 For example, if you're doing a barbell curl, the entire time you're doing the curl, you're focusing on your biceps. Everybody would say that a curl is a bicep movement, but if your glutes, your hamstrings were not contracting, your calves in your low back, your entire body would just flop forward. To be able to perform a barbell curl, you have to work every muscle from the back of your heel up to the back of your neck to maintain proper position. And you're also working muscles in the shoulders, chest and everything to maintain proper bar position. Your chest and your shoulders are working when you're doing a barbell curl. As you approach the mid-range of the exercise, your biceps are holding the weight with your elbows at a 90 degree angle. Your chest and shoulder muscles are preventing that weight from wanting to push them back. So something like a bicep curl, an exercise that most people think only works just that little amount of muscle in the upper arms, is involving a large amount of the body. It's just that you don't think about it because that's not the part that's moving. And you kind of automatically do everything else while you're focusing on that. So a lot of the, you know, wondering, should I do this exercise for this muscle and this exercise for this muscle? If you first look at how much they're involved in just those couple of movements that Doug mentioned earlier, I mean it really, really hits all the major stuff there. Certainly the only stuff that might really benefit from supplemental work is the neck. If you've got access to a good machine or somebody who really knows what they're doing. Grip and, you know, if you're doing any kind of grappling, if you're doing football, some things like that, racket sports, grip, some grip work tends to help. But other than that, everything else pretty much is being hit by just those couple movements. Is this loud? I can hear you a little bit. Okay. Any other questions? I'm actually training for like competition, powerlifting. And a lot of people I know who have actually gotten really good like state records, not like state champions, they train like at a minimum of five days a week, but they separate their workouts to like upper body or lower body and things like that. I'm wondering like do you have any differences or advice on powerlifting because it's not a lot of reps. You're just trying to get your one rep maximum a lot higher. With a powerlifting, there's additionally the specific skill of performing the exercises that you're being tested on. There's actually a guy, his name is Doug Holland, who does same type of training that Doug does in his studio, same type of training I use with my clients. He's out of Shreveport, Louisiana. He's I think in his, either earlier or mid fifties now. He is a regional powerlifting champion and does this exact same type of training. He pretty much as far as the big lifts, he'll do a workout like this once a week. And then once a week, he'll do one workout where he focuses on one of those big lifts, but not very much. The main thing if you're doing a sport like again powerlifting or if you're doing Olympic lifting, is that you have to look at the specific practice of the movements as a workout in itself as well as a practice session. You wouldn't need to do a lot of volume from an exercise standpoint, but you would have to make sure that you practice those specific movements on a regular basis. If you were to do all bench and one workout, you might take a workout again for powerlifting competition specifically, where you're just focused on doing heavy triples or doubles, very occasionally singles, but that would be a workout in itself, bench. You do a regular workout. Later on you do a workout just focused on the deadlift. Again with a relationship between intensity and volume, when you're doing very, very heavy work and very, very low reps like that, just doing that one exercise for a couple very low rep sets, that could be a workout in itself if you're really, really pushing. And also I should mention a lot of people when they think of volume, they think of in terms of sets and reps and everything, but it actually comes down to the total volume of physical work performed. For example, if you did a set of 12 repetitions, or if you did two sets of six repetitions, four sets of three repetitions, three sets of four repetitions or whatever, you're doing roughly the same amount of physical work. So doing a powerlifting workout, you could take the bench and you could do a bunch of sets of doubles or triples and that would still be okay, even though you're doing a bunch of sets, the total volume of work is low. And even if you were to combine the benching with a squat, although I wouldn't do bench and squat and deadlift in the same workout, possibly, and again this is from somebody who doesn't powerlift. A full body workout alternated with either a squatting and benching workout or with a deadlift workout. Again, the principle is the intensity needs to be high, but you have to balance that against the volume. And you have to balance the total work between a full body workout and the specific powerlifting workouts so that you're not doing them too frequently to where you're over-training. One last question. Do you have any advice on supplements? I've heard a lot of conflicting things on what supplements to take. Most of them are a complete waste of money. If a person is eating properly to begin with, a lot of the supplements aren't going to make much of a difference. For example, there's something really basic like a multivitamin. If you're getting adequate amounts of vegetables and fruits, eating a lot of meat, you're probably getting everything that you need right there. Creatine monohydrate is one that is kind of iffy with people. I think if a person is eating enough meat to begin with, they probably won't benefit much from the creatine. That's also one that depending on the person, some people get some gastrointestinal distress from it. So that's one that you have to be careful with. Fish oil is probably one of the only things that I really would recommend that people take other than that. I'm not a big fan of supplements. I think most of them are over-hyped, over-priced, and really don't make nearly as much of a difference as just eating and training properly well. Quick question. What do you recommend for your range, for your time under tension, before you move up on weight? Varies completely between individuals, and rather than focus specifically on the time or the repetitions, what I would do is have a person try to shoot for as much as they can with a weight that is maybe 75 to 80% of what they can lift once. It varies from person to person. For the average person, this is going to be about 10 repetitions, or about a mid-range is maybe about 60 seconds or so. Some people are going to do better with less. Some people are going to do better with more. If a person has more fast twitch fiber, if a person is physically capable of pushing a little harder, they might need to cut the times shorter. If they have more slow twitch fibers, if they fatigue more slowly, they might do a little better with longer time. There's one way of actually testing this over time though. If a person needs a shorter time or less repetitions, you'll see that they consistently get to a particular level and get stuck there, but if you increase the weight, even if they haven't hit their target, they're able to do more. For example, if you start with somebody with 10 repetitions, but they really are put together in such a way that they would do better with something like a 7 or 8 range, you'll find they typically get stuck at 7 or 8, but anytime you add weight, they can keep hitting that number. On the other hand, you have some people who do better with higher repetitions. In that case, what you'll find is, if they get to 10 and you increase the weight, they drop way down, whereas if you get up to 12, 13, 14 or whatever is appropriate for them, when you add weight, they'll still stay in the same range. Somebody who would benefit from a shorter time under load or a shorter repetition range will typically get stuck at a particular number, but still be able to hit that consistently with small weight increases. Somebody who would do better with longer time or with a higher repetition count will typically have a significant drop in reps if you go up at a lower repetition, but if you wait till they get to higher repetitions, they're able to stay in that range with moderate increases. For most people, when you're ready to go up and wait, it's best to go up in a little bit smaller increments. Rough guideline would be about 5% or 5 pounds, whichever is less. Even when a person is starting out, they might be capable of going up faster than that, but beginning it's better to be a little bit more conservative because it's going to help you establish correct form as you gradually build up the intensity. For somebody who's been training for a while, it's unrealistic to go up more than 5% at a time, and even that for some people might be a little bit of a stretch. That's the time? Announcements? Actually, yeah, I'm finally almost finished with the book On High Intensity Strength Training. It's geared specifically towards bodybuilding, and the main focus of the book is how to find the proper balance of all these things for a particular individual, how to figure out how many exercises should I be doing, which ones are the best for me in particular and how often should I be training, and basically taking all these principles and fine-tuning them to find out what's the best application for your particular response to exercise. Actually, I've got a sign-up sheet up front here. My business partner has set it up so that we've got a page for pre-ordering, which has a discount for anybody at the convention. If anybody's interested, you're not obligated to anything signing up, but if you just leave your name and email address, we'll send you out an email that contains the discount code for convention attendees and a page that you can go to for the book or consultations or anything else. I'll hang out if anybody, I don't know how much of a break there is, but I'll hang out. I'll be here for a little bit if anybody else wants to ask any other questions.