hey folks it's me Dr Mike Israel and I am here to talk to you about mistakes that I've made in my life just kidding that could be another fun very long video intermediate training mistakes if you've been training for oh three to six years or so relatively diligently with weights what sorts of mistakes are common to make and if you're a beginner watching this or if you're intermediate watching this if you're an advanced person who coaches intermediates watching this there could be some gems in here that you could avoid and it'd be really really uh
really awesome because then you could do a good job at coaching people and coaching yourself without making these mistakes what are they I have six that make the list the first one is very very Ultra common and it is kind of almost everyone makes this at some point when they transition from being a beginner to an intermediate one of the big sort of inflection points there is you can no longer make the same gains so for example beginners can just add five pounds to the bar and still do sets of five for like months and
as an intermediate you may try to do that sort of thing and typically where it took you three or four months until you just got tired and needed a break you were still hitting PRS as a beginner now after two months you're not tired you don't need a break but you physically have stopped making PRS because your body doesn't adapt as fast anymore it's more challenging to adapt you've already adapted quite a bit you're an intermediate welcome and you have to now realize that beginner games are gone some people will program hop trying to find
those beginner games again but they're gone forever well unless you stop training recess and all of your games then you can repeat beginner games but it's really just getting the gains back gains so a lot of people will just assume people they'll assume that they progress just as well and continue to run into high levels of fatigue and shitty caps plateaus in their PRS and what they have to understand is that the same rates of progress are not around anymore and it's time to adapt here's one way in which you can adapt if you like
to run two months or eight weeks of successive training until you take a deload or a break as a beginner you used to do that and you'd put five pounds on the bar every single week and you could just hit PR's PRS all the way through now you can't do that anymore try this every other session put five more pounds on the bar and every other session just do the same reps you did last time with the same weight just try to get the technique a little bit better better mind muscle connection a little bit
better external technique and really high quality reps right so you have a challenge week and a Mastery week a challenge week and a Mastery week and that way you only progress instead of all let's say 40 pounds to the whole process you may progress only by 20 pounds but it's actual progress because remember 40 pounds is an illusion you can't progress like that anymore in two months because you would hit these Mega plateaus you get Ultra fatigue you take delude weeks in the middle of your plan it throws everything off so just as long as
you're realistic and you understand now my ability to adapt isn't as high anymore you don't have to just continue to assume you can make beginner gains and do a sad face when you find out that your whole program is fucked up all the time uh that's the deal that's the deal next another mistake is very poor or no focus on anything regarding the stimulus to fatigue ratio so beginners will just do the same exercises they were doing as beginners all right now they're intermediates and they don't understand that sometimes those exercises don't pay off anymore
or even their techniques could use some work for example if you bench with a relatively narrow grip as a beginner it's amazing stimulus for your packs great for your triceps great for everything shoulders don't hurt it's awesome as an advance as an intermediate individual you might continue to do this and then you're like man you know I'd really want more PEC growth I'm already doing all the stuff for PEX and someone could say well do your pecs get really pumped or really sore from when you do those closer grip bench presses and they go uh
I don't know I've never paid attention to it ta-da as an intermediate lifter you have to start to learn how to figure out your body and listen to its signs and symptoms its trials and tribulations you could say and say okay this technique really gets my pecs going but this other technique doesn't I'm gonna try this technique this technique really doesn't feel great for my shoulders but this other technique feels incredible that way you start to alter your techniques even Ultra some exercise selections Ultra some rep ranges so that the amount of muscle stimulus you
get is awesome High stimulus and a low fatigue especially your joints and connective tissues this is something you have to start paying attention to because it's worthwhile for you now as a beginner every exercise every everything every rep range is all right answers it's not all right answers anymore some of them are wrong answers you have to find the right ones by listening to your body number three sticking to limited exercise numbers this especially is true if you come from a beginner culture of very limited exercises now just generally pretty good beginner culture because you
don't need that many exercises to do a good job as a beginner also if you constrain yourself to just a few exercises as a beginner you can to put all of your learning into just a few exercises to keep things simple for you and it makes you a master of those few exercises and of their core basic exercises like squats process pulls Etc you can easily Branch out and become a master of a lot of other stuff so it's actually a good idea to do very few exercises as a beginner maybe you'll do like you
know two total exercises per muscle group for the first year that you train right when you train quads it's either lunges or squats that's it different wrap ranges different Arrangements sometimes not much difference you just make gains as an intermediate you're gonna have to realize that some exercises will start to get stale on you the stimulus to fatigue ratio if some exercises might start to fall off and you have to try some new exercises because they're in the gym you're already very competent at your old exercises they're now starting to become very stale and all
these other exercises are now good for you to use because you're an intermediate so not only do you are you ready to use them because you have a great base of Competency in the core Basics but you're also need to use them because all your core Basics just don't work as well as they used right so a lot of people could go out and try to hack Squad and could lead presses intermediates or could dumbbell press instead of barbell press and it would be great phenomenal movements and they should be trying them on occasion to
regularly test them out to see which exercises and what techniques have a really good stimulus to fatigue ratios keep those in the rotation start to build up their exercise repertoire as intermediates really learn about their bodies and which exercises are best but a lot of people don't do that because oftentimes they come from a cultural background of low exercise selection we're doing their cultural background like if you're raised you know Ashkenazi Jew that means you're stingy on the exercises watch me get canceled for that one Israel okay no not culture culture training culture so for
example if you started with a program like starting strength that's what culture it really is starting strength is like five exercises in it which is fucking sweet for beginners but as you become intermediate you may realize that okay low bar squats were pretty well for me but not as well as they used to and honestly my hips are kind of irritated and my quads don't really feel a fucking thing anymore and you try some high bar squats ah different exercises illegal but higher immediate now you're not a beginner now it's a good time to try
that try those in the rotation see how they feel okay they feel great put them on the back burner after a few months try leg presses try hack squats that doesn't mean do everything new and everything crazy and every day a new movement still one to two exercises per muscle group per session multiple sessions through the week so that's like two to four exercises per muscle per week but you know you might be learning five or ten exercises are really good for you and slowly sampling from that list that's a good idea keeping needlessly constrained
constrained to just a few exercises not wise because they might not be ideal for you or it just might be stale or you're just missing out on other perfectly good variants another one extremes of volume and Reps in reserve intermediates know how to train now fundamentally but they don't really know the landscape of what works best for them because they just exited the beginner phase of everything worked so now people get drawn into different arbitrary directions some people go fuck I want my beginner be gains back but going back to number one that's a stupid
idea I'm gonna do German volume training psychotic amounts of volume zero progression just boom right up to high volume bad idea other folks will just really take the low road and say oh man I'm just going to do like five through one five through one's not a good intermediate hypertrophy or strength program because the volume's so fucking low it barely stimulates you at all sure it'll keep making you stronger neurologically for a while but it's not ideal in the least well so what's the answer well the answer is you start learning your body you start
learning how much volume you can get a nice stimulus from while still recovering for your next session good pump bit of soreness and then the next session comes Monday was your first session second session is Thursday by Thursday you're completely healed and you're strong and ready to go and then you hit it again with a certain volume which isn't also not so little that you barely feel it and not so much that next Monday you're still basically broken and you can't use your legs and you're like I'm supposed to do legs today but I'm in
a wheelchair not the middle ground but somewhere between Ultra extreme and Ultra easy that's the right part for you so start close to easy and if it's too easy do a few more sets next week and if it's a little easy do a few more sets and eventually you'll build up to a volume that is the right volume for you and as a beginner you don't have to worry about shit like that because you do minimum volumes and everyone benefits to a huge extent but as an intermediate you need to start exploring that landscape and
not going to arbitrary insane extremes and just doing rational shit right because your gains depend on it and if you're going to think about anything might as well be gains as a direct quote of Albert Einstein that's right along with many of the others on the internet there are also direct quotes of his for real for real problem number five that people run into all the time and bad habits that they have is in the opposite of the spectrum they a lot of intermediates want to pretend they're Advanced people and what they do is they
try to get really crazy on the Mind muscle connection and they pick exercises like yeah man I can really feel my lats Contracting and someone's like have you been getting stronger on this exercise over time and they're like it's not about how much weight you lift man it's about how much tension the muscle feels thanks Frank Zane but on a serious note as an intermediate you need to be very concerned with with good technique getting stronger over time and really pushing the progression good technique set of 10 and 100 pounds next week good technique set
of 10 to 105 pounds good technique next time set of 12 and 105 pounds and so on and so on and so on every time getting closer to failure and as failure looms you still have good techniques still have good technique earn your progressions that way you really learn how to train fucking hard two benefits one during learning how to train hard you train hard and you get great results two is the way that we Define mind muscle connection the perception of a high degree of tension to the muscle and or the perception of a
profound deep painful burn in that muscle close to failure both of those rest on your ability to push hard right now feeling my bicep that is not the Mind muscle connection that's just kinesthetic awareness yay I have a bicep and I can feel when it moves mind muscle connection has to be with heavy loads under control or with lighter loads really fucking close to failure someone's like are using your biceps like yes fuck burn them off of me or something I fucking hate them so in order to even qualify for the Mind muscle connection to
be validly used you have to learn how to train hard and if you skip to the Mind muscle connection without learning how to train hard all this bullshit if you're like I feel my lap no no no you fear a lot Contracting that's not the fucking point you're supposed to fill your lap with a shitload of metabolites in it or an unreal degree of tension pulling it apart every single way that's my muscle and you have to do a lot of intermediate training of progression slowly moving Unstoppable Into the Fire of close to failure training
that's how you learn how hard feels and how hard feels on each of your muscles then you can start to pay attention to my muscle connection and actually pick good exercises for it as opposed to bullshit where you can just feel the muscle but it's not feel with heavy load or very close to failure because that exercise might be shitty for generating both of those boom you gotta earn that shit best analogy I have to come up with people who pretend have a mind muscle connection when they're too weak and too out of touch with
their bodies or have never trained hard enough to really understand what that means is me I'll do this for you right now actually watch this ready I bring all the old laptop and I am a hacker watch this ready preaching a file protocol all right we're in we're in fellas wait I was just doing this on the keys randomly oh it looks Advanced but I don't know what the fuck I'm doing just like almost all hackers and movies don't know what they're doing and they're doing random shit and people of the gym that think they're
hitting Lots with this one weird bullshit but they've only been training for three years and they actually don't know how to train hard enough to hit any muscle so if you like Pilates or whatever and you like feeling the muscles working sweet that's not mind muscle connection so fuck that number six lastly it's a big one as a beginner you can do a lot of pre-packaged programs where it's verbatim sets wraps everything written out for you Cookie Cutter and you can get a great result because you're a beginner it's not that hard to give you
a great result as an intermediate you have to understand that now Begins the era of pre-packaged programs no longer being ideal you're gonna have to Thoughts with them a little bit you're going to have to alter them at the margins because you have a unique knowledge about yourself you have some limitations and some very good abilities and you have to design and tailor even if it's a little all programs to match your needs so for programs that's five sets of five but you know you can't recover from any more than three sets at your current
time do three if it says five sets of five but it's the last week and you know like I can easily recover for more then you do seven right already changing things at the margins this program says overhand pull-ups but you know those just hurt your elbows and if you knew neutral grip they don't have your elbows at all and you can do a shitload of reps the answer is neutral a beginner would probably just do what it says but immediate you have to start thinking for yourself if you want the best results the alternative
of course is to do the programs exactly as they're written obviously know during the time that you're doing them that they're sub-optimal and you know how well I really shouldn't be doing these overhand pull-ups because they fucking hurt my elbows thought the program says look if the program designer could talk to you he'd say wait hold on that horse your elbows are yeah he's not gonna say well just harden up he's probably gonna be like just you can do another pull-up variant and you can say why didn't you put that in your program because beginner
program dummy you just took somebody's beginner program and using it as intermediate so don't do that good intermediate programs like the ones we have the custom Training templates at RP that was a weird cough they are Auto customizable which means you design them with some structure we provide and then you pick the exercises you can pick how to do the exercises too good programs for intermediates and advanced are just architectural layouts onto which you build your beautiful new um Mega City yeah it's the perfect City no crime no hippies especially no hippies no coffee shops
either because those attract too many hippies I'll see you guys next time
