Video Fact Check Results

Why is it that some people can seemingly have no idea what they're doing with fitness but have the best bodies? I used to think this was just down to genetics and I had bad luck. That is until I stumbled upon a principle which over a few short years has transformed my physique utterly beyond what I was given genetically. And the most wild part is I've been able to do that whilst reducing my training down from four hours to less than 40 minutes of work a week. The way that fitness basically works is we're trying to build as much strength as possible so that our bodies in doing so build muscle tissue and therefore we can be lean and look good. Now the principle that most people miss is in how we actually signal our bodies to build that strength and muscle tissue. Because none of the growth and change actually happens when we're training. It happens when we're recovering in between sessions. All that training needs to do is signal our bodies effectively to say, hey, you're not strong enough, you need to grow, you need to get stronger. And the way that your body then does that is by literally building muscle tissue and transforming physically. But that takes time. And so the job of training is just to send that signal as effectively as possible so that we then go away, recover, grow stronger, and then we just wanna repeat and get as many cycles of this in as possible. Ideally just build a routine that does this basically on autopilot so we can do it long term. Now what most people miss is that in order to be an effective signal, the work that we do needs to test our current limit. It needs to reach the threshold of our maximum strength because our body only responds if its current capabilities are being maxed out. And so say our level of strength currently is here. Our goal is to get it up to here. It's not to stay the same because if we were staying the same we would need to be training and our body's not gonna change. In order to tell our bodies effectively that they need to grow, we need to do work that's actually at this limit, that's pushing our maximum strength. Because then our bodies say when they recover, not only do they get us back to this baseline, but they'll add buffering because evolutionarily that's how we stay alive, by having buff life. We're maxing out our limit for whatever task we're needing to do to stay alive, then that's dangerous because we have no strength in reserve. And so that's how we tell our bodies, okay, we're using everything we got, let's build some more so that we've got spare strength. So basically if you're doing work in your strength training, in the gym, that's anywhere in this region below your strength threshold, you're simply not doing anything productive. You're not telling your body that it needs to change. And so why would it? Muscle tissue's expensive metabolically. It requires more energy on a daily basis just to maintain. And so your body doesn't wanna build it unless it really needs to. And unless you're working right here at the limit, then what's the point? If you are working at that limit, and the details surrounding it don't really matter, as long as you're not trying to do too much on a weekly basis and actually impeding your body's ability to go and do the recovery that it needs to do to grow stronger, then all you really need to do is keep coming back and sending this signal consistently over a long period of time. And so that's why some people can seemingly know nothing about the science of strength and fitness, and yet just through sheer effort alone, in a way that they enjoy, they keep coming back. They keep testing their threshold, and over time that threshold increases, which means they end up with the muscle, with the definition, with the physique. Imagine strength training was like the high striker at the fair where you whack the hammer onto the pad and try and get the number as high as possible. That is essentially what we're trying to do when we train. We're trying to use every single bit of strength that we have so that we do get as close to that limit as possible and signal maximum change. It's not about hitting it over and over and over. If you had 20 goes at the high striker, it's probably not gonna be as effective as if you just went once and tried to swing as heavy as possible. That is how you'd likely get the highest number. And if you just have a swing, get the highest number you can, and come back next week, and the week after, and the week after because you're enjoying it, well then you're gonna build muscle mass. It's the people that tap with the hammer for four hours a week that get bored, frustrated, don't make any progress, and then wonder why they're finding it difficult to sustain. Find strength in it, don't overcomplicate it, don't try and do it with too much work, and you'll likely find you can make a hell of a lot more progress than you even thought was possible for your body and become one of those annoying people who walks around with a six pack all year.