 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 Publix 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. It's sleeve tattoos of all sorts, crazy hair that makes Fuji's look tame. And you have to, you 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 though. He's gonna 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's 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 master's degree in exercise science. Maybe I'll go get a PhD. I don't know if that's just from 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 wave loading techniques. I've done pen delays 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 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 the my goal was to get supremely muscular super hero muscular I grew up drawing superheroes. That was my shtick comics and superheroes and I could never achieve that 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 And 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 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 their coach 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 its lean mass and 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 we 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 on train 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 we're men biceps chest abs I'm being I'm joking here, of course, but if you go to a college gym boy Biceps bench press Monday Wednesday Friday, and maybe it may be an extra session on Saturday if you've got a date So that's but that's 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, but and he is a PhD in artificial intelligence, right? Which is pretty cool, and So he has no 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 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 a hundred and fifty thousand dollars 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