 So this is a hard pill to swallow. It's a bitter pill to swallow. And I saw Patrick just walked in. I've never met you, Patrick, but I might as well have. Did we meet at the conference five years ago? I'm sorry, I don't remember it. You might not remember me, I had long hair. Again, I made Fuji's hair look normal. It was like long and frizzy and kind of out to here. And I was about 50 pounds heavier. This is when I was dead lifting a car and eating a whole pizza in one sitting. Nothing that I recommend anyone does. But Patrick and I are kind of of that lighter-boned, sort of naturally lean. I walk around, no problem at all, 10% body fat or less year-round. It just is not a problem. I don't ask how to get lean. I'm just like the bodybuilder who doesn't ask how to get bigger. Anyway, so there's the fat-free mass. And only the tallest individuals tend to move beyond these numbers. Anyone familiar with World's Strongest Man competition? Sure. They're on some sort of beautiful Mediterranean island, getting great tans, and they happen to be lifting heavy things, pulling heavy things, tearing muscles. Bill Kazmier is frequently a host of this. And he has a neck that is unbelievably large. And you'll find some genetic freaks out there. One in a million genetic freaks the same way a man with 200 IQ is a freak, the same way a man who is seven feet tall is a freak. These guys are freaks. And Bill's neck is one of those sorts of things. And you know it when you have it. And it's like the meal. If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it. If you have to ask how he got it, you can't have it, right? OK. So however, most people are not trained enough to be anywhere near that genetic potential. And if you want to know how to train, well, Drew will be happy to talk your ear off next year. Or you can go online and watch him go on and on. Or you can listen to McGuff talk last year, all fantastic presentations. That's beyond the scope of my presentation today. But the point is that knowing that there's a genetic limit is no excuse for not working hard. This is the argument against the term hard gainer. Since the mid-80s, there's been a term probably since the early 50s. Reg Park was the original publisher of Iron Man Magazine. And he possibly invented the term. And what it meant is that lighter-boned individuals who don't gain muscle as quickly as someone who's genetically elite. So that's everybody else. So this is the normal people and how fast you're capable of gaining with hard work. The majority, which is to say, don't hold yourself up against an NFL linebacker who has 15 years of conditioning, weight work, and a good genetic hand as to what you can be physically because their bodies break down in 30 years because of all that abuse. You have to set yourself to a different standard. But in your 20s, you've got great hormones. Your testosterone is through the roof. All sorts of growth factors are spiked. And right now, it's the time where you're going to put on, if you want to work out, you're going to set the table for the rest of your life as far as how you're going to be physically. You all have heard the term muscle memory, right? Sure, everybody has. It used to have no basis in science. But more recently, they figured out that there's a code, kind of like Konami, up, up, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start. It's a gene code that encodes in the muscles. It sort of says, here is the ceiling you were previously at. And this ties in uniquely to body fat set point theory as well. If you previously, when you were younger, hung out in a certain area of lean body mass, resting heart rate, body fat, and you veer away from that for a period of time, it's much easier to get back there. So that's why the talk is training over a lifetime. And what I want to impress upon you early on is that right now, regardless of what your genetic potential is, is the time that you can make the most change and set yourself up for health, well-being, strength, for the rest of your life. But most people, and most guys in their 20s, don't train with that intent. And what you're learning here, and what I'm going to tell you is kind of adjunct to what all of these gentlemen are talking to you about, about finding confidence when approaching women, that it's not about your hang-ups and it's not about what you think about yourself, the negatives you think about yourself. Because as a client of mine said the other day, I just put him through a workout, and they're all really excited about this talk. And he leaves, and he sticks his head back, and he goes, remind yourself that they all wiped their asses just like you, which is to say, everybody has a thing, even the woman you're approaching, which I'm sure you've heard a million times. And the same thing goes here with training, you shouldn't, I'm not going to say you shouldn't train with the intent of being muscular and healthy to approach women, but they decided long before they ever saw your ripped abs if they were going to sleep with you. When I was most successful dating, I'm married now, I have three dogs and a house, I was not in my best shape, I was tubby, I didn't have a good haircut, but I didn't care when approaching women, it was about, I felt good about myself, I felt good about my accomplishments in that point in my life, and I had a good social circle, and so if I didn't get their phone number, I was never going to see them again, right? It had nothing to do with the fact that my internal and external obliques are looking extra sharp today. My lats are popping. Boy, I'm going to pick up this phone number. You'll get married someday, and your wife will complain that you're too hard and that you should put some body fat on so that you are a nice surrogate, self-warmed pillow for her in the evening, right? This is true, this is true. And Rick Fox, he was a NFL player married to Vanessa Williams, because of her pictures in Playboy, she lost her Miss America crown and also appeared in that wonderful film with Arnold Schwarzenegger called Eraser, and so Rick was complaining that, she was complaining that he was too ripped, and here's a professional athlete, you tend to associate these pretty people with coming together, but at the end of the day, they're still human, and this tends to be what ends up happening. It's more than just the body. So if you're just training to pick up women, you've lost the plot, and you won't sustain it, okay? You'll train five days a week, you'll get to where you wanna be in the short term, and then you pick up the woman, and then what do you do? So then, hopefully you get some perspective and you find out that there's a middle way. You find out that you can train two or three days a week, you don't need more than 90 minutes, and then eventually you find out you don't even need that much if you're doing it right, but then you start to get lingering, creeping doubt, and you start to think, I should be gaining muscle faster because when I first started training, I gained muscle really, really quickly. Well, there's a reason for that too. When you are a novice, you are super sensitive, this is no different to learning curve than in any activity you do. The closer you get to your limit, the slower the rate of gains. And in my experience, and in the experience of exercise physiologists like Lyle McDonald and Alan Aragon, people who train a lot of clients and have seen a lot of people going, your first year, if you do everything right, if you've never trained before in your life, never done sport, never done weightlifting, never done anything, you can put on somewhere between a pound and a half to two pounds a month of dry muscle tissue. Now understand that when you're gaining this weight, not all of it is going to be muscle. You'll see the scale weight go up three, four, five pounds, you're thinking, hell yeah, I'm getting cock strong now. Some of that's water, some of that is glycogen, human starch, it's our form of sugar stored in the muscle tissues for use onsite to power these muscle contractions. When you start training muscles, they want more of that because they need to have that fuel onsite to meet the demands that you're asking of it. So after that first year, you can expect, again, if you're training consistently, you're training of a sufficient intensity, and you're getting adequate nutrition, you might gain half of that amount. Okay? So suddenly the first year, you gain, say 17 pounds, the next year, you gain eight or nine pounds. You're going, man, my program's not working anymore. I must be doing something wrong, my diet's off. I know what I need. I need creatine. Actually creatine's a fine supplement. It's got 20 plus years of research. It does everything from increase glucose sensitivity to help the brains of old people, and I'm not kidding. I need this new supplement. I need this mass gainer. I need this, I need that, I need that, and then that's where supplement companies make all their money, from those people who expect newbie gains to last forever. I've done this. My first four months of training, I put on 16 pounds. I say first four months of training, I mean first four months of training after high school. I was severely underweight from doing two plus hours a day of basketball. And I very quickly put on 16 pounds. Women, friends who hadn't seen me, were shocked at how much weight I had put on. I did that in four months. Over the course of the next two years, I managed to put on another 14, and I felt like I was doing everything wrong. So I'm here to tell you now, for some reason you decide to take up strength training, what, hopefully not to pick up a woman, this peters off. The third year it cuts in half again, and then the fourth year and so on, you're lucky to get a pound and a half a year out of it. So you have to start finding reasons to continue training. If all you went into it for was to be a bodybuilder, which looking out, I don't think anyone here is chasing that goal. And it's not making fun of you. You might some day decide you want to be a bodybuilder because it's not just about being huge. Most of the bodybuilders are middleweights, which means they show up on stage at around 160 to 165 pounds. That's not a lot, but when your bone dry and super thin, low on body fat, you show muscle real well, and that's why bodybuilding is a, it's not a quantitative sport. It's not biking, where you're gonna complete a course in X amount of time. It's qualitative. How well you can create the illusion of size, how well you can accentuate your positives and take away from your negatives.