 and is typically in the range of five to ten days, averaging around seven. Now, during periods of time, can you get away with it every fourth day? Yeah. But over time, we're looking at a spectrum, and you can slide up and down that spectrum, but it's much longer than you realized. But the important thing to realize is that if you bring this signal back to the organism before it's completed its adaptive response, you will interfere with that response. You will block it. And that's where everyone makes the mistake. You start to see some results, you get six-sided, you start to do more, and you do it more frequently, and you end up doing this. And then all of a sudden, the progress that you saw comes to a stall and not understanding the underlying biology of what's going on there, you try to fix it with more effort, because that's what our Western culture has indoctrinated us with, is that don't force it, get a bigger hammer. So you get a bigger hammer, and you keep hammering at it, hammering at it, hammering at it, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, you keep on doing it until you get fed up and discussed and throw your hands up and quit. And then six, nine months later, a year later, you look at the cover of Men's Health and go, I wish I looked like that, and you start all over again. But if you learn, number one, to apply a stimulus that's meaningful, that's hard, that hard workout will make you have a short workout. If you can stand a workout that lasts longer than 12 or 15 minutes, you're not working hard enough to awaken that ancient message in your DNA that says ADAPT. It has to be hard enough where 12 to 15 minutes is all you can stand. If you've done that, you've produced a stimulus that's going to produce an adaptive response that takes time, and that's where the 12 minutes once a week comes from. Now, the particulars of the workout is in the book, but I will capsize it to say in the book what we've done, just to get people started, has picked five very big, basic, simple movements. There's a leg press, there's a pull-down movement, there's a chest press movement, there's a rowing movement, and an overhead press movement. Big, multiple joint movements that cover all the musculature of your body. And they are movements that don't require a lot of coordination. We're not going to have you do the Men's Health Bulgarian overhead split squat, because we don't want you having all your mental energy focused on balancing and doing this tight rope act. We want all your mental energy focused on producing effort and a level of fatigue that will wake up that ancient signal. That's where the money is. That's where the good stuff is, is to produce that level of fatigue. And not only that, is if you do something that is so skill-based and combine that level of fatigue with a skill-based movement, you're going to get hurt. You're going to be slinging your kettlebell around, you're going to get fatigued, and you're going to get sloppy, and then you're going to hurt yourself. If you're doing a simplified movement, slow and smoothly, you can get to the deepest level of fatigue, and if you're doing it right, guess what? By the time you get down here, you're too weak to hurt yourself, because if you're going to hurt yourself, you're going to hurt yourself with force. Force is mass times acceleration. You do it slow and smooth. You eliminate acceleration. By the time you get down here, you're too weak to hurt yourself. So you're getting it done safely too. So these five big movements done safely, back to back, it's going to take you 90 seconds to two minutes to reach complete muscular fatigue. Bam, bam, bam, five done in and out, go home. That's basically the workout, but I'm going to let people that are better discussing that, like Drew, give you more details about that, but that's the premise of how the workout works. Now, what I want to do is take what you learned from Mark Sisson yesterday, and do two things with that. One is I want to provide medical support for everything that he told you, and then I'm going to show you how doing this wraps into that. Okay? So, while I try to get this thing flipped over, does anyone have any questions thus far or anything they want to ask? Yes, sir. Based on what you just mentioned, so are you opposed to skills-based exercises or workouts? Can you clarify or expand upon that? No, I mean, to some extent, all exercises are skilled-based, but if you're going to be producing this level of fatigue going to muscular failure, I would much rather you do it, you know, squatting with a spotter or on a leg press machine that's set up in such a way that you can't drop it on yourself when you get to the level of fatigue that I'm seeking out. Now, can you do a significant level of fatigue with a skill-based movement? Yeah. And can you do it for a long time without getting hurt? Yeah. No, it's just, I think it just goes down and then flips. This way. So, no, I'm not completely opposed to it, but what we did in the book was we wanted to get people going with this with extremely simple movements because our focus is effort and not technique. What we're looking for is that depth of fatigue and we want someone to come right out of the blocks and be able to aspire to that on day one as opposed to spend all their mental energy on trying to coordinate things. That answer? Okay. Yes, sir? Not working. Could you maybe shed a little more light on the anabolic versus catabolic state? Mark mentioned it yesterday and he said, basically dispelling the common wisdom that, you know, people were thinking that you need to eat every three hours or you're going to enter catabolic state. Right. Yeah. And that's true from the exercise standpoint. It's also true from the dietary standpoint. And the thing is, is no omnivore in nature eats three meals and two snacks a day. I mean, it's ridiculous. If you had to eat that much, you're going to get eaten. You don't have time to hunt, gather, reproduce or do anything else. Okay. But what happens and the reason that becomes part of our culture as we'll discuss here is people become metabolically deranged to the extent that they can't tap their energy stores. And as a consequence, when they feel their energy start to wane, they can't tap into their body fat or their glycogen stores because of their hormonal environment. So they need to eat right away. And the way most people that have been eating a grain based and a high in carbohydrate diet exist is as soon as their blood sugar drops, they got to eat something to kind of level it out. And that is the conventional wisdom's approach to managing hunger. But it's a losing battle because hunger always wins. But when you eat an appropriate evolutionary based diet, you'll find yourself, you know, if you eat what March recommended for breakfast, for instance, you just have that. After you've done that for a while, you'll be going along and it'll be 2.30 in the afternoon and you go, I forgot to eat lunch. And you'll find yourself wanting only two meals a day because you're eating in such a way that doesn't drive hunger and you're eating in a way that sets your hormonal environment where you can actually experience satiety. So, but that'll come out more as we go through this. You'll see what I'm talking about. Yes, sir. My question is you're doing a workout once a week and you're getting an adaptive response to that workout. How often do you have to tweak that workout because eventually you're going to get used to that workout? Do you just increase the intensity until you're the fatigue or is there, you know, a method to change your workout? Yeah, you really, I mean, there are ways that you can tweak things but you'd be surprised at how far you can go without having to change much at all, okay? You'll learn a lot from Bill de Simone. Muscle and joint function really does not change much over time. And the whole concept of variety and, you know, the P90X muscle confusion and stuff like that is really not as true as they make it out to be. The real key is to allow the adaptation to occur and then to step up the challenge in terms of the resistance accordingly. Now, over time, what you really have to make tweaks for is not something necessarily going on in your body but tweaks in the mechanics of the equipment itself. Because no equipment's perfect, the strength curve of the equipment doesn't match that of your body perfectly. So there's going to be a sticking point at different places. I don't know if you've ever done a barbell squat but you know it's much harder when you're coming out of the hole than it is when you're up almost completely standing. So what happens is the weight progresses over time that sticking point's like a speed bump. Well, when you first start, you're pushing a little Ugo over a speed bump. But as you get advanced, you're pushing a Mack truck over a speed bump. So you end up having to alternate movements that have a different location of sticking point and things like that. But really truth be told in terms of approaching your body's own phenotypic maximum, it almost doesn't matter. You're slicing things pretty thin at that point. Anyone else? After your workout, when would you recommend for sport training? Like how much rest? Say if you have to train five days a week, six days a week for your certain sport. Can you give me more particulars about your question or a sport per se? I play volleyball and our weightlifting program revolves a lot around squats, deadlifts, and RDLs. And usually we'll weightlip around two o'clock for an hour and then have rest and we'll practice for three hours and that's five days a week and we'll lift for three days a week. Because I want to talk to my coaches and my strength training coach about this and I want to ask them... Yeah, you're not going to get very far with that. Yeah, because after we do those squats, I can't jump at all and it's very hard to practice for three hours. Yeah, I mean, they are indoctrinated to such an extent, you're going to get nowhere with it. And as long as part of your organized sport, you're kind of locked into that training paradigm. To try to add this on top of it would just be suicide. What I would suggest to you is for yourself is to try to use something that follows this paradigm more during your off season, leading up to the beginning of your season when all this starts. And then try to sell it by demonstrating your performance right at the beginning of the season on the conditioning that you did for yourself. Because, yeah, the folklore and coaching is just abhorrent. I mean, you couldn't do it any more wrong. I mean, to be doing, you know, squats in Romanian deadlifts and a jumping athlete five and six days a week, you might as well put a 40-pound weighted vest on them and have them go out and compete. I mean, they're going to be so fatigued, so ragged out. And the thing is, is doing that kind of training fatigues your fastest twitch motor units, which are the ones you need most for that particular sport, but they're also the ones that are most fatigue sensitive, meaning they fatigue quickly and they recover slowly. So your most productive motor units, the 15% of your muscle that is the most productive for explosive movement and jumping is just out of the equation for the entire season. It's hosed, so. But how to approach it with your coaches, I've got no good answer for you. If I can't do it, I don't think you can. Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and here's the real key with this. Yep. Oh, I'm sorry, he went on the mic. He was asking, is, kid, when you incorporate this kind of workout at the time that you're initiating a new sport for yourself like martial arts, correct? Yes, and the neat thing is that when you're taking on a new sport from martial arts, what you're really focusing on, even though there's a large exercise component to it and a lot of activity, what you're trying to do there is to hone a skill, to develop a skill set. So you are skill training. This has nothing to do with skill training. This is physical conditioning, which the more you separate your physical conditioning from your skill training, the better it will be. And when you do your skill training, you want to make certain that you're doing it in the freshest, most recovered state possible, because you want to entrain the neuro motor pathway, sort of a dog trail in the back yard, so to speak, that is most efficient for all the skills that you're learning. Because if you're going to compete with this, you want to compete when you're fully recovered. So what you need to do is, when you're taking on your new sport, is to look at it and then back engineer your workout around your sporting activity so you make certain that when you're practicing your skill, you've had enough recovery time. And if that means pushing the workout out to every 10th day, because you're having so much activity learning your skill, that's fine. You're not going to decompensate. Your body's not going to build a sound of ground round and allow to decompensate in 14 days. It will not happen. Okay? Now your metabolic conditioning will decompensate over 14 days, but if you're doing this other activity, that's going to be taken care of by itself. So the key becomes, this is short enough and brief enough where you can build your workout around your life and not your life around your workout. Okay? It's really interesting to me and I actually have three small questions. Okay. Could you first please repeat the five basic movements? Then I wanted to know how yesterday Mark System was talking about incorporating more play activities and I wanted to know how you thought that might affect that R part of your model if you're playing after you've done this kind of training. And then the last one, does your approach also apply to cardio exercise? Yes. And we'll hit the cardio thing more when we do this, but first the five movements are a leg press, a pull down movement and Bill Desimone will go through the mechanics of those in great detail for you so you don't have to worry about that. So leg press, a pull down, a chest press movement, a rowing movement which is in the horizontal plane and an overhead press. So that will kind of cover all the major elements of your body there. Second part of the question was the play. Yeah, that's very easy to incorporate because remember we're trying to separate our physical conditioning which is a very deliberate engineered triggering of a biologic process from other activities, but the thing you've got to remember is that play is not going to interfere with the recovery side of the equation too much.