 So the 21 convention at Tampa, Florida, we have a pretty, I'm gonna say legendary speaker here, who started speaking at the 21 convention in 2009. I actually was there to witness it, but as I was just telling him before, I actually saw more change in attendees directly coming from what he said and what he recommended than almost any other speaker, and that was impressive. That caught my ear and really made me start looking at my diet, how I exercised, and his philosophies of life. I can check him out at Bay.com, that's B-A-Y-E. Let's bring on Drew Bay. All right, thanks. Glad to be here. Now, the past couple times that I was at the 21 convention, I talked about how to exercise. I wanna do something a little bit different now since you've been hearing about how to exercise from a lot of other great speakers. L. Darden's gonna be a little bit of a hard act to follow, but what I want to talk about is how to think about how to exercise, and this is important because the way you think about something is going to influence how you go about it. Now, if you attended Bill's presentation, I'm assuming you did biomechanics of exercise again, which is a phenomenal, phenomenal presentation. He taught you about how body positioning affects the moment arms that your muscles work against during exercise, and how that can increase not only the difficulty of exercise, but safety of exercise. Well, I like to take an example from that. If you were to take 100 people and hand them a barbell with no instruction at all and tell them to perform a curl, what you'll typically see is they'll stand, holding the bar waist tight here, leaning forward slightly. They'll use a little bit of a hitch with the hips to swing it up, and as they come up, they're gonna move their elbows forward in front of the hands and the barbell. Now, if you were paying attention during Bill's presentation, you know that you start with zero moment arm, you go through the maximum moment arm, and then you end up with no moment arm at all. Now, this is a great way to do a curl if your goal is to make the weight go up. It is a horrible way to do a curl if your goal is to effectively work your biceps. The difference between the two is that when you're thinking about making the bar go up, if you think of exercise as something that you do to the weights with your muscles, you're gonna tend to move in a way that makes it easier to do that. But easier is not what you want during exercise. You want exercise to be demanding. Instead, you want to think of exercise as something you do to your muscles with the weights. Now, the difference between the way most people curl, and I'll just use the curl as an example, and how you should curl, is that a proper curl is so much harder. You won't be able to lift as much weight, but it's going to be so much more effective for the muscle. And because you don't require as much weight, it also makes it a much safer exercise. I don't know if Bill went into specifics with the moment arms and curling, but if you start here, it's easy. If you start with a slight backward lean and you've got the barbell a few inches in front of your elbow, it's a whole lot harder. If you end here, this is pretty easy. Again, it's zero moment arm. But if as you curl, you move your hips back, again, the barbell stays in front of the elbow. There's no difference in how far your elbow is moving, but there's a big difference in the average lever between this and doing this. And it's the same with a lot of other exercises. Now, the hard part about this is that when most people go into the gym, pick up a barbell or you get in a machine, we're conditioned to think about exercise as being, again, a process of doing something to the weights, doing something to the handles or the pedals or the pads on a machine. And again, when you think about exercise in that way, you're going to tend to move in a way that makes it easier to do that, which again is the exact opposite of what you want to do. If instead, you think of the goal of the exercise as not doing work or not moving weights up and down, but rather on efficiently loading the muscles that you're targeting and doing so in a manner that avoids wrecking your joints in the process, you're going to tend to move in a manner that is more efficient for that purpose. Now, getting into the mindset of found something that has made a huge difference in my workouts and workouts with clients is to take a few minutes before the workout to, first off, just empty out your thoughts, clear out, or actually quieting your mind is probably a better way of putting it. And then thinking about what you're going to be doing during the workout, mentally rehearsing the exercises. And as you are mentally rehearsing the exercises, it's important during that mental rehearsal to think about what you're really trying to accomplish. Again, you're not trying to make weights go up and down. You're not doing work to the machine or doing work to the barbell. In fact, the work you do is almost irrelevant and I'll get to that in a moment. You are trying to place as much of a demand as possible on the muscles that you're using during the exercise. Now, something about work, I'll try and keep this tangent short. Elle talked about negative exercise. Now, if you are performing a curl, and again we'll just use a curl as an example, you're doing work on the bar. You're doing positive work. And although technically you're doing negative work, so the net is zero because you're back here, you're performing a certain amount of mechanical work. If you were to hold the same barbell in the mid-range position of a curl and do nothing with it, nothing at all, just hold it there. You wouldn't be performing mechanical work, but you would still be doing metabolic work. There would still be tension on the muscle. There would still be fatigue and inroad. You would still get benefit from that. So when doing the exercise, and again this leads back into the real objective, you don't want to concern yourself so much with how many repetitions you perform, but rather how you perform each of your repetitions. And you are going to get more results with much, much less risk of injury doing fewer repetitions in perfect form and keeping a lot of tension on the target muscles, even using a lighter weight than if you were to use sloppy form to allow the use of a heavier weight and allow the use of more, or the performance of more repetitions. Now, another aspect of thinking about exercise that's important is differentiating between exercise as a stimulus, rather than a producer of improvements. Exercise does not directly produce any improvements in the body. All of the improvements that happen as a result of exercise happen because your body is trying to respond to what it perceives as a negative thing, an extreme stress. Again, the stress that you're trying to create, the real goal being to do that. Now, the importance of thinking about it this way is that the exercise just being a stimulus doesn't directly produce the results. All it does is send a message to your body to produce those adaptations. For your body to be able to produce those adaptations, though, requires that you not do so much exercise that you utilize resources or energy that could have gone to recovery and adaptation, and that you give your body adequate time between workouts to be able to do that. And when people think of exercises, you know, I go in the gym and I'm gonna grow, it makes more sense for them to be, to them, for them to be in the gym more often, to do more sets, to do more exercises. But when you understand that exercise doesn't produce any improvements, all it is is a stimulus, then it's easier to appreciate why exercise, if done correctly, also has to be relatively brief and relatively infrequent. And to expand a little bit on what Elle talked about, an example that I like to give to clients. And his philosophies of life, I can check him out at bay.com, that's B-A-Y-E. Let's bring on Drew Bay. All right, thanks. How'd you do it? The aspect of thinking about exercise that's important is differentiating between exercise as a stimulus rather than a producer of improvements. Exercise does not directly produce any improvements in the body. All of the improvements that happen as a result of exercise happen because your body is trying to respond to what it perceives as a negative thing, an extreme stress, that strength to be able to move that weight. Now with every repetition, you're gonna fatigue a little bit so that the amount of force you can produce, gradually attempt to move it again. If you were to take a very heavy weight and lower it slowly, and as you approach the bottom, gradually slow to a stop, and then very gradually begin to lift it, was what I had previously thought of as a 10 on a scale of one to 10 with intensity of effort became about a two or a three. And so,