 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 you all have been sitting here for an incredibly long time I would have pulled the priest and asked you all to sit up, shake hands with your neighbor, talk to someone, stretch your legs out, but you 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 couchsurfing 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 having met Anthony he always kind of has a look of kind of staring off slightly squinty eyes a little bit on his face. 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 and then that's like seven miles in the heat there's no shade there's no sidewalks in my in the town in which I train that rooms for big trucks were 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 Publix to take people there for events for wine tastings for cheese tastings 88,000 feet of all sorts of wonderful things hippie 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 you park in a parking garage you go up three flights of escalator so we're going towards the grilled meats area and Anthony's kind of walk in 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's gonna eat with his bare hands so that 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 as the first time I took money for training I was certified a year later as the super 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 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 gonna be a buzzkill I'm gonna tell you that there are limits and I'm gonna 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 have done high hypertrophy specific to training I've done conjugate periodization I've done waveloading techniques I've done pendulase 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 in German volume training I've done super brief heavy-duty training everything in between and at my heaviest I was much fatter and 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 the my goal was to get supremely muscular superhero muscular I grew up drawing superheroes 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 if if you can't quite get to your goal if all the puritanical work ethic in the world isn't gonna 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