And once bound, the inhibitor prevents that substrate from actually occupying that active side. Now, what competitive inhibition does, and we'll discuss this in much more detail in the next lecture, is it keeps the V max the same, so it keeps the maximum velocity of that enzyme the same, but it increases the parent Km value, it increases the mechaless constant, and we'll see exactly what that means and why. That's the case in the next lecture. So let's take a look at the following diagram. So we have the enzyme shown in blue. This is the active side of the enzyme.