 I'm Drew Bay, a personal trainer. I've been training people since about 1993, during which time I worked with a lot of the top people in high-intensity training. It's actually inspired to become a trainer when people started asking me questions about my own workouts. Prior to using high-intensity strength training, I'd done a lot of the more popular bodybuilding routines, nonsense out of the magazines. And for years had been stuck at around the high at 140s, at the most low 150s. Within a period of maybe about six months after starting high-intensity strength training, I went up about 30 pounds, solid pounds, got leaner in the process. People started asking me in the gym, what are you doing? And constantly, it started working with other people and their workouts and decided, this is something I enjoy, it's something I could do for a living. My biggest influences in exercise were former Mr. Olympia Mike Menser and Ken Hutchins, who was a researcher for Nautilus. The general principles that I follow with my training came from what I learned from Mike Menser and the specifics of exercise instruction and a lot of more advanced things came from Ken. Well, the biggest general influence has been the philosopher, Ayn Rand, and her philosophy of objectivism, which I learned about through Mike Menser. It would actually be easier and a much shorter list to say the few things I see people getting right in the field of exercise than the misconceptions about, and this is a conservative estimate, about 99% of the things you see most people doing when they think they're exercising are complete nonsense, utter bullshit. The biggest three things that people do wrong and this is with regards to whether they're training for bodybuilding, for fat loss, athletics, all across the board, the biggest mistakes people make exercising are to do way too much, too often, and without anywhere near enough effort. If most people cut their exercise volume and frequency in half and doubled the effort that they put into their workouts, they'd immediately start getting a lot better results. Some of the biggest misconceptions in the field of nutrition are the idea that large saturated fat intakes are bad for you and that there's an association between saturated fat intake and cholesterol and heart disease. And along those lines, the idea that people should eat large amounts of grains, starchy carbohydrates. In fact, the opposite is true. A lot of people have made it out to be this devil claiming it's responsible for increase in amount of cardiovascular disease, rising rate of obesity, but going back as far as Ansel Keyes in the 1960s and the lipid hypothesis, none of these claims have had any real science behind them. A lot of the beliefs that we have about saturated fat and cardiovascular disease are based on a lie in Ansel Keyes' research that he initially presented, trying to show a correlation between saturated fat intake and rates of cardiovascular disease. He left out data from all the countries that disproved his hypothesis. So basically anything that didn't agree with what he was trying to say, he just cut out. Since then, since the 1960s, there has never been any study that has conclusively tied saturated fat intake or even fat intake in general to cardiovascular disease. If anything, it's the inflammation resulting from chronically elevated insulin levels, which is caused by people consuming large amounts of grain products and other simple sugars that have led to increases in cardiovascular disease. The fats have almost nothing to do with it. With regards to body composition, body fat gain versus loss, fat intake is not as big of a deal as overall calorie intake. And it's actually better for a person to get their energy from fat calories than from consuming too many carbohydrates, especially a lot of simple sugars and grains. See, a lot of, and this is a little bit of a simplification, but to a large degree, fat storage is driven by insulin. And while carbohydrate intake causes an increase in insulin, fat intake does not affect insulin. For the same intake and calories of fat versus calories of carbohydrate, you would end up with less of the fat coming in stored as fat than the carbohydrate because you don't have the same increase in insulin. Again, assuming same calorie intake. Three biggest mistakes I see people doing with regards to nutrition, first off, is just not paying any attention to it to begin with, particularly where fat loss is concerned. People think that they can just exercise and lose fat. Well, exercise makes very little contribution to fat loss. It's almost entirely a matter of diet. Second, and along those lines, people tend to take in far too many starches, far too many grains, far too much processed foods in general. And in doing so, usually way too little protein. The majority of people do much, much better to increase their protein and fat intake and reduce their carbohydrate intake and cut out grains and processed foods altogether. A lot of people say, oh, I don't have the time or healthier food costs more tons and tons and tons of excuses. Most of those excuses come down to, again, laziness. A person choosing convenience, choosing what is expedient or thinking in the short term, what is going to satisfy them at that particular moment as opposed to their long-term health. They need to make a decision. And that decision is what is really important to them. Initially, you have to do a little bit more planning, but in the long run, it's actually going to be more convenient for you if you're willing to do that planning and stick to it. And no, it's not gonna be more expensive. You can buy healthier foods. You can buy nice cuts of meat. You can buy a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables and still save money because you're buying based on a plan. You know we need this much food because this is what we're gonna have on these days and you don't end up with a lot of it going to rot and you don't end up spending a ridiculous amount of money for items at a fast food place. So it's not hard. It's not that inconvenient as far as your time. You just have to educate yourself about what you need to do, plan for it and stick to the plan. I think a lot of what people consider conventional wisdom in different areas is outright wrong. Everybody is ignorant. We only have a limited amount of time, so much that we can devote to learning about different things and people tend to have a few areas that they focus on that they might be educated about. But nobody can know a large amount or everything there is to know about everything. So if you have a particular area of interest and if you have the necessary critical thinking skills to sort a fact from fiction, you might be aware that certain things in your field are not what most people think, but there's no knowing how much of what is generally accepted about other things is or isn't correct. For example, because I've been fortunate enough to work with real experts in my field and because I do have the critical thinking skills, I know that the majority of what people believe about exercise, a lot of what's considered common sense is outright bullshit. Best that I can hope to do is do my homework if I wonder about something and be critical in thinking about the answers that I get. In the fitness industry, the idea that a person can lose fat doing aerobics is based on the idea that a person burns a significant amount of calories doing it. Most people hear things like training studios advertising that a person's gonna burn 1,000 calories doing a kickboxing class or they got a gadget on TV that if a person rides this for 30 minutes they're gonna lose so much pounds of fat per week. The average person, if they did a little bit of research could find out that pound of fat contains approximately 3,500 calories worth of energy and that these activities don't really burn anywhere near enough that even if a person were to spend an hour or more a day doing them over the course of an entire week that they might burn, might enough to lose maybe a third maybe a half a pound of fat which over the long run is barely anything. Somebody training properly, somebody training less than half an hour an entire week of proper strength training and following a proper diet could easily lose pound and a half, two pounds or in some cases more per week. A lot of mistakes that people make in making conclusions about different areas and especially in exercise and diet is confusing correlation with causation. A lot of times you'll see people reporting on different studies or using studies to justify some claim that they're making saying because this group did this, they got this result. Good example is something that Ken Hutchins brought up once. If you went to a basketball game and you saw a bunch of really tall people running up and down the court you wouldn't make the mistake of saying well if I wanna be taller I should run up and down the court. I see all these tall people running up and down the court that must be how that happened. Now the fact is they're there playing professional basketball because their height gave them an advantage. Same goes for a lot of different exercise studies. A lot of times it's assumed that a person gets a particular physical characteristic whether it's getting leaner or getting more muscle or being able to do something better or longer because of the activity that they're doing. What they fail to consider is that people are drawn to activities that they excel at. Somebody who has an advantage in something who does better at it because they do better at it are going to enjoy it more, they're more likely to do it. A common example is saying exercise and health. Well, you can say that you took a big survey of all these people and the people that exercised tended to be healthier. Well, are they healthier because they exercised or were they more likely to exercise because they were healthier, they had more energy, they were more apt to do so? This is really general, but you see it in all sorts of areas. And like we just talked about a little bit ago with the running and joint health saying that people that ran for such and such a period of time that have been like masters runners, competitive runners in their 50s, 60s or whatever have better health this or that. Well, the fact that these people have better health is usually in spite of the fact of all of their running. If anything, they're lucky that it hasn't wrecked them. The majority of what people believe about exercise and the majority of what some of the bigger fitness organizations and equipment manufacturers are promoting is complete and utter bullshit. These things have become popular not because they're safe or effective or efficient ways to improve the human body, but because they're trendy. These things are based on fad, not science, stuff like Pilates, traditional aerobics or cardio, the use of stability balls, the so-called functional training craze. These are all things that got popular in spite of not being very good ways to train because they were marketed effectively because there's a lot of money to be made. Now I've had a lot of people that have argued that, well, I've done some of these things. I've done Pilates or I've lost fat doing cardio. Problem with this is the fact that a particular person got some result doing these activities is not proof that they could not have gotten better results in much less time and with less wear and tear on their body had they been training properly. A couple places that people can go if they want more information on this, bay.com, it's a b-a-y-e dot com, mikemencer dot com, bodybyscience.net. And if they read the information and I challenge them to apply it, even if it's just for a month or so, they'll find that they're gonna get a lot better results, they're gonna get noticeable results much, much more quickly and with a lot less wear and tear on the joints. Regarding independent versus corporate, that really depends on the individual and the corporation. I think some people work better on their own, some people work better as part of a team and if they do, it also depends on who they're working with. If you've got a corporation where everybody has complementary skills, good communication and a plan and they work together well, then that's great. But if you've got something where there's a lot of infighting or where you don't have the right people with the right skill sets, it can be a nightmare. Another problem with corporations is, unfortunately, you can only be as honest as the most honest person above you in the hierarchy. Especially in industries where there's a huge profit potential. Higher potential for profits, more likely are gonna have somebody in there who is going to look the other way on certain things or maybe do some things that are a little bit immoral. Problem is, if you're underneath that person, then you're either obligated to go along with it if you wanna keep your job or get out of the company. So, again, it's really hard to say which is a better way to go. It really comes down to individual circumstances. I'm gonna try and say this without getting too pissed off. Most people seem to not wanna take responsibility for themselves and in a lot of different ways. Financial, the people out there, they don't wanna take responsibility for their kids. They don't wanna take responsibility for their actions and going along with not wanting to take responsibility for their actions, a lot of people don't seem to wanna take responsibility for their health. Go outside and just look around anywhere, a mall, an airport, a busy street, anywhere where there's a lot of people and you will have a harder time finding one fit person than a fat person. And the problem with this is that the burden is on everybody else because of the costs on, not just healthcare, but every single thing, every service we use, every product we buy. If a person is in poor shape, they're not as productive. If they're not as productive, they don't give as much to the company they work for. That company has to pay a certain amount of money to produce a product or to provide a service. And if because that person is too lazy to take care of themselves, they're not fit, they're not able to function efficiently, whatever that product or service is, that costs more money. So it's not just healthcare, it is literally everything. The biggest danger that younger generations face is the increase in government. People are becoming more and more willing to give up what little freedoms they still have in exchange for handouts from the government, in exchange for the idea, not the reality, but the idea that they're getting more and more security. Now, the problem with this is that a parasite, which is literally what a lot of people are becoming, cannot survive if it kills its host. The host are productive, hardworking people. The people who innovate, the people who are inventing, the people who are out there starting corporations, coming up with new products and new services. And the parasites are all the people who would rather sit at home, who would rather have the government babysit them, babysit their children, and provide them with everything they need. Somebody has to pay for these things. And they say, oh, the rich, the rich have to pay for this, the rich have to pay for that. They have all this money. Well, government, take it from them, give it to us. I enjoyed participating in the event, I enjoyed speaking there. And although I wasn't talking about, I guess you refer to it a game, I think that all of it ties in. Although what most of the people were talking about was nuts and bolts of this is how you go out about and do this, physical fitness and bodybuilding, development to the physique in particular, are as much a part of it as a psychological side. As with any industry, they can't generalize. Within the pickup artist industry, I'm sure you've got some people who are scam artists. There's probably a couple out there who are selling complete bullshit. And on the other hand, you've got people who are actually providing an important service. Now, I've been married for five years, been with my wife for a total of 10 years. So it's been years since I have gone out and tried to pick up any women. But when I was, this was pre-internet. I'm gonna show my age here a little bit. And over the past decade or so, people have been more and more reliant on technology for communication and for socialization. You got people going into chat rooms, people meeting people on MySpace, Facebook, whatnot. But as a result, a lot of people are losing the ability to interact with others face to face. And this has probably resulted in a lot of people just not knowing how to go out and really meet somebody, how to go to a club, how to go to any kind of event and know how to pick up a woman and not make a complete fool out of themselves in the process. So although maybe 20 years ago, it might have seemed like, well, who needs classes on this? I think now more than ever with people being more and more disconnected because of technology, something like this is a real service to people who may not have developed the social skills that they would have if they were out there more. I met Anthony through another personal trainer. I maintain a blog on high intensity strength training and Anthony maintains a blog on a variety of lifestyle issues. And we started communicating through the internet, and I had Anthony over to try out a prototype of a motorized exercise machine that I was testing at the time. And just from there, stayed in contact. One thing led to another and I ended up speaking at the last 21 convention. I wasn't sure what to expect speaking at the 21 convention, but it sounded like it would be an interesting event and most of the audience was obviously there because they wanted to focus on appearance improvements, physique enhancement, and that's an area that is of primary interest to me. I've always, first and foremost, considered myself a physique transformation specialist in terms of personal training. More so than athletic training, more so than any other aspect of fitness, my focus has been making people look better. And considering the content, the focus of the 21 convention, I figured this is a chance for me to talk about something that interests me and talk to people who are gonna get a lot of benefit from it. I actually didn't spend a lot of time at the event. I hung around a little bit before my presentation and got to here. I think it was Adam Lyons speaking. And my impression without having seen any of the other presentations was just from his talking with people offstage on a personal level that this is a science. And this is not just a bunch of guys sharing tips that they picked up on meeting women. This is a psychological science. I was very impressed. And that's just with what little bit of informal conversation I picked up. It's definitely something that if people feel awkward talking to women, if people aren't sure of themselves or want to do better in social situations that they would benefit a lot from going to. Now, while a lot of the guys that are coming to the convention are probably a lot more interested in learning game, they shouldn't ignore anything else that's going to give them an edge. And being healthy, being physically fit is going to make a difference. Now, going back millions of years, our genes have been programmed so that we find people who are fit, people who are healthy, more sexually attracted. We all don't have to look like fitness models, but just being a little bit healthier could give a person just enough of an edge that they're going to be more successful. I think that it's good that the 21 convention is broadening the lifestyle topics that it's covering because ultimately, if you want to be more successful with women, you have to focus on yourself first. You have to create yourself as somebody that women are going to be attracted to. And that's not just about game, but being healthy, being savvy financially, and being an all-around well-developed person having a balanced lifestyle.