brother who told me, Brett, you got to get on Instagram. And I'm like, Joel, I don't do social media for fun. Like I'm a businessman and I do Facebook, I do Twitter, I do YouTube, I blog, I have a newsletter, that's it. And if Instagram could make me money, I would do it, but you can't link things. And he's like, just trust me, it's the wave of the future. And I'm like, and it's so crazy because a few years later, I abandoned, I don't do Facebook, I don't do Twitter, don't do YouTube, don't blog, don't, I think I send a newsletter out once every couple of months now. I need to, I need to get back into that, but I'm doing so well on Instagram. It's like my main, and then now I'm nervous, what are the algorithms change on screen? But that's a reminder of why I think you gotta be a little bit older. Like as I mentioned, I'm 43, you gotta have some perspective. So I lived through the housing market crash of 2007-ish or whenever that was when, when I just opened up my gym, my gym was killing it. And I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna be making six figures in like two more months. And then the housing market crash and all my clients were like, Brett, this is the best part of my day. It's the only thing I look forward to, my husband just lost his job. Our kid is, we're trying to put him through college. I have to quit. I'd be like, I totally understand. But through no fault of my own, the whole plaza went under at that time. And I was forced to figure something else out. And then when Facebook's algorithms change, I remember going, what is it going on? Like I used to get, I'd post my blog, a blog post onto Facebook, choose the thumbnail. You'd get like 2,000 likes and 500 shares. And then all of a sudden you're getting like, you know, 300 likes and 30 shares. And I'm like, this isn't fun anymore. So I know they were, I could have figured something out and started advertising there, but it was like an ego thing. I don't want to advertise. I liked that before they tweaked that you could, and what I liked back then is as a scientist, I had power. If someone was saying some BS, I could write a blog post to counter them and it would go viral through, through just stay out of it. And it goes viral because people want to know that, but then after they tweak with things in it. So I always know now, no thing is forever. Things will change five years from now. Things will be different. And that's why you got to stay humble because yeah, take away everyone's Instagram followers. And yeah. Well, now speaking to, I want to kind of jump in. You're talking about like science. I want to get into the science. Like you found this new way to develop your glutes, right? Immediately then take that and put it up against the old squat and kind of like see which one had the most effect and what sort of results were you seeing? So looking back now that I'm a better scientist, and by the way, I should mention that still to this day, I consider myself a lifter first, then a personal trainer, then a scientist. But I love science. I always have, even as a kid. Looking back, you can always look back at the things I did wrong or things I should have done better. What I did was I decided, okay, I'm going to start blogging, all right? I'm going to start writing articles like crazy, but I have no revenue coming in. I need to make some money. So the only thing I did is I wrote an e-book and that was my only revenue source. And I never even promote, I don't think I ever promoted it on social media. It was just in the corner of my blog. And this was 2009, so I wrote this e-book and I had all these theories as to which exercises grew your glutes the best and which categories. And I wanted to, all of a sudden it occurred to me, like I could test this, I could learn EMG. And coincidentally, Narraxon's headquarters, the Narraxon makes EMG equipment, they just so happened to be a mile away from me where I lived, like out of everywhere in the world, they were in Scottsdale, right where I lived. So I went to them, I'm like, can you teach me how to do this? They're like, yeah, no problem. And they taught me that they're different now, the company's very different now, but back then they just trained me for free and I learned how to do it. And I spent like three months of my life. Well, like pretty much when the, when my clients were done for the day, I'd lock the doors, strip down to my underwear, throw on electrodes and- Go ahead and have a party. Yeah, have a party. And I learned so much at that time. Last weekend. However, it's funny cause I always, you know how that you talked about the pendulum swing? Yeah. So I started posting a lot about EMG and my friend Brad Schoenfeld did too. And then I think this pendulum swung the other way and one of them was my intern, Andrew Vygotsky. He wrote a couple, published a couple of articles talking about how EMG does not infer increased motor unit recruitment. It does not infer hypertrophy. And I was on those papers with him and I agree with it, but I also think people then, you see people go, EMG doesn't mean anything. It's stupid. And I'm like, no, it's- I was just gonna ask you about that actually because, you know, I remember reading the first EMG, I think it was a book. I think it was called, I think it was called Magnet to Muscle or something like that. I remember with the title of it was a long time ago I can't even find it anymore. Wait, Matt, that might have been, was that with a, that might have been MRI with per-tesh or something like that? I don't remember. It was activation, but it was with MRI. Something like that. It was a long time ago. It was in the 90s. Per-tesh, yeah. I was a kid. I was like my teens. And it would say some things about certain exercises like decline bench press activates upper chest more than incline pet press or reverse grip. And I remember thinking like, this doesn't make sense at all. Especially when you look at the thousands of anecdotes and the years and years and years of people training and then the experience you have when you train that I don't think that's true. When I do this exercise, I can see where I develop. So what does EMG then show if it doesn't necessarily show motor, you know, motor recruitment or hypertrophy? EMG is a voltage meter. It's just measuring the electrical juice to the muscles. But what you just said is very important because what I, all right, it's just like I don't like when coaches are like, screw the science. I am the science. I am the research. No, you're not. Like when one of our clients sees good results it could be from what we think it is but we're not, it's not a controlled setting. It could also be, I see that a lot with power lifters. When I started doing, you know, one arm rose my deadlift went up but also you also start doing trend and like, yeah, yeah. Or you just got more consistent all of a sudden. You're not controlling variables, you know? So that's why research is important but I think it's even more egregious because scientists are supposed to know better when they act like the only evidence on this planet is published research. Oh, beautiful. Glad you said that. And it's like that assumes that everything's been researched and in sports science, in strength training science, the funding goes to things that are endangering lives, you know? Diabetes, obesity, things like that. We don't get much funding and also so we have these low sample sizes. We have short studies. And you have a little bit of a self-selection bias. You got, you know, 10 college aged males, you know? Yeah, because that's the subjects you get at a university. A lot of times it's your, if you're in a PhD cohort it's your five friends, it's your nine friends and you all do each other's studies with each other. And... I remember, I mean, some of the best science came out of the former Soviet Union when the Iron Curtain fell because they funded a lot of studies on exercise and what works and what doesn't work. Yeah, but that was like, they really cared about winning Olympic. Yes, right, they were motivated. They motivated and so, but you take everything with a grain of salt, like, and that's, God, I wish I had in my book, I have this, I wish I had in front of me because I talk about like the different forms of, like how you would figure out if an exercise is good. Here are the different ways, okay? You can do a bunch of sets and see where you're sore the next day. You can do some high reps and you'll see where you feel the burn and get a pump. You can palpate while someone's doing it, see what muscles get the hardest. You can, and like throughout the range of motion where sometimes things shift and stuff, you can perform EMG to get like a mathematical quantity of how much activation. And then there's also, you can use things like ultrasound MRI, things like that to also get kind of like measures of activation or muscle thickness changes. But anyway, you can kind of perform a functional analysis where you analyze the movement and look at the direction of the fibers and the attachment points and see logically with this, you know, and then you can talk to other coaches and lifters and get their feedback of what they think, what they feel, what they've noticed. And then finally you have like longitudinal training studies where this was done for 12 weeks. Here's the effects that it had on these things. But really what you wanna do is use all those. You never abandon how you would, you're thinking like a scientist there because you're like decline, I don't think it works more upper pecs. And that depends on the study by the way. So, but back then they didn't have like, when you read that. Yeah, the MRI showed activation of upper chest was higher in decline. But sometimes you can get, with EMG and that's a pitfall, it doesn't show you the stretch. So like, Yeah, there's a right. There's a lot of factors that go into, and you know- So that's why with EMG it would be effective if you look at similar range of motion. Like, let's say you did a lap pull down where your hands were close together. You have this huge arc of motion and you go from fully outstretched overhead to touching the top of your chest. And then you do really, really wide grip where it's a, it's gonna be half the range of motion, but it might activate the lats more. But what grows your lats? Ultimately what we wanna know is what grows your lats more? And I've never seen a longitudinal study on that. So we have EMG to give us clues, but then we have to say, well, are all things controlled and we're not controlling. And that's a lot of things in the literature like that. In fact, when I defended my thesis, God, I had this total hater on my reviewing my PhD. I thought I wasn't gonna get it. Two of them were like, this is the best, one of the best theses I've ever seen. And this other was like, God, he just hated my work. He said, there's nothing novel about this. And I'm like, what? It's looking at the hip thrust. It's the first evidence on the hip thrust. It's exploring the force vector hypothesis. I also thought of a new way to use a force plate where you stand on it and push against a wall to measure horizontal force is not just vertical forces in the case of like a isometric mid-diapole. So it's way more novel than like, I mean, obviously I'm biased, but it's one of the most novel PhDs. Anyway, he was saying, why didn't you, we had this big argument and my supervisor was like, it was amazing watching you duel. It was like two men with swords, but I can't, I had to be very respectful. But he was saying, you should have normalized the hip range of motion between a squat and a hip thrust. And I'm like, and he was saying all these things. And I'm like, okay, that's the kind of things that coaches read it. And they're like, that's stupid because you should do a deep squat. That's the way people do it. You know, if I were in a partial squat, everyone would have been pissed. They're roasted again. You don't, you do it, you want ecological validity. So you do it how the first study in my opinion should always be how it's done in the gym. Yes. Here's what I found during my studies. The hip thrust, it's compared to a squat, okay? So it's funny. So, and this is a good example for the listeners, okay? Of different types of evidence. If you look at my EMG study from my thesis, that one is actually published in the Journal of Applied Biomechanics. You would come up, you would say the hip thrust is the superior exercise out of the two because, well, what muscles did I look at? Upper glutes, lower glutes, hamstrings, or biceps, femoris, vastus, lateralis. So quads, hammies and glutes, okay? And it showed that quad activity was actually pretty similar into a squat. The squat was superior, but not significantly. And then hamstring and glute activity was superior in a hip thrust. But then again, would it be better for quad hypertrophy? No, it's mostly it's like a quasi-isometric. The knee doesn't move through much range of motion, so the squat will build the quads much better. We don't have a training study for that, but what we know as lifters, the squats would be better for the quads. Now, but then we looked at another study I looked at, used motion capture and force plate. And we found that the squat utilized more range of motion and also way more eccentric force. So what people do in a hip thrust is they come up and then they kind of like gravity come, especially when they touch down. They'll just kind of like a deadlift where you just let gravity do most of it. When you take out the moment, like you take out the inertia with a squat, you're only using 10% less force on the way down compared to the way up. In a hip thrust, you're only using a third of the eccentric force compared to the concentric force. So because of the low eccentric component in the hip thrust, it got lower total power impulse, all these things, unless you separated into its concentric and eccentric constituents. But then if you looked at that study, you'd be like, wow, the squat is markedly superior. It also takes longer to perform a repetition because the longer range of motion and the slower lowering so you get more time under tension. So you look at that paper and you're like, okay, the squat is better. So if it was EMG, you'd say the hip thrust is better. Well, ultimately those are called mechanistic studies. They're cross-sectional studies, they're quick. I like these studies because I geek out over the mechanisms and the biomechanics, but ultimately you need a training study then and we need a training study looking at hypertrophy. Right now we can just speculate. I would take the hip thrust, other people might take the squat. We need one of those to take place. The problem with hypertrophy studies is... Oh gosh, you need a big sample, genetics and diet. You need a big sample, but also people would take, okay, glute girth, tape measure, you could just gain fat and that would show in glute girth. You can use ultrasound is really hard for the glutes. For certain muscles like the biceps, it's like you see, because I bought an ultrasound machine, you see like fat muscle, fat bone, or like, sorry, fat muscle bone, you can see the fascia. It's like this is how thick the muscle is, you just measure it. With the glutes, there's no bone underneath. You're looking at fascial borders and it's, some people it's really hard to detect. So with MRI is what you really need. MRIs run about 1.5 million. I want to buy an MRI machine one day, but I gotta save a lot of money. That's for down the road. You know what I like about you besides your eyebrow piercing is that you're a trainer. You sound like a trainer. And the reason why I say that is as a trainer, oftentimes you go with the literature and science and other times you go with what actually happens in the real world. And so you'll see a study and you'll be like, okay, that's nice. I can see like, for example, I had a debate with Lane about artificial sweeteners and he talks about how artificial sweeteners are great to help people lose weight. And as well as studies show they don't help at all. It's probably because people replace them with other foods which is why I don't recommend them. He goes, well, when they're controlled and I said, the average person doesn't track everything in which case. And that's just my experience as a trainer. I know in the real world, you can show me all the studies you want in the real world. You have someone just replace their sugary sodas and they end up filling it with something else, which is why I don't use it. And when it comes to training and exercise, there's a lot of muscle building wisdom that's out there that we still have yet to support with science. Here's a good one. It's common knowledge, I would say, or common wisdom that freeweights for the most part, for most people, build more muscle mass than machines. Studies show that when you talk about activation, all that stuff, that shouldn't be true. Do you have any theories as to why that may be or do you even agree with that in the first place? Oh, that's such a good question. So, but real quick, I do want to finish off what I, so let me finish that. And then I'll, this is an important question to me. So I, it's one of my passions. So I want to get to this, but with my PhD, the final study, well, two studies, I did a case study looking at a pair of twins. And then I also did a study using rugby players. And these showed differential functional, like performance effects from the squat and the hip thrust. The squat appears to be better at developing your vertical jump and your squat strength, whereas the hip thrust appears to be better at horizontal pushing strength, like pushing people forward and also horizontal jump and sprinting. That makes sense. So any logical person would go, okay, you should probably do them both. And it's probably because the squat strengthens, the quads more and deep ranges of hip flexion, whereas the hip thrust strengthens more in range hip extension. So you need both to kind of develop the full spectrum glute strength or whatever. But anyway, so that's what's cool is like you had, I had the EMG, I had the force plate, I had the twin case study, and then I had the training study. Even then, that's just on adolescent male rugby players. Does that apply to... So you need, in a perfect world, we'd have 50 studies on every topic, like you just asked about free weights versus machines. We'd have 50 studies looking at different types of machines, looking at different populations, looking at elderly, looking at bodybuilders, looking at young and men, women, different anthropometries. And you'd even have review papers and meta-analyses on it to give us real good guidelines. We rarely ever have that. And so here's what I'll say about machines. I used, I grew up as a strength coach. I have my CSCS, I call myself a strength coach even though I think really to be a strength coach you should be a strength coach for a team. I just like to call myself that because personal trainer gets boring, but now I'm more proud to be a personal trainer, but I think for a while you wanted to be more than that. And I grew up in that world, free weights are best. Now I kind of think that it's a bias that we have because our gyms are mostly free weight, and we don't want to think that we could, because the machines cost like three to five grand a pop. And no one has a space and you don't want to spend, I mean, you have to spend an extra 100 grand and have this giant facility. So you want to think you're doing your clients the best service. Here's the thing, there's different types of machines. Number one, the leg extension. Obviously if you just did leg extensions in another group did squats, the squat is going to greatly help, they're going to grow more quad. They're also going to have more performance benefits. Now here's what a lot of people don't know. The leg extension is better at activating the rectus femoris. When you look at certain two joint muscles like the rectus femoris, the hamstrings, during a squat the rectus femoris would create hip flexion but you're trying to do hip extension. The hamstrings would create knee flexion but you're trying to create knee extensions. So the brain knows this and only activates the muscle at around 20% of maximum capacity. It would be foolish of the brain to say, I'm going to turn on full juice to my rec fem and my hamstrings because you'd be playing tug of war. The quads would be playing tug of war with the hammies. That's why the leg extension is valuable. It's also valuable for higher reps to put some people like warming up with them. So I love all, I'm a biomechanics geek. I love all tools but free weights, obviously like my book that I just wrote, it's just almost all free weights. Now you guys have a lever squat out there in your facility that I noticed. I measured the EMG activity of that and it's very similar. Here's the, so here's how as a scientific person, here's how you generate a hypothesis. You'd say, look, on the one hand, free weights requires a little bit of stability and like a barbell squat is stable compared to like standing on a bosoob ball or single leg but it does require stability whereas the machine stabilizes it for you, okay? Some people kind of get fear when they do barbell squats and especially when going super heavy or trying one more rep to failure. I make my clients fail like in the power rack or dump the bar just so they can get used to it realize it's not that big of a deal but initially people are very scared of that. They don't want to push. In a machine, you're not quite as scared. You might be able to push it harder. You might feel more comfortable. You could, if you take away your bias is what you've learned, you could make a good case for either one and we think about this. You have this stability continuum and all the strength coaches and physical therapists or sorry, personal trainers know that unstable surface training isn't best for building muscle. So unstable is bad but then machines are too stable. So there's a sweet spot in the middle where it's mostly here like our barbells, the perfect amount of stability or are we wrong? Here's the thing, all the studies will look at a squat compared to a leg press or a squat compared to a leg extension or a stiff leg deadlift versus a leg curl. I want to see studies looking at a squat compared to a plate loaded squat, squat machine because a plate loaded squat machines are awesome. Yeah. Well, there's no research on that and then I'll really form a good opinion. Well, so here's a good example of why I'm just kind of reiterating what you're saying about the grain assault thing. There was a for a long time we were told don't wear a weight belt when squatting because it reduces the activation of the core. Then studies come out showing no, your core is activated just as much with the belt. So then everybody's like wear a belt all the time. Now I'm a personal trainer and as a trainer I know it's different activation. When I'm squatting with a belt, my abs are pushing out against the belt to create stability. When I'm squatting without the belt, it's bracing and creating a different type of stability. Which one's more applicable to real life? Obviously squatting without a belt. So using the lever squat for example, you're gonna see similar activation, still not the same. And then comparing the leg extension, if you train to utmost failure and intensity with a leg extension, it's still not gonna build the quads as much as a barbell squat. Why is that? Like why is a barbell squat? The barbell squat has more vastness lateralis activation. And I think you can't maximize it on, it's gotta be something where the knees go in front of the toes a little bit or travel forward and that's how you get maximum in my opinion. Well then why would it, okay how about this? So you just use the, you'd really use the leg extension to build the rec fem. But like with me you can't even see my rec fem that much because I'm not, in bodybuilders that don't matter, you know. What about like a compound movement versus an isolation movement? Like why would a fly not build my pecs as much as a bench press, for example? When I could stress the pecs maximally, what is it about compound movements that make? Would it be CNS? I mean where does the CNS come into play here as the value that you get from training that? I think the reason why free weights work so well or compound movements work so well is because I've thought a lot about this. Like what if you had one group, one group does mostly compounds and then another group does the same amount of volume the same, well, they'll be hard, you almost need more volume because you need a single joint movement to make up for every, but they just did single joint movements working the same muscle groups. The thing is the compounds work so many additional muscles in one shot. And so yeah, I think you forget about that. Think about a deadlift, how many, like I remember putting electrodes on my lats. I mean, I don't feel like I did a lat workout after my deadlifts. I don't like, not like when I do, deadlifting built, deadlifting built my back more than anything else in my career. But they got sky high, like they got like almost maximal with deadlifts. So then think about all the traps, the rhomboids, the, there's so many muscles that get worked. Is there some kind of irradiation effect then? If you're going to get a louder signal from more muscles involved, is that going to like affect like the overall growth? I don't think so. Like Stu Phillips, this researcher did a good job of showing for example that you can do like say, say you have leg press versus leg extensions. The leg press will, because it's more compound, generates a higher testosterone growth homerun response. But it doesn't affect the, we used to always say this back, you probably, you guys probably said it to people and I did it. In my first gym, I had a piece of paper that I gave to like a flyer that I gave to every person. It was like, you want your arms to grow, squat. Jacks of your testosterone growth hormone. So you grow muscle everywhere. And that's actually not true. I was bro-sciencing the shit out of them. So it doesn't make the biceps grow. Yes, you have this transient increase in hormones, but it didn't make the... What about the studies with people where they have them do, they'll do exercises on one arm and find, obviously most of the muscle gain and strength happening in that arm, but they see a little bit on the other arm too. Yeah, the cross education effect. Yeah. And most of the studies are with strength, but I found one or two of them that showed hypertrophy or less atrophy on the other side. So I think it has to do with just the louder the signal or maybe I'm using the wrong terms, but I think it has to do with just how the body's activating and the way it evolved to activate. You know, the body, and by the way, I'm not making a case to say that isolation movements don't have value. I think they have a lot of value, but the body didn't evolve to move in isolation. It was evolved to move all together in very efficient kind of ways. And I think the body just responds overall better to that than it does to isolation. I think the best approach is a combination of both. But I'll give you another example. You know, you could test this over and over again. You could squeeze something that measures grip strength, keep the rest of your body completely relaxed and squeeze as hard as you can. You won't squeeze as hard as when you tense up the rest of your body. It's like this. You're talking about your radiation that has research behind it. Also, what's funny with grip strength, the way you look has an effect on it. I don't know that. If you look the opposite way, your grip is stronger than if you look at it. Really? Yeah. So if you look away from it, you can squeeze harder. Yes. And that probably has to do with maybe like the neural tracks and the knack and things that, but you're talking about something that is well-documented at your radiation. But this is why I love biomechanics. Let's think about a bench press versus a fly. With the fly, you have the dumbbells overhead. You come down, you come down, you get this nice stretch. That's probably, that stimulus is probably equal to what you get in a bench press in terms of the bottom of the fly. Or more. It's probably similar to what you get in a bench. And then you come up, you come up, and then once you're about halfway up, the tension, the moment arm diminishes. And now, you almost shouldn't even do the top half of the movement. Then you come down. And this is where you need to have experience. As the set starts going on, you kind of like, you find yourself. Shortening the lever. Yeah, you maneuver and you don't quite get, when you do a bench press, and some people don't feel their pecs much in a bench press, but I always have. But anyway, when you do a bench, it's just a good exercise. And that's one of my problems, like in my book that I just wrote, I categorize exercise like horizontal hip extension versus vertical. And I say that horizontal is better for this. And the hard thing about that is, really I'm talking about hip thrust, because they're a good exercise. You can't just take any horizontal, like a pull through, like a band pull through. If you've ever done a banded pull through, you only feel it at the top. You feel nothing. It's just a squeeze. It's a, yeah, just a squeeze. It's a kind of crummy movement. So you have to just look at the exercise itself and think, I think bench press would grow the pecs better, but obviously bench press will also grow the front delts. The triceps better. Overall, it's just the better exercise. And you're getting way more. And then, but it might have to do with like why you get more out of compounds is because this, yeah, and this is what's hard. The research is really confusing on this is the volume research out there. I'm on a paper with my friends, Brad Schoenfeld and James Krieger showing that we did up to 48 sets per week for the muscles and they saw better results. Now there's other studies coming out showing that if you do five to 10 sets is optimal doing 15 to 20 sets. If you go to failure, greatly diminishes your results. Right, that's what we talk about. That's when training of failure. So it's like, how do you look at this research and how do you make sense of it all? I think when you do too much volume and I don't think this was ever, I think a lot of people when I write about cause I caution people on doing too much volume and people are like, what are you talking about? Cause they don't, they don't know the DMs we get from these spazs out there that think they should be training four hours a day and they don't understand that a lot of people really overdo it. Like you've got the sedentary people who need to be more active. Yeah, we have two extremes. Yeah, exactly. And that's what's really tough to communicate for all of us. And we always, I always say depends. Depends on who I'm talking to. Am I talking to the kid I can't ever motivate to get to the gym? Or am I talking to the fitness fanatic that will do whatever I say and we'll go above and beyond. And to take it back to the fly, I understand that the fly doesn't have much tension once you pass a certain point because you're not fighting gravity directly. Whereas with the bench press, it's continual. But in that case, then the argument would be made that a cable fly then should be just as good as a bench press. But the cable fly doesn't get you as much in the stretch. It would depend on, because the moment arm would be dependent on the angle of the cables at the bottom. And you'd have it, it wouldn't be as great. So the dumbbell fly would get you more tension at the bottom. The cable, the pec deck, well the cable fly would get you more at the squeeze. And then theoretically a pec deck because the torque would pass kind of through the center of the shoulder joint should be equal through the full range. The problem with that is we're not as strong. You have your internal muscle moment arms and that affects the strength that you have throughout your range of motion. That's why they invented cams to kind of mimic the human strength curve and make it more consistent with the body. But even with cams, because that was interestingly a huge problem with the NSCA back in the day. You had Nautilus funding. So they'd have ads in the JSCR, the Journal of Strength and Ignition Research. Actually it was, I think it was the NSCA Journal. And then you'd have these researchers like Mike Stone and William Kramer being like, because Arthur Jones was the inventor of Nautilus and he would be saying, because theoretically it makes sense. He'd be saying barbells can't make you have constant tension through the full range of motion. Like a squat is hard at the bottom and then it's easy at the top. You can invent a machine that has a cam that makes it the right- Sure, manipulative strength curve. Well, did you guys ever use that strive equipment back in the day? Yeah, you could change it. Like that leg curl, I would put like a 25 on the top peg, a 45 on the bottom peg and a 45. And that was like the perfect, it felt so smooth for me. And I'm like, this is amazing. But I think studies still show even when you mimic the human strength curve, you do see better results with barbell with performance. Now with muscle mass, and now a new study just came out just like two weeks ago showing that a lying squat machine led to better performance benefits than barbell squats. It's the first ever to show this and people flipped out on my friend Brad on Twitter when he posted it like, because it wasn't trained subjects. But I think we need to, I think we need to be more chill out on machines. And let me, let me give you a case study example for me. People hate the Smith machine, okay? I actually love the Smith machine. And I remember my eyes opened to it when, you know, this is before the days of- It's a good quote, right? Right? We're talking shit about the shifts on it. I can't wait for this, right? Good, good, okay. I love the shifts. That's great. I remember reading like, you know, even some of my colleagues, like Eric Cressy was like, he basically wrote that article. The only thing it's good for is maybe doing inverted rows or a hover or a coat rack. But- I like him. But I remember watching, this was back when I think it was a tape. I don't even think it was a DVD. It was a video tape. It was this Brent Mike's all. He was, I think the first guy to squat 1200 back. I don't even, this must have been like the year, like 2002 maybe or something like that. You know, I bought his tape and he would do his squats and then he'd do Smith machine squats. And so I was like, huh, but I watched the way he did them. And as a scientist, I could say, okay, if I stood on a force plate and you put, okay, if you put your feet way ahead of the, of yourself in the Smith machine, you're kind of doing it more like a hack squat. That's right, yeah. Okay, but what if you put your feet, if you notice next time you squat, you unrack the bar and you're kind of leaning forward just a little bit. In fact, I remember Dan Green, I was watching him in a seminar and he's like, I like to lean forward just a little bit because when you get to the bottom, you're going to be leaning anyway. Why not start off that way? So that when you're at the bottom, it's not so dramatic of a, you just kind of start there. And I, I adopted that. So if you set up in a Smith machine with your feet underneath you and a little bit of lean, and then you go down and come back up, you can argue the Smith machine takes out the antroposterior balance component of it. But you could measure on a force plate how much antroposterior forces there are. And if you set it up like a regular squat, you would have such minimal, so then you're like, then why do it when I just squat? Well, I, when I started doing Smith machine squats, I liked the way they felt. It was a little bit different, but I actually felt like they forced me to be because I'm six foot four, I lean. I'm like laying, I'm a leaner. I mean, I remember when I got my good morning to exceed my squat at one point, when I did Westside training, my good morning got to four, oh five, and my squat was four, oh five. So I have this incredible ability to like lean forward and good morning my squats. So the Smith machine made me stay a little more upright and, and, but it still looked like my squat. So I decided to do a, I think it was a six or eight week just Smith machine squats. But I also did Smith machine hip thrust and dead lifts. Now my dead lift strength went way down. I ended up losing like 30 pounds off my dead lift, losing like 50 pounds off my hip thrust cause they're very biomechanically different. But my squat strength, I actually set a PR, not even squatting at all. I did tons of Smith machine squats and I felt my quads getting stronger. And then I remember, cause I hadn't performed a squat in six or eight weeks. And I got on the barbell and I was like, oh, this feels, I feel a little bit wobbly. I still set a PR, but people don't, when they talk about the Smith machine, they mean you put your feet forward. The bottom line is, is what you said earlier, it depends. People who want to lean, lean, I used it, it forced me to stay more upright. I liked it. I set it up like my actual squat and it benefited me. All exercises are tools. And when, if you find the right use for the tool, they work really well. Some of them have far more uses. A barbell squat, you know, or just a squat in general for the average population, phenomenal exercise. As long as you do it right, it's a phenomenal exercise. Smith machine squat, probably not going to be applicable to as many people. But again, if it's a novel stimulus, if it's the right person, it can produce tremendous results. But I still go back to, and this is something I don't know if we'll ever be able to explain a way through science for some reason, free weights. Like, look, a machine curl. I don't care what machine curl you do, unless it's novel and it's new, just doesn't build biceps like a barbell or dumbbell curl. And this is based, by the way, on my experience training thousands of clients, either directly or through proxy, through other trainers. And through my own experience, I have no studies to support this. So there's a lot of that kind of stuff. And this is what I like about fitness right now is that, you know, you got science coming out, but then you got the old wisdom that you're coming through and saying, well, why is it this way? What I don't like about all of us, you know, as quote unquote experts, debating these types of topics is the average consumer gets really lost in the weeds. They hear a statement like, this is better than that. And then what I know from behavior, from training all these people, they hear that and now all they do is that. And what I think we would all agree on, no matter which study shows that this is better than that, all of it together and intermittently or phased, you know, and actually working through all of it is most ideal, which happens, what happens to the average person. And I remember being a young kid who was learning all this information, I would read an article or read a study, holy shit, this is the best for that. Then what would I do? That's all I did for the next six months to a year. And what we know is that if you did that for a good six to eight, maybe 12 weeks, that's great. But then the returns on that start to diminish in a more ideal situation would be moving to another movement or exercise similar, but different, right? Even like the EMG studies, they look at a specific muscle at a specific region. Did you have a strip of electrodes over the entire muscle? Could it be that maybe the seated row works a certain portion of the lap more than the pull down? Could it be that seated rows build your rhomboids and traps, mid traps, better than the lap pull down? Or, you know, like we need to look at all, like you always, every bodybuilder always did a variety of exercise. For my one minute video, Instagram tip for you guys out there, I said, you see this, males do this all the time. They're like, they see a woman doing like a cable kick back and they're like, quit doing that stupid shit and just squat, just squat. And I'm like, when do you ever hear any bodybuilder say that with any other muscle? Do they get pissed off when people are doing laterals and they're like, just military press, stupid. Like, no, we don't do that. We know that you'll probably get better results in your shoulders doing military press and lateral raises. But it's the only thing with, I never see someone doing like lying leg curls and they're like, you idiot, just stiff leg deadlift. It's just some weird thing with the glutes. And obviously you'd see better results doing like squats and some hip thrusts and some abduction because people forget about the upper glutes too, like the glute meters and the upper subdivision, the gluteus maximus. And I take some women who want that shelf and I prioritize abduction and it grows. And anyone who wants a good upper glutes do more abduction. Also, with males who do that for a while, they, you've built those up and then all of a sudden squatting tends to feel better for some weird reason, even though they're not used. Well, you just tested it. I just started, I've never done hip thrusts for hypertrophy. I always did them for either correctional exercise or for activation. I'd have a client that says, I can't feel my butt when I deadlift and we do some hip, you know, some bridges and then we deadlift and they could connect a little better or whatever. But for the first time ever, I started doing hip thrusts for hypertrophy and my squat and my deadlift are doing better. I'm feeling more solid in them. So there's definitely value to the weighted hip thrust. And that brings up another point, like, all right. So this exercise makes you feel, but like when you start doing face pulls, maybe your shoulders feel a little bit better. When you start doing some extra glute work, maybe you feel up, but so they can help your squat, they can help your deadlift, they can help your bench press or something. Like that's what I started noticing. Like my military press, I started doing, you know, the bands with the handles on them? I'd double them up to make it really hard and I would just do these like seesaw presses where I would hold the top for three seconds and then alternate. And then I noticed my military press lockout got, I mean, that was a weak point for me. And then I got to where I could just hold the top, the lockout for a minute if I wanted to. No, it's interesting. I love the science about around this. And you know, the strength gains that you get from exercises tend to be, there's some general strength gains, but then they tend to be very specific. Even points of tension, you could do the same exercise, but because the tension is highest at a different, you know, I remember reading this a long time ago in another book, an old school book. I think it was called points of flexion. I think it was a term. I'm so happy when I have someone else in here who remembers all the old shit. And it was all about that. It was about exercises that created the most tension in the stretch position, mid-range, and at the contracted position. And ever since reading that, I really understood how to choose the exercises and how to change the angles and say, okay, I want something that's gonna give me more resistance in this bottom portion, top portion, mid-range portion. And if you look at really good bodybuilding routines, that tends to be what they focus on. And the theory has to do with, I guess, the way that the muscle fibers contract with the sliding filament theory. Is that where you would? No, it's really just like, yeah, what, like, all right, some muscles, like this is what's interesting, too, because I don't think we don't really know why this happens. If you're training the quads, they get their most activation kind of around like 70 degrees of knee flexion, all right? Biceps, try and flex your biceps fully flex, it's hard. Try and flex them fully stretched, it's hard. Mid-range is where you get the greatest biceps activation. Triceps are similar. But then with the glutes and the erectors are two of them that come to mind. They get activated the highest in the most shortened position. So like, if we're sitting right now and we try and squeeze our glutes, you can't quite get as much activation as if you stand up and squeeze in the walkout. And same with the erectors, they're like, you wanna do like a Superman pose. I think that all has to do with how we evolved. I mean, think back to the quads, we were designed to walk and run or we evolved to walk and run glutes. It could be from evolution. It could be about like the moment arms, like the brain senses, because like with the glutes you do have better moment arms at end range. It could be to do with like the resting sarcomere lengths or something. But anyway, so why wouldn't you wanna perform an exercise that stretches the muscle? Why wouldn't you wanna do like a lunge or a deep squat for the glutes? Why wouldn't you wanna like, you can still get great. No, the caveat is if it hurts, if you get pain when you do any exercise that's real deep, then quit going deep, pain inhibits muscle activation, you'll see better results from not doing something that hurts you. But if you can tolerate it, do something that stretches the muscle, do something that do just an awesome compound lift for it and then also do like a target movement that squeezes the end range portion and you'll probably see the best overall muscle development and it probably activates different regions and things like that. And so I don't think it has to do the sliding filament theory as much as well, because the sliding filament theory is like, you're strongest when, but the thing is all the muscles have different, they operate at different ranges. So some, so I think that just is like an insurance policy that you're gonna, yeah. Okay, interesting. I wanna address what we were talking about, this trend of, you know, people telling me, I'll stop doing that and only squat, because I think I'm guilty of even saying things like that because I remember probably in the early 2000s, mid 2000s when you started to see, and I don't know who it was. So maybe one of you two who remembers the studies or remembers who was popular at that time. But I used, I made a living off of finding girls in the gym that were doing jump lunges, donkey kickbacks, dog peas, and teaching them how to squat and deadlift because they were just not doing that exercise at all. And they were doing all these isolation type exercises where they could feel it and feel the burn or feel it in their butt. And they're doing supersetting and circuits and high rep. And I thought, man, I know if I could get this girl to deadlift or squat and go heavy, I'm gonna blow, I'm gonna blow her butt up more than she ever has with all these months or years of training this way. So I think a little bit of that is the pendulum swung one way again where it was, you saw there was this girls were not, girls and guys, but girls especially were not doing low rep strength training type of exercises for the glutes. It was a lot of circuit isolation exercises. And it wasn't, in my opinion, until CrossFit, did we start seeing girls squat and deadlift and do some of these incredible movements for the ass? Yeah. And I think also when it comes to training, the average person doesn't spend a lot of time or have a lot of time or make a lot of time for working out. So the average person is gonna go to the gym three days a week, 45 minutes. I'm gonna have them, I'm gonna make sure that they do the best exercises. So when I see, when I used to have clients that would work out twice a week and then I'd see them do all these isolation cable exercises, I would say, okay, stop. You're wasting your time because you're not here that much. There's not a lot of volume. You don't need to add tons of volume if you're not doing the main exercises. And so that would be my argument when it comes to that. What are some of the things that you see? By the way, let me chime in. Oh yeah, go for it. I still agree with you and I did the same thing. Made a living off. I mean, I remember writing blog posts, like, I mean, it's like the, I think this was this. Who did that? Who made it so popular? Like, who was it? Jane Fonda on TV doing shit? Probably like that, yeah. Jazzercise and all that. It's how they got women to work out because they were afraid to get big and bulky. You see it with everything. Yoga, Pilates bar. They prey on the fears of women. Like, this will get you, like, well, or even if they don't even mention weight training makes you bulky. If you say this gives you long, lean muscles, the implication is that as opposed to strength training that gives you short fat muscles, yeah. So they're not stupid. They might not even know they're doing it, but they're pinning that form of extras against, it's like every agonist needs a protag or whatever. Every hero needs a villain. And so you've got weight training that's popular. So you need these, these other things can piggyback off of them and pit themselves against them. But so yeah, but like the Jane Fonda, that buns of steel and all that, that probably contributed to it, but you do see so many people. I remember this, I was training this competitor back. This was probably, yeah, 2000 and probably 2005 or six. And I'm training this competitor and this nerdy guy walks up and he's like, and he has a, he's in a, it's in a hotel gym. All right. And he has a clipboard and he's decked out in like full fitness apparel and has no muscle on him. And he spent the whole hour doing like every arm isolation movement and tricep isolation movement. And I bet you his program was like a five day body part split. But you don't need to spend a whole day on arms. You need to get strong at the compound lifts. And he went up to her and she was squatting 135 and doing Romanian deadlifts with 155 for like three sets of 12. And he was like, I can't believe how strong you are. Wow, you have such nice legs. And I'm like, can't you see the, you see what she's doing? And then why aren't you doing this? If you can, it's weird, this disconnect. How long did it take you to piece together the frequency aspect of training? Cause I mean, I grew up reading the magazines of the 90s and everything was about hit a body part once a week, leave it alone, let it rest. Took me a long time to realize that if I lift, if I train my body parts, not to failure every time, but train them hard and split up the volume, train them three days a week, my body exploded. Did it take you a long time to? Same for me, but that was during my body part. The first eight years I lifted, I did just body part splits. And here was my routine for like eight years. Monday was leg day cause I wanted to build my glutes and it's funny, I'd have my friends come with me or clients that I train and I train with them. And no one could make it through my leg day cause it was like four sets of squats, four sets of leg press, four sets of hack squats, four sets of stiff leg deadlifts, four sets of leg extensions, four sets of leg curls, and then the abduction and adduction machines. It was just people would puke. And then Tuesday was chest and then Wednesday was back and then Thursday was shoulder, well, sorry, chest and arms and then back and biceps and then Thursday was shoulders. And then, but I noticed, I started doing this after a few years, I noticed that I gained more strength when I had that Friday I'd have the three power lifts. So then Friday I'd do bench squat and deadlifts. And I noticed, and it's funny as I was doing that when I was, you know, 20 years old and I noticed I needed that extra day cause if a week went around I didn't gain strength. I needed more frequency and it's funny cause I remember when I was in New Zealand getting for the first year of my PhD, my professor's like ready to pick me up. He lives in the Kaimais, which is kind of where like the hobbits, like that was filming stuff and it's a beautiful area, but we were going for a week and we were gonna be gone for a week. And he's like, I'm gonna come pick him. I'm like, hold on, I gotta go to the gym real quick. And he's like, why? I'm like, cause I don't want to lose strength. And he starts quoting me the strength literature. He's like, strength decays at this rate. You won't, you have nothing to worry about. I'm like, I know what the average person might do but I'm telling you I lose strength. My twin brother's the same way. Like we get weak quickly. And so yeah, even if I bench press once a week, I get weaker. Now, maybe if I did like eight sets, I haven't tried that, but anyway, I need more frequency. I realized that for myself long ago, but everyone is unique, but I realized for glutes, if I want them to do variety, like one day I like them trying to go heavy on hip thrust, but sometimes if you go too heavy, you don't feel it as much in your glutes. So that's what I like about having then a lighter day where you focus not on progressive overload but more on the mind muscle connection and stuff. That's what I like about high frequency training. The problem is if you try that for every muscle group, you spin your wheels. Yeah, no, but one thing I learned that I implicate that I use now and I've used on my clients is something I call trigger sessions. And the funny thing is I've heard other people talk about something similar. They just have different names for it. But what I used to do is it worked phenomenally. Is that hit my whole body, relatively heavy, roughly three days a week. But then on the days in between, I'd get some bands and a few times a day I'd get a pump and the muscles that I want to really work. And I just get the bands and I do this three times a day on my off days. Boy did my progress explode and the intensity's low. It's so funny. I call that the compound bro system. Really? Yeah, and I made that, but yeah. When did you come up with that? I think I started talking about it like three years ago. Okay, so I beat you. Yeah. I'll pay you some royalties. He's got you on the hip thrust, right? Yeah, he invented that. What I realized was, for me, I love training full body. I love the whole Monday, Wednesday, Friday full body. It's awesome because you get the two days off on the weekend, you come back on Monday ready to roll. It also leaves a lot of, if I want to focus on my squat, I can do a squat on Monday and Wednesday and then, sorry, Monday, Friday, and then Wednesday, lead off with a single leg movement really. I can specialize, I can really build strength on a movement. So I love that, but people like us like to go to the gym and you have to recognize that. So you can theoretically have what's best on paper, but you have to address the psychology. And I have a lot of followers that are like, I like to work out five days a week. If I don't go to the gym, I feel and I'm like, why can't you read a book or watch TV instead? Or do something for your business or film an Instagram thing or something. But no, they want to go to the gym and I understand that because I'm the same way. So I start saying either on Tuesday, Thursday or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, go to the gym but do these bro sessions. And with the bro sessions, you just have to learn what exercises interfere with your strength the next day and what exercise don't. You can do some lying like, now assuming, let's say you haven't done lying leg curls in two years and then you go do three hard sets. Of course your hamstrings are sore the next day from novelty, but if assuming you're doing these movements frequently, you can bust out some leg curls, some typically single joint movements, but also rows. Like rows don't ever beat you up. Trigger sessions or focus sessions. This is what's in our programs. And they blow people away because there's something to be said about frequent muscle stimulation. You know what got me to this point was witnessing the blue collar workers in my family who never lifted weights. You know, I'd have mechanics in my family who were like retired at 68 and their forearms were just and they didn't lift weights. And at some point, you know, cranking a wrench isn't gonna make you sore anymore. So I'm like, how are their forearms so damn muscular? It's that frequent signaling. And so I just combine that with traditional resistance training where I'll take bands and this is what I'll do three times a day. Take five, eight minutes, I'll get a pump and whatever body parts I want to work three times a day on the off days. My recovery accelerated and I built more muscle. And then I just tested it on the clients. Now think about the bands though. In the bottom position, there's not much. You're not creating a lot of damage. Yeah, no damage or not much damage at all. So it doesn't, you don't take as well. So with the bodybuilders, all the exercise they ever did were hard, mostly like stretch position. Like think about chest day. It would be bench press, dumbbell incline press, dips and flies. That might take five days to recover from. I'd rather do a little bit less. And also maybe just do bench press and like peck deck, cause peck deck won't but then do chest three times a week. And you get better results that way. I think so too. And I think there's this disconnect between, it's like the bodybuilders all love body parts splits but a lot of the personal trainers when we take, we're not gonna put most of our clients on a body parts, because they come to us two or three days a week. So we would do full body. I also think though, here's the deal. When you look at bodybuilders, especially high level bodybuilders, you are looking at a very special group of individuals whose muscle building signal after lifting weights probably stays elevated for two or three times as long as the average person. If I hit a body part once a week, I don't give a shit how hard I hit it. I'm not gonna build muscle. In fact, I start to get weaker. Now you might have some people who are just so genetically gifted in that department, they hit their body part hard once during that week. That muscle is building all week long. Doesn't work like that for me. What I learned, I agree with you on that. Well, I don't know about the like elevated, I'd have to look into that, the elevated protein synthetic time, kind of like where it drops off. I'm sure there's a genetic component to that like everything else, but I don't know a lot of this while I have like my smart friends I asked them these questions, but anyway, but look at what the bodybuilders always did when they wanted to bring up a lagging part. More frequency. Every one of them would say, you know, I remember Tony Freeman back in the days like I'm training arms three days a week, I need to build up my arms. Nasser used to do back three times a week. Yeah, Arnold, I'm gonna start doing calves like, you know, frequently to build them up. But the problem is you have to, that's a specialization. You can't do that for every single part or else. You have to learn how to modify intensity. You have to be very smart with how you, how hard you train, what exercises you pick. The volume, the exercise selection and the effort that you put in it, right? All that, but what I've learned from training clients and I learned training myself, frequency, that's a wonderful, very underutilized tool. It was all about intensity forever. It was always the hard you could train it and nobody was thinking, wait a minute, if we train, we reduce the intensity, train it more frequently, what's gonna happen? In my experience, people would get better results almost every single time. It's funny, there's like what we talked about the pendulum swing and this kind of ebb and flow. Even as my experience as a lifter, I go through phases and it might be related to my work stress and all these things and, but like, I remember when I started more high frequency training, I saw better results, but then I think I got a little caught up in. Too much? You get to, I wanna train my glutes every session. I want my, I wanna train every muscle every session. You had a thing with glutes, man. Not just glutes, I also like delts. I want delts every session. Button shoulders. Yeah, and, cause when my shoulders are pumped, like if you could, when I have an awesome shoulder pump, if you said to me, Brett, for $1 million, this will be like your resting, your resting look, I would easily hear, deal. I mean, I would kill to look like how I look with a glute pump, just, I mean, a shoulder pump, a delt pump. There it is again. A delt pump, I would do anything to just look like that permanently. Hey, I wanna touch on that. Actually, you would be a great person to talk about this, cause I've never been able to really put words to this and this is just my own experience with myself and training clients. I neglected heavy strength training for a really long time because I fell, I fell in love with chasing the pump and the hypertrophy side of training forever. And I used to say this, and you and I are built pretty similar, I'm six, three lanky, been always a tall lanky kid, man, if I could just look the way that I was aired up and pumped, like I would be so happy. That's the look I want. Cause being a tall lanky guy, you probably had the same thing too. I grow like two, three sizes in the gym. When I'm waters in me, I'm pumped up. I'm a lot different looking than what I look throughout the day. And I just, I used to love that. Now, when I started to strength train, I noticed this change in my body. And again, I started to apply this to clients when I started to pieces together because a lot of trainers, probably bad trainers like myself early on in your career, you do a lot of the shit you're doing to yourself to your clients. So if you're training yourself not the most optimal, you're probably not training them the most optimal. Of course. What I noticed, and I don't know how to put words to this, when I started strength training, I looked better out. There wasn't as much of a inflated, deflated version of me. When I was only hypertrophy training, I had this huge drastic swing. And I've seen this too in my career. I compare, I don't know if you know, I'm an IFBB pro. So when I was competing with all my peers, a lot of them still neglected. I don't know, you should know this cause you're, you train a lot of competitors too. A lot of them neglect strength training. A lot of them think that's power lifting. I should never lift three to five reps. And so they avoid it and they only chase the pump, chase the pump. And they look great aired up. But then when they are flat, they look kind of smaller and soft. When I started to strength train, I felt like almost I built denser muscle. Should I, can I say that? What do you think that is? So that was this, I mean, that's in the Zatzjorski text, the Melsif stuff, like super training. And it talks about two different types of hypertrophy. There's myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic. And the drawings they did were very dramatic. Like here's all the myofibers that you build. And then if it's sarcoplasmic, just the fluid inside and the organelles and stuff like that. And then they talked about irrational hypertrophy, which was when the sarcoplasmic outstripped the capacity to feed the myofibrillar on something like this, something crazy. But then that got scrutinized. And then a lot of some researchers were like, no, that's not even a thing. They grow at a fixed rate. Like there's a fixed proportion. And then just in the last year, some evidence came out showing that there is a difference. Like you can build a little bit more sarcoplasmic versus myofibrillar. It's just not as stark as people think, but what made it make sense was they'd say, well, look at these power lifters, they're all dense. The bodybuilders look like they're pumped up and full of fluid. They don't look as functional and as dense. Now, I don't think it's as big of a deal as most people make of it. But I think the thing is the bodybuilders were just on more stuff. They take more steroids than the power lifters did. And so then you think they'd be more filled with fluid and water because of that? Maybe, have more water retention because they're on a lot more stuff. Cause I don't think you see that much of a difference with like natural power lifters versus natural bodybuilders. But regardless, I totally agree with you. And this is what I've found. So I can mention like one of my clients, Tana Eubanks-McCoy, she finished in the top 10, Bikini Olympian in the last several years. She's a really good competitor. When I started training her, I'm like, because everyone, like, all right. I guess so, I'm sure you guys deal with this. Everyone thinks they're advanced. I'm not, this has nothing to do with Tana right now. Everyone thinks they're advanced. They're like, well, that routine's too simple for me. I need a more advanced routine. I hate that. Everyone. And I'm like, oh, you're advanced. How many chin-ups can you do? Why? How many chin-ups can you, like one or two? Okay, you're not advanced. I mean, I don't mean to be a dick, but like, I just get annoyed that everyone thinks they're so advanced. Because they've been going to the gym for three years, they assume that they could. Right, for three years and half, and most of it was unproductive training. But back to Tana, that had nothing to do with Tana. Tana wasn't like, I'm advanced. Tana came to me saying, I'm fizzled out. I've competed so much. I don't even want to go to the gym. And I'm like, I know the perfect solution. She's been doing body parts. Split for so long, I'm going to have her do- Strength athlete. Yeah, I'm going to have her do full body and have strength goals and she's going to love it. So I said, how many chin-ups can you do one? I'm like, what are you currently doing? She does a lot of different types of pull-downs. And pull-downs are great. I love pull- In fact, I like pull-downs more than chin-ups for me. But I weigh 240 pounds right now, and they just feel better. But it's the same with leg curls. That's why I like Nordic ham curls so much. I have a Nordic station. You guys should get one because you do them way more when you actually have a dedicated station for them. With the Nordics, you're not going for two sets of 12. You're three sets of 12. You're going for like three to five really good reps and you're focusing on the lowering phase, okay? You're putting your all into a few reps. Chin-ups. I said, Tauna, you're a fitness person. You should be able to do 10 chin-ups. She got 10 chin-ups like 10 weeks later. Like she got one chin-up week one, two on week two. It was like, linearly, she gained a rep every week. And in 10 weeks, she's doing 10 chin-ups. She wasn't doing as much volume for her back. Before she was doing more pull-downs, but obviously she wasn't giving them at all. When you're striving for performance goals, you're footing every last, you know, you're like fighting for that extra chin-up whether you get it or not. And so her back grew and she started taking pictures like she'd screenshot the top of her chin-up. She'd go, what is this? Oh my God, what is this? Look at this back. And her back grew. So we talk about volume. We talk about all this stuff. But exercise selection is important. And that's why my girls, same with the Nordic, they start sending me, one day I'm in Glute Squad and I'm like, okay, we're gonna do hip thrust, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do Nordics. And all of a sudden like 10 girls go, yes. And I'm like, they don't even do that with the hip thrust. So I'm like, I think that's like their favorite exercise right now. So I start doing Nordics twice a week with them. And all of a sudden they start kind of, I didn't think anything of it, but all of a sudden they start showing me their competition pictures. So they're like, Brett, my glutes look better, but look at my hamstrings. The only thing I've done different is I started doing Nordics. And I'm like, and they're like, everything else was the same. And a lot of these girls too, it's really cool because on peak week, a lot of the bodybuilding coaches, they just, I could go on for a long time about how poor some of their practices are. But they kind of say like, oh, quit lifting like a month out, you pretty much quit training hard. And the week of you take the whole week off. And I like to push my girls really hard on that Monday, the Monday of peak week. And I like to give them body weight. So I have so many clients that got their first full range Nordic where they go down all the way and come up. And then like they said, a chin up PR on like the Monday or Tuesday before their competition, it gives them, it reflects in their confidence on stage. They're up there strutting their stuff because they just set a PR. They're, you know, because you'll lose absolute strength, but gain relative strength. Because your weight goes down on. And so anyway, I think with some exercise like that in these strength goals, but everything we've talked about this ebb and flow, I remember earlier, I meant to make the point that I started training too often. And my elbows and shoulders start hurting from trying to hit lateral raises three times a week while you're also benching in this. I chilled out on those and my shoulder, I cleared up. I think you can get even with strength goals. You can't, I mean, I have to tell people all the time they're like, well, is 10, what should I do? Just go up 10 pounds a week. And I'm like, okay, there's 52 weeks in a year. If you went up 10 pounds a week, you'd go up 520 pounds in a year. If you went up one rep a week, you'd get 52 more reps. It will not happen if you went up one rep a month, that's 12 more reps. You won't do that with chin-ups, you know? So that's the hard thing about teaching progressive overload and what it means. And you have to, that's what I like about. And I think that's the hardest thing we do is as the experts or whatever, we dole out advice and it's so hard to explain to people how to back up, when to push it, how to back off, push this exercise, then back off on it, then focus on this exercise. There's so many variables and we always answer questions in our question and answer episodes. We'll say it depends. It tends to be, it's the answer for most things. It depends. How many times should it work out during the week? It depends. What are the best exercises for quads? It depends. But there's no better time, like what you said, I just took a, okay, I just started training my client, my client, Carly, you know, I've always been accused of playing favorites even as a teacher and as a personal trainer. And they're always like, Mr. Kendra, as you play favorites and I'm like, of course I play favorites. You think I like you all the same? Some of you suck and some of you are amazing. This is the real world. You're not gonna, you want me to like you, you'd be a good student, you know? But even as a trainer, like you pay closer. Of course, no trainer, every trainer loves a client that follows everything you can. Because it's our way of studying all the time. It's like, I have this idea or this theory. I'm gonna apply it. I'm gonna apply it to my five best clients who I know are gonna follow it to a T, right? So I have this client, Carly, and I didn't pay much attention during all of a sudden, I gave the progressive overload speech to them. And then anyway, one day I'm looking at her and she's hip-thrusting like some ungodly man. And I'm like, whoa. And she's like, yeah. Well, ever since you gave us that talk like a month ago, I started pushing it hard. And I'm like, well, what were you doing before? She's like just doing the same workout every time. I'm like, what? So I've really started pushing her. And I have to tell her like, Carly, there's never, you're gonna be spoiled because this is the first progressive overload plan you're on. So. You're not gonna always progress this way. Yeah, two weeks ago, she sumo-deadlifted 245 for five. Wow. And then Monday she got it for 10. Or sorry, Thursday she got it for 10. Like she doubled the reps that she got. And she's just, I'm having her squat. She's on cloud nine right now. And then she's gonna be so spoiled when in like three months that comes to a grinding halt and it becomes hard to get another rep. And you're used to going up multiple reps per week or adding weight and it's really hard. But I told her like, please don't, you're spoiled right now. You gotta learn how to not be depressed when those gains, I remember one of my powerlifting friends. Be more realistic. My powerlifting friends, he was so strong and he was a natural lifter. And then he started doing steroids and he's like, Brett, I don't mean to sound shallow but I've never been happier in my life. Like it is so fun working out. Yeah, every workout you can struggle at every time it works. Every single workout. And then I watched him come to a grinding halt too. After a time when you start, I think he got so strong his muscles can do the job but the connective tissue can't. He started getting beat up so bad. And I mean, he was deadlifting 750 pounds and didn't even weigh 200 pounds. And it was so cool for me to watch that too. Cause, and that's what we were talking about earlier with he was so strong off the floor with his deadlift but his lockout was weak. And I'm like, I want you to do two exercises, barbell hip thrust and then rounded back extensions. But I want you to hold a dumbbell and just really squeeze cause when you're on the platform, you know, lift number one and two, you generally hold really good if you're conventional sumo is different. If you're conventional rep one and two, you might hold good posture but rep three usually around a little bit. And then that makes it comes off the floor quicker but it makes it a lot harder to lock out. So you strengthen the glutes at end range hip extension. And then, you know, he's like two months later, he's like, Brett, oh my God, this is now a, that's no longer a weakness. It's a strong, my lockout is now a strong point. If I can get it past my knees, I'm locking out now. And then I've watched him, his career and then you start battling injuries cause he, he went up too fast or you've got to learn how to, I don't know. It's interesting to work with that population because they get so strong and then they have to, they can't train as frequently or you've got to do things differently than what you did. Everything works, not everything works all the time and what works now may not work later because circumstances, context change, age changes, you know. Oh, tell me about it. This is true for nutrition, this is true for exercise. And so I think the best advice that I've ever given a client is, or the best thing I've ever taught them was to learn how to read their own bodies and listen to their own bodies cause we can get really hard headed with, no, this is the what's supposed to work. So I'm going to do this the whole time when it's not working for you. So it works great for, well, you know, the period of my time where I saw the best results ever was when I did the one set to failure. I did that for eight months. But you read Heavy Duty, Mike Menser? Not Heavy Duty, I stumbled upon this forum, it was like the hard gainer with like, he wrote Braun and beyond. Oh, I know what you're talking about. Stu McRober or something like that. But then there was also this cyber pump website. I think it's still there. It was about just doing one set to fair. But the reason it worked so well for me is because for eight years, I told you, my first eight years I did high volume body parts. Totally opposite. And I remember going, how could you ever get a good workout doing one set? I needed four or five sets at the time to feel like I got a good workout in. So I was like, okay, I'm not going to do one set. I'll do two sets to failure. And then I saw some results. So then I'm like, okay, maybe I'll go to one set. What I learned then is you get really good at, I mean, I would do like, bent over rear delt raises with like the 20s, you know? But when you're only doing one set, I remember I got to where, that was probably the muscle that grew the most was my rear delts back then. Cause I included a rear delt raise in that, during that time. And I went from doing like the 20s for four sets of 12 to only doing one heart set. But I was like trying to beat the record every time. And all of a sudden I was doing them with 60s. I'm sure I wasn't, I was like betting my arms more, but I remember looking like eight months later, I was like, my rear delts have grown a lot, but my strength went up a lot. And my physique improved. And I think that I was just, you know, we never de-load. We don't, we go to the gym every week. We don't, I would push it really hard. And I was probably over doing it a little too much. And then doing the one set to failure, not only did I have more recovery abilities cause I wasn't doing as much volume, but it taught me how to really push us that hard. Where I thought I was going to failure. Well, you get really good at going to failure when you're only doing one heart set. And also you learn to like breathe. Like you kind of, it's kind of like a cluster set or like rest pause training. Cause I would do a set of squats and it would be like. Yeah. And you'd end up getting, you know, I'd end up getting three or five more when you thought you were done. I did the same thing. I read the Colorado experiment with Arthur Jones, you know those old pictures. Yeah, and I remember being like, that's it. That's what I'm going to do. And it worked because it was novel, but it stopped working just like everything else does if you don't change it. Same. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, man. I'm really glad you came on the show, dude. You're a lot of fun. And I really appreciate you communicating the way you do from your perspective. You're very measured. And you seem to have a lot of integrity. And I know I've seen you before getting debates and then come back and change your position. And you don't, you always seem like somebody who's willing to do that. I appreciate that. Well, you know why? And I think I've never heard you say this until today. You know, you listed yourself off as a, would you say a teacher, then trainer? A lifter. A lifter trainer and a scientist. And, you know, one of the things I found with our other scientists friends is not a lot of them have been trainers or were trainers first. And so they speak from the study all the time and somebody who's trained a lot of bodies has probably seen a lot of studies kind of debunked right before their eyes. And so I think that's what makes you so special when you talk about this stuff. So it was a pleasure having you here today. Yeah, thanks, man. Yeah. Thank you very much. Great time.