Hello everyone. Thank you for coming or for staying. Those of you who stayed past Patrick's talk. I understand. I don't have his celebrity status. But yeah, I will be talking about sequencers layer two sequencers and more generally the principles of ordering and execution. It will be sort of a survey of the design space. There we go. Cool. So the stuff that will be covering stuff will be covering. I'll start with sort of an introduction into sort of the motivation and design rationale of kind of what sequencers are and why we even have them to begin with on layer two. We'll talk about the current state of sequencers in the layer two world. Basically that they're centralized, but there'll be a little more to say than just that. And then focus on ways we can sort of improve this state of affairs. Trust minimizing them to centralizing them sort of limit sequencers power in various other ways. And then if there's time we'll sort of wax theoretical about how these concepts could apply to layer one, what extent they do to what extent they don't. But we'll see how things go. So, oh, yeah, hi, that's me. My name is Daniel. I'm, I'm, I do engineering and tech research at off chain labs. We are the team behind arbitrum the layer two that hopefully, you know, And yeah, I won't be focusing on arbitrum, but there'll be a bit of like, you know, arbitrum perspective arbitrum bias. So, okay. To get into the subject of sequencers, I think sort of the fastest way to understand why we have them is to think about why we even have layer twos to begin with. Sort of what we want from layer twos, right. So the baseline starting point for what a layer two is, is we're trying to scale a theorem, while not introducing new trust assumptions so inheriting security from a theory. That's our starting point. The scaling part is we want to improve the status quo of what a theorem is like to use in in some other ways. There's all sorts of ways it could potentially be improved at layer two, but notably we want it to be cheaper because when layer one gets congested it gets expensive. And we would also like it to be faster because when layer one gets congested, it becomes slow. So an ideal layer two would just sort of do all of those things. So what we've sort of seen in the layer two space, I paced around so I have to get used to not leaving the mic, forgive me. What we've seen in the layer two space is that basically when we're talking about layer two in the context of Ethereum, we're talking about rollups, that's the design that's dominated. And that's in large part, I think because of the UX, the sort of transition in UX, if you're sort of used to using Ethereum, used to layer one, it's actually just very similar. You can use a lot of the same tools. It feels very similar. But the key trick that rollups use as layer twos is they require that you publish transaction data on layer one itself. And by doing so in a roundabout way that I won't get into, that's how we're able to claim that these things are trustlers that they inherit L1 security. So via layer two magic, we can sort of enforce the safety of the layer two chain after data is published. But essentially all we're doing is publishing data as far as layer one is concerned. So all of the other work that goes into processing a transaction, validating it, updating state, that happens in a separate environment. We're not using layer one resources so we can make things cheaper. So long story short, by publishing data on layer one, we get trustlessness, we needed that. Yeah, we get cheaper transactions, we needed that. The other thing we said we wanted or top of the list of things you wanted was fast transactions, right? So do rollups give you fast transactions? It turns out is kind of a loaded question, right? So if you've used any rollups, you've probably noticed it's faster than using layer one, but it sort of depends what we mean by fast transactions. And even right here with what's on this slide, we can see we have a bit of a contradiction here, right? By fast, we mean faster than layer one. But what I said is that the requirement of rollups is that we post data on layer one. You can't go faster than layer one by posting data on layer one because that's a circular problem. Or perhaps a triangular problem. I'll be honest, this slide probably isn't necessary, but I really wanted to include a trilemma somehow. So this is a new trilemma. I don't expect you to catch on. But this is another way of thinking about the sort of situation we're in with rollups, right? We have this nice feature of open participation that's kind of directly downstream from the fact that we publish data on layer one. So we can have trustlessness, but that means we can't quite have fast finality. We can only have two of these things. There's other L2 designs called channels, which give us fast finality and trustlessness, but those, the UX is very different. They don't have the flexibility of rollups and so on. So we kind of have to decide where in the design space we're going to live. And in fact, by the way, if you, those of us, the arbitrary emojis in the crowd who followed our first test net release, it was actually, you know, it had no notion of fast transactions. It was entirely like that diagonal line, the one that says rollups, right? And as we put that out, one of the questions we kept getting was, okay, it's a layer two, aren't we going to get fast transactions? And we kind of just said, no, that's not really possible. But there was clearly demand for it, right? So we kind of reached this point, this kind of middle ground settlement where we said, okay, what if we can provide a fast path that's trusted, but it's optional? And we were not the first layer two team to come up with this or do this by any means. Pretty much all L2s do this. In fact, we were actually came around to this idea later. And the idea here is, you can imagine, so you have a situation where there's some party, a user can trust them. The trusted party says, I promise to include your transaction later, and then hopefully later it does. That's basically what it comes down to. The sort of version of this that doesn't work, the naive solution is you let a user trust whoever they want, whoever they want. So if a user just decides, I trust this random party, that party promises to include their transaction, even if the party is trustworthy, this doesn't quite work. Because that party can't really predict the future. And even if it thinks it will include your transaction in a given order, someone else kind of might get there first. So even to have a trusted solution like this, you need to sort of enshrine a party within the protocol, give it this special permission privilege. And that's kind of what the sequencer is. So the sequencer, in other words, is literally this party that we give the ability to directly post transactions into L2. Everyone else kind of has to wait. So the sequencer has this narrow short-term view of what will happen on L2. Therefore it can give trusted kind of soft confirmation transactions we call them. So to sort of recap that, for those who just saw Patrick's talk, this is a bit redundant, so I'll go quickly. But when we introduce the sequencer, the sort of life cycle of a transaction looks something like this. The normal in the sort of normal state of affairs, the user kind of gives their transaction off to the sequencer. The sequencer immediately gives this promise, totally trusted, that says, I will include your transaction later. At some point later, in the case of Arbitrum, usually every few minutes, it'll post a batch of transactions on chain. And at that point, the sequencer is kind of out of the picture. So once it's on chain, we're in full roll-up mode, full trusted mode, it's committed to this particular ordering. And as far as a user is concerned, your transaction is as finalized as a Layer 1 transaction, right? Because all of the data is available there. Anybody can execute it. Anybody can see what the final state will be. The actual explicit claim or commitment to what that final state actually is happens later, and the sequencer is not involved. And that's that third step there. So that's how to research the state, but there's no rush to do that. That's really just so that we can communicate back to Layer 1 and process withdrawals. But from the layer, if you're just interacting on Layer 2, once your data is on chain, you're done. So that gives us this way that we can get this nice fast, low latency, fast transaction path trusted if you want to, but it's optional. And that's very important. So just to drill that point home, because you should be suspicious when I start saying it's optional, what does it mean that using the sequencer is optional? Well, in the sort of normal case, the system is working well.  I don't care what you say, I'm going to wait for you to post on chain. So it takes another few minutes and then you get the full sort of trustless finality. In the unhappy case where the sequencer just goes rogue and isn't even answering anything, there is still a way that you can do anything you want. On Arbitrum, there's this sort of alternative path. Basically, long story short, it's a lot slower. I think Patrick talked about this well. I'm going to stop talking about him, but it's on my mind. But yeah, the point is the system can work in a sort of slower way and a slightly more inconvenient way. It can work without the sequencer entirely. So it's entirely optional. And that's why we can still call this thing a layer two and sleep at night. So I've just been talking about the sequencer, like it's my friend or something. But what actually is it? And basically, we just define the sequencer as this entity that can give these fast promises that has all the properties that I had. But you might ask, how does it decide which transactions to include, who controls it, in what order these transactions go, and so on. And basically the design space for what the sequencer is is pretty open. It could be anything. It's going to be controlled by some smart contract. It could swap in whatever sort of mechanism you can think of with the one caveat that because the whole point is to give fast transactions, whatever mechanism we use can't involve interacting with layer one because that just defeats the whole purpose. At least the way we see it. Other people would describe it differently. But yeah, it could be all sorts of things. So the current state of affairs of what sequencers actually are in layer two, as far as I can tell, I think at least predominantly most of the layer two is most of the major ones. Is that they're centralized? Somebody did something fancy on a layer two that I don't know about. You can yell at me afterwards. I apologize. But generally speaking, sequencers are centralized. That's the status quo. And, you know, we get asked about this a lot. It's probably the most frequent question that has to do with like, you know, progressive decentralization and decentralization roadmap is like when are you decentralizing the sequence? And it's not a bad question. It's a good question. These are good things to ask about. But I think often it comes from a bit of a misunderstanding. So there's kind of two things to say to this issue of centralized sequencers. And the first thing is it might not be as bad as it initially appears, specifically centralized sequencers. I'm suddenly nervous someone's going to like screenshot this slide. If you're going to screenshot this slide, screenshot the next one too. That's all I ask, okay? Because the next one is very important. I'm not claiming centralized sequencers are fine. But the first step of the answer is the power that a sequencer had is very limited and circumscribed, right? It can't, for example, simply steal money from the system, and it can't lock up users' funds forever. So other parts of the system are sort of more important. Even a centralized sequencer arguably could, you know, you could argue that an L2 could just have a centralized sequencer for good. That wouldn't be the end of the world. And the other thing that's worth saying here is that, you know, again, on just about every L2, certainly Arbitrum included, in the current state of affairs, they all sort of have more fundamentally centralized parts. But even if we said, hey, we decentralized the sequencer, if we didn't take care of those other things, it sort of doesn't really give you anything. You can read more about that on our docs or L2 bit. But, you know, we don't want to, we don't want to mislead by emphasizing one thing and not another.  Don't spam our discord. You know what I mean. Okay, important follow up, obviously having a centralized sequencer is not ideal. Looking at the time, I'm going to try to speed up a little. So what can a centralized sequencer do that's bad? Well, even if it's honest, honest mistakes happen, right? So even an honest sequencer could have downtime because of infrastructure failures and server issues. And that's bad, because it sort of slows the whole system down. It's very inconvenient. I'm going to skip over one thing in there. The juicier stuff is what if the sequencer is actually malicious? It just turns evil. What can it do? Well, it can equivocate. In other words, it can make one of these promises and then not make good on it later. It can make inconsistent promises to different users, right? These fast transactions are trusted. It can violate that trust.  So if it stops processing your transaction, you'll be able to get it through eventually. And we like emphasizing that fact. But the also important fact is there is a short window of time that you'll have to just wait. And that also could suck, right? Being unable to transact for some number of hours might be a real problem. The sequencer can do that to you. And then finally, the kind of elephant in the room here is MEV. Ah, MEV. Okay. So all I want to say here, there's plenty of other talks about MEV, people who have more and more interesting things to say about MEV than I do. I'm not an expert. I don't even know what the M stands for. It's unclear at this point. It was minor, now it's maximum. I learned when I was procrastinating this, this is called an orphaned initialism. If it stops meaning anything. But when we talk about MEV, we're talking about the power you get when you have the power of ordering transactions, particularly the power to order them in such a way that benefits you, the order to extract value from them. And what I would say is this whole architecture of introducing a sequencer has this side effect that the sequencer has control over transaction ordering, which means if it's economically interested, it might use this to extract value. Whether this is a, you know, a bad thing we need to fix or an opportunity to take advantage of is sort of a philosophical debate. But we can say this is the case with sequencers, right? We have this power. We need to at least think about it. And yeah, the way we think about it is in terms of sort of minimizing it. So I'm going to sort of run through some of the strategies that we can be used to sort of improve this bad situation of centralized sequencers. And they'll all involve improving kind of one of these four things, I mean the equivocation, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so the simplest thing that we can add to sequencers to make them better a little bit is the sort of crypto economic penalties. We can require sequencers to be staked and we can say now if they particularly equivocate, basically when they give these off-chain promises, they'll be signed. So they give a signed promise and then users can use that to prove that they equivocated and if they equivocate, we can just slash the sequencer. So that's cool. This helps with the equivocation problem, not the other problems. And in fact, this could be applied even to centralized sequencers. This is easily really any sequencer mechanism this could and probably should be applied. A thing to note here is all we can really do in this case is punish the sequencer. We can't sort of rectify the situation for users. And that's because if the sequencer is equivocating, each of these claims are sort of internally consistent, they're just inconsistent with each other. So it's not really clear which one is the more valid one to take. Either way, if we simply took one, we'd be screwing over the other user unfairly. But all we really can prove is that the sequencer did something wrong, so okay, we have this like provable cost to equivocation for the sequencer. Something. In terms of particularly the MeV problem, shout out to Shutter here who's working on this strategy. I probably should have put their logo bigger or something. But there's this idea of threshold encryption. So, and sort of using threshold encryption to minimize the MeV that a sequencer can extract. And the idea here is when a user, instead of simply passing their transactions onto the sequencer directly, there'll be this step where they pass it in this encrypted form. And they encrypt it. There's sort of this network. They call them keepers, which is kind of cute. They do this distributed key generation. So you encrypt your transactions, give it to the sequencer. The sequencer commits to an ordering blindly. It doesn't know the contents of the transactions. Commits to it off-chain, right? And then only after it commits to them do we sort of reveal the contents of it. So now the sequencer can't easily extract value because it doesn't know what it's looking at. So this is cool.  The parties that are in charge of this distributed key generation, the idea is you distribute it so that they can't easily collude. But if they do collude, they could, for example, reveal the contents of the transactions to the sequencer before you want to. Also, if they sort of don't reveal keys in time, things like that, there's certain ways that they can delay things further. And remember, this was kind of all about improving latency. So we do want to take latency concerns seriously. Even in the sort of normal case, when you're doing the threshold encryption stuff, there's rounds of communication that are required. So it's inevitably going to add some latency. So that's one concern in our eyes. But yeah, cool stuff. So, I mean, these two techniques so far, again, you could apply these to a centralized sequencer, where I really talked about decentralizing it, just limiting its power. Now let's get to some ideas for more properly decentralizing it. So one design space, let's say, is that of MEV auctions, as it's known, proposed by some of the folks at Optimism, along with a few others some years ago. I'm not going to describe it sort of in the abstract. I'm not claiming this is their plan or anything like that, just sort of talking about the design space. So the idea here is, you can imagine, at any given time, we can point to who the sequencer is. It's still one specific party, even a centralized party. But every so often, over time, we hold an auction and you can buy the right to become the sequencer.  Now why would you want to be a sequencer? Seems like a thankless job. The answer is, by being a sequencer, you have the power and the ability to profit by extracting MEV. So this design kind of leans into the MEV thing and kind of says, yeah, let's take advantage of this and use MEV as a revenue source. Again, that's sort of a philosophical distinction, or an ideological one even, in terms of how we want to handle it. I think important in the mental model for these is that these auctions kind of have to be infrequent. It's not as though, you know, it's not as though these potential sequencers are sitting, looking at transactions, seeing ways to extract value from particular transactions, and then bidding on the rights to order them. It's more like they're bidding on their future potential for ordering. They're taking a bet on their own MEV powers in the future. They can't really be frequent for a few reasons, these auctions. You can't have frequent sequencer turnover. The main reason being that you sort of, at any given point, have to know who the sequencer is so that it can give these fast transactions, right? Otherwise, again, it sort of defeats the whole purpose. So imagine on the order of maybe hours, maybe days, I don't know, we hold these auctions. So I'll talk about why, you know, myself, I'll just speak for myself, but generally, I'll set that, you know, of off-chain labs are sort of resistant to this design space. So if, you know, if it depends, because it depends on the ability to order transactions and extract MEV, this is sort of inherently at odds with the other thing that we want sequencers to do, which is give low latency, simply because if you're, you know, you need some time to figure out the optimal order of transactions to extract value from them. So there's some tension there. In practice, maybe that won't matter. Maybe they only need a few extra seconds, but it's not nothing, right? And again, the way I kind of see it, latency is the name of the game with sequencers. So that's one thing. Because these auctions sort of have to be infrequent, like I said, and there, you know, you have this temporary centralization.  It's sort of the double edged sort of decentralization in this case, right? You open it up to any party, but that means any party can come in and sort of not do what they're supposed to. And things like not including transactions, it's a hard thing to prove. It's hard thing to punish because of like data availability problems and stuff. The other practical, the thing that we would probably expect is that, you know, there'll be a single party that just keeps winning the auction again and again, simply because, you know, some, you know, whoever sort of best optimizes for this, there will be some party who does that, right?  But again, the sort of the bigger thing is this question of, are we really comfortable with leaning into the idea of extracting MVV or introducing new parties that have this MVV power versus minimizing it? So, real, I'll try to just get this in before I stop. I know we're almost done, but I want to talk a bit about sort of where our heads at, at off-chain labs in terms of decentralizing the sequencer. The model here, this sort of fair ordering model, is we replace the sort of single party sequencer with a fixed federation or committee of sequencers.  But it has this special property, which is the ordering of transactions is sort of enforced within the consensus itself. Unlike, you know, a lot of BFT leader selection algorithms where there's a leader's chosen and that party kind of has full control over what to propose. In this case, that control is distributed and we enforce fair ordering. What we mean by fair ordering, it's a little hard to formalize, but it's something like, you know, you have transaction A and B. And if a super majority of sequencers kind of witness transaction A coming before transaction B, then as long as the super majority is honest, that will also be the result. So, and yeah, some nice research has been done, some nice progress has been made into sort of improving the style of algorithm. The initial ones were just practically required a lot of network level communication so they weren't usable, but the latest thing called Themis is kind of the, a nice breakthrough, which makes it viable. So this does introduce an honesty assumption. We have a fixed set of parties where we're assuming an honest super majority. Again, any sequencer solutions going to have some centralization and again truly be open. But that is a definite downside. The more interesting downside here, and this is some of the pushback that we got has to do with, okay, we've taken power away from sequencers, but now if you're a power user who's trying to extract MVV, what sort of what world does this create for you and what are you capable of doing. So, just because, okay, so we have fair ordering, there's still this question of what exactly is the ordering that we're enforcing. And initially we were thinking FIFO first in first out, right. The order that the sequencer sees them is the order that they that they sort of give the receipts and publish transactions, which is what which is what the centralized sequencer does now, if you trust me. The, the issue here is now you can imagine a power user who sees an arbitrage opportunity or something if they want to get their first now they're incentivized to have like direct network level access to the sequencers like literally set up servers geographically close to the sequencers and have fancy hardware so that he can communicate clearly where, which is, which is sort of all exogenous to the system it's it's not really something we want to incentivize. It's it's it's sort of benefiting users in this weird way and probably a pull towards centralization because someone will optimize that best. So, we can do better. So, this idea, the top of the slide is cut off, but very recently we got this proposal from some of the folks at at flashbots, who really Shin, aka, I guess, sexy son set you pronounce it. But the idea here is we have a sort of hybrid ordering policy, so we can keep our fair ordering algorithm, but we don't enforce the fairness at the transaction level we enforce it in the sort of chunks of time. We can imagine discrete intervals of like half a second. I think that's the rapid of music. Anyway, this is a really interesting topic. It's all very new and fresh. So I recommend if you're a researcher or interested person. This is a good place to start in terms of fair sequencing. I have more to say about L one, but you can find me later. Thank you all for listening.


In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's top fitness, health, and entertainment podcast, we talk about workouts. Now, a lot of you who listen to this podcast are currently either working out literally at this moment or following a workout program. And one of the hard things to figure out is whether or not the workout has actually the best one for you. Like, is this the best possible workout I could be doing for my body, my goals, for what I'm looking to accomplish. So what we did is we broke it down, okay, we give you three ways you can tell if your workout is right or wrong for you. So the things that we cover are results, how you feel, and whether or not the program that you're following is sustainable. Of course, we go into detail and we break it down for you because the right workout for your body is one that gives you the best results, makes you feel the best and is the one that you can stay the most consistent with. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Zbiotics. 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I tested it again. I tested it again. It worked every single time. Crazy stuff. Anyway, we have a massive discount for you.  Also, before the episode starts, I want to let everybody know that this month we've put one of our programs on 50% off, Maps Starter. Now Maps Starter is a great at-home workout program. All you need is a physio ball, a resistance ball.  So you need that and you need dumbbells. It's a full body workout. That's all the equipment that you need. It's a great workout program for beginners. It's a great workout program for people who've worked out for a long time who want to refocus on their form and technique. It's one of the workouts that I can honestly say is for pretty much everybody. Again, it's 50% off. Here's how you get the half off discount. Go to mapsstarter.com. That's M-A-P-S-S-T-A-R-T-E-R.com and use the code starter50. That's S-T-A-R-T-E-R-5-0, no space for the discount. One of the hardest things for people to figure out, I was thinking about this the other day, is believe it or not, because a lot of people think that would be easy to realize. It's actually not. It's figuring out whether or not the workout that you're doing is actually right for you. It's working for you. I always found that one to be, especially when I first became a trainer, I found it to be very interesting that that would be a hard one to figure out. But then I think back to when I worked out and how many times I followed workouts for long periods of time, ignoring lots of signs and signals. So I think it'd be a good idea if we did an episode on that. I think it's really difficult to judge because what we think is results sometimes are not the right results, if that makes sense. I think a lot of the things that we, as in people in general, measure the success of their workout are not the right indicators. I also think that the space, we are responsible for feeding into that. And so the consumer gets stuck on a few metrics that they think is what tells them if they're doing well or not. And many times, those metrics are not good for you to utilize as a good judge or indicator is if this workout is working well for me. Yeah, your average person just has a lot of assumptions of what their abilities, like what they can actually do and where they should start based off of what they see other people doing. And just in my own experience, it's really difficult to identify exactly what your body needs and what's going to benefit the most without trial and error and really a lot of detective work. I'll give you an example. We've all heard the story now in the podcast of I was a skinny kid and I started lifting weights because I wanted to get bigger. So my goal was just gain size. That was my number one goal always gain size. So as long as the scale showed my weight going up, yeah, that meant that the workout was working, you know, as long as my shirts felt tighter, even if my pants, you know, my waist on my pants started getting tighter and I had to get bigger pants. It didn't matter because the scale was going up.  Oh my gosh, I'm so much bigger. What's going on? Reality or actually not? Well, I feel like it's the mind, the mirror and the scale. These are the three things that I think that most people use. And they all three I think play serious tricks. And I mean, I'm just as guilty, right? I'm like you, Sal, had the and a lot of times it's because we all have these deep rooted insecurities like we talked about that drove us into the gym. And because mine was being a skinny guy trying to build muscle, you know, I'm looking at the mirror more than in the scale, you know, looking at those two things like I want to be bigger. I want to be bigger. So if the weight is going up and I'm filling shirts out in the mirror, I'm on the right path. And like many things, there's there's some truth to that. But sometimes that can be really deceiving on how successful your programming or your diet really is. Totally. Because okay, so the first thing in this one can be good and bad. Okay. And it's obvious, right? Are you getting results? Like, are you getting results from your workout? That's that's sounds objective. The problem is, it's not always objective. Like we're talking about right now. I remember one time in particular, I went on this, you know, I was, I think I was probably 18 or 19. And I was like, you know what, I'm pulling all the stops. I'm just that's it. I'm going to get big. Yeah, I'm going to force feel myself means necessary.  I'm going to lift heavy. I'm going to take all the supplements. I'm going to do everything just to get big. And sure enough, the scale would go up and would go up. And at one point, I think I reached 230, maybe a little over 230 pounds, which is heavy for me. And I'm six feet tall. I don't have a massive frame. I weigh right now probably around 195 to 200. So 30 more pounds on my frame. And I was so proud of myself, because I had put packed on all this weight and I gotten so much bigger. Then I got a body fat test.  I literally got tested, saw that my body fat went up. First I didn't care.  I'm a lot bigger. And I'm like, wait a minute, let me do the math real quick. I gained, I think during that period of time, something like 25 pounds. And I think out of that 25 pounds, I gained something like four or five pounds of lean body mass. I gained 15 to 20 pounds of body fat to gain five pounds of muscle. And of course, when I went down in body fat, I lost everything. And I realized that I had been fooled. I had been totally tricked. I was getting results. The goal was to gain weight. But my mind had totally played tricks on me. This happens a lot. And this happens a lot with weight loss. I was just gonna say, it happens in the averse just as much, if not more, where a client is losing weight. And so they think they're on the right path.  Or in a perfect world, they do it before they start their program.  A lot of times too, this is when we would get trainers that would be arguing the method of the body fat test, like it's not accurate. Like, oh, there's no way, you know, just to make them feel better. We get that a lot even today, right? People always ask if these tools, like, you know, how accurate, I heard they could be off by this much. And you start hanging on, oh, the fact that it could be inaccurate. And therefore, there's no way this is right, because it's saying that I got fatter, but yet I lost, you know, 20 pounds off the scale. It's not possible. But absolutely, it's impossible. Not only is it possible, it's actually more common than the other way. It's more common that I see somebody who loses 20 pounds that does it through just restricting food and increasing tons of movement or following some program that they bought.  And so I think before we go any more, we have to really explain how is that possible and like how body composition works, like changing your body composition versus just losing weight or gaining weight. Right. So let's say you weigh, you know, 200 pounds. If you have 20 pounds of body fat on your body, you're 10% body fat. If you weighed 100 pounds with 20 pounds of body fat on your body, now you're 20% body fat.  Now the ratios change. It's your percentage went up. Obviously, a my kids, my kid is going to have less total body fat on their body simply because there's so much smaller than I am, although I may actually be leaner percentage wise than my kid. Does that make sense?  Now why is that a bad thing?  It makes that big of a difference. So that's the aesthetic component. But let's take it a step further.  Now you're stuck with a slower metabolism. Now to maintain your weight, you have to eat much less.  Now, it's obvious that this is a failing approach because how low can you go? Right. How long can you sustain that plan? It's just not realistic. No, it's not. And I've actually worked with people like this where they do, and I used to see this all the time. Some will come to me and they're doing five or six days a week of cardio. They did some kind of diet keto, low carb, paleo, whatever. So the calories are really low. They come, they see me and they say, Hey, I've lost all this weight and I start to look closer at what they're doing.  And you're doing five to six days a week of cardio. How do you feel about cutting your calories even more and working out even more? And, you know, of course, most of them are like, wow, that's a lot. I got to work out more. I got to eat less. You know, they've put themselves in a really crappy situation. So results are an important indicator of whether or not a workout is working for you, but you got to break the results down and you can't let your, you can't be fooled by yourself. You can't be fooled by the scale or the mirror. You have to get much more objective when you break things down. And a lot of times this is really driven by this surge of momentum and this passion to get to a place and a goal. And by all means necessary, like you're trying to gain all this weight, you know, what's going to get me there, you know, the quickest, the fastest, the most efficient way possible. But you don't like realize the byproduct of that, what happens as a result of that? Or even, you know, you look at the overall like, oh my God, I actually lost muscle by trying to lose weight and now I have to rebuild the muscle. And now I'm like starting this whole new process when I could have been a lot more effective if I drew it out a little bit further. We have to speak to the people who don't care too. So I recently shared that the story about my brother-in-law who has dropped, you know, about 25 pounds in the last year through all his cycling and then restricting his calories, you know, and his response to me when I initially told him that his body fat percentage probably stayed the same or actually went up even though he lost weight was like, I don't care.  And I know there's a lot of people like that. There's a lot of people that have, you know, 30, 40 pounds and it bugs them, they're insecure about it. And then they do all this hard work of restricting calories and training to get it off and they get it off and they feel, you know, super excited and happy to be there as they should, you know, because they've disciplined themselves to follow a program and stick to it. But the thing with that is this, and this is what I explained to him. Now, he rides really aggressively in the summertime and then wintertime comes around and he's just, it's not possible. It's not possible to go on these three, four-hour rides. He lives in an area where it's all snow and everything like that.   And what I was explaining to him is you really set yourself up for this yo-yoing effect to happen. You no longer can keep up that movement, but then you're kind of eating the same. And even if you do kind of modify that a little bit, you're nowhere, you're not burning anywhere nearly as much as you were burning for. And like to Sal's point, you've now slowed your metabolism down. You've now told your body to be efficient with only that many calories that you're eating and expecting in that it needs to burn this much. So then when you stop, the weight piles back on.  But in reality, you have no idea that you're really setting yourself up for long term failure. That's the big one. Now one measure of results is usually, and I'm not going to say always because I'm going to give you some examples of when it's not, but usually a good sign. And that's if you get stronger. So if you get stronger in the gym, a performance increase or improvement like that, it's typically good news. It usually means something about your workout routine is working. Okay, now here's when you can even be fooled by that. I've actually seen this before. I've actually had people come up to me and I've watched them in the gym and they tell me, oh my gosh, I added 30 pounds to my squat. And I know I watch them squat. I'm like, well, you're not squatting as deep as you used to, and now you're wearing a belt and knee wraps. Or, oh, I can bench press more. Well, your technique is better now. So that's why you're lifting more. Not a bad thing, but you're not necessarily adding more muscle and getting stronger. You're just getting better at your technique or you're adding new aids to help you lift more weight. Or you could also be adding more fat, like your example that you gave with yourself. So you could be getting stronger, but then you're also adding fat at a higher rate, which puts you in the same similar predicament. I find that the strength results are better for somebody who is losing weight. Like if I have a client who is losing weight and getting stronger, that's almost always a good indicator. That's normally a really good indicator. If we're getting stronger and we're leaning out or losing weight on the scale, that's a pretty good sign that we're probably at least hanging on to muscle mass, maybe even potentially building some. But if you're on the gain and you're trying to build, and that's your main goal, and you see the strength go up a little bit, that always isn't a great indicator because if the ratio of fat that you're adding to the muscle you're adding is much higher, you're technically just getting fatter. Right. And here's one that you can look at. Look at your strength to weight ratio. Now, this isn't perfect at some point. If you get big enough, your strength to weight ratio is not going to be as good as it was when you're lighter.  Okay. Yeah, you're stronger and you're actually weaker as a percentage of your body weight. If your body weight went up 20 pounds, your squat should theoretically go up a little bit higher than that. But you only added about five pounds to the bar. Same thing with your bench or anything else. Now, that's something you want to pay attention to. Just because you added weight to the bar, look at your overall body weight. Now, some people don't care too much about this, but you know, being a certain strength, but also being really, really heavy actually makes you weaker as a person moving around. It just makes you weaker. You might, you have gained 40 pounds, but now you can't do a single pull up or you can't do a single dip. So your fitness level really hasn't improved that much. This, by the way, is coming from, again, personal experience where I was just pushing weight on the bar and weight on the scale so much. And I did get stronger, but my strength gains didn't match my weight gain. And so, yes, I was strong. In fact, I'll tell you what, at my absolute heaviest body weight, I was not able to deadlift, squat, or bench press as much as I was able to later on when I figured this out at a lighter body weight. That was actually my PRs that I've ever hit my all time PRs were not at 230 or 35 pounds. They were like at 205. And it's because I did it the right way later on. Well, and to like, if you're adding just pure mass, like, and I know a lot of people don't really care because they just want to get big, you know, and this is something that they're just trying to get as big and massive as possible. But when you go into the doctor and they kind of assess your BMI, and they tell you like, well, you're kind of at a higher risk for you know, these these these things, these diseases, these these complications later on in life, these health problems, you know, it is something that you need to consider if you're adding all this excess mass, what kind of mass is it that you're adding on top of everything? Now, we have to talk to you about what it looks like to see no results at all. Now, it seems obvious that if you're not seeing any results whatsoever, your program is not working for you. But I think it's deeper than that. Many times, when I thought I was seeing no results because I was judging it through the three things we talked about before, the mind, the mirror, and the scale, I wasn't seeing anything happen. You weren't paying attention to other results. Exactly. And I actually was actually on better progress than I was when I was seeing those things fluctuate the most. So that's the real tricky part about this is, and this is something that I remember coaching the clients a lot, you know, them telling me, I don't feel like my body's changing. My clothes are fitting about the same. My scale is about the same. But I know as a coach, that if they're if they're reporting to me correctly, like that we're eating this way, I know I've got them on good programming, I'm constantly having to reassure them that stay that stay the process. And then I'm also asking other things. I'm asking them about their their energy levels. I'm asking them about their sleep. I'm asking them about their mood. I'm asking pain. I'm asking about a lot of other things to help them make a connection that your body is changing for the good. Sometimes when you're at the perfect place, it's got this beautiful ratio of you just you'll lose about a pound of fat, you gain about a pound of muscle. And that takes weeks and months to do that. And so because you're not seeing this huge swing in the mirror or huge swing on the scale, your mind starts to play tricks on you and think, Oh, what I'm doing, is it working for me? In reality, it could be working perfectly for you. Right, right. So results, although they sound objective, and I would say of the things that we're going to cover in this episode are one of the more objective things because they can be measured. They can still play tricks on you. And it's not a 100% guarantee that your program is the right one for you that your workout is working for you. Now, the next one you just alluded to, Adam, was how you feel. Now, this is a big one. This one to me is one of the bigger ones because people have confused feeling crappy with an effective workout versus feeling good. This one's hard.  And it's so gray and I've lost weight. And of course, you know, we don't know if it's fat or muscle.  I can barely walk. Like I'm so sore. And when I get home from the gym, I could all I do is I just lay on the couch because I can't move because I just had the best workout. I'm like, Holy cow. You have completely confused what an effective workout is supposed to feel like. You are doing the whole martyrship thing where it's how much I can withstand how you feel is a very, very important metric. But you got to you got to fix that. You got to fix how you think about how you feel. Your workouts should make you feel good. Now, I don't mean feel good, like I feel good that I'm beat up. So that means I had a good workout.  Oh, I remember the first time I made that shift personally, to understanding that the, you know, hobbling out of the gym or just destroyed, you know, used to be connected for me as, Oh, that was what was a good workout. When in reality, when I really honed in, you know, my programming, I realized that no, when I, when I had a perfect workout, I actually left the gym feeling with more energy. Oh God, that took me so long to figure out. I remember when I started to piece that together, it took me a long time. But you know, the way I used to feel after my workouts when I was first started working out was exhausted, tired, lay on the couch. Didn't want to get up in the morning. Yeah. And I'd be satisfied. Like, yeah, I did it.  That's what I'm supposed to do or whatever. Well, later on as I started to really figure this out. And by the way, a lot of the stuff that I learned for myself, I learned through my clients, one of the wonderful things about being a trainer is that when I train other people, all my insecurities are, or most of them are gone. I'm not applying them to my client. I only apply them to myself. Yeah. I'm much more objective and trainers listening to exactly what I'm talking about.  So I'd be watching my clients and I would see what would give them better results. I'd see how their energy levels were. I'd see what workouts worked best for them. Eventually, I started to kind of put this together and apply it to myself. And I remember it was, I was, it was years after I'd been working out. I remember, wow, not only my building muscle, getting stronger, staying lean, but also I have tons of energy.  I feel good. I would leave the gym feeling like I could do another workout feeling like I want to talk to people. I want to hang out with people. I want to have a good time. I felt phenomenal. If your workout is making you feel crappy, that is the wrong workout. Also, let's also remember this. Most of you listening right now, don't just work out for a living. Okay. Most of you have a normal life.  It should not take away from it. If your workouts beat you up so much that you come home, you don't have time for your kids, I need a lay on the couch, I'm so sorry, I can't move. Like it's not, even if the workout was giving you results, what are you, what are you trading?  Well, I found too, like training clients to kind of talk about when you, when you feel like you're not really moving the needle, you're not, you're not progressing. I'm not really losing weight right now. The most value I could provide my clients was to highlight these things, to highlight how much better their sleep were, how much more energy they had, you know, how much better their movement was like sometimes like strength metrics for people that were losing weight. You know, while we were still going through that process, it's just better to have all these other things that are still happening and we're still moving you forward, but you're not always going to see those results just, you know, one or the other result happening. It's usually, you know, it shifts quite a bit. Well, the other thing too, when talking about feel is also how you feel going into the next workout. Another one that was really tough for me, it took a long time to get through this was, you know, if you're training to get that sore feeling, and then you go into the workout the next day or two days later, and it hinders the workout you're about to do, like that's something that you have to pay attention to. We don't want that. Like I don't want to go into a workout after the previous one I just did.  You'd like to get in a place where I can get, I can kind of pick up where I left off versus trying to recover still from the damage that I done just two days ago. And that's so important because we're sending a signal when we lift, but there's also the important factor of how we recover.   If you're constantly hammering the body all the time, it's constantly trying to recover. You don't give it its chance to actually adapt and progress. That's right, because recovery and adaptation is getting stronger, building muscle, burning body fat, improving endurance, all those different things. Recovery is healing. And oftentimes they happen simultaneously, but they are not the same thing. One is healing. One is super compensating. One is adapting.   So before when I cut my hand before my body can think about building a callus over where I just cut, it needs to heal the cut. That's the priority. And if I keep cutting it over and over again, am I going to add a callus? Is it going to adapt by making my skin stronger? Of course not. I'm cutting it too often. My body's only trying to heal. And that's what that recovery trap, this is what it feels like. This is what the recovery trap feels like. You beat yourself up in the gym. You get really, really sore. You go into the next workout, no improvements. You do the same thing, beat yourself up, get really, really sore, rinse and repeat. You just do this over and over. It's like a hamster wheel of beat up, recover, beat up, recover without any real progress. It literally is like a hamster wheel.  Nothing's happening. You're driving a car. You're not getting traction. You're making a lot of smoke, but you're staying exactly the same place. And ignoring these signs is going to be to your detriment.  And I know training a lot of strength athletes personally, a lot of it is we're always trying to push so far forward and trying to get PR lifts and try to maximize whatever we can in the gym in spite of these indications of pain. And so we're going to put aids there to suppress the pain and move forward. Now, in terms of a long-term strategy, you have to really think about what you're going to be left with in terms of joint function, in terms of your overall performance. It's not going to be what it used to be, even though you got certain numbers you're looking for. Such a good point. There's a good pain and there's a bad pain. What's a good pain? A little bit of soreness. A little bit. I'm being honest here. Okay. So I'm a little sore. I worked out like, okay, I can feel like I did a little workout. By the way, no pain is fine too. If you're progressing, getting good results and you feel great. No pain at all is also an awesome thing. But a little bit of pain, perfectly fine. What's bad pain? Excessive soreness. It lasts for more than a day. It's sore to the touch. It hinders how you move. It hinders how you move. Adam, you made a great point earlier.  I don't know how I'm going to do this next workout. You got to be able to perform each time. Joint pain. Joint pain is terrible. If your workout is making your joints hurt and stiff, like Justin said, a lot of people think, oh, my knees started bothering me. So I think what I'm going to do now is rub Ben Gay on it and then put a knee wrap around it. Oh, cool. It doesn't hurt anymore. While I squat, let's just keep doing that. We know what's going to happen. You keep pushing that. Eventually, you're going to have a big problem. Your workouts should reduce pain. They should reduce that kind of pain. Always. They should not increase that kind of pain.  Yeah, you're going to have some bad pain afterwards. Understandable. You push yourself to the limit. But when you're training your body on a regular basis, when you're exercising, working out on a regular basis, when you're doing this so you can have long-term forever results and success, 99% of the time you should not have lots of pain. There's another one. This one for me is a very big signal. For some people, it's a big signal. And that's sleep. I know when my sleep is crappy that I'm pushing it too hard in the gym or that my workout is just not working for me. My workouts, when they're good, always improve my sleep. They always get better sleep when I'm having really good, effective workouts. When my workouts are not effective, my sleep just isn't as good. Well, that works both ways too, right? So sometimes you get the bad sleep first, right? So sometimes when you get that, learning to modify and change your workout. So maybe you're on a great workout plan. Maybe it is working for you, but learning to connect that the sleep and workout part, how much they work together and knowing that, oh, I got a poor night's sleep. Today, even though I'm scheduled to get after squats or that, maybe that's the day where you work more inward or do more mobility work or scale back the intensity. You've got to learn how to do that because real quick, you could take a good program and make it shitty because other aspects of your life are not in place.  And even though you have great programming, it'll look like poor program. That's a great point. Remember, your workouts are moldable. You can change them depending on the context of your life. So a workout that may be effective for the healthy, well-rested version of you may be ineffective for the not as healthy, not as well-rested version of you. There's a different workout or a different intensity that will be superior for you depending on the context of what's going on, how you feel. And sleep, I think it's so undervalued. I think people just don't even realize how vital it is in terms of recovery and what that does to balance your hormones, what that does to set you up for energy and repair damage cells and everything else. In terms of that, I know you guys have probably experienced this a lot with your clients where when they're on a good path or getting good sleep, they're making good progress. Their libido goes up. I think the people that don't understand this are the young, right? Because it's always there. If you don't have kids in your 20s, you may not understand this.  There's no doubt in your mind. That morning would still there. Well, you know what? It's actually becoming much more common with younger people now. Libido's a big one. You should have a good workout, should give you a healthy libido. It should feel, and what I mean by healthy is, and the reason why I say healthy is of course there's dysfunction in the opposite side, right?  I'm not talking about that. What I mean is you should feel vibrant. You should feel a healthy libido. You should be able to have good sex, good performance, good orgasm. By the way, these are all reflection of your hormones. Bad workouts tend to cause hormone imbalances and men, we see drops into testosterone and women, we see estrogen and progesterone getting way out of balance. Bad workouts will start to do that. And by the way, the way to fix that is not to take hormones. This is what I see a lot of people doing, where I see a guy is like, oh, my testosterone level is low, just give me some testosterone. It's like, well, let's look at what's going on in your lifestyle. It's actually a signal. It's low because your workout's wrong, your sleep is wrong, your diet's wrong. Fix those and then see what happens.  And then coming back, and the way I had to train was so different than what I was training just a year prior to that. And understanding that, what I realized, now for me, where I was at, now this is going to be dependent on everybody, it is different, right? So where I was at, my levels were so low that if I went in the gym and what I thought was like a normal, pretty good workout, it was too much sometimes. Sometimes the next day, it would be terrible. I would end up having bad sleep, my sex drive would be down.  And then I'm just going to get like a good squat session or a good deadlift session. And then I would see it within the next day or two. I would feel that spike in my libido. It's amazing how the body will speak to you like that if you're paying attention to those signals. So I can't stress enough like how important that one is and to not ignore that as a good signal. The other thing that we talk a lot about too is just the importance of consistency. And one of the things that helps so much with consistency is enjoying what you're doing. So what do you say, Sal, time you talk about a subpar workout done consistently is better than a great workout done inconsistently. Right. So you have to factor that in. And I'm always very cognizant of this when I'm speaking to a client that maybe I wish they were doing their programming a little more like this or I wouldn't, but they really enjoy what they're doing. And it's working for them. You got to try and find that balance. You want to have obviously the most ideal programming for you and what you to see the results at the same time to you also have to be enjoying it. Those those go hand in hand. You can stretch yourself, but it can't always be a chore. You know, at a certain point, you have to be able to look forward to it and find elements in there that really excite you and try and maintain that and try and look for that constantly. Otherwise, it's just not going to be something you keep doing. I've always I've always found this to be true when a person is doing a workout that makes them feel good, good energy, good libido. They feel mobile, no pain. They're getting results. Maybe their strength is going up. Their body composition is changing for the positive. Metabolism seems to be faster. They enjoy the workout. They enjoy it. Right. I've noticed that I don't care what kind of workout you're doing, how fun it is for you. You're not getting good results. You've got a lot of pain. You start to feel crappy. You're irritable.  Your libido's down. You start you stop enjoying it. Now, you may you may be one of those people that's like, I'm going to do it no matter what. Then you just push and push and push. And I've seen this many, many times and cause a lot of damage. But so that becomes a good thing, a good sign. Are you enjoying the process? Is this something you want to continue doing? Which brings us to the next one. Is your workout sustainable? This is a big one. Because I think a lot of people don't consider that when they get into a workout. In fact, one of the number one comments I would get from people is, okay, great. I build muscle and burn body fat. Then what do what happens when I stop? It always surprised me when I would hear that. But I would hear it always. I still hear that from people. What happens when I stop? Do my muscles turn to fat? You're not supposed to stop, guy. That's right. This is something that you have to do that sustainable. So let's say right now you're doing this workout plan, and it's having you work out, you know, six days a week and you're, you're working out like crazy, you're getting good results, you feel good, but you also have kids a job. In order to work out six days a week, you are really carving out time. It's very difficult. You got to be honest with yourself. Is this sustainable? Because if it's not, then that may not be the right workout for you. Regardless, look, here's the thing. For a lot of people, they could get way better results if they had all the time in the world, but most people don't. So the best workout for them, like we said earlier, that's going to keep them consistent, is one that'll be more sustainable. Now, this doesn't mean you can't stretch and push yourself, but you need to have an exit plan. Well, no, this is why if you look at this, the spectrum that we've built all the programs on, you have maps anabolic on one of the spectrum, and then you have maps PED at the other end of the spectrum. We would never recommend the average person, no matter what their goals were, to start in PED. The amount of volume and training that we're asking somebody to do. It's just time. Oh, yeah. It's not a sustainable place. Now, if you are somebody who's gone through all the programs and you've been consistent with no hiccups all the way through it, then maybe you are somebody who is ready for that volume of training and can handle that and may be something that you could potentially sustain. Somebody else, that's a horrible place to start them. Because, yeah, maybe even if they did that program right out the gates, they might see some great results, but it doesn't mean that it's sustainable for them long term. And you have to factor that in, which is, I think we've all talked about this, early in the career, I used to try and close people on committing to three or four days a week in the gym. And when they'd tell me, like, well, I'm really busy and this and that, I only have a sitter for two days.  And I didn't realize how many people I was setting up for failure versus now in the opposite.  I got this time. I've, you know, I'm off of work right now. And I've decided that I'm going to focus hardcore on my training. And I've got five to seven days a week. Can you write a program for me? And I go, well, you know what? Have you been training at all in the previous month or six? No, not really. But I'm ready now. Okay. Why don't we start off with something a little bit slower, like two days a week? Oh, no, no. But I got all this free time of this. Well, yeah. Here's the thing, though. Will that last forever? Will you forever not have a job? Will you forever have this open availability to always train five days a week? Why don't we build something first that's sustainable with less? And then from there, you can start to add to that. And that's really hard for people to make that switch or that decision when they are committed right now to make a change. And they've like mapped it out for themselves and they've have lauded, okay, I've got this time for me. It's just because you have the time to do it right now doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea for you to be doing that. That's right. It's because when you're motivated, you just want to do everything. And you think the more you do the faster you'll get there. Here's one of the one of the wonderful things about asking yourself if something is sustainable and what is a realistic amount of time you can dedicate to exercise or working out forever. One of the wonderful things about it is you learn how to become efficient. Okay, some three day a week workouts will give you far better results than other six day a week workouts. In fact, I could I know that I could do this all day long. Oh, I remember what happened to me. Oh, yeah. So what happens when you start to ask yourself these questions is you actually become more efficient, you actually become more effective, even total, because you know you only have a few days a week that you can make it to the gym. So the sustainability question that you need to ask yourself isn't just about my time and how much I can fit. It actually oftentimes leads to more effective, more efficient, smarter workouts. Because if I'm going to the gym every single day, you know, I may I may be getting as many results with twice as much twice as much work. That's a that's a waste of time. I have to share when that went off for me as a trainer in my mid 20s. Because, you know, there's somebody who's listening right now and they're like, you know what, I'll always have five to seven days. I love the gym. I'll always commit to that. But even if that is sustainable to your points out, sometimes it's not what's best for you. That was really hard for me to get that because I was a young kid. I was athletic. I love to move. I love to train. I was in the gym always five to seven days a week. And one of the biggest plateau breakers that I ever did was taking my five to seven day workout and dropping it down to three.  That was really hard for me to do that because I was so focused on building muscle and I have my thought process was the more I did, the more results I would get. But the reality of it was one, I was stuck in that recovery trap to I was moving and burning so much I couldn't keep up with the amount of food that I needed to replenish myself because of how much I was burning. And I know there's somebody listening right now that is probably in the same place that I was because I was in that place for years and I was a trainer. I should know better, but yet I still fell on that same trap because of my own insecurities of wanting to be bigger, wanting to train harder, thinking that that was what was going to get me to more muscle on my body. But in reality, I packed on a good 10 pounds of muscle the first time I switched after being consistent with five to seven weeks back to a three day a week program. You have to ask yourself, look, let's say you start a business and you're working 15 hours a day, seven days a week, and you build it up to a certain point. At some point you have to ask yourself, okay, we're doing fine. Am I going to be able to do this every single day forever? I need to figure out how to make this sustainable. That's the thing that you need to ask yourself with your workout. If your workout is not sustainable, regardless of all the other stuff we talked about, it's probably wrong for you. It's probably not right for you. Now also, I want to talk to the people that have been consistent, that are in the gym, that are kind of like your typical person. You always see them in the gym doing like the same thing. They're always, they got their routine down, they got their program down, they figured out the amount of days a week that they can commit to, but they're still hitting like a plateau. This is something too that I've found, if you're in that sort of position where you've nailed down like your habits, like what works best for you and all this, but now you're hitting a wall.  We got to start really looking ahead about how we can add new stimulus and how we can look forward in the future to keep this going, because this is something that you want to make sure that you keep moving forward. How do we now shift little elements of the workout to then provide a whole new stimulus? Totally. And by the way, sustainability can also be this, like, oh, I found this Zumba class. Oh my gosh, it's so fun. This is keeping me consistent because it's so fun. Now you got to ask yourself, am I going to still be excited by the same Zumba class in three years? You might not be as excited about them. I kind of start getting boring at some point. So you want to think to yourself downstream. That doesn't mean you have to change the workout right now, but you might want to have a bit of an exit strategy. One thing that I recommend always is to change the goals of your workouts and change the focus of your workouts. I mean, if you were to follow MAPS workout programs, you could follow one, which would take you for anywhere between 10 to 12 to 14 weeks. When that one's done, you move to a new program for another 12 to 14 weeks. When that one's done, you move to another program. Now my experience, besides that being more effective for your body, besides that being better for the way you move and feel because the goals change a little bit, I've also found that to be superior for consistency because for 12 weeks, I did a strength, heavy strength powerlifting type routine. And now for the next 12 weeks, I'm doing more of an athletic mobility based routine. You're just staying ahead of it that way. You're staying ahead of it that way. It gives you better results, but it also keeps things fun and exciting. And fun is part of sustainability. It's not all of it. Of course, discipline plays a big role because you're not always going to have fun when you work out, but you can definitely get really bored with the same thing over and over again. That can make it very difficult. Well, part of that sustainability too is learning to wear that sweet spot is for your body. I want to go back to talking about my experience with the five to seven day a week and then dropping to three because that was an issue for a really long time. And it was really hard for me to even put it together like, why? How's this working? I'm working less, but I'm seeing more results. And I think the analogy that someone gave to me that thought was really good. And they brought it to like a golf swing. And anybody who's ever golfed before has experienced this, right? I'll never forget trying to hit a golf ball as far as I could. And it's the funniest thing ever. The more you muscle it and the more you get after it, the worse it gets. Yeah, the worse it gets. And that's so weird. You think like, to go further, you'd have to hit it harder, but it's not that way. In fact, hitting it lighter would, and if I backed off, I'd end up hitting the ball sweeter and straighter and further. And that analogy, I think of that with when it comes to training and diet and programming is when you learn just the right sweet spot for your body, it does. It just goes. The results come. It's consistent. It's fluid. Feel good. All the things we're talking about kind of comes together. And if you continue to try and push thinking that more is better, it's the same thing like the big muscle guy trying to muscle the ball further down the course. It's the same thing you want to find. What is that great balance for you? What's sustainable long-term? And you know what? What makes it sustainable? Back to your point, Sal. You know what? When you do, when it's hard, when you are, it's easy, when you are feeling good, you're sleeping good, results are coming. Most everybody does love that. Just like when you're golfing. It's a lot of fun when it is fun. When you're staying on the course and you're moving forward and you're hitting par or birdies, like it makes the thing fun.  It's not fun to play.  Same way. Totally true. Now, you know, back to feeling good and pain and how do I know the right exercises.  You can definitely do a self-assessment to figure out what works best for your body. Now, the problem with that is it can feel a little complex. In my experience, it's hard to teach that without actually coaching someone. So what we did is we put together a free class, a webinar online where Justin actually teaches you how to do a self-assessment. And through that self, there's three movements. So he takes you through three movements. And through that self-assessment, you'll learn what are good priming exercises for my body, which can also lead you to what's going to be a better workout for you. It's a free class. Highly suggest that everybody take it, assess your own body. This will help you figure out what workout is right for you, or at least how to prime your workout properly, which increases the odds that your workout is going to be better for you and right one for you. You can find that at mapsprimewebinar.com. Sign up. Again, it's totally free. You get free replays. If you go on there and you show up when we're putting it out live, Adam, Justin, and myself and Doug will actually be on there answering questions live as well. So if you get on the live webinar, you'll be able to talk to us. If not, no worries. You'll still see the whole assessment on the replay. Again, free. It's at mapsprimewebinar.com.