 As a good example, they'll get to a point where it doesn't go and you'll start seeing them do this. They'll kind of drop the weight a little bit and then pull into it. What that dropping and catching does is elicit a stretch reflex, cause a little bit higher intensity contraction in the muscle. But what it also does is increase the force to where you could possibly pull or strain something. When you get to that point, you want to continue to try and contract as intensely as possible, but you want to ramp it up gradually. You don't want to drop and then push into it because that drop and bounce there, especially when you're fatigued that much, you're not going to have as much control over it, you're more likely to pull or strain something. I wanted to ask you about your take on the meaning of using muscle soreness as a gauge of the intensity or the proper intensity to do a workout. I just want to add a correlator to that, that I notice that I get, if I do even 60% or 70% in an exercise, particularly like squats or lunges, if I'm coming off of an injury and haven't been working out in a while, I will be sore for seven days and I've tried to eat diet, extra sleep, warming up, cooling down. I get sore when I do these exercises. I also notice when I come back that I make sizable gains. I just always use that in the back of my mind is if I'm sore the next day, I probably worked my muscle pretty good and even if I could have done more weight at the time, I hold back consciously in squats and lunges because I know that I'm going to be sore shit the next day. Unfortunately, some people have that response, but it varies between individuals and it really isn't a very good indicator of exercise intensity. Now, when a person starts out, usually the first couple of times they do any exercise, they're going to have a lot more soreness. Some people continue to get sore from exercise. Some people don't get any soreness from the start. It varies from person to person, but it generally doesn't correlate. I've had some people who don't push very hard, but they get very, very sore. And I've had other people and I'm an example. It doesn't matter what I do the next day, I might feel a little fatigued, but the soreness is just not there. Just some people are more sensitive to it than others. Some people are going to notice it for a little bit longer than others, but the best gauge if you're training hard enough is if you're making regular progress on a workout to workout basis. If you're getting stronger, you know you're training hard enough to stimulate that response. When you say workout like once every five or seven days or whatever it comes out to for you, do you recommend doing all four or five of the major exercises just in a row that day? And then that's your workout for the day? Yeah, for most people, that works best. Now, and then this reminds me of something else is a topic of doing a full body versus splitting up the exercise and workout. If you're doing a workout like this, in most cases, if you do all those exercises in one workout, that's fine. You don't need to spread it out too much. Some people will need to split it up, but it depends on a variation in the rates of recovery of two different things. When you're doing the exercise, you are causing damage to the muscle. If you're lifting with a heavy enough weight, there are going to be microscopic tears in the muscle fibers. And it takes a certain amount of time for these to completely recover. Like Doug had actually mentioned earlier about fast twitch muscle fibers being taking a little bit longer to recover. They're very, very quick to fatigue, but long to recover. Slow twitch muscle fibers tend to be the opposite. Well, in addition to the muscles being worked having to recover, every exercise you do has an effect on the rest of the body. There is an inflammatory response to that damage, and that inflammatory response is cumulative. If you do squats or leg press, and then you do a couple other pushing and pulling movements, every time you do an exercise, the damage to the muscles involved is going to cause an increase in that inflammation. Now, in some people, the recovery of both the individual muscles and total recovery of the body from that inflammatory response might track roughly evenly to where, after about four or five days, they're completely recovered both sides. In some people, it might take longer for particular muscle groups to recover than it takes the body to recover from the inflammatory response. The inflammation has died down, and we still have some of that repair and remodeling going on inside the muscle itself. If you have somebody who's got, for example, predominance of fast twitch fibers in the upper body and more slow twitch fibers in the lower body, they might find out that after so many days, their legs are completely recovered, but they find that they're not making the same amount of progress with the upper body. Now, one way to determine, or if a person has all fast twitch fibers, they might just, after a period of time, find that nothing has recovered, not because the inflammatory response has been taken care of, but because the individual muscles haven't. Now, one way to determine whether or not you need to split things up or not is to try cutting the workout in half, staying at the same frequency. For example, if, let's say that your individual muscles are taking longer to recover than the body's recovering from the inflammatory response. If you cut the workout in half, the inflammatory response is going to be less because you won't have as much cumulative inflammation as many exercises. So that should recover more quickly. If after a certain number of days, you're still not stronger, well, then you know that it's not that your body is requiring as much time for the inflammatory response, but it's at the individual muscles. And if after a certain amount of time, you are stronger, then you know that maybe it was just the inflammatory response that was the problem. It'd probably be easier if I diagram this, but basically for the most part, doing the full body, you're not going to overstress yourself if the overall routine is brief. But if you find that particular body parts are not progressing while others are, then you can try cutting the routine in half and seeing if they respond to that. Again, it sounds like very little exercise, but it's better to get a little bit more recovery or better to do a little bit less exercise than your body can tolerate than to do too much, too often, in which case, rather than having a little bit slower progress, you'll shortcut it completely. Could you talk a little bit about breathing and set? About what? Breathing technique? Breathing. Actually, the best breathing technique is none. Most people try to set a pattern to the breathing, exhaling while lifting, lifting, inhaling while lowering, but it's best to just breathe as relaxed as naturally as possible during the exercise. If you start to time your breathing with the movement, one, it tends to cause people to perform what's called a vulcelvis maneuver, or to attempt to exhale, they're tightening up, but closing their glottis, so it increases the pressure in the thorax and abdomen, and that pressure can cause an increase in blood pressure that, in some people, can lead to what's called an exercise-induced headache. Two, three times as bad as a migraine, they can last from a couple days to a couple of weeks, so they definitely don't want to get one of those. Also, if you're moving at a controlled pace, suppose, just for the sake of example, taking about three to four seconds in both directions and doing a chest press or a pulling movement, if you're training hard enough, it's gonna actually be difficult to slow your breathing down to the point where you're keeping track with that. If you're really, really pushing your muscles, the cardiovascular system is going to be working extremely hard to keep up with that demand, and you're gonna end up breathing pretty heavily. So the best thing is just breathe as relaxed as naturally as possible, better to breathe through the mouth so that you're able to get in and out as much air as you can. And some people find actually helps if they almost try to over-breathe. I have a question. I heard you talking about direct work earlier, I think, to the calves, I was been in and out of the room. Do you have any comments on direct work to the lower back, like with machines, if you have access to them, or like Doug showed in a video, I'm pretty sure you saw it maybe two months ago, where he was able to do lower back work directly, pretty close, without machines. You know what I'm talking about? I haven't seen it, but it depends on the equipment. If you're doing a barbell squat, or even if you're doing barbell rows, you're gonna get a good amount of back work there. If you work up to where you're lifting a very, very heavy weight in either squats or doing a barbell row, you're gonna get about as much back work as you need from that. If you are using a leg press, it's more effective for the legs, because like Doug mentioned earlier, with the skill aspect of things, the more you can focus on the muscles that are working and the less on the skill of performing the exercise, the more you're gonna get out of it. With a leg press in particular, as opposed to a squat, the resistance is directly applied through the hips. Either you're pushing a seat back, or you're pushing a pedal away from the seat. The low back is not an issue. Balancing weight isn't an issue. You can focus entirely on the pushing movement with the legs. If you've got a good leg press, it's actually a better option than a squat, as far as hip and thigh development. And I believe Bill's gonna talk a bit more about the specifics of that tomorrow, so I won't go too much into mechanics of squat and leg press. But if you're doing the leg press, and if you're doing a machine row where your chest is supported and you don't need the low back muscles, then an isolated back movement might be beneficial if it's really an isolated back movement. And the reason I say that is because a lot of machines that are labeled low back machines are not back machines so much as hip extension machines. If you have access to a nautilus low back machine, both of those are excellent. Otherwise, you're working your glutes and hamstrings more than the low back in those other exercises. Now, if you're doing a pull down exercise, and if you're doing it correctly to where you're leaning back slightly, your low back is going to be involved in that too. So even if you're using machines, it's really actually very difficult to do any exercise without the trunk muscles being involved. The idea that there's actually any such thing as isolation in exercise is somewhat incorrect. There's no such thing as a pure isolation exercise. Anytime you're doing an exercise, you have two things that you're doing. You're producing the desired exercise movement and your body is working to prevent all of the undesired movements that would either take you out of proper positioning or alignment.