Perfect Training Volume for Building Muscle with Paul Carter Part 1

All right welcome to the next episode of the echo cast uh you guys have been enjoying these segments up to this point and I'm sure you guys are going to get a lot to benefit out of this we got Paul Carter the man the myth the legend he is with us today and we're going to talk through a couple topics that you guys just ask me ad nauseum about so I'm figuring the first topic that we should probably talk about the one that Everybody wants to know the Magic Bullet of volume because we have that

52 we per that 52 sets per week study all of these people saying oh you need a certain amount of higher volume with more reps and Reserve or sometimes you need D loads and like let's let's just clear up a bunch of these things uh I'm going to let Paul take it away and we're going to start with uh just a very basic overall view of things and we'll see how technical it gets over time if it gets Too technical I'll tell Paul to rain it back a little yeah I'll use you to reel me

in so I'm just start small words yeah I'll start like blasting you with the fire hant hose and if you start drowning just tell me to back the pressure off a little bit and of build from there of course all right so go ahead all right so first things first what is the magic sets per week per mon okay so let's start with something You know that's actually that's actually so that's actually a good question because I get misquoted you don't get misquoted on social media do you I I have don't think it's ever happened

not once people repeat you exactly in the context that you said in whatever perfectly so have how what is it that you have heard that I said about what's the optal number of sets for a muscle group in a session have you ever heard this okay so I have heard and this is This is what I've heard from other people is that uh Paul says four sets per week per muscle group and then if you're not progressing work your way up from there and that's basically it okay that that's that's the one that I get

quoted to the most often and I also get quoted uh one r no length in partials ever and uh that they're use that they're useless like that those are the things that I hear the most my favorite words from the kids that they use are Always worthless useless those you they have no applicable you know meaning in our training at all so with the volume one the I'm continuously misquoted on the volume one because what I've actually said is what we have seen in the research when you separate all of the research out by rest

periods so on one side of this we have shorter rest periods anything that's 90 seconds or under and then we have longer rest rest periods which are two minutes or 3 Minutes or something like that right so there's definitely some stuff with the metabolite clearance that happens between the 90c mark and that two that 2minute Mark that basically allows for greater motor recruitment after kind of that two-minute Mark so it's a relatively quick clearance of metabolites between that 30 second period so there's a pretty big difference that what's going on their recoverywise between 90 seconds

and 2 Minutes but in all of the data where we split that out and we're looking at what does it look like when we're kind of getting the maximum amount of either myof fibral protein synthesis which is what we need right that's a cellular response that we need for uh myof feral Edition so what is it that we're you want to explain to them myof like they they they will it's we got we got to start we got to start slow we got to start slow okay myof fibral Okay what are we talking about if

we're talking about actually growing muscle we're talking about the cellular processes that cause us to get bigger muscles right so when we're talking about that somewhere around six to eight sets looks to be the utmost platto for everything after that is going to be a point of diminishing return six to eight sets to failure yeah to failure for muscle in a session M now everybody's going to have a degree of independent Variability when it comes to frequency and they don't like to hear that because they just want us to tell them train a muscle group

once a week or twice a week or three times a week or whatever it is like that I'm like I'm not going to tell you that I'm going to tell you based on all of the data I've looked that I generally say 5 to seven days is kind of what it looks like and if you want to train a little more frequently then you just kind of have to back off the number Of sets working sets that you're going to have right so you it's better to start at a lower volume tier and see how

much Progressive overload is occurring so when you hear that the number four somewhere around three or four sets for muscle in a session is kind of like a good place to start because you have to have a starting point right if you wanted to start at one set that's cool you could do one set and repeat that every so many days and just see what Happens there's nothing wrong with doing any things and I think it's almost like a lot of the young guys they struggle more with um what I'd say asking for forgiveness rather

than permission because it's totally okay to go in the gym and say I'm going to do one set for a muscle group every so many days and just see what my Progressive Overlook looks like and then I'm going to add a set after so many weeks and see does it go up does it just say the same what Happens and that's a lot of what I did when I was younger I would play around with training and programming and less volume more volume all that kind of stuff to find out where I felt like where's

kind of my sweet spot where I feel like I'm getting that that really good amount of progress that's you know pretty steady and that I also there's the component of just wanted to be in the gym and training hard and I think that those are kind of uh underrated Principles like the whole like you like there's I mean we actually have some research on that where they have they looked at guys and said okay we're going to give you a structured routine and then you have to train this many days a week using these exercises

and then they had the other group that could train the same amount of days a week but they got the pig own exercises and guess who guess who made the most progress yeah so there's a definitely a thing for having Autonomy in your training and being like I train this way because I like to do it and if you like to do it you have higher degree of motivation if you have a higher degree of motivation you're going to train harder if you harder and have a higher degree of effort you can have higher mod

recruitment you're going to actually activate more fibers that you can mechanically load you're going to grow better so there's your whole mechanistic approach how all of that Works just from a I like to do it thing yeah so all of that stuff matters so the volume thing I really think gets it's a NeverEnding this is what I really feel like Joel I think that um I think that the volume thing is so obsessed about because a lot of guys will not accept that growing is [Music] slow so if they're not growing as fast as they

want to grow bullet that's going To change everything they're missing some they're like I'm missing some component and for the most part I think everybody's got access to all the same stuff I do right and at some point you're going to have to go in and actually try some stuff out right but I mean I had a dude tell me the other day he goes he literally told me he dm' me he's like tell me how many sets for arms I got to do don't give me your range you tell me how many weeks he

Got blocked I'm like I'm not going to just tell me what to tell you I'm saying I can give you a range because I cannot tell you five sets are magically going to add an inch to your arms right right like nobody can tell you that right so when I say that using a two-minute rest period or a 3-minute rest period you're the plateau not the optimal but the plateau meaning that's about where you're going to get to before anything more than that is just the point of Diminishing returns then somewhere around six sets seven

sets somewhere in that range is um about where you get to where anything past that tends to incur just more incur more muscle damage which actually takes away from that cellular process that gives us larger muscles and goes towards repair okay now here's the interesting thing since you brought up the 52 we study do you remember you dm'd me I do remember you you dm' me so you I Literally waking up and like my phone goes off and it's like you know I got a message from tnf and I'm like what's this and you go

look at this 52 we study yeah I said you were going to have some fun because I knew a lot of people were going at it and I literally scrolled through it and I broke out my calculator did this so what did I tell you that if you added up the effective reps that that were actually in the study that it came out to what we Already know no it was like 3 minutes you can't can't can't think on that level no guess a bunch of people were asking me about it recently I'm like you

know what I'm going to have Paul Carter on the podcast in the next little while I'll just let him explain to you guys here there that study really it's a perfectly fine study the um I think the researchers were trying to find some things if you look at the cross-sectional area of all three Groups they didn't change significantly from each volume tier so it was start off at 22 sets M everybody had T 22 sets a week and then there was one group that got added it was like like basically one group got like two

sets a week one group got like double sets a week the highest volume tier was doing 52 sets a week by The End by the end yeah and then there was a middle tier volume tier then the one group stay at 22 sets the whole time but if you look at the cross-sectional Area they're not statistically significant difference in any of the groups so then but the nice pretty graph wa wait wait no no no no trust me that gr my gears bro I gr my gears because they the people who like to I think

it irritates me because it's disingenuous because it takes these these young kids and as much as like as I harp on them sometimes I do love them I love the fact that there's plenty of them out there that do want this Knowledge and they do want to get better and they're just like just don't mislead me and there's plenty of these a-holes out there I feel like they just mislead these people because they have agendas I really do so if you look at the muscle thickness they go oh look but the muscle thickness study and

I go do you really need for me to break my foot off in you're behind on this one because that's what's about to happen so muscle thickness is like a generic measurement Right it's not accurate it doesn't tell us like the cross-sectional area increases it doesn't tell us the fast go length increases it's not tells us these exact measurements we want know it's generic hey this got bigger but it doesn't it doesn't account for things like a and o and TR elements and things like that it just says hey this area is larger well I'm

like what do you think is larger when you do more sets is that you're going to end up with more muscle Damage you end up more contractile elements you end up with more edema that's in there so I had one of the phds who was trying to prop up this study and said well they took the measurement 72 hours I was like do yeah I was like do you need for me to show you all the multitude of research that we have where it says that muscle damage can Peak P four to six days after

the last training session but you were also ramping volume in the in the groups that saw the Increased muscle thickness which clearly they had Adema they hadn't cleared out yet so people always point me to one study I can't remember who it's by but they always point me to one study that said that edema should be gone by 48 hours and I was I I don't know why this just this one individual study that everybody's decided to pick up on and so as long as something's tested after that they assume factors that go into that

one of the things that Chris and I went Over in our podcast about this is that it's not a coincidence that the the two groups that had the greatest muscle thickness also were adding volume during those times so it's not like the repeated B effect was in they haven't already had the adaptations they were doing more work when we know doing more work and this was actually even covered in the M regression on training to failure was that doing more work is going to actually create more fatigued By way of muscle damage right so they

would have had more muscle damage so 72 hours in my opinion would not have been enough time if they would have waited say if they didn't say five or six days after I would have been like oh well that's maybe something but the biggest thing there is also is that the cross-sectional area just wasn't really any different mhm so they were getting all of the growth they were going to get off of the 22 sets right well the thing That I found the uh the most interesting about that study in particular was the people who

are propping this study up to say oh look more more sets equals more growth Etc they weren't then saying to people to go do it because they understood the Practical the that was actually the next point I was going to get to so is there the other thing I I usually ask myself whenever like any of the research comes out is are we just doing this study to look because we want To see specific physiological outcomes are we doing this because we are trying to further along the ability to do better training and programming for

people so nobody's going to go do 52 sets for legs and then the other thing that nobody wants to really talk about here is if you do understand the physiological concepts of all this stuff no Advanced guy is going to grow more off 52 sets a week right right because and I don't know how deep that she want To get into that but basically the fibers that are control at the High end of the high threshold motor unit pool are going to be the first to fatigue so they're going to be the least mechanically loaded

in those big volume studies so again once you hit that that's why that kind of threshold exists and there's a nonlinear kind of pattern that goes with volume where you do a set and you get a stimulus like the biggest amount of stimulus the bag for buck that You get in your workout is that very first set you do sure right that's that boom that's you get that big one then the next one is like yeah you get a little bit but cuz fatigue exists yeah fatigue exists right like it's there so then you do

another set and it's like n you get a little bit and then if you go from that one set to get the same amount of stimulus that you get from that very first set it's five more sets yeah you'd think from talking to some people though That they think that it's on a uh it's just like a linear just like some people I've seen the way that they and they they would never say this outright but they almost act as if it's exponential and when when it comes to it's the exact opposite yeah well the

like they don't talk about them in this way because again it kind of destroys their narrative so if you take it back and you go to this you get that as the one about say well I know all these people that do High volume and they grow just as well I'm like you can do high volume and grow as well but you will have to use you'll have you short rest periods or you'll be in the gym forever or you'll just create enormous amount of fatigue that you not recover from in your sequ sessions then

we lead to D loads people needing DS every six weeks so if you if you're doing a longer risk period and take five more sets to get the equal amount of stimulus that you got out of the first Set if I do three sets with a short breast period how many more sets does it take to get the same amount of stimulus I got from those thees sets with a short rest period take a lot more 18 yeah huh so when you say like the the body pretty funny about you can't really hack it or

trick it so if you look at say how much work you could get done in say like an hour if you're taking short or long Rest periods the plateaus end up being from the cellular response mechanisms like if you extrapolate them out and look at them together it's the same places so like if you want to take if you want to do a bunch of sets because you like training that way take your short rest periods but if you want to use sets with longer rest periods you don't have to do very many to actually

get to that plateau of s and that's kind of the thing that's been misleading Because we had all of that research done for all of those years and they said Oh look The Higher volume tears they create so much more muscle growth but it was if you just break them down and go the first place I would start going is I would go what's the rest period yeah and as soon as you start looking go what's the rest period what's the rest period and as soon as You' find the ones that would use short rest

periods of course the higher volume tiers would have more Hypertrophy right because when you have those shorter rest periods you don't have enough clearance time for the metabolites which means you got to do a lot more work to get the same amount of M fiber protein synthesis MH so but when you're allowing that to clear out you get to recruit those higher threshold motor units each subsequent set so you get there very quickly so that threshold comes very quickly so otherwise you got to do a butt ton of sets with a short Resp I would

ask so going off of that I would ask something that a lot of people ask me about because for myself I've noticed that two-minute rest periods especially if I'm doing an exercise that's fairly taxing I I very rarely take two minutes rest it's almost always getting closer to three plus um would would you say that most of that would be psychological in the extra benefits that I feel like I might receive from that or would there Actually be me needing that extra time to actually get the most out of those sets so it really comes

back to what exercise were you doing squats let's say let's say a fairly heavy squat so if you did a fairly heavy squat for how many reps about six or seven right so if you have cardiorespiratory demands that are still in place that can be a negative feedback to the basically the the central motor command in the brain that can limit motor unit recruitment Any type of negative feedback loot that you have back to the brain since three part of the brain will be like this is painful like I'm breathing too hard any that kind

of stuff and it increases pretty much increases your your maximal tolerable perception of effort right away so things feel harder right so if you take a short rest period after a hard set of because I personally think a very hard set of a rep some Squats is hard right very hard like CU basically you you're that six one's really hard and then you're going to take a few deep breaths and knock out those last two yeah so you're really pretty heavy there so you take four minutes rest maybe five oh yeah absolutely exactly so you

don't want to be in any type cardiovascular cardiorespiratory debt going into the next one un it'll Le be able to be kind of breathing normally right you don't Want anything from like a cardiorespiratory demand to be causing an interference effect for the next set so as I was talking about before metabolizes clear out pretty fast and those cause an afrine feedback that is a negative feedback that causes to have a reduction in M un recruitment too so if you're taking that longer rest between something like periodic squads like you're doing squ watch for set set

like 6 to8 you're going to want to go ahead And just take make sure you're recovered so I don't think you have to put yourself on a timer and that there's something magical you like three minutes and I have people ask me that there's like is there anything negative about taking five and I'm like no if we're looking at the the the one area that we've looked at is post activation potentiation and that is like after the set how long um do the myin heads stay in a leverage position to have basically Allows to have

much stronger contractions probably start to decline a little bit after 5 minutes okay so anything more than 5 minutes and I think there is some research saying that it might be a little longer but you know like you're you're within the workout I if you're doing hard set of squats a hard set of leg press something that attacks you you know from a cardio respiratory standpoint five or six minutes is fine I don't think there's a There's definitely not a negative impact there so that's fa where I would be with that so what what I

was what I basically trying to get out with that is do you feel like if there's a study that examines leg growth quad growth and they're giving these subjects only 2 minutes rest time and then do you think that that for a particular muscle group like the quads could be something that negatively influences the hypertropic outcomes CU it's only 2 minutes or do You think that that's enough time for them to get the reading that they're looking for out of the study well that would be like you'd have to come back at way like what's

the um what is the the training status of the subjects they use and so then if we take and you should know this from like working with people you can put like kind of a novice Noob and have them do a allout set of squats of like six to eight and they're fine like it's weird a Minute later like what is happening right now so again they're fine like a minute later but like if you've ever gone in and with a train with you like we go and we do legs and you were're getting you

know psyched up for a set of hacks or something we do like an all out set of eight I'm going to be sitting you know give me some time to sit on the bench after for the next like you said you know four to six minutes yeah so it's very different so if you're looking At a study like that then the other thing I'll go in and I'll go let me look at these subjects who are they using do they squat half their body weight or two times it I had one study I looked at

that was included in a ma analysis and Chris and I are we're about to go on a rampage about one of the meta analysis and regressions that happened and some of the stuff that that met the inclusion criteria because some of this stuff is pretty bad okay one of them was they Were considered recreationally trained if they had done one leg session in the previous six months oh so you a lot of people don't realize about research is that you often times have to get dig into especially on Ma analysis and regressions dig into all

the stuff they're using figure out what was this one did it shift that mean somewhere in there because they included it because that happens a lot oh I've seen some where you have an individual point where This person went from here to here you're talking about an individual study and give go oh you're you're talking about in a meta analysis oh meta analysis or the individual studies and um Chris and I broke one parts and I cannot remember what it was on but we were reading and I said why did this study come out this

way and we were looking down at it and I go hey I go look at that gray dot there was one person in the whole training Group that was so far outside the spectrum that it move basically the whole average mean for the group right A lot of people do not understand how some of these so once you include that that study like an a analysis if it has a shifting momentum and that kind of stuff it's literally because of that one dude right so sometimes you have to get into this stuff but getting back

to that as you're talking about the the two minutes and stuff am I looking at the training Status of somebody who squats double body weight for a set of six to eight or am I looking at somebody who's just been in the gym for a month or that has done one leg session in the last six months so what am I looking at in terms of if I do my a quad study and it's a two-minute rest because I think the 52 sets a week was 2 minutes rest and those were supposed to be well-trained

people so the and I think they had it was like 1.5 body weight squats or something like That pretty good like like so they were supposed to be doing I wouldn't say sets of me like they even varied their rep ranges so one workout I'm pulling on this from memory one workout was a lower rep range workout one workout was a higher rep range workout MH so sometimes I don't really know because I for example there was a study it was the show andelt study that was done years ago on the higher volume tiers where

they were supposedly doing Sets five sets of squats of 10 reps with 90 seconds rest to failure and then like five sets of leg extensions yeah and nobody's doing that right nobody's doing that well I don't want to throw anybody under the bus necessarily but I remember seeing a popular researcher doing a set to failure as a demonstration and it was the furthest thing from failure and I was like okay if this is the person that's in charge of some of these Studies that are to failure that automatically is going to call into question what

they're actually considering failure and I think there on the flip side there's other ones who because if you if you read in that 52 um 52 sets a week study they actually say in there if they aren't going to hit the target reps then somebody assisted them oh okay so that's literally the opposite side of like in other words if they weren't getting them they had assisted Reps done right so in some of these studies and I've heard this from guys have been involved in some of the research is that it depends on who's running

the study so some of the guys that are running the studies I guess can have some pretty brutal training that goes on on yeah and then some guys like you said they they just know they're like oh yeah that's failure and I'm like it's not failure I'm just trying to imagine 52 sets with assisted RS well The other part I was getting back about that so the practical application there's not really a practical application right because you'd have to train other parts of your body they only trained quads during that time right they're only training

lower body during that time so the normal average person even or even if they were a high level let's say they're a high level competitor still to train the other parts of their body so there's a certain Amount of resources that have to be allocated to train the other parts of their body so they still you still can't do kind of um real life comparison because they didn't have them doing their whole body in the program so no extra fatigue demands or anything like that no and that does matter MH so that didn't happen either

so but the volume thing is I I think most guys need to stop believing that there no matter how many times we Say this and or how much content you can make on it or whatever is to try your best to get out of your head that there's some magical number of sets that are going to suddenly expedite your process and get you past this Plateau that you you're stuck in or speed up your you know your gains at a rate that you're you're going to finally be happy with I don't like until you get

on the sauce you're probably not going to be Moving along at a rate that you're happy with right like as as an naty guy and I was naty 20 years and I mean I can so I can speak from the heart about that so um it's never fast enough yeah and there's no amount of like food like that's going to like you can't you can't eat into a faster rated growth you can't volume into a faster rated growth you can get to your B basically a point where you can give your body enough of a

stimulus and then you have to basically Allow those ad ations to happen right and that you're not overrunning your recovery by inducing a bunch of muscle damage yeah so that's pretty much when I say my volume recommendations are the lowest end is I think somewhere around and then I like I always try to use the research here but one of my favorite studies is is they were they found they took these guys they were doing around 24 sets of legs in a week 24 or 27 sets of legs in a week which is a lot

and Then they reduced it all the way back to it was nine sets in a week and then they still kept gaining M which means that the nine sets were there if you go look at this one so it was a young group and it was an old group and they had them do both so they had them d uh uh um reduced training uh volume and then D Lo at one point and then it was like 24 27 sets for legs in the week and then they had them reduce it back to nine sets

and they kept growing mhm at nine sets for The week so then they had him reduce it back to three sets a week so they went from training it was like three like three times a week three exercises of three sets do the math on that and then they they went to doing three times a week one set for those three exercises yeah so was nine and then they finally go just once a week for each one of those sets and then everybody maintained H so even at three sets a week they were maintaining everything

they got off the 27 sets so it takes so little to just keep what you got so little you can literally go in and do a few hard sets for the wheat and keep your stuff yeah right and a lot of people freak out about that I'm like if you're just trying to maintain where you're at it takes very very little yeah so if you think about what does it take for me to grow it's just a little more than that that's the best way I think I've ever phrased that is like what does it

take For me to grow just a little more than that yeah so if if it takes this tiny amount to maintain what does it take for me to grow just a little more than that really and you would be the one I would I would put this back on I don't know if you saw that study that came out recently there was there's been a couple of bulking studies of calories and I don't really do and stuff anymore but I had said for a long time like um you don't really need to eat a ton

over I Think you and I have both have said this and we've C some flag for that true is like you don't really need to a ton over your mainten to grow you can't really force feed it I don't it's somebody explained to me how the mechan the mechanism behind Force feeding would cause you to grow faster they did or or you're asking somebody to no I was like okay that's fine exp look I don't do the BS talk I don't do the the bro talk I'm like cool explain the mechanism right Explain me the

mechanism so if Force feeding protein will cause you to grow faster explain the mechanism is how that'll happen so I think what's happened for the most part is is most of the people that have um come from the perspective of force feeding muscle growth works are people who were small for a very long time and then they started eating a whole lot more and they started growing a whole lot more just because they'd never actually tried Smaller surpluses in the first place y they so like that was something that happened to me where uh I

I I was not a big person for very long I was around 170ish pounds for a long time during my lifting career just kind of staying around maintenance and then I went way above on calories for a while and I experienced the most growth I'd ever experienced and so that kind of gave a positive feedback loop in my head that oh it was the it was the the M exactly But really it was just eating more in general I could have done that with a whole lot less and it's kind of like the volume stuff

right that I was talking about with Progressive overload is like start with a little you see what so what's going on there so if you pile on the calories right you can sit at home and watch the scale go up oh yeah right but if you're actually trying to do this a meticulous way you me tell you something I said piss people off big Time I always have one thing here or there but like this one really made I said you probably don't need to get above 12% in your bulking phase oh yeah that would

that would get to that would get that got everybody so mad and somebody's like everybody's individually different I was like tell me what happens physiologically at higher body fat levels that makes you grow faster M right I don't think and I would budge and say probably 12 to 15 is probably a Better range but 12% body fat is lean but that's not not sustainable 12% is sustainable year round in my opinion athletes do it all the time and not having crazy diets yeah and my other part about that was well then if you do a

cut where are you going to on your cut are you going are you only going to what 9% or 10% because I don't feel like that's really cutting cutting so if you're if you're going to do a cut wouldn't somewhere around 7% be kind of The area you might be shooting for for a cut you would cut all the way down to 7% why not I know for I know for me from personal experience it also might have to do with the fact that we're considering different things to be 7% so that that probably is

where we should start okay cuz for when I when I take a look at a person who's 7% they are pretty much stage ready very close yeah and I know that's what I think of as a Cut I think to me a cut is getting very close to being stage ready from what I've experienced for myself testing my testing my levels all the way through cutting bulking etc for me once I start getting down to around 8 is% my testost tanks so pretty I think the research for natural Zone looking at that is pretty pretty

clear is like once you get down around and I think that also may have something to do with the fact that you're just hypocaloric so long as well Mhm I so I don't know what all of the mechanistic properties there'd have to be so many things that you controlled in order to figure out the exact figure out that but I yeah I think there's so many but I do think for shooting for seven or eight in that range if you're going to do a cut because here's my thing about this if you do a bulk

and you allow yourself get 20% body fat and you only die it down to 12% you still really can't tell if you made significant Improvements you need to get lean enough to say did I actually add tissue but you also need to have an area where you're like you're not getting so lean that you're continuing to sacrifice that tissue that you built as well right so it is a balancing act for me yeah but the reason why I'm definitely I air on the side a little bit more of being extreme is because how many guys

have you seen that do the big ball and they die back down and there's no difference Right big ball down and down there's no difference big ball down D you know come back down there's no difference so I think saying relatively lean near your bulk is smart because you don't have to diet as long to get lean after right and then the other thing is you get a a little bit better feedback visually if you're growing in the right places yeah because if I just throw a bunch of fat weight on I can't tell what's

going on so if guys are really trying to figure Out if their training is actually working correctly outside of the progressive overload thing hey is stuff really growing I'm seeing Progressive overload what is are my quads really growing or I'm the way I'm doing my squats actually grow my abductors and my ass or you know what I'm saying like what's really going on with my physique are you lean enough that I can tell right because if you're just if you just packed on a bunch of slop weight I can't Tell and you can't either so

I think there's a balance in there saying lean enough that you could tell during your gaining phase if your training's working and then when you cut back down what do I look do I look different now in from the last time that I did this so I think Sam suet kind of kind of does a similar thing cuz Sam had to be close to the 7% range in this last cut yeah he never I would say maybe a bit closer to 9ish but he never really I would say he never Really guess see I didn't

see his glutes so I can't exactly it's always in the glutes I can't see his glute cuz there's lots of dudes that get absolutely like diced around the seratus intercostal section right just like fingers everywhere and then you're like what about that low back and glued area what's that looking like for me it's always the low back yeah but I low back genetic too man because there's there's there's guys like Dorian couldn't have Been more peeled than he was and Dorian didn't have like super strided glutes true and he didn't have fat on the bottom

of his feet yeah did you ever hear that story or he talked about he couldn't walk because he had no fats so it the whole thing is that's kind of that's not really like a something I think that applies to everybody that kind of gets misspoken sometimes is that everybody carries the greatest amount of fat in their butt and the only way you Can go by like true degrees of lanus is just looking at their ass yeah because Doran didn't have like that super strided butt but there's no way he could have been any leaner

right there's no way well then you have guys like uh dri lford lford who glutes are peeled all the time but his from but I don't think his chest had like a ton of Separation right no so these are like trying to apply like but didn't you hear uh rambod describe that as the muscle been around For longer and that's why that's why it look somehow L existed for his PEX exactly I get hammered hammered on social media if I ever question anything said by certain people and I'm just like you're meaning hating I'm like

you have to you have to at least give me a reason you have to at least give me a reason if you're going to say that's that that hst7 I'll give Haney credit for this I think the guys that work on him they usually Come in in really good condition condition is amazing I mean they're he's got that down yeah we he took I mean Chris bum said was already one of the Le competitors here's the thing to give props boxer do Chris from a conditioning standpoint ever since he's worked with handy looks freaking a

Untouchable it's stupid like it's Untouchable and he looked good before but his conditioning stuff next level with Hy right saw the differences side by side and you're like Oh and that ain't the training no that's not the training that's like a some combination of you know um um exogenous whatever along with the diet stuff exactly so yeah that's and that's where part of me wonders how much of it is the diet and how much of it is the knowing which substances at which time to pull and which ones to add in like how how I

I would love to know super great coaches man and 100 100% say and I said that when I made the post about the study That looked at FST 7 training because the stuff that Heeney says about training like it's not true like it's there's I I could sit down and take that stuff apart like all day long like mechanistically it just doesn't exist right there's nothing that supports any but from uh does he get his guy's show ready oh yeah oh yeah well that's why a lot of people have said to me they're like if

I question something he says and they're like well you think you're a a Better Coach than like no I never said that like his the the level of conditioning I say that it's probably that he's a better coach at certain things exactly I'm like his ability to prep athletes is unmatched unmatched it's amazing yeah and there's nothing wrong with saying that but I'm saying if I if you would put me in a room with him and I was you were to allow me to ask him questions mechanistically why these things Work right yeah they don't

yeah they don't work that way so and they tested that and the study and there's a multitude of things I mean we already knew I already knew the outcomes before they did the study so you know there's I I think it should be okay if you're going to put yourself out there don't attack the person I've never attacked him as a person I generally don't I don't make content like attacking people generally people make content attacking Me oh yeah right you've had the same so like I don't make content attacking people but I make a

Content debunking ridiculous ideas or right or stuff that's just not true but that tends people have a emotional attachments to training programs they have emotional attachments to other people that they Aspire either to be like or look up to and then whatever they say they have emotional attachments a lot of that's tribalism dude oh big tribalism so They're like this doctor doctor put a name behind it doctor said this and that so it has to be true and you don't have a PhD so you don't know and blah blah blah I'm like okay so have

Mr doctor here explain to me why all these mechanisms have never been supported in any of the research yeah like I think it was just this this past year I don't know if you saw where I shared that but it was like I think metabolic stress is finally dead I don't know I still hear It brought up I think it's it's F it's finally getting there though because um and I've been well ahead of the curve on pretty much most of these but Stu Phillips who's like one of he's one of my favorite researchers he's

done some of the best research we've had done in in the last you know 6 eight years on all of these topics and he made that Instagram post he's like metabolic stress doesn't cause muscle growth uh no serious researcher has ever believed That and I was like I'm going to repost that so yeah that was pretty much I was like they did his lab did three straight um lactate studies that proved there's there's nothing going on with muscle gross and metabolic stress and they're like they did every they like we going test this they had

one of them was a combination of rats and people in the study you know and we've tested out every way possible yeah so some of those like I said people get emotional Attachments because Dr Sho said that does feel muscles so and he's got a PhD so he knows and he's an expert I'm like right huberman's got a PhD too and oh yeah I've there's there's been multiple things that I've pointed out that he's said and I'm like no because of this this and this who are you to question who are you to question it's

like it does it doesn't matter doesn't matter who you are if you can't actually address the points made who what does it Matter who's saying but that's what I mean by the tribalism you got your own tribe oh I and I they tag I I love I love hate relationship love hate relationship with it they tag you on all my I'm like you guys don't nf's my boy but you guys don't have to could you can probably tell everybody here I do like kind of like a minor mentorship with you and stuff absolutely mind the

scen absolutely not and I'm not taking away From from from you and any you're a very smart guy you areas that you're more studied up on than me I have areas like on nutrition that here's the thing another thing that I think people don't want to do or either don't do is is I would just say like because I sto reading about dietary nutritional stuff years ago because it just doesn't interest me anymore and you still address that stuff so if somebody has something I'll say go to go to you or go To Alan argon

or go to Joe agu go to somebody else who don't ask me I have I have clients who ask me various questions I'm like well I know Paul's already made a really good video on that topic copy link send it over to them you don't need me to explaining the the exact same thing that somebody else has already done a really good job of I the the biggest thing I think a big part of growth personal growth emotional growth professional growth is Knowing or you hope is getting to a place where you're like I I

want to know as much as possible as I can about just these few select subjects mhm cuz there's way too much stuff to know overall I'm never going to know it all and I actually figured that out that's the old dudy Krueger thing right yeah so it's like when you don't know anything you got that big full chest right that's most of the Tik Tok kids don't know anything but They talk like they're like absolute like Behemoth they heard it yesterday yeah so then you start hitting that like that that that bell curve coming down

where you're like yeah I really don't know and then by the time that you actually really do know a lot of stuff you realize how much you realize oh it's overwhelming yeah when I was a computer engineer and I had done that for a long time I come a point it was probably About three years in I thought I was big right and then by the time I was in my 12th year or whatever I was like there's just so much to know I just can't know it all so years ago I was able to

pretty much do that with physiology bi mechanics and stuff I'm like I can't know everything so I'm just going to I really want to know this though yeah I want to be the best in the world at these things and there was a funny conversation between us and you Had you played me like a really good compliment he's like you don't think you already are like no there's so much to know like I'll have conversations with Chris most time Chris and I Chris Beardsley y like we talk weekly and I feel super fortunate that I

Chris has kind of been my mentor the last few years and now we work together and do everything I think he and I usually talk at a level that I I can't talk to other people about oh of course and then You're like well don't you think you're the best already already I'm like no no no like sometimes Chris and I have a conversation and I'll be like okay I'm still way behind right but then he'll tell me he's reading stuff from some other guy he's like this is a hard read I'm like I don't

even want to know about that like if you're telling me that's a hard read I don't want to know yeah there's always somebody and that the thing is pick a pick if you're going to Do something find somebody smarter than you absolutely don't make them your enemy be like that dude's smarter than me look I want to learn from that guy I I want to bef friend that guy yeah people don't realize like in the background a lot of the topics I speak on I have friends that are really really smart in each one of

these topics right and if I don't know what I'm talking about there I go to them and I learn from them so that I can relay quality Information and I feel like everybody needs to do that some regard cuz you can't be the best in every as find whatever like I really really like enjoy and have a lot of passion about this one who is the best at yeah I think that's like the Ultimate key we were having this sidebar conversation about people like how do I get famous on social media or Instagram whatever I

never had those aspirations Charles poock when one of my mentors we talked about he Charles Always told me he's like set your life out and learn as much as you can and grow your knowledge base as wide and deep as you can everything El else will take care of itself oh yeah absolutely and you can't really do that if you're spread out so far all over the place and that's why I really not a lot of things get my gears going despite the fact of what people think about either how I respond online or whatever

my energy we've been Together all day like at this point you can see yeah not it's not like no is no issue right not that there ever would be but um I mean the one of the things that gets my gears going is when some of these guys with phds who don't do anything in this area start chiming in as experts on this area I'm like dude does eating food make me an expert in nutrition right going to the gym if you have a PhD you go to the gym that doesn't make you an Expert

in knowing everything about either strength development or hypertrophy or athleticism right right I'm a member of a flag football team on the weekends I'm not but if I was could I suddenly say football expert athletic training expert no there's other things that come into play and I also think we're kind of living in a time and age where now like as far as exercise science goes the PHD stuff is so watered down at this point Anyway they're so far behind where the actual data is when I have conversations with phds I'm just like bro like

you're literally 10 years behind the research right now yeah yeah I think you even see that for yourself in interactions I've seen it that conversation about somebody coming there's PhD out there absolutely do not know the science well part of part of the problem oh man okay unfortunately we could keep talking about the subject but due to time Limitations we're going to have to we're going to have to leave it for another time was was pretty pretty simple oh yeah yeah I think uh we got we got off on some tangents but the volume one

was pretty straightforward I'm going to leave you off with one question and it's not a it's well not for a long explanation okay just if a person is more advanced will they require less or more volume in like in a general sense not Not obviously there's individual circumstances that could vary but volume is not the right question okay if a person is more advanced and they're trying to eek out that last three to five pounds or whatever it is of muscle mass it's not so much about the volume I will say I typically they will

need less volume but it will be more important that they're figuring out ways to access motor units that they have not been accessing because those are going to Activate fibers they haven't grown yet okay and that could lead to our next topic that I do want to talk about okay because if we're talking about different mechanisms for growth okay we know you're the the stretch meated hypertrophy guy so I think that's going to be apparently I'm not apparently so for some reason I'm the anti-stretch mediate hyper well you got you got to leave you got

to leave that for our next segment is that all right yeah yeah okay Well thanks for joining us guys and we'll definitely have Paul back on here and we'll talk through some more of that stuff