 is holding back so that they're capable of performing more exercises. So although they might be able to work everything individually and isolate this muscle, that muscle, they're not actually getting nearly as much out of the workout. One, because they've compromised intensity for the sake of adding all these different exercises. Two, because in doing so, even if they're working the actual muscles separately, any time you perform an exercise, in addition to the local effect, the effect on the specific muscles worked, you're going to have a systemic effect. The damage to the muscles that occurs is followed by an inflammatory response, and that's cumulative. The more exercise you do, the greater this response, and it's part of what contributes to overtrading. Eventually, you get to a point where if you've done enough of this, and you've done it too much within a particular timeframe, you start to have flu-like symptoms. Basically, this inflammatory response is affecting your nervous system in a way that's trying to make you slow down and back off. So you don't want, you don't need to do a bunch of different muscles for all the different muscle groups, or exercises for all the different muscle groups, if we take chin-up, for example. Now, if you did nothing but chin-ups or pull-downs, you get your biceps, your forearms, your upper back, back of your shoulders, traps a bunch of different things there. If you were to do nothing but that exercise, and over time, build up to the point where you're doing pull-downs with double your body weight, where you're doing chin-ups with your body weight plus another 50, 60 pounds hanging off of you, even if you had never done a single isolation exercise for your biceps, they would have become much, much larger, and the same would go for doing an exercise like dips, bench presses, shoulder presses, and the triceps. You're not going to be able to progress and weight over time in these exercises without all of the muscles involved becoming larger. Now, some people talk about weak links and compound movements. For example, claiming that, you know, if you're doing a chest exercise, your triceps are always going to fail before your pecs or your shoulders or whatnot. Now, if you're performing the exercise properly, everything is going to be worked to approximately the same degree. The only time that you're going to see disproportionate involvement to those muscles is if you are specifically changing the way you're performing the exercise to change the leverages involved. I'm not going to get into that a whole lot because I know that Bill's going to talk more about the biomechanics tomorrow, but just a real quick example in the case of doing, say, a chest press. If you grip the bar with about a shoulder width or slightly wider hand spacing, the positioning is such that as you're going through the movement, the moment arms or the levers or the difficulty encountered by the different muscles involved is going to be somewhat proportional to where all of those muscles involved are going to experience a similar amount of work. If you feel like your triceps are going before your chest, chances are you're using too narrow of a grip. In fact, some people will specifically use a very narrow grip doing a bench press because it changes the leverage in such a way that your triceps have to work a lot harder. If your grip is too wide, you're going to feel more chest, more shoulder, less tricep. And if you look at what's happening, the closer in, the more tricep, the further out, the more chest. At some point in between those is a grip where everything that's involved is going to be working roughly, equally proportional to their capability. Another way to look at it is we would not have developed or evolved the muscular system that we have in a way that you have any one particular muscle group that is a limiting factor for the others. If such was the case, we'd have a little bit different leverages, different musculoskeletal geometry because it would make no sense to have a certain amount of strength in your upper back muscles if you couldn't apply it in regular activities because of a weakness of the biceps or grip. So again, it does not take a lot of exercise to effectively work all the major muscle groups in the body. Like Doug mentioned again, if you're doing a push and a pull both in a horizontal and a vertical plane and doing a multi-joint leg movement, you're pretty much hitting everything. Now the only things that would not be directly involved in something like that might be the abdominal muscles and if you're doing a leg press instead of a squat, the lower back. If you're doing barbell movements, if you're doing say like a standing press, you're doing squats, you're doing bent rows, any additional work for the lower back of the abdominal muscles would be completely unnecessary. They receive plenty of work doing those activities. In fact, if you're doing squatting, your lower back is working somewhat harder than your legs even. Now if you're doing a free weight active or machine movements in which case, you know, leg press, chest press, row. In a machine exercise, you have enough bracing that the trunk muscles are not doing as much. Now they're still involved. You're still involving the abdominal muscles and maintaining proper torso position in some exercises. You're still involving the lower back muscles. So in that case, occasionally performing an additional isolated trunk exercise, flexion and extension might be helpful. But then that's still occasionally, for the most part, a multi-joint hip and thigh movement, a push and a pull both horizontally and vertically. Now as far as how often you should be doing this, again like I mentioned earlier, if you're stimulating the body to produce an adaptive response and if you're not overstressing the body so that you're overwhelming its ability to recover from and adapt to that and if you're allowing adequate time for it to do that, to recover from and produce the response stimulated by the workout, you should be seeing improvement in strength on a regular basis. You absolutely have to keep track of what you're doing in terms of the weight. The exercises perform, how many repetitions you're doing when you're working out so that you're able to evaluate this over time. And again, starting out, most people aren't going to be training as hard like I mentioned earlier, five days. As your training becomes harder, if you're somebody that needs that additional time, you'll find that you're not making the gains on a frequent basis. When that happens, and only if there's nothing else that might be an issue, then you start adding additional rest days in between workouts. The diet's going to be an important thing. I'm not going to go into that, but if you're having difficulty as far as your progress, if you're not seeing a strength gains on a workout to workout basis, before you start stretching things out too much, look at other things. Is your diet in order? Are you getting adequate rest? Do you have additional work or other physical activities that are causing stress that's going to interfere with recovery? If none of that is the case, if everything else is the same as it has been, but you start to slow down in progress, add that additional day in between. And don't be afraid to go out as long as 10 days, two weeks, even longer in some cases. A lot of people have the idea that if they're not constantly in the gym or if they're not working out on a very regular basis, that they're going to lose strength. I've had people who have gone away for as long as six to eight weeks come back and beat all of their previous reps on their last workout. Usually if a person's gone for an extended period of time, I have them do the same weights that they would have for the workout when they come back as if they had come back to workout again just after a couple of days. In almost every single case, they're significantly stronger. So after the body produces that adaptation, it takes a while before you're actually going to start to lose it. And some people, because of the genetic differences I mentioned, might actually require several weeks in between. Arthur Jones, a novice inventor, told me of a particular instance. They had somebody that was a research subject. They were doing a research on exercise for the low back at the University of Florida. And this particular individual had way, way below average recovery ability. They found that he trained once a week or more frequently that he would actually lose strength. If they increased his rest time to two weeks, he would stay right about the same. He wasn't allowing enough time to produce any kind of an improvement just enough that he was able to recover and return to his previous baseline. He only actually started increasing his strength and was doing so regularly when they increased his rest time out to about three weeks. Now, this is an extreme example, extreme. Most people are not going to be anywhere, anywhere near that. But it illustrates how important that recovery time is. Now, I'm just going to open this up for questions. I'm not going to go into a whole lot more on that. So, anybody, oh, give them a microphone. If you don't have a spotter with you, and based on what you're saying, it seems like you won't be able to get to the max under those last reps. So, do you recommend using just machine exercises if you don't have a spotter? There's a couple of options that you can go with depending on the exercise. In most cases, the machine is going to be safest if it's a properly designed machine. But if you have a power rack, if you're doing a free weight exercise, the only exercises that you need a spotter for would be something where you're moving the barbell overhead. If you're doing a bench press, if you're doing a squat, something like that, then you need to have some sort of a mechanical safety there if you don't have a person there to stop it.