 One of the biggest mistakes most people make, second biggest, in addition to not training intensely enough, is that people do way too much exercise. They do too many exercises, they do too many sets, and they work out too frequently, which is the next part, under the belief that more is better. That somehow, if one set is good, and if I do another one, I'm going to get even better results. Or a third will get even better results than that. It doesn't work that way. It's like doing a second set or even a third set of an exercise, if the first set was done correctly, is like walking up to the elevator, pressing the button, and then pressing it a bunch more times, thinking that maybe the second or third time will get it to come faster. It doesn't. You very, very quickly reach a point of diminishing returns as the volume of exercise increases. And the debate has been going back on this since actually about the 1950s. A lot of people think that it started with Arthur Jones and Nautilus, the recommendation of single set training, but it's actually been going... Delorm and Watkins was 1953. David should remember this. 51. They started this. They actually started it with their progressive resistance exercise book. And they were talking about three sets, 50 and 75, and then 100% of your 10 rep maximum. And it caught on, but a lot of people looked at the recommendation without really carefully looking at what they were recommending. The whole thing was based on a rehabilitation protocol. They'd been doing work with soldiers coming back from the war. And then Berger, who fudged his results in his studies. But it got popular. And like a lot of things, once enough people think this is the way to do it and it catches on, they'll keep doing it regardless of any evidence to the contrary. But... Yeah, we are still pretty much everybody's principles. That's a whole other thing. But here's the thing. If you have a demanding enough stress on the body, there's going to be a limit to the amount that your body can tolerate. And the limit is going to be inversely proportional to how demanding that stress is. The harder your training, the more conservative you have to be with the volume of training to avoid overstressing your body. You have a certain amount of energy. You have a certain amount of resources over any period of time that your body can devote to recovering from the stress of the workout and then producing the adaptation stimulated by it. Now, like I mentioned before, you very quickly hit a point of diminishing returns. If you're training intensely enough, you will very quickly reach the point, if you're training again, going as hard as you possibly can, where the stimulus, the message to your body to produce the adaptive response is maximal. Any additional work beyond that point is not going to make things happen any faster. It's not going to make things happen to any greater degree. What it is going to do, though, is contribute even more stress, even more damage, microtrauma, that your body has to expend energy and resources recovering from. So rather than getting better and better results as you do more exercise, you level off and then at some point you go past leveling off and you actually start to get worse results because energy that could have gone to adaptation is going to just trying to recover from that effect. Now, the third mistake is people do too many workouts over a period of time without allowing their body adequate time to fully recover and produce the adaptation stimulated by the workouts. You don't just recover from a workout like that. There are certain things damaged to the muscle tissue in particular that takes the amount of time for your body to completely repair and it's like digging a hole or actually an even better example, getting a callus. If you were to take a file and draw it across the back of your arm, that would cause damage to your skin that your body would respond to by repairing it and then compensating even a little bit more by thickening it. Now, if you apply that stress and then you give your body a little bit of time to recover and then produce a little bit of a callus and then you do it again and again over a long enough period of time, you will develop a relatively thick callus as an adaptation to that stress. But if you don't wait for that skin to recover before you apply that stress again, if you just keep doing it over and over and over, not only are you not going to get that callus, you are going to end up eventually going right through the skin into the connective tissue and bone. Now, it's not a perfect analogy, it's a little bit of a gross oversimplification, but the principle is the same. If you are training very, very intensely, imposing a significant stress on the body, your body has to be allowed time to adequately recover from and produce an adaptation before you impose the stress again or you are just going to eventually reach what is considered an overtrained state. Rather than improve, you will plateau and then if you keep doing it anyways, after plateauing, eventually you can actually start losing strength and negatively affecting your health depending on the degree to which you go.