 Hey guys, welcome back. Up next we have Skyler Tanner. He is one of the top high-intensity trainers in the country currently. He is also the youngest super slow certified personal trainer in history, and he's currently one of the general managers at Efficient Exercise in Austin, Texas. His speech today will be called Great Expectations Training Over A Lifetime, and here he is. Now normally if y'all have been sitting here for an incredibly long time, I would have pulled the priest and asked y'all to sit up, shake hands with your neighbor, talk to someone, stretch your legs out, but y'all just came in, so we'll we'll get right over that to the good stuff. I'm gonna start off with a story. Anthony as you know, or maybe if you follow his blog last summer, he was couch-surfing across America, and it came through Austin and he had a couple workouts. One with myself and one with Keith, our genetic freak whom y'all will listen to later on over the course of this weekend, and it came through for a couple workouts, and Austin in the summer is like Orlando, super humid, plus about 10 degrees, and he goes through a workout and you having met Anthony, he always kind of has a look of kind of staring off slightly squinty eyes, a little bit on his face, and so imagine after a workout in which he effectively got sucker punched metabolically, he's really looking like this. He's going, I'm gonna walk to Whole Foods from your studio. No, no, no, that's like seven miles in the heat. There's no shade. There's no sidewalks in the town in which I train. That room's for big trucks. We're in Texas. So I put him in my car and we go to Whole Foods. Now in Austin, you go to Whole Foods because it's 88,000 square feet of grocery store. It would be like if you cared so much about publics to take people there for events, for wine tastings, for cheese tastings. 88,000 feet of all sorts of wonderful things. Hippy girls, possibly wearing bras or maybe not in the salad section. Sleeve tattoos of all sorts, crazy hair that makes Fuji's look tame. And you have to park in a parking garage and you go up three flights of escalator. So we're going towards the grilled meats area and Anthony's kind of walking and we're talking about something and he goes, stops, full stop and he goes, wait, are you libertarian? And I'm like, I'm taking it back and going, we're just talking about fitness, women, Austin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, and he went, boom, right back into what he was talking about before to get his whole chicken. That's what he was really there for, that he was going to eat with his bare hands. So that's the first time I ever met Anthony. And here we are a year later at this event. So he asked me to speak after I did a blog post that I called the six year itch, was it all a waste? I'm a personal trainer and as introduced, I've been a personal trainer since I was 16 years old. That was the first time I took money for training. I was certified a year later as the youngest super slow instructor in the known universe at the time, as my old boss used to say. And I've been doing it ever since, something I kind of fell into. And now I'm working on a master's degree in exercise science. Maybe I'll go get a PhD. I don't know if that's just for my ego calling myself doctor. I really don't know. I'm just being honest there. But the point is I really like the stuff. And so I've tried everything. And you're seeing me here. I'm tall. I'm lanky. I'm not muscular. What am I going to tell you all about proper exercise? I think I got a few things to tell you about, but mostly I'm going to be a buzzkill. I'm going to tell you that there are limits. And I'm going to ask you to explore personally what you are going to do when you reach them. The blog post I wrote was sort of a long form version of that. What have I done over the course of my training career? I've done super slow. I've done high hypertrophy specific to training. I've done conjugate periodization. I've done waveloading techniques. I've done pendilase hormonal manipulation technique in which you bring yourself to the verge of breaking. You back off and you hope your testosterone ends up a little higher than when you started. I've done German volume training. I've done super brief heavy duty training. Everything in between. And at my heaviest, I was much fatter than I was 220. I was bull strong. I could pull 455 on a deadlift for five repetitions. And I felt awful. It was just too heavy for my body. And so now as I stand here, I'm about 180 pounds. And so the question is if you're, my goal was to get supremely muscular, super hero muscular. I grew up drawing super heroes. That was my shtick, comics and superheroes. And I could never achieve that. Well, hell, what the hell are you supposed to do after that? If you can't quite get to your goal, if all the puritanical work ethic in the world isn't going to get you there, what the hell else are you supposed to do? That was kind of an exploration of that. And as it turns out, as it turns out, there are limits. And there's some good science behind those limits that play out again and again and again, no matter how intense and advanced our training techniques become, these limits are structural. They're biological. And that's the extent of what I'm going to talk about first in this talk. And so in going through every one of those routines, you very quickly learn that the very quickly learn that the people who are genetically gifted to gain muscle mass don't ask how to gain muscle mass. In other words, if you were naturally talented at something, you are not on the internet trying to find out more and more about how to accentuate that talent. These are the guys who get to the college level playing football or crew. They have a talent for it. They keep doing what they're coached to do and they keep advancing. They never reach a wall. Well, there is a wall as far as muscular development is concerned in weight, which is to say gravity imposes a certain amount of weight on all of us, right? Of course. So one pound of my muscle weighs as much as one pound of your muscle. And so two people of average height at roughly the same weight will roughly have the same arm measurement, assuming roughly similar body fat percentage. We call this the Fat Free Mass Index. And scientists determined that it's like a more advanced version of the body mass index. Everybody's heard about that, right? BMI, BMI, BMI. The problem with BMI is it's just height to weight plus some funny math. And if you're a 230 pound bodybuilder, you're as obese as someone who is 35% body fat and on the verge of a heart attack. So Fat Free Mass Index meant to spread that out a little bit and separate the two. And the number, the maximum number that they came up with was 25. It's lean mass in kilograms divided by height in centimeters squared. You don't really get over that number. Only the people with the largest structures get there. Okay. And that's the next step is that what determines how big you can possibly be. Your bones, your bones. Everybody's heard about big bone or small bone. And some people use big bone as an excuse for their gluttonous ways and the fact that they really like the big cake. But there is some truth to this. And we want to talk about structure. You build a building, a large building, you need a sufficiently sized foundation. Our foundations are our bones and they're set at birth. We can make them stronger. We can make them denser. But a man who has smaller bones, say seven and three-quarter inch wrist at a certain height compared to someone of the same height with eight inch wrists will have greater muscular potential across the board. And in fact, that person with an eight inch wrist untrained will likely be larger than the person with the six and three-quarter inch wrist as far as bicep is concerned, right? Because that's what we care about for men. Biceps, chest, abs. I'm joking here, of course. But if you go to a college gym, boy, biceps, bench press, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And maybe an extra session on Saturday if you've got a date. So that's the way it is. You have limits and that's one of the limits. And so the guy who came up with this actually is not a bodybuilder who sort of put all these equations together. His name is Casey Butt. And he is a PhD in artificial intelligence, right? Which is pretty cool. And so he has nothing to gain or lose from doing all these maths and figuring this out. And he comes up with these equations. And this is not, I don't get any money from this, but he's wrote a booklet on it. You can go and get these equations and very quickly punch in your numbers and figure out that if you train really, really, really hard what you can get to on a muscular level. And then it becomes a problem because you're sure that that's lying to you. That if your goal is to be a big, strong, muscular athlete or just have big muscles, and that's not going to be satisfying to you knowing that there's a limit. And not only knowing that there's a limit, but having a nicely defined ceiling, who starts a job or a business as an entrepreneur with the intent of going, I only want this business to make $150,000 a year. I want that to be all I'm capable of. No, you set out with these really, really super high goals, hopes, aspirations. And the great thing about capitalism and about businesses is that you can make changes that change your ceiling. You can make changes on the fly that improve what you do. Biology, physiology doesn't allow for that, unfortunately. So this is a hard pill to swallow. It's a bitter pill to swallow. And I saw Patrick just walked in. I've never met you, Patrick, but I might as well have. Did we meet at the conference five years ago? I'm sorry I don't remember it. You might not remember me. I had long hair. Again, I made Fuji's hair look normal. It was like long and frizzy and kind of out to here. And I was about 50 pounds heavier. This is when I was deadlifting a car and eating a whole pizza in one sitting. Nothing that I recommend anyone does. But Patrick and I are kind of of that lighter-boned, sort of naturally lean. I walk around, no problem at all, 10% body fat or less year round. It just is not a problem. I don't ask how to get lean. I'm just like the body builder who doesn't ask how to get bigger. Anyway, so there's the fat-free mass and only the tallest individuals tend to move beyond these numbers. Anyone familiar with World's Strongest Man competition? Sure. They're on some sort of beautiful Mediterranean island, getting great tans, and they happen to be lifting heavy things, pulling heavy things, tearing muscles. Bill Kasmeyer is frequently a host of this, and he has a neck that is unbelievably large. And you'll find some genetic freaks out there. One in a million genetic freaks, the same way a man with a 200 IQ is a freak, the same way a man who is seven feet tall is a freak. These guys are freaks. And Bill's neck is one of those sorts of things. And you know it when you have it, and if you have to, it's like the meal. If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it. If you have to ask how he got it, you can't have it, right? Okay. So, however, most people are not trained enough to be anywhere near that genetic potential. And if you want to know how to train, well, Drew will be happy to talk your ear off next year, or you can go online and watch him go on and on, or you can listen to McGuff talk last year, all fantastic presentations. That's beyond the scope of my presentation today. But the point is that knowing that there's a genetic limit is no excuse for not working hard. This is the argument against the term hard gainer. There, since the mid-80s, there's been a term, well, probably since the early 50s, Reg Park was the original publisher of Iron Man Magazine, and he possibly invented the term. And what it meant is that lighter-boned individuals who don't gain muscle as quickly as someone who's genetically elite, okay? So that's everybody else. So this is the normal people and how fast you're capable of gaining with hard work. The majority, which is to say, don't hold yourself up against an NFL linebacker who has 15 years of conditioning, weight work, and a good genetic hand as to what you can be physically because their bodies break down in 30 years because of all that abuse. You have to set yourself to a different standard. But in your 20s, you've got great hormones. Your testosterone is through the roof. All sorts of growth factors are spiked. And right now is the time where you're going to put on, if you want to work out, you're going to set the table for the rest of your life, as far as how you're going to be physically. You all have heard the term muscle memory, right? I'm sure everybody has. It used to have no basis in science, but more recently, they figured out that there's a code kind of like Konami up, up, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start. It's a gene code that encodes in the muscles that sort of says, here is the ceiling you were previously at. And this ties in kind of uniquely the body fat set point theory as well. If you previously, when you were younger, hung out in a certain area of lean body mass, resting heart rate, body fat, and you veer away from that for a period of time, it's much easier to get back there. So that's why the talk is training over a lifetime. And what I want to impress upon you early on is that right now, regardless of what your genetic potential is, is the time that you can make the most change and set yourself up for health, well-being, strength for the rest of your life. But most people and most guys in their 20s don't train with that intent. And what you're learning here, and what I'm going to tell you is kind of adjunct to what all of these gentlemen are talking to you about, about finding confidence when approaching women, that it's not about your hang-ups and it's not about what you think about yourself, the negatives you think about yourself, because as a client of mine said the other day, I just put him through a workout and they're all really excited about this talk. And he leaves and he sticks his head back and he goes, remind yourself that they all wipe their asses just like you. Which is to say, everybody has a thing, even the woman you're approaching, which I'm sure you've heard a million times, and the same thing goes here with training, you shouldn't, I'm not going to say you shouldn't train with the intent of being muscular and healthy to approach women, but they decided long before they ever saw your ripped abs if they were going to sleep with you. When I was most successful dating, I'm married now, I have three dogs in a house, I was not in my best shape, I was, I was tubby, I didn't have a good haircut, but I didn't care to when approaching women, it was about, I felt good about myself, I felt good about my accomplishments in that point in my life, and I had a good social circle. And so if I didn't get their phone number, I was never going to see them again, right? It had nothing to do with the fact that my exterior and internal bleak, or my internal and external bleaks are looking extra sharp today. My lats are popping. Boy, I'm going to pick up this phone number. You'll get married someday and your wife will complain that you're too hard and that you should put some body fat on, so that you suffice, so that you are a nice surrogate, self-warmed pillow for her in the evening, right? This is true, this is true. And Rick Fox, he was a NFL player married to Vanessa Williams, who, because of her pictures in Playboy, she lost her Miss America crown and also appeared in that wonderful film with Arnold Schwarzenegger called Eraser. And she, and so Rick was complaining that, she was complaining that he was too ripped. And here's a professional athlete, you tend to think, you tend to associate these pretty people with coming together, but at the end of the day, they're still human. And this tends to be what ends up happening. It's more than just the body. So if you're just training to pick up women, you've lost the plot and you won't sustain it, okay? You'll train five days a week, you'll get to where you want to be in the short term, and then you pick up the woman and then what do you do? Okay. So then hopefully you get some perspective and you find out that there's a middle way. You find out that you can train two or three days a week. You don't need more than 90 minutes. And then eventually you find out you don't even need that much if you're doing it right. But then you start to get lingering creeping doubt and you start to think, I should be gaining muscle faster because when I first started training, I gained muscle really, really quickly. Well, there's a reason for that too. When you are a novice, you are super sensitive. This is no different to learning curve than in any activity you do. The closer you get to your limit, the slower the rate of gains. And in my experience and in the experience of exercise physiologists like Lyle McDonald and Alan Aragon, people who train a lot of clients and have seen a lot of people going, your first year, if you do everything right, if you've never trained before in your life, never done sport, never done weightlifting, never done anything, you can put on somewhere between a pound and a half to two pounds a month of dry muscle tissue. Now understand that when you're gaining this weight, not all of it is going to be muscle. You'll see the scale weight go up three, four, five pounds. You're thinking, hell yeah, I'm getting cock strong now. Some of that's water. Some of that is glycogen, human starch, it's our form of sugar stored in the muscle tissues for use onsite to power these muscle contractions. When you start training muscles, they want more of that because they need to have that fuel onsite to meet the demands that you're asking of it. So after that first year, you can expect, again, if you're training consistently, you're training of a sufficient intensity and you're getting adequate nutrition, you might gain half of that amount. So suddenly the first year you gain, say, 17 pounds. The next year you gain eight or nine pounds. You're going, man, my program's not working anymore. I must be doing something wrong. My diet's off. I know what I need. I need creatine. Actually creatine's a fine supplement. It's got 20 plus years of research. It does everything from increase glucose sensitivity to help the brains of old people. And I'm not kidding. I need this new supplement. I need this mass gainer. I need this. I need that. I need that. And then that's where supplement companies make all their money from those people who expect newbie gains to last forever. I've done this. My first four months of training I put on 16 pounds. I say first four months of training. I mean, first four months of training after high school. I was severely underweight from doing two plus hours a day of basketball. And I very quickly put on 16 pounds. Women, friends who hadn't seen me, were shocked at how much weight I had put on. I did that in four months. Over the course of the next two years, I managed to put on another 14. And I felt like I was doing everything wrong. So I'm here to tell you now, for some reason you decided to take up strength training, what hopefully not to pick up a woman. This peters off. The third year it cuts in half again. And then the fourth year and so on, you're lucky to get a pound and a half a year out of it. So you have to start finding reasons to continue training. If all you went into it for was to be a bodybuilder, which looking out, I don't think anyone here is chasing that goal. And it's not making fun of you. You might someday decide you want to be a bodybuilder because it's not just about being huge. Most of the bodybuilders are middleweights, which means they show up on stage at around 160 to 165 pounds. That's not a lot. But when your bone dry and super thin, low on body fat, you show muscle real well. And that's why body building is a, it's not a quantitative sport. It's not biking where you're going to complete a course the next amount of time. It's qualitative. How well you can, how well you can create the illusion of size, how well you can accentuate your positives and take away from your negatives, hide those if you will. But most people aren't going to do that. So then the question becomes why also are you training? Are you training for health? Sometimes people don't, in my experience, if they're in their 20s into their 30s, it tends to take a backseat to the rest of your life. You're going, yeah, I know I need to train. Exercise is great. Diet exercise, it's wonderful. But I got kids. I got a mortgage. And I don't believe that I can just do it in an hour a week, 30 minutes a week, what have you. And so that's why people between the age of 30 and 40 tend to lose about 10 pounds of muscle and put on a whole bunch of fat to the tune of two to three pounds a year. About a pound and a half to two pounds a year when you first start having that every year after until you're in your fourth year and it becomes pittance. But you can keep this up for a long time. I have three good examples. One is Clarence Bass. Anybody from there with Clarence Bass, if anybody at all? Okay. We got two in the back. Ding, ding, ding. Clarence Bass is known as old man ripped. He's an interesting case. He's a lawyer, a retired lawyer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And in 1978, he decides that he is going to get freaky lean after Arthur Jones tells him that he's too fat at 12% body fat. And he says, the reason why is that if you're going to gain muscle mass from your weight, you're going to put on equal amount of fat and muscle. And then when you strip off all that fat, you'll end up right back where you started. And sure enough, there is some science to back this up and aside. If you are lean and you overeat, you tend to put on about 70% of that weight as lean body mass. This includes bone tissue, water, connective tissue, and muscle tissue. If you are over fat, over 20% nearing obesity and you overeat, you put on mostly fat. This does not mean your metabolism is broken. This does not mean you violate the laws of thermodynamics or whatever other woo-ha-ha, some fitness individuals trying to sell this month because this industry is built on fads. It has to be because if you tell someone lift heavy, gradually increase the amount of weight you lift, which just happens to be pittance per week. Once you're out of the novice stage, we're talking half pound to a pound a week of strength on most exercises, maybe. And do it enough time to see results. This is the cat's out of the bag, and there's no mystery anymore. So building it on fads, P90X, 10 years ago was power 90, and they were selling the same thing. Only they weren't selling it with Xs, which they stole from WWE for anybody who used to watch wrestling. I'm not proud to say I did, but manholecomania, Andre the Giant, those are the genetic freaks I was talking about, and they end up as wrestlers. They don't end up as accountants, and they don't end up here. So we exclude them from who I'm talking about. So you gain that amount of weight and that amount of time. Clarence Bass decides he's going to get freaky lean, and so from the age of 38 on up until now, he's 73 years old. He's maintained under 10% body fat, and by the measures he's using, he's actually maintained under 7% body fat for 25 years. And in that time, in that time, it's traditionally thought that if you're lean, you can't put on muscle tissue, or it's hard, because you only need a little bit of calories to keep gaining, but when you're that lean, your body thinks you're starved. Your body thinks you are Dachau. Your body thinks you're about to die. And so you have all these feedback mechanisms that are telling you hormonally, you need to eat something or you're going to die. In fact, he's maintained it this long, and between the age of 38 and 46, he put on 11 pounds of muscle. That's not very much at all. It's about an inch on his arm. And so then I started looking around to see if other body builders experienced this. In Austin, we have a guy named Dave Gooden. He is known as the Texas Shredder, which is a bad B movie title if there ever was one. But he is possibly the most talented in winning this natural body builder of all time. In an interview he did about four years ago, he said that he's gained 30 pounds in 20 years. That's a pound and a half a year. Would you get excited waking up a year from now after all of your working out and going, I basically look the same. All right, that was really worth it. We deal so much in external cues, especially with fitness, and especially if you're coming from a sport background, right? Shoot the three-pointer, make the three-pointer, get three points, score the touchdown, an event is externally reinforcing what you've done. Or if your training was worth it, body builder is much slowing. It's a marathon. Health training is much slower. It's a marathon. Another body builder, Josh Trentini. He's Mr. USA. He trains in hit fashion. He says he's put on 24 pounds in 18 years of lifting. Not a whole lot. Not a whole lot of muscle mass, but it's enough to totally change his body. And so you have to be wary of what people say when they say, ah, I put on 15 pounds of lean mass in this new program I've got, in this new diet I've got. The only way you can be sure of your body fat percentage is to be dead as a doorknob and be cut on with a scalpel. Every other method has an amount of inaccuracy built into it. So yeah, they gain 15 pounds. A lot of that because water, some of that's fat, maybe some of that's muscle. There's really no way to tell. And so if you look at body builders over the course of time, over the course of their career, on stage when they're super lean, you can tell how effective their training program was. And a more recent example is someone by the name of Lane Norton. He is a PhD in nutrition sciences. He took time off after becoming a pro to be a powerlifter. So he proceeds to squat over 500 pounds and deadlift close to 700 pounds. And he walks around at about 235 pounds at the height of about 5, 10 and a half. Four or five years later, right, of doing this powerlifting thing, he comes back to the bodybuilding stage and gets freaky lean. And he comes in four pounds heavier than when he last competed. One pound a year for all that eating and training and all those sorts of things. Okay, so once you get past your first couple of years of training, you've gained really most of the muscle you're going to train. Those pounds a year aren't going to sustain you. So what's the next step? Where do you go from there? Life's long, you got to find new challenges and things you might be good at and use the training as an adjunct to that. I guess I'm getting close to that there. You got to use the training as an adjunct to that. Finding things you might be better at because this is meant to make your life better. It's not meant to be your life. But the way people tend to do it, they make it their life. They obsess about it. They read bodybuilding magazines, they read nutrition magazines, they scour the scientific journals. They go to grad school for it. And they don't have balance in their life. And then reality hits and they have to move on. And so often a false dilemma is made. If I can't train five days a week and five days a week is always what got me results. Well, why train at all? It's very black and white thinking, right? But there are some guys out there who do it. If I can't do biceps three days a week, my arms are going to shrivel. Why train at all? Why put in any effort? Because I believe that anything less than five days a week is not going to get me the results I need. It's patently false. As you get stronger and you get bigger, you become better at recruiting the what are called high threshold motor units, fast-switch muscle fibers. They are your biggest, strongest muscle fibers. And when you are an novice, you are in fact unable to recruit them voluntarily. You can have them recruited for you if you happen to select a weight that is much too heavy. But then you have inhibitory mechanisms from your nervous system to keep you from hurting yourself trying to sling that weight around. So eventually as you train and get stronger, you get better at using all of these muscle fibers. And the thing about those muscle fibers is they require a lot of time to recover. So if you're able to train five days a week, you can't do it intensely. You're not really recruiting those high threshold motor units. If you train intensely, you recruit those high threshold motor units, then you have to back off and rest. And in fact, really interesting about backing off and resting, understanding that these are the biggest muscle fibers and bodybuilders who are really large or athletes who are really strong, Usain Boltz of the world, they tend to have a lot of these muscle fibers, explosive sports. There are studies that have been done where they have people train and the training actually reduces their high threshold motor units. It seems strange, but there is a certain amount of aerobic in any sort of training you're doing. Unless you're doing heavy singles, you are to a certain extent up regulating these intermediate fibers. And then they had to take time off. Three months after they ceased training, they had more than doubled their fast twitch muscle fibers from doing nothing. And in reality, you see the same thing in spinal cord injured individuals and individuals who have broken bones and have been forced to cast muscles. That anaerobic environment is the environment in which these big strong motor units best express themselves. So if you're sufficiently strong and a normal human being, you have to balance rest with effort. Your effort has gotten up so much higher that you can readily recruit these and fatigue them. You need to rest that they actually recover and get stronger. And periodically take more time off than you think is necessary. A week, two weeks, at least. So you get into your 30s, you get over the false dilemma, and you decide, all right, I can do something. I can train, I can train at least full body twice a week and I can work really hard. And I can make steady gains and I can balance this with my family, with my work demands, with the demands of my children. And I'm feeling pretty good compared to my peers. I still look really fit. My arms are still bulging. I still fit in my jeans. I don't have my gut hanging over my belt and fooling myself into thinking I have a 36 inch waist or whatever reasonably small waist they think they have, because they take the pant, the belt line, and they tilt it like this so it sits on the lumbar spine and wraps underneath the globe of their stomach and think, all right, I've still got it. I'm walking around like this. If you've been training, not five days a week, two days a week, working hard, eating real food, only occasionally going down to the bar and putting down a bunch of pints and hot wings with sporting events, you're going to maintain a good lean-ness. And you'll find yourself capable of playing any sport you want to play. You're not going to play it really well, because you have to practice the sport to be really good at it. It's just like you take a basketball player and try and have them play tennis. They're going to be sucking wind. They're going to be feeling like total novices, but they'll very quickly get better at playing tennis, at least from a metabolic aerobic standpoint, because they had this global metabolic conditioning, this base with which to build upon. And you'll be in that position. And really, the demands of your life will dictate that unless you're a professional athlete, that that's what you're going to do. You're going to be the weekend warrior. It's not so bad if you can do it and you don't hurt yourself. And you especially don't want to be hurting yourself in the gym. And if anybody saw Bill DeSimone's presentation last year, there's certain biomechanics of every joint of every muscle, and muscles are patently ignored in the gym. They're thought of as a suggestion rather than, you know, you've seen guys doing a behind-the-neck military press. They prop up and they grab the bar here. They're going, yeah, awesome. I'm really feeling my deltoid. What they're actually feeling is ligament binding and impingement at the joint, because your arms come into your scapula. Here's a little anatomy, guys. How does your arm attach to the rest of your torso? It's not at the shoulder. It's here at your collarbone. It comes into your shoulder blade, attaches to the AC joint, which then attaches here to the clavicle. Okay, so it comes in at 30 degrees off of the, what's called the frontal plane, which cuts you from the back. That's why a normal military press isn't terrible, because it's at least in that plane. But the moment you rock back here, you're getting extension at the joint and compression at the joint at the same time. And you want to think about this AC joint as kind of being like football pads, right? It extends way over your shoulders, way out to here, if you've seen these guys. Think of the bone is that over your humerus, over the glenohumeral joint, which is your shoulder. As you think about it, it's not here, it's moving down here. So you've got this distance that you're all, everything underneath is going to run into that bone. And since this is its most protruded point, you're getting the most impingement right here. But I'm feeling those deltoids. So there's a lot of trade. There's a lot of lore built into this. And you're going to want to be informed by biomechanics, by kinesiology, and you're going to get a lot of that just watching Bill's presentation last year. If you want to make your joints last, because it's like pulling rope over a boulder. When you flex those tendons, ligaments, they are moving over bone. Bone is not the smoothest thing in the world. They do wear down if you're not careful. Training five days a week is a sure way to expedite this process. If you're looking to have crappy joints, train five days a week. If that's your goal, that's an easy one to achieve. But you're not. You're training for health and you shouldn't be getting injured in the gym. The whole point is to make you better at doing things away from the gym. That's what you're training for. So you get past that false dilemma and you keep your gains. You keep getting stronger and you get bigger. And then you get to 50. And you're way better off than everybody else ever was. And you've invested maybe an hour a week. You've got lower body fat percentage. You've got low resting heart rate. Blood panels are good. Your testosterone is still up as opposed to what happens when you get fat or even a little fat. You basically start producing hormones like a woman. The more body fat you have, the more aroma taste you have. The more aroma taste you have, the more of the testosterone that you are producing gets turned into estrogen. And the more this ratio gets out of whack. The flip side of that is that have you ever noticed how when your grandmothers or mothers or aunts, they go through menopause? And after all the hot flashes and all that wonderfulness happens, they sort of become a little bit like cocksure. They really have this reduced fear and sort of aggressiveness that they suddenly have or at least that we don't associate with all women. It's because their ratio of testosterone to estrogen has changed. Simultaneously, when men go through what we colloquially term manopause and their testosterone to estrogen ratio gets a little smaller, they have a little bit of less testosterone to their estrogen, they become a little calmer. They become a little less manlike. Because testosterone has two functions. Truly two functions. I'm getting crass and you all better laugh. Ready? Bucket or kill it. That's all testosterone is for. That's all it does. And if you're training, if you're training, you maintain some of that. If you get in fat and out of shape and not training, you're losing that. You're really losing that edge. And you can maintain this on the smallest amount of effort. Well, your effort at the gym is going to be high, but you're only investing an hour a week, maybe, depending on how good you are. I mean, if you've watched Patrick's videos, he's training like 30 minutes a week, busting his ass. And the rest of the time, he enjoys time on the bike because he'd rather be riding the bike than in a gym, on a machine, making weight go up and down. And so on and so forth. So I've got some examples. I'm fortunate enough that I've trained people from the age of 10, all the way up to the age of 92. And everything in between. My joke is that I charm women between the age of 50 and 70 on a daily basis because they can afford my fee and their patient. Their demands from training is that their bones get stronger. And strangely enough that they have someone to talk to. Personal training is not unlike hairdressing. I mean, you are dealing with very fragile people and you're not wheeling sharp instruments. But it's the same thing. People come to you with all sorts of, they tell you about their daughter's divorce. They tell you about someone's drug rehab. They tell you about the sexual problems that they and their husband are having. They tell you about how they had 12 drinks last night, yet they're still here to work out in the morning. And maybe you should go easy on me. They do all these things. It's a relationship. And that's part of the reason why I enjoy it so much. And so I have some examples of this. People who have managed at different points in their life to keep perspective, to make this a part of their life without making it their life, to make their life better, every aspect of their life. So I start off after talking about all these people who are genetic freaks with two genetic freaks. When I first moved to Austin, there was a gentleman who was working for us. His name was Ben or working out with us. His name was Ben. He used to be a power lifter. And you could tell he had a barrel chest. He had short legs, short arms. He trained three exercises once a week. He came in. He did a pull down. He did a what's called a ventral chest, which is kind of a combination dip and chest press. And he did a leg press. They were all done very slowly to momentary muscular fatigue. Ben, at a height of about five, seven, had over 16 and a half inch arms lean. And he could still pull close to 500 pounds in the deadlift with minimal amount of training. And his total time investment exercising per week was 10 minutes. Now, he's a freak. That's why I'm starting off with him, because they're impressive, but they're also not the norm. And the next guy we had, his name was Andrew. Andrew looked like he played rugby, like a college rugby player. He had calves that were super thick. He had a yoked neck. And he had actually strangely reasonably small joints. And he ran an IT company. Austin's got a lot of those. And he would sporadically train. He'd come in and maybe train for two months and then fall off the face of the earth for eight. But in those two months' time, without fail, he'd come in looking like he's been constantly training bigger than anybody in this room. And he'd train once a week again, 10 minutes, and he'd put on 10, 11 pounds. And then he'd stop training for the rest of you because business demands, he had travel, he had kids, he had so on. But he was able to focus and get the most out of those workouts and maximize the genetic card that mommy and daddy handed him. But he understood that. Most guys who are big and strong don't understand that it's not that you aren't as big and strong as me because you work less hard. There's not an understanding. It's the same way someone who's a genius can sometimes have a hard time grasping. Why don't you get this concept? Why don't you understand it immediately? There's something unseen. It can't be told. And it can't be given. They've already got it. So those are the freaks. Now, most of my clients are not freaks. They own insurance companies. They're lawyers. I have two, I have one right now person. She's in her early 60s. Shredded to the bone. She and her, she's a physical therapist and she, a number of years ago, decided to compete in Primal Quest. Now, Primal Quest is interesting in that it, you pay a lot of money, work your ass off to get dropped off in the middle of nowhere and effectively be told, figure your way back to civilization by all means possible. Have fun. Since a 10-day race, they drop you off in Moab, Utah, although they changed the location. You never quite know where you're getting dropped off so you can't scout it. And you and three other individuals are a team. You're going to bike. You're going to row. You're going to climb. You're going to walk. You're going to crap in baggies along the way because you're not going to crap all over nature. And occasionally, one of the pit stops will put you at a Denny's. And after about five days, suddenly that grand slam seems like gourmet cooking when all you've been having is like power bars and granola. Their group was the oldest. They all averaged age 56, 57. They trained with us 21 minutes twice a week. And you know what they did the rest of the time? Biking, climbing, running, all the stuff that they'd actually be doing at this event. Most of the competitors were in their mid-30s. Some were in their late teens, but they were usually like a fourth man on a team. Um, this group finished in the middle of the pack, which comparatively speaking, you got people 25 years younger than you and you're beating them. Even if you don't win the thing, that's a victory. And they came back and they were like, yeah, we were tired. None of us got hurt. We were able to do it. We're really proud of ourselves. Um, I know that when I was younger, I had this idea that being in your 50s and 60s meant, you know, that the slowdown was inevitably going to happen. That's probably because of Western aging, the people we see. Fortunately, we have these examples, like I talked about Clarence Bass earlier, who's still under 77% body fat at 73, and he still competes in rowing, who are breaking that mold. So you have to think over the long term. You don't have to think I'm going to train until I'm 50 and then I'm not going to do anything after that. And I've had some really old clients. I have one currently. His name is Jim. Jim sends me all sorts of chain letter jokes. Do your grandparents ever send you chain letter jokes? Do your grandparents have your email address? Are your grandparents Republican? Because if they fit these things, this is Jim. So, uh, he sends me lots of jokes and he always has a joke when he comes in and he always likes it when I have a lady fill in for me on my workouts, because he gets a hug out of them, right? Because grandparents, grand, uh, grandpa's especially are seen as non-threatening. But this is one of the jokes he told me one day he comes in, he goes, you know, Skylar, my, uh, my mother once, she never trusted me. She never understood anything at all that I did. In fact, she thought I was in the KKK. She comes to me and she goes, Jim, I think you're in the KKK. He goes, why would you think that? Why would you think that? And she said, I heard a couple of little girls down the street saying you were grandmaster under the sheets. Grandmaster, they wear sheets. Guys, 80. Guys, 80. Clearly his test-osterone ratio is still good. And I asked him, I go, Jim, why do you train? I'm going to be talking 20-somethings. Why do you train? He goes, well, hell, I still want to be able to carry my golf clubs on the course when I play. I still want to occasionally slice it long. And I want to be able to get out of my king-size water bed. And this was the point he made. He said, if I'm not strong, I can't get out of the thing. But that's a victory for him, right? The king-size water bed, all right. He didn't care about big biceps, you know. He colors his cholesterol as good. And he's way stronger than any other 80-year-old as I see around under most circumstances. And I asked him, I go, Jim, if you're lucky, how will you die? He goes, I'll play golf. I'll come home, have dinner. I'll fall asleep and I'll never wake up again. That'd be a pretty good way to go. I'm not saying that training in a good diet is going to keep you from getting cancer or heart disease or diabetes or any of those things, but it stacks the deck in your favor. And if you've got a genetic disposition to get them, you're probably going to get them later. And it's probably going to be much more minor. And if you're training correctly, the way in which you train between the ages 30 and 70, it's probably going to look pretty similar. If you look at the bodybuilders of the Golden Era, the Arnold Era, most of those guys are training nothing like they used to train. To wit, Ken O'Neill is a 67-year-old writer for Ironman Magazine. He was there during Arnold's era, Frank Zane's era, all of those guys. And I was talking to him the other day, and he's telling me about Frank Zane. Does anyone here familiar with Frank Zane? Frank Zane won the Mr. Olympia a number of times, which is the zenith of bodybuilding. And he wanted one of the smallest competitors to win it. His arms never measured more than 17 and a quarter inches against these guys who had 19 or 20-inch arms, but he did it because he could show muscle really well. He could make his waist look incredibly tiny. He could flare his rib cage out, do this thing like back in the 60s, 70s, and even before, guys used to practice rib cage expansion because all the connective tissue at your ribs doesn't fully set until your late teens, so they'd practice getting this as big as possible. And then it became the solution. They could make this big, they could make their stomach small, and they'd look like they could fly. But Frank Zane recently had his shoulders replaced. And he says, Ken, if I would have known now, I would have trained lighter. I would have trained less often. I would have paid attention to my form more. And the point I'm making is that if you pay attention to all of that now, it might delay a little bit getting to as big as you are going to be or your athletic goals. But if it means 10, 20 years down the road, you're still walking and the joints you own are still the ones you were born with, you've done all right. And this means making sure your goals are your goals and that they're not someone else's goals because it's easy to go into a gym and someone says, why aren't you deadlifting? Or why are you deadlifting sumo? You should be deadlifting normal. And there's this macho pressure that's going on there, and you have to be able to separate what someone else might want for you, for what you want for yourself. And if you're in this for the long haul, that perspective is necessary. And not only should the way you train at 30 be the way you train at 70, they should look fairly similar anyway. It shouldn't look any different if you have a terminal disease. April 10, 2009, my mother passed away from stage complications from stage 4 colon cancer. Less than a year after she had been diagnosed. My mother was in fantastic health. She was a model when she was in her 20s. She was one of my early clients, if you will, basically, when I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Because looking back now, I've been at this for 12 years, I look back when I first got trained, I go, why the hell are these people paying me? But this is how you should be in your life. Every year you look back and you go, boy, I was an idiot last year. Boy, I was an idiot last year. And when you stop doing that, you should be worried. You should always be trying to strive and get better. So I look back and she was kind of my guinea pig going, letting me really try and refine my abilities as an instructor. So she trained really hard, 5'9", and after two kids in her mid-40s, size 4, 130 pounds, strong, you know, all those things. Clearly, I think very highly of my mother. Honestly, I was a momless boy. Now, she is diagnosed with cancer and every other week she is subjected to 55 straight hours of chemotherapy. And every other week, when she wasn't on chemotherapy, she was back as an executive assistant at the Chapman Automotive Group in the Phoenix area. It's a big, big dealership group. So that was the way she was. And she couldn't train and she missed it so terribly. She used to train twice a week for 30 minutes. And now that she had cancer, she couldn't train at all. And then a move for normalcy, that's what she wanted. She missed her training so much. On Christmas Eve, 2008, I was back home and I was able to put her through one last session. I didn't know it was going to be the last session, but one last session of a workout. Down at the old gym I used to work at. Put her through medx leg press, overhead press, dip, pull down, compound row. We used about half the weight she had previously used. She worked her tail off and she sat there drinking water, huffing, heaving. If you do a high intensity workout properly, you are sufficiently winded because you cranked your anaerobic system so hard that your aerobic system has to deal with all that substrate. It just doesn't disappear. Your aerobic system gets a superior workout. She's sitting there and she goes, that feels like it used to feel, even though she was much weaker and shaky. And so on my head, I'm thinking, all right, well, she's starting to turn the corner because her PET scan numbers were down, her tumor count numbers were down. They had removed the primary tumor, but when she was diagnosed, it had already moved into her liver. It had already been assessed. And the next step was going to be direct radiation and through the liver. So I gave her a yoga DVD. I said, well, try and ease into this. See if you can do this because I'm not there to train you. And who knows when you're going to feel like training? So a week and a half later, she does yoga and hurts herself. You want to avoid hurting yourself, but boy, people think yoga is safe compared to lifting weights. If you lift weights properly, they tell you very quickly if they're too heavy and they're going to hurt you if you're paying attention. Yoga, you're trying to bend yourself like a pretzel, you're not going to know when you've gone too far until it's too late. She never got the train again. She passed away. She had complications from the radiation treatments. Effectively, her liver started to fall apart. And on April 10th, she passed away in Scottsdale, Arizona. So I didn't know it'd be her last workout, but I think it's kind of poignant that if you do this correctly, whether you're young or you're old, sick or in health and you're doing it in a way that is sustainable, it's not going to matter. It's going to look very similar. It's going to resemble regardless of what it is. And so I want, that's what I really want you to take away. Yes, there's limits. All men are created equal. Some are created more equal than others. But if you're going to be doing this over the course of your life, you've got to find something you like, keep it safe, keep it brief and remind yourself it's there to make the rest of your life better. It shouldn't be your life. That's all I've got unless you all have any questions. Yeah. Oh, we got a mic. Yeah, him. What's your name, man? My name's Andy. I'm actually a reporter with the UCF student newspaper. Yeah, yeah. Well, basically, I think I had read somewhere that it's been said that two 30 minute workouts in a day are better than doing one one hour workout in a day because you're revving up your system twice. What would you say about that? The first question would be how is the workout being defined? And I say this because for so long aerobics was seen as the de facto workout because the crude instruments we had at the time, that is what could be tracked. Exercise science is only about 60 years old. I mean, really, your first physical education courses come about turn of the century. And they start to figure out about the 1940s that, wait, they're science specific to this, and we need to be testing for these variables. But our instruments are not fine enough to track necessarily what happened with weight training. It's very easy to stick a person on a bike with a trainer, keep them in place, have them pedaling and measure their VO2 max, their oxygen consumption, their metabolic output, and so on and so forth. So that's the tough question. This is also where the carb drink type stuff comes into play. They say, if you have carbs after your workout and a lot of them, you're going to replenish your glycogen faster. Well, weight training doesn't decrease glycogen in the muscle tons. If you're doing it right. If you did long two hour sessions, yes, it would. But most of those studies that were done were done on cyclists doing long distances, even though they're stuck in place. So yeah, they're going to burn a lot of glycogen. That's what they're there for. So got you. So two 30 minute workouts a week, or in a day, what are the workouts? And then I can answer your question better. So if it's someone who is competitively cycling, oh, go ahead. You're not burning many calories walking. And the interesting thing about walking is that it's like any skill. If you've never done it before, and you're even picking hilly walking, let's use that example, you start it and you're a little over fat. It's kicking your butt, right? You're just huffing and puffing. You lose 10 pounds and you do the same route again and again and again. It's not burning nearly as many calories. There's less body mass, which you're lugging around. And you increase the economy of your locomotion, the economy of your movement, you get better at doing what you're doing. That's why we wrote lines as kids, right? We practice A a thousand times so we can do it without looking at it. There's an element of that. We traditionally, the shorthand is called muscle memory. That's crap. Your muscles either turn on or turn off. Neuromuscular memory might be better. You have a map buried in your head of a movement, a movement pattern. And the more you do it, the better you get at doing it. This is why, and is the confusing part, Olympic lifting. Olympic lifting is a sport. It's done with a barbell. But a Romanian deadlift is an exercise, done to build your hamstrings, your glutes, and your lower back. It too is done with a barbell. This is confusing to the average person. Do you pick up a football and do anything else with it, but play football? No. Do you do anything with a basketball but play basketball? No. But you have at least three different, two different sports and an activity that you use a barbell for. This is why it gets confusing for the lay person when we talk about science. And that's the distinguishing point you need to make that exercise, there are things that produce an exercise like effect. Walking. Walking is great for a lot of things. It keeps the gray matter in your head as you get older, and it keeps your hippocampus at size, which is your librarian of your brain, takes the information that comes in, files it so you can go get it again. People who walk regularly, especially as we get older, tend to have a larger hippocampus and more gray matter. Walking is good for a lot of things. Weight loss is not one of them unless you've got your calories tanked. And I wouldn't even recommend doing traditional cardiovascular activity unless you like it. People traditionally do it because they've assumed as aerobics it's all about trying your heart and your lungs. You have to go through your muscles to get it the heart and the lungs. The most aerobic thing you do is sleep. You only your heart and your lungs are cranking along, your muscles are as relaxed as they're ever going to be. And again, I referenced Doug's presentation on the website last year because he explains, he explains, you've heard of the Krebs cycle. This is like 10th grade biology, and I'm not saying this to dumb it down or anything, but your body is going to use ATP, that's the muscles currency, and it's going to use that to power contractions. And then when that runs out and it's going to run out quick, you're going to then have to start taking the sugar that's in the muscles and running it through glycolysis to make more ATP. And then the byproduct of that is going to run through the Krebs cycle and then it's going to go through the electron transport chain. All this is to make more ATP. And you can think of it as a funnel, each step producing X amount of byproduct. And so you do your weight workout and you're left with a whole lot of this byproduct. That's all stacked up at the mitochondria, which is what deals with lactic acid or lactate as we call it. That is going to have to be used for energy. And the aerobic metabolism is when the mitochondria is producing the energy demands of the muscle tissue, whether it's in real time, or whether it's dealing with it post talk, doing it after you've done your workout, because the substrates have to be dealt with. There's a certain environment the cell likes to keep in that environment is not a whole lot of lactic acid built up inside of it. It has to be dealt with. So I like walking because I've got a nice park near my house. I've got three dogs. They demand it. So I walk about two miles a day. In addition to all the pacing I do with my clients, I'm up typically at five training people six done by one, then it's napping in Xbox. That's what it is. But I do not recommend people take it up, take up traditional aerobics, unless it's something they like. You like riding your bike. In Austin, tons of people like riding their bike. We talked to them about balancing their effort and balancing their volume of biking with their weight training so that their weight training makes their biking better. I'm not in there to make them good weight trainers. I'm in there to make them better bikers. So they bike farther with less effort. But if you're just trying to get lean and you might get freaky lean, then aerobics might be necessary because you can run out of calories real quick and then doing some aerobics might increase your will increase your caloric burn and you're back losing again. But most people if you train intensely and you know, you don't need to add additional aerobics if you're doing it right in the gym. Like I said, unless you have a sport that you have to train for, then you got to do it. I mean, that's the way the skill conditioning though. That's that's very specific. That's correct. But you know, you can go in between because if you're new to the gym, your 15 minutes are not the same as my 15 minutes, partly because you don't know how to get this high threshold motor units quite yet. You can I can have you hold a real heavy weight, but that's not going to last very long. And it's not you're trying to sidestep your biology in that sense. So as you get stronger, you better recruiting those muscle fibers, you achieve a more complete exhaustion, which is saying my 15 minutes is different than your 15 minutes. So early on, you might need more time to achieve a good exhaustion. But the intent is that you're able to gradually increase the intensity over time. Sometimes that's weight. Sometimes it's how you're handling the weight, moving slower, moving segments. There's a lot that can go into it. But generally, yes, if the more intense, the sort of the workout has to be. What's your name, man? Max. Nice to meet you. Likewise. So I have, I have three questions. Okay. One, what are your long term goals to how did you determine them? And three, how do you suggest that we come up with them? Good. Those are great questions. Long term goals. Okay. So I mentioned Casey Butts calculator for maximum muscular potential. Mine is to get back to that because when I was at my biggest and my strongest and my heaviest, I was hitting the nail on the head. I'd like to do that at a lighter weight at a lower body fat percentage. And I understand that this is going to take a while. Part of being the problem with reading all this stuff is that you get program OCD. Like you understand that there are all these variables that are very easy to implement and they all have something to do with your end result. But the tricky part is focusing on just getting stronger because that's a slow process. Anytime you go to a new routine because of the initial skill acquisition period, which comes real quick, you feel like, man, this is great. I'm going to gain like this forever. And then reality sets in and you start gaining at a realistic rate. And that can again be a little disheartening. So it's that moving towards that number, taking what I'm learning in exercise science and keeping it intellectual rather than letting it totally inform my routines and form it in the sense of do am I doing it biomechanically correct? Am I exhausting the fast twitch motor units? Making sure that I'm not changing routines every month, which in the past is one of the things I did as part of that, there's got to be a magic routine. So the first question is, what are my long-term goals? Second one was, how did I come to them? Was that okay? Part of the coming to it was seeing individuals who had been training for a really long time and done really well by being patient. It reminds me of a sort of what I'm what I've tried to get at here is a guy walks in off the streets to martial arts studio and he goes, master, man, I love what you're doing. I want to be a master just like you. Master goes, the first thing you must learn is patience. The guy scoffs, how long is that going to take, right? And that's the problem is that these that's the point I was making. These gains are very small once you're no longer new. So you have to find something about the training you're doing that you inherently find enjoyable regardless of the external result. You want it going in a positive direction. It's just happening so slow that after you're not going to have these like, ah, my pec's an inch bigger or some sort of external feedback queue, it starts to come slower and slower and slower, so you have to start to like the process. And reminding myself that I have all these other things going on in my life, right? Even though I'm a grad student, I'm juggling a full workload. I've got a house and three dogs that we're doing a lot of training with right now. And having those issues in your life makes it easier. Having other interests other than working out makes it easier to stick to what matters, which is gradual weight increases over a long term with big basic exercises. Because if you have time to sit and think about it, you get all this grist for the mill and you'll think yourself in all sorts of weird routines. So how would I suggest you come to it? I would suggest you pick up a book called Braun from Stuart McRoberts. It's about this thick. And Stuart tells you how to train. He tells you the whys of training. He reminds you to err on the side of caution, having a little temperance and patience. If you could think of about a 450 page version of what I've tried to explain with a little bit less science because it's about 10 years old and some of the more recent sort of limit sciences has come out, then that would be kind of what it is. Ignore the fact that the cover is awful. It's bright orange and it has this like skeletal guy hitting a bicep pose. And it's a bicep that as far as I can tell the radial tuberosity, which is where your bicep connects into your form, is down here somewhere. So he's like flexing and it looks ridiculous. It's a horrible cover. It's a fantastic book, however. That would be my suggestion to start there. And also, I keep referencing it just because it's a good talk, go back and watch what Doug McGuff said last year on the YouTube. Because when you have an understanding of how long this stuff takes, then you can kind of temper your training routines, right? Because gosh, five pounds a year, you know, or say you gain 10 pounds per second a year. It's less than a pound a month. But that's enough to put an inch on your arm. And that's very visible. It just took a year to get there. So those would be my suggestions. And maybe find someone who's kind of detached from you to keep you accountable. In other words, like some sort of wise old mentor or someone you can go to and say, I'm thinking about changing my routine. They go, small poundage increases over the long period of time. Cut that crap out, you know, like keep you on track. Because coaches are terrible training themselves. I say this as a coach, right? When you spend your entire day telling people, basically looking, I say, okay, you're doing this well, your form's good on this. Yeah, you shouldn't be doing that with your diet. You have a hard time maintaining objectivity to the situation at hand, partly because you've got so much information you're working with, and partly because if you've been dishing out information all day and correcting people, you start to kind of think you're special. So you need someone else to kind of slap you upside the head and go, you're getting off on the wrong foot. Keep doing what you're doing. Hey, what's your name? Ben. Ben? Nice to meet you. So you mentioned the false belief that the body just naturally breaks down over a certain time and you get examples of 50-year-olds that are extremely fit. But I've encountered this belief repeatedly in my friends and family, and no matter how much I try to explain the benefits of paleo nutrition and body by science, exercise, things like that, they always just rationalized away with, well, I'm just going to get fat anyways. You're going to get fat anyway. So how do you go about explaining to people the benefits of eating right and putting in there 15 minutes of exercise a week? I'm fortunate that I have a captive audience at their appointments when they come in, because I have people who are there because they understand rationally that they need to be working out, but emotionally they sort of waiver. They wouldn't be working out if they didn't have an appointment, and so they're a captive audience. I try to explain and show examples, because the great thing about YouTube is that you can go on there and go like 74-year-old bodybuilder, boom, and you've got examples, or you can go, you know, there's a great one in the New York Times, I think, back in March of a woman named Olga who's 91 years old, 91, she picked up track and field at the age of 77, and her records, which, you know, you're going to say, ah, doesn't sound that impressive, her records are better than the 80-year-olds and she's at the age of 91, so two age classes down, her records are better than theirs. Now, having trained all the way up to 90-year-olds, I can tell you that even that under most circumstances, you think, ah, just 10 years, no, no, no, no, octogenarian and nanogenarian, it's a chasm, it's an enormous difference if, even if they've been just moderately active, and so you can show them who aren't bodybuilders, because most people don't want to look like a bodybuilder, but you have to train in a similar fashion, and not necessarily two hours a day, six days a week, you have to train with the intent of getting stronger, getting more muscular, you just pull the reins on that horse a little sooner, but also understand that your ceiling's probably set. So you can show them and then you can explain, you can then reference, get out your National Geographic on the old Netflix and look at these individuals who are 70, 80 in these indigenous tribes and they're still climbing the trees and they're still hunting, because their world yesterday is about the same as their world today and is about the same as it's going to be tomorrow, and the more you can live today like yesterday, the more you're going to live tomorrow in a similar fashion, and if you've been doing that for 50 years, some things are breaking down, we are decaying, your tissue producing machine at 10, you're not turning over tissue nearly as quickly at 50, or at 70 or 80, but you still respond in a predictable way, exercise is still a stimulus, even if your response isn't as great because of a different hormone environment. Also remind them that they, when we say, ah, your genetic hand is set, which genes do you get from your parents? You don't know. Do you get all of the genes from your parents? No, you only get 50% of each parent's genes to come together, so that's why it's a risk of heart disease if your dad died of a heart attack, it's not a fact of heart disease, and I've noticed people tend to focus on the good, I have a client who her dad died at 52 of a heart attack, she's 71, but she only talks about the fact that her mother did nothing and lived to 91. I go, yeah, but your dad did nothing and died at 52 and you don't know which genes you got. There's a whole lot in the ether that you can't control. What you can control is putting in a little work and reminding them it's like medicine, right? Strength training is like a flu shot, it's, it was just to say one flu shot protects you from the flu, five flu shots gives you the flu, right? But people should do strength training, like I trained today, I've built up and I got to train tomorrow to keep building up, like it's this constant building on top of when it's a constant response to, response to, response to, and if they don't want to hear it and spite your best intentions, save your breath, and if they do want to hear it, they'll come back to you, they will. I'm Roman. Hey Roman. Hi, obviously you're very knowledgeable, so I appreciate the information. I just started a new workout and diet from Tim Ferris, his four-hour body book, where he claims that he, with testing, gained 34 pounds of muscle mass within 28 days. Occam's razor protocol. Occam's razor protocol indeed. Yeah. So based on what you said, one and a half pounds a month for the first year, so what is your take on that on Tim Ferris? Sure. He's, he regained, he regained, if you go back through his old blog, he talks about this, if you search geek to freak, Tim Ferris, he has a blog post on this some five years ago, he talks about, he goes to Buenos Aires to learn the tango, and in doing so, he gets light, he loses a bunch of weight. And then Tim Ferris is notoriously good at manipulating his weight, and this is why he's a martial arts champion. He found out that the Wayans were 24 hours in advance, and he dehydrates down, loses 30 pounds, puts on all that weight and more, and he comes in 10 to 15 pounds larger than the nearest competitor, pushes them out of the ring, that's a DQ. Yeah, you're a national champ that way. And it's not cheating, even if you don't agree with it. So he was regaining, and he references the Colorado experiment in that book, in which Casey Viadier, who was one of Arthur Jones, like, he, the kid wins Mr. America at 19, 200 IQ, seven feet tall, he's one of those freaks. In which he, Casey working, I don't remember if he's in Louisiana or actually here in Florida, he's working at a machine shop, gets his pinky cut off in an accident, okay? And then he has an adverse reaction to the penicillin injection. He loses a bunch of weight. And Arthur says, we're going to get you back in the gym, and we're going to put this weight on you as quickly as we can. So Casey comes in on his before photo, and he looks like, I would like to look like him in his before photo. He looks like he's ripped, he's in shape, he's got big arms, he's got cap deltoids, he's got a full chest, very little body fat. And then he proceeds to gain 64 pounds in a month. Holy crap! And it's mostly muscle. Well, he had been, he had been that big before. In fact, he had been bigger. At the end of that month, I think it was 207 or 208 pounds, Casey was. He had been as heavy as I think 219. So he, this is the muscle memory component. If you've been there before, it's easy to get back to. Tim Ferriss is an example of that. Casey Vidar is an example of that. Now in my case, when I started training, like I said, I gained 16 pounds in four months. I did it on a minimalist routine. I would be dry heaving at the end of it. I was working so hard. And, but after that is where it slows down. So if you had been that big previously, if you'd been 34, 30 pounds of muscle heavier than you are now, yeah, you could put it back on in a month if that was the only thing you focused on. And he's, he's, he doesn't put that disclaimer up every time, but he's always said that too. I was regaining weight. I was regaining weight. And that matters. That really matters. So I don't, it's not something you're going to see. Even in guys who take steroids, like people think steroids, steroids are like, if you feel you have to take steroids, whatever the next level is you're going to be at, you're going to be mediocre in. In other words, if you were a high school football player and you're like, I got to take steroids to play in college, you're going to be like a backup in college, right? If, if you needed to get to the pros, you're going to be maybe an average pro. And I think this was from either Dave Tate or Jim Wendler. These are enormous power lifters who don't hide the fact that at some point or another in their careers they view steroids. But if you look at someone who surely was on steroids, Dorian Yates, he is a, he was, I think seven times in a row, Mr. Olympia from England. Over the course of his training career with steroids, he puts on 75 pounds in 15 years, five pound a month on average. At no point is he gaining 30 pounds of muscle in three months or what have you, even with anabolic assistance. So you can regain it, but if it's new muscle, it's extremely unlikely that it's going to happen. Unless you were just so run down from an endurance of sport. And even in that, you would have been somewhere near that anyway, had you not been doing the sport. Hi, I'm Bill. Hey Bill. Nice to meet you. I am. So I used to be quite fat, like I weigh 42 pounds less now than I did then. Cool. Great job. You were talking about like muscle memory. Sure. So if you used to be bigger, you can get bigger. Does it work the same way with fat and? There is some, there's some research done and this seems to be kind of a point of contention among scientists about the body fat set point. That people will diet and then they'll gravitate back towards kind of an equilibrium. I think that if you, I don't think the paleo diet is magic. What I think it does is that it ends up, you end up eating a whole lot of nutrient dense foods and lots of very filling foods. So you're satisfied on less. There's nothing magical about that. There just isn't. But what it can do is keep you from reachieving that set point because it just becomes so impossible to keep the food down. And you're doing that by picking more dense foods. The BBC did kind of an opposite of that. Talking about set point and I'll get back to exactly what you're saying. You'll see why I'm talking about this. Why are thin people not fat? Why are thin people not fat? They took these kids in England who had always been fairly lean there in their mid 20s. They were never shredded, but they were certainly not fat. And they said like, I'm on the seafood diet. I see food. I eat it. So on. And they had them double their caloric intake. And this is a much more modern version with much better instruments of what was called the Vermont experiment, which was done back in the 50s, early 60s, I don't recall, in which they fed inmates, overfed them, saw how fat they could make them in a certain period of time in exchange for like lesser prison sentences, right? That homicide, we'll let that slide if you just fatten up a little bit, Tony. By the end of the experiment, they had guys who could not push their weight more than 20% above where they were at to start, in spite eating 10,000 plus calories a day. They start fidgeting it off. And this is what kind of came out of this newer study, because they had fine instruments. The body fights back in a number of ways. Some of the people couldn't keep the food down. They would literally vomit. They could not eat enough to double their caloric intake in this more recent version. Some, they became very fidgety. Like I said, they sort of shook the weight off. And there was one guy who he put on something like 22 pounds. He really didn't look all that different. They get him in the Bod Pod. His metabolic rate has gone up 30%. And he's put on three quarters of that weight as muscle tissue, right? And he's a computer science guy, right? He's just sitting there. He's kind of pushed up his glasses. He's like, yeah, that's really interesting. Just this is not a care in the world. I would kill and rob a bank and carry some women across the border until you have that sort of reaction. Like that's the zenith. And those are people who are genetically elite. And some people are genetically elite. The onion made a joke the other day. World class violinist dies without ever having played. Right? The thing that we're talented at is typically not the thing that we're obsessed with. As I was saying before, in high school, I had a 39-inch vertical leap. I could smack my elbow on a regulation backboard. I could touch three quarters of the way up the bank shot square. It came relatively, if I was playing basketball and I was jumping, I could push it up. And I've got video on my blog of me jumping on a 55-inch box, basically rocking back, planting and going. It's no big deal. I can do it, so I'm not obsessed with it, right? It's something I'm talented at. I rock climb really, really easily, bouldering. No big deal. I'm obsessed with this. And so coming all the way back around to what you're saying, the body fights back when you've lost a lot of weight too. And so this is why I tell people to ride the plateaus. If you just go on a hard diet and you just tank, you go on a hard diet and you tank, what happens is you haven't changed really any habits and you haven't let the body acclimate to a newer weight. So what I try and get people to do, you seem like you're maintaining 42 pounds lost. And how old are you? You're 19? Yeah. I mean, I hesitate to say baby fat, but you're in a position right now where you've got this hormonal environment in your body to where you can maintain that leanness for the rest of your life if you set the groundwork now. But yes, there is. You see people do it all the time. They'll just diet and they won't change any other habits. They'll do it as a goal. I'm going to lose X amount of weight. They get there and they go right back to the shitty way they were eating before, or they just totally drop exercising. And that's no different than some guy who says, I'm going to work out. I'm going to get more muscular and I'm going to get this woman or I'm going to do this event. And they stop working out and doing that event because they got what they want and they're out of shape. Both have to be sustainable and they have to be something that you want to do. So you want to ride those plateaus because if you can stick it that way, it's easier when you can refocus yourself again to drop even more. But in your case, if you put in a little bit of work, I don't think you'd ever get back that fat just paying a motochrome of attention. So yeah, there's a set point, but I don't think you'll go back to it. Yeah, one minute. Yeah, man. Last one. Like my question is pretty basic. For someone who's just looking to straight, just burn fat, what would you say is the most effective workout? I got two exercises for you. I'll demonstrate them. Someone offers you something that you know is high in calories. I want you to practice the head shake. And when you're eating, I want you to practice table pushaways when you're satisfied and walk away. It's calories. I mean, these are dependent variables. Exercise doesn't burn many calories. Boy, it burns crappy amount of calories. Really, 30 minutes might get you 200 calories burned at a moderate intensity on a treadmill. 45 minutes might get you 300. I can put down 300 calories in 30 seconds. I could put down way more than that in a minute. It's a disproportion amount of effort to reward. It's much easier to train regularly and eat a little bit less or pick foods that fill you up a little bit more and be flexible with that. Don't have the I have a cookie syndrome, which is you're going well on a diet, you've lost some weight. In a moment of weakness, you have a cookie. And you think, I've ruined everything, give me the bag because now you've ruined everything. But that's how people fall off the wagon. Like 100 calories of cookie just ruin the fact that let's say I lost 10 pounds of fat. That's 35,000 calories worth of energy you've lost. 100 calories of cookies going to ruin it? No. That's the flexibility you need to have to keep it up over the long term. Find something you like doing, get the calories down a little bit, eat real food as close to as natural packaging as possible, and be patient. That's it guys. Thanks a lot.