 Next question is from Lisa J. Kennedy, 75. Do deadlifts give you a thicker midsection? I love doing them and have gained a great deal of strength in my back from them. However, as a female, I worry that my midsection is thicker as a result. This is another one of these myths that are out there. I hate this one. This one really makes me upset. So first of all, you don't want to look at the extreme top lifters of any sport and look at their physique and judge their physique and say, oh, that's why their physique necessarily looks that way. First off, people who can deadlift ungodly amounts of weight naturally probably already have thicker waist, okay? And eat tons of... Many of them may be on anabolic steroids. There's lots of muscle being built. Here's the deal. If you want a smaller waist, get leaner. Even if you develop the muscles around your waist, you're not going to develop a much thicker waist. You might get, I don't know, a couple centimeters of thickness around in terms of lean muscle around the waist, but you're going to appear leaner and more sculpted. This myth makes me upset because people tend to neglect training the muscles around the core like the obliques because they're afraid they're going to get a thicker waist. And what ends up happening is they lose function. They lose strength. And the truth is if you're lean, your waist is going to be small. And if you have muscle around your waist and your lean, not only are you going to have a small waist, it's going to look more impressive. I think this is like... I think of when I was competing, we were constantly focusing on building my shoulders and the width of my back to give this illusion that my waist is smaller, even though my waist wasn't technically really shrinking. If you are training the obliques, your training exercises that may even thicken... Who cares if it puts on a quarter inch on your waist, but puts three inches on the width of your back. The ratio, when you look in the mirror or somebody else looks at you, will look as if your waist is smaller. And it'll look more shapely, too. Man, adding a half inch to your waist of muscle is a lot, by the way. People don't realize that doesn't happen. Those are exaggerated numbers. It's very, very unlikely you would even do that. But I'm saying even if you did do that, it's a lot easier to add that width to the top of your body to the tops of your shoulder caps and the width of your back. So as long as that ratio either stays the same or it increases because you've built your back up and your shoulders, it's going to give the illusion of your waist being even tiny or small. I also think there's a point to address here about training width and without the belt. Sal, you talk a lot about training with a belt. You train your core and midsection to do something different than what you do if you train without a belt. If you go to a deadlift and you don't wear a belt, you have to think about the vacuum pose. You end up, you know, your transversus dominance, you contract inward, inward, and you tighten up and you shrink the waist to be tighter and stiff around your spine for when you lift. If you always wear a belt when you deadlift, you actually train the core to push out. So if you are concerned about your waist looking smaller, staying tighter, staying in, that's a suggestion I would have also is don't deadlift with a belt all the time. Deadlift without a belt. Train your TVA to draw in and actually shrink your waist versus using a belt where you're pushing your waist out against the belt. Yeah, this is an interesting one because it keeps getting perpetuated. I'll hear this even from Courtney sometimes about doing something too often that will promote like a boxier kind of look that I've heard this is a common concern with a lot of females that I've trained even. Again, to the point that you're not going to be building, it's really difficult to build like a substantial amount of size in your core to begin with. Most of the ways that you're going to train your core are going to be to brace and so everything is working its way to protect and it's essential for you to work in that area to have that function because if you're still working out, that's really what's protecting you and that's what's keeping everything moving forward in the right direction long-term. So to neglect that area, you're going to run into all kinds of problems down the road and honestly, there are different styles of training that will produce different looks. I know you guys speak to this a lot more from the aesthetic side in terms of being able to focus on bringing up and developing other muscles to then balance the overall aesthetic to provide whatever that sort of v-taper or whatever you guys call it, kind of look, they're going for. It's just a problem because this has created a market for corsets and for all these really horrible ideas that people are still gravitating towards that because they're not considering the body as a whole. It's silly, it's silly. You know what's funny too? Considering the muscles that you develop and the muscles that women and men want to develop, the deadlift is an excellent phenomenal exercise for women. Oftentimes, female clients would say they want to develop their hamstrings and their glutes. They'd like well-developed lower backs so if you want to stand up tall in a bikini, not just have good glutes but have that nice lower back where you see the indentation come in a little bit, that's deadlifts. I've never trained any female ever who got really good at deadlifts and I don't like the way my body looks. They've all fallen in love with the deadlift so this is so silly to me. This is a myth perpetuated by extreme bodybuilding in which case I would not take much of their advice because it doesn't apply to most people. In fact, it's unhealthy advice. For most people, men and women... It's even bad for bodybuilding. I used to scoff at all my peers that thought this way. I deadlifted all the way up into competition day. Yeah. And to your point about the back, the DNA looks kind of like abs on your back. So doing things like deadlifting gives you this great definition. It creates those canals and that little dip. So even if it added again a quarter inch to your waist, you'll have this illusion of it dipping in and being more aesthetically pleasing so don't eliminate that exercise and fear of adding a little bit to your waist. That's a ridiculous notion that's been perpetuated way too long. Yeah, I think they're canals. Is the canals or canals? Let's go with canals. Canals? Canals. More of a now. It's like pilau, pilau. I got my lisp in going on over here. Yeah, yeah. Put that in the library.