 Welcome back to the 21 convention of Orlando, Florida, 10-year anniversary special event. Our next speaker is one of the first ever high-intensity training and exercise speakers at this convention. At this point in 2017, he's a veteran alumni. He's also an author at Bay.com and in a number of e-books he publishes there and a world-renowned authority in high-intensity training similar to yesterday Jim Flanagan or on Thursday you guys met Jim Flanagan up here. Before bringing him on stage, I want to mention that him speaking, like I mentioned in the first day of this event, him speaking in 2009 opened the gateway for this event to expand well outside of the PUA community and the seduction community, which I think has been absolutely fantastic. It has led us all over the world and brought in a range of speakers from many different fields, from personal trainers similar to Drew, who's also a consultant for that, to medical doctors, PhDs and on and on and on. So Drew Bay speaking in 2009, I was just some random kid that showed up at his house basically, has changed the course of my life in a significant way in the course of this company. Without further ado, please let me welcome Drew Bay to the stage. Thank you. Welcome back. Glad to be here. Yes, sir. How's everybody doing? Cool. So first off, how many of you were here for previous events or listened to any of my presentations on the YouTube channel? Okay, good. So few. How many of you are familiar with high intensity training principles? Okay, great. So a lot more. So the way that I want to do this, I'm going to start with some basic stuff. And as I'm going through this, if you have questions, raise your hand. I'll be taking questions as I go instead of waiting to the end to do this so that I can cover them as we're on specific topics. And so you don't end up forgetting the question if you're thinking about something and then we don't get to questions 30 minutes later. Now every year, or every year that I've done these, I come up here and I think, you know, what is going to be the most important things that I can pass on, got a limited amount of time, but there is literally, if you guys didn't mind not eating or sleeping, we could talk about this stuff for a few weeks. And the thing that comes to mind first, based on my experience training people for 20-something years now, almost a quarter century, is there are a couple mistakes that almost everybody makes that prevent them from getting as much as they could out of their workouts, prevent them from getting it in a time-efficient manner. And unfortunately, also a lot of mistakes that people make that increase their risk of injury. Exercise is extremely important. One of the most important things that you can do, not just because of the health benefits and not just because of the fitness benefits, but also because if you improve your appearance right or wrong, it affects the way that everybody interacts with you socially. Now, as important as it is, everybody of course should be doing it. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't. And most of the people that are doing it don't do it in a very time-efficient manner and don't do it in a very safe manner. Two of the most important things you have are your time and your health. You shouldn't be doing something for exercise, which is extremely important, while compromising these other things. So I'm going to talk about how you can get the benefits from exercise in the least amount of time and with the least risk of injury. You're looking at basically a return on the investment. How can you get the benefits without wasting your time and without unnecessarily increasing your risk of injury? Now, the biggest mistakes that most people make in training are to not train intensely enough to stimulate their body to produce the adaptations they want. They don't train in a progressive manner. They don't train consistently. They use a volume and or frequency of training that is not appropriate for their genetics. And oftentimes they don't eat, sleep, or do the other things that they need to support their body in recovering from and producing the adaptations stimulated by exercise. So recap, if you want to get as strong, you want to get as muscular, you want to get as conditioned, you want to get all the possible benefits from exercise, you have to train intensely, progressively, consistently with a volume and frequency appropriate to your genetics and then you have to also do other things in your life to support the recovery and adaptation exercise, eat properly, get enough rest, avoid other activities that can negatively affect that. And I'm going to go through each one of these points one by one. Again, if you have questions as I'm talking, raise your hand, we'll cover them as we go. First off, intensity. What does it mean to train intensely? If you ask a lot of people, you'll get a lot of different opinions on this. Some people, if you ask what does it mean to train intensely, they'll think it means with a heavy weight. Other people might think it means they have a very elevated heart rate. For other people it's a perceived effort. How hard do I feel like I'm working? But in the context of exercise, there's a very specific meaning of intensity. First off, intensity isn't a thing in and of itself. Intensity is a measure of something. In this case, we're measuring exercise. So to understand what intensity is, we have to understand what we are really trying to do in exercise. A lot of people that think exercise is about lifting and lowering weight, doing work, are going to say it's a percentage of the weight being lifted because they're thinking in terms of that work. People who are thinking in terms of heart rate elevation are going to define it that way, but all that's off. When you're exercising, you are trying to impose a stress on your body's ability to produce movement. You are stressing your muscles' ability to produce force. And through that, you're stressing all of the other systems that support your muscles in producing that force, metabolic conditioning and the ability of the muscles to produce energy to deal with the waste being produced. Your cardiovascular system, it's supplying blood to those muscles for delivery of oxygen and nutrients, removal of wastes, the connective tissue and bones that that force is being transmitted through, et cetera, et cetera. It all comes down to challenging your muscles' ability to produce force, the contraction of the muscles, and how hard you're contracting the muscles. The effort you're putting into the exercise is a measure of the intensity. It's not how much weight you're lifting or lowering because you could take a certain percentage of your one repetition maximum and make that very easy or very hard to lift depending on how you're lifting it and how many times. The same percentage can be easier or harder depending on what you're doing with it. It's not a precise measurement. Same thing with heart rate. You can get two people that are contracting their muscles just as intensely and have very, very different heart rate responses depending on different factors. It's not an accurate measure. Again, when we're measuring exercise, what we're measuring is the effort that you're putting into it. And the best way to think about this is how hard you're working versus how hard you are able to work at any time. For example, suppose that the most force your muscles can produce in an exercise was 100 units. And you started that exercise with a weight that required, on average, about 80 units of force. Now, at the beginning of the exercise, the effort would only be about 80 percent of what you're capable of, not very high. But as you perform that exercise and as your muscles' momentary strength gradually decreases, the amount of effort required becomes an increasing percentage of your decreasing momentary ability. So it becomes more and more intense, more difficult. When you get to the point where your muscles have been fatigued so that instead of producing that 100 units of force, they can only produce the 80 units of force required to just barely move that weight, at that point you're working as hard as you possibly can. Now, why is this important? Now, when you're exercising, again, you're imposing a stress on the body. You're trying to stimulate an adaptive response. Your body is going to be relatively stingy with the energy and materials required to produce this, because from an evolutionary standpoint, efficiency is important. You don't want to spend calories. You don't want to spend protein on things that are not absolutely essential for survival. Suppose that you did an exercise and you stopped short of an all-out effort. You didn't ask your body to do anything that it was not already perfectly capable of doing. You're not asking your body to do something that is momentarily impossible. You're not giving it a reason to improve. But if you go to a point where your body is barely capable of moving against that resistance, it is threatening. Everything that you do, obtaining food, preventing yourself from becoming something else's food, being able to reproduce depends on your ability to move. If you can't move, you're something else's food, and you're not going to pass your genes on. So anybody in our history, or in the history of any species that had a body that wouldn't adapt to these kind of stresses didn't get to pass on their genes. It's important that you be able to move. And so your body is going to respond to anything that is a threat to that by improving that ability, but only if it deems it absolutely necessary. Again, if you're not asking your body to do something, it isn't already capable of why spend additional energy and resources in improving that ability. You know, you can better use that just going towards normal bodily functions required for survival. So it has to be intense. Now, progressive is the next thing. If you stimulate your body to produce an increase in strength and along with it, all those other factors of functional ability, your capabilities will have improved. Now, going back to the previous example, let's say the next time you just use the same 80 units of force, but this time you're stronger. Let's say you can produce at the beginning 110 units of force. Now if you stop at the same point you did previously, you would not have worked as hard. Another way to put it is as you become stronger, as you become better conditioned, you have to increase the demand you place on your body proportional to your improvement so that you can continue to stimulate further improvements. If you only lift the same amount of weight in the same manner for the same amount of time, every single time you train, at some point it's going to become too easy. It's no longer asking your body to do something that it can't do. It's not going to give your body any reason to adapt further. And unfortunately, this is one of the biggest mistakes that if you go into a gym, you watch people working out, you'll see them making. A lot of people will go and they will put the same weight on the bar and they'll do the same things over and over and over if they don't go in with a plan and if they don't keep track. If you're not writing down what you're doing during your workouts and if you are not attempting to improve that over time as you're getting stronger, then you're not going to improve or at least not as quickly as you otherwise might be able to. And the next thing that's important, the consistency, can actually be interpreted in a couple different ways. First off, you can't work out for a year or two and then stop and expect for your body to maintain all of the benefits that you've achieved through training. You have to continue to do it. Your body will adapt to disuse in the same way that it adapts to use. You stop exercising, you don't do it pretty much for your entire life, then you're not going to maintain all of those benefits of exercise. So it has to be done on a consistent basis. The consistency also means that you don't arbitrarily, don't randomly change your program. There is a belief that you can confuse your muscles. Joe Weider and Tony Horton, the guy promoting P90X and a bunch of people promote this idea as a way to convince people that they need to constantly vary their workouts. So you've got to confuse your muscles. Your muscles will get used to a particular exercise and stop adapting to it. So you've got to switch things up. The reason that some people believe this is because adaptations to exercise include different factors. Some of those, the factors that we want for most of the physical improvements, are increases in muscular size, actual hypertrophy of the muscles. But there is another factor that contributes, actually a couple other factors, that contribute to exercise performance that aren't as visible. And this is skill. When you perform an exercise, you're not just working the muscles. You are also training the body to perform a movement. And the more you perform a particular movement, the more efficiently your body will move during that, making it easier. What will typically happen is a person will start performing a certain workout, a certain number of exercises, and initially see a lot of improvement. Those first six to eight weeks, you'll see the weights going up relatively quickly. And suddenly they hit a point where progress seems to start to level off. And they assume, oh, my muscles have stopped adapting. They're used to the exercises. I need to switch them up. And this is where a lot of this idea about muscle confusion comes from. But the opposite is actually true. During the first six to eight weeks, if you're doing a new program or a new exercise, you have neural adaptations and skill improvement in addition to the strength gains from performing the exercise. And actually, they kind of work in reverse. At the start, more of the adaptations will be improvements in skill. And as you get towards the end of that eight weeks or so, you have more improvement or should from hypertrophy, assuming you're doing everything else correctly. Problem is actual growth of muscle does not happen for most people nearly as quickly as skill does. So people get to this point and they assume, oh, well, I'm not adapting anymore. Well, no, that's not the case. It's just you've gotten to the end of that neural skill adaptation phase. This is where it is most important to be consistent because this is where further improvements are going to be primarily actual increases in the muscle. If you switch at this point and go to a completely different program, you go through that whole skill acquisition thing again. And it may appear on paper that you're making progress again, that you've broken the plateau, but you've actually taken a few steps back in terms of actual improvement of the muscles. So you want to be consistent with your workouts. There are so many people that and I, the muscle magazines, a lot of the websites are largely to blame for this, but they'll start a program thinking, I'm going to gain this much muscle in this much time. And after four to six weeks, they don't look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. And they think, well, this is not working for me. I need to switch and do something else. And they stop before they get to the point where they would have actually started making some real progress, assuming again that they're doing all the other things correctly in the first place. You don't want to do that. Now I'm not saying that you shouldn't change your workouts. Not saying that variety is not necessary or beneficial. But when you make a change to anything that you're doing in your workout, it should be for a reason that you can understand and articulate. You shouldn't change just for the sake of change. You should change if there is a specific reason that maybe you need to change your volume or your frequency based on how your body's responding to exercise. Maybe you make a change in exercise selection due to something going on with the joint or because you want to focus more on a particular muscle. There's valid reasons to introduce some variety or to make changes to your workout over time, but it shouldn't be done arbitrarily. You don't need to change your workout every six to eight weeks. Sometimes you'll hear people say everything works and nothing works forever, which is absolute nonsense. Anything that is based on these principles, if it is hard, if it is progressive, if it is done consistently with a volume and frequency appropriate to the individual, and if you're eating and resting and doing the other things correctly to support growth and adaptation, it will work consistently for as long as you are alive and keep doing it, provided that you follow those things. So, again, consistency is important. You don't want to arbitrarily change your workouts after a certain amount of time just because you're not suddenly putting on 10, 20 pounds of muscle. Now, the next point, an appropriate volume and frequency for the individual is one where I see people make some of the biggest mistakes. If you are training intensely enough, very little exercise is required and very little frequency compared to what is typically recommended. One of the biggest mistakes most people make is doing way too much exercise, way too often. When you exercise, if you are training very intensely, that stress on the body includes damage that is being done to the muscles. And your body requires a certain amount of time, a certain amount of energy and resources to repair that damage before you have a net increase in muscle mass. And this varies between individuals. People recover and adapt very quickly. Other people may take a very long time to recover and adapt. Most of us are somewhere in between. But if you attempt to work out too much, you're going to do a lot more damage. It's going to increase the demands and the time for recovery without stimulating any more of an improvement. Or if you work out too often, you can actually interfere with your body's ability to recover and produce that adaptation. A good analogy I like to use is getting a suntan. Now, if we were to go outside in the middle of January on a cloudy day, the intensity of the sunlight would not be very high. It wouldn't threaten your skin's ability to do its job, so it wouldn't stimulate your body to produce anything in terms of an adaptive response. However, in the middle of July or August here in Florida, if you go outside in the middle of the afternoon and go to the beach on a sunny day, it's going to be pretty intense sunlight. And because it's intense and because it poses a threat to your skin's ability to protect you and do its job, it's also going to stimulate an adaptive response up to a point. Now, depending on your skin tone and depending on other genetic factors, some people can handle a little bit more. Some people can handle a little bit less, just like exercise. Depending on those factors, some people respond very quickly. Some people take longer and respond very slowly, just like exercise. And also in both cases, up to a point, you will stimulate an adaptive response, but beyond some point, you're doing damage. You're not going to stimulate your body to produce more of a tan or to produce it any more quickly, but you are imposing more stress that you can cover from and produce that adaptation to. Once you get beyond the point where you're stimulating the biggest response that your body is possibly going to get, any additional work beyond that isn't going to make any difference. You're not going to get any bigger. You're not going to get any stronger. And it's not going to happen any faster. All it's doing is placing more stress in the body that's going to require more energy, more resources to recover and adapt. That process is going to take longer. Recently, actually, a paper just came out, Journal of Gerontology. Obviously it's geared more towards older people, but it's based on research of people of all age ranges. Showed that for the majority of people, any training beyond twice a week after that beginner stage, once you've gotten to the point where you're training pretty intensely, is not going to provide any better results than more frequent training. And doing any more than one set of an exercise, if it is done intensely, produces no significant benefit. And I've seen this. This is anecdotal, but it's based on literally hundreds of people over about a 20-year period. Consistently, I've had clients come to me who've worked with other trainers previously. And obviously they wouldn't have come to me. They'd still be with their other trainer if they were happy with the results that they were getting. And typically, these other trainers would have them doing multiple sets. Typical frequency would be three to four days a week, in some cases even more than that. And the biggest complaint, the biggest reason these people stopped working with their other trainers and came to work with me is because they were not happy with the results that they were getting. And they heard that I was only training people once or twice a week. They'd start people twice a week, adjust it from there based on individual response. And in every single case, with the reduction, not doing more but doing less, a reduction in the frequency and the volume of their training, they started getting stronger, faster. They started seeing changes in their body. So it's not just a bunch of stuff happening somewhere at a university with a bunch of people in white lab coats. This is stuff that I've personally seen over a long period of time. Actually, I'll give you an example. Back when I was in college, I worked at a gym in Green Bay, Wisconsin. And my younger brothers used to drive up there on Saturdays so that I could work them out. And while I was training my clients, they would train a bunch of friends that came up with them. And there was one kid, and I think he was a senior at this time, about six foot three, weighed 140-something pounds. His nickname was Ethiopia. He was a stick. And now all these guys had been working out previously. We had, at the high school that we went to, they had a... It wasn't a great gym. I think most of the equipment was built by the shop class. But it worked. But they were following these conventional strength training programs that were typically, they got them from the muscle magazines or they were handed down by some of our football coaches who were great guys, great coaches, didn't know a thing about exercise. And I'll call him Ethiopia. I'm not going to bring his real name into this. But he was frustrated because at six, three and 140-something pounds and he was pretty skinny. Well, he was working out once a week and he only did a handful of exercises. Stiff-legged barbell deadlift, hammer strength leg press, hammer strength pull down, hammer strength chest press, row, overhead press, and a calf raise. And I can remember the workout to this day because we had that hammer strength circuit set up specifically for that. So those are the basic exercises that we had most people starting out with. Actually, those were the exercises he was supposed to do. That was when he got through the entire workout. Usually it went stiff-legged deadlift, leg press, pull down, run to the locker room and vomit. And then after maybe about 10, 15 minutes they'd have him back out there to finish the rest if he could. Part of the reason for him throwing up is he was actually stopping and getting a couple double cheeseburgers on the drive up to Green Bay because part of what we had him doing was eating a lot more calories to help put on the weight. So this is once a week, once a week, and one set of each of these exercises which if you were to ask most people and think, well, how could that possibly do anything? Well, by the end of his senior year he was 190-something pounds. He had put on 50-something pounds and he was as lean, if not leaner, than when he started out. It was almost all muscle. Very, very brief, very infrequent, but very intense training. Which brings me to the next point because of the eating. You can do everything perfectly in the gym. You can train intensely and progressively. You can be consistent with your program. You can have it perfectly adapted to how much you can handle and how often you can do it and recover. But if you are not getting enough rest, and unfortunately a lot of times it's difficult for people, and if you are not eating well, your body is not going to be able to do as much with the message that it's getting from the workouts. It would be like, suppose that you wanted to have a house built and you had an architect draw up these great plans. That's your genetics. The instructions for how to build and how much of that muscle to build. And you could have the best, hardest working construction crew in the world. A good workout program based on your genetics and good hard work ethic. But if you don't have somebody delivering the necessary materials for them to build with, they're going to be hanging around on the site with those blueprints getting absolutely nothing done. And this is another mistake I've seen a lot of people make, is they try to do all these things well with their workouts, and then they're going out at night and not coming back until 2, 3 in the morning and then waking up 6 or 7 o'clock trying to get to work early. And sometimes doing this not just on a couple of nights a week, but on a consistent basis. Or they're not eating to support their goals. I've had a couple people that have done training for consultations with who have been frustrated because they've been doing almost everything else really well. But when I talked to them about their diet, they're not even keeping track. And when I do have them keep track, it turns out that they're not getting enough calories to support their goals or too much if their goal is fat loss. They're not eating enough protein. And a lot of times they're not getting enough rest. I've had a few people that have unfortunately had just messed up job schedules. Sometimes they'll work swing shift. And depending on when they're working and how much sleep they're getting, you'll see significant changes in their rate of progress. Somebody could be doing really well. They can get strength increases. Suddenly have something change at work and not be able to get enough sleep. Or I've had this happen to a couple of clients, guys whose wives have given birth. And then for the next few months, instead of getting seven, eight hours of sleep a night, they're getting maybe four or five and it's all broken up. So the quality is crap. And their results go down the toilet. As soon as they're able to start sleeping normally, again, it goes right back up. So it's not enough that you train correctly. You've also got to support your body in recovering and adapting to the training by eating a diet that provides all the nutrients that you need. The appropriate amount of calories for your goal, whether you're trying to increase muscle mass or lose fat. And get enough sleep. If you're not getting enough sleep, it's very difficult for your body to recover from and produce those adaptations stimulated by the workout. And I know kind of gone over a lot of this with a really broad brush. As I know, I don't know how many of you have been to some of the other presentations. I know Mark Siss and Doug McGuffin, a few others talked about exercise, sorry, diet. A bunch of us have talked about exercise over the years, so I didn't want to spread things out too much. But just to recap that before I start taking questions, biggest mistakes people make. They're not training hard enough. They're not keeping track of their workouts and training progressively. They're not increasing the difficulty proportional to their rate of improvement. They're not doing things consistently instead of taking a program and sticking to it. Or if they do make changes, making reasoned changes and mixing things up arbitrarily, people are just switching from program to program. They try something for a few weeks. If they don't get the results they want, which often are unrealistic, they completely switch to something else instead of trying to modify what they're doing. They do too much too often. It's one of the biggest mistakes. And they don't eat or sleep well enough to support those adaptations. So again, get a train hard. You need to work the muscles in each exercise to the point where you are unable to continue in good form. You've got to train progressively. You have to keep track of what you're doing. Write down the date, write down the exercises, write down the weight and either the repetitions or how long you did it for. Keep track of the settings if you're using a machine, if you're doing a squat and a power rack. Keep track of where you have everything set so that from workout to workout, you're doing things in a consistent manner. You're comparing apples to apples so that the numbers are meaningful when you're comparing them. You have to make sure that, again, you're doing things consistently. If you do need to make a change, it needs to be something that you understand exactly what you're doing and why you're making that change. And also, if you make a change, make one at a time. Don't completely flip everything around because if you change a dozen things and then your results get worse or they get better, you don't know which one of those things or maybe a couple of them are responsible for the regression of your genetics. Don't do too much. Don't do too often. Most people don't need to do more than one set of an exercise of more than just a few exercises per muscle group at the most two or three. And more advanced trainees who are training very intensely may do better with even less. It varies between individuals. It depends on your genetics. And also, most people don't need to, don't benefit from training more than twice a week, assuming that those are full-body workouts that they're hitting all the major muscle groups in those. So if you're not getting the results that you want and look at those couple of things and if you're doing all those right but you're still not getting everything, look at your sleep and look at your diet. So now open it up to questions and we get to... there's somebody with a microphone somewhere. Thank you, Drew, for the talk. My question is how do cortisol level and training affect each other in both ways? So training, how does that affect cortisol and cortisol, how does that affect your training? If you have elevated cortisol levels it'll negatively affect your training. It will interfere with your body's ability to produce new muscle tissue because it's catabolic. It's important to keep in mind you don't want none. You just need to have a balance. There's cortisol, it's also going to be less growth hormone, less testosterone and the cortisol isn't just affected by the amount of training you do but also other stresses. So in addition to getting plenty of sleep and sleep actually has a significant effect on cortisol. If you're not getting enough sleep your cortisol is going to be up, your test and your growth hormone are going to be low. So you want to make sure that you keep that from getting too high and reduce sources of stress outside of the gym helps too. If you get a stressful job anything you can do to manage that. If you're dealing with stressful people you can cut them out if you possibly can. Unfortunately, we can't completely eliminate stress from our lives but anything you can do to keep it within a manageable level is going to help you recover and adapt better to your workouts. Hi Drew, great talk. My patient confirmed something for me that I suspected for some time which was overtraining and my question to you would be how long should I take a hiatus before I kind of reset the central nervous system before I get back in? It would depend on how long you've been doing something and how much you suspect you might have been overtrained. For most people if I get somebody that's coming to me for an interventional program I will usually start them right away but the first two weeks of workouts aren't even hard. What I will tell them is that it's weird because I have people come in and I talk about intensity. Intensity, you got to train hard, you got to do all this and then the first couple of workouts they're barely working. It seems contradictory there but what I prefer to have people do starting out is to focus on how hard they're training but on how well they're performing the exercises and then I gradually build that up instead of just shoving them right into it. There are some exceptions but so that's usually about a two week period or so and part of it is because I want them to learn to do everything really well if I just start them as hard as possible a lot of times the form is not going to improve as much as I'd like to. Usually about two weeks I have to completely stop training but I would use that period of time just focus on if you're doing different exercises or if you're doing them with different equipment think of it not as workouts but think of it as a practice session to be able to get the feel for how you want to move and do these exercises. You're not overstressing the body because you're not really trying to push yourself too hard but you're getting the benefit from going in there and getting that practice and often when you take that weight and you crank it back down and just have people focus on that movement once they do get to the point where they're working a lot harder they're going to have better form they're going to get more out of it so I usually don't recommend just cutting out completely but using that time to not train very intensely give your body some time to recover and just think of it as a practice session and you're using a weight that is barely challenging and you're just almost like a moving meditation you're focusing on how your body feels paying attention to the muscles, the joints, everything as you're going through the exercise and getting a feel for how you want to do that a lot of times if you start somebody and it's really intense they are so preoccupied with the discomfort the muscle burning the heart pounding breathing they're not able to focus as well in those other things so it gives them some time to take a break from the harder training but without throwing away the two weeks you get some practice in so I wouldn't recommend a complete layoff I'd recommend practicing instead of exercising during that time oh, I think he's going out on here Thank you, that was a really informative session I've been doing a triple split with push, pull and legs for the past four months and from what you're saying I would make it twice a week but in the two sessions which I'm doing like twice a week is it the same exercises or do a split it? you could alternate between different exercises again, and keep in mind this is an average this is a starting point when I say twice a week and working the muscle groups twice a week this is based on the average in the research there are going to be some people who can do a little bit more frequently not a lot but some if they're training intensely there are going to be some people that need a lot more rest in between but you can train the full body twice a week and you can either do the same exercises or you could have some variety between those for example if you want to make sure that you're covering all of the major muscle groups ideally your workout should involve a few compound exercises for the lower body and upper body pushing and pulling movements in both vertical and horizontal planes you can also do simple exercises instead dividing these compound ones up but compound exercise is a little bit more efficient allows you to work more muscle mass less time and it's going to have a little bit greater metabolic and cardiovascular effect so for example if you were to work out twice a week the full body in one workout you might do squats and stiff legged deadlifts for the legs and in the next one a deadlift and a sissy squat or a leg press or something in the first one you might do a pull down in a row in the next one you might do a variation on those where you use a different grip for each for example in the first one maybe a close underhand grip pull down and a normal row with a parallel or a wide grip and then the following workout you might do the pull down with a wider grip and then do the row with a close underhand grip one workout you might do chest press and shoulder press in the next one you might do dip or a decline press and an incline press so still hitting all the major muscle groups but a little bit of variation between the way that you're moving and then you'd want to round that out with exercises for some of the smaller muscle groups something for your neck, your calves and your abdominal muscles and if you're using a leg press instead of a squat and if you're not doing anything that involves trunk extension combined hip and back extension you'd want to do something for the low back as well but yeah you could do the full body twice a week and you could do the same exercises each time or you could alternate and do an A workout for your first one and a B workout for your second one Drew you actually pretty much just answered my question I was going to ask you about compounds versus isolation or if you do a combination of both so it seems you focus on compounds since you have such low frequency the benefit of doing a compound exercise over doing a simple exercise is that it is more time efficient in terms of muscular strength and size increases if you did just compound exercises or you did just simple exercises eventually you're going to get about as big and strong as your genetics will allow there in somebody who I was just talking with somebody earlier about this there's no specific exercises that you have to do there are some people say you got a squat or you have to bench or you have to do this you have to do exercise for all of the major muscle groups all the muscle groups involved in gross body movement you don't have to do any specific exercise as long as you're covering all the muscle groups you're good now one benefit of compound exercises is the efficiency if you're doing the compound exercises it takes you about half as much time to work all the major muscle groups another advantage is that from a skill standpoint it is easier for most people to learn and do the compound exercises correctly so there's an advantage there as well from a teaching standpoint but if you got somebody, for example let's say you had an issue with your wrist and you couldn't do a pull down or a chin up it would be just as effective for you to do a pull over on a machine and then to do curls using a strap on the wrist so that you circumvent whatever problem there is with the grip and that would be just as effective as doing a pull down for general strength and size increases there's a difference if you're trying to improve your skill or performance in a specific exercise important thing isn't that you do specific exercises the important thing is that you're getting all the muscle groups hey Drew, actually I have two questions for you here so the first is about diet and the second is about supplementation so I heard you mention Mark Sisson and he's somebody that I've just recently found and I'm starting to follow a lot so I was wondering your opinion on high fat diet and testosterone and also intermittent fasting as far as the studies on HGH boosting from it because that's also something that I've just started experimenting with from everything that I've seen in terms of research it is an effective way to it's an effective strategy for fat loss but only if it results in a calorie deficit research comparing different meal frequencies doesn't show any benefit long term when the calories and protein are the same in terms of the growth hormone there is a slight increase in that but it's one of those things that if you just look at these specific changes rather than the long term actual effects on the end goal which is improvements in muscle mass and body composition again I haven't seen any significant difference with that now the same goes with high fat low carb versus low fat high carb it doesn't appear to make as much of a difference in the long run in terms of fat loss or body composition as long as calories and protein are the same and there are problems though if you go too low in either if you go too low in fat there tends to be problems with reduction in testosterone if you go too low in carbohydrate there are also problems in that you tend to have an increase in cortisol and still as a result of that a decrease in testosterone I know low carb has been real popular with people for fat loss but it's important to keep in mind that the goal is not fat loss in and of itself the goal is improved body composition you're looking at the ratio of fat to lean body mass and going too low in either carb or fat negatively affects your ability to build or maintain muscle part of the problem with low carb again there is an increase in cortisol and along with that you end up with a decrease in testosterone decrease in growth hormone if the carbs are too low and a decrease in IGF-1 all of which are anabolic and there's also an increase in MPK with lower carb intake which again negatively affects you have a reduction in protein synthesis so for most people I recommend how many calories you need for your goal you need a little bit of a surplus if you're trying to increase muscle mass you need to have a deficit if you're trying to decrease fat mass how much protein do you need and make sure that you're getting for most people if you're not resistance training you don't need a whole lot but you should be and for anybody who is strength training protein requirements go up considerably not because you need a massive amount of protein to build muscle but rather to repair all the damage that occurs during the workout before additional muscle can be built and so for most people it's about 0.8 to maybe 1.2 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass daily and like most things it varies I actually prefer that people because it varies that people err on the high side because you're better off getting more protein than you need than you are not getting as much as you need a really simple way for most people to figure this out without having to get body composition measurements done is to aim for a gram of protein per pound of gold body weight per day and then I'll typically have them just divide the carbohydrates and fats evenly between the remaining calories and then we'll adjust that based on how they feel and how they're doing during their workouts there are some people who will do a little bit better or a little more carbohydrate versus fat some of that also depends on what they're doing you know somebody who is very sedentary who's sitting in a chair in an office all day and doesn't do much moving around is not going to need a whole lot of carbohydrate your carbohydrate is primarily a fuel source for anaerobic metabolism more demanding activities somebody who is involved in you know regular somebody who's doing jiu jitsu a few times a week or thigh boxing or somebody who's got you know a very hard job involving a lot of physical labor might do better with a little bit more so it's something you can't just look at what's best for fat loss you also have to look at how is this going to affect your lean body mass in the long term and also what are the individuals needs and how are they responding to it so again I would just split down the middle pay attention to how your body is responding how you feel during your workouts how your hunger is in your energy levels the rest of the time and then if you don't like the way that you're feeling in performing experiment with it maybe decrease the carbs a little bit keep track of how your body responds to that if you feel better then you know you're heading the right direction if not then you've learned something from it you know you might need to swing things back the other way but I don't recommend specifically going very low in carbohydrate or going very low in fat but rather adjust starting in the middle pretty even mix and then adjusting it based on how your body responds alright thank you then the second part of that was just the supplementation part because I know a lot of people that lift are into supplementation or have misconceptions about it so in high school football is when I first found creatine, monohydrate and I heard that that's an amazing supplement which I still use and also zinc as far as testosterone goes and fish oil zinc, magnesium helps with testosterone if you're getting insufficient amounts from your diet if you've got a pretty well rounded diet then it still might help to supplement with that the creatine is actually something I recommend to everybody now there is a lot of bullshit in the supplement industry in fact the vast majority of things that are being sold are just it's a complete waste of money at the best it will have a small effect usually no better effect than if you just met if you had a good diet and at worst a lot of them just don't do anything at all especially a lot of the testosterone boosters creatine is one of the few things that is an exception in fact part of the reason that I recommend that everybody take creatine has nothing to do with the performance and the muscle gains but rather that there is research showing that creatine has a protective effect against brain damage in people that have concussions so it mitigates the damage somewhat if you're involved in any kind of a sport or any activity where there is the potential for brain injuries or concussions and even you know soccer or football if you're outside of the US technically it's supposed to be a non-contact sport but there's a lot of head injuries anybody that would be involved in that in creatine to help mitigate the potential damage if they have something like that but creatine also is one of the few things that is going to help with both your energy how hard you can push yourself during the workouts as well as how much muscle that you'll gain after that you don't need a lot of it most of the research doesn't show much of a difference if you take about 4 or 5 grams a day or any more than that you don't have to go through the loading phase which is just a way to get you to take a bunch more of it but creatine is one of the few things that I would recommend in large part for the protective effects for people that are involved in context sports all right, thank you Drew, first I want to thank you for being here as a physician I love seeing people get more engaged in exercise and the benefits of training I wanted to ask you specifically about how you apply auto-regulation in your own training so I love high intensity training one for the time efficiency but two because I love to push myself and if it was up to me I would just keep pushing myself hard but working long hours I find that two days a week is probably my max and I've got to do it on a day where I'm not burnt out mentally so I just wanted to get your opinion about how you apply auto-regulation in your own training well first it's important to keep in mind that the purpose of exercise is to stimulate the physical improvements that will benefit you in all of the other areas of your life and your exercise program serves those other things not the other way around you should always model your program or modify your exercise program around your life not change your life around your exercise program couple things first when people are exercising they need to keep track of their workouts when they do the workouts how many exercises they're doing how much resistance is used how much time they're performing the exercise for or the repetitions so that they can see on a workout to workout basis whether or not they are making progress or maybe you want to look at these things over a longer period of time if you are doing a level or sorry an amount of exercise and a frequency of exercise that is not excessive then you should see relatively steady progress and so it's important to keep track for that but also you have to pay attention to how you are feeling on your off days and during the rest of the time because again the whole point of the exercise is to benefit you from the things that you do and if you find that you feel like crap on your other days or if you feel like you're completely run down and if there isn't an obvious other cause for it if you have your sleep in order if you have your diet in order but you find that with your workouts you wake up the next morning and you just feel like garbage and you're feeling tired and unmotivated and then even if it's not showing up as much on your workout charts then you would need to cut back your volume somewhat on that the absolute minimum would be an amount that still hits all the major muscle groups with a reasonable frequency but in addition to keeping track of how you are doing during your workouts you need to pay attention to how it makes you feel the rest of the time and adjust based on that it's a tricky thing to do between individuals it would be nice if everybody responded exactly the same and again one way to look at it dose response ultimately there's a like Doug McGuff talks about a narrow therapeutic window that is effective for most people if you have too little you're not going to get the benefits that you want if you have too much you start having some of the negative effects a lot of those negative effects can be felt during other activities the lack of motivation feeling run down in some place some people can start feeling sore a lot of the time basically you're just paying attention to what's happening during and around the workouts and making an adjustment based on that again not doing too many changes at a time because you want to know what is the factor but for a lot of people when that happens typically you know just either giving them an extra day or two a rest between workouts or sometimes cutting back on the volume during the workout and cutting back on the workout volume doesn't always necessarily mean a reduction in the number of exercises but sometimes you might substitute simple exercises for compound exercises so that the total amount of muscle being worked during the workout is a little bit less but just some practical examples I've had some people who again I mentioned earlier I start people out just focusing on form gradually increase their intensity some people when they get to a point where they're training pretty intensely twice a week they start feeling kind of crappy and a lot of times a lot of times it's their sleep or their diet but once they've got that in order if they're still feeling run down sometimes it's an indication that they just need to back off a little bit on the volume of the workouts you wouldn't want to reduce the intensity if you're stimulating as much of an improvement but sometimes they just can't handle as much and this is a very general rule but if you're training intensely enough for the first 15 to 20 minutes after your workout you should feel just completely wiped out but within another hour or so you should feel like you could go back and do it all over again you wouldn't want to but again the whole point is to improve your health and your physical fitness and appearance so that all of the rest of your life is better you work the workouts around the rest of your life not the other way around and if something you're doing during the workout or the way you're doing it makes you feel crappy the rest of the time then something has to change with that and again usually it's the volume sometimes it's a little bit extra rest in between workouts