 Ladies and gentlemen, Drew Bae, give it up. Thank you. I'm just going to add to what Doug said, a little bit more nuts and bolts of how to take what he talked about and put it into practice in a workout. Most important aspects of that being the intensity and the volume and frequency of your training. How hard you should be training, how much you should do, and how often. An analogy that I like to use with clients when I'm explaining this, and something that came from Arthur Jones, who got invented the nautilus equipment, is training is a lot like getting a suntan. Exercise is physical stress. Exposure to a very intense sunlight is a physical stress. And any time that you're exposing yourself to a stress for the purpose of trying to get a particular response, you need to consider those three things. The intensity and the volume and the frequency of exposure to that stress. In the case of getting a suntan, if the sunlight is not intense enough, it's not going to stimulate anything in the way of the tan, you could lay out all day on a cloudy day and nothing's going to happen. However, if it is intense enough up to a point, it will stimulate a tan. But beyond some point, rather than being a stimulus, it's going to start to cause damage. A similar thing exists with exercise. As Doug mentioned earlier, for exercise to be effective, it has to be very, very intense. You have to push yourself as hard as possible during the workout. But if you are training intensely enough for your workout to be effective, there is going to be a limit to how much your body can tolerate. And this limit is a lot less than what a lot of people have come to believe. Now, the third part, frequency, has to do with your body's ability to recover from and then produce the adaptations stimulated by the stress. Now, if you determined through trial and error that you could lay out for about 15 minutes on a clear day of very intense sunlight, and that that was about as much as you could tolerate after that you would burn, well, you wouldn't do that and then get out of the sun and then go back out five minutes later and repeat the process. Because it's not just the volume or the duration of exposure to that stress in a single instance, but the total, the cumulative amount of stress over a period of time that has an effect on your body's ability to recover from and produce the adaptation. Same with the workout. You might do a workout like Doug had discussed consisting of just a couple heavy multi-joint movements, stimulate the body, leave the gym, but you wouldn't go back an hour later and try and repeat the process. Well, actually shouldn't even go back a day later, or in some cases, a couple days later. The body requires a certain amount of time to completely recover from that before it produces an adaptive response. And if you go back into the gym, you work out again before you've allowed your body that much, enough time to do so, it would be the same as tanning, going inside, coming back out five minutes later and trying to repeat the process. Rather than get the results you want to tan or an increase in muscular strength and size, you end up overwhelming your body's ability to tolerate the stress and produce an adaptive response to it. Now also, and just like getting a sun tan, and this is where a lot of confusion comes from with training, there's a significant amount of variation in how much exercise a person can tolerate and how much recovery time they need between exposure. I've got mostly Western European genetics. My wife is from the Philippines. I can tolerate very little exposure to intense sunlight before I burn, and I can't be out too often. She can be out all day, doesn't make a difference. She tans very easily. Depending on a person's skin tone, their tolerance and the frequency of exposure that they can handle is going to vary significantly. And a similar situation exists with exercise. Some people can tolerate more. Some people can train more frequently. Others have very, very little tolerance and require a lot more recovery time between workouts to be able to completely recover from and produce the adaptations stimulated by exercise. Now, how do you determine what is or isn't appropriate for you in terms of how much and how often? Most importantly, when you're exercising, what you're doing is trying to stimulate a specific adaptive response and increase in muscular strength. The size just comes along with that. If you're exercising intensely enough that you're stimulating an adaptive response, and if you're not overstressing the body by doing too much, and if you're allowing the body adequate time to recover and produce the adaptation, you should see a measurable increase in strength on a regular basis. If you're not getting stronger, if you're not either able to perform more repetitions or able to use a little bit more resistance, every time you work out, either you're not training intensely enough to stimulate the adaptive response, you're doing too much. You're overwhelming your body's capability to tolerate the stress and adapt to it, or you're training too frequently and not giving your body enough time in between. Now, Doug had mentioned an average of people being around once a week, with a pretty significant range. As little as five days for some people, up to 10 days or longer for other people. This is kind of middle of the bell curve. You've got some people on the extreme end who can train a little bit more frequently than that. You've got some people who actually require a lot more recovery time. Most people, though, fit right about in that five to 10 day time frame. Now, for the average person starting out, most people are not going to train intensely enough at first that they need a lot of recovery. This level of intensity, what Doug is talking about, requires a bit of building up to. There's some resistance to it psychologically, like Doug mentioned, with that panic as you approach the really hard part of the exercise. And a lot of people just are not accustomed to or are familiar with how hard they're able to actually push themselves. So I would recommend a person start out on the lower end of frequency, or the lower end of their recovery, about once every four or five days, about three or four workouts within a two week time frame. And from there, keeping track of their workouts, how much weight they use, how many repetitions they're able to perform in all their exercises, make adjustments. You'll find over time, as your intensity of training increases, that you might start to see a slowdown in progress. If you're somebody that requires, say, seven, 10, or whatever amount, a number of days, when you start to get up to a point where you're training hard enough, you're gonna see that you're not making those strength gains on a regular basis anymore. And this would be an indication that, hey, it's time to cut back a little bit either on the amount you're doing, or the frequency over a course of, you know, however many workouts you're doing per week. Now, as far as the intensity itself, Doug had mentioned about a lot of people reaching that point where the exercise is beginning to get hard, they start to panic, they hold back. There's a couple reasons that people do this. One, you know, the genetic aspect Doug talked about, just a panic at exerting yourself to the point where you are literally almost incapable of further movement. It is, you know, again, like you said, as far as your body can tell, a life or death event. The only time in the course of normal day to day activities when any animal would exert themselves to that degree would be if it was a life or death situation. Your body does not know the difference between you struggling against a heavy barbell in your back doing a squat, or fighting off something that's either trying to kill you or that you're trying to kill to eat it. It's natural to get to that point to hesitate to want to hold back, usually, again, because of the panic Doug talked about as well, is because of a lot of people's minds fear of injury. A lot of people associate training hard with the potential for damaging themselves during the exercise. Now, there's kind of an idea that the harder something is, or the heavier the weight, the more likely you are to damage yourself in the process, but the weight has nothing to do with it. It's not how heavy the weight is, but the manner that you try to lift it that determines whether or not you're going to injure yourself in the process. For example, and getting a little bit off track here, but I'll come back to the intensity, if you were to go out in the parking lot right now and attempt to lift somebody's car or truck, it's not gonna happen. It's a much, much heavier weight than anybody's ever gonna touch during a workout, but whether you're injured in the process has nothing to do with how much it weighs, but rather the manner in which you attempt to lift it. If you grab the bumper and you just yank at it as hard and fast as you can, you're likely to pull or strain something. On the other hand, if you grab the bumper and you begin to pull gradually and over a period of a couple seconds, a little bit harder and a little harder until you're contracting as hard as you possibly can and then you gradually ease off, you're not gonna wreck yourself in the process, you're not gonna pull or strain anything. In either case, it's a tremendously heavy weight, but whether you hurt yourself depends on the manner in which you attempt to lift it. And you wanna move similarly during an exercise. You have to lift heavy. If the weight is not adequately heavy, it's not going to do you any good. No amount of lifting with light weight is going to produce any kind of meaning for results and it comes down to that intensity, the level of effort that you put into the exercise. It's an absolute, but if you're going to do this for the long run, if you're going to be doing this when you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s, I know some people in their 70s and 80s that train in this fashion, you have to do so in a manner that's not gonna wreck your joints in the process. So you need to keep in mind when you're doing these exercises that you have to always be moving under control. Again, with the example of picking up or attempting to pick up a car, if you take the weight and you try to yank or jerk at it as fast as you can, you're gonna pull or strain something. If on the other hand, you attempt to lift it gradually and as you approach the end of the lifting movement, you gradually sort of stop, you reverse direction, you bring it back down, you anticipate reaching the start, you slow down for that so that you're able to reverse direction smoothly. You'll be able to lift as heavy a weight as your muscles are capable of, but you're not going to pull strain, wreck or damage anything in the process. In a healthy person, your tendons, your ligaments, your other connective tissues, everything will be able to more than adequately handle the heaviest weight that your muscles are capable of contracting against in as long as you're moving in a strict and controlled fashion. The other thing that tends to stop people from pushing as hard or pulling as hard as they possibly can during exercise is physical pain or fear of physical pain. For most people, the exercise stops when it starts to become uncomfortable. If you look at a lot of people in a gym, if a person is really going all out, by the time they get to the point where they are at their actual physical limits, they will have slowed down considerably. A person who can comfortably curl at a moderate pace if they're using a heavy enough weight, their last repetition is going to look like this, they're just going to be barely moving it. Watch a lot of people, their speed doesn't change too much, they get to a point where it starts to get uncomfortable, they set it down. Problem with that is the point where you start to become uncomfortable is those last couple most productive reps where you reach that point Doug was talking about where you're sending the message to your body that it is about to die or it thinks it's about to die. If you stop when it starts to burn, if you stop when it starts to become uncomfortable, you are stopping right at the point where the real exercise begins. Keep in mind that you're not going to injure yourself if you're moving in a controlled manner. The burn is not an indication that any kind of actual large scale physical damage is being done. Now there is damage, very, very small damage. You have little tears, it's called microtrauma, a structural level. Galactic acid Doug discussed is going to have some effect on that discomfort too, but there is no kind of real injury occurring. Now something that helps is if you keep in mind the difference between pain which is informative. Pain is basically telling you that, hey something is wrong and doing so so that you stop doing whatever is causing the damage and what is called exertional discomfort which is actually what's happening during exercise which is non-informative. It doesn't tell you anything you don't already know. Your muscles are working hard, okay? We already know that, but there's nothing, again there's nothing happening there that's going to cause any damage. You can safely ignore that. If you also consider as you're getting to that point that the exercise is temporary and what's happening is not suggesting an injury that's going to persist afterwards. That helps you be able to push through that but one of the things that seems to be most effective is if you look at it, the burn, that discomfort that occurs during exercise, rather than an indication that you're getting towards the end of the exercise, but as a cue that it's time to start working harder, it helps you push through that. For example, leg extension, which if anybody has done any heavy, heavy training, anybody here do leg extensions or has done leg extensions part of the workout? One of the worst as far as the sensitivity. For some reason people tend to feel it in their frontal thighs. Some people calves more than anything else and on almost more than any other exercise, I see people quitting on the leg extension before they've gotten anywhere near what they're actually physically capable of because of that burn. It is, well it's just downright painful. People stop because they're worried about hurting themselves. People stop because it's extremely uncomfortable but again, that burning means that you're getting towards the most beneficial, the most important part of the exercise and rather than stop at that point, you should consider it your cue to push even a little bit harder. Something else that makes a big difference is having some external motivation. Having somebody else there to push you doesn't have to be a trainer, but even if it's just a friend, somebody else in the gym, as most people will push themselves no where near their limits, but if you have somebody else there, even if it's just trying to impress somebody else in the gym or somebody who is going to push you that makes all the difference in the world. But that's, as far as the intensity is concerned, those last couple repetitions are the absolute most important exercise. What you're trying to do is send a message to your body that its current ability is inadequate to meet some demand that your environment is placing on it. If you're capable of an all-out effort completing 10 repetitions and you were to stop at seven or eight, you're not asking your body to do anything that it already isn't capable of. It's less likely to expend any resources to produce an increase in muscle mass, or any other metabolic adaptation, which can be expensive. You have to give it a good reason to do so. It's only when you attempt that 10th repetition and even when you get to a point where it's no longer possible to continue, you keep contracting against it that you're really telling your body, hey, we need to be stronger. We need to be better capable of tolerating this so that the next time we encounter it, we're able to successfully complete whatever it is if it's in the case of an exercise, the exercise, or as far as your body knows, again, you could be fighting a bear or a tiger or something. As far as the amount of exercise, we're balancing it against the intensity of exercise. You have to train hard for the exercise to be effective, but again, doing so is going to limit the amount of exercise that you can do. Now, most people think you gotta do dozens of sets of bunches of different exercises for all the different muscle groups. If you read the muscle magazines, most bodybuilding or fitness books, you'll have routines that'll typically involve three to four sets of anywhere from three to sometimes five or six exercises per muscle group. Anybody who's capable of completing a routine like that is not working anywhere near as hard as necessary to get the maximal benefit from the exercise. In fact, if a person is training as hard as I'm talking about, pushing to your absolute limit, and then at that point continuing to attempt to push for a couple seconds, you're not going to be able to tolerate a very large amount of exercise at all. And like Doug mentioned, the workouts last around eight to 12 minutes. Mine, a little bit longer, not because I spend more time doing the exercise, but because where I'm working out, I'm using barbells, so there's time in between that I have to have to switch out the plates. But where I'm using machines where I can just pull and switch a pin, my workouts would probably be pretty similar to Doug's in length. And I don't do just that much because I don't like working out or don't do that much because I'm in a rush, but because I am not physically capable of doing any more exercise than that when I'm done. Now, if you look at the major muscle groups in the body, the hip and thighs, chest, upper back, bicep, shoulders, delts and whatnot, it does not actually require a lot of different movements to involve all those muscles. If you were to perform a push and a pull and a multi-joint hip and thigh movement, you would have pretty much hit almost every single muscle in the body, adding a push and a pull in another direction. For example, doing a vertical or a horizontal push and pull and a vertical push and pull just kind of rounds things out a little bit better, but it doesn't take a lot of exercise. For example, if you look at biceps, upper back, back of the shoulders, it's not necessary to go and do a rolling movement or a pullover for your upper back and then add a bent over fly for your rear delts and a shrug for your traps and then a dozen different types of curls for your biceps and broccoli alice, and broccoli radii alice and whatnot. If you do a row, every single one of those muscles is involved and if you're doing it hard enough, all of those are going to be involved to enough of a degree that you're gonna stimulate about as much improvement as you possibly can. By trying to do a lot of different exercises, this exercise for the specific muscle, that exercise for that specific muscle and so on and so forth, what a lot of people end up doing is holding back so that they're capable of performing more exercises. So although they might be able to work everything individually and isolate this muscle or that muscle, they're not actually getting nearly as much out of the workout one because they've compromised intensity for the sake of adding all these different exercises too because in doing so, even if they are working the actual muscles separately, anytime you perform an exercise, in addition to the local effect, the effect on the specific muscles work, you're going to have a systemic effect. The damage to the muscles that occurs is followed by an inflammatory response and that's cumulative. The more exercise you do, the greater this response and it's part of what contributes to overtrading. Eventually you get to a point where you've done enough of this and you've done it too much within a particular timeframe, you start to have flu-like symptoms. Basically this inflammatory response is affecting your nervous system in a way that's trying to make you slow down and back off. So you don't want, you don't need to do a bunch of different muscles for all the different muscle groups or exercises for all the different muscle groups. If we take chin up, for example. Now if you did nothing but chin ups or pull downs, you get your biceps, your forearms, your upper back, back, your shoulders, traps, a bunch of different things there. If you were to do nothing but that exercise and over time build up to the point where you're doing pull downs with double your body weight or you're doing chin ups with your body weight plus another 50, 60 pounds hanging off of you, even if you had never done a single isolation exercise for your biceps, they would have become much, much larger and the same would go for doing an exercise like dips, bench presses, shoulder presses and the triceps. You're not going to be able to progress and weight over time in these exercises without all of the muscles involved becoming larger. Now some people talk about weak links and compound movements. For example, claiming that if you're doing a chest exercise, your triceps are always going to fail before your pecs or your shoulders or whatnot. Now if you're performing the exercise properly, everything is going to be worked to approximately the same degree. The only time that you're going to see disproportionate involvement to those muscles is if you are specifically changing the way you're performing the exercise to change the leverages involved. Not going to get into that a whole lot because I know that Bill's going to talk more about the biomechanics tomorrow, but there's a real quick example in the case of doing, say a chest press. If you grip the bar with about a shoulder width or slightly wider hand spacing, the positioning is such that as you're going through the movement, the moment arms or the levers or the difficulty encountered by the different muscles involved is going to be somewhat proportional to where all of those muscles involved are going to experience a similar amount of work. If you feel like your triceps are going before your chest, chances are you're using too narrow of a grip. In fact, some people will specifically use a very narrow grip doing a bench press because it changes the leverage in such a way that your triceps have to work a lot harder. If your grip is too wide, you're going to feel more chest, more shoulder, less tricep. If you look at what's happening, the closer in, the more tricep, the further out, the more chest. At some point in between those is a grip where everything that's involved is going to be working roughly, equally proportional to their capability. Another way to look at it is we would not have developed or evolved the muscular system that we have in a way that you have any one particular muscle group that is a limiting factor for the others. If such was the case, we'd have a little bit different leverages, different musculoskeletal geometry because it would make no sense to have a certain amount of strength in your upper back muscles if you couldn't apply it in regular activities because of a weakness of the biceps or grip. So again, it does not take a lot of exercise to effectively work all the major muscle groups in the body. Like Doug mentioned again, if you're doing a push and a pull, both in a horizontal and a vertical plane and doing a multi-joint leg movement, you're pretty much hitting everything. Now the only things that would not be directly involved in something like that might be the abdominal muscles and if you're doing a leg press instead of a squat, the lower back. If you're doing barbell movements, if you're doing say like a standing press, you're doing squats, you're doing bent rows, any additional work for the lower back or the abdominal muscles would be completely unnecessary. They receive plenty of work doing those activities. In fact, if you're doing squatting, your lower back is working somewhat harder than your legs even. Now if you're doing a free weight activity or machine movements, in which case, leg press, chest press, row. In a machine exercise, you have enough bracing that the trunk muscles are not doing as much. Now they're still involved. You're still involving the abdominal muscles and maintaining proper torso position in some exercises. You're still involving the lower back muscles. So in that case, occasionally performing an additional isolated trunk exercise, flexion and extension might be helpful, but then that's still occasionally. For the most part, a multi-joint hip and thigh movement, a push and a pull, both horizontally and vertically. Now as far as how often you should be doing this. Again, like I mentioned earlier, if you're stimulating the body to produce an adaptive response and if you're not overstressing the body so that you're overwhelming its ability to recover from and adapt to that and if you're allowing adequate time for it to do that, to recover from and produce the response stimulated by the workout, you should be seeing improvement in strength on a regular basis. You absolutely have to keep track of what you're doing in terms of the weight. The exercises perform how many repetitions you're doing when you're working out so that you're able to evaluate this over time. And again, starting out, most people aren't gonna be training as hard, like I mentioned earlier, five days. As your training becomes harder, if you're somebody that needs that additional time, you'll find that you're not making the gains on this frequent basis when that happens. And only if there's nothing else that might be an issue, then you start adding additional rest days in between workouts. The diet's gonna be an important thing. I'm not gonna go into that, but if you're having difficulty as far as your progress, if you're not seeing a strength gains on a workout to workout basis, before you start stretching things out too much, look at other things. Is your diet in order? Are you getting adequate rest? Do you have additional work or other physical activities that are causing stress that's going to interfere with recovery? If none of that is the case, if everything else is the same as it has been, but you start to slow down in progress, add that additional day in between. And don't be afraid to go out to, as long as 10 days, two weeks, even longer in some cases. A lot of people have the idea that if they're not constantly in the gym or if they're not working out on a very regular basis, that they're going to lose strength. I've had people who have gone away for as long as six to eight weeks, come back and beat all of their previous reps on their last workout. Usually if a person's gone for an extended period of time, I have them do the same weights that they would have for the workout when they come back, as if they had come back to workout again just after a couple of days. In almost every single case, they're significantly stronger. So after the body produces that adaptation, it takes a while before you're actually going to start to lose it. And some people, because of the genetic differences I mentioned, might actually require several weeks in between. Arthur Jones, a novice inventor, told me of a particular instance they had somebody that was a research subject. They were doing a research on exercise for the low back at the University of Florida. And this particular individual had way, way below average recovery ability. They found that he trained once a week or more frequently that he would actually lose strength. If they increased his rest time to two weeks, he would stay right about the same. He wasn't allowing enough time to produce any kind of an improvement just enough that he was able to recover and return to his previous baseline. He only actually started increasing his strength and was doing so regularly when they increased his rest time out to about three weeks. Now this is an extreme example, extreme. Most people are not gonna be anywhere, anywhere near that. But it illustrates how important that recovery time is. Now I'm just gonna open this up for questions. I'm not gonna go into a whole lot more on that. So any, anybody, oh, give them a microphone. If you don't have a spotter with you, and based on what you're saying, it seems like you won't be able to get to the max under those last reps. So do you recommend using just machine exercises if you don't have a spotter? If you don't have a spotter, there's a couple options that you can go with depending on the exercise. In most cases, the machine is gonna be safest if it's a properly designed machine. But if you have a power rack, if you're doing a free-wet exercises, the only exercises that you need a spotter for would be something where you're moving the barbell overhead. If you're doing a bench press, if you're doing a squat, something like that, then you need to have some sort of a mechanical safety there if you don't have a person there to stop it. I work out just at home. For squats, I just use a rack with adjustable safeties. I bench inside of the rack so that rather than use a traditional Olympic bench where once you un-rack it, it's all on you, the way I've got it set up is once I un-rack it, I also have pins that are set to just above the height of my neck. If I get stuck, I roll it up, it sets on the pins, I can turn my head and slide out from underneath it. If you work out at a gym that has a power rack, if they let you move the benches around, you can safely bench press inside a power rack if you can adjust, and you want to test it first to make sure that it's at the right height, but you can adjust that so that you have a safety there. For pretty much any other free-wet exercise, I wouldn't worry too much about it, but definitely, definitely use a power rack if you're doing any kind of benching or overhead movement. I'll just let him pass it around. What are your opinions on the CrossFit methodology as far as their general recommendation of a three-on, one-day off pattern for workouts? It's excessive for most people. The majority of people, if they're really training hard enough, don't need very much exercise. And doing too much, and especially with some of the type of movements that CrossFit involves, it can lead to joint problems and other injuries over time. They recommend a lot of very fast, a lot of quick movements. I know that they recommend a kipping version of pull-ups, a lot of Olympic lifts. These things, if done infrequently, are still a recipe for injury for some people. Done on that kind of a schedule, they'll tear somebody up. So I definitely would not recommend that kind of frequency, especially not with that level of demanding activity. I just wanted to ask because I know a lot of us are going out, so with sleep, what's your recommendation on how many hours and also on a regular sleep schedule? Because I know that's hard for a lot of us. It's difficult for a lot of people. It varies from person to person. Some people can get by and they're fine, they function well and very little sleep, and some people need a little bit more. What I would recommend is on a weekend or sometime when you don't have to be up, if you know that you're not already somewhat sleep deprived, go to sleep, little bit after it starts getting dark, nine, 10, see when you wake up naturally, and try that a couple times and average it out, and seeing how long you sleep just naturally when you wake up without having an alarm will give you a rough idea of how much you actually need on a regular basis and allow you a plan for that. But the sleep is absolutely important. If you don't get adequate sleep, it starts messing with a bunch of different hormones. You have an increase in cortisol, you have a decrease in growth hormone, and Doug can probably explain better than I do, but both of those, switching that way, are gonna negatively affect both muscle gain and fat loss. Like a range. Average, I think again, it does vary just like pretty much everything else, but about seven, eight hours for most people. More sometime if for younger people though. Also, I was wondering if you recommend doing any like scop work, rotator cuff work, calves, wrists and neck, and if that correlates with those five exercises you said. Well, as supplemental work, as far as a rotator cuff, it depends. If a person is performing their exercises correctly and in proper form, those muscles are going to be strengthened as well. If a person has an injury, sometimes, doing additional rotator cuff work will help. I trained somebody who had some issues with that, and we would do some additional stuff at the end of the workout, and he did function a little bit better after a while. For most people, if they don't develop a problem with it in the first place, they're not gonna require any additional exercise for it. Now as far as grip, if a person is doing heavy pulling movements, chin ups, pull downs, rows, if you do deadlift as your multi-joint leg movement, you're gonna find over time that your grip, if you don't use any straps or hooks, is going to get pretty strong. If you get to a point where you're able to deadlift 315-something pounds for reps, or you're doing chin ups with an additional 50 pounds, you're gonna have increased your grip significantly. Now the only time that I would recommend supplemental grip work is if there's an issue where you might be involved in a sport or something where grip strength might be a limiting factor for wrestling. It's tremendous. As far as the neck, I generally don't recommend doing direct neck work unless you have really good equipment for it. If you've got a properly designed neck machine, it's incredibly valuable. And adding that neck work does not, your neck is a very small muscle group. No matter how hard you're working your neck, you don't have so much muscle that the effect on the rest of the body is going to have that much of an effect as far as overturning. But without proper instruction, a person, if they're doing things incorrectly with the neck training can easily mess something up. If you have access to a nautilus four-way neck machine, a Med-X neck machine, or there's a company, it's a Pendulum Strength Systems, which makes a neck machine. They're sold by one of the football equipment companies. Other than that, most of the neck machines that I've seen have been really, really poor and you'd be more likely to do some damage than good. Another option is doing manually resisted neck extension, flexion, lateral flexion. But if you do that, you need to have somebody who's providing the resistance that really knows what they're doing or they can screw up your neck. Cavs, if you're doing leg press or squat, you're actually going to be getting a pretty good of calf involvement. If you notice, if you're squatting down the movement of the ankles, your ankles are actually going to be flexing considerably too. And on the way up, everything that you're doing in a squat stacks down. All of the weight on your shoulders is being supported by your back. The weight of the barbell and your entire upper torso is being supported by the muscles from the hips down. All of the weight of your entire body plus the barbell from the knees up is on the calves. So if you're doing that kind of a movement, you're actually going to have a significant amount of calf work involved. As far as the isolation exercises, they have their place. They're just not necessary. And where I would recommend including isolation exercises is after a person has already been training for a long time on basic heavy multi-joint movements, if they find that a particular muscle group proportionally does not seem to be up to par or balanced with the rest of the body, occasionally doing an isolation exercise might help. Again, it depends on the individual and this is something that I wouldn't even recommend a person try until after they've been doing very basic heavy movements for a while because again, just those heavy pulling and pushing movements are going to hit all the muscles pretty effectively. Just to go back to the topic of spotters, should I, let's say I'm on my last repetition and should he kind of help me like to go slowly or should he just just move it when it's done? The spotter should not provide any assistance until you get to the point where you're incapable of performing any movement. For example, if you were doing a bench press, suppose that you got to a particular point or repetition, usually a sticking point for most people is when the upper arms are roughly parallel to the ground and the bar is not moving. He should have his hands in position, he should be ready. In fact, the spotter should be in a position at any time to where they're able to assist. They should constantly be in position to assist but he shouldn't actually begin to assist until you tell them to and that point should be when you're absolutely positive there is no way if your life depended on it that you could get another repetition. If they start to help you before then what tends to happen is people start to back off a little bit saying, okay, now I've got some help and not push as hard. If you go to the point where you absolutely, positively cannot move in any further and you continue to push and it's not going, then have them help but they should provide only just barely enough assistance for you to be able to re-rack the bar at that point. Okay, and if I'm alone, like how many seconds should I stay like in that stuck position? Well, hopefully you'll be using something to catch the bar if you're alone. What I recommend is a couple seconds. You know, maybe four or five at the most. If you get to a point where the bar has come to a complete stop or the handle or the pedal depending on if you're using pulling or pushing or a leg exercise, when you get to a point where you cannot move anymore, you want to keep trying for at least a few seconds because a lot of times what people will find or what I found with clients is, you know, personally get to a point where they stop but they're not stopping because they're physically incapable of movement. They're stopping because they've gotten to the point where they think they're contracting as hard as they can. But if when you get to that point, you continue to gradually attempt to contract harder and harder, focusing on squeezing the muscles you're using as hard as possible. Occasionally, you'll surprise yourself. You'll think there's absolutely no way I'm going to get this rep. This bar is not moving. And after a couple seconds, you manage to get an inch. Another couple seconds, it starts going further and eventually you're able to get that particular rep. Now after that rep, chances are you're not going to get a second one. You should still try. You probably won't but you should still try. But when you get to that point, you want to keep contracting and try to gradually ramp it up until you're giving it everything that you've got before you set it back down. Now the word gradually there is important. Often when a person starts getting to this point, if they haven't been goached properly, what you'll see, especially on curls is a good example. They'll get to a point where it doesn't go and you'll start seeing them do this. They'll kind of drop the weight a little bit and then pull into it. What that dropping and catching does is elicit a stretch reflex, cause a little bit higher intensity contraction in the muscle. But what it also does is increase the force to where you could possibly pull or strain something. When you get to that point, you want to continue to try and contract as intensely as possible, but you want to ramp it up gradually. You don't want to drop and then push into it. Cause that drop and bounce there, especially when you're fatigued that much, you're not going to have as much control over it. You're more likely to pull or strain something. I wanted to ask you about your take on the meaning of using muscle soreness as a gauge of the intensity or the proper intensity to do a workout. And I just want to add a corollary to that that I notice that I get, if I do even 60% of or 70% in an exercise, particularly like squats or lunges, if I'm coming off of an injury and haven't been working out in a while, I will be sore for seven days. And I've tried, you know, eat, diet, extra sleep, warming up, cooling down. I get sore when I do these exercises. And I also notice when I come back that I make sizable gains. So I don't know, I just always use that in the back of my mind is that if I'm sore the next day, I probably worked my muscle pretty good. And even if I could have done more weight at the time, I know I just, I hold back consciously in squats and lunges because I know that I'm going to be sore shit the next day. Unfortunately, some people have that response, but it varies between individuals and it really isn't a very good indicator of exercise intensity. And when a person starts out, usually the first couple of times they do any exercise, they're going to have a lot more soreness. Some people continue to get sore from exercise. Some people don't get any soreness from the start. It varies from person to person, but it generally doesn't correlate. I've had some people who don't push very hard, but they get very, very sore. And I've had other people and I'm an example. It doesn't matter what I do the next day. You know, I might feel a little fatigued, but the soreness is just not there. Just some people are more sensitive to it than others. Some people are going to notice it for a little bit longer than others, but the best gauge if you're training hard enough is if you're making regular progress on a workout to workout basis. If you're getting stronger, you know you're training hard enough to stimulate that response. When you say workout like once every five or seven days or whatever it comes out to you, do you recommend doing all four or five or the major exercises just in a row that day and then that's your workout for the day? Yeah, for most people, that works best. Now, and then this reminds me of something else is the topic of doing a full body versus splitting up the exercise and workout. If you're doing a workout like this, in most cases, if you do all those exercises in one workout, that's fine. You don't need to spread it out too much. Some people will need to split it up, but it depends on a variation in the rates of recovery of two different things. When you're doing the exercise, you are causing damage to the muscle. If you're lifting with a heavy enough weight, there are going to be microscopic tears in the muscle fibers, and it takes a certain amount of time for these to completely recover. Like Doug had actually mentioned earlier about fast-twitch muscle fibers being now taking a little bit longer to recover. They're very, very quick to fatigue, but long to recover. Slow-twitch muscle fibers tend to be the opposite. Well, in addition to the muscles being worked having to recover, every exercise you do has an effect on the rest of the body. There's an inflammatory response to that damage, and that inflammatory response is cumulative. If you do squats or leg press, and then you do a couple other pushing and pulling movements, every time you do an exercise, the damage to the muscles involved is going to cause an increase in that inflammation. Now, in some people, the recovery of both the individual muscles and total recovery of the body from that inflammatory response might track roughly evenly to where after about four or five days, they're completely recovered both sides. In some people, it might take longer for particular muscle groups to recover than it takes the body to recover from the inflammatory response. The inflammation has died down, but you still have some of that repair and remodeling going on inside the muscle itself. If you have somebody who's got, for example, predominance of fast twitch fibers in the upper body and more slow twitch fibers in the lower body, they might find out that after so many days, their legs are completely recovered, but they find that they're not making the same amount of progress with the upper body. One way to determine, or if a person has all fast twitch fibers, they might just, after a period of time, find that nothing has recovered, not because the inflammatory response has been taken care of, but because the individual muscles haven't. Now, one way to determine whether or not you need to split things up or not is to try cutting the workout in half, staying at the same frequency. For example, if, let's say that your muscles, individual muscles are taking longer to recover than the body's recovering from the inflammatory response. If you cut the workout in half, the inflammatory response is going to be less because you won't have as much cumulative inflammation as many exercises. So that should recover more quickly. If after a certain number of days, you're still not stronger, well then you know that it's not that your body's requiring as much time for the inflammatory response, but it's at the individual muscles. And if after a certain amount of time you are stronger, then you know that maybe it was just the inflammatory response that was the problem. It'd probably be easier if I diagram this, but basically for the most part, doing the full body, you're not going to overstress yourself if the overall routine is brief. But if you find that particular body parts are not progressing while others are, then you can try cutting the routine in half and seeing if they respond to that. And again, it sounds like very little exercise, but you don't want to, it's better to get a little bit more recovery or better to do a little bit less exercise than your body can tolerate than to do too much, too often, in which case rather than having a little bit slower progress, you'll shortcut it completely. Could you talk a little bit about breathing and set? About what? Breathing technique? Breathing. Actually, the best breathing technique is none. Most people try to set a pattern to the breathing, exhaling while lifting, lifting, inhaling while lowering, but it's best to just breathe as relaxed as naturally as possible during the exercise. If you start to time your breathing with the movement, one, it tends to cause people to perform what's called a vulcelvis maneuver, or to attempt to exhale, they're tightening up, but closing their glottis, so it increases the pressure in the thorax and abdomen, and that pressure can cause an increase in blood pressure that in some people can lead to what's called an exercise-induced headache. Two, three times as bad as a migraine, they can last from a couple days to a couple of weeks, so they definitely don't want to get one of those. Also, if you're moving at a controlled pace, suppose, just for the sake of example, taking about three to four seconds in both directions and doing a chest press or a pulling movement, if you're training hard enough, it's gonna actually be difficult to slow your breathing down to the point where you're keeping track with that. If you're really, really pushing your muscles, the cardiovascular system is going to be working extremely hard to keep up with that demand, and you're gonna end up breathing pretty heavily. So the best thing is just breathe as relaxed as naturally as possible, better to breathe through the mouth so that you're able to get in and out as much air as you can. And some people find it actually helps if they almost try to over-breathe. I have a question. I heard you talking about direct work earlier, I think, to the cabs, I was been in and out of the room. Do you have any comments on direct work to the lower back, like with machines, if you have access to them, or like Doug showed in a video, I'm pretty sure you saw it maybe two months ago, where he was able to do lower back work directly, pretty close, without machines. You know what I'm talking about? Or the video? I haven't seen it, but it depends on the equipment. If you're doing a barbell squat, or even if you're doing barbell rows, you're gonna get a good amount of back work there. If you work up to where you're lifting a very, very heavy weight in either squats or doing a barbell row, you're gonna get about as much back work as you need from that. If you are using a leg press, it's more effective for the legs, because like Doug mentioned earlier, with the skill aspect of things, the more you can focus on the muscles that are working and the less on the skill of performing the exercise, the more you're gonna get out of it. With a leg press in particular, as opposed to a squat, the resistance is directly applied through the hips. Either you're pushing a seat back, or you're pushing a pedal away from the seat. The low back is not an issue. Balancing weight isn't an issue. You can focus entirely on the pushing movement with the legs. If you've got a good leg press, it's actually a better option than a squat as far as hip and thigh development. And I believe Bill's gonna talk a bit more about the specifics of that tomorrow, so I won't go too much into mechanics of the squat and leg press. But if you're doing the leg press, and if you're doing a machine row where your chest is supported and you don't need the low back muscles, then an isolated back movement might be beneficial if it's really an isolated back movement. And the reason I say that is because a lot of machines that are labeled low back machines are not back machines so much as hip extension machines. If you have access to a nautilus low back machine, access to a medx low back machine, both of those are excellent. Otherwise, you're working your glutes and hamstrings more than the low back in those other exercises. Now if you're doing a pull down exercise, and if you're doing it correctly to where you're leaning back slightly, your low back is going to be involved in that too. So even if you're using machines, it's really actually very difficult to do any exercise without the trunk muscles being involved. The idea that there's actually any such thing as isolation and exercise is somewhat incorrect. There's no such thing as a pure isolation exercise. Anytime you're doing an exercise, you have two things that you're doing. You're producing the desired exercise movement and your body is working to prevent all of the undesired movements that would either take you out of proper positioning or alignment. 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 and 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. Again, 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 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. I can't, is this loud? I can hear you a little bit. Yeah, okay. I have a few questions. I'm actually training for competition, power lifting, and a lot of people I know who have actually gotten really good state records, not state champions. They train at a minimum of five days a week, but they separate their workouts to upper body or lower body and things like that. I'm wondering like, do you have any differences or advice on power lifting? Because it's not a lot of reps, you're just trying to get your one rep maximum a lot higher. But with a power lifting, there's additionally the specific skill of performing the exercises that you're being tested on. There is 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 50s now. He is a regional power lifting 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 power lifting 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 power lifting competition specifically where you 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 power lifting 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 power lift, 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 power lifting workouts so that you're not doing them too frequently to where you're overtraining. One last question. Do you have any advice on supplements because 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's 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 overhyped, overpriced 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's maybe 75 to 80% of what they can lift once. It varies from person to person. For the average person, this is gonna be about 10 repetitions or about a mid-range is maybe about 60 seconds or so. Some people are gonna 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 do a little better with longer time, 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 somebody with 10 repetitions, but they really are put together in such a way that they would do better with something like in a seven or eight range, you'll find they typically get stuck at seven or eight. 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. And 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. So 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 in weight, it's best to go up in a little bit smaller increments. Rough guideline would be about 5% or 5 pounds, whichever is less. Now even when a person's 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. Oh, 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, how often should I be training, and basically kind of 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. So 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. And I'll just, 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.