 But generally, yes. If the more intense, the sort of the workout has to be. What's your name, man? Max. And I have a. Nice to meet you. Likewise. So I have three questions. OK. One, what are your long-term goals? Two, how did you determine them? And three, how do you suggest that we come up with them? Good. Great questions. Long-term goals. OK. So I mentioned Casey Butts' calculator for maximum muscular potential. Mine is to get back to that, because when I was at my biggest and my strongest and my heaviest, I was hitting the nail on the head. I'd like to do that at a lighter weight, at a lower body fat percentage. And I understand that this is going to take a while. Part of being, the problem with reading all this stuff is that you get program OCD. Like you understand that there are all these variables that are very easy to implement, and they all have something to do with your end result. But the tricky part is focusing on just getting stronger, because that's a slow process. Anytime you go to a new routine because of the initial skill acquisition period, which comes real quick, you feel like, man, this is great. I'm going to gain like this forever. And then reality sets in. And you start gaining at a realistic rate. And that can, again, be a little disheartening. So it's that moving towards that number, taking what I'm learning in exercise science and keeping it intellectual rather than letting it totally inform my routines, inform it in the sense of, am I doing it biomechanically correct? Am I exhausting the fast-twitch motor units? Making sure that I'm not changing routines every month, which in the past is one of the things I did. As part of that, there's got to be a magic routine. So the first question is, what are my long-term goals? The second one was, how did I come to them was that? OK. Part of the coming to it was seeing individuals who had been training for a really long time and done really well by being patient. It reminds me of what I've tried to get at here is, a guy walks in off the street to a martial arts studio, and he goes, master, man, I love what you're doing. I want to be a master just like you. Master goes, the first thing you must learn is patience. The guy scoffs, how long is that going to take? And the problem is that that's the point I was making. These gains are very small, once you're no longer new. So you have to find something about the training you're doing that you inherently find enjoyable, regardless of the external result. You want it going in a positive direction. It's just happening so slow that after you're not going to have these, like, ah, my pec's an inch bigger, or some sort of external feedback queue, it starts to come slower and slower and slower. You have to start to like the process. And reminding myself that I have all these other things going on in my life, right? Even though I'm a grad student, I'm juggling a full workload. I've got a house and three dogs that we're doing a lot of training with right now. And having those issues in your life makes it easier. Having other interests other than working out makes it easier to stick to what matters, which is gradual weight increases over a long term with big, basic exercises. Because if you have time to sit and think about it, you get all this grist for the mill, and you'll think yourself in all sorts of weird routines. So how would I suggest you come to it? I would suggest you pick up a book called Braun from Stuart McRoberts. It's about this thick. And Stuart tells you how to train. He tells you the whys of training. He reminds you to err on the side of caution, having a little temperance and patience. If you could think of about a 450 page version of what I've tried to explain with a little bit less science because it's about 10 years old and some of the more recent sort of limit sciences has come out, then that would be kind of what it is. Ignore the fact that the cover is awful. It's bright orange and it has this like skeletal guy hitting a bicep pose. And it's a bicep that as far as I can tell the radial tuberosity, which is where your bicep connects into your form is down here somewhere. So he's like flexing and it looks ridiculous. It's a horrible cover. It's a fantastic book, however. That would be my suggestion to start there. And also, I keep referencing it just because it's a good talk. Go back and watch what Doug McGuff said last year on the YouTube. Because when you have an understanding of how long this stuff takes, then you can kind of temper your training routines, right? Because gosh, five pounds a year, or say you get 10 pounds per second a year. It's less than a pound a month. But that's enough to put an inch on your arm and that's very visible. It just took a year to get there. So those would be my suggestions. And maybe find someone who's kind of detached from you to keep you accountable. In other words, some sort of wise old mentor or someone you can go to and say, I'm thinking about changing my routine. They go, small poundage increases over the long period of time. Cut that crap out. Keep you on track because coaches are terrible at training themselves. I say this as a coach, right? When you spend your entire day telling people, basically looking, I say, okay, you're doing this well, your form's good on this. Yeah, you shouldn't be doing that with your diet. You have a hard time maintaining objectivity to the situation at hand, partly because you've got so much information you're working with and partly because if you've been dishing out information all day and correcting people, you start to kind of think you're special. So you need someone else to kind of slap you upside the head and go, you're getting off on the wrong foot. Keep doing what you're doing. Hey, what's your name? Ben. Ben, nice to meet you. So you mentioned the false belief that the body just naturally breaks down in a certain time and you get examples of 50-year-olds that are extremely fit. But I've encountered this belief repeatedly in my friends and family and no matter how much I try to explain the benefits of paleo nutrition and body by science exercise, things like that, they always just rationalize away with, well, I'm just going to get fat anyways. You're gonna get fat anyway. Yeah, so how do you go about explaining people, explaining to people the benefits of eating right and putting in there 15 minutes of exercise a week? Okay. I'm fortunate that I have a captive audience at their appointments when they come in because I have people who are there because they understand rationally that they need to be working out, but emotionally they sort of waiver. They wouldn't be working out if they didn't have an appointment. And so they're a captive audience. I try to explain and show examples because the great thing about YouTube is that you can go on there and go like 74-year-old bodybuilder, boom, and you've got examples or you can go, you know, there's a great one in the New York Times, I think back in March of a woman named Olga who's 91 years old, 91. She picked up track and field at the age of 77 and her records, which, you know, you're gonna say, ah, it doesn't sound that impressive, her records are better than the 80-year-olds and she's at the age of 91. So two age classes down, her records are better than theirs. Now, having trained all the way up to 90-year-olds, I can tell you that even that under most circumstances, you think, ah, just 10 years. No, no, no. Oct PTSD in the nanogenarian? It's a chasm. It's an enormous difference even if they've been just moderately active. And so you can show them who aren't bodybuilders, because most people don't want to look like a bodybuilder. But you have to train in a similar fashion, and not necessarily two hours a day, six days a week, you have to train with the intent of getting stronger, getting more muscular. You just pull the reins on that horse a little sooner, but also understand that your ceiling's probably set. So you can show them, and then you can explain, you can then reference, get out your National Geographic on the old Netflix and look at these individuals who are 70, 80 in these indigenous tribes, and they're still climbing the trees and they're still hunting, because their world yesterday is about the same as their world today and is about the same as it's gonna be tomorrow. And the more you can live today like yesterday, the more you're gonna live tomorrow in a similar fashion. And if you've been doing that for 50 years, some things are breaking down. We are decaying. Your tissue producing machine at 10, you're not turning over tissue nearly as quickly at 50 or at 70 or at 80, but you still respond in a predictable way. Exercise is still a stimulus, even if your response isn't as great because of a different hormone environment. Also remind them that they, when we say, ah, your genetic hand is set, which genes do you get from your parents? You don't know. Do you get all of the genes from your parents? No, you only get 50% of each parent's genes to come together. So that's why it's a risk of heart disease if your dad died of a heart attack. It's not a fact of heart disease. And I've noticed people tend to focus on the good. I have a client who her dad died at 52 of a heart attack. She's 71, but she only talks about the fact that her mother did nothing and lived to 91. I go, yeah, but your dad did nothing and died at 52 and you don't know which genes you got. There's a whole lot in the ether that you can't control. What you can control is putting in a little work and reminding them it's like medicine, right? We, strength training is like a flu shot. It was just to say one flu shot protects you from the flu. Five flu shots gives you the flu, right? But people should do strength training. You're like, I trained today, I've built up and I gotta train tomorrow to keep building up. Like it's this constant building on top of when it's a constant response to, response to, response to. And if they don't wanna hear it, and spite of your best intentions, save your breath. And if they do wanna hear it, they'll come back to you. They will. I'm Roman. Hey, Roman. Hi, obviously you're very knowledgeable so I appreciate the information. I just started a new workout and diet from Tim Ferriss, his four hour body book, where he claims that he, with testing, had gained 34 pounds of muscle mass within 28 days. Occam's razor protocol. Occam's razor protocol, indeed. So based on what you said, one and a half pounds a month for the first year. So what is your take on that on Tim Ferriss? He regained, he regained, if you go back through his old blog, he talks about this, if you search geek to freak, Tim Ferriss, he has a blog post on this some five years ago. He talks about, he goes to Buenos Aires to learn the tango. And in doing so, he gets light. He loses a bunch of weight. And then Tim Ferriss is notoriously good at manipulating his weight. This is why he's a martial arts champion. He found out that the Wayans were 24 hours in advance and he dehydrates down, loses 30 pounds, puts on all that weight and more and he comes in 10 to 15 pounds larger than the nearest competitor, pushes them out of the ring. That's a DQ. Yeah, you're a national champ that way. And it's not cheating, even if you don't agree with it. So he was regaining and he references the Colorado experiment in that book in which Casey Viatter, who was one of Arthur Jones, the kid wins Mr. America at 19, 200 IQ, seven feet tall. He's one of those freaks. In which Casey working, don't remember if he's in Louisiana or actually here in Florida, he's working at a machine shop, gets his pinky cut off in an accident, okay? And then he has an adverse reaction to the penicillin injection. He loses a bunch of weight. And Arthur says we're gonna get you back in the gym and we're gonna put this weight on you as quickly as we can. So Casey comes in and his before photo and he looks like, I would like to look like him in his before photo. He looks like he's ripped, he's in shape, he's got big arms, he's got cap deltoids, he's got a full chest, very little body fat. And then he proceeds to gain 64 pounds in a month. Holy crap, and it's mostly muscle. Well, he had been that big before. In fact, he had been bigger. At the end of that month, I think it was 207 or 208 pounds, Casey was. He had been as heavy as I think 219. So this is the muscle memory component. If you've been there before, it's easy to get back to. Tim Ferriss is an example of that. Casey Weider is an example of that. Now in my case, when I started training, like I said, I gained 16 pounds in four months. I did it on a minimalist routine. I would be dry heaving at the end of it. I was working so hard. But after that is where it slows down. So if you had been that big previously, if you had been 30 pounds of muscle heavier than you are now, yeah, you could put it back on in a month if that was the only thing you focused on. And he doesn't put that disclaimer up every time, but he's always said that too. I was regaining weight, I was regaining weight. And that matters, that really matters. So it's not something you're gonna see. Even in guys who take steroids, like people think steroids, steroids are like, if you feel you have to take steroids, whatever the next level is you're gonna be at, you're gonna be mediocre in. In other words, if you're a high school football player and you're like, I gotta take steroids to play in college, you're gonna be like a backup in college, right? If you need it to get to the pros, you're gonna be maybe an average pro. And I think this is from either Dave Tate or Jim Wendler. These are enormous power lifters who don't hide the fact that at some point they're another in their careers they view steroids. But if you look at someone who surely was on steroids, Dorian Yates, he was I think seven times in a row Mr. Olympia from England. Over the course of his training career with steroids, he puts on 75 pounds in 15 years. Five pound a month on average. At no point is he gaining 30 pounds of muscle in three months, or what have you. Even with anabolic assistance. So you can regain it, but if it's new muscle, it's extremely unlikely that it's gonna happen. Unless you were just so run down from an endurance of sport. And even in that, you would have been somewhere near that anyway, had you not been doing the sport. Hi, I'm Bill. Hey, Bill. Nice to meet you. Hi, man. So I used to be quite fat. Like I weigh 42 pounds less now than I did then. Cool, great job. You were talking about like muscle memory. Sure. So if you used to be bigger, you can get bigger. Does it work the same way with fat and? There is some research done, and this seems to be kind of a point of contention among scientists about the body fat set point. That people will diet, and then they'll gravitate back towards kind of an equilibrium. I think that if you, I don't think the paleo diet is magic. What I think it does is that it ends up, you end up eating a whole lot of nutrient-dense foods and lots of very filling foods, so you're satisfied on less. There's nothing magical about that. There just isn't. But what it can do is keep you from re-achieving that set point because it just becomes so impossible to keep the food down, and you're doing that by picking more dense foods. The BBC did kind of an opposite of that. Talking about set point, and I'll get back to exactly what you're saying. You'll see why I'm talking about this. Why are thin people not fat? Why are thin people not fat? They took these kids in England who had always been fairly lean in their mid-20s. They were never shredded, but they were certainly not fat. And they said, like, I'm on the seafood diet. I see food, I eat it, so on. And they had them double their caloric intake. And this is a much more modern version with much better instruments of what was called the Vermont experiment, which was done back in the 50s, early 60s, I don't recall, in which they fed inmates, overfed them, saw how fat they could make them in a certain period of time, in exchange for lesser prison sentences. That homicide, we'll let that slide if you just fatten up a little bit, Tony. By the end of the experiment, they had guys who could not push their weight more than 20% above where they were at to start in spite eating 10,000 plus calories a day. They start fidgeting it off. And this is what kind of came out of this newer study because they had fine instruments. The body fights back in a number of ways. Some of the people couldn't keep the food down. They would literally vomit. They could not eat enough to double their caloric intake in this more recent version. Some, they became very fidgety. Like I said, they sort of shook the weight off. And there was one guy who, he put on something like 22 pounds. He really didn't look all that different. They get him in the bod pod. His metabolic rate has gone up 30%. And he's put on three quarters of that weight as muscle tissue, right? And he's a computer science guy, right? He's just sitting there, he's kind of pushed up his glasses. He's like, yeah, that's really interesting. You know, just, this is not a care in the world. I would kill and rob a bank and carry some women across the border into have that sort of reaction. Like that's the zenith. And those are people who are genetically elite. And some people are genetically elite. The onion made a joke the other day. World-class violinist dies without ever having played, right? The thing that we're talented at is typically not the thing that we're obsessed with. As I was saying before, in high school I had a 39 inch vertical leap. I could smack my elbow on a regulation backboard. I could touch three quarters of the way up the bank shot square. It came relatively, if I was playing basketball and I was jumping, I could push it up. And I've got a video on my blog of me jumping onto a 55 inch box. Basically rocking back, planting and going. It's no big deal. I can do it, so I'm not obsessed with it, right? It's something I'm talented at. I rock climb really, really easily. Bouldering, no big deal. I'm obsessed with this. And so coming all the way back around to what you're saying, the body fights back when you've lost a lot of weight too. And so this is why I tell people to ride the plateaus. If you just go on a hard diet and you just tank. You go on a hard diet and you tank. What happens is, you haven't changed really any habits. And you haven't let the body acclimate to a newer weight. So what I try and get people to do, you seem like you're maintaining 42 pounds lost. And how old are you? I'm 19. You're 19? Yeah, I mean, I hesitate to say baby fat, but you're in a position right now where you've got this hormonal environment in your body to where you can maintain that leanness for the rest of your life if you set the groundwork now. But yes, there is. You see people do it all the time. They'll just die and they won't change any other habits. They'll do it as a goal. I'm gonna lose X amount of weight. They get there and they go right back the shitty way they were eating before or they just totally drop exercising. And that's no different than some guy who says I'm gonna work out, I'm gonna get more muscular and I'm gonna get this woman or I'm gonna do this event. And they stop working out and doing that event because they got what they want and they're out of shape. Both have to be sustainable. And they have to be something that you wanna do. So you wanna ride those plateaus because if you can stick it that way, it's easier when you can refocus yourself again to drop even more. But in your case, if you put in a little bit of work, I don't think you'd ever get back to that fat. Just paying a modicum of attention. There's a set point, but I don't think you'll go back to it. One minute. Yeah, man, last one. My question is pretty basic. For someone who's just looking to straight, just burn fat, what would you say is the most effective workout? I got two exercises for you. I'll demonstrate them. Someone offers you something that you know is high in calories. I want you to practice the head shake. And when you're eating, I want you to practice table pushaways when you're satisfied and walk away. It's calories. I mean, these are dependent variables. Exercise doesn't burn many calories. Boy, it burns crappy amount of calories. It really, 30 minutes might get you 200 calories burned at a moderate intensity on a treadmill. 45 minutes might get you 300. I can put down 300 calories in 30 seconds. I could put down way more than that in a minute. It's a disproportion amount of effort to reward. It's much easier to train regularly and eat a little bit less or pick foods that fill you up a little bit more and be flexible with that, right? Don't have the I have a cookie syndrome, which is you're going well on a diet, you've lost some weight. In a moment of weakness, you have a cookie. And you think, I've ruined everything. Give me the bag. Because now you've ruined everything. But that's how people fall off the wagon. Like 100 calories of cookie. Just ruin the fact that, let's say I lost 10 pounds of fat. That's 35,000 calories worth of energy you've lost. 100 calories of cookie is gonna ruin it? No. That's the flexibility you need to have to keep it up over the long term. Find something you like doing. Get the calories down a little bit. Eat real food as close to as natural packaging as possible and be patient. That's it guys. Thanks a lot.