 Question is from Melissa Lenari, S-Y-T. For a woman who lifts alone, should you just ask some random dude to spot you when you want to lift heavy? Is it weird or creepy? Hmm. Who picked this question? I did. Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did. First of all, I had a lot of likes from people that obviously wanted to hear the question answer. I'm trying to put myself in her shoes. And I guess that's a really, really good question. It is a fair question. Especially, we encourage strength training and there's a lot of women, I think, that are really starting to move in that direction. And it's a new area. They're having to do three to five reps and that's a much heavier load and can be scary to feel like what's to do that on your own. And also, to be fair, if you're in the gym and you're a man and a woman comes up to you and says, hey, can you help me with an exercise? You instantly probably assume she's flirting with you or she wants to talk with you. I mean, that's every guy, unfortunately. I know. And I can imagine that that would be a challenge for a woman. She's like, God, I just want to spa. Yeah, I don't want all that, but I just actually, you know, want what I asked. Well, I'll tell you what, spotters were very valuable about 20 years ago. Today, not so much. And here's why. Most gyms have a free weight equipment that you could set up to spot you. So like if, because I'm trying to think, what exercises do you really need to spot her for? Well, this is a, I was going to go the same direction as you where you're going right now. And in fact, maybe Doug, we can write this down too. Maybe Danny can shoot some videos on this. Cause I don't think we've done a series on how to bail out of some of the biggest lifts, like how to bail on a dead lift, how to bail on a squat. Like things did like how to bail on that. I mean, we were just lifting together and I had to bail squatting with Justin and we were caused the discussion afterwards. And you know, Sal was like, man, you bailed from that. Really? I'm like, yeah. No, I would, I always Justin's there. I know Justin would be a great spot. I don't even ask him. I don't want him to. I would much rather, I know my limits. I know how far I want to push you. If I feel my form breaking down at all, I just bail on the exercise. I feel it's way safer. I agree too. Yeah, it's just like you're not so relying on somebody else like making sure they're really hyper paying attention and having the right, you know, leverage to really help you know, in the spots where you could just dump it. Well, I'm trying to think right now, like what are the exercises that you would, that people would really be afraid if you're using dumbbells, mostly squatting, squatting, overhead pressing and bench pressing, especially bench pressing. That's probably the scariest pressing is, but here's the thing. Most gyms will have a power rack where you could set the safety safety bars underneath and you set the safety bar so that at the very bottom of the rep where it's at your chest, the safeties will catch it. So if you fuck up, I can't get it up. You put it down. The safeties will catch it. Then you can shimmy your way out from under the bar or unrack the bar and you're okay. Same thing with the squat. Same thing with an overhead press. You don't need a spotter for anything else. You don't need a spotter for a deadlift. You drop the weight. You don't need a spotter for any dumbbell exercise. You just throw them down onto the ground. Make sure you don't throw them at someone. So really it's just squat, overhead press and bench press. In which case, and like this is what I meant by saying 20 years ago, it was hard to find a gym that had a lot, unless you went to like a hardcore bodybuilding or powerlifting gym, there weren't many safeties for free weights. I mean, you had machines but they didn't have like ones for free weights. Now, if I go to, I go to gyms and almost every single gym I've been to these days that's got a decent weight room has safeties for their benches even. Yeah. You know, you don't even have to use a power cage. You just have the bench press. There's a little arms on the side, set them up so that they're down at the bottom. You don't need a safety. And to be honest with you, I think it's, I think it's better because using a spotter means that the spotter also needs to know how to spot. Yes. There's a skill involved. And I think that's, I think that's what eventually moved me in the direction of never wanting a spot is I've had enough instances where I thought I could just tap, shoulder tap the guy who looks buff or looks fit, you know, come over here. Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to push myself. I'm going to do a, you know, one rep max. Can you spot me? And then they end up spotting me and it ends up being worse. And then I end up hurting myself trying to get the weight up where I wish they would have just taken it up off of me. It's like, dude, why'd you let me struggle that much, you know? And because there's a, especially in, especially in gyms, there's a lot of meat head guys that have this mentality of like, that's what it should look like. You know, one rep, if someone's going really heavy they should be at a sticking point. Come on, you can do this guy and his fingers are right there. Come on. You got this is like, no, if I have a spot, I don't want to break momentum. Yeah. I don't ever want to get stuck and stick there because that's where the issues happen. That's where somebody gets hurt and I would much rather hit that sticking point myself and then realize I'm not going to get this weight today and drop it and bail. Yeah. I think the only one I'd even consider anymore is bench just for the lift off, you know, just for that initial bit. So I could have it like ready to go and then drop in, but I don't want them intervening at all, but it's even then like you should be able to do that first part where you unrack it yourself. And then I know I'd love, I'd like to be able to put the weight down. Here's what happens with the bad spotter. You decide you're going to drop the squat on the safeties, but the spotter fucking thinks they need to help you more. So now they're pulling up harder on you and you're trying to let go. You just gave them a job. So now you've got to fucking lift too or they're pushing you forward. Dangerous. It's better to have, it's better to use a squat rack with safeties or a bench with safeties than if you can't do it, you'd put it down yourself. You're not, the spotter's not sitting there trying to lift it. I told you guys like what happened when I was squatting, I had somebody, I brought somebody over to spot me and they actually ended up like intervening so much right at my sticking point that they pushed me forward. And so I started to fall forward with weight on my back. That's bad. You know, and so then I ended up like falling onto my knee and then like being in a compromised position where they had to get like more guys to come pull it off me and almost like injured me. Have you guys ever got stuck under weight? No. Never? No. Well, you know what? That's probably because I started lifting young in the backyard. Yeah. Yeah. I've gotten stuck under. Oh, stuck like, yeah, I've had that before. Oh, yeah. Before I learned how to, actually that's the first time I learned how to bail. Really? Yeah. I had a bench, I was benching man and the bar, I was, I thought, oh, I think I can do one more. And I was in the backyard. Mom was cooking dinner. So she, that was just me back there. And the weight started coming down and I was like, oh, fuck. And he was just sitting on my chest and I remember sitting there like, what do I, and I was keeping the bar from rolling back on my neck. So I had to like roll the bar down my body, which fucking hurts. You're rolling this bar and then sit up with it across your waist type of deal. That happened to me five or two times. The truth is that 95% of the time you shouldn't even be chasing that kind of weight that you're, you would potentially not be able to get it up. 95% of that. Going to failure causes that. Yeah. Yeah. 95% of the time you should not ever be training that heavy that you would have to bail on a load. Now, I just said I did it the other day and what happened, I'm lifting with Justin, you know what I'm saying? And this is, we talked about this afterwards like no way I would have done that had I not been all hyped up because I took a pre-workout Justin's lifting, he's adding weight into it. I'm not going to be a wuss and be like, nah, drop the weight. I don't want to do that. This is why we don't work out so much. Right. It's just two days later, he chooses to deadlift with me. Yeah. He's like, what am I doing? I swung with Justin. I don't know. You picked the wrong exercises. Oh man. So and that's just it. It's like, I shouldn't have done that. I did it anyways. If I'm going to do something like that and I feel myself stick through it, I'm smart enough now to know that just get out of it. And if you think about it, if you know how to bail properly with the squat, having a spotter there only puts the spotter in danger. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It's better that you just bail on your own or what I say for this young lady, use the safeties, go get a power, go use the cage, learn how to use the safeties or use the bench with the safeties. You'll never need to use a spotter. That's why I think we should have Danny do a video because I teach them how to do that. Yeah, we could do a really good video, especially on bench and on squatting, which I agree is probably the two main ones that somebody needs help learning how to bail on those or set up the safety racks. And then, you know, that's and then use it that way. Forget using a spotter. I'm not a fan of using somebody else as a spotter. And just keep in mind too, this is if you're training that heavy, it should it should be very infrequent that you're doing this. Like you shouldn't be using safety bars and having to, you know, go to failure on most of your workouts. Too much. Yeah, too much.