 Hide those, if you will. But most people aren't going to do that. So then the question becomes, why also are you training? Are you training for health? Sometimes people don't, in my experience, if they're in their 20s into their 30s, it tends to take a backseat for the rest of your life. You're going, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I need to train. Exercise is great. Diet exercise is wonderful. But I got kids. I got a mortgage. And I don't believe that I can just do it in an hour a week, 30 minutes a week. What have you. And so that's why people, between the age of 30 and 40, tend to lose about 10 pounds of muscle and put on a whole bunch of fat to the tune of two to three pounds a year. About a pound and a half to two pounds a year when you first start, halving that every year after until you're in your fourth year, and it becomes pittance. But you can keep this up for a long time. I have three good examples. One is Clarence Bass. Anybody familiar with Clarence Bass, if anybody at all? OK, we got two in the back. Ding, ding, ding. Clarence Bass is known as Old Man Ripped. He's an interesting case. He's a lawyer, a retired lawyer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And in 1978, he decides that he is going to get freaky lean after Arthur Jones tells him that he's too fat, at 12% body fat. And he says the reason why is that if you're going to gain muscle mass from your weight, you are going to put on equal amount of fat and muscle. And then when you strip off all that fat, you'll end up right back where you started. And sure enough, there is some science to back this up and aside. If you are lean and you overeat, you tend to put on about 70% of that weight as lean body mass. This includes bone tissue, water, connective tissue, and muscle tissue. If you are over fat, over 20% nearing obesity and you overeat, you put on mostly fat. This does not mean your metabolism is broken. This does not mean you violate the laws of thermodynamics or whatever other woo-ha-ha, some fitness individuals trying to sell this month because this industry is built on fats. It has to be because if you tell someone, lift heavy, gradually increase the amount of weight you lift, which just happens to be pittance per week. Once you're out of the novice stage, we're talking half pound to a pound a week of strength on most exercises, maybe. And do it enough time to see results. The cat's out of the bag and there's no mystery anymore. So building it on fads, P90X, 10 years ago was power 90 and they were selling the same thing. Only they weren't selling it with Xs, which they stole from WWE for anybody who used to watch wrestling. I'm not proud to say I did. But Manhole Kemenia, Andre the Giant, those are the genetic freaks I was talking about and they end up as wrestlers. They don't end up as accountants and they don't end up here. So we exclude them from who I'm talking about. So you gain that amount of weight and that amount of time. Clarence Bass decides he's gonna get freaky lean and so from the age of 38 on up until now, he's 73 years old. He's maintained under 10% body fat and by the measures he's using, he's actually maintained under 7% body fat for 25 years. And in that time, it's traditionally thought that if you're lean, you can't put on muscle tissue. It's hard because you only need a little bit of calories to keep gaining, but when you're that lean, your body thinks you're starved. Your body thinks you are Dachau. Your body thinks you're about to die. And so you have all these feedback mechanisms that are telling you hormonally, you need to eat something or you're gonna die. In fact, he's maintained it this long and between the age of 38 and 46, he put on 11 pounds of muscle. That's not very much at all. It's about an inch on his arm. And so then I started looking around to see if other body builders experienced this. In Austin, we have a guy named Dave Gooden. He is known as the Texas Shredder which is a bad B movie title if there ever was one. But he is possibly the most talented and winningest natural body builder of all time. In an interview he did about four years ago, he said that he's gained 30 pounds in 20 years. That's a pound and a half a year. Would you get excited waking up a year from now after all of your working out and going, I basically look the same. All right, that was really worth it. We deal so much in external cues, especially with fitness and especially if you're coming from a sport background, right? Shoot the three pointer, make the three pointer, get three points, score the touchdown, an event is externally reinforcing what you've done. Or if your training was worth it, body builder's much slowing. It's a marathon. Health training is much slower. It's a marathon. Another body builder, Josh Trentini. He was Mr. USA. He trains in hit fashion. He says he's put on 24 pounds in 18 years of lifting. Not a whole lot, not a whole lot of muscle mass but it's enough to totally change his body. And so you have to be wary of what people say when they say, I put on 15 pounds of lean mass in this new program I've got, in this new diet I've got. The only way you can be sure of your body fat percentage is to be dead as a doorknob and be cut on with a scalpel. Every other method has an amount of inaccuracy built into it. So yeah, they gain 15 pounds. A lot of that because water, some of that's fat, maybe some of that's muscle. There's really no way to tell. And so if you look at body builders over the course of time, over the course of their career, on stage when they're super lean, you can tell how effective their training program was. And a more recent example is someone by the name of Lane Norton. He is a PhD in nutrition sciences. He took time off after becoming a pro to be a powerlifter. So he proceeds to squat over 500 pounds and deadlift close to 700 pounds. He walks around at about 235 pounds at the height of about five, 10 and a half. Four or five years later, right, of doing this powerlifting thing, he comes back to the bodybuilding stage and gets freaky lean. And he comes in four pounds heavier than when he last competed. One pound a year for all that eating and training and all those sorts of things. Okay, so once you get past your first couple of years of training, you've gained really most of the muscle you're gonna train. Those pounds a year aren't gonna sustain you. So what's the next step? Where do you go from there? Life's long, you gotta find new challenges and things you might be good at and use the training as an adjunct to that. Guess I'm getting close to that there. You gotta use the training as an adjunct to that. Finding things you might be better at because this is meant to make your life better. It's not meant to be your life. But the way people tend to do it, they make it their life. They obsess about it. They read bodybuilding magazines. They read nutrition magazines. They scour the scientific journals. They go to grad school for it. And they don't have balance in their life. And then reality hits and they have to move on. And so often a false dilemma is made. If I can't train five days a week and five days a week is always what got me results, well, why train at all? It's very black and white thinking, right? But there are some guys out there who do it. If I can't do bicep three days a week, my arms are gonna shrivel while I train at all. Why put in any effort? Because I believe that anything less than five days a week is not going to get me the results I need. It's patently false. As you get stronger and you get bigger, you become better at recruiting the what are called high threshold motor units. Fast-switch muscle fibers. They are your biggest, strongest muscle fibers. And when you are a novice, you are in fact unable to recruit them voluntarily. You can have them recruited for you if you happen to select a weight that is much too heavy. But then you have inhibitory mechanisms from your nervous system to keep you from hurting yourself trying to sling that weight around. So eventually as you train and get stronger, you get better at using all of these muscle fibers. And the thing about those muscle fibers is they require a lot of time to recover. So if you're able to train five days a week, you can't do it intensely. You're not really recruiting those high threshold motor units. If you train intensely, you recruit those high threshold motor units, then you have to back off and rest. And in fact, really interesting about backing off and resting, understanding that these are the biggest muscle fibers and bodybuilders who are really large or athletes who are really strong, the Usain Boltz of the world, they tend to have a lot of these muscle fibers, explosive sports. There are studies that have been done where they have people train and the training actually reduces their high threshold motor units. Seems strange, but there is a certain amount of aerobic in any sort of training you're doing. Unless you're doing heavy singles, you are to a certain extent up-regulating these intermediate fibers. And then they had to take time off. Three months after they ceased training, they had more than doubled their fast-twitch muscle fibers from doing nothing. And in reality, you see the same thing in spinal cord injured individuals and individuals who have broken bones and have been forced to cast muscles. That anaerobic environment is the environment in which these big strong motor units best express themselves. So if you're sufficiently strong and a normal human being, you have to balance rest with effort. Your effort has gotten up so much higher that you can readily recruit these and fatigue them. You need to rest that they actually recover and get stronger. And periodically take more time off than you think is necessary. A week, two weeks, at least. So you get into your 30s, you get over the false dilemma and you decide, all right, I can do something. I can train, I can train at least full body twice a week and I can work really hard. And I can make steady gains and I can balance this with my family, with my work demands, with the demands of my children. I'm feeling pretty good. Compared to my peers, I still look really fit. My arms are still bulging. I still fit in my jeans. I don't have my gut hanging over my belt and fooling myself into thinking I have a 36 inch waist or whatever reasonably small waist they think they have because they take the pant, the belt line and they tilt it like this. So it sits on the lumbar spine and wraps underneath the globe of their stomach and think, all right, I've still got it. They're walking around like this. If you've been training, not five days a week, two days a week, working hard, eating real food, only occasionally going down to the bar and putting down a bunch of pints and hot wings with sporting events, you're gonna maintain a good leanness and you'll find yourself capable of playing any sport you wanna play. You're not gonna play it really well because you have to practice the sport to be really good at it. It's just like you could take a basketball player and try and have them play tennis. They're gonna be sucking wind. They're gonna be feeling like total novices, but they'll very quickly get better at playing tennis, at least from a metabolic aerobic standpoint because they had this global metabolic conditioning, this base with which to build upon and you'll be in that position and really the demands of your life will dictate that unless you're a professional athlete that that's what you're gonna do. You're gonna be the weekend warrior.