 Now in terms of the specifics, because this is usually after talking about these things people ask, well exactly how much should I do? And this is where people make another big mistake, is expecting there to be a single answer that works well for everybody. If anybody tells you that there is a best exercise for this muscle group, if anybody tells you there is a perfect repetition range, an ideal repetition speed, a best workout, a best program, they are full of shit and you should turn around and walk away because any more time spent talking to them is a waste. Imagine that you went into a clothing store and you saw a mannequin and had a pair of jeans and a shirt on and looked great on the mannequin, looked perfect and you went up to the sales person and said, that looks great, I want that shirt and I want those pants and they said, okay well we'll go and find something that fits you, no, I want that, that looks great in the mannequin, I'm going to take it. Similar thing happens when people see people in the gym doing something and they say, well what are you doing? You see the big guy back in the corner benching or some guy flexing in the mirror like that guy looks awesome, I wonder what his program is or you pick up a magazine and it says, follow these five points to add two inches to your arms or something. People look at what other people are doing and they assume that that particular person's results can be duplicated if they follow the program that they espouse or that they are supposedly following, actually a lot of these magazine programs they make up. The people that you see in the pictures have probably never done these workouts, they hire them, they come in, they get a bunch of photos of them doing the exercise, they match them to an article which was probably thrown together over the period of a couple days and tailored to whichever advertisements it was going to be put with. But here's the thing, there is a general set of principles and these principles apply equally to everybody. Any normal healthy functioning human being is going to be able to get results if they apply the principles correctly. The problem is that there is huge variability in how individuals respond to exercise, there's variability not just in genetics but also lifestyle factors and variability in goals. And to follow a particular person's program just because they got good results with it does not necessarily mean that it's a good fit for you. And it's like if you were to want to succeed in a particular business, you wanted to start a company and you went and looked at somebody else's company who was very successful and how they went about it and tried to copy their exact plan but if you failed to consider that that individual's success in that particular business or any other endeavor might have had to do with factors other than the plan might have even had to do with factors that allowed them to succeed in spite of a bad plan, personal connections, being in the right place at the right time, having specific character traits that allowed them to excel in that particular endeavor. And the same thing is true with workouts because there's differences in how much exercise a person can tolerate because there's differences in how quickly some people are able to recover and adapt because there's differences even within some muscle groups between people and sometimes within individuals in whether a higher maybe a little bit lower repetition range will work better. If you try to copy somebody else's plan exactly, depending on how well the plan matches what you need it may work to some extent but unless you dissect it get rid of the specifics look at the principles and apply the principles in accordance with how your body responds you are not going to get the same results and this is a problem because a lot of times what people do is they don't even consider the principles. They think that there is a plan a specific workout a program that is going to do the trick for them and they try a program and it doesn't work instead of asking what about this doesn't work what could I change to make it better they just drop it and they jump to a completely different program they don't bother to look at any of the specifics of what they're doing they just toss it wholesale and do something else sometimes eventually they'll find something if they're lucky that does match them but this introduces another problem in that they will often make the assumption that they have found the program suddenly after failing at all these other things they find something that appears to be working for them and they figure this is it and then they become obnoxious like crossfitters and they start telling everybody else this is how you've got to train I did all these other things and it didn't work for me and then I discovered this this is a way to do it same with diet same with a lot of other things but then you've got somebody with a different set of genetics who's done something completely differently and they tried the program that that guy did and they didn't get any results from it so that guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about he's clueless they did this thing and this is what worked for them and they completely miss the point because it isn't that it was anything about the specific program that makes it better than every other program out there but just that the way the principles were applied in that particular program was a better fit for them an analogy that I like to use is getting a suntan