It's it's really it's a it's the non-training time and so that the cellular process is running its course to create functional proteins right so that's the hypertrophy adaptation like we're not dealing with neural adaptations we're just talking about the hypertrophy adaptation so you go in and you do one set two sets three sets or whatever if we can create it so that there's basically almost no fatigue That that's long lasting fatigue from those then we're not because the repair process and the hypertrophy process is the same cellular mechanism so if we have a high degree
of repair and regeneration that's going on then it robs the hypertrophy cellular process of what it needs to [Applause] [Music] do it's time to sit down keep it real and cut the [ __ ] welcome to table Talk all right guys we're back with another episode of table talk today my guest is Paul Carter again he was out before check out the last episode I should have the number but I don't but just search it'll be easy to find Paul's got over 30 years dedicated into strength and hypertrophy last time you out I put your
main your primary focus was muscle physiology biomechanics and Anatomy research um would you say that's still that yeah pretty much I mean I'm Just a the Big Nerd as far as that stuff goes now you know you know distance myself for the most part from all the years we were just like picking stuff up and putting it down so that's pretty much my focus now so the questions I'm going to hit you with first are not training related but I'm going to go with a cheat meal thing oh my gosh right because I I'm I'm
probably like most people that are on social media in some ways and that I'm not going to read a Whole lot of the captions I'll skim through them unless they your captions and you're like trashing something then that's kind of funny for me to read but so I don't know why you're doing it you know is is it a refeed is it a cheat me all I'm doing is flipping through the images and then thinking is this just you or is this like other people yeah CU it's a lot yeah no it's just me what's
funny is is um I used to post them years ago and uh people would Question like they would say you're you're not eating all that now I have a multitude of Witnesses are like yeah he actually does eat all that so I find like a the whole dieting stuff I think is pretty boring I think you have kind of a similar approach to dieting you just don't find it that interesting right yeah um I think we have that very much in common so pretty much during the week I eat the same stuff over and over
and over again um and right now I'm Doing like I'm in the middle of kind of a cut and I have that kind of as a landmark so my week I'm pretty much like a machine my week is just same meals same time each day over and over again and it helps to kind of have something to look forward to at the end of the week and then to break up the monotony of just kind of eating the same Foods over and over and over again I try to change it a little bit now that
I'm I'm really trying to be serious about my fat Loss face where I actually don't just go all out and eat like a straight a-hole like on that like that Friday night I actually try to make it a little bit more like like a pure car blow kind of thing where I'll have like spaghetti um and then lowfat ground beef or turkey or something and then figure out something that's like super that's not super calorie dense for like the dessert or whatever but then sometimes I just throw caution into the wind like I Did the
Hawaiian this was amazing this last week I did the Hawaiian King rolls you know which ones I'm talking about right yeah so I did those into a french toast it's the most amazing French toast I've ever made I never thought about doing those before and it was just those Hawaiian sweet rolls and I did my usual French toast well not my usual I actually used heavy whipping cream this time cuz I was going to go balls out yeah yeah oh my gosh I ate 24 of them 24 Of them yeah I I did the whole
thing so it was I couldn't even once I took a bite one I was like oh my gosh like they were 101 I just started eating them so I did that with and I I'm in Nashville now and they have a lot of really good burger places so I'm kind of going through that thing trying to find who yeah who has the best burgers so cuz burgers are such a good right like such a good cheat and then the the burgers were that I picked this particular time Were unbelievable so it was one of those
really really good ones so I I try to have a good time with that because then I'll go into the weekend um and then I'll pull back and deplete a little bit over the weekend um and then go back right back to my diet on Monday I just find dieting such a boring thing to even talk about or approach or do so it kind of keeps the little changes that I kind of have going on there kind of keeps me focused on what I'm doing with my diet I Remember I always love your old articles
about when you were actually trying to diet and how you kind of had the same thing you're like man this dieting thing just sucks and is stupid and I don't find it interesting so you had to it was John barardi you were working with at the time right and had to find ways that you could approach a fat loss face that works for you yeah I was on Jordan Sid's podcast talking about this because people find that stuff for whatever Reason so interesting and I'm like I can't do a flexible dieting plan I think you're
probably a little bit like this with too Dave is if I'm not going to eat a cookie I don't know what that is like if it's during the week like somebody's like just for you can have a little piece of chocolate you can have I'm like no I'm going to have a whole vat of chocolate or I'm going to have 20 cookies exactly what is this I'm going to fix you know my diet so I can have The poptart I don't want the poptart just give me four boxes of Pop-Tarts so it's kind of an
All or Nothing thing so I leave during the week very strict very on point and that's very rewarding to me cuz cuz it's like an accomplishment thing right and so then Friday rolls around I'm like what am I going to do for Friday and from my own body I can tell when I'm my diet's kind of dialed in Because by the time Friday rolls around I'm really hungry and looking Forward to that and that's when I usually see a lot of like I'll see very good results in terms of fat loss that's what I was
going to ask is because when I would go through those dieting phases those cheat meals could be very epic because I'm hungry as hell right so wait I remember this now Justin Harris talking about how he had to make rules for your cheat meal well actually I changed the way that he did cheat meals with every client moving forward and um It was because he had one the one rule that he had implemented was it always it was always at the end of a high carb day yeah right so and that kind of would lower
how much you'd really want to cheat because if you're already pulling in 800 gram or 1,000 grams of carbs and it's the last meal you're kind of full you know to begin with and where with with the incident that you're speaking about I think I want a lone star yes and that wasn't because I'm writing [ __ ] Down all week long and this goes back to even right I want [ __ ] Ho Hos right and then and then in my head I'll think to myself I haven't had Ho Hos in like 15 years
like why am I craving that it's pretty it's crazy the stuff that you start remembering you're like I want that this week and it'd be something you literally not had an that's why I wrote it I would write it all down because it became this giant list then I go through there and be like cinnamon Pop-Tarts Suck you know why why did I write that right so I had this big list and then we went to Lone Star beforehand and nothing was on my list so I ate that you obviously everything you could eat there
was stuffed so then I just I had the um and I I get those chains mixed up do they have the who has the the the honey rolls honey is that might be I get mixed up Texas road because there's Texas Roadhouse log there's kind of like all the same thing but yeah of course that Was part of it you know from it was the one that didn't have the peanuts I know that cuz that's also te Texas Roadhouse I don't think they do that anymore okay it could be CU I remember that I'm like
I don't want those right because that's just I can I can have way better calories that I want to cheat on than [ __ ] peanut right yeah you don't but I but I already peanuts man I already bought all the [ __ ] I wanted to eat you know so then After that it was I had raisins and M&M's so I would just eat like one raisin or one Eminem every five minutes and in my brain the meal never stopped y I kept eating you know so I went from like 700 p.m. to like
2: in the morning then when he asked me the next day you know how was your cheat meal and I'm listing all this stuff out like morning he he's confused like how is this possible yeah that you ate this much and then I La it all out so then he put a Time cap on it of 45 minutes or whatever it was from there but I remember his I when I I remember that article such a good one and it was something to the effect of I think Justin initially had it so that it was
like once you stood up initially something the meal was over had to be over like once you stood up from like the table or something yeah and then for you he had to actually change it so it was a time span a time I do the same thing because people will Ask me well how do you eat all that and I don't know if if this is how yours would feel but initially when I would eat it's a pretty weird thing I don't think I've ever even said this out loud but I will get full
and then like in 20 or 30 minutes I'm hungry again did you have the same thing it's a very weird thing I don't know how to explain it but like I'll eat a bunch of what I've got and then I will feel satiated but then within like half an hour I'm hungry all Over again it's like it doesn't last and then I'll finish everything and then it's like I can eat more the second round um and so you can get if you you are if you have a pretty ravenous appetite you can get pretty wild
on some of those meals and that's why people like well you don't eat all that I'm like you're right dude I'm just buying all this and for social media and then just throwing away food but I've had enough people that have come out and uh And done that with me they're like no he he's really eating all that so but I do try to like I said if I'm actually trying to be more strict in my fat loss phase you can blow up pretty much your whole week I mean you're like me and you you
can blow up a whole week of dieting oh easy yeah with with a few hours so I had some competitive eaters actually do a few of my cheat meals and for a competitive eater we we're nothing they can they're on some kind of whole other Level right yeah um but he actually did say he goes he goes it's not like difficult but it's for a non-competitive eater pretty impressive some of the the me the cheat meals that Paul does so that was a pretty good compliment so he said the best way I can explain it
like bodybuilding terms is you're not a knbb pro but you'd be like a super heavyweight NPC guy yes yes when I was trying to still competing and trying to gain weight but having a hard time doing That you know and this is prior to jm's advice of you know oil on pizza which you know lasted like three weeks by the way but people have tried to replicate that for months and they're just [ __ ] idiots and don't listen to what was actually stated in the first place but as a side topic of that I
had a um professional eater that I was asking like how how can I eat more food and he said eat heads of they eat they'll eat heads of lettuce to stretch Your stomach part of my problem would be if I had a meal kind of like what you're talking about but you're not dieting and you don't not hungry is there's you get a heartbeat in your stomach you know so I being a quadruped just wanting to die and my stomach would have this pulsating in it and and the way it was explained to me and
I don't follow research or anything with this is they if I would just start eating heads of lettuce on other days I could stretch my stomach And then I'd be able to eat more food you know so every other day I'd be eating walking around eating like a head of lettuce you know to be able to stretch it all out and um I don't know if it really helped because then I'm full from that that's why that's what I heard too so cuz I wondered the same thing I was like how do these dudes eat
this unbelievable quantity food because there's the one guy I don't know if you ever watched on YouTube He'll do crazy like 30,000 calories or 50,000 calories he's a little guy yeah and then I read I was like how are they doing this and I read the same thing they eat like these giant they'll eat as much lettuce to stretch their their stomach out it's possible but then I often wonder cuz I don't have I don't have the people will always say something like well the next day you must be living on the toilet but that
really I never have that like I never Have I don't I don't I never have that and I don't know why they bring that up I'm like I wouldn't if that was the outcome I was having the next day I wouldn't do it exactly they always like you must be in pain or you must be living on the toilet the next day I'm like no you guys must have digestive problems because I don't have any of that stuff but I do Wonder for those guys that are can do 20 or 30,000 calories like if they
have anything if There's any negative effects to that because that's had a difference like you and I could probably do you know pretty easily 10 12,000 C calories maybe up to 15 I've done counted one time I put it on Instagram live I think I did 7,000 calories just randomly at a Cheesecake Factory oh yeah cheesecake alone oh you can you go to Cheesecake Factory they have the calories listed right there so you can plot that out yeah so and I was like 7,000 calories pretty easily so I Know I've done at least 14 or
15,000 and I don't have any problems like people will bring that up I'm like no I don't have any problems so I don't um I don't know those guys do but a lot of them are really you probably noticed that too they're not big guys a lot of those competitive eaters well if they're eating lettuce all the time they're not going to have the calor you know what I'm saying over because you you kind of tapped on it earlier that you can screw Up a whole week you know if you're really trying to pull fat
off in that one meal well if three meals of their week is heads of Lett there like no calories no calories you know then I wonder how many days they spend just eating heads of Le I don't know I don't know I'm going to have to get one the podcast cuz there's a lot of [ __ ] about this I don't really know you should definitely get one of those competitive eater guys on here to talk about what They do cuz that's a whole that's a literally like a training oh I know right it's a
the competitive like the training they got through has got to be difficult yeah they got to peek for it yeah PE can you imagine peeking for stretching your stomach there's so many questions going through my head right now like how would you cycle Peds for competitive eating and what what would the Peds be I going say I was going to be like wait What are the Peds exactly what are the P the PS it's not zic I would think it would be of all things something like alcohol like yeah because you ever noticed that too
like if you get a drink or so well yeah because something that numbs down any pain that would be your ped something that would numb any kind of pain my God how does this discussion yeah here we're pling wow okay all right so let's get into training um as we talked about a little bit before we Started um where I wanted to jump off on are just basic training philosophies that when when I speak to people about training you know the agreement is very high 95% are going to agree on pretty much everything that it
might even be higher than that it's probably 99% if you're looking at the full spectrum of everything that's involved in training recovery sleep all those other type of Things but most of the conversations happen in the margins you know the 5% and I get it that's what people are looking for that's what's rewarded on social media that's all the other kind of stuff and it comes to the expense of the basic stuff which nobody really wants to talk about I I don't want say I don't want to talk about they everybody around the space for
a few decades knows exactly what those things are but the consumer of the education wants to Breeze over all that and look at how much creatine do I need or should my how many sets to failure should I actually do oh Lord you know and all all those type of things where when we just peel it all back and like here's the basic stuff what would be those basic things for you very basic very basic I think that um one of the things I've really come full circle with this past year as deep as I've
gotten into the physiology Biomechanics fatigue um whatever's happening with stimulus mechanical tension everything is that training heavy solves just about every problem so if you're training heavy you're going to reduce the amount of fatigue that you're going to have from session session to session for a long time it was thought that heavy training cause more fatigue actually causes less fatigue we can get into that if if you want to there's far less fatigue with heavy training lower Um with uh heavier training you don't have to train to task failure and you're going to reduce some
fatigue mechanisms with that and the other thing is people will bring up is the fact that well heavy training quote unquote kills my joints but with heavier training you actually get the adaptations at the tendon level that create a stiffer tendon and actually reduce the potential for injury so there's kind of a lot of I would say almost misinformation that's Kind of been repeated over the course of day decades that keeps getting repeated that people kind of believe as these are the truths that actually either they're not the truths or they need context yeah but
I think for the most part if guys will understand to start moving especially talking in the hypertrophy spaces that we're talking strength spaces because I get asked about that a lot then you have to get back to getting very specific about what are you trying To get strong in so like if you're trying to improve your squad bench deadlift and powerlifting then you need to Squad bench deadlift and you probably know this from just like you talked about with the creatine thing or people focus Jim used to call it Windler people too many people trying
to major in the minors yeah but if you wanted to get a better squat bench and deadlift you needed a squat bench and deadlift a lot and that was people don't like that as The answer right they they they want the tell me the best assistance work how many years did you go through that oh God still it's like you know what's the best triceps exercise Improvement bench like dude you got what's your bench yeah so or how often are you benching how you programming your benching what are you doing with that they always believe
there's some mystical magical exercise that they're missing out on that's going to add 100 lb to their bench and then You know you talked about I remember this you have so many good gems man um Gems g Ms over the years you talked about how you would train very hard and very intelligently to add five pounds to your bench in a year you know because once you get to that upper echelon dude you're training to get very small improvements and performance yes so if you're training for strength you're looking more at specific adaptation to whatever
you're trying to do so you Have to get very limited into what all you're doing right and then if you're looking at um hypertrophy it's we're have a different appro a little slightly different approach where the the main mechanism is going to be mechanical tension so we have to really Define like what's driving the adaptations that we're looking for and is my Approach really the most optimal towards getting those adaptations and kind of like we were talking about preliminary I don't Think people like to except the fact that on paper what actually ends up is
going to be the most productive is quite boring and simple looking mhm and they don't like that because they think there is a mystical magical um answer that's going to turn the guy that's been training for a few years and he's going to become the natural Ronnie Coleman and I'm like dude if you were going to be that you know six months into training that was the case yeah so from a like What the Basics are is is I've kind of helped come like helped other people even come full circle to if you can start
moving towards just heavier training that almost solves all of your training problems so like to start there like if we want to reduce fatigue as much as possible uh we want to get the maximum amount of stimulus out of the training session to go towards increasing adaptations and in order to do that really we just have to train Heavy and we have to progressively overload in our training now there would be a balance and I'm interested to know where you would put this with training heavy and then movement quality MH because on we'll get into
a lot of other things later but say if we're dealing with training the muscle in the stretch position or whatever it's going to be and whatever the science kind of shows with that I kind of see that but then They're making an assumption that the movement quality is good to begin with I would say that's probably even my own um false assumption because in my head if your execution quality is not good well then you do have to back off and get to a point where your your execution movement is going to so that you're
you're targeting the tissue that you're trying to gr right well the the the balance there would be in some of the big compound lists maybe they're just Not strong enough to be able to do it effectively and that's that weird balance because I fall on the side of everybody can do it correctly they're just need to use less weight you you know and where the counter to that let's say if it's a a barbell row which just for example sake um that they if you were to look at their form it's eh like a five
out of 10 and some would say well if they just train it hard and train it heavy and keep that movement quality the Same as what it is then the movement quality will get better as they get stronger so we're kind of on the same page here I saw that you were going yeah because we're training a pattern and all that tends to happen is if we're progressiv progressively overloading is that we just start progressively overloading that pattern yes and the the other fault that can come is they'll never go heavier yeah you know they'll
always they'll become one of them super Slow super technical one of those those super squeezy stretchy guys yeah and there's probably a time and place for that but probably not with a dime on each side for a barbell row and a 220 lb that's an interesting thing though is that one of the things that is I actually really do love about the research is if somebody actually gets into the right research the right research actually will explain exactly what you're talking about so there's What we call like an internal Focus where we're focused on like
mind muscle connection and that's as you said that's fine to a point but at some point you have to progressively overload that motion right you got to add some load to the bar now it doesn't mean that you get sloppy but it means that if you're constantly focused on the stretchy squeezy whatever you absolutely limit the amount of loading potential that you're going to have within an exercise You know this right like if you're always focused on the stretchy squeezy that kind of stuff learning emotion that's fine I do that in my groups with an
acclamation we come like get used to the movement learn how to do it correctly and we're going to add load for the weeks and weeks after that if you take somebody and say keep good execution but hit a five rep max they're not going to think about stretchy squeezy they're going to do the movement Yeah now I don't mean again let's keep this in the context of good training they're going to do the movement or should be doing the movement still with good execution but you're not thinking about the stretchy squeezing you're thinking about moving
the load from A to B and it used to be thought that was the wrong way to approach hypertrophy training but it's not look man if you're doing a lat pull down or you're doing a a press on even on a machine or a highly Stable exercise or whatever and you're doing a four five or six rep max what do you think's moving the load like it's the same muscles and you climb higher up on that motor unit recruitment scale you don't have that Summer's here and so is the heat I've spent most my life
training in unconditioned gyms and I know most you that are training in garage gyms private gyms black Iron gyms know what I'm talking about when I say the Heat sucks it kills your motivation To go to the gym it kills your performance but it doesn't have to if you keep your electrolytes up that's why today's episode is sponsored by element element is is a tasty electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't this means lots of salt with none of the junk no sugar no colors no artificial ingredients no gluten no fillers no
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work so there's that I think you hit on that there's that ground between okay am I prog am I able to progressively overload this motion and so that way I can see that adaptations are occurring because that's what Progressive overload is it's feedback that you know either neural adaptations have occurred or muscular increases have happened one of the two things so if I I Need to go from where I'm learning this movement to where I'm I'm overloading this movement yes well I think that's that's definitely the route to go and then all of a sudden
now hypertrophy Bec comes basic you know and how it's being trained where that has shifted over the last decade to where more people training for hypertrophy are seeing it in that light to where you know when I was coming up and when you were coming up it's what body part are we training You know and maybe you have a set range maybe you know you're going to just train it until you don't want to train anymore the pump goes away or whatever the gauge you're actually using whatever you're using stay that way all the time
you know to where you know what you very briefly explained if there's a block of training in there that's going to acclimate or re acclimate right and that would be different time periods based upon the skill level of the athlete Right 100% you know and now they have that movement locked back in now you push it you got to load it yes yeah yeah and then switch it out or whatever needs to happen during that next phase that becomes like this weird argument on social media where people will go on and on about mind muscle
connection I'm like well if you're doing a if you're doing a lateral raise if you're doing abduction what do you think is lifting your arm like it can't be anything but your Lateral deltoid with some you know anterior deltoid you get some some secondary and tertiary movers in there but what do you think is doing the motion like I'm I'm keeping within the realm of we still have good execution going on with the movement right what do you things do in the motion like this idea that you need to to feel it move like a
robot and super slow and all kind you're going to be very limited on your ceiling of hypertrophy adaptations that You're going to get if you're always working within this realm I have to feel everything doing stuff you I mean you know that day right so there comes a point where like you learn the motion you standardize your range of motion you standardize your execution and then you've got to load it you you will never be able to get around that if you are lifting 25 lb dumbbells doing this exercise and then two years from now
you're still liing 25 lbs for however Many reps you were doing then you will look no no different like at some point you have to load that motion so it's I think that's the area that people need to come to terms with is like I think there's a time and space for mind muscle connection or learning what emotion feels like and then after you have that standardized really well to move into I'm going to start loading this motion and that's pretty much the what I said like that's the the boring this is how It really
works thing that I think people often have a hard time getting their head around that it's not more complicated it's not drop sets super sets ISO holds you know everything's got to be at a super stretched position it's not all that stuff it's really pretty simple load something heavy with good execution and then add reps or add load over time and that's the Magic Bullet that I think people know exists but they always think there's something deeper Than that yeah and I kind of get it because I I try not to separate myself too far
from how I thought 30 years ago mhm you know cuz we're all looking for the shiny things we're all look nobody wanted to progress slower right which is you see what I'm saying well it's it's funny though because I mean one of the biggest pieces of advice we all put out there is you know this takes time you know this is like a decade it could take longer than that um meanwhile when we Were younger it's like [ __ ] that you know the same type of can never when you're younger it can never come
fast enough yes but the the difference would be we probably had two differences that I noticed is we had less shiny things to be attracted to right so there there's that I mean what you flip through a magazine or watch a VHS I think there was so much advantage to the time that we learn training compared to what kids have to deal with now because I figured Out when I was younger you know Dorian Yates was like my guy right and he used a very simplistic what I think is like a simplistic approach was using
low to moderate volumes and progressively overloading your stuff and I figured out early on I was like well if I can take an eight rep max to a 12 rep max and then double progression and then just increase the loading bring it back down to eight I'll grow it and it was really that simple right and like you said we Didn't really have a chance to get distracted by too many shining things cuz we'd have to wait another month before we got another issue of a magazine yes and they didn't always have shining things in
the next issue of the magazine well the other thing too is I think at least in the bubble that I've always lived in is if somebody was training for something you know um meat competition fat loss whatever because not everybody competes you know so we'll Put that out there but they were all training for this is what I want to accomplish here they didn't lose focus of that it's like they weren't kicking that can away or getting six weeks into it and oh no no now I want to do this yeah there was a there
was a old term do you remember when message boards which were you know good and bad but I think for the most part good but there was a term used to use on message boards that was called a chronic routine changer Yeah you remember that where guys would start doing a routine they'd be three four weeks into it and they see some other routine they thought was going to be better and then get they would switch over and start doing that routine and the the one thing I have to go back and remind people is
if you're doing something and it's working EG you're increasing reps with a load or you're able to increase load you know under all the same conditions then your Training is working you don't want to change anything it's funny even as we get Advanced sometimes I think there's times where we may get a little more selfish in terms of wanting more and I had this conversation with Windler years ago and um he was feeling his best he was like man I'm absolutely just crushing weights that I haven't been able to touch in a long time and
he told me he's like I'm going to make some changes yeah Jim's like I'm going to Make some changes he wrote about this I think the second edition of 5'1 and I was like dude you don't want to do that like if everything's working right now then just keep crushing with what's working yeah ride the wave yeah ride the wave fantastic and he went and changed his training and got injured oh yeah well I mean that happens right right um and on the strength side this this can happen as well they they're actually ahead of
plan you know and so then They'll change because when in reality what they need to do is let it dial back a little bit so they're they go into the meat or lessue with less fatigue instead of it's a good thing that you feel like you're ahead of plan so you're absolutely right and I remember going through this with um when I was doing competitive powerlifting and I'd be working with clients right and the training would be really dialed in they're moving we would Use more of kind of velocity based approach sub maximum loading making
sure that we had really good speed with the with the you very similar to what the Russians did remember for years um what I want to say shico would program somewhere between 68 and 75% for the majority of a meso cycle with the main lists right like you you worked on your speed and then you'd have a few weeks of loading and they would get greedy and then they would do something like take Like a Max double or something like the whole reason why everything is moving like it is is because your training is working
that's a really sort of subject I'm like if if your training is working the way I've designed it don't change anything don't do anything to it these are that's exactly the way it's supposed to work and then a lot of people do not understand they think a small thing doesn't matter like one of the things this is how much a small thing can Matter one set to failure using High Reps 15 to 30 reps can take as much as two days to recover from like we have that in the data so if you were just
like I'm going to add in this whatever now you just actually because that's going to reduce the amount of motor unit recruitment that you'll get in the next two days your next two days are actually shot comparatively performance-wise to what they would have been if you had just not done that so A lot of times People think that these are simplistic things they're putting in that don't make no difference but they can cause a significant difference in the performance outcomes in the following days or even weeks because so an example of that could be a
back down set of 15 100% yeah so like if you didn't have let's say you were guys well I want to do a back off set um and the back off set it's not programmed and you do a back off set and I do back off sets but I still keep it heavy and I keep my reps low but let's say you're like I'm going to do a back down set of like 15 or 20 and I go to failure and like that's not a big deal to add in well like I said the research
pretty clear on that if we're taking sets of failure there's going to be more fatigue we're doing higher reps there's going to be more fatigue so now I'm going to actually take a couple of different metrics and combine them together and I don't think It's a big deal when in fact the subsequent training days will be impacted by something that you think was kind of inconsequential yeah let's Circle back real quick just to put more context behind what you're speaking about and what we'll talk about and defying mechanical tension okay wow that's my favorite because
I think the majority of people on social media now do not know what mechanical tension is um they repeat it On a m in a multitude of ways that are erroneous um some people were mad because um I did a stitch on Lane Norton this past week where you know Lane doesn't understand mechanical tension and it's in the appropriate manner so mechanical tension you have two types of mechanical tension you have passive mechanical tension which happens on Ecentric phases of uh Dynamic repetitions when you lower the weight so you get passive tension the Magnitude of
passive tension that you're going to get there is depending on a multitude of barriers um you have active mechanical tension which on the concentric when you have the cross bridging that's going on between act and mein and basically they're you know you have the that action going on um kind of at that very tiny uh that level within in in the muscle cell so you have those two different types of mechanical tension When we talk about mechanical tension within the growing muscle realm what we're really talking about for the most part are kind of two
factors we're talking about well before that if we're if we're talking about the aromatization the phase between I can never say that word the am amation phase the what happens between the Ecentric and the concentric yeah right how does that play into that we're not stretch Position wise just from that repetition wise and and what granularity do you mean um from the St well if we're talking a plyometric right so I mean that would be the easiest way to explain it you you have that stop right then there's that stretch reflex I guess you're talking
about like the stretch shorting cycle yes okay so yeah I mean that's so if we're we're lowering a weight like that um the passive tension comes from okay If we're lowering our weight passive tension is usually coming from a couple of places um passive tension will be coming from Titan which is a a very large protein molecule that runs um through the sarir and we also have the slow detach M rates that are happening between actin and masin so you have that combination of those things kind of occurring you do get some passive tension that
occurs um from the sarcolemma and and some other stuff kind Of uh in that you know basically surrounding the the fiber in the cell but for the most part what we're looking at when we talk about passive tension is from Titan uh and then we're talking about the Detachment rates of AC and mein so as we lower a load we're going to have that's when you look on the force velocity relationship right on that e side it's flat so you have this High degree of force that's happening regardless of load that's going on over There
but you have a a low degree of activation because you can lower 20 or 30% more load than you can Le right so you have a low degree of Activation so the only fibers that are really active and an Ecentric when we're talking about loads that were're capable of lifting are mostly fibers that on that moderate to low end of the high threshold motor unit pool so they're going to be like type one fibers yeah they don't really I know it gets said a lot that you're Going to grow a lot of muscle from using
slow Ecentric you're really not because you don't have a fiber has to be active to be mechanically loaded right and so if you're doing any load that you can lift at all even for a one rep max you're going to have a very low degree of activation comparatively on the lowering part than you'd have on the lifting part right yeah so you'd only have like type 1 fibers for the most part that get mechanically loaded on Slow Ecentric so the passive mechanical tension that comes from there will come from the detach rates of Acom and
from Titan and then as soon as you go through back through as you reverse it out go through the the into the concentric well the reason I'm asking about that stret shortening cycle is that could be a dead stop you know it could be a dead stop for time right or it could just be continuously right back through right so how do those variables impact what's Going to happen then on the concentric on the concentric it's basically just going to come back to you would just get Action potentials right that get sent down hey I'm
I'm about to do a the concentric phase of the repetition and then you get the M heads to start pulling on acting so um you'll get some you would get some active tension from Titan on because of the fact that it's a basically it's it gets stretched out and then when it shortens it provides a Little bit of active mechanical tension back so as you're doing the concentric the mechanical tension part is really just force yeah so tension and force are interchangeable terms yes so when the sarum um when you have the the filaments that
are doing basically muscular contraction the actin amiin that's the active mechanical tension so um that's pretty much the two types of mechanical tension that you can have well will the Mechanical tension change if it's say a dead stop deadlift or if another example just say a of curls to where you stop and then start no so you after understand so because what you see what I'm saying because if if I'm thinking more from you know explosive strength you know going from that dead stop into that explos into that say if it's a box squat sit
stop boom explode as fast as you can compared to a free squat drop come back Up through right you know there's there's that difference in there so what I'm wondering how does that impact that mechanical tension does it does it scale differently I suppose would be what I'm trying to ask does it inate differently um what is that there's a term rate of force development that's the one you're looking for so the rate of force development so there's an increase in rate of force development When you have kind of used the stretch shorten cycle where
you have myostatic reflex that's going on so you have an increase of rate of force development but from a Howard driving the actual mechanical tension I don't think that's going to ultimately play some major part in terms of how much um total active tension or how much total passive tension that we're getting from that exercise all right so now when we move into the the active tension that you're Speaking about what what are the factors that play there right you know because there's so when people talk about hypertrophy training and they're talk talking about the
mechanical tension that's driving muscle growth the really the two factors that we're concerned with is that are we getting the largest fibers active within that the set we're performing and then do they get mechanically loaded so you have a couple of principles that you Have to look at so effort drives motor unit recruitment so people have trouble kind of putting these Concepts together so if I get out here Dave and I asked you to do a vertical jump and you so you jump as high as you can you have a very high degree of motor
unit recruitment you'll recruit all of the the largest fibers um in order to do that vertical jump but because the velocity is very quick there's a very fast there's there's you don't have a slow degree of Um uh velocity you need a slow degree of contraction velocity to have a high degree of force right so if I if I ask you to pick up a load that's a five rep max you have to apply a high degree of effort but the load going to move slow no matter what like no matter how hard if I
say here Dave do this machine for five reps it's a five rep max load your first rep's going to be pretty slow even if you applying as much effort as you can and so those are the kind of the two Principles that we're looking at is that the fibers that we want to get to grow on that top end of that that motor unit pool they require a high degree of effort so we need them active first to mechanically load them but we also need an involuntary slowing of contraction speed because that's when we're going
to have the greatest amount of cross bridging that's going on between the actin and M and that's creating that tension so those are kind of the two Factors when we look at mechanical tension that we have to say how do we get mechanical tension on those largest fiber types so we have to have a high degree of effort so they're active and then we have to have an involuntary slowing contraction speed so that there's a high degree of force being produced and it's really that simple so some of the things that I hear about mechanical
tension that are wrong is like oh there's more mechanical tension On Ecentric no there's passive tension on an Ecentric and if it's Ecentric overloading you would get passive mechanical tension on the larger type two fibers but passive mechanical tension creates a completely different type of adaptation than you get with active mechanical tension so one is going to be more longitudinal growth and one is going to be more radial growth so they actually create different types of adaptations too because adaptations are Concentric or um um con uh con um contraction based so a concentric contraction gives
us a different type of adaptation than an Ecentric contraction and that got mixed up over the years because you remember the old research would say like well Ecentric heavy like Ecentric overload training produces more hypertrophy it it didn't like once they kind of figured this out were able to equate the loading correctly they just saw well they actually produce similar Degrees of hypertrophy but um they just produ different types so even though it's kind of widely accepted now that mechanical tension is the primary driver between behind all hypertrophy mechanisms most people don't actually know what
it is like you different exercises don't cause it you can't like get more of it by doing um you know like intensifiers or things like that like it's really just occurring um kind of at that cellular level between the um uh Functional um proteins mhm so it's really not a complicated thing but people have trouble understanding those Concepts so if effort predominantly is what you're speaking then slower concentric speeds would not be optimal that's a really I'm intentionally no no no no the fact that you picked up on that immediately just like just fills my
heart because most people have trouble understanding that Concept and you picked it up right away if you did a on purposely slow concentric it would be a low degree of effort right yeah and somebody tried to explain like well no it's a highve effort I'm like no it may feel hard but if you're moving a weight very slowly on purpose there's a very low degree of effort right like if you if you pick a weight that you could curl very intentionally slowly for 10 reps um those first few repetitions there it's a Very low effort
so you have a low degree of motor in your recruitment it's not going to be until there's enough accumulation of things that cause you to go well this is really hard and I have to I'd have to produce a high degree of effort to continue go right that's when you can get into those higher ends of motor unit Recruitment and you can get those fibers active so you have to get to a Point somewhere within the set where you have to apply a high degree of Effort and then the bar is moving slowly but not
because um you're intentionally moving it slowly it's voluntarily involuntarily moving slowly right where I think some people could mix this up trying to think of a movement that would be something that so if you a machine PE fly for instance you know if you're in that deep stretch position then some people will hear that mechanical t and then the effort and then right from the very jump of that very deep stretch Position they're going to bang into it right as fast and as hard as they possibly can to where on the other side of that
is you you start with you know the pet contraction and then once it starts moving then ramp up the effort as hard as you possibly can right do you get what I'm saying yeah so they start in like that almost like more in that slow stretchy mind muscle connection thing and when they feel like yes yeah so what are your thoughts on That cuz it's older beat up people I would tell them that you probably want to start it you know with that chess contraction there's always the some people think that I'm like super black
and white I'm not everybody has different histories injuries tendonopathy well this is going to be movement specific as well cuz well I mean yeah you I don't think you'd want to um and that comes back to kind of remember as we were talking about Earlier staying within the of am I moving this with good execution with good control and that kind of thing and I I found over time that I can even if I'm doing like a PEC Tech or whatever I can still be very controlled with a heavy load of five or six reps
in that stretch position so that I'm not setting myself up for injury I don't tell people when it's like go heavy even if it's a stretch position movement you still need control right like it doesn't mean that You're trying to do a PEC de Fly Like an Olympic lifter you know you still want control you still want to yes you do want to make the muscles do the motion but you still need to be able to overload the movement so you if if it was something where also the resistance profile would matter too right like
if you were working on one of those PEC decks where it was super heavy in the stretch position probably want to maybe pay more attention to not trying to be Explosive in that part well a better example would probably be a dumbbell fly you know so let's put more stability into the and like think about if you do a really heavy dumbbell fly what kind of intuitively happens on the lowering phase you lower kind of slowly right like you're not you're not trying to like bounce out of the bottom of a dumbbell fly so I
think some of that does happen intuitively you're like oh I'm going to do dumbbell fly well if You're doing dumbbell flies I will say there are people now that my brain's kind of ruminating all that they're you see those videos where guys are doing you ever see those dumbbell curled guys and they're doing like way more loow they tear their biceps because they're doing like they're doing those really Jerky like heavy dumbbells that's just ego lifting and there's people like to use those those are there's there can always be an Exception to something I mean
you know this more people have blown out pecs from bench pressing and stuff like that but it just some of that stuff just happens but some of it's just ego lifting it's like those leg press videos where somebody like snaps their legs in half I'm like well just watch the video and what there's three of there only three of them there's only three or four and people have leg press forever but I think that intuitively if you're staying True to keeping good execution some of those things work themselves out I think naturally so if you're
doing a dumbbell fly I'm going to do a heavy dumbbell fly I'm going lower it under control I'm going to use a proper range of motion so I'm not trying to get too stretched right I'm not just trying to um get more stretch for the S of more stretch so I'm working within a range of motion that works for my structure that works for my my history for my injuries for whatever It is that I'm dealing with and then I use good execution I can overload this in an appropriate manner so I mean I think
it's the the movement is does matter it also matters like you said with the resistance profile if I mean with a dumbbell fly it's going to be heaviest at the bottom you know because the load is furthest away from the shoulder at that point so it's going to be heav to the bottom if you're using something like a prime or one of those Old stride machines where you can change the resistance profile your execution could change a little bit depending on how that resistance profile looks what are some of the other areas with this mechanical
tension that you see people are not understanding I think the the main things is that they think that number one there's something different happening with different rep ranges it's still the same me mechanistically it's the same process so whether you do a set Of six reps or you do a set of 25 reps it's still just mechanical tension so it used to be thought that there was a multitude of different mechanisms that were causing muscle growth like whether it was metabolic stress or whether it was all these different things because they were trying to figure
out why are we getting the exact same hypertrophy outcomes with a set of six reps as we are with 20 reps and they were all tested and we have a pretty good amount Of data at this point now to where we're like okay you know lactate metabolic stress none of that stuff actually causes muscle growth and I mean I when I started beating that horse years ago when I was looking at the data I I took I took a lot of shots online because that was thought forever okay that's one of the drivers but we
have gone as far to do um to inject people with lactate to no results like it can be difficult because it's hard to isolate off some of Those mechanisms from one another and training because if you if you every repetition that you do every contraction you do produces metabolize right so you'd have to be able to say how do we get a metaboli accumulation without actually getting mechanical tension and vice versa how do we look at these things in isolation and that that can be very difficult to do but we have enough data now to
understand that there's it's really just mechanical tension there's No like mechanical ion and then if you're doing higher reps or whatever there's like an additive hypertrophy effect coming from like metabolic stress or muscle damage or any like that it's just mechanical tension so at the end of the set by the time you get to the end of set if you're doing a heavy set there's the two things we're talking about you have a high degree of effort and you have a inventary slowing of contraction speed so that's mechanical Tension if you're doing a high rep
set what happens by the time that you're getting those last four or five reps in the set of 15 or 16 or 17 reps what is happening you have a high degree of effort to finish the set and you have a involuntary slowing of contraction speed it's just mechanical tension and either those and some of some people have still tried to say that there's kind of other mechanisms going on but and one day we could find out there is you and if there Is I'll be like oh he look it's another mechanism but we the
other ones that have been postulated at times they just haven't panned out so right now it just looks like and it should make sense because Dave if you look at all the data and you say well hypertrophy outcomes are pretty equal between all these various rep ranges it should make sense there's only one mechanism right that there's not a multitude so if you had one driving it and another that was an Additive you would one in some way shape or form it can't just keep equaling out that it's the same over and over again there
there's statistically insignificant differences it's pretty much it's really similar across a a wide variety of rep ranges right so it only makes sense that there's kind of just one thing happening here the other one is that heavier loads cause more mechanical tension heavier loads don't cause mechanical tension it just exists On the force velocity relationship and I'll read that or hear that often is that heavier loads cause more mechanical tension um they don't cause more a heavier load immediately means you got to apply more effort which means you get a higher degree of moor recruitment
but there's no not more mechanical tension there it's just mechanical tension that those active fibers are experiencing within that set so that gets tossed around is not correct there's not more Mechanical tension there if you do of the light load for 15 reps you're going to get very similar degrees mechanical tension as you get on a heavier load for five or six reps so there's not more mechanical tension with heavier loading it's just a high gr of motor recruitment very early in the set so if we're just speaking hypertrophy and you're phasically laying out different
blocks then would there be granted we're we're being very general here CU I'm sure There's individualistic properties that going to apply to different people from what I'm hearing is is they can simply just stay in that you know four to six rep range heavy and change generally I've nared down to about 4 to eight 4 to eight and then just change movements with each phase that they go through yeah while the Contemporary thought would be here's phase of tens you know here's a phase of eights here's phases of six where they Both can work right
but it may not even be necessary to do the tens that was another one I took a lot of crap for for a long time was I'm like you don't H good hypertrophy training doesn't need periodization at some point you'll Plateau out on a motion Plateau with it and you're going to need to train that muscle using a say a different a joint angle range of motion different exercise or different component function but for the most part you can work within that 4 To eight rep range and you're going to get all the hypertrophy you're
ever going to get so the idea used to be to periodize your rep ranges for different adaptations that doesn't really exist yeah I I think Dave the problem is that people become very emotionally invested in Concepts and then when those Concepts don't pan out over time they almost take it as like a personal attack and I'm just like look dude it's just physiology well it could be I mean it could I mean It play devil Z but it could also be that somebody wants to keep that same movement in totally for 16 weeks and there's
no way that they going to there's c times you've gone through your training where you just love an exercise for six months right yeah but then it becomes like how are you going to how do you keep overloading exactly right that that becomes the the trick you know with that to where that's where those rep ranges could fit that bill but there's So many different things I think as far as that goes um I had kind of a PhD guy challenged me to that and he's like well then he goes if you look at the
the rep range Continuum and you see the dots and the studies that represent like the subjects in the study goes you'll see some people that are outliers and he's like why is that I'm like well that's pretty easy because they like doing that rep range more than they liked another rep range So if you like doing a set of 10 to 12 Guess where you're going to put a lot of effort if you hate doing sets of five guess where your effort is going to be low yeah so it comes back to a very simple
principle if you have a high enjoyment for say doing 12 to 15 reps you're going to apply a lot of effort you're going to get higher degrees of Mo and recruitment so that might be more productive for you during that time but it doesn't mean there was something Magical per se about changing a rep range where you're like oh I saw more progress when I cycled some different rep ranges it could be that you just get tired of doing a specific rep range for and and you've probably had that too there comes a point I
think mentally if anybody is training long enough or gotten developed even like a modicum of decent strength you do hit those times where going into the gym and man you just do not want to load the bar That heavy MH week after week after week you know so I think that what how that can work into something is maybe you want to keep doing a movement but man you're just like it's daunting to load it that heavy week after week after week and you're like well I'm going to do some sets of 10 to 12
for a while and a lot of people will say well I got fantastic results off doing whatever I'm like I'm not saying you didn't I'm just saying mechanistically there's nothing That magically happened with doing that other than allowing yourself to change those repr ranges gave you kind of a spike in enthusiasm and um motivation and then you got back to training a little bit harder so it really you know it's like we talked about the concepts are so simple but you have to kind of get granular and break them apart down into the root core
of what they're really doing and that is if this caused me to train harder well I'm going to get More m in your Recruitment and then I'm going to get back to having a greater degree of stimulus that's happening so it's all the same mechanisms you just have to break down and say why did that happen because we if we get back and we know here's the mechanisms that are consistently causing it then there's no like magical spells that are happening in there that made this change it's just that you got tired of doing sets
of six and you started doing sets to 12 and That felt good and then you were able to go hard again and there's your result yeah so if we're if we're to take that concept which is now defined and then bridge that into effective reps you know for the muscle hypertrophy then how do you how how would you explain that the the whole effect of rep so principle I I'm concept all right so the effective reps principle um essentially stay is is those two principles we have a high degree of Motor Improvement and then we're
working on the force velocity relationship so there's there was kind of like a couple of people that narrowed that down so whenever we do a five rep max load we have pretty much full modor your recruitment from the first rep five rep max load can't get a six rep you have you have to use pretty much you're getting full modor unit recruitment from the first rep and we saw we see this we've seen this in maximal voluntary Isometric studies um where we've done isometrics um they we see it in EMG where they can see right
around the last four or five reps of the set you kind of tend to have the activation um the action potentials kind of tend to max out and they don't like go up or go down it's they seem to be right there in the last four or five reps so it was kind of the um looking at how much mod un recruitment where is it getting maxed out at it's Not a like a Max single still has the same amount of motor unit recruitment that a fiber at Max does you're still getting the maximum amount
of motor unit recruitment but the perception of effort is a little different so if you look at the effect of rep's model which is pretty much undefeated I know there's tried there's people there's been some quote unquote detractors of that but it consistently falls apart when you look at the data so Chris beersy and I Chris Was kind of one of the guys that looked at the stimulating effective reps model and and you know really refined it it got challenged by some people and we looked at the meta analysis on reps and reserve and hypertrophy
because some people were saying effective reps would span as far out as a reps away from failure now without getting too sciency and too nerdtastic into that discussion Dave does that even sound right to you it doesn't does it so that was pretty Irritating for me I'm like look man you don't have to be in the gym that long to know if you're a I don't even know how you gauge eight RS well I guess my my only caveat to that would be if you taking Advanced lifter has been Lifting for a long time and
you use a movement like a leg press you know if you really get on their [ __ ] on the last set you might be able to get them to do more reps because all of that's Here in the brain yes yes you know so but that's like one example that's not going to happen across all movements by any means whatsoever right so but I could see that being a case where yes you could potentially be if you're doing really High Reps you could be but for the most part if we're talking generalities without getting
ner tased by the conversation it does if I tell you hey Dave you can still grow half the amount Of muscle you're ever going to you immed like no yeah no right right that's just like a common sense you don't even need to be like a nerdy lifter guy like me you just like if you've been lifting and you know how you grow and what causes people to grow you know you're not getting anything a reps out from failure so the people that kind of challenged that were trying to insinuate that the data showed that
as much as a reps out from failure would cause muscle growth So we took apart every study that looked at reps and reserve and muscle growth and there was one that showed people did get some hypertrophy a rips out from failure it was sedentary elderly people who can do anything and see some improvement right in muscle growth that was I don't know if they didn't bother looking into it or if they were just being disingenuous because they you know they just want to take pot shot but I'm like that's it and so when we spend
the I it was like a full month we went through every study really breaking this down and as it turns out looks to be on average about the last five or six reps when you're go training to task failure those last five or six reps are the ones causing growth like pretty consistent M and then when the training to failure the first meta analysis came out they have a graph in there you can go look at and when they did the red graph on the rep ranges they start at five 4 3 2 1 so
They narrowed it down to looks like these five reps here are the ones that are doing all the all the stimulus right and for a noob for a beginner guy could be six reps he gets six reps stimulating reps out of a set to failure could be six because they just haven't activated those fibers and that mechanically loaded them right like at all like like you know how it is being a bab you just grow from anything but it and it could narrow down a little bit as you get more Advanced where it might could
just be you know and these are just basic kind of assumptions um because anytime you look what's really going on between non-trained people and very well-trained people are the magnitude of things that are occurring right so a really well- trained lifter maybe he's only getting four simulating reps in a set failure um because he's he's kind of reached an upper limit to how much those fibers can Grow so but I don't think it really the range is pretty small but I think in a set faure you can kind of say when there's no fatigue present
that you're probably able to get somewhere around five simulating reps out of that set so we're literally talking walking into the gym you don't have any really any amount of fatigue presence so you can climb up on the motor unit pool like as high as you can go take a set Val you're probably getting somewhere around five Simulating reps out of it all right so with the question that I've always had with with that aspect a couple things would be um would power why would powerlifters not have bigger legs right because they operate in that
three to five rep range all the time you know it's I'm the volume probably isn't enough stimulus for that growth but that that's one of the counters that I would he that a lot And that one I think is easy to answer um so go ahead and answer that one first I'll get to the next one so generally as powerlifters we're training pretty far away from failure on our yeah on our B so if we're doing a triple um we're not taking 90% triples except maybe a couple of weeks yeah right got right before meet
so people would be like why aren't P lifters bigger it's not the rep range it's it's the mechanisms that are occurring but if if you and I let's say Dave that we're like Hey we're getting ready for a meat and we're we're 10 or 12 weeks out well we're how many weeks are we going to go until we actually get into what we consider heavier loading it's going to be a while right so we spend a lot of time getting really efficient at the Motions at the movements and building up to those loads so we
don't really spend as much time mechanically loading those fibers we spend more time getting neural Adaptations to that movement so that we're becoming far more efficient at doing it so I got to ask this a lot and I'm like because you guys are just looking at it's a rep range if I'm doing if the 4 to eight rep range and powerlifters are always working in three to five then why aren't powerlifters bigger I'm like well some of them are I mean Kirk kaasi had no some are right yeah kry had legs that Revival any bodybuilder
ever yeah take what you just Said though and kind of expand that out over an annual plan you may be looking at 12 total weeks not a lot right right out of you know so first off they're they're they're they're making a pretty broad leap to assume that you're going to put a lot of muscle mass on in 12 training weeks especially when you're not when especially when you're far away from failure most of those trou yeah and and that's not what your primary goal is so you're accidentally going to get Ifbb cuz you're going
to throw in maybe for your assistance work right so most of your assistance work I found when I was powerlifting you really aren't trying to failure very often you're using some heavier loads and maybe on some of your assistance stuff um I would do some pretty heavy like elevated kind of stiff leg deadlifts um a little bit for but for the most part when you're do my deadlift didn't actually move Dave um you struggled with deadlifting too my Deadlift didn't move till I stopped going heavy until I stopped moving until I started moving with velocity
so I'm not training the deadlift heavier very much my squad also had its best gains when I started using a compensatory acceleration approach and was doing multiple sets of stuff in like anywhere from the 65 to 70% range well if I'm only doing I'm doing five sets of five with 65 to 7 70% and really working around velocity stuff then again I'm on That velocity side of the force Vel relationship we don't get a lot of tension there so This falls right in line with so if we're doing let's say we're doing five sets of
five on a squat and what we're really working on is increasing velocity over so many weeks then we're not working on the force side of the force velocity relationship so we're not getting a high degree of tension in those sets now of course we'll do some assistance work but if You're a raw guy what are you doing like you know what I mean you're you are kind of limited maybe you'll do a couple leg extensions or leg curls or something here there but for the most part you're focusing on your time in the gym and
getting better at and more efficient at doing the lifts so um you know getting a better overhead press despite the fact that people are like um you know well my overhead increased my bench because i' I've heard that before and I'm like well If overhead increasing your bench I would have been like a 600lb bencher cuz I had a near 400lb overhead press and I'm like that didn't cause my bench to go up like benching helped my bench but I wasn't a great bencher cuz I didn't have huge PS right at the end of the
day you probably noticed that too did definitely some cor cor causation correlation whatever guys that had really huge PCS with good benchers I wild how that works out right yeah or Had really big triceps or really great brch so weird you know Kurt was a great squatter he had massive legs so there is some I think carryover in that Dan Green was incredibly jacked right and he did some bodybuilding style stuff in the off season so I think you do see the Russians were never very jacked but they trained more of that shico style training
where it was like sub maximum loading acceleration velocity um and then they only had a few weeks out of The year but they didn't look like bodybuilders but a lot of the American powerlifters did because they would do some more bodybuilding style training so it fits perfectly within all of the other mechanisms I think people just get they hear 4 to8 reps and like well power LIF do 4 to8 reps I'm like not the way a guy is trying to grow is doing 4 to8 reps is completely different approach plus you don't want the existing
fatigue when you're trying to maximize neural Adaptations in terms of like motor patterns because that can actually disrupt that and make them less efficient over time so you want the least amount of fatigue while maximizing those neural adaptations and motor patterns in order to really get those um to like maximum levels yes the second part of this would be they I've seen people have less emphasis on all the other reps you know if it is for strength right They're not effective so those other reps don't matter to where those other reps are having those different
adaptations that you're talking about the neural adaptations um increasing work capacity for instance you know a lot of lifters now you can increase your work capacity to the to the point of a crossfitter which isn't going to help you as a power lifter right so right so there there is there there's definitely Limited applications there there's there's definitely limited applications but on that strength powerlifting side I've seen that pull back so far that that work capacity will drop then the recovery suffers and all that and they're doing it because they they they'll say you know
I don't want to do the Reps that aren't effective I'm like effective for what right because we're there's different adaptations that are going to occur with other things and um I guess a a pro bodybuilder could be an example of this is there may be some body parts they don't want to bring up right right so then in that case or like in case where there's something that just grows really easily on them they don't want to they don't want to continue to grow that and then they have and that's going to be the case
with everybody I know this is wild to say Dave um but uh genetics ultimately matter is genetics ultimately matter Right at the end of the day so if if somebody has naturally you kind of know early on when you have a naturally good body part something kind of responds much faster than everything else and then you're going to after 3 to 5 years you're going to have something and you're like well this muscle just really underdeveloped I've not really seen that many cases where people truly kind of overcome that stuff like and I feel like
people get irritated at me about saying That I'm like dude if you've been training smart intelligently for five years and you have a weak muscle that muscle's probably going to be weak forever M as do you do you not feel like I do I mean it's it's the degree the degree which you can bring it up is going to be far more limited yes I mean you can load it with glycogen I mean there's there's temporary things right but for the most most part without Synthol right you know that's it's it's going to be very
for for for the majority of you people you're speaking about 100% yeah you know for outliers maybe but that's going to be more you know if you're dealing with that ifbb Pro I'm not and the shoulders are a weak point maybe it's not a matter of building the shoulders but it's a matter of making the things that are around the Shoulders not as large to make the shoulders look was when uh when Ramy won the his first Olympia he actually got incredibly smaller comparatively to the previous years and had a much better looking overall physique
and I said for years that from a bodybuilding perspective I always it outside of Ronnie Coleman who is is always the exception even for bodybuilding most the bigger most guys got the harder it became for them to get really nail Conditioning mhm I just felt like that was an anecdotal thing I noticed and then when Ramy actually came in really great condition he actually got way smaller and his physique looked way better so sometimes it is just a matter of if I have something that's overpowering but I have a weaker body part you know and
I I'm actually after a more aesthetically looking physique then I just don't train that that muscle as much or I or I reduce you know the Amount of stimulus that I'm giving it within the training week yeah I'm going to go out on the limb here and say that there's probably a high probability that everybody listening to this is not that person nobody's going to do that Dave yeah no nobody's going to do that nobody that's listening to everybody loves their everybody loves their strong body part let's just yeah unless somebody's really trying to win
an Olympia there's that's the 1% of 1% and it's like this Needs to come down a little bit to accentuate something else but I also think the average guy sometimes forgets bro you're not on the Olympia stage right like so I'm like if you got weak arms you're probably going to have weak arms you know forever um I think it was back when I was powerlifting and I remember there was some people had a meltdown over this I'm like if you've been training for 10 Years and you got a 315 Beach 3 315 bench you're
never going to bench 500 I felt like that was a pretty and somebody be like well now I'm talking about let's say you even taking Gear Well yeah no I'm a yes assuming that their technique and everything is good you know you're I would agree yeah so like whatever's probably your weak Point's going to be your weak point forever right yes that guy that's Peg and I were talking about on the drivein So like just those guys that have arms down to Mid Shin level that you know are pulling like 900 and they have like
185b benches they're never going to bench 500 you know what I mean like there's always limitations genetically there whether it's your structure whether it's your ability to recruit fibers um whether it's your ability to train at a certain level kind of hard some guy can train just train harder than others there's always a genetic limit in there that's Going to no matter what that you're just not going to be able to effectively overcome to get to some level that you think you're going to get to I get asked often is there a a Natty genetic
limit it's such a weird question it's like of course there is you know like you can't I don't even know where to go from with that question if if somebody asked you Dave is there a Natty genetic limit you're like yes I would say that there's a synthetic genetic limit too right a Gear yes of course there is right so you can only respond to a certain like whatever response you're going to get out of whatever dose is still even genetically going to be limited to what Androgen receptors so you've only you've got limits basically
built in at every level whether it's your Natty limit or whether it's how you respond to gear whether it's your how how your nervous system responds in terms of MOT recruitment Whether it's how many type two fibers you have in a certain muscle or division of a muscle there's I sometimes I will get people ask me well like if you know all this stuff like why don't you have like an elite level if physique I'm like cuz I don't have the genetics for that it you could know every possible secret to maximizing muscle growth but
you are still inherently limited by those genetic factors no matter what anyone says now really smart really efficient Training that is based around the physiology and biomechanics and all the stuff that we're talking about can help you maximize what you have but there's a limit to what that is and there's a multitude of things right down the line that create what that maximization is so well to Circle back to your bench example to put a little more context into that is with all the assumptions that we put out there being laid down technique is good
all all this is good It's not like we can go fix something on their technique and add for 40 lb there are people we can do that with yeah but all those have been done it's all done what I find that a lot of lifters will do and this I'm sure it's going to carry over into strongman and other string Sports as well is they will literally think that I have to train this harder they're going to beat their head into the wall to try to get to the next meet to where they're still going
to just Bench 315 to where in my mind they should find the least amount of work that they have to do to be able to have that 315 bench take that other so it reduces the systemic fatigue to be able to apply more effort into the lifts that will grow for them so maybe the bench doesn't go up five PBS you know but the squat goes up 30 or 40 right because they reduced that training volume isn't it called like dance with the girl that Brought you or whatever yeah exactly and but and you got
to make absolutely sure that you're there you know what I'm saying so I can see a lot of people like oh I my bench is white 165 it's been there for 5 years but your bench sucks your setup sucks you know you're not activating anything right you're not there there's still a lot of you know well hanging Pro that always comes back to kind of what you just hit on before and that was are people actually having Honest conversations about what their goals are yeah because if your goal is to Total to have life you're
a power lifter if your goal is to get the greatest total you got and you're a 315 bencher and you're doing everything right then you're probably going to go into that meet and bench somewhere around 3 320 or 330 or something right so what Liv can you really help help yourself with right to get that the bigger total if you're a Bodybuilder like and um you know you know like we talked about you have to kind of let something come down to create a more aesthetic uh more streamline looking physique that or or if you
just have to you know diet better because dieting at the end of the day guys at the pro level if you're on gear you're not going to lose any muscle right if you're taking a gramma test a week you know you can pretty much just not eat you're not Going to lose any muscle so that really comes back to a dietary discipline thing so do you have the dietary discipline to show up absolutely peel or is that the problem yeah that you've had in the past because anybody can get shredded especially if you're on gear
M what I mean by that is is like gear doesn't burn fat um anytime you see a dude online that's like shredded people always think that it's the gear I'm like that's dietary adherence bro when when Straw Burns F dude you know how many guys that knew powerlifting that were fat that were on every drug yeah I know I know it's just these these funny things just keep popping up in my head I always say wind St burn like explain how that happens yeah I'm I'm in my cut mode so I switch to um I
what's funny about that is I remember um uh when you when John was life his his favorite oral F filling out was Actually Anadrol you remember that right so John's like Anadrol is awesome he's like the reason why guys think that they're bloed on anad is because they eat like a-holes yeah he's like and then they take anadol like Anadrol blows me like no your food is bloating you CU he would take andw and said dude I get so filled out and hard so um back to that point if guys are having honest conversation about
themselves where what what it is that their their goal really Is so if they're competing in Pro bodybuilding that can't ever get in shape have an honest conversation about the fact that your dietary he really just sucks like that's why you can't get peeled it's not because of your drug cycle and it's not because this you don't do enough cardio and you don't eat a few enough calories right somewhere you're short circuiting what you claim is your goal yeah if your goal is like you want to um you know you're just a a Guy that
you know Works down at Best Buy or whatever and but you're obsessed over growing your lateral triceps well you know I I just always think those are funny because I'm like dude if that's just if I feel like there's like not congruency between what guys obsess over and then what they're actually doing so I think it caus this angst where they could kind of settle that angst if they would have better honest conversations with themselves about hey I'm not a Professional bodybuilder it doesn't matter if I get lower lats right you know what I mean
and so now they can just go in and focus on improving their overall physique and they'll actually be much happier here but like that's not the honest conversation they're having cuz they're they're caught up and like you said we didn't have all of these shiny distraction things growing up we were just like man I need to get better at doing this exercise and get this Strong one of the things I used to do was I thought and this is not a it's not a true thought but I think it was a good thought if I
could lift as much weight for reps as the guys I were seeing that I would be you know like similar size now that's not a true thing but that's also not a bad thing to think about because you're still just focused on how do I progressively overload these motions and that's going to get you pretty far mhm so I think that's the the Biggest thing is like they just don't have honest conversations with themselves and like I said if you're a 315 bencher you're never going to bench 500 I've had so many people get mad
at me and have emotional meltdowns over stuff like that I'm like it's just an H honest conversation I was never going to pull 800 right like I was ecstatic when I pulled 725 but I was like I was never going to I was never going to be an 800 puller I was pulling the bar up all the Way into my crotch like there's very few guys Josh Bryant pulled 800 was not built for deadly thing it's very difficult people don't understand leverages that genetic thing coming back into play you know what I mean like if
you're having to pull the bar you know a mile from the floor it's going to be very hard to pull a lot of load so there's always that genetic limitation you know and I get get guys and gals in my groups and why hasn't this happened Why hasn't that happened I'm like I'm I'm probably giving you the best programming on the face of the planet at this point number one you have to be patient um and number two is that it could be that you don't you simply are not going to grow that muscle very
much and that is sometimes an answer people don't like to hear how with those cases though how do you anchor with them effort right because if they they need that effort and that repetition you know What you may think this is where the RP stuff kind of begins to fall apart even R to a certain degree because it has to be anchored between who you're working with mhm right so what you think is two reps and Reserve may actually be what somebody else feels is seven yeah you know and until they learn that effort component
of that so how does that kind of play into the programming or even a dialogue that You're having with somebody well I used to be a you know task failure to like everything that you're doing kind of guy and then over time I begin as I really started to look at what's like I talked about what's going on with heavier loading where we're already at maximum org recruitment with heavier loads and what's kind of going on with that last rep is that it has exponentially more fatigue that it carries with it with if you just
kind of knock that last rep off Then I started implementing that in my own training and I actually started seeing Progressive overload happening at a exponentially faster rate than I was dealing with before and then so I started putting that into my groups and there's definitely some um there's like an art to figuring out like what is this all you like if you're been training to failure all the time trying to do a set to one R can feel really difficult at first yeah but at least you know what Failure is right I think that's
an easy thing actually for most people because they're like I'm just going to go till I can't do another one right and I think there's definitely some nobility in that and I think you need to cultivate that in your training so that way you do know where failure is but I think if you can get to where you're doing heavier loading and you're just kind of lopping that most fatiguing rep off you're probably going to see the greatest Amount of progress because you're just kind of eliminating this significant degree of fatigue that one rep is
actually causing you more than the others and then the the other thing is the approach you're asking like well how do you get these people is that because you still keep failure stats within the training program right because I still think that you need failure sets in there for a couple reason number one to make sure you're gauging your RS Correctly and then but more or less using it as a tool rather than the driving mechanism behind the training itself so you're using at am I gauging my RS RS correctly my RP correctly and then
is my Progressive overload really occurring because you really hit on something really really good a little bit ago and you said if people would kind of get back to being okay with progressing slower and not having to to um max out their performance every Training session they would actually prog they would actually progress much faster it's it's the what is it then the shooting is is slow as smooth and smooth as fast right and if people would look at progression as terms of you know this next eight or 10 weeks in this meso cycle or
this next six months in this meso cycle and instead of trying to see Progressive overload every single session and they're constantly pushing up against like what they're capable of They would knock off that fatigue that's existing because they not always training to failure and then they would realize at the end of like three months or six months man I am the stuff I used to max out with is like literally become one of my warm-ups now but they're so impatient like I I have L had to explain to people look man when you're a a
rank beginner you should probably expect to see performance improvements session to session to session you can expect that For maybe 6 months and then as you start to get more trained that rate of progression starts to slow down exponentially I mean the majority of the muscle mass that you're going to gain happens in the first year if you're training smart intelligently hard it's somewhere around now we're talking about natties right let's just stay within the natural realm of discussion if if you have somewhere around 45 pounds of natural muscle that you can gain I I
Literally it's like something like 28 to 30 something pounds of it come can come within the first year so you're going to spend the REM of your life chasing around 10 pounds mhm most of it comes within that first year so um or I think it's like the first year and then the second year pretty much first two years is where you're can to get like 90% of your gains 90 95% and then guys would be complaining I haven't seen haven't added a reper load In two workouts I'm like that ain't [ __ ] yeah
yeah yeah that is nothing if you've been training for 5 years you really I don't think you can expect to progressively overload Maybe maybe every third or fourth fifth workout and that could be a month right that could be a month so I learned to stop sweating that stuff a long time ago I'm like if I really like a movement gives me no problems doesn't hurt me um Feels good to my structure it's highly stable I can load it for a long time I'm okay with taking that slow Progressive approach where I'm adding you know
getting a rep maybe every third or fourth or fifth even fifth workout if I enjoy it because I still think the enjoyment of training is massively important like I feel like that still needs to exist because if you just hate training a specific way no matter what you're just going to get really terrible Results so kind of understanding where you're at in your training status with what Progressive overload should even look like I feel like is often lost because as you stated earlier it can never come fast enough for most people it's the rate of
progression is always slower than what they want it to be so then therefore they start to question is this even the best way to train because I'm not adding a rep every single workout I'm like well you've been Training for 10 years you you really expect to add a rep every single workout mean that was remember the old in the old um cycles and powerlifting where a guy would be like I'm going to add I'm G to add you know 10 lbs to my bench every couple months so there by the end of the year
it's like 50 or 60 pounds I'm like that's not going to happen yeah remember that where people would line these up so I'm add 10 lbs to my bench here I'm like why don't you just think about adding 10B to your Ben in the next 6 months right cuz even if you added 20 pounds to your bench at a high level in a year that's incredible progress so if you're if you're a well-trained person then the expectations that you're going to see Progressive overload workouts workout workouts not very realistic well I think when if we're
talking about the hypertrophy movements or accessory movements or however you want to put that with a higher trained person they Have to think of and it's it's always been odd to me because they'll do that with the big lifts they're going to think it through like what's this going to look like over 6 weeks or 12 weeks or whatever that or cycle is going to be whatever the phase is going to be but when it comes to the accessory movements they don't do that you know so it's I I personally I call it like a
Runway like how long of a Runway if I want to put in a certain movement am I going to Actually be able to have to where if I started you know day one assuming that it's once a week it's going to change obviously it's Monday Thursday if with frequency right so say I want to hit it the frequency of this movement eight times and I start that first week with one rep shy failure you know I'm not going to be able to run that eight times no you I'm just not you know so I'm I'm
forced with the choice of it's going to either be a shorter Cycle you know or I'm going to for me personally I'll build in stuff before that which may not be as optimal slower tempos whatever it's going to be you know for to reaccumulate or re acclimate to that movement and then that takes care of two you know where if I want to Runway a six there's two that's already taken care of now I can go you know say three R and then two R and then one R and then try to get one more
rep you Know out of there's six you know it's done but I mentally how many exposures am I going to have with this movement and then is that last exposure going to be my best recent best because it should be right that's the progressive overload aspect um but I'm not going in naive thinking that my best is going to be the first time you know yeah because of course you know it's well if it was it would be conent Max effer work and you just hope to God That it's going to happen that way but
you know cuz most of the time it does doesn't um but that's where I think that really a lot of the mistakes will occur or on the other end of that Spectrum it's just they're going to work that movement pattern and change whatever the stimulus is each time they do that movement pattern but even that I feel should have some phasic structure behind it you know with the intensity or the volume or whatnot so when you look at Those things when you plan those things out um what you say for yourself to make it a
little easier to kind of diagnose or to dial down on how do you look at the intensity the volume and the frequency wow so that that kind of leads us into the conversation of something um we've been working on a lot lately and we kind of coined is called the the weekly net stimulus and so kind of the um culmination of that is that looking at instead of looking at like weekly Volume which is become a big thing you need to look at the workout volume in the frequency you were just kind of hitting on
that so like how much stimulus am I getting out of this training session how do I to keep F fatigue minimize as much as possible and then when am I going to do this again so when you can understand the kind of the physiology metrics behind those layers then you can really maximize training in a way that I think That most people I made a joke about this a long time ago um and I said the reason why guys keep asking they always ask say how many sets to do how much volume to do this
exercise or that exercise and I would say at best science can give you guidelines I would say best science can give you guidelines and everybody's different you hear that all the time there's individuality blah blah blah blah blah and then one day I was having this conversation with Chris and I go but can't we kind of figure that out like if we know like this a set of failure this many sets the failure creates a cellular response of whatever magnitude and it lasts so long and then after that atrophy occurs right so then can we
get an idea of how much volume we'd want to do in a session and then when that need would need to be repeated to kind of keep us in a a somewhat anabolic State And reduce the amount of time we spend catabolic and wouldn't we kind of have an idea of how much recovery time would be needed when we look at the recovery data and volume and Reps and and all this kind of stuff like couldn't we do something like a mathematical equation with all of the physiology that we know to where it kind of
gives us kind of like a a pretty good ballpark outcome of what we're looking for and we had these this these long these long intricate Conversations and I was like I remember I went to bed and I was like I'm going to wake up tomorrow and really focus on figuring out these metrics and I woke up the next morning and Chris had sent me a spreadsheet where he' already done all the math for it and I was like okay that's cool thanks man you just totally totally beat me on my my own um my own
thought process but essentially when you look at when we're talking about muscle growth when you go In even one set to failure right creates the stimulus for muscle growth if you're doing one set to failure so then all you have to ask yourself is and how long does that stimulus remain after I've done it so somewhere in the Daya you're looking at somewhere between 30 and 48 hours so those fibers that got mechanically loaded are anabolic for that period of time so that's again approximate time figure so once those because those fibers are never activated
Those largest fiber types right at the top end the high threshold motor in you pool they're only activated when going and do hard training right we're training either to failure or very close to it so how long do they kind of stay in an anabolic state so um or how long is our our body physiologically in an anabolic state to where it wants to create those adaptation for for hypertrophy so once that gets back to Baseline and drops below Baseline those Fibers start to atrophy they start to shrink they don't just hang around muscle is
metabolically expensive your body does not want to hold on to it for no reason you have to give it a reason to either retain it or to grow it more right so I was like well if that's the case then regardless of what the kind of the body of research says that frequency doesn't matter that wouldn't make sense with any of the physiology that's also another one of those things where Dave Like if I told you is like if I had you do three sets for bicep on Monday but I and you didn't get to
do biceps again for another seven or eight days but if I told you to do one set of biceps every other day and you're trying to grow your biceps as much as possible and you had to pick one of those two options which one would you pick it's changed over the years but now I'd say every other day right yeah right like if you think about it for a minute You're like well if I'm just getting to do one set or three sets but I don't get to do biceps again for another 8 days it
seems intuitively like okay well I'm definitely going to take the other day one right cuz there's not going to really be any fatigue one set failure but I'm going to get a chance to stimulate that muscle to grow over and over and I was like well if we can minimize fatigue as much as possible then it really comes back to whenever That cellular response to adding you know myof fibral to the you know existing fiber whenever we can kind of restimulate that then we would kind of maximize out growth so we started working on that
so my TR own training started changing in accordance too it's like well I'd already moved into more of a um let me Lop off that that failure rep because once I did that I'm one of those guys that I'm like I'm going to look at the data but then I'm going say Does this have practical application because I think that's one of the things that Meatheads like to complain about they're like this isn't real world stuff I'm like well if we put in the real world let's see what it looks like so I take that
stuff and I'm like let me put it in my own training see what happens and once I lopped off that failure I saw my own Progressive overload go up I felt recovered from my training sessions better I don't think people realize how Much fatigue really just taking everything the failure all the time just creates and it it causes a reduction in performance in your subsequent training sessions over and over and over again because as soon as like you do a de lo and the fatigue subsides what happens you're like oh man I'm strong as hell
again all those adaptations already existed you just allowed fatigue to subside so you can create the least amount of fatigue in the training Session each training session should be pretty close to maximal you can't completely eliminate it all together right I mean you could if you train like contracted position exercises super low reps but there's so many things you're going to do in your training where you can create some fatigue the idea is to minimize it as much as possible so once I Lop that off Lop that and I like I said I still have
failure sets programmed in I started saying well how Do we how do we get that the stimulus in whatever muscle that we're training as often as possible I just made a post the other day if we know that volume has a nonlinear relationship meaning you walk in you do that first set to failure close to failure whatever you have to do five sets to equal the amount of grow stimulus from that first set takes five more sets because of the saturation effect and because of fatigue right so you the the fibers that are active are
Already saturated with stimulus from that set and then fatigue reduces how far up we can climb on the motor unit pool to activate more fibers right that's why volume can never be the answer to getting last bit of muscle growth you'd have to throw out every bit of the physiology research to make that work it could never work so if we can if that first set is the most stimulating one how many times in the training week can we get a first Set that I felt like that was such a very big light bulb so
if we know like hey that's the set has the least amount of fatigue we're going to get the most amount of stimulus from it how many times in the week can we get that first set so that was kind of where things started to change and I was like well that what that looks ultimately ends up looking like Dave is either kind of a full body split three times a week or something like an opener lower and where We can get those first sets in there as often as as possible during the week and then
I was like from a how this should work mechanistically that should be pretty close to what we're going to get to In terms when we're looking at like Optimal hypertrophy adaptations then with all that said how would a the aspect of a pump play into hypertrophy even at all it doesn't because it's with what you're saying There you're you wouldn't have enough volume you know for that pump right so if it doesn't play then it you know it doesn't play if if anything um the pump is disadvantageous how so well we have an in vitro
study that looked at muscle swelling which is essentially what the pump is doing um and if anything in the initro study which was done it was done on people and rats because people for some reason hate rodent studies but it Was done on both and from what they could tell it actually caused a reduction in force production something called excitation contraction coupling failure which happens at the neuromuscular Junction to where the uh action potential sent from the brain goes down sarum gets to the the T tubules and gets to the the neuromuscular Junction right it
can actually communicate with the calcium ion store so there's no muscular Contractions for those fibers so that's what we see essentially with this research um there's a multitude of of other um studies where they've tried to induce there was one where they actually did bfr Blood Flow Restriction in conjunction with doing um an arterial infusion with vasod dilators that would have given you the most insane pump you could ever experience in your life right to the Tune of nothing no um anabolic signaling no muscle growth no nothing so that kind of comes back to where
we were talking about we if we're going to say something creates a hypertrophy adaptation or some type of additive effect we need to be able to essentially isolate it off as much as possible away from mechanical tension to se this is what's happening but there's been a multitude of studies that have done that um and have like the pump doesn't serve if anything like I Said the the pump the the myof fial protein synthesis um study where they looked at short rest periods with longer rest periods they actually concluded that the swelling occurring from the
pump probably helped to reduce um myof fibral protein synesis that it was part of it so the pump May forever about in bodybuilding circles was talk aled about you know something but if anything the pump is is disadvantageous I'm not telling people not to get a pump or like Avoid pumps I'm just saying there's nothing that the pump is doing to promote hypertrophy so from that standpoint then there's another study the mangene study where they did 10 set four sets of 10 to 12 one minute rest periods compared to three sets of uh four sets
of three to five with long rest periods and these were in advanced trainers this is one of my favorite studies and the the four sets of 3 to 5 beat the brakes Off the four sets of 10 to 12 with short rest periods now we know short rest periods um don't allow Central fatigue to dissipate so there's always a reduction in motor unit recruitment with short rest periods but you would get a greater pump doing sets 10 12 with short rest periods so there would it doesn't make up ground anywhere again there was a the
the group that did longer rest periods heavy loading um lower rep ranges absolutely demolished the the Other group so the idea and again I think this comes back to one of those things where it's been repeated or comes so prevalent among lifting culture that it's hard for people to get out of that mindset but there's it's just not serving any purpose in terms of creating hypertrophy pom's fun it's like dude makeup I'm say you get a pump right that's what I call it if you got a beard and a pump dude you're going to look
like a completely different guy right so Um but in in terms of like what are we seeking out in our training it's like I I don't ever program for like a pump like it's not doing anything to create an additive stimulus effect right I need to use the restroom take a break okay Summer's here and so is the heat I've spent most my life training in unconditioned gyms and I know most you that are training in garage gyms private gyms black Iron gyms know what I'm talking about when I say The Heat sucks it kills
your motivation to go to the gym it kills your performance but it doesn't have to if you keep your electrolytes up that's why today's episode is sponsored by element element is a tasty electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't this means lots of salt with none of the junk no sugar no colors no artificial ingredients no gluten no fillers no BS it contains an electrolyte ratio of 1,000 mg of sodium 200 Milligrams of potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium element can help prevent and eliminate headaches muscle cramps fatigue brain fog sleeplessness and
other common symptoms associated with electrolyte deficiency right now element is offering a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase get yours at drink element.com this deal is only available through the tabl talk link okay staying on the pump so I'm pretty sure I already know what your answer is Going to be to this so what would your F be to uh finishers probably the worst thing you could do mhm so I actually just recently made a post that I think that that there's there's any one really detrimental thing you can probably add into your
training would be something I can finish here we're we're talking from a hypertrophy so if the most stimulating sets are going to be done early in the workout the least simulating ones will Always be at the end so and if we also understand that High Reps are going to cause exponentially more fatigue than lower rep sets if you think about a finisher at the end of your workout you're not really getting a lot of stimulus out of a light load you know with a lot of reps in it and then the on top of that
you're just creating exponentially more muscle damage from those sets um than basically anything that you're Getting out of it so I know again once those that's one of those things I've done finishers yeah pretty much over the course of the last many years I've had lots of things I've had to to be open to that's why when some people somebody says something like I'm dogmatic I'm like I'm probably the least dog dogmatic person I know because if I learn something is more effective or efficient I want to use that so that was one of the
things that hit me I was like Well if we're getting to the end of the workout we have a limited number of sets that are going to be truly productive within the workout Itself by the time we get to the end if we're just doing like this finisher mechanical drop set 30 40 rep thing it's not really giving us anything but it's actually it's going to take away from a lot so um probably no place in my opinion and finisher for almost any kind of training mhm so people get mad about that kind of stuff
Well with that other than just like you're just doing it because you like you want to have fun but I'm saying if you're trying to make your training as as effective as possible there's really no place to put one in so when you're speaking about you know the frequency that you say upper body lower body upper body whatever it's going to be right then you're going to be dealing with more work sets per training session right So I'm going to pause on that CU that's not really true more well I'm just F because there's more
body parts there should be more work sets but you know I'm going to pause on that one because that doesn't mean you're doing three sets per body part so yeah so kind of how that I spliced that out was do you remember old one of the things I remember I felt like I really enjoyed and I thought was effective um that Dante put in Remember When he had the Rotating split between it was kind of an up or lower of three days a week but it was over three workouts so it's very similar so if
you think about the multitude of exercises that you use there's almost always a bit of overlap between like the musculature that you're using you're just doing different motions right so you might be loading something more at a short something more at a lengthen um for the most part there's a certain amount of overlap You're having if you have a lower body day if you have like day well there's only so many muscles you can train you can train glutes hamstring quads adductors right Cavs so if you're figuring four or five exercises in there and you're
doing if you're using an Upp or lower split one day could be a little bit more glute dominant you put glutes at the you know more of the beginning of the workout you allocate a little bit more volume to those but if you're doing Like a even if you're doing like a quad based leg press or a squad or whatever on another day glutes are still going to get some stimulus right so it's it's what I found was is that I could do an upper lower split rotate over kind of like three sessions and and
emphasize something a little more in one session than another and that worked really beautifully so how do you manage your back training then MH so I really just didn't like training lasts for a little While anymore so it was pretty easy just to drop that out easy yeah yeah yeah but if you wanted to have like a so you're bag training right so really what you're looking at at the end of the day you're looking at a lap movement you're looking at an upper back movement for the most part right yeah so um if you
do a lot of people think in terms of very ice um absolutes so if you do any kind of pull if you're doing a pull even if you're pulling through the transverse Plane like a row where you're kind of abducted at 90° there's still some lats in that like you they still pull on the humorous right so if you're doing a row you pull the arms behind the body you're going to get the traps you're going to get the lats so they're they're still getting stimulus if you're trying to be a little bit more specific
um you know something like a a lat pull down where you're in the frontal plane you know you're pulling down wide there's not Much upper back in that that um so that's going to be more lat specific so if you're trying to do your upper back training one day you might have a a row that's an upper back like dominant row but there's still some lats in it and then you add in maybe some trap work like a Kelo shrug or even a vertical style shrug but then the next workout you go in you have
more lat based pulls um and then you can keep like if you do like a rear delt fly you're still Getting some upper back in there so I didn't get too obsessed over trying to make sure everything got hit like super directly because everything's still going to get hit how many times have you ever had an injury Dave and then you realize how much that muscle gets used in doing stuff you never thought about yeah right so like when people try to isolate this stuff off I'm like there's always a dominant prime mover right like
in a motion especially depending on the Range of motion that we're using but there's also stuff working in there that you're not thinking about so if you ever got like a low back injury or ham or glute or like anything you're like man I did not realize how much that work doing other stuff I never thought about so if you're really overloading stuff um or how often you ever remember benching and like next day you'd be sore and muscles that like oh yeah like like you either your L you contracted your lats so hard Yeah
so there's always some degree of like hey everything's kind of getting some work I know this one is getting really getting the greatest amount of kind of concentrated attention and that's the point of it but I don't get so obsessive over so it's like an upper body day and I'm going to do I'm going to like focus on one of the divisions of the PCS for like a type of press whether it's a sternal press or it's a clavicular press and then you know That'll get a couple of sets you know right you know close
to failure heavy loading and then it's a if it's an upper back exercise I might pick a row where I'm kind of working at like kind of this angle here with like 45 degrees of abduction because the lats are still pretty going to get a a fair amount of work in there but I'm really focusing on you know scapular retraction so I'm really hitting deer back but then the ad get some work in there too right so um And then if I wanted to emphasize traps a little more I would focus on something more like
a type of like a Kelo shrug where it's just just retraction without bringing in the rear delts without bringing in the triceps or any of that kind of stuff so there's little tweaks that you can make in your programming too where you can both make sure that nothing is getting neglected but you're also kind of emphasizing one thing a little bit in each workout to workout And then where you place the workout in this uh the motion in the sequencing right if it's it's early on in the workout it's going to it's going to get
a little bit better work than if it's late in the workout so you can do rotations with u with your workouts too where the sequencing is a little bit different so like I said if one leg day is a little bit more glute dominant your glute stuff comes first if the other one's like more quad dominant you're Putting your quad exercises first so I found it to work quite beautifully so if there's two lat exercises in the upper body day are you going to stick you know a a pressing movement between those two lat exercises
or have them sequence after each other no I wouldn't put two L exercises in one workout anymore okay so all right well forget that let's say right if it well if it's if it's back then biceps you know the same situation are you going to follow the the biceps With the back or are you going to put some kind of pressing in between those two to be able to allow for the greater recovery so if it's like I'll give you an example of like some ones I've gone through so it's like right now I'm focusing
a little bit more um for the next yoke Squad m cycle where they can have a little bit of arm emphasis so if you do something like a hammer string press which I don't like for pecs because the resistance profile is Terrible it's really super hard at lock out but if you do a close grip Hammer Strength press pretty good triceps motion right because you're really loading the lock out right there at the end so you would still get some PE stimulus but if you want a little bit more arm emphasis you could start with
with a hammer string press um and then if you did after that you did like one or two of your tricep motions and then you did like a uh a bicep motion and Then finished with like I talked about like a Kelo shrug or a shrug then um that's kind of your upper back stuff so if it was um let's say it was the other day and um let's say I wasn't doing arm stuff and I was emphasizing more on something else then I might start off with a lab movement then an upper back movement
and then say like a lateral raise and finish with like a pec deck or whatever so I don't like force have to make sure everything's getting like some Something super like uh direct every single session because there's a certain degree of overlap that's going to occur if you're doing a press triceps are still getting some chest getting some regardless of the resistance profile delts are still getting some somebody asked me the other day why didn't you have why didn't you do delt work in your workout I'm like well do the interior delts get work in
a press do the rear Delts get work in in in a poll they do right so but then if you have another another session if you have like three upper session you'll do some direct lateral delt work like a lateral raise um or you might do a rear like a pectic rear rear Del pec deck or something like that so you'll add those in to where it's like the more direct stimulus um like that either way and I found that to work really really fantastically I forgot where I was going To go with that topic
of the oh the the rest periods we didn't tap into the rest periods the rest periods yeah so which part well for hypertrophy right there's well be you it's actually even going to matter if it's between sets or between movements right because it's kind of the same thing in my opinion if it's um unless the movements are stacked you know like multiple lap movements or whatever it's going to be you mean like A superet um well the reason I went there was you know if it is a Time matter and it's an upper body day
M you know then if you superet with a long enough rest period and it is you know a lap movement chest movement then a lap movement whatever it's going to be by the time you get back to the last so um that's definitely if you're trying to do some time saving one of the type of suets that can work well with that is if you're pairing like antagonist muscle Groups right like so if you're doing a chest like you said that think that's where you're going with that so if you're Say Hey I want to
fit more motions in here into this workout but I don't want my workout to spend like 90 minutes you know what I mean two hours I don't like to be in the gym I I don't know if you're like this I've never wanted to be in the gym more than an hour I feel like there comes that that point where you know you're just not Getting much out of what you're doing you know what I mean after you've been in for like an hour and a half like I just don't feel like that you can
maintain a really an effort level effort level at really high levels for like two hours it just anybody who says that I'm like you're just not there's a lot of junk volume going on you're training very hard well if they're telling you to take six minutes between sets or that remember back in the days when uh guys Who used to laugh about that would bench for like 3 hours do five sets yeah dude you don't need to you don't need to rest 10 minutes between sets so if you were keep me on this topic so
I don't deviate too much because I'll give you some good stuff here so if you were doing antagonist either super set or an alternating set so an alternating set you know where you do like a like a chest press and then you rest for let's say just a minute to allow you know Heart rate to come down a little bit cardiorespiratory demands kind of reduce um and then you do a back exercise well because those are different muscles with different nerve Innovations you don't end up with the same degree of central nervous system fatigue because
you are um you're using different nerve Innovations like you still have to central nervous system fatigue is operating at the brain and spinal level but at the spinal level you're dealing With those consistent repetitions that are happening with those Action potentials that travel down the spine over and over again so it's the same nerve inovations same muscle group working over and over and over again then the magnet itude of those signals gets reduced due to that fatigue but if you're using antagonist type muscle groups um like a biceps and a triceps or you know chest
and back or whatever then you can effectively kind of Stack those A little bit better as you were saying save a little bit of time and kind of get a little bit more work in um I don't really do those for just a simple fact is in most gyms now um it's hard to hold on to two machines at one time if you have your own place like this right here that be F that would be fantastic right cuz you could really condense some good work into a short period of time and actually kind of
work on those upper echelons of what I Consider the workout volume yeah which is still pretty low comparatively I think what's recommended but it would definitely be able to allow you like if you were even just resting like I said just a minute like say do a a press you know five or six reps and then rest a minute and then do something like a laat pole like a minute later you could really you can condense that in there a little bit better I just found in most commercial gyms now it's tough to hold On
to two pieces of equipment at one time right like somebody could take your stuff yeah yeah so like even if you put your bag in front of the stuff and put your drink on there they'll yeah I've had people take PL like plates off the exercise I'm using right like I'm using this EXT I'm like no dude I'm I'm there I'm L standing in front of the machine you're taking plates off so um yes you could that could be an approach the rest time between sets Thing has gotten people [Music] um have gotten I think
like almost religious Fanatics about arguing this when I think they don't understand mechanistically what is what matters is that you really need to be recovered before you do your next set so that depends on your training status if you're a beginner and you do yeah a concentration curl for six reps you probably don't need to rest for three Minutes you probably recovered you know you remember being a beginner you could do a set all out the fail you feel fine in 30 seconds right you get Advanced you could do a set of curls for eight
reps you you need those two minutes right so there's a big difference between the effort and the degree of kind of um recovery needed um from beginner to advanced level so there's a lot of things be taken into context the most important thing is we just don't want Anything that's creating a type of interference effect on the next set so if your cardio um vascular hasn't kind of come back to where you feel recovered you don't need to do your next set um if you still got that burning in your muscles from metabolite accumulation and
acidosis like you don't need to do your next set so those things need to be allowed to subside so if I'm doing a you know like a set of leg press six to Eight reps very heavy I might take or the worst one of all time like a Bulgarian split squat for whatever reason like those like you need like about a year between sets split squats right so it depends seor size specific too and I just tell people look you probably I'm slightly to blame because I was like you longer rest periods are better than
short ones and then the data you have to look at the data whether they were measuring three Minutes or five minutes or whatever there seems to be something that definitely happens two more than two minutes later from a recover recovery standpoint that happens Believe It or Not Just Between 90 seconds and 2 minutes so that extra 30 seconds allows more metabolite accumulation to dissipate which allows us to with that dissipates we can we don't have that same afrine feedback that mechanism that we get that says hey This really sucks and it's hard so you kind
of have that metabolite accumulation dissipate a bit so the next set you can apply a greater degree of effort um cardiorespiratory demands tend to come back down quite a bit so you just don't want anything that's interfering or making the ne next set feel unnecessarily harder than it is now are those trainable capacities in other words you know will you adapt to be able to become better to recover in shorter Periods of time yeah so if you're out of shape and your cardiovascular sucks right you know this like once you get into shape like recovering
from a set feels much easier um I don't know other than we do 100% understand that um if there is very short rest periods taken they consistently show um less myof fibral protein synthesis which is a cellular process that creates hypertrophy but I don't know if it's just because nobody's really fully Recovering in 60 seconds you know what I mean like that's a pretty short rest period if you do something for any substantial amount of reps um or and in some way like that was the one like they they felt like the um the swelling
that was occurring from the shorter rest periods the pump was prohibiting um those higher degrees of motor un recruitment which again comes back to why I said the pumps probably if anything is detrimental to good training So um but I think the most important thing is even if you and you should know this too if you're doing higher rep sets um you tend to get better at them over time in terms of tolerating kind of that that pain perception all of that stuff becomes somewhat trainable so again the magnitude of it I think is what
you kind of have it gets debated is like how much better do you get a tolerating pain and do you need to be getting better at tolerating pain or or just not doing High Reps that feel super painful so yeah I mean those are the questions I mean the same question could be applied to the number of you know effective sets that you can do in a period of a week you know as as you become for lack of better Concept in better shape what you would expect that that would go up because if it
always stayed the same so if the cardio respiratory demand was like there right and you say hey I'm going to I'm going to tack on 30 minutes Of like power walking to my days well then yeah then you would not have the same uh cardiovascular Demand right from one set to the next you would be more recovered so your effort will be able to be higher in those subsequent sets anything that makes the set feel harder right takes up space in the brain right that can be used for for motor unit allocation so it reduces
the effectiveness of it so think about like if you anything that makes a a a set or An exercise feel more difficult as soon as you take that part out you can move more load you can do more reps with it or whatever if you go from a standing press right as soon as you sit down and you take away those coordination and stability man you can press more load so anything that's adding to a um our perception of effort in an exercise or a set is is going to reduce how effective it is so
it's kind of like another thing people think well how if it's harder It's got to be better well it depends on what your goals are MH so if if we can make it to where the exercise itself feels easier and we can load it more and do more reps that actually makes it more productive so anytime you change something within that exercise to where you can substantially increase the loading now we're not we're talking about within working in the same range as motion not just like shorting range of motion but where you can suddenly Move
more load because you produce a demand of that exercise makes it more productive from a hyper standpoint as a um going to go in a little different direction here as a a hobbyist when it comes to the research so let me explain what I mean by that so you know I will read the research no I'll skim the research reviews you know I think Lane's got one there's Mass there's there's four of them that I'll get and I'll I'm only going to look at the [ __ ] that I Think applies to me so and
that's just a review of somebody else's opinion or whatever it is so that's kind of my experience over the past decade there or somebody will site something that I think looks [ __ ] up then I'll go look at what they site and this is where the real hobbyist comes in and typically find that a lot of times it doesn't even it's not even a study that's what they're talking about I don't know if they just have some list of citations They just copy and paste [ __ ] from you know to put it out
there assuming nobody's actually going to click on it right the CDC was great at doing that a few years ago by the way but anyhow that's a whole other topic um and um but as that with that context in mind which is somebody that's not doing deep Dives on all this other kind of stuff but as an outsider kind of looking in there's been a lot of research you know previously on the Ecentric right and Then a lot of research just recently on that stretch position so the question I would have is are we waiting
for the research on the concentric position and are we waiting on the research on the contracted position in 5 years from now are we're going to have all these studies about how that concentric part is this main emphasis or or is it all being looked at now yeah I wonder how I don't know how the stretch people are going to walk back all this stretch Stuff in five years when we we've been aware for a very long time that it's the concentric yeah that is actually giving you muscle right yeah it's the concentric that's where
all your I talked with a guy who's like one of the number one sarir sarir Genesis guys in the world he doesn't even consider the stretch position adaptations to be hypertrophy like he's like your hypertrophy is radial growth it's myof fibral in parallel so he's like it took Him a while to understand what I was asking him so there's a couple of things that are completely wrong that all these people that are talking about stretch that keep saying number one well stretch adaptations are sarir in a series they increase either the sarir themselves will increase
in length for a period of time and then the fasal will increase in length and then we'll get the addition of sarir in a series and we know that this happens we don't even Need to get into the idea that we have to get in there and look use like ultrasound to like actually measure them out we have done that but we know because of the angle of peak torque changes so where you see an increase in strength at those longer motions and that's because more sarir have been added in a series right so they're
producing Force now at a longer length so they'll say well that's how you're getting um more cross-sectional area I'm Like that's literally one of the dumbest things I've ever heard so all of your the majority of your muscle growth is going to I'm talking 90 plus% easily is all going to come from radial growth it's all going to come from an increase in cross-sectional area that happens through M fibral Genesis the increase the increase of u m fbls in parallel so that happens through concentric contractions so Ecentric contractions or stretch position stuff when you're in
The stretch like or when you look at distraction studies where they actually like you know like lengthen the bone and do that kind of stuff you can watch for the people that have said this is why I said that's the dumbest thing ever you can watch a reduction in pation angle and you can watch a reduction in cross-sectional area and those distraction studies as longitudinal hypertrophy occurs as sarir in the series happen so the idea you have to Separate this house by either Ecentric or stretch static stretch or stretch position stuff and say what adaptations
are occurring there they're very limited um and some muscles do not actually really experience them at all we do measure them by fast coolings the idea that they're going to create more cross-sectional area because it's training at a longer length isn't there's literally nothing to support that I don't even know why it's said so The the majority of your muscle growth comes from those con contractions right so I don't know why there has other than I think that if you're taking noobs which most of the research and we need studies using untrained people and trained
people because we need to see kind of what adaptations are occurring and then the magnitude of those adaptations that are occurring that matters that helps us a lot but all these this whole that there's a building Body of research showing everything grows longer at stretch that's not true we have if we we understand that a stretch position or an Ecentric or a static stretch creates a very specific type of adaptations we see it in the Ecentric or stretch positions to occur in terms of a fasal length increase because that's a a signification that sarir is
in a series increased and we know this through like I said the angle of peak torque that it changes they Can't ever seem to get around that I'm like so why did the angle of peak torque change and that's pretty much ends the discussion so if we know those adaptations are limited and that's what most of these studies are using n non-trained people we expect to get those adaptations so some people are like they think I'm I'm not anti-stretch at all I'm like there's there's lot of muscles mostly in the lower body and the PEX
we know they're going to go grow Well from longer length motions but it's limited in terms of magnitude scope time frame all that kind of stuff you still need to train them at stretch positions to maintain those adaptations but stretch positions also increase the magnitude of uh muscle damage which is going to prolong recovery um not just localized but when muscle damage is present there's an inflam inflammation effect with myocin all sorts of stuff that's going on that also reduces motor Unit recruitment so you have a bunch of muscle damage from the workout you did
on Monday Tuesday's workout is going to be subpar right anecdotally if I tell you this you'll probably have maybe have an aha moment you ever have like a banger workout on Monday like Crush just and then you go in Tuesday and it's just well below what you're normally oh yeah I mean that that should be that should be you almost never have two Banger workouts in a row right like even if Monday is just like good you can kind of have a good Tuesday one but if Monday is like on like you know you burn
the world down set it on fire you can almost assure Tuesday's going to kind of suck right so um that's just because we kind of tend to push up against those extremes when we're having a good one we train like you know everything to failure we had more load you know we kind of create those fatigu we do more sets we kind of create those fatiguing Mechanisms so longer position stuff um it basically causes more intracellular calcium ions into the cytoplasm which when that happens there's an activation um of proteases called cow panes and those
are the ones that do the muscle damage so when that happens there's really nothing you can do to reverse that so the idea to train everything at longer muscle links is pretty opposite of how we want to be approaching training like we want to actually Especially once we have those adaptations we want to limit the amount of stretch position longer muscle length that we're training muscles at just enough to keep those adaptation and then Focus mainly around the contraction stuff really funny you brought up the contraction stuff because I think people are missing the boat
on it and that the concentric contraction stuff is where we're going to get our growth now with if we go back years when Tempo was a Thing that everybody was putting in their programs you know there'd be four numbers the Ecentric PA the stretch concentric and then a peak contraction at the top so where would that Peak contraction fall so I I program i' I've narrowed down program to making sure people use a controlled like a slish but controlled Ecentric not because you're getting extra I think when you're kind of we hit On that earlier
if you're trying to standardize your range of motion and you're trying to standardize your execution I find that using a controlled EC makes all of that stuff way easier um if you're not using a slow Ecentric controlled Ecentric your execution can get a little bit more wild so if we're trying to adequately gauge if Progressive overload is like occurring most effectively then standardizing as much stuff as we can to where it's very It's the same workout to workout so that way we're not cheating something that so we think progress is happening but maybe we rested
longer between sets or maybe we were a little more loose in our execution this time so I think with like the tempo stuff if you're using a a Tempo that is like adequate like there's some some motions where a Tempo is not always it doesn't work as well like if you're doing a lateral rise trying to lower laterals really slowly just Doesn't the moment arms forever it's as long as you can get to the shoulder right so out there long and you're not getting any any extra like real hypertrophy so it's it's not super beneficial
to that motion doesn't mean that you don't still want to lower it under control to to kind of manage your ROM and execution but there's some movements where they lend themselves to Better tempos In terms of like slower you know slow lowering or control Lowering or other ones you you don't have to be quite as dogmatic about using a slower one from a like holding Peak contraction thing again I think that for the most part comes back to kind of just standardizing your execution so I think what you're probably thinking of is like order position
movements may like a leg extension yeah yeah or something like that and I still I think that it um it really just going to come back to making sure You' just standardized your Execution for those motions so that way you're saying hey if I added two reps here today was it exactly the same way I did before so from a benefit of like is it if I hold the top for two seconds comparatively to getting to the top and just lowering immediately um so what that's essentially going to cause is and you should know this
from like just doing it is anytime that you have more metabolic cumulation the sooner you're going to lose reps off in that set so if I hold the top for two or three seconds on a leg extension there's a greater degree of ATP uses or greater degree of metabolite accumulation so I'm going to lose some reps off the top of that set now could that be a good thing if we're talking about effect of reps though um generally speaking um if you're you're looking at like that metabolite accumulation thing that's just going to it's kind
of like washed out on one end or the other so if you have any place That you have like a high degree of force production we have a lot of cross bridging that going is going on you have to automatically have a higher degree of ATP usage so there's going to be probably more feedback saying hey this really sucks because of again the metaboli accumulation so I think you have to find that balance of am I losing enough so many reps off the top of this to where um if I do it this way if
I don't do it this way I get like six more Reps but if I do it this way I'm getting basically what I'm doing is I'm I'm getting say three or four reps less comparatively and is that the same stimulus tonight my guess would say no because again you're just getting feedback that this sucks and is really hard so you have to deduct whether or not if cuz I think there's there's some research showing if you make eccentrics the Ecentric lowering too long that the fatigue just ends up cutting into the Concentric reps that you're
going to get and you should know that probably from times where you've done really long eccentrics it eventually blows your concentric repetition count out so fatigue can interfere with us getting to really maximal amounts of M recruitment so the if I'm understanding correctly the the most important thing is the the concentric basically with his greatest intent as you can do if I say that somebody automatically Assumes well if we were to rank it okay no no no what I was going to say is I tell no I may I actually I'm I said that I
was like if you have a concentric you want the effort to be very high right but immediately people start assuming you're talking about doing like explosive style like movements right and I'm saying well if where I would throw that in there it would be an ISO kinetic machine yeah so then we're taking out that that Then you're like like full effort yeah yeah to where it's like maximum effort right from the go yeah so if you take everything out of the equation except for that you know and if we were to look at that would
that create more hypertrophy than you know a non-isokinetic right you know stimulus and I don't know the answer to that but my my guess is going to be no you know because everything's going to still have to work together I think that If if you were literally going down to where you're doing like measurements to very specific muscle groups you're probably going to get somewhat equal type of adaptations say if you're doing an isometric at depending on the muscle length it's difficult right because with an isometric or isokinetic yeah or istic right but like with
an isometric I was I was tying these in okay yeah so with an isometric right if you're holding it at a certain length for a certain period of Time certain degree of effort like principally speaking you should get a similar degree of outcome if you could match that up in some kind of way with like um Dynamic repetitions right looking at the concentric so with the isokinetic type machine where you're just removing right like it's just concentric based stuff um if you could do that that's something actually that Chris and I have talked about is
like if you once you got somebody more advanced Like because they're not getting any growth out of Ecentric based stuff right if you're Advanced and you're doing like the Eastern Trick's not really giving you anything if you could just overload the concent yeah that would be where you want to go because you're going to reduce or eliminate the majority of muscle damage related fatigue and then you're still going to be able to climb up high on that motor unit recruitment scale so it's it's there's something to Be said for that but nobody's really explored it
to like like super in depths yeah it would be Louis had one when I first came to Westside which is basically a Smith machine yeah you know that the more Force you put into it the slower it's going to move but and it was I used it after my first PEC tear right because it's obviously I'm not putting a lot of force into it I just came out of surgery right you know but I could put in the maximum Force I could put into it Y you know with all that and not have that ascentric
component and all the other stuff but there's there's a lot of limitations there as it's on Rails you know good for like one maybe a squat if you can get it like the stabilization there's a lot of limiting factors associated with it number one being the the movements that you can use it for but you know anecdotally I do think it helped me but it also didn't stay in the gym for after we moved so you know if if If it was as great as it if it had a profound impact then it would have
made it to every gym that we ever went to yeah you know so that's how you can that's how I could always tell what worked what didn't like what makes it to the next gym and what gets thrown out you know or sold from there with the recovery and the fatigue management that you're talking about there's the systemic fatigue which you talked about a little bit expand on that some because If there's one area that I think people really get messed up it's that what we were talking about that yeah I don't think most people
understand so like when you use the term like systemic fatigue it's kind of a that term gets thrown out a lot but it's it's a vague term because we have multiple systems that can experience fatigue at different degrees for different reasons so the when somebody says systemic fatigue like I said one of The old things people used to say is like heavier loads cause more systemic fatigue it's just not true like we have a ton of research showing that that's absolutely just not true so if we if we're going to say um fatigue we have
to Define which system that we're talking about and then we have to Define why fat fatigue exists and then even pulling back further away from that is to Define what fatigue is which is a temporary and reversible reduction in performance Right so if fatigue exists then is are we talking about fatigue that exists within the workout um are we talking about F and that's going to be mostly um at the central nervous system level there will be some peripheral level fatigue that can occur all depending on what's going on but if we're talking about central
nervous system fatigue within the workout mostly that's going to occur due to um like I said interference mechanisms like metaboli Accumulation cardiorespiratory demands stuff like that um it can even be um some stuff that's going on like pro-inflammatory pyocin that have been released within the workout itself which makes you know everything feel hard but there's that's central nervous system fatigue within the workout and those happen at the brain and spine for different reasons can be measured and that's the other thing is that fatigue all different types of fatigue are Measurable they're not like how you
feel so you could actually you've probably had this happen to you many times where you feel lethargic tired getting into the gym after a few warm-ups crush your whole workout have PRS so clearly censal nervous system fatigue did not exist despite how you felt feeling tired is not central nervous system fatigue you can feel tired and not have uh central nervous system fatigue prevalent at that time um you've probably had these These Are the weirdest ones where you go into the gym you feel pretty good you know where I'm going with this oh yeah and
you do your warm-ups warmups feel good but as soon as you get to like your heaviest loads it just ain't there right that's a that's the weird one because you feel good going in and then you feel it drop off very suddenly right like you're like man just like the bottom drops out and I think in those times that we feel okay but the central Nervous system fatigue exists cuz we're a couple reps shy of normal like and then after that we're way below everything else those are like you're like what is going on so
I felt good coming in I felt good on the warm-ups and it just doesn't happen and the other ones you start warming up you felt like crap going into the session like man I'm about to burn some worlds down right now right so the central nervous system fatigue is a measurable condition so one Of the ways for example you could measure that is anything that's Dynamic explosive because that requires that high degree of effort and so are we climbing up high enough on the motor unit recruitment pool that we can recruit those fibers so if
you did something like let's say you set a baseline for a vertical jump you you had the little the little deals you jump up and jump and and you you slap what are those called um oh God you asked me too Soon vert vert something you know what I'm talking about right the NFL use them for combines up up slap them however many of the little tile things whatever they're called so if you spend a month creating vertical jump adaptations to where you kind of know after 3 or four weeks of like you and your
vertical JP you could get an idea of when you're fresh you're not suffering from fatigue like take a couple weeks off training you could set a baseline for central Nervous system fatigue using that vertical jump so if you wanted to you could literally go in at the start of your workout test your vertical and see how much Central fatigue you're suffering couldn't you do that with a grip dynometer with a what a grip no so the I that was the one for while people thought but what it appears is that you need to be able
to because you're dealing with small muscles and central nervous system seem to affect larger Kind of your larger main muscle groups more than something like your grip string stuff so you would definitely want to do it with something where you're creating a dynamic explosive Mo with larger where you're having to activate larger muscles so that's kind of that's kind of the deal there so that would be for testing Central Nervous System fatigue to see if it's prevalent if it exists within that workout um peripheral fatigue would Would be different um because it's at the actual
muscular level um there's we can you can test that with something that tests low frequency fatigue which is something nobody's ever going to do however if muscle damage exists as we talked about earlier if muscle damage exists within that you do this workout a Mond day but you create a bunch of muscle damage it's going to cause a reduction in in motor unit Recruitment and there's going to be a type of Feedback it's going to reduce um your ability to get up high on that motor unit Improvement scale so um there you will actually suffer
from central nervous system fatigue due to that muscle damage but that would be testable with your vertical jump right so you'd kind of know so within the workout itself you can you would have an idea of whether or not you're suffering from central nervous system fatigue so as I said within the workout any Ty thing That's like metabolite or cardiorespiratory creates that type of interference that tends to dissipate within 20 or 30 minutes post workout so everything kind of tends to subside there the central nervous system fatigue that is caused by muscle damage that can
go on for quite some time so and then the other one is so we're dealing with two different systems there we're dealing with the central nervous system and then we're Dealing with the basically the muscular system right can which can also suffer from um fatigue so that can suffer from also suffer from fatigue a type of fatigue where essentially we don't have communication between action potentials and calcium that drives muscular contraction so and that's called excitation contraction coupling failure so that can happen let's say you do too much stretching before you do the Workout um
we have some really good research on that so there's a reduction in in force production when you do stretching before the workout actually reduces the hypertrophy outcomes because you don't actually get um you don't get mechanical tension at those High fibers that you get if you just wait do the stretching after so it that creates an interference fatiguing mechanism too and then the other one is the that gets tossed around a lot will be like the Automic nervous system stuff the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system which is mostly impacted by aerobic stuff so remember for
a while people were trying to use heart rate variability stuff to determine if recovery was happening but the recovery that's happening with that stuff is more aerobic based so if you had a component in your training that was aerobic challenging you would see a reduction in performance but we there's quite a few HRV studies looking at string training and even when HRV um when you're looking at that type of fatigue that's present it doesn't actually impact like string training um if you're not if it doesn't have a cardiovascular demain so that was kind of one
of those things people got messed up a few years ago was trying to use HRV training to determine if they were covered between string training workouts so if there's an aerobic demand it'll affect if there's not then that's Not a fatigue you're you need to be worried about so that's kind of when you when people when they say systemic fatigue I think a lot of times what they they're meaning is a Sy a a symptom of C like lethargy they're feeling lethargic or tired whatever but all fatigue is measurable in some kind of way so
and when you split the fatigue up and you look at them across those things they're generally caused by different things within the training and then they have Different time spans that they last and then they have different ways they impact the training performance itself what I find is the is they need to understand the the cost of what they're doing right so it's if it's that's a really great way if it's a power lifter that the day feels great and it's whatever the last week of fives doesn't really matter and it feels Really really good
they need to understand if they're going to do another set you know 30 40 pounds heavier what the cost of that's going to be because on that day right they're thinking this is great this feels good but that cost may be whatever they're if they're deadlifting four days later it may come at the cost of what that is and that's fine as long as they're actually thinking this and balancing that's what I was talking About earlier was like oh if I'm going to do this set of like this back off set of 8 15 20
reps of failure what is the juice worth the squeeze yes is it g is it giving me anything that I wasn't already getting um is it is or is it detracting from tomorrow's session or the next days and that was the shift I had in my thinking over the past few years was like if you can reduce fatigue as much as possible then you maximize your performance in every away from Their own out so I think people have had their Vision backwards for quite some time in that it shouldn't be about maximizing the stimulus it
should be about getting the stimulus and minimizing the fatigue part I don't think you need the maximal the maximal stimulus I don't think you can get to the maximal stimulus without incurring a sign significant amount of fatigue yeah but that then brings up this weird dichotomy of you have to have Stimulus to need the restoration to recover from right you need to because I think we're kind of coming out of that Trend now where the overemphasis on restoration but yet you're not even training hard enough to really create the damage that you think that you
need all this restoration [ __ ] from does that have you seen that I I think that one of the things because there's two components there's a stimulus and then the recovery yes right so The for a while there the recovery is really it's different I think than most people realize so the recovery part is the cellular process of creating the adaptions right and it does happen like I talked about whenever so you go on and you train even if you just do one set you have created the need the stimulus for adaptation whether adaptation
occurs or not is a multitude other things but you can do one set and then the actual cellular process is that creates that Adaptation happens so a lot of people like well one set won't do it yeah one set will do it like we said I asked you to do one set of bicep curls one set three times a week or you know for four days a week just on non consecutive days or three sets one day which one are you going to choose if you're trying to grow your biceps you're like well it's going
to be the Every Other Day One MH so I think that when people talk about the recovery aspect it's really not in my Opinion the way that I view it now is very different because I used to think it was like well well we know now 100% you don't tear muscle down and it grows back bigger right like that's not how it works I'd be huge from all the surgeries that I had every all the [ __ ] that I T every time you tear something you're like man look at my hamstring now it's just
like coming off my leg so um I think the recovery aspect is it's it's really it's A it's the nontraining time and so that the cellular process is running its course to create functional proteins right so that's the hypertrophy adaptation like we're not dealing with neural adaptations we're just talking about the hypertrophy adaptation so you go in and you do one set two sets three sets or whatever if we can create it so that there's basically almost no fatigue that that's long lasting fatigue from those then we're not because the repair Process and the hypertrophy
process is the same cellular mechanism so if we have a high degree of repair and regeneration that's going on then it robs the hypertrophy cellular process of what it needs to Doh does that make sense so if myof fibral protein synthesis Well here here's this it makes sense but how many people are going to actually utilize that that information in their own training I think that's because Dave we we still Haven't had a nice shift away from helping people understand active recover is not doing anything to help us actually once those physiological mechanisms are in
place from from muscle damage there's nothing you can do to reduce that there's no reduction in that time so active recovery we we got data on that it's like nah it doesn't do anything so active recovery doesn't do anything um sleep like if you're getting Seven 8 9 hours of sleep at night you're meeting the demands needed for Recovery right so sleeping more than that that isn't doing anything um protein intake like that's another one people I think the old adage they would always just say check your sleep check your diet whatever I think they're
somewhat overstated so I don't think that okay not even think I know for the most part anybody that's remotely involved in kind of our area they eat enough protein yeah so I don't I like I think that's something people used to say you know know decades ago was like the general pop did not eat enough protein anybody who's involved in this space probably eats enough protein right do they have a protein powder container in their cabinet my guess is yes they probably have a protein powder they probably have a creatine they probably have a glutamine
they probably have a pre-workout I'm guessing that protein intake is not the issue and we Just had I don't even keep up with the diet stuff anymore it's like you know I said that's just not a big interest but there was just a study that came out again I mean we've had studies on protein since the 70s it's about 08 grams per pound shows that you're meeting the demands for Recovery right so slamming a bunch of protein and sleeping a whole bunch doesn't speed up how fast you're going to recover and I don't even think
now I'm going to get You in a lot of trouble for saying this one um and I think it at some point I'll be proven right on this I don't think anabolics increase your recovery that much so most of that is based off of like anavar burn victim stuff but do you remember those studies where they were they I don't think we can do them anymore because they're probably not deemed ethical but do you remember those studies we had where they were giving guys like 600 Mega tests and they Would put them in like one
group and then there was a there's a control group and there was a group that sat at home and did nothing and then took 600 megga test a week and there was a natural group that trained but didn't get it and there was a group that trained and got the 600 megatest so what it looks like is that you just get a growth stimulus off the anabolics that have nothing to do with training in fact that's the fact so the Group that sat home and did nothing grew more than the natural group that trained over
those whatever 10 weeks they grew way more and if you look at this if you go find the graph for this the group that trained and then the group that sat home and took steroids if you take the group that trained Ani steroids if you look at those if you stack those it's almost equal and then they also had that same guy did a group where where he did 20 weeks of I Think it was test at the same level and or may have been more but they gain the average was 20 pounds of muscle
gain doing nothing they just sat home and they G gave them test so that's not a training stimulus now I'm not saying there's no recovery at all um because I think we we know like if you could take there's certain compounds you can take that definitely feel like you recover faster it's like deca seem to have kind of that Anecdotally that going on but I don't I don't think that the recovery I think what happens is you're getting the training stimulus as if you were a natural guy and you're getting that grow stimulus that's just
coming from the compounds and that's what that looks like and when I was on what I found was I didn't notice a difference like I didn't get on was suddenly able to do like in ordinance amount of like volume I tried it because like when you first Get on you're like oh I'm about to crush right like I'm about to go do 20 sets for chest or whatever and I found after a few weeks I'm like I can't do this so I went back to just training like I trained as a natural guy and saw
all sorts of results anodically I've seen the inverse yeah where if somebody goes on they they they can't do as much as somebody that's clean you know so that somebody that's because you feel like Ass well yes well it's I I think there's some several components to it maybe you're more aggressive so your intent you know for with each repetition is going to be what's funny is now that you mentioned that that's exactly what I experienced I actually found as a natural iy could do more work yes and I've seen that so many times that
I can almost say with with as close to certainty as I possibly know that I just never really Thought about it but you're actually right I I couldn't do as much yes and I think that's because you're Contracting with more Force you know and I don't know if the com if this the the anabolics are doing that or if it's the aggression that's doing that but something's changing with that intent well we we we we do have I think some nonconclusive research that shows that uh anabolic guys get hyperplasia so the addition of actual new
fibers so if you Think about it if there was like an addition of new fibers you're Contracting more fibers than you've had at that point right so if that's the case then there would be you would take the the magnitude of all those other fatiguing mechanisms and they would go up exponentially just like you would experience like the strength increase the muscle mass growth increase so there's a multitude of things that could be going on there from fatigue Standpoint but that is true like I found um as a natural guy I feels like you can
definitely go in and do more stuff and when you're on it feels like all you got in you is about one or two good yes and I've seen that like I said I've seen that with almost everybody that I've spoken to with I don't think guys realize training on is hard yeah it's harder it's harder M like yeah you can move loading stronger but like it's difficult when uh when Jim and I used to Talk a lot he used to laugh his ass off cuz like when I would be getting ready to go into a
meat like once you get all the compounds coming in and you're you're bloated and every Everything gives you a pump including like in your hands you know what I'm talking about M you I couldn't do I'd put a plate on one side of the squat bar and walk around the rack Bend have to bend over pick up plate put on and I had to lay down after that because the low back pump would be So strong I remember when laughing his ass off about me because I could do my squats and then I'd have to
contemplate whether or not I could do my pulls after that and then I'd sit in the parking lot and I couldn't drive out of the parking lot because my low back would be cramping so hard I do not miss being on yeah I think people have this and I guess that I'm really it sads me to watch the kids nowadays getting on so early and running hard compounds and Stuff like that because they could learn so much about how their body responds to good training and good nutritional approaches but there's just this [Music] um this
kind of what permeates throughout social media is that these kids just want all this validation from everybody looking at them long-term wise they're still going to have to learn all those things this is what I don't think they Understand otherwise what are you left with Dave well exactly but if you learn them first then you have more tools training yeah yeah you have more tools to play with where what we typically see if they go on too soon and this goes not just present day but back to when I started decades ago is if that's
the first card that's played then when things stall you just double that card yeah I remember that I said you got a lot of gems you used to say that was Your Ace card to last one you got left to play and well what I said was the only thing that you're left with if you don't learn really good physiological training approaches is all you're left with is upping the dose yes that's what you're left with MH if you do not ever figure out how to maximize your training approach whether you're on or you're natural
and I think they look the same I really do I think they look the same and If if the one person is saying well I I I could do more and recover for more this is what I want to say that I think that's probably Placebo for being on I think that's probably a placebo effect because I think it's when you first get on and like I said you think you're going to conquer the world and just grow and do all this kind of stuff that's a that has a significant degree of mental stimulation as
far as how you're going to approach training right I think That's largely placebo effect because they had that one fake dball study do you remember that one where they didn't give him dball but they told him they would and they just crushed I got to find that man because that's a good one that's one of my favorites because they said whoever was like at the top tier after like the 10 weeks of this training study was going to get selected to go to the next one and be given dball MH and then so that means
those guys I want you To think about this this is how strong the placebo effect is for anybody who goes well that's not true cuz I got on I did way more like okay so the placebo effect is so strong those guys were hitting PRS at the end crushing like their PRS at the end of that study got selected to go to the next phase and continue to crush P because they thought they were getting dball think about that it's it's a crazy one but it wasn't dball it was it was Like it was a
placebo yeah so for the guys who are like well I know I got on and I did way more and blah blah blah so I was recovering I'm like that's can just be attributed to placeo now I'm not saying there's no recovery yeah cuz I wouldn't say that because I don't know but what I can look at in terms of what looks like is happening between like being a natural and being an enhanced guy I don't think I think the training that you're doing if it's really Effective natural you don't need to change anything if
you get on just get on and take the benefits that come with getting on you're going to grow really great if that training caus you to go grow really great when you're a natural guy it's going to be it's going to still work just as well when you're on I don't think you need to train change your training approaches were there any topics you wanted to go over I didn't bring Up no I you you pretty much I I got one I got one to throw at you you had all yeah so I'm G I'm
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drink mix purchase get yours at drink element.com this deal is only Available through the table talk link all right guys you like the content that we put out through Elite ft yes if it's the podcast extra content 20 years of being on YouTube so there's a lot of different content there we set up a membership YouTube channel and with the membership YouTube channel what you'll get is early release on all the podcast so you'll get access to it before everybody else those will also all be add free so you won't have any Interruptions and can
listen straight through and we'll have exclusive content uh such as as amas to where we'll take all your questions and then answer them for you guys so take a moment join the channel is that what it is join the channel join the YouTube just hit the join button and help support the podcast and we'll help you I on one I wasn't I wasn't sure what all you've pretty much hit on everything I was like Dave talk about this and that whatever so you well I'm going to piggyback on one of your Instagram post that I
just saw that like shitty movements or whatever it is right so but I'm going to go a angle right so we're going to go with um we'll go with each body part like what would you consider the shittiest movement for each body part that's a good one so I'll start oh people get mad yeah I know that's why I want to do it that's why you're doing it that's why I'm going to do it that's why you're doing it CU you Want to see people people are going to watch this and they get because Dave
at the end of the day people have emotional attachments to exercises yes they do they do so if you say something's not great and you give them very logical reasons why this is not a great they have a a mental melt down so I'm like if you're trying to train delts and you're going to do a standing press why would you stand up and load all of that other stuff then they'll start talking about You know functional movements and body stabilization I'm like that's not what I'm asking if you want to load your delts with
a press why are you standing when you can sit down and remove the coordination component the perception of effort having contract your glued to lower back your whole body just to do a press now if we're just talking about in the context yeah of hypertrophy training like you see what I'm saying yeah so if we were to stay With adults what would be the shittiest exercise they over overhead all right so we're gonna I'm going to jump down so I can remember all these so we're going to go yeah we're going to go from ground
up so we'll go with Cavs first I think with Cavs it comes back to there's a couple of things it's just how they're doing it so I've managed to kind of crack the code a little bit on that along with the anecdotes and um with the data that's why when people were like Science sucks I'm like science gives us good stuff we just have to know how to to do it in the practical application of things so the caves um I don't think is are as genetic as everybody thinks they are I think they've just
been trained wrong so the shitty thing people do for Cavs is they either do that b those bouncy reps where they bounce up and down which isn't doing a damn thing or they do High Reps um because I think the Cavs and the actual gas rock is like 50/50 fast twitch slow twitch that's a topic we can do like like you don't need to change the rep range is due to to fiber type ratio but anyway the Solus is mostly mostly it's like 90 plus% slow T but the top part of the calf ra the
contract position it doesn't do anything so if you look at it link to tension relationship It suffers from active its efficiency which means the there's not enough um cross bridging that's happening in those short positions so There's no Force being produced there there's no tension being experienced so so once they narrowed this down to keeping the calves in a stretch and just coming back up to kind of a neutral foot position calf growth for days and all everybody in my group that has change that they've seen phenomenal results so I think with Cavs um the
C calf Rays don't you don't need to do it that's the that's the shittiest that's the [ __ ] you don't need to do it because if you The Solas and the gastrock both do um plantar flection right so then when they can they compared them against each other that was one of the studies I put up and they compared them against each other the C as you might expect did not grow really grow the gas shock very much at all it grew the Solus but the standing when grow the solist almost as much but
the gas truck way more so just do in my opinion the best one to pick when we weren't doing best we were doing Worse but the like a a toe press on a leg press MH you don't have to load your back that's another one like if you do I know I said standing calf raay but why would you do axial loading for just loading the cast mhm it seems like common sense but if you're just loading the cast just do a leg use a leg press all right so we'll go to hamstrings probably um
Nordic so probably Nordic curls that's Another one boy there's going to be a lot Dave why are you doing you're going to have everybody pitchforking probably Nordic so um the hamstrings are one of the most easily damaged muscles and it's an Ecentric based um so it's you're basically just creating massive butt tons of muscle damage with the hamstrings so they will get those longitudinal adaptations we know that we actually have a multitude of studies With the hamstrings on on um nordics but um they it just creates a butt ton of muscle damage they're they're activated
really easily they're mostly faster twitch fibers um they're they they're all the way down on the link tension relationship on the descending limb which means they're going to be more prone to um muscle damage do so they basically meet all of the criteria for what muscle damage is like really easily damaged what muscle suffers from damage So you don't want to load those with Ecentric overload based exercises stretch position overload so probably nordics like I don't advise anybody to nordics all then quads like what's the shitty quad exercise that people do well I don't know
would you define I think the zerter any deserter Squad is like the dumbest exercise anybody can do we're we're staying in the context of hypertrophy right cuz they always get Out the pitchforks no no I'll say again so it's like five times we said this we're speaking purely hypertrophy here okay so like there's no reason to ever do hypy wise wler had the best I even put that in my caption Windler had the only time wler comes up anymore is about come out and see you I love Jim he's my dude um he had such
a great quote about that he said I don't do zercher squats cuz I'm not in prison you think about it takes a minute But that was actually poin thought it was the dumbest exercise ever either um what's a bad one though like what is a I think it's tough for quads because essentially you know you're loading knee extension MH um I would other than like zerchers is just what's the point of putting an arm in the B like the the the the bar in the the been in your arms when you could do a back
squat and I think a front squat is not a great exercise for everybody because um not Everybody can get those show their shoulders in that I could never get my shoulders in that like that what's it called the rack position I it just didn't work for me I could I could figure it out like this but I was like why why am I choking myself when I could just put the bar on my back or do a hack squat so um I don't know if we're including zerchers in that I don't outside of zerchers I
think you could kind of say probably front squats people Love their front squats for whatever reason and I do still program sometimes for my my home gym people just as a change up but if you're in a gym and you have access to stuff do a hack Squad you know you'd even do Hill elevated um SSB squat pretty good for quads not bad um but probably fronts and sees are just not great all right so we're at glutes now okay like a bad what's the we're doing all F tier stuff right like it's all the
F tier stuff so F tier stuff um for glutes what would be an F tier F tier for glutes so so probably um I think those have you ever seen those like those those crossbench step up things where they step up on the bench and cross over you know what I'm talking about are you talking about where you use a assisted dip chin machine and just push down on that that's pretty bad too that's that's you're okay with that one why would you Do that when you do a leg press single leg leg press right
so I think that one's pretty bad I don't know why you would do that that was pretty that doesn't make a lot of sense right so you L literally have to hold your body down to do that when you could just lay down on the leg press and do the exact same motion all right so ABS so you got that one I don't train ABS so all right so ABS low back the thing well the ABS okay you know what we can do even though I Don't train ABS we could definitely go through if you're
doing there's no divisions of abs like people like there's no upper lower abs they they're they they're on your pelvis and turn them so really only you do is like load a crunch type movement that's really all you can do for abs I think those bicycle thingies are stupid I forgot about all those like old high school football [ __ ] the god what was it where you have To hold the leg raise for five minutes or whatever the [ __ ] it was yeah that was stupid as hell just unnecessary um AB will rollouts
um your your training planks just all dumb stuff in my opinion an AB will roll out you're in my opinion you're you're training a a movement ABS have to do they get stretched out and but they don't think about it you don't you don't actually do you know the ab's main component function is lumbar Flexion right or or spinal flexion you're not really doing that there all right so we'll we'll take the Erectors we'll skip that CU that's kind of just a stabilizer for the lats and all the other kind of stuff I consider the
Erectors what I call like an anti flexer so it's like the antagonist the ABS so if you're if you're Erectors what what's a bad one um for Erectors um I know everybody likes those Jefferson curls but I think you probably think this too I thought I've always felt like the Erectors got so much work from just every other basic stuff that you're doing MH and I think oh guys also think the rectors are these huge slabs and muscle when they're really just kind of like sheets that run down the spa so they'll say what's that
on this guy or what's that on on this guy or whatever and they're either looking at the tendonous stuff by the lats connecting in there but the Erectors are not like Huge muscles like if you actually go look they're they're they're those kind of spindly rustles that run all the way down well I also don't think that people understand just how low the lats actually connect they're on the pelvis you know what I'm saying yeah they're on the pelvis you know so it's it's I think you're 100% right with a lot of L of times
what they're seeing isn't what they think that they're seeing totally yeah so so okay we'll move on to Lats um dumbbell pullovers not even a l exercise so um that was going around for a long time any really can't do a dumbbell pullover is really a PEC and tricep exercise so and you when you go to those upper degrees of humoral elevation the lats pretty much drop off in terms of having any type of leverage at the shoulder to do shoulder extension so they don't really do any shoulder extension till you get down to closer
to 90° and if you think about the loading aspect of a dumbbell pull over is super heavy in that top position and then by the time you get over your face right you're stacked your joints are stacked The Lads over top of you there's no resistance going on that's where your lats would start taking over and this has been I think there's five EMG studies that have looked at this and the the lats are just sitting there doing almost nothing so somebody will be like Well I feel my lats I'm like I didn't say you
don't feel them I'm just saying they're not doing shoulder extension from that position it's the pecs and triceps so that's not really a lat exercise people still think it's a lat exercise all right so we'll go into traps which is another one that I don't think people understand exactly how far down they actually go on the yeah the lower traps go really far yeah so traps most people are really mixed up about Traps today because they think that bold look that people see they they call it they think it's upper traps is the mid traps
and you can see the I had this somebody the other day triy to say why do you say the the upper the upper traps are not doing something on the scapula and I'm like cuz they don't have an attachment on the scapula they attach on the clavicle so and then he tried to at first it was two guys and they tried to Challenge me I was like well here's the actual like Anatomy stuff for the upper traps the upper traps are relatively small but the mid traps go out and ATT on go from the C7
to the acroman right and so like all the way they're like well I see it all the way out to my shoulder I'm like to your shoulder so like out here so like that's your traps and it's what you're really that meaty thick part you're seeing is your mid traps Um probably well I mean really if you want to get effective you just have to go the opposite of what you're looking at if you're get an effective trap training we're always looking at scapular retraction cuz all of the divisions of the Trap um and somebody
say well you just said that the upper trap they pull the CL posterior right so it's it's an accommodating motion so the upper traps pull the clavicle posterior on any type Of retraction so what's a bad one I think that people use I don't think the vertical shrug is great I think it's the most common one use um it does train the the mid traps and there's a little bit of upper trap uh stimulus but it's a lot of levator and do you remember this um John Meadows had to stop doing shrugs vertical shrugs cuz
they started giving him excruciating headaches and if you think about like the lader attachment that makes sense so I think that's a big Reason uh why and I I wouldn't say it's an F tier but I would say if you're looking at really effective trap training you want to get back into rows and like loading scapular retraction well there another negative to that would be you're going to use a lot of weight so it's going to take more time CU there's more warmup sets yeah so what would you like you you you're coming out with
what would you call it f tier trap probably That or yeah I mean it's I would say even something like a face pull is pretty low cuz like what are you going to load with a face P well it's hard to load you know I mean there's there's reasons for all these things like I I can see the shrug is just shoulder distraction you know just to kind of open the shoulder up but we're not we're talking a completely different thing now we're doing here's the the argue I can make four and against four is
probably If you're doing shoulder elevation um there's probably some subdivision in the mid traps that may get activated on that that aren't getting as heavily activated on your traction so it's like okay to include both it's not a big deal but I think that the common idea oh you know any of the Olympic lists yeah how there we go they just hit me because people will be like Olympic lift Olympic lifters have huge crafts I'm like no they're just Lean why do people say that like they'll be like was it was it re rer am
I remember remembering that was it like had like huge traps but they they do if you think about the first part of like a what is it a snatch or pull is like a like a row from there right but it's not this stuff this stuff cuz there's a high velocity so if the force velocity relationship exists and we're we're dealing with the velocity curve of the side there's no mechanical tension there Right so if like it's a fast motion you can't have mechanical tension so I think it's um most also most especially the Chinese
Olympic LS they do a lot of bodybuilding stuff mhm so like the idea that Olympic lifts and vertical PS are building the traps especially those that's probably an F tier plus here's the thing here's another reason why that'd be an F tier for traps it's a massively it's why would you go learn like those are hard lifts to learn Snatches cleans and all that [ __ ] why would you go learn to do those when you could just do a rope yeah yeah or or a shrug on a [ __ ] you know chest supported
row you know I'm looking no I'm I'm going to go out and learn how to snatch yeah I'm kind of looking at the time demands of the whole thing like I get on chest Porter row and just you know so if I was if you're training a bodybuilder that's think about this so since we're talking right hypertophy you Would never take a bodybuilder and teach him how to snatch the grow his traps that's ridiculous MH so when people try to make those arguments they don't try to keep the argument in the context of the discussion
because they have an emotional attachment to the exercise so I'm like look dude if you do Olympic lifting you got to do the snatch and the cleaning jerk if you're you're trying to grow your traps as most as possible you don't need to do those and that would be That would be they're not going to serve the purpose all right so we the triceps well the long head doesn't grow from any pressing so that that's one thing I think that people um get mixed up you your lateral medial head grow well from your pressing stuff
the long head suffers from antagonist and ambition impressing stuff we we do have research on that so anytime you have a two-joint muscle if there's an antagonist motion Going on one joint pretty much going to get shut off so um for triceps what's an F tier again it comes back I love you're just getting pitched fors after me triceps F tier I think it's more along the lines of since triceps are only only muscle that does uh elbow extension we're just constantly looking at elbow extension [Music] um I think it's more along the lines of
people still think overhead stuff is More L head um when that's not the case so it's more along the lines if you're trying to pick you have to think about triceps training this way either you got the long header involved or you kind of don't so if you're doing a heavy pressing so if an F tier for the long head would be any kind of press you're not going to get a good stimulus here we go let's do it this way so an F tier for the long head would be any kind of press you're
not really getting anything out Of that I would say borderline F tier would be the overhead extensions they're still going to grow some people have tried to they've incorrectly um kind of came after me and said I said overhead tricep extensions I'm just saying they're not more long head um The Long Head will grow anytime you do a elbow extension where the shoulder is held in a static position so even if you're overhead long head will grow it's just not a long head biased exercise because They say that because of the stretch stuff um so
I would say if you're talking long head pressing stuff would be F tier stuff the medial and lateral head um they pretty much grow similarly regardless of the exercise you're doing so there's almost not one for those M all right then biceps um biceps um well nobody would think of a reverse Curl because they know this spicular radialis so an f-tier biceps exercise um any of those preacher curl machines where the resistance profile is a ascending so it gets hard at the top be really crappy for the biceps there you can hack that a couple
ways so you can just keep it cut it to the range of motion where you're kind of at that fully extended elbow till only about halfway up but if you're if you're using one of those that it'd Be like more like an f-tier bicep machine would be those preure curl machines where it's really hard at the top so those are kind of f tier for biceps but the hack there is to either cut your range of motion like in half just use the bottom half or you can actually lay back on those and it changes
the resist profile because of the trailing arm so you can kind of hack that a little bit but if you know that's the kind of machine you're dealing with You can take it from an F tier to kind of a more like an a tier by using those two hacks so it's more like the machines in F tier yeah well I think we got them all so what's the best way for people to get a hold of you they can find me um generally by typing in um Paul Carter hypertrophy or anything related to that
kind of stuff or at I still I'm still using lron bang um but it's lron bang one I get asked all the time how I came up with that name and it was when I Started my my blog and um at the time I was really doing a lot of I was lifting and that was when that was when me and wler were talking all the time and we're doing a lot of conditioning with like Hill running that kind of stuff so the whole point was just lift do some conditioning and the bang people always
think has something to do with sexual intercourse but it really doesn't it it's done that way because people most people remember lift Run bang because it's easy to remember and kind of catchy but really it's just the um it's a variable because life can't just be about lifting weights and doing conditioning and dieting and all that kind of stuff so what is your bang is your bang you know like uh fabricating trucks or is it Brazilian jiu-jitsu or is it um home design and interior design what is your bang in life and um that's the
whole point of it is like to have that stuff but then have The things that fulfill your life that give you meaning outside of just like lifting weights and running and doing meal prep and all that kind of stuff CU you get this one go around make sure you fill it with other stuff besides you know doing all of these things I was going to ask for the final thoughts but I think you just kind of did that yeah I feel like that's probably um yeah my final thoughts other than I think the one thing
that people should really get Out of despite the fact that I I feel like I write these like either intricate post or do this kind of stuff at a high level really hypertrophy training is much more simple than they think and um find you good stable exercises that you can progressively overload over time and train really heavy and I mean that's going to fix 99% of your problems without you making them more complicated than they got to be okay well I want to thank you for coming out again Absolutely it's been a pleasure and we're
done all right all right guys thanks for watching the video to the end make sure to like And subscribe to the channel and click here here here or here for more videos
