#2114 Top Ten Workout Mistakes - Harps

adapting and changing bodies, all that stuff. We've even bumped into this topic, but I've never really done a solo, extensive kind of unpacking of what I think is some of the most common mistakes, ranging from just that's kind of not very efficient or very effective through to it might be kind of dangerous for you in that space of how people work out. So if this is not

interesting to you or for you, then jump out. If you are interested in changing your body or joining a gym, or you already go to a gym, or you're on the kind of reinventing yourself on a physiological level, but that fitness, health, wellness, performance, posture, pain, blood pressure, whatever it is, I think you'll find this interesting. So just to give you some context and background for those of you who don't know, and there's no bragging bragster in this.

This is just kind of giving people insight into where this stuff comes from. So this is not a list. I got from anywhere. This is not off the interwebs, this is not this is not out of a book. This is just me, the exercise scientist who's worked in jym since he was eighteen, so worked in gym's been in Jim's owned multiple gyms, owned for gyms. It was the first, if not one of the first PTS in Australia. Co wrote the first personal training qualification, set up, the

first personal training center. Blah blah blah. All of that not meant to be any skyting in that. That's just my journey. That's just practically where I've been. And I started that at eighteen, so that's forty four years ago. And I've worked with professionals, teams and elite athletes and Olympians summer and winter Olympians, blokes in prison, people with disabilities, people with terminal illnesses, people with all kinds of neurological problems,

Parkinson's disease, people coming back from horrendous injuries. I still work with three times a week with my friend John, who's got a traumatic brain injury, a spinal cord injury, and had basically died multiple times after an accident that he had and he's still a work in progress, and I still help out a few friends here and there, but I'm not officially a trainer anymore, but nonetheless still

look through an exercise science lens. Still talk to people most days of my life about something to do with health, wellness, performance training, and so that is where this is coming from. It is very much my thoughts, my insights, my ideas, my observation, my experience, my beliefs kind of intersecting into

the chat. So not advice, not individual advice, not an individual prescription or program, just me talking to you about what I think about all of these individual topics that I'm going to cover, all these ideas or these suggestions that I'm going to unpack with you, and then and then I guess it's up to you what you do, if anything, with this. I'm not going to point you

in a direction. I'm just going to say what I've seen, what's worked, what hasn't worked for me, but also for the people that I've worked with, And as the title kind of suggests, just things that are very common that are just really mistakes or perhaps flawed ideas or approaches.

And often, in fact, I would say more often than not, people are not really aware, so they're not intentionally doing something unproductive or something bad, or they're not intentionally trying to of course derail our own kind of progress or outcomes. But there are so many things to understand with of course health in general. But I'm talking today purely about the exercise component. I'm probably going to focus a little bit more on gym stuff, typical what we would call workout.

But also all of this is pretty transferable, whether or not we're talking about strength training or cardio training or flexibility training, or power or speed or something specific to a sport or something where we are just trying to get leaner and change our body composition. We're trying to do something that is productive and constructive and performance enhancing in a healthy way for our body. So I think most of you, if you're interested in this, will find

this somewhere between mildly interesting and really fucking valuable. So I might do. I've actually got two points here talking about intensity, and one is too easy and one is too hard. No, no kind of light bulb moment there, necessarily, but let's talk about Let's talk about what is too easy.

Let's talk about why intensity matters. So and by that I mean, how hard relative to your ability and your strength and your fitness and your physiology and your anatomy and your injuries and your bioage and your chronological age, how hard are you working out? Remembering that my seven out of ten hard could be your three out of ten, or it could be your eleven out of ten. Because

we're talking about intensity relative to you alone. Doesn't matter how how many reps or sets or volume or how intense somebody else is doing something, because you do not live in your body and vice versa. So we're just talking about what does intensity relate to and what is

its role in changing a body. So apart from the fun and the fitness and all of the things, and the socializing sometimes and all of the reasons we go to a gym, or we go to a running park or a rock climbing all or a CrossFit whatever, apart from all the obvious I want to change my body reasons, there is something that people don't think about too much, which is what is the level of intensity that I need to operate at to make my body adapt, To make my body change, to make my body build muscle,

to make my body lose weight, to increase bone density, to increase range of movement around the joint or flexibility. Because when I build muscle, or when I lower my resting heart rate, or when I find that I can now run at fifteen kilometers an hour for an hour instead of twelve kilometers or ten, what I've done is I have forced my body to adapt. And the thing that I do to my body is I impose some stress on it. So lifting a weight is stress. Going

for a run is stress. Stress in the terms that we think as in distress, dis stress, but you stress which is eu stress, which basically means you're doing something that's somewhere between a little bit hard and really fucking horrible to create an outcome with your body. Now, at one end of the scale, we've got a lot of people in the gym who are kind of going through the motions. Again, this is not individual advice, but this

is what I see. I see a lot of people in a lot of gym training at a level of intensity which will not change their body significantly, if at all, anytime soon. An example is I see someone doing an exercise where they could comfortably do, say fifteen repetitions at fifteen kilos I'm just using a number and a weight, fifteen reps at fifteen kilos. They do the fifteen reps, They're nowhere near exhaustion, They're nowhere near high performance, They're

nowhere near testing themselves or getting uncomfortable. And they put the weight on the floor because old mate, somebody wrote that for them perhaps, or that's just the number that they want to do, and as soon as it starts to get uncomfortable, they put it down. So we need a level of use stress, We need a level of stress. We need a level of discomfort for our body to change.

If I can go and run five kilometers in say thirty minutes, which is six minute kilometer pace, So five k's in thirty minutes, and I go out and I do that Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I do it three days a week. I run the same distance, the same course kind of at the same kind of day, in the same body, at the same kind of speed. What I'm doing is maintaining. Now, if my goal is to stay

the same, or I'm doing the right thing. If my goal is to change, then I need to manipulate the intensity or manipulate the variables or the way that I do this thing to give my body a reason to get fitter, to increase my lung capacity my VO two max, to be able to lower my resting heart rate in the simplest of terms, to build aerobic fitness, right to be able to do a thing that was hard, now

I do it easier. So the way that I would do that, as an example, is over time, I would do maybe the same run, maybe five k's, but instead of in thirty minutes, I do it in twenty eight minutes. Now I'm working at a high level of intensity. And now because I'm doing the same thing, but I'm running quicker and doing it in less time, my body will And of course there's an end point to this, but for the most part, if I'm on the path, my body will adapt eventually able to run five kilometers in

twenty eight minutes and will be kind of easy. And then I should maybe either up the speed or up the distance, or lower the recovery time or whatever it is. We need to keep tweaking these variables, these components of exercise to get our body to keep evolving and changing

and improving if that's our goal. So in the gym, I often see guys in the gym with better genetics than me, who are somewhere between twenty to forty years of age, who've got no injuries or seemingly no injuries, who are full of testosterone, who spend their life with fucking headphones on. Nothing wrong with headphones, or wear headphones sometimes, but we'll talk about the problem with that in a

little bit. And they are training at three out of ten and then wondering why they're not getting ten out of ten results. Well, your body will only do what it has to do based on what you do to it. Should they go in the gym and kill themselves and train to their outer limits? No, of course they shouldn't. We need to be wise. We need to listen to our body. But training at a level where your body has to progress creating a kind of intensity around what you do. So how do we make it more intense

but safely so we don't take crazy leaps. We don't go from lifting X to lifting three X. Of course, we might lift X plus ten percent. Or I might instead of going into the gym and doing the same ten exercises I always do, which I've now adapted to, I might go in and do the same muscle groups but ten different exercises. Now, all of a sudden, instead of doing a regular barbell bench press, I'm on dumb bells. I'm using dumbbells and on a football which is convex

or spherical in shape. And now my shoulders are on a ball, not on the bench, and now my back and my hips are in space, in free air. Now I've got to not only do I have to do the bench press right, It's the same biomechanical movement. I'm still pushing that weight. I'm horizontal or parallel to the ground, and I'm pushing that weight up in the air as I do on a regular bench press, but now my shoulders and my head are on the ball and my feet are on the ground, but everything else is in

free space. So now I need to stabilize my hips and my lower back and my core. And I'm doing dumb bells, not a barbell, which means each weight in each hand is the same, but I'm not holding onto a bar so this is a unilateral movement where I'm lifting let's say twenty k's with my right hand twenty k's with my left hand. Now, because it's not a bar bell, there's much more balance involved. So now I need to use my stabilizer muscles of the shoulder, and

so on and so on. So I do the same exercise in a different way, and the demand goes up on me, the demand goes up on my physiology. And as a result, I do it the right way. I do it sensible, I don't be an idiot. I do it over time and my body adjusts. My stabilizers get stronger,

my core gets stronger. I get used to doing this movement on this ball instead of this bench, which, by the way, is way healthier for your shoulders because doing something on that shape which is round obviously, and it's convex not concave for you as you do it, it allows your shoulder blades or scapula to come into your spine when you do the downward part, so the negative part of the bench press, and when you do that on a bench, a hardish bench, it doesn't allow that

what we call scapular retraction, or in simple terms, your shoulder blades moving across your back in towards your spine. Then as you push the up away from your spine and back out right, that's that's what our shoulders should naturally do do during that movement, but they don't quite often on a bench preser. So, for a range of reasons, right, instead of doing barbel curs, you might do dumbells. Instead of doing you know, push ups with your hands and feet on the ground, you might do one foot on

the ground. So now you've got three anchor points, not four. All of a sudden, this is way harder. So what we're always trying to do in theory, if your goal is improvement, let me underline that if your goal is change, if your goal is better strength, better power, better fitness,

better balance, better coordination, better posture. Right, and this is what most people want, but most people do not train in a way that produces that result, for a range of reasons that I'm about to continue on with here. So now, if you're unsure, train with somebody who's or

get a trainer from minute. I'm not necessarily a big fan of trainers, because, like every other profession, some are fucking terrible and some are brilliant, just like painters, just like bricklayers, Just like every profession, there are people who are great at what they do and people who are less great. Right, so, but perhaps you need to train with someone for a period of time. Maybe you don't, but when you are doing something, this is one of my kind of go tos. Now, if you're a brand newbie,

don't do what I'm about say. But if you're someone who's got some miles on the clock and you've got a bit of a base, you've got some conditioning, you've been training for a while. Let's say you're doing it, and I'm just picking fundamental exercises that we all know rather than some weird random exercise that most of you won't. But let's just say we're doing barbell curls. And it's not about curls or bench press. It's just about picturing

an exercise. Now, you're doing a barbell curl with pickaway. It doesn't matter what the weight is, and you've just taken it from the top of your thighs. When your arms are straight and your palms are forward, and you bring the bar up and you bring it under your chin. Now, what some people will do is they will bend their knees, they will bend their hips, and as they're bringing it up, they'll throw the bar a little bit and they'll straighten

their knees and straighten their hips. Now, instead of it being a single joint isolation movement, which is just biceps and brachialis a little bit of bracchi eyed radialis but in other words, may they biseep exercise? We now make it a hip and a quad exercise and a little bit of a calf exercise. Because we're bringing in all of these other muscles to assist. We need to try

to find the safest and hardest way. So I walk up to you and I say, now, do that exact same thing, but don't bend and straighten your knees, don't bend and straight in your hips, and instead of taking one second per exercise, take four. Now what happens when we see that is or do that is we're using the exact same weight. The weight hasn't gotten heavier. The technique has changed, which is good. We're slowing it right down. But all of a sudden, the intensity goes through the roof.

Not because we're doing a new exercise or something inherently difficult, or not because we've increased the weight, but we've now increased the way we do that thing. Your body responds to intensity and stress. Your body does not respond alone to sets or reps or volume or weight. So it is in your interest if this is if you're in the group I'm talking to you, it is in your interest to figure out how do I train relative to me intensely, effectively, safely. So I am pushing my body.

I'm exploring the edges of my performance threshold right now. I'm not doing anything crazy or silly, so that every workout that I do is somewhere in the ballpark of pretty productive to really fucking productive. Now, are there times where you should ever have an easy day? Sure, if you want to go in some days and just kind of go through the motions, you're a little bit you know, you're not brand new, your energy is not ten out

of ten. You're feeling a bit jaded. My suggestion is, either have a day off of full recovery, which, by the way, sometimes is the best. I'm not talking about be lazy. I'm not talking about fucking off. I'm talking about you understand that you having today off and getting great recovery and maybe a great sleep and hydrating well and eating well is probably overall going to be a better decision than going in the gym and doing a mildly shit workout because you just want to get through

it right. So there are so many variables with this stuff. And what I was going to say before is sometimes I will go up to somebody Obviously you know, I won't go and interrupt the stranger, but somebody that i'm somebody that I know, or someone that I'm working with or whatever, and they will do, let's say, like I said to you, fifteen reps of something, whatever, exercise, whatever weight, and I go, how is that? They go, oh, that, well, that was solid, that was hard. And I'll say how

hard do you reckon you're working? And they'll often say eight or nine out of ten And I'll say, now, I want you to pretend that I am going to give you ten thousand dollars for extra every extra rep that you do. I want you to do as many good reps as you can with good form, not being silly, because I don't think fifteen is anywhere near close to

what you can actually do. And I'm not lying when I say hundreds and hundreds of times in front of the same person with the same exercise and the same weight three minutes after they did their eight out of ten set, and then they then double or trip all the reps. Now, I've spoken about this before. We don't understand our potential, we don't understand what our body is capable of. We are not great at judging how hard

we are working. Now, keep in mind, I'm not saying we all need to go into any training environment and flog ourselves. Of course, So for my mum who's eighty six, a really really good weight might be two kilo shoulder presses. That's a really good weight for my mum. But it's not a good weight for me, and it's probably not a good weight for you. But it's not about a number or a set of reps, or it's about what this does to this individual, and what for this individual

is going to move the needle. So that thing I was about to talk about is called rate of perceived exertion. Rate of perceived exertion up here in excise science is essentially you starting to really understand how hard you are working. My guestimate is that most people that they most people that tell themselves the I'm working at eight or nine or ten out of ten story, not all, but a huge percentage of working somewhere closer to five. Because and

here's the other thing. Right, let's just be really practical, like getting in shape, looking amazing, creating amazing, losing fat, building muscle, creating a higher performance version whatever that is for you. Right, is my sixty two year old body high performance? Fuck? No is my sixty two year old body high performance for sixty two? Yes? Am I special? No? Am I gifted? No? Do I have great genetics? No? But what I do is I do the things to

optimize what I have to work. QUI now, John, that I've spoken about before on my show many times, and I think I mentioned earlier, who's got a traumatic brain injury, in a spinal cord injury. And I've been working with him, and you know, John has got so many challenges. He's in his seventies, he's got all of this shit, is in constant pain. He's medicated for this and that. I started training him in a wheelchair. Eventually he progressed to

a frame, eventually progressed to a stick. He's still with sticks now too. Sticks. He trains in his seventies with multiple fucking and way more than just the brain injury and the spinal cord stuff, other stuff I won't mention, but way too many issues than most of us could even think about. He still trains three days a week, and he does what he can with what he's got available. And at seventy I think he's seventy two or three. He is for the bits of his body that he

can train. He can train his just and back and arms, legs not so much. But he is stronger, much stronger than the average bloke his age, and he has got so many reasons not to be, so many reasons not to be. So you are probably underestimating yourself. You may not be. I don't know you. Well, maybe I know you if I do what's uphm. Okay, So intensity, Now let's look at the other end of the scar let's

look at too hard? Okay. So we want to train at a level where, like I said, we're safe and we're getting this adaptive response, and going into the gym and punishing ourselves and training at our outer limits is more destructive than productive. Heart is good, sensible heart is good. Stupid heart is stupid. Okay, And we see some what we see is a multitude of people or some people more accurately training really intensely with bad form. So guess

what you're going to produce? What's the most likely thing you're going to produce. Of course you're all saying a fucking injury. You are right, So let's use good form. Let's train intensely when it's right for us. Let's not train intensely every day, because recovery matters, sleep matters, appropriate nutrition matters. Most of us are not built unless we're eled athletes and we've got all the other things in place. But even elead athletes don't train intensely every day because

it doesn't equate to optimal performance. And what we now, whether or not we're an Olympian, or whether or not where you and me, Joe or Josephine Suburbia and we're just trying to get the most out of ourselves. The same principles apply in that we need to train, we need to move our body, we need to understand what's going on. We need to be be able to recognize

am I training hard too hard, not hard enough. We need to be able to understand that days off matter, that recovery matters, that all of these variables that matter for Olympians in terms of the performance and the adaptation and the recovery on a level, they matter to us it is not that different from a training and a conditioning point of view. There are way more similarities than not.

And that's what people don't really understand. So when I talk about high performance, and I've worked with in inverted commas typical high performers in many fields. But when I talk to you about high performance, I talk about myself. I'm just talking about am I getting the most out of me based on what I have to work with? Now,

what do you have to work with? Will you have your genetic potential, you have your brain, you have your willpower, you have your mind, you have the ability to manipulate and control all of the other factors you know, like sleep to an extent it's hard sometimes, and nutrition and supplements and environment and other people and support and education and all of these things that we can, if not

totally control, at least somewhat influence. So training hard is good, But training hard and poorly or training hard with bad technique and bad recovery and all of those things is more negative. So it's trying to find the level. What is the level for me? So, for example, you are hypothetically you're a yoga person, or you're a super bendy Wendy kind of person. And you and I you're a you know, for you your potential, you're a nine out of ten on flexibility. And you and I go to

yoga tonight, or you and I go to a stretch class. Now, in the context of the class, you are going to be way better than me. You're going to be more elite, or you're going to be more progressed, more advanced, whatever you want to call it. But I go in there and I do a couple of things which for you would be incredibly easy and require next note effort. But for me, I'm working at nine out of ten legit because I feel like I'm about to tear shit off

the bone. Right, So what is too easy for you or what is not valuable for you instead of in terms of growth and adaptation, might for me be borderlined dangerous. So again it comes back to us, comes back to us as individuals and trying to figure out our body. All Right, A couple of other things that I have seen people train repetitively, They do the same thing the same way I spoke before about progression and maintenance. If you go and get one hundred random people, this would

be creepy so let's not do it. But if we could kind of in some alternate universe, we could see people training in the Let's say we had one hundred peace over one hundred days, and we just kind of observed what they did every time they come in. You would find a very high percentage of those people do kind of the same workout. It's kind of the same intensity, kind of same weights and machines and movements and sets and reps and volume and recovery time and effort and

all of these things. So they are kind of living in an exercise form of groundhog Day. They're doing the same thing the same way. So if we do the same thing the same way, what are we doing? Well, we're maintaining how many people? In other words, we're staying where we are. We're not going backwards, We're not going forwards. We're staying where we are. How many people that you talk to that work out and exercise and go to a gym, their goal is not to improve fucking No one, hardly,

no one. Maybe three to five percent who are kind of happy where they are and they just do it to stay in shape or whatever. And if that's the case, also that is brilliant. That is not a bad thing. That is for some people that is appropriate. But if you are in the group that you're like, well, Harps, I want to get better. I want to get stronger, a fitter or leaner, or better at my sport, or want better flexibility or balance. I want to be able to get in and out of a car easily. I

want lower blood pressure. I want to be more functional. It might just be I want to be more functional to do life because I'm sixty seven as fuck right, Great, Then do not do the same thing the same way every fucking day, day in, day out, for two years and then go, how come I'm not improving? Because you know why you're not improving, because you're not giving your

body a reason to improve. Also, keep in mind that our body adapts to what we do, which is why Fatty Harps can go to the fucking yoga studio and look completely incompetent, but in the gym for his age elite because I'm really good for that. I'm really good for strength stuff. Now, by the way, this is true what I'm saying. I would say where I'm at right now, my flexibility. I've spoken about this, this is a personal

floor of mine. I admit my flexibility is for my potential are two or three compared to other sixty two year old It's maybe a little better even who knows, But my strength is maybe an eight or nine for what I have to work with right now. Then it's up to me, well, how important it is is it to me having better flexibility? How important is it for me to be able to run around the block, or how important is it for me to be able to

go and do a ten k bushwalk? Or how important is it for me to be able to pick up my grandkids or kick a footy with my granddaughter or my grandson or whatever it is. Or how important it is it for me to be able to load up the trailer with shit, put the trailer on the car, go to the tip, jump up on the trailer, throw

shit off, right, activities of daily living, just life. But in order for that to happen, we need to make sure that we are doing the things that will work for us in terms of variety and needs and goals. Am I hugely worried about getting more flexible? Not really? Not too many people die from tight hamstrings. I'm not shaying, don't be flexible. I'm just saying it's not super high on my list of things to do, and honestly, if I cared that much, I would do more. But that's me.

That's just full disclosure me. Next on my list is consistency, or more accurately, lack of consistency. I don't know what the actual number is, but I do know that what they call the active gym membership in Australia is relatively low. And that is by that active gym membership means people who are current members of gyms who either don't go or rarely go. They show up with a burst three or four weeks the fucking superman or superwoman. They do what they do, and then you know, live happens. Oh

what happened? Oh live happened? What do you mean, Ah, live happened? You know, so you stopped going? Well, yeah you stop? Did you accidentally stop going? Or And this is the thing, this is a psychology part of it. Right. We are inconsistent, most of us. Not that we need to be addicted. Right, here's the problem too. We always frame things to make ourselves feel good about what we are doing or not doing. Do you know how many people because I exercized nearly every day of my life.

I walk every day ten k's. I lift some weights sometimes. In fact, today, as I record this, it's twenty sixth of February. Having a day off today. You know why a little bit tired. You know why I got a million things on and that equals and by the way I lifted weights the last six or seven days, I'll probably do something tomorrow. All good, but I never just stop. So if I said to you, do you want to be healthy and functional and strong and well for as long as you can, you would say to me yes.

If I said, do you want a long health span? That is the percentage of your life lived well. So if you live to ninety, would you like to be relatively healthy for most of that time or would you be happy to come into massive health issues at seventy and then just stumble you away with drugs and whatever to your ninety The answer is no, I want the first option. I want a long health span. Well, guess

how you have a long health span? You be consistent, you will not accidentally live to ninety healthy years, And yes, unless you're a genetic freak, and if you are, I'm a bit jealous, also well done. But the thing is, we need to find a way. If consistency of performance and feeling and health outcomes is our goal, we need consistency of behavior. If we rely on our feelings, if we rely on our day to day level of motivation

or inspiration, almost none of us will get there. What we need is we need to create a relationship with our body and with exercise, which is intertwined. Doesn't mean we're obsessed. It just means we've got a habit. We've created an operating system that works for us. Do I love every workout? Sure don't. Do I get excited about the gym, Sure don't. Sometimes I do, Often I don't. But it's not I don't go up there because it's fun or it's fucking great, although I do enjoy it

most of the time. But the reason I really go to the gym is Okay, I was going to say something that's probably not totally true. So the reason I go now is because I hang out with some of my mates. But more importantly, I love that bit more importantly because it keeps my body and my brain and my performance in a place which is where I want to be. I know that I'll get old. You know that you'll get old. But the way that we get old, the way that we age, is to a very large

extent in our control. Putting aside illness, you know, genetic illness and predispositions and all of that. But my observation is that a large percentage of the population, at least that I have worked with, we're getting older and more dysfunctional and more broken at a rate which was not necessary. So consistency matters. Consistency matters. I'm going to keep going technique. I spoke about that before people in the gym. So

if you want to progress, you'll form your technique. The way that you do things needs to be as good as it can be to ensure one that your body knows what's going on and you can progress and you can adapt safely. And two, of course, that you don't

get injured. And people who start out and I was one of them, I started out with poor technique because I was young and dumb, and I got a long list of injuries that please don't be as dumb as I was, but please learn how to do things well in the gym, so that you know what's happening with

your body. And I'm just going to bump into one of my next points, which is body awareness, and all that means is understanding what your body should be feeling, and how your body should be moving, and how your body should integrate with this movement, whatever the movement, whether it's running or skipping or or lifting a weight. I watch people in the gym all the time who are doing things with terrible technique. That's not a criticism, that's

an observation. And perhaps it's because nobody's ever actually helped them, or maybe they haven't asked. But the difference between doing something well and something not well, even investing the same time and energy and finances and all of that, the difference is incredible. And one of the beauties of doing things really well is you don't need to smash yourself.

It's fast, safer, you don't need to use the same heavy weights, you don't need to do anything that's going to predispose you more than likely to a bad outcome. Let's talk about a few more so something I've observed more recently, and this will say make me sound like an old dude. That's all right, though, and that is about around our inability to focus when we exercise. Now, I'm not going to be the guy that goes there should be no phones or headphones in the gym or

blah blah blah, but it is. It is just a reality that in most gyms, in most gyms, there's not a complaint. This is an observation. In most gyms, most people are looking at their phone maybe most of the time in the gym. And you might go, well, I go to a gym where that doesn't happen. It's cool, great, well done you, And I mean that that's great, and if you're the person who doesn't do that, fucking well done.

But our inability to focus on where we need to be focused our mind, our body, our energy, our attention on doing this thing that I am doing, doing it well, it is so low at the moment, and as a result, we're seeing we're bad outcomes, we're seeing bad injuries. We're seeing people who are at the gym for an hour, training for ten minutes and not training for fifty minutes, and so trying to figure out what is the best

protocol for me. I see some people they'll do three or four sets, then they'll scroll or they'll look at their phone for two or three minutes. Fine, I think that's great. But I also see people who do one set and then literally sit in the same place for the next fifteen minutes looking at their phone, totally disengaging

their body, totally cooling down. And then when anyone says, are you using that machine, which they're clearly not using that machine because they've been fucking sitting on their phone on that machine for fifteen minutes, they say, yes, I am. Now there is an issue at the moment that everyone seems to get upset about when I bring it up. That's cool, get upset. I don't really give a flying fuck.

But the bottom line is is whatever the environment, whatever the kind of exercise, whatever the distraction, for the most part, when you work out wherever, whatever, however, it is my very strong suggestion that you be completely focused on what you are doing. You predispose yourself to mistakes and injuries and poor results and lack of productivity when you are in any training environment with any kind of distraction. What

you don't need is a distraction. And if you can't train well without some kind of stimulation, that's something to think about. Doesn't mean don't go for a run with music or it doesn't mean that. It just means that if you going to the gym and doing a workout for forty to fifty sixty minutes without your phone terrifies you for a range of reasons, that's an issue. And I mean, this is no this is no revelation. Yeah, the last one I'm going to talk about is just mindset,

and it's just the mind stuff. And I'm you know, my first book that I wrote was essentially about the psychology and the emotion and the human stuff around and getting in shape. And so even though I'm an excise scientist, even though I've written tens of thousands of programs, trained tens of thousands of humans and all of these things that I've done, which there's you know, that's just my

track record. But I can tell you that largely getting in shape and changing your body and getting sustained results and moving the needle and seeing real progress is way more about your thinking than it is your biceps. It is way more about your attitude, It is way more about your state. It is way more about your fucking drive and your commitment to act, actually fucking doing the work and making real progress and then not looking for accolades,

just do the work that produces the outcome. You might have the best resources, the best genetics, the best support crew, the best environment, the best everything. But if you've got the worst fucking attitude, the worst mindset, the worst thinking, you cannot optimize what you've got to work with. So it is a convergent, not a divergent process. And by convergent, I mean it it's about your mind. It's about your emotions,

it's about your attention, it's about your focus. Of course, it's about your body, of course, it's about education, of course, it's about what resources you have. Of course, it's about energy and time and all of those things. But in the middle of that, the driver of our behavior is really our mind. You don't accidentally not go to the gym to you don't accidentally join a gym. You choose to. You don't accidentally stop going for six months. That's a choice.

That's a decision, And I'm not judging you for that. I'm just saying, let's be honest. Let's be honest. Are you one of the people that has repeatedly gone right, buck, and that's it, I'm doing it, and then you haven't done it. You don't need to hate yourself. You need to be self aware, not self learning. What is that about? Have I done that? I did that many times in my younger years, many times where I my thinking, my attitude was the problem, not my potential, not my genetics,

not what I had as a possibility for me. And so what do we want? We want to train well, We want to train consistently. We want to train properly for our body. We want to follow the right program. What is the best program for me? Well, the best program for you will be dependent on what you need, what you are capable of. What is your current level of strength and fitness, and flexibility and mobility, mobility and agility and muscular and aerobic endurance. What are your goals?

Where are you now? Where do you want to be? What's your timeline? What's your structure? What's your process? What happens when you can't be fucked? What happens when you lose motivation? What happens when the scales go the wrong way? All of this stuff that we just need to go, Oh, this is this doesn't have to be hard, in inverted commas or complex, but we do need to be somewhat

cerebral about what we're doing. And if you are getting a generic program from someone, not a program written purely for you and all of the you variables, you are definitely not following the optimal program for you, definitely because it wasn't written for you. It's like you've got ten people who all feel unwell and the doctor doesn't ask them or test them or check them or do blood test. The doctor just gives them all the same medication because

they're all crook. Well. That's literally or metaphorically what's happening in Jim's all over Australia and the rest of the world right now is that people are oh, Sally does this program, so I'm doing and she got in great shape and I'm doing this, or Dave did so I'm doing it. Well, you're not Sally or Dave, bro or bro Sephine. You're you. The best program for me could be the worst program for you. It's very in fact, it's totally unlikely that what will work for me will

work for you because you're not me. And so there's this individuality of biology and physiology and adaptability and function. There's all of these individual things that need to be factored in. But if we can take a little bit of time and not be lazy and I go, ah, fuck, it's all too hard, harps. Can you think? You can think? Can you solve problems? You can solve problems. Can you stand in the gym and look in the mirror while you do a movement and go, yeah, there's something not

right here. Let me get it right. So instead of doing it wrong for five years, you might get it right in the first week or two or three. Now you've adapted. Now you've developed a new skill, more knowledge, more awareness, and now you're doing the thing right, and now the benefits come. I see blokes in the gym that have been bence pressing like shit for fifteen years, but they won't be told by anyone they're doing. They've

got good intentions, they've got terrible form, terrible technique. They bring it two thirds of the way down, not all the way down, because if they take it all the way down, they can't get that inappropriately heavy weight back up. And they're more concerned with what the weight looks like than the actual fucking benefit of doing the exercise properly. Chuck your ego out, don't rely on a round of applause or recognition or bullshit ego based kind of rewards.

This doesn't work. And I know for some of you, I'm looking at the time, it's nearly fifteen minutes. You might think, fuck, this is full on, this is difficult, this is guess what, things don't have to be fun all the time. I'm not saying it needs to be hard. It doesn't. I for the most part, really enjoy most of what I do. But there are times when I'm doing something where it isn't fun, quick, easy, or painless. But guess what, it's fucking effective. So that's the thing

that I do. That's the thing that I do, and that's the thing that we sometimes need to do. And I'll finish on this that we often we get almost like an emotional attachment to something. Here's a story I've told once before on this show. So in one of my gyms, I used to have ten treadmills lined up along the front of the building looking out. I had a big, dirty, big window, clean, big window, and in front of that window, looking out the front of the building,

I had ten treadmills side by side. And one day I was in my office and I saw which was near the treadmills, and I saw someone happen to be lady, doesn't matter, it could be a dude. But I went over and I said to her, and she was waiting for a treadmill that now I don't know, five of the treadmills are being used, five for free, and she was waiting for the last treadmill, first one away from

my office. And she was standing there, clearly waiting for the person to finish on that treadmill so she could get on that treadmill. And I walked up and I said, how you going, And I was speaking to her. I said, what you're doing? She said, I'm just this is my favorite treadmill. And I went, they are all identical. They are all the same brand, they are all the same age,

they have all the exact same components. And she literally wouldn't go and use one or the other five because she had a story in her head that they weren't the same, they weren't as good, and that fascinated me, And of course I didn't you know. I just went, I went, well, FYI, but if you want to stand

and wait, that's cool. So I left her. But we tend to do the things that we are good at with exercise, sometimes we tend to do the things that are the most fun, and I think that there should always be an element of fun in what we do with our body at times. But there are also times where we go and do the thing that we are not good at, the thing that we are not comfortable at, the thing that we're not comfortable with, the thing that is not easy, because that is the thing that we need.

It's not the thing that we want, but it's the thing that we need. I have more, but I don't want to. Boy, you let me know if you like this. I'm not seeking improval. I'm just trying to get feedback so I know whether or not to do another one of these or version of this ever. So don't forget the you Project Facebook page. If you like this, jump in,

give me some feedback. If you hate it, give me some feedback, that's okay, and let me know whether or not I should do I'm not going to do these daily or even we but whether or not, you know. Sometimes I think because of my background, which is really the first thirty years of my work life was really more about anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, nutrition, high performance from a physical point of view, even though he incorporated mind stuff like that is really my my the major story of

my work life and my background. And so if you want more of these kinds of potties, let me know. All right, enjoy your workout.