 Introduce our next speaker. It's Keith Norris. He's a returning speaker to the 21 convention, and he's a regional manager, sorry, at Efficient Exercise. He's a founding partner of Paleo FX, and you can find more about him on his website at incestralmomentum.com. Help me welcome Keith. Well, yeah, I saw Robbie out in the lobby when we first came in. I was like, couldn't really, you know, it's dramatic. Awesome, good job. Wow, so following Skyler, so I'm gonna mention Skyler quite a bit here and just let everybody know this is being taped. So Skyler had a presentation right before mine, so I'll make reference to Skyler's talk quite a bit through here, but Malibu Marks. We just saw Mark at the incestral health symposium last week, so God, I wish I would have had that when we went up there. Freaking awesome. So I'm gonna kind of segue off of what Skyler talked about, the biomarkers of aging. I'm gonna talk a little bit more health versus performance, and I'm gonna talk about the efficient exercise prescription, or my version of it anyway. At efficient exercise, we give our trainers the leniency to kind of craft their own programs, as long as it's under our dictates, and as long as the number one rule is adhered to, that number one rule being that the client is made healthier and made better by whatever that trainer does with them. So my take is a little bit different than Skyler's take, which is a little bit different than Leslie's take, but we all follow in the umbrella of making a patient very, very healthy, very, very efficiently. One of the things we have to battle as trainers is the perception that to be healthy, one has to train like an athlete, and I can tell you that is patently wrong. If you want to be an athlete, you can do it efficiently, but you're gonna have to put in a hell of a lot more time than what it takes to be healthy. And conversely, someone shouldn't think that, so we just saw the Olympics recently, right, and you see all these athletes in fantastic shape, and the problem is the general public sits back and thinks that those athletes are healthy, and I can tell you that they're not. If we were to look at their internal biomarkers, they're high-performing people, but health, that's a totally different issue. These people are essentially Ferraris that are one bolt falling off away from a total crash, essentially is what they are. Can they get back to being healthy after their competitive careers are done with? Absolutely. They certainly can't if they train properly, but to be healthy, you do not have to train like an athlete to do that. Let me see if I can figure out this clicker. I'm a Texas State guy, so we'll see what happens here. Ha! All right. So why am I up here speaking to you? What qualifications do I have? I don't have a science background. Actually, my background is in political science, but I have been involved in strength and conditioning since the time I was about 11 or 12 years old, and I'll get into that just a little bit. I just wanted to let you guys know what my background is because my background colors how I approach training. Totally, totally colors that. So I'm a fishing exercise is Austin Area Regional Manager. I'm a founding member of PaleoFX Austin Partners, which puts on the PaleoFX Symposium here in Austin. For those of you who are interested, that's going to be this spring, last week in spring. I also, along with my wife, who is a fabulous chef, together we do ancestralbomentum.com. I do the theory to practice part of that. She does the eclectic kitchen part of that. So that kid there is about, I think that's 15 years old. That's circa 19. Oh god, I'm dating myself. We'll just say it's the early 80s, okay? That happens to be at Powerhouse Gym in San Antonio, Texas. What I didn't know at the time when I originally went to Powerhouse Gym in San Antonio, Texas at the age of about 12 years old, was that it was one of the premier strength and conditioning gyms, well, anywhere. Certainly in South Texas, but anywhere. It was an interesting mix of bodybuilders, strength and conditioning athletes, Olympic lifters, and also Arthur Jones-style hit people. I mean, it was everything under one roof. So I came up from an early age exposed to all different kinds of training. I wasn't pigeonholed into any one style. I got to see everything. I got to see the strength and conditioning guys feed off of the bodybuilders, feed off of the Olympic lifting guys, feed off of the Arthur Jones disciples. All of that under one roof. So I've come up from an early, early, early age being very non-dogmatic in my exercise selections. As long as it works, I use it. Whether it's body weight or whether it's the high-end technology stuff, if it works, it's effective and I can utilize it, I'll use it. So not much has changed in, oh God, whatever that's been, 30-something years. Not much has changed. I still hit it. I still hit it hard. I love it. Another thing that I had going for me here is I was exposed early on to fantastic coaching. My original sporting love was track and field and Taekwondo kickboxing. Actually, I stayed more towards the track and field end of things, but I had a fantastic coach at that time and was part of an AAU Junior Olympic track and field team at a very young age. The coach, Lemaniel Cook, was wise enough to let me know that I had some natural talent, but if I was going to compete outside of my small little pond, that I would have to work at it. That the small little bit of talent I had was going to get me nowhere. If I really wanted to be a competitive athlete, I was going to have to work at it. That was probably the first time I heard that, because as a young kid, I was always a fastest, always the best, always the strongest. All of these things. He was the first person who told me, yeah, you're all right, but I've seen kids a lot better than you. That was kind of shocking at the time. It's kind of the cocky little 12-year-old, but at that time it kind of floored me. I thought, well, okay, if that's what it's going to take, that's what I'll do. Also, at that time, a lot of different things kind of coalesced at the same time. I saw the first Rocky movie, the 76 Olympics. All of these things really got me going. Also, at 12 years old, I met Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is a kind of a fascinating story. Actually, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Colombo were doing an opening at a sporting goods store. Doug knows this. Doug was there. We found out. The fact that he actually sat down, there was kind of a break in the action. I was, it's lucky enough to be planted right in front of me. He actually sat down and talked to me for a while. Hey, what's your training? It's the Austrian accent. What's your training like? First of all, he was the biggest human being I'd ever seen in my life. He's actually asking me what my training is like. I'm like, what? It's crazy, but those things stuck with me. Anyway, I guess that's what I'm saying. So I went on, had a pretty good football career. Ironically enough, and Doug may know this kid too, but the JM on his helmet happens to be John Hage. From Marshall, who I ran AAU track and field with as a kid. We had a fantastic sprint relay team. Anyway, John Hage went on to play free safety at the University of Texas here in town. It went on drafted by Buffalo, and then later went on and played free safety for the New England Patriots. The kid tackling him right there had a devastating knee injury at Southwest Texas State and never went any further. So the moral of the story is, shit happens, number one. But number two, I was always, always very interested in what I can do in the strength and conditioning realm to better myself as an athlete. As an athlete, which is totally different from doing things to be healthy. So what is my goal now? My goal now has shifted. I still love messing with an athlete. Any mechanic, if you want a mechanic on something, you want a mechanic on a NASCAR or Ferrari, right? You want to work with the best. But my goal now is no less than changing the direction of the American healthcare delivery system. I know it can be done a hell of a lot better than what it's being done now. Another part of my background is I worked for the pharmaceutical industries for 17 years, so I've been on the other side of the fence. But I know that we can affect the American healthcare system much better from the preventive side than we can on the maintenance side or just perpetuating illness, which is essentially what we're doing with the pharmaceutical industry. What is it we're facing exactly? So if you want to look at numbers, by 2030, more than one-third of the entire federal budget will be spent on Medicare and Medicaid alone. That's pretty sobering, right? So is this fact here. I looked at it another way from my friend Rob Wolf, Medicare and Medicaid cost and projected to consume 300% of the US GDP by year 2030. Okay, so I'm the political science guy, and I know as good as anybody that numbers can be manipulated and words can be manipulated to say anything you want, right? I mean, that's pretty much what political science is. But all you have to do is look at that. Anybody go to their state fair this year? I mean, you don't really need numbers to know that we've got a serious train wreck getting ready to happen with the American healthcare system. And some more numbers to look at. 50% of all Americans will be obese in 2030. Holy crap. And we know that the disease follows obesity, and you're just about hand in hand. So we can't pay for that. And the thing is, we can't run from it either, because even if we are healthy, even if you individually are as healthy as a horse, it's still a financial strain on the nation. It's certainly a financial strain on infrastructure. If we can't, you know, if we're spending 300% of GDP on healthcare, there's going to be nothing left for infrastructure, nothing left for defense, nothing left for anything else. So your quality of life is going to be affected. And it's not like you can run from the U.S. and go somewhere else, because it's the same everywhere U.S. is just leading the pack. So what do we at Efficient Exercise, what are we going to do about it? Well, it's very easy. We get people in. We put them on a nutrient dense diet. Okay. I kind of avoid using the term paleo because it can kind of turn some people off or it's, you know, it's kind of, I don't know, it's kind of an inflammatory word now, paleoprimal, all of this. That can all be wrapped up. All of these diets, paleoprimal, anything that has to do with that can be wrapped up very easily by saying we're going to eat a nutrient dense diet. Well, what does nutrient density mean? It means that a hunk of liver is a hell of a lot more nutrient dense than a Twinkie. It's a hell of a lot more nutrient dense than a bushel of grains. So when you make your food selections, you go down the list of nutrient density. It's very easy to make selections. We also put people on a very, very intelligent exercise program that doesn't take a whole lot of time. And if those first two things don't work, which in probably 90% of the cases, they will pretty, pretty much not all of these cases with a good diet and a smart exercise program, we can, we can reduce body fat levels and tracking right along with that will be any indicator of disease internally as well. But we also have holistic practitioners that we can send them out to for some additional work. This is just something I came up with to a little chart. I came up a graph that I came up with that will give you a visual sense of what it means to be training for health or what it means to train for performance. When we get people in at efficient exercise, whether they come to us because they've had a blood screen and they've been kind of scared into action, or if they come to us because they want to be fit or they come to us for whatever reason, most people we get are down here. They're in a bad way. Interesting thing about this is if we train people for performance, okay, first of all, I guess I should back up and listen to find what fitness or performance is. Fitness is simply the ability to perform a task. And that's all it is. So it's very hard to say was a power lifter more fit than a 100 meter sprinter or so that's kind of hard to define, but that's what fitness is, the ability to perform a task. Health, on the other hand, is more internally driven. Health, I mean, you can look at things like C-reactive protein, A1C, you can look at blood lipid counts. And it's as easy as the inner workings of your organs. You know, is your pancreas pancreas seen right? Is everything acting in synergy? Orthopedically is everything is everything in one piece. So health and performance are totally different and that's going to make a big difference when we get over in this zone over here. This line down here, we could say that's time. So I can bring someone into efficient exercise. I've got a case study I'm getting ready to put up here in just a sec. I can bring someone into efficient exercise, give them about an hour's worth a week in training, and I can raise their performance up. I can increase hypertrophy and what I don't have in here is body fat decreasing, decrease body fat. I can bring their health up to a level in here, which we can, once we get in this zone here and we start coming across, I've kind of got this health line rising, but essentially you can only be so healthy, right? I mean, if everything's in working order, if we have stellar blood work, if we're good orthopedically, if all of our organs are working in synergy, I mean, you're healthy. Now you might be, whoops, Texas State guy, I'm telling you, so we might, we can surely increase performance, that's for sure. But health, that's kind of a little bit murkier, a murkier thing. What happens is, if we want to increase performance, after we reach this baseline of good health, now we're talking about investing some time here. When we get into this zone over here of the competitive athlete, we're going from, say, one hour a week here to 20 plus, and that's no doubt, that's no joke. So when people come to me and they say, you know, I want to be healthy, I'm like, sure, that's an hour a week, we can do that easy. If I have a kid comes to me and says he wants to play Division I football, and he only has five hours a week to invest, I'm going to tell you to find another way to get there, because I can't do it with five, but you'll never get there on five hours a week unless you're just superstar stud, which are few and far between actually. So leveraging technology to achieve ancestral wellness. A deficient exercise, we use everything, speaking of Malibu Mark, I forgot he was in that. There he is. So a deficient exercise, we will use everything. What you see right here is an ARX machine. What we're going to demonstrate in a little bit is a home version of this machine, but there's one of the machines we have actually in our studio. But along with that, you can see back here, we've got a rack, power rack back here, dumbbells, what you don't see back over in the front over here is a big area for body weight exercises. We also have a machine that looks like it came out of the Spanish Inquisition time. It's a leverage machine, which is a fantastic piece of equipment. So we will use everything. And the combination of these methods that we use allow us to drastically decrease the amount of time it takes for a person to work out. My preferred method of using resistance training to achieve health is using high intensity interval resistance training. Well, what is that? If you're familiar with the Tabata studies, where there's a burst of activity in a scaled rest period, traditionally Tabata has been 20 seconds of burst of activity, 10 seconds recovery, wash rinse repeat eight times, four minutes. And from that, essentially this study showed that middle distance runners trained in that fashion outperformed middle distance runners trained in a traditional fashion in a fraction of the amount of time. The only thing that I've done, and this is nothing new, this is not like I came up with this, this is just a mingling of ideas that I got initially at Powerhouse Gym way back when. But what I'll do is I'll use the same methodology using resistance exercise. So it's a burst of resistance exercise, typically 20 to 90 seconds followed by a scaled recovery depending on that person's metabolic fitness level. And then it's just, and then I'll pair that and we'll just keep right on going for 30 minutes. And it's usually paired in a push-pull fashion. In other words, I might do a horizontal push followed by a horizontal pull. And I'll use, again, everything from body weight exercises to the ARX equipment. I'm going to talk about the DEXA scan here for just a second because one of the huge problems that we face as trainers is people focused on the scale weight, okay, is my weight going up or is my weight going down, which means nothing, right? So if I have a guy who wants to put on a lot of muscle mass, right, all he thinks about as he's increased, as the scale is increasing, is that I must be putting on muscle mass. Well, no, you're probably putting on a lot of fat, maybe a little bit of muscle, but it's going to be a lot of fat. On the other side of the coin, I'll have females coming in. And all they want to do is see the scale drop. But the problem is, what are you losing? Are you losing muscle mass or are you losing fat? Oprah Winfrey, back in, I don't know when this was exactly. I'm going to say late 80s, early 90s, sometime in there. She went on a diet and exercise program and lost 67 pounds of something. She claims it was fat, right? And this is a public perception. If she dropped weight, obviously that's fat. The problem is, the way she trained and the way she dieted, if she had a DEXA scan to document this, I would bet that of that 67 pounds that she just wheeled out there claiming it was fat, it was probably 40 pounds if it was muscle. So we know what happened to Oprah following this, right? She ballooned right back up. Now she's got a smaller metabolic engine. She started with less muscle mass than what she started with when she was heavy, right? Yeah, anybody can lose weight. Anybody can drop weight by eating a crappy diet. I mean, it's called DACAO, right? I mean, those people lost some serious weight. They also lost a hell of a lot of muscle mass. So the DEXA scan, what this is, dual energy x-ray, it gives you a fantastic, Schuyler will tell you that it's not the optimum way to measure body fat. There are some other methods we can use, but practically, this is one of the best methods that you can use. Bod pod is a close second. If any of you guys are interested in body composition, if you have access to a bod pod, that's pretty good as well. If you have access to a DEXA scan, that's even better because DEXA scan will give you something that looks like this. It's very, very accurate. And if you look at this right here from a psychological standpoint, I can't tell you how many people that I counsel that flip back to this page and look at that because they make that association. You can look at blood panel numbers. You can look at all these numbers, but you can't run from that. That's you. I mean, that's you on a page. You cannot run from that. So from a psychological standpoint, it's very, very powerful. So the Chris Sheppler, this gentleman that I'm talking about was a collegiate soccer player, was in fantastic shape apparently back when he played soccer. He came to me, he's 33 years old. This is what he looked like when he came to me. One look at him, obviously he's got problems, right? I can tell you physically, he couldn't do a single push up, couldn't do a pull up. I mean, he was in bad shape. This was his initial dexa scan. If you look at this, look at that percent body fat, right? He was devastated when he saw that. And most people are, when they actually get their dexa scans, they're devastated by the results, especially females. Especially females who consider themselves thin, say a size six that comes back and they can have a body fat like that and they are wigged out because they're like, I'm a size six. Yeah, you're a size six, but you know, what's your body composition and that's what matters. Another interesting number, look at that, 84 pounds of fat. These are shocking numbers, right? And these are the kinds of numbers I can give my clients and go, look, we can change this, right? This is bad. This isn't good right now, but we're going to get a hell of a lot better. And now we have a benchmark because I'll show you what comes up next. This is just regionalized. It's the same dexa scan from him, but this is just regionalized. And if you can look, look at that fat mass in the trunk, right? Legs. So we went through. This is about after five or six weeks with Christmas and New Year's thrown into the mix, right? He's happy, right? We're making some serious progress here. Go back. So we're making some good progress. His body fat's actually coming down pretty good. Not bad. His lean mass is going up. Everything's looking good, right? I'm going to show you a picture here in just a second, but he would come in. He's feeling good. Everything's tracking fantastic. His shirts are fitting tighter in the shoulders. They're ballooning in the waist. I mean, he says, belt's coming down. But the thing is, he's got a wedding coming up. And he's like, I've got to get my weight down even further. I want to get my weight down for this wedding. And we keep having this conversation about weight versus body composition, but he doesn't care. He's fixated on weight. So he says, I'm going to continue working out with you, right? But I'm going to step it up. I'm going to step it up a notch. And I keep telling him, don't do this, right? We've got a good thing going here. Don't screw it up. But what does he do? Of course, he screws it up. Get to this. Okay, this is when we're good. This is right before we go off the reservation, right? We got good progress going on. I mean, if you just look at him, we've got excellent progress going on, but it's not fast enough for him. This cannot be done fast. This has to be done slow. He didn't gain all this weight that he gained. And I was telling him this too, 11 years, that's a lot of time to gain. It's not going to take you 11 years to get it off, but you're going to have to give me some time. Give me four months. Give me four months to get you back down. But still, it's not good enough. So he's looking good right here. So in five weeks, he dropped three pounds of fat, pretty good. He dropped three pounds of fat. He gained five pounds of muscle. But look at this. He's wigging out. He's like, I want to lose weight. I'm fricking gaining weight. I've talked to him. Chris, this is muscle. It's muscle mass, right? It's a totally, totally different thing. Now you've got a bigger metabolic engine. Now these workouts that we're doing, these high intensity workouts, now all of this time that you're spinning away from me, you're churning, churning, churning, okay? You're burning calories even when we're not working out with this bigger metabolic engine. He doesn't want to hear that. He wants the weight to go down. So from week six to week 12, the wheels come off. So now I see him. He comes in to work out. He's lethargic. He's starting to have rings under his eyes. I'm like, dude, what are you doing? He's like, well, I'm doing some distance work on the days that I'm off. I'm like, dude, no. Look, if you're going to do something, let's do some interval sprints, right? But he's not thinking that way. He's just, he can't get around it. Also, his diet is now messed up, right? Because if he wants to lose weight, what's the first thing we're going to do? We're going to cut calories. The first thing he does is he starts dropping fat out of his diet. Now he is not only doing high intensity work. He's doing long cardio. Now he doesn't have the nutritional support to support any of this. And he starts auguring into the ground. He's coming in with rings under his eyes. He's lethargic. All of these things. But hey, the weight on the scale is going down. Yeah, it's going down. It's going way down. He dropped nine pounds of scale weight in the following six weeks. But if we look at this, only 2.2 pounds of it was fat. So now after the following six weeks, he has a less muscle mass than when he came to see me originally. Now the wheels have come off. His metabolic engine is smaller. He feels like crap. He's got less muscle mass. Now he set himself up. If he would have continued this course, he would have set himself up for the same Oprah thing, the same thing that happens to everybody that does this kind of a diet. And that's the saying, again, we lost all that harder muscle. And essentially, what Skyler talked about earlier, he gave his body the signal, I don't need this muscle mass. For Christ's sake, you got me doing all this endurance work. That's the last thing I need is to carry around this load. I've got to get rid of this. It's doing me no good. So fitness or health, I'm going to bring this back in to talk specifically about you guys. You really have to figure out what your goal is. You can kind of ride that gray area between fitness and health. You can push your fitness to a certain point because I do that. You just have to be good at manipulating the variables and taking checks every now and again of how your internal health is. But really, you have to choose. Do I want to be healthy? Or do I want to perform? Because once you make that choice, that's going to determine everything else. It's going to determine what your workout is going to be. And it's especially going to determine how much time you invest. Last year, I talked about the four Ts. This year, I've expanded it one to five Ts because if we go down here, and I'll get down to this in just a little bit, the technique and talent portion, I've kind of split up. But essentially, we need to find out what your goals are and to help you figure out what your goals are. Maybe you don't know. Maybe you're like, well, I'd kind of like to be a high-performance athlete. But I've only got two hours a week to devote to it. Well, it's not going to happen. It's just not. I can make you healthy easy in two hours. So maybe we need to readjust your goals. Maybe we have a conversation. You know what? Right now, at this point in your life, you don't have time to devote to being a performance type athlete. We need to bring you back down. We'll talk about, I can make you healthy as a horse in two hours. And maybe that's good enough for you at this time. You also have to figure out what's my temperament or my tenacity. Because there's one thing about it. It doesn't matter what protocol you follow. It doesn't matter whether you want to follow more of a bodybuilding template, whether you want to be a high-intensity training guy or whatever that is. But there's one thing about it. You have to bring a certain temperament or tenacity to it. So that's something else you need to determine. You also need to figure out what tools do I have available to me. An efficient exercise, like I say, I've got everything from ARX stuff all the way down to body weight stuff. Not everybody has access to that. So this is another determination you need to make too. What do I have available? Technique and tools. I equate this to being a chef. Michelle, my wife is a chef and being a trainer or someone who trains themselves is very much like being a chef. And the fact that you can look at a cookbook, you can follow a recipe step by step by step by step by step that template and you will have a meal that's all right. It tastes pretty good. But it has no pop. It's got no kick. If you want pop and kick, you've got to go outside of that template and be a chef. Create your own meal. So you have to find out, number one, what do you even want to do that? Do you want to devote that kind of time to become a chef? Not many people do, right? Because he gets into geekville after a while. I mean, it's asked Michelle what it's like when Skyler and I get together. It's ugly. I mean, it's geekville. I'll also talk about base camp. Skyler talked a little bit about fast twitch and slow twitch too. This is going to determine your training style. So let's say we have a kid or a trainee who's fast twitch and I'll just use myself as an example. I am primarily a fast twitch guy. My training methods look like I'm a train like I'm a fast twitch guy. I stay in the power zone. I'll get to this in just a second. I stay in the power zone most of the time but that doesn't mean that is my only training protocol. I have to train outside of that to get better at being a fast twitch athlete. But the majority of my time is spent in this area. I have many clients who are endurance athletes. Obviously, those are slow twitch dominant people. The majority of their time needs to be of their weight training time needs to be centered around me addressing that portion of their training because that's where they're going to excel. I can make them a little bit better by jumping outside of that band and having them train more power-oriented stuff or strength-oriented stuff. But for them to stay in the game long and for them to be better at what they are already wired, already best suited for, I need to stay in these zones. How do I know whether I'm a fast twitch guy or a slow twitch guy? Well, I guess you could spend $500 and get some genetic testing. You might have an idea. I mean, they do offer that but the best thing is it's really easy. If you are trained, I mean, we're not going to do this to a guy who's never touched weights. But if you've got a couple of years under your belt, you've done some semi-serious training, if you were to take 85% of your one rep max and let's say a squat and go to failure, how many reps can I do with 85% of my one RM? That's going to give you a good idea. I can't knock out very many at 85% of my one rep max. It's not going to happen. I know other people who can sit there and do 10, 12, 15. All that says is their max isn't very high but they can, 85% of it, they can just knock out, knock out, knock out. Guys who are fast twitch dominant have a higher max, obviously, but at 85% they're, I mean, they're still done. You can still knock out about 3, 4, 5 maybe. The idea of frequency comes up quite a bit in training. Well, how frequent should my training be? If we're talking more on the performance side of things, we really want to try to manipulate how many times we can get in the gym or train our specific sport. If we're talking health, for health reasons, this isn't really going to come into play a whole lot. But when you're talking about training, the thing that's going to limit you in your frequency is not going to be muscular because muscle will regenerate and muscle fiber will recuperate pretty quick. What we're really talking about is the nervous system recuperating. This just gives an idea. This is from Charlie Francis via Don, or Dan, not Dan French, Dan John. First time I went through there, not Dan French. That's another guy. But what happens is if we do very, very explosive work, let's say sprints, for instance, at 100% effort. Let's say heavy power cleans, heavy power snatches, things of that nature that are super explosive and super taxing on the nervous system. I might not even get sore from that training. I might not even get sore from doing that kind of stuff, but they will be wiped out the following day. Well, why are they wiped out? It's because a nervous system is freaking smoked. Now, can I train the following day after doing that? Yeah, certainly I can. I can do isolation work. I can do a little bit of upper body work, lower intensity stuff. So I can train just about every day if I'm smart enough on a program right, and I can cycle these things through. What I'm not going to be able to do is come back and do another explosive session, probably not for a few days. This is very in equals one when we start talking about this, but just in general, you're certainly not for the next couple of days going to be able to repeat that. If you do, then you're going to dive off the cliff and you're going to be on that strength and performance curve way on the other side, having fallen off. Force velocity, something else that you want to think about when you're manipulating your workouts. This stuff here can be easily done with just about any in any gym. So for speed work and this really should be over speed stuff. For instance, running at a slight decline over speed work, taking a swing with a lighter bat, lighter golf club, really emphasizing speed work, strength speed, normal sprints on a level ground. For instance, power work. We're talking power clean, power snatch, traditional Olympic lifts, speed strength. You can take the Olympic lifts, raise a weight such that the bar speed slows down a little bit, just a bit. So now you're doing high poles and things of that nature. All of this stuff can be done in traditional gym, but what is very, very hard to hit is right here, maximal strength. And the reason it's hard to hit is do you really ever tap into that? So traditionally we've been able to train in a strength and conditioning environment. We've been able to train with chains or bands on the bar to be able to force an extreme effort throughout the entire strength curve. But that's very, it's cumbersome, it's time consuming. And it's inaccurate in a way is I can't precisely weigh these chains perfectly to match my strength curve. If I could, if I could do that, what I would come up with is an ARX machine, because that's exactly what the ARX machine does. It maximizes your, maximizes the force output that you can develop throughout the entire range of emotion. And we'll get into this in just a little bit, but because we'll actually do a demonstration up here with the home version of that. Force velocity curve, this is coming back to the power, the power output. In my opinion, whether you're training on an ARX, whether you're training more traditionally in a bodybuilding fashion, any type of training, it's my belief and it's from what I've seen in the field for many, many years. If we, if we can maximize the power output in any one area, that is an effective repetition. So if I could leave you guys with one thing that would be it, how do you want to maximize each repetition? It would be very, very, or a very, very controlled descent, maybe a thousand one thousand two thousand three and explosive positive. That's pretty much what I call the perfect repetition. In the reason, the reason I do that is to try in every exercise, no matter if it's a bodybuilding isolation exercise or no matter if it's power clean, something like that, I'm trying to maximize power output with each stroke. That if you can do that, that's going to minimize the amount of time that you spend overall in the gym. It's going to give, it's going to be able to get you in and out a lot faster and spend in two and a half hours every day in a gym if you can, if you can try to hit that with every exercise. And I think that's about it. I'll take questions now. I'm sure there's probably some questions. I threw a lot of stuff at you guys. Each one of these, each one of these ideas I threw out at you, I mean, that's a rabbit hole. That's a whole other two hours that we can go down. I mean, I'm just, this is just tip of the iceberg overview. Just give you guys something to think about. In trying to determine whether you're more toward the fast twitch or the slow twitch, I find that with something like squats, I could probably do the 10 times at the 85% or something like bench press I can do maybe closer to the three as well as the 10. So how would you determine that? Yeah, so it's not uniform throughout the body. I mean, and that's just an indication or just kind of a guide, right? Because everybody is that way. No one's going to fall perfectly like that. And it could be that you really haven't tried pushing your max squat up too. So do you really know what your max squat is, right? Most everybody knows what their max bench is, right? Because everybody's bench press savvy, right? Monday is national bench press today, right? So everybody knows what their bench press max is, right? So I would assume that you're probably more fast twitch oriented. You just haven't tried pushing your max squat up yet. That would be my guess. When you were talking about the hit workouts, I like to do them, but I was just wondering what your idea was for like the ratio of rest to work. Yeah, I've heard two to one, one to two, like, yeah, I, you know, it depends under my philosophy and under my training system, it depends on whether I'm trying to push more of the strength end of the continuum or more of the metabolic conditioning end of the continuum, if that makes sense. So if I'm, if I'm more concerned at this period in time, or with this particular client trying to get that client's strength up, I'm going to extend the rest period in between, in between sets. And that's to say, would be the difference between maybe 30 seconds or 20 seconds and someone I'm trying to get more of a metabolic hit to, to maybe a minute, minute and a half and someone I'm working more of the strength stuff. And that, again, that's a thumb rule tool, but that's in general. So in general, as you move towards trying to concentrate on strength, you're going to want to increase the rest period. If you want to work more metabolic conditioning, you decrease the rest period. Hi. I just wanted to thank you for your presentations in the past. I have the best blood pressure of my adult life because of it over the past two years. One thing you talked about explosive movements. And I know that one of the cardinal rules that we've kind of heard is not to jerk during our, so how can I be explosive without jerking the weight? You'll see that in just a second whenever we bring it. So that's another advantage of a, that's another advantage of the, of the arc fit equipment is I can explode into it and I'm not jerking. Okay. So that's one thing. Now, if you're talking more traditional barbell lifts, so there's a play here between the risk to benefit ratio. If I'm training an athlete, okay, and this is totally, if I'm training an athlete, that athlete is not going to be able to perform anyway if he can't jerk the weight, you know, especially a football player, right? So he's going to have to, already he's pre-selected for that motion. If I'm training a normal client that just wants to be healthy, yeah, I'm going to, we're not going to, you know, Olympic lift derivatives aren't going to be in the mix. They don't need to be, you know, it's, I can find many other exercises other than an Olympic lift derivative for someone who wants to be healthy, why even go there? This is a, this is kind of the headbutt I have with a CrossFit crowd, right? I mean, why do some of those exercises, especially with a client under fatigue, why do that? I mean, you're just, you're just asking for trouble. I mean, unless, unless that person is going to compete in the CrossFit games or something, and even then I would train them different to where they were not beating themselves up in training so that they can get to the games. And I do train some guys who are trained with us at Efficient Exercise to get better at CrossFit. And I can guarantee you I'm not having them do crazy ass, you know, 50, 50 snatches. I mean, it's just, it's ludicrous. But to answer your question, you have to kind of make that determination by training for health and by training for performance. If I'm training for performance, I've got, I'm going to have to give a little bit more leeway on that side, on the safety side, just a little, not a lot, but a little. But if you're training for health, yeah, you don't have to. I can explode into a weight and not jerk, if that makes sense. Okay. Hi, thank you for coming. I really enjoyed the presentation. So you, you distinguish between health and fitness. And I remember you gave an example, health, I mean, one hour fitness 20 hours. So the average folks, I guess, are between eight and five and 10, I guess. So what's that? Is that health or fitness? So that's a gray area, right? Let me go back to that. If we can get back to that real quick. Turn it off. That's all right. So that's a gray area, right? If you just want to focus on health, then I can get you there in an hour, roughly a week. Then we start grading out. Actually, between health and performance, it's probably an exponential increase, right? It's not shown good on that graph, but it's probably an exponential increase to where you get to just, just on that verge of overtraining and unhealthiness, which is an n equals one determination, because what might be, what might be my off day might be your full bore day. You know what I mean? So this is kind of a, this is kind of an n equals one determination. I just throw those, those hour numbers out there just to give you an indication. That's good. That's going to change for everybody other than the health. Everybody, everybody can be trained efficiently for health purposes in roughly an hour a week. If not, you're doing it wrong. But then we move from that into the performance side of it, and that's where it starts to get murky. So for instance, my personal training, I'm probably, you know, seven hours a week, maybe somewhere in there, roughly, just to give you an indication, but I'm not training for anything specifically. I just like a little bit more performance under the hood. Now, if I were to train for a specific event, that would, they would have to go up. Whether that event is a bodybuilding contest or whether that event is a sporting, you know, sport specific, I would have to spend lots of time training skill too for a certain sport. I don't know if I answered your question sufficiently or not. A great presentation. I've lost 25 pounds doing paleo diet over the last three, four months. I just started doing jiu-jitsu a month ago. I'm 44. Gathered over your presentation, the one before cardio is not good. What should I be doing? So it's not, it's not that cardio is not good. Sport specific cardio is a necessity. So there's a big difference between cardio for health, which is, you know, it's not going to happen. Skyler went over that in his presentation. It's kind of, it's not. If you want to be healthy, cardio is the wrong way to do it. Endurance training for your specific sport is a totally different manner or a totally different subject. So I guess in saying, you know, are you going to be metabolically trained for your sport by lifting weights? No, you're not. You're going to have to do some sport specific training on top of it. That's about the easiest way to say that. So is it safe to assume you're not a huge fan of P90X? Yeah, it's safe to assume. I just, my question was, is it safe to assume you're not a huge fan of P90X? Yeah, not really. I, you know, it's every six months, there's going to be a new something come out, right? I mean, P90X has a lot of marketing behind it, obviously. For people who are otherwise healthy, you know, it's probably not bad. But what happens is, people who are not healthy try to do that kind of stuff in hopes of getting healthy and they get hurt, get burned out, lose interest, all of that. So I guess it kind of depends on who you are and where you're trying to go. So to say whether it's good or bad, you know, it's better than, you know, if you're a semi, if you're a fairly healthy person, is it better to do P90X or sit on the couch? I would say do P90X, you know. Is it the best thing you could do? I don't think so. It's hardly. Cool, yeah. Two quick questions. One, do you guys have Dexascans in your studios? And the second is just fast hit, twitch versus slow twitch? Do you think that is, it's more genetics as in like body type, or is it more early conditioning if you're like a competitive athlete? Yeah, I'll answer the second question first. So it's a huge genetic, it's hugely defined by genetics, but, and this is a big question, right, and especially in the strength and conditioning world now. Can the central nervous system be trained? And can someone become more fast twitch dominant? Or is, can someone, they wouldn't say dominant, can someone increase their fast twitch profile? Seems to be that yes, you can a little increase your fast twitch, the amount of fast twitch fibers that you possess. Whether that is enough to make a difference, we don't really know, because it's these things are very, very hard to study because it's so individualized, right? The only way to properly study it would to be to train a twin or make, you know, somehow time regress somebody and train them again a different way. These things are extremely hard to to ferret out, which is why we look so much to experience coaches and what's happened in the field to kind of make these determinations. So so can someone train in such a way to to increase the number of fast twitch fibers? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think it's been determined through scientific studies. I believe there have been studies that have shown that slow twitch fibers can be recruited and actually, and I think it has more to do with the invert and Doug can probably help me with this more the how that particular muscle is, how can I say, wired for lack of a better term, which would be determined by your training. And can someone, can someone's central nervous system be trained? In other words, can we make somebody faster? And I think we can to a small degree. So I'm not ever going to be able to take a slow kid and make him, you know, even a high school champ, it's not going to happen. You have to have a certain amount of genetic material to work with first. Can I make a fast kid faster? Oh hell yeah. Can I make a slow kid faster? Yeah, I can make a slow kid faster too, but the window's pretty narrow right now anyway. Your second question about a dexa scan, usually you're going to find those in a university setting. For instance, here in Texas, University of Texas has one, Texas A&M has one, maybe in a medical setting as well, but usually a university setting with a strong, with a strong exercise science program. Do you send your clients, do you send your clients like to UT or? Yeah, we send them to University of Texas. We have a good working relationship with UT. So that's where we send our clients. In terms of self experimentation, how do you know what variables attract? And when you have that data, how do you discern causality from it? Yeah, so this is a big thing, right? So it's a correlation or causation. So again, to go back to the Olympics, watching the Olympics, and this is, this is a, we've talked about, and I can't remember who it was, is it Talib maybe who made the reference to this, to the swimmers, right? Everybody goes to the swimming finals or watches the swimming on Olympics and you see these guys and gals up here and you think, oh, I want to look like that. So if I swim, I'm going to wind up looking like that, right? Well, no, you never saw the junior high swim team, right? That had every freaking shape imaginable. And it's just these kids that happened to have everything, had had the big wingspan, had the torso, had the big web-like hands, had the big feet. All of this stuff was predetermined genetically, right? They were the ones that filtered up through. So it's very hard to, it's very hard to distinguish this, the correlation-causation thing. Do you have a specific, specifically, what's your, I mean, in your personal experience, would you be saying, you know, what methodology works best, maybe? I mean like sleep, caffeine intake, other nutrients, things like that and how it affects your performance? Yeah, so you know, the best way that, okay, so what I do for me personally, I track overtraining because I want to know what it is, what those things are that push me into the overtraining zone. And I want to know what it is before I even get there. I want to know what those markers are before I even hit there so I can stop before I get, before I go over the ledge. The things I look for are not things that are easily tracked in a, in a numbers driven way. So a lot of it is internal feeling. A lot of it is mood tracking. A lot of it is, you know, I've been bitchy like four days in a row and you know, I might be pushing things a little too hard. I might joint soreness, things like, things of that nature, the things I really pay attention to to keep myself out of the overtraining zone, but these are things that are very, very hard to quantify. You know, I can't, I can't put a number to it and say I'm at number seven, I need to back off. These are just things that you have to keep track of mentally and you might be able to do some tracking, you know, of your sleep patterns. There are certainly some awesome bio hacks. I mean Dave and Jolly can speak to that a hell of a lot more than I can about certain bio hacks and how to relate that into preventing you from going into overtraining. But I've just been personally, I've just been doing this for so long, I just know internally when I'm starting to hit that edge. This question is going to be basically for me and any other like college guys out there because I recently got into the paleo thing like just like two weeks ago. And my main concern is when I go back to college, I'm going to be stuck with like dining hall food. And I mean, it's all going to be like, CAFO, like really not like limited selection. So what would you recommend? So specifically your question about CAFO meat, right? You don't want to let the ideal get in the way of the good, right? If it's ideal would be all grass fed meat, right? That's the ideal. If all you have access to is CAFO meat, I mean, what can you do? It's you don't want to shuck the whole diet and go back to eating Twinkies just because you can't get grass fed meat, right? I mean, this doesn't make sense. So you do, and I tell this to all my clients, you do the best you can under your circumstance. So like, you know, for dining hall food, you're always going to have a protein, you're always going to have vegetables available. You don't have to choose the pasta, the rice and all the other stuff. You choose the meat and choose the vegetable and you go on. Don't worry about whether it's CAFO or not, right? Whenever you get out of college, you get a good job. You start having some income. Now we can start moving into the grass fed meat and we do the same thing. I mean, I don't eat totally grass fed stuff. It's expensive, especially for the prime cuts. But what we do do is we stretch our dollar by getting ground meat that's grass fed, which is pretty comparable to ground meat that's CAFO raised in Oregon meats and things like that that are pretty cheap and you get those grass fed. So yeah, everybody's got certain compromises they have to make. And if that's all you have, I mean, think about the guys in the military, right? I mean, they're even worse off. And there's a lot of guys in the military who are heavy duty in the paleo. And it's tough. I mean, especially in the field eating MREs, you know, you can do what you can. But yeah, so don't worry, don't worry about it right now. Okay, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up. If anybody has any other questions, I'll be glad to talk to you afterwards out at the dinner tonight or just hanging out up here. And it was a pleasure talking to you guys.