0:00

What's happening people? Welcome back to the

0:02

show. My guest today is Dr. Mike

0:04

Isretel. He's a professor of exercise and

0:06

sports science at Lehman College and the

0:09

co-founder of Renaissance Periodization. If you've ever

0:11

wondered, is this exercise actually working, then

0:13

you are not alone. However, there are

0:15

now scientifically proven optimal methods for building

0:18

muscle in the most efficient way possible.

0:20

And today we get to learn from

0:22

the best teacher on the planet. Expect

0:25

to learn the biggest mistakes people make

0:27

when building muscle, how much stimulation is

0:29

required to build mass, Mike's top 10

0:31

exercises, the best rep ranges, sets, rest

0:33

periods and timing between workouts, all backed

0:35

by science, how much you should lift

0:38

for your body weight to know if

0:40

you're strong, how to maintain motivation in

0:42

the gym and

0:44

much more. Mike

0:47

is nothing short of a legend. His

0:49

YouTube channel is completely destroying it at

0:51

the moment and I'm so happy for

0:54

him. I love his content. I love

0:56

his insights. I love the fact that

0:58

he's evidence-based and I love the sus

1:00

jokes and complete overt flirting that he

1:02

does throughout today. So yes, strap in

1:04

for this one. Don't forget you

1:06

might be listening but not subscribed and that means

1:08

you're going to miss episodes when they go up.

1:11

So make sure that you've gone to Apple Podcasts

1:13

or Spotify and hit the follow button because that

1:15

way you'll make me happy and you'll support the

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show and you won't miss episodes when they go

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up. So go and do it. I

1:21

thank you. But

1:24

now, ladies and gentlemen, please

1:26

welcome Dr. Mike Isretel. Dr.

1:33

Mike Isretel,

1:35

welcome to

1:40

the show. Chris,

1:48

thank you for having me. Look at your head in

1:51

all of its high definition glory. Yes,

1:53

I believe the folks helping us videotape this

1:55

had to make 10 adjustments because my head

1:57

is too shiny, which is a

1:59

compliment. an insult? I can't quite tell that thumbs up

2:01

most of my life. Dude, I love

2:04

your YouTube channel. You are absolutely blowing

2:06

up at the moment. Evidence-based training,

2:08

hypertrophy, muscle gain, all that stuff.

2:10

So I want to do a one-stop

2:13

shop today of everything

2:17

that anybody needs to know to get as

2:19

jacked as possible from an exercise science standpoint.

2:21

Sounds simple. Let's do it. This is literally

2:23

what you've been doing your entire life. For

2:26

sure. Something like that. You doctor or something,

2:28

doctor of something? Physiology. Yeah,

2:30

that. I mean, if you don't know, who

2:32

does? Yeah, good God. Tons of way more

2:35

qualified people, but they don't have this beautiful

2:37

bald head. And that's why they're not in

2:39

Hollywood. All

2:41

right. So taking it

2:43

from the top, what are the things that

2:45

you see when it comes to

2:49

training for muscle growth that

2:51

are the biggest mistakes people

2:54

make? Where are people going

2:56

wrong the most when it

2:58

comes to this? Thinking all that time in the gym will

3:00

get you laid. And

3:03

Chris, let me tell you from a personal story, it

3:05

just doesn't work. Nothing works.

3:08

Help. Anyone who's listening, help. Send

3:11

me a letter telling me how this whole thing works.

3:15

On a serious note, if

3:17

I had to be scientific about it and

3:21

explain the biggest source

3:23

of variance and not growing muscle over,

3:25

let's say, timeline of about a year,

3:27

which is a realistic amount of time

3:29

for like people who haven't seen you in a year to be like,

3:32

holy crap. It

3:34

has to be consistency, because

3:37

if you just go to the gym and scream

3:39

a lot and do crappy technique, crappy volumes and

3:41

crappy loads and do a lot wrong, but

3:43

you have a requisite intensity that's anywhere

3:46

north of reading the newspaper and

3:48

you just show up multiple times

3:51

a week over and over, you're going to

3:53

get some results. If you

3:55

have the ultimate evidence-based plan from

3:59

Jesus. Renaissance periodization

4:01

itself and you've downloaded

4:03

the RP hypertrophy up this discount

4:06

code and bio. I don't know if that's what

4:08

influencers say, but

4:10

you do it intermittently. You

4:12

do it on and off stuff. You ever

4:14

had conversations with people? You're like in the

4:16

Metro, let's say in London where you're from,

4:18

I believe all English people are from London.

4:20

Yes, of course. And

4:25

they're asking you tips because they saw that you're jacked and

4:27

you start giving them tips and you eventually get in the

4:29

conversation of like, well, so like how many times a week

4:31

do you lift? And they'd be like, well,

4:33

you know, it's five. You're like, yes,

4:35

yes, I see where this is going. They're like,

4:37

well, like lately, you know, my

4:40

dog's been real sick, so my

4:42

wife left me. An interesting sounding Londoner. And

4:45

yeah, right. So bro talk is actually universal. It's

4:47

just one accent everywhere. You could be

4:49

British English and then the lifting starts and you're

4:51

like, yeah, man, fucking curls like

4:54

Arnold did it. You're like Arnold, that's

4:56

it. Drop that meme. Yeah, consistency is

4:58

a big deal, but it's

5:00

not the only deal. If you

5:02

do something consistently, my thought

5:05

on that is you might as well do it pretty well. You

5:07

don't have to go all crazy sciencey like we're going to get into in the next, you know,

5:10

whatever, half hour, however long it takes you to get pissed and kick me

5:12

off. But

5:15

when you are consistent, it multiplies the emphasis that

5:17

you should be doing whatever it is you're doing

5:19

quite well because with you as you're committing a

5:21

lot of time to it, a bit

5:23

of a sunk cost there might as well optimize on

5:25

the margins. And then we can talk a lot about

5:27

all the details. Okay. One of

5:29

the first places that people are going to go to, and I'm going

5:31

to guess one of the most common questions that you've got asked, what

5:34

exercises do I need to be doing? Yeah, all

5:36

of them, bro. Right. Yeah.

5:39

That's it. like

5:42

that. But then they see the back of my

5:44

very shiny head and it makes them happy. Yes.

5:46

Okay. Which exercises? So

5:49

there is a lot to say about it, but

5:52

you can start with the supposition

5:54

that it's whatever exercise nominally targets the

5:57

muscle you want to grow. So

5:59

if you want big. bigger biceps, some

6:01

variation of doing this is

6:04

probably good. And then to be honest,

6:06

that's maybe 80% of the answer. So

6:09

if a lot of people, here's why I'm saying

6:11

that, a lot of people will

6:13

look at, let's say for quads, they'll

6:16

look at hack squats, they'll look at leg presses, they'll

6:18

look at lunges and they'll look at regular high bar

6:20

squats. And they'll vex

6:22

themselves infinitely over the question of which one

6:24

of these is superior, which

6:27

is kind of like asking, I need to get

6:29

to Austin, Texas in two days, which

6:31

airline should I take? You

6:33

ask someone who works at the airport, which airline's like

6:35

really the one I should be taking? They're

6:38

like, I don't know, all of them really get you there.

6:41

There are subtle differences, but at least make

6:43

sure the ticket says Austin, Texas. So if

6:45

the exercise hits that muscle, then you're good

6:47

to go. Now, there are ways of seeing

6:50

which exercises hit the target muscle that you

6:52

want. A couple of

6:54

what we RP at RP called proxies for

6:56

stimulus. So this is

6:58

something like tension, the perception

7:00

of a lot of tension generated or

7:02

exposed in that muscle. So

7:04

if you're doing chest flies and you feel

7:06

a crap load of stretch and pulling in

7:08

the chest, that's probably good. If

7:11

you're doing what you think is a chest fly,

7:13

but you misread the machine's instruction thing and

7:15

you feel a ton of tension in your biceps or your

7:17

forearms or your shoulders, but you don't really

7:19

honestly feel anything in the chest on

7:21

a just pure physics perspective because of the

7:23

mechanics of the movement, your chest has to

7:25

be getting some exposure. But

7:28

maybe you could be doing better by actually

7:30

doing the exercise in a way or picking

7:32

an exercise that really you feel some tension

7:34

off with. Another clue to if

7:37

you're stimulating the muscle properly is the burn.

7:40

And that's seen in a medical context when people

7:42

don't wear proper protection. I

7:46

know that resonates with you personally because of the conversation we

7:48

had right before this. I don't mean

7:50

to expose you, but look, Chris, you

7:52

could just be making better choices is what I'm trying to say. Oh,

7:55

theoretical. I've never been with a woman as everyone who

7:57

watches our YouTube knows. Now,

8:00

the burn is in especially higher rep

8:02

sets when you start feeling

8:04

the accumulation of metabolic byproducts in the

8:06

target muscle. So the chest fly analogy.

8:09

If you're doing high rep pec flies and at the

8:11

end of that set, your pecs are burning, hey, that's

8:13

probably good. You're probably getting a good stimulus there. On

8:16

the other hand, if it's just your biceps that are burning

8:18

but your pecs don't really feel much, are

8:20

you getting a stimulus in that exercise? Oh, yeah,

8:22

sure. Is it guaranteed to

8:24

be a really robust, really good stimulus? Probably

8:27

not. You're probably feeling some combination of

8:29

tension and burn. And

8:32

then also there's pump. Again, none of these

8:34

are mandatory, but together they're kind of like puzzle

8:36

pieces that take what could be a C plus

8:38

exercise for you and make it an A plus

8:41

exercise if you're getting all the feelings right on

8:43

this. So another one is pump. How

8:46

much after several sets of the workout

8:48

or of the exercise, how

8:50

filled with fluid is your target muscle?

8:53

So if you're doing pec flies and after a

8:55

couple of sets, a girl walks

8:57

by and she's like, oh my

8:59

God, she runs away. I guess that's

9:02

good, even though she ran away. But she ran away in

9:04

a way that she obviously respected your pecs as, which is

9:06

the whole point of the gym. If you do a bunch

9:08

of sets of something, let's

9:10

say you're doing pec flies, your shoulders are

9:12

pumped, your biceps are pumped, even your forearms

9:14

look more veiny. But can you honestly say

9:17

your chest has changed in any visible or

9:19

palpable way? No doubt

9:21

still change your pecs, but maybe not that great. Another

9:24

one is perturbation, which

9:27

kind of presents itself in two forms. One

9:30

is, is that target muscle feeling really

9:32

weak? So let's say you do a few

9:34

pec exercises and you think they're for the chest and

9:36

then you try to push yourself into

9:38

your car, like push off your steering wheel and

9:41

you feel like a profound weakness

9:43

in that pec. You're like, oh my God.

9:45

A really good example is if you're trying to walk

9:47

downstairs after you hit quads. If you think

9:49

you hit quads, but you really hit glutes and adductors, you can hop,

9:52

skip down the stairs. No fucking problem. Are

9:54

we allowed to swear in here? Or is that not

9:56

a good idea? Whereas if you're doing this on the

9:58

handrail. Yes, like desperately clean you for dear life. life and

10:00

your legs are shaky. Another

10:02

thing with perturbation is crampy. None of this is

10:04

required. But if your chest cramps hard when you're

10:06

trying to pose after a few sets of whatever

10:09

you're doing, then whatever you're doing absolutely hit your

10:11

chest. The other thing is weakness too. So if

10:13

I tell you, hey, this mega peck workout, what's

10:15

your best bench? And you're like, well, it's like,

10:17

you know, 200 pounds for a set of 10.

10:20

And I take you through a mega peck workout.

10:22

After that, if we put 200 pounds on there,

10:24

if you bench it for any of the close

10:26

to 10, your pecks never gotten very fatigued, which

10:28

almost certainly means they never got very stimulated. So

10:30

you should see a pretty big repetition strength drop

10:32

off. If you can barely do a pushup after

10:34

a chest workout, oh shit, something happened to your

10:37

pecks for sure. Especially if you feel like your

10:39

chest is the kind of bonus of weakness in

10:41

that movement. So those are all ways

10:44

to kind of proxy that. And I would say in

10:46

another one, again, not a huge deal, not the deal,

10:48

but a good little additive to the

10:50

mix is do you feel any kind

10:53

of weakness or soreness that persists for hours or days

10:55

after? So for example, if you do some kind of

10:57

new quad machine at your gym,

11:00

and two days later or your

11:02

inner thighs are sore, your glutes are physically sore,

11:04

your quads aren't either the way you did

11:06

it, which I'm sure we'll get to technique, or just

11:08

the exercise itself, it says quads, but it's really

11:10

not quads. Maybe it is to some extent, but

11:12

you would expect if you had a novel stimulus

11:15

to feel some kind of soreness. But

11:17

if you did something that says quads on it, and then

11:19

the day later, you can barely walk in your sore

11:21

to the touch, you have

11:23

to have stimulated your quads. There is

11:25

no alternative. So all those things are

11:27

in the plus side category. And

11:30

any exercise that hits a bunch of those check marks

11:32

for you, man, that's a good

11:34

exercise for you. And we're all different. So

11:36

some people respond better to pec fly machines,

11:38

some people to dumbbells, some people to cables,

11:40

some people to something in between. Whatever exercise

11:43

checks those boxes for you really well, that's

11:45

probably a good exercise for you, at least

11:47

for the time being. What about stimulus to

11:49

fatigue ratio? I hear you talking about this all

11:51

the time. Incestently. Yep. To the point where people are just

11:53

done with it. They're like, shut up. Well,

11:55

this is a new audience. What is it? Oh, hello.

11:58

Where are they? We're in an empty room. Oh, there's

12:00

cameras. That's right. I know

12:02

how this works from watching many adult films

12:05

myself. Just kidding. I'm

12:07

a nofap for the

12:10

last several hours. The

12:13

fatigue part is a big part. So what I

12:15

just described was the stimulus proxies. Basically

12:18

like indirect ways to know like, hey, did I

12:20

get a good stimulus? But fatigue is important. So

12:23

another way to categorize exercise is how much fatigue they

12:25

cause, which can be split up into a couple of

12:27

different types of fatigue. One is joint

12:29

and connective tissue fatigue. If you're doing some kind of

12:31

skull crusher machine thing or tricep machine, and every time

12:34

you're like, oh, my elbows, oh, my elbows, oh, this

12:36

is hurting a lot more. Is this an elbow exercise

12:38

or tricep exercise? Maybe

12:40

your technique is off or maybe

12:42

that exercise is just not that great. So

12:45

you want as little joint connective tissue soreness

12:47

as possible, as

12:49

little exposure as possible in that regard. Now,

12:53

humans are robust, adaptable creatures.

12:55

So zero tendon

12:57

and connective tissue stimulus of

12:59

any kind or fatigue rather, it's not

13:02

the goal. You just

13:04

want to get really pumped and really sore and really

13:06

fucked up with the muscle for any degree of

13:08

joint connective tissue. So squats beat up your knees

13:10

a little bit, but they fucking wreck your quads.

13:12

Sweet. But if you have like some kind

13:14

of weird hack squad designed by people who don't know how to make

13:16

machines, which is like at least half of all machines in the gym,

13:18

they go like, oh, this is like a knee exercise and my quads

13:20

don't feel shit. That's bad news. Another

13:22

thing is there's several different kinds of other

13:24

fatigue. One is called axial fatigue, which

13:27

is a special kind of fatigue that results from

13:29

spinal loading. So you'll notice that the

13:31

amount of fatigue on the system, if you do a lot

13:33

of deadlifting, bent rowing and squatting

13:35

with a barbell on your back is

13:37

different and more intense than exercise programs

13:40

that don't have those. Why?

13:42

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. More

13:44

for science to figure out, but it seems like

13:47

when the muscles that keep the spine erect are

13:52

active a lot or something to do with the

13:54

spine, fatigue is a little shit out of you, which almost

13:57

everyone who's ever deadlifted seriously has reported

13:59

that The total fatigue tolerance of the

14:01

deadlift is very low. You can

14:03

do plenty of leg pressing, and it stimulates a huge

14:05

muscle mass, gets you really fucked up really sore, tons

14:07

of lunges, but the

14:09

fatigue is mostly local. When

14:11

you do deadlifting, something leaves you that you don't quite

14:13

get back. Systemic. Systemic.

14:16

And so Axial may be a subcategory of systemic fatigue.

14:18

There are other ways to measure systemic fatigue. Your desire

14:20

to train. One

14:22

of the reasons that you want to do some exercises

14:24

you generally like is because your

14:26

desire to train can stay elevated, and that keeps

14:29

you coming back for more. If you have a

14:31

low desire to train, it can actually physically result

14:34

in the promulgation of more overreaching type of escalating

14:36

fatigue, and then you're just going to be fucking

14:38

out of the gym because you start hating the

14:40

shit. Stimulus

14:43

fatigue ratio is kind of like bang for

14:45

your buck. It's literally and exactly only what

14:47

that is. Cost benefit, but expressed in muscle

14:49

terms. I've asked this question

14:52

of some of the greatest bodybuilders of

14:54

this era. Chris Bumstead, Phil

14:57

Heath, asked Ryan Terry who recently won

14:59

the Olympia. What a look that was.

15:02

Yep. And I looked at it for a

15:04

long time. I know. He

15:06

knows who I'm in as DM's. If

15:08

you only had 10 exercises for

15:10

the rest of your life to hold onto and

15:12

build as much muscle mass as possible, what

15:15

would they be? Yeah.

15:19

That's a question, huh? So

15:25

I would say that I'd have to go muscle group

15:27

by muscle group to make sure I check off all

15:29

the boxes. I don't

15:31

know if there's 10 muscle groups. And

15:34

some of these... So the caveat is these are

15:36

just my personal spirit exercises, the

15:39

ones I really like. That doesn't mean

15:41

they're best for everybody. They

15:43

can't be, and I can talk about that afterwards

15:45

of what the stimulus fatigue ratio actually means. But

15:48

I'd say high bar squats. Why?

15:53

Because they hit the quadriceps and adductors

15:55

and glutes very well, the

15:57

amount of fatigue you get from them is less than you would with your

15:59

body. other types of squats like low bar squats

16:02

because until my arms got too big

16:04

to hold the bar in my back, I

16:07

fit into the high bar position like a glove and

16:09

I love that. I fit into

16:12

various things like a glove, mostly

16:14

condoms as like 80 cubic

16:17

centimeters left of room. So

16:20

high bar squats, I would

16:22

say the standing overhead barbell

16:24

press just because I'm

16:26

like really good at it and it feels

16:28

great for me to do until I guess

16:30

my arms not too big, I can't do

16:33

that either so that's fun. Is there anything

16:35

in that where the bracing, the midline bracing

16:37

is good for just other stuff generally? Yeah,

16:39

it's good for like manhood strength. Like if

16:41

you can overhead press two plates for reps

16:43

like you're a serious motherfucker and people shouldn't

16:45

fuck with you probably. So

16:49

that's cool for that for sure. And

16:51

then I would have to say skull

16:54

crushers for triceps, barbell,

16:56

skull crusher. How

16:58

many we got? Three. Three. Pull

17:01

ups for the back, overhand,

17:05

chin to bar. Why

17:07

overhand and underhand? Raw

17:09

personal preference, I can't rotate my shit in

17:12

enough to do underhand anymore. I slowly

17:14

become more disabled, I became more jacked. Isn't that great?

17:16

Yeah, there's like an ability curve where you get better

17:18

at shit and then you get worse at shit. So

17:23

barbell bent rows from a deficit.

17:26

Barbell bent rows from a deficit. So you stand on

17:28

an old box and go super deep in the stretch

17:30

and then touch your tummy and come back. Any reason

17:32

for doing that as opposed to a chest supported or

17:34

a seal? Manhood. Yeah.

17:36

You ever seen a seal and then tried to

17:39

go the fucking pathetic, they always need to be

17:41

rescued, there's babies and stuff, fuck that. No, manhood

17:44

shit like an orangutan would do. You don't keep

17:46

leaning on a fucking tree branch. Are we five

17:48

deep now? I think we're five deep. I haven't

17:50

been keeping track. I think it's five. I think

17:52

it's five. Yeah, yeah. Five more. Let's see what else.

17:54

Stiff legged deadlift for the

17:56

hamstrings. You wouldn't have hit that enough

17:58

with your bent over rows. No, not even

18:00

close. Yeah. Isometric only with bent over rows.

18:02

You need a dynamic movement for the hamstrings.

18:06

It also hits a crap load of your spinal directors

18:08

and glutes and all this other stuff. Okay. Six. And

18:12

then we have the cambered

18:14

bar bench press for chest. That's

18:21

the one that does like this. It's like a

18:23

pale. So it allows you to press. It's like a

18:25

middle ages old and like a young

18:27

boy carrying milk. Yeah. Yeah. Or like a torture

18:30

device or something they put on a bison. So

18:32

he goes around in a circle and mills wheat

18:34

or some shit. Yeah. Okay. How English people have

18:36

the last name Miller because like that used to

18:38

be you hundreds of years ago.

18:43

My word. Why

18:45

the cambered bar? Why? The cambered

18:48

bar is allows you to go deeper

18:50

than your own chest level. And

18:53

we have lots of research, especially recently, but lots

18:55

of good theoretical work before that

18:57

shows us that deep stretch

18:59

is a pretty big deal for

19:01

hypertrophy. It enhances the amount of muscle growth you

19:04

get rep for rep. It also feels fucking amazing

19:06

and ultra challenging. And if you do bench presses

19:08

with a regular bar afterwards, you're like, oh my

19:10

God, the shit is easy as hell because it's

19:12

a huge portion. So I'd say

19:15

I'll take an inclined version of cambered bar

19:17

bench as an extra. So seven. Yep. I'll

19:20

take dips. In

19:24

addition to that, for the lower pecs and

19:26

just overall manliness. Gaps are sweet. Good amount

19:28

of triceps as well. We've got long heads

19:30

on the overheads. Yes. Yep. And

19:33

what do we got? Two left? Yeah. So what

19:35

are we missing? If you're bothered about abs, if

19:37

you're bothered about calves. No, calves.

19:39

Fuck that. I could say

19:42

something about calves, but fuck that. Have we

19:44

done it? We haven't done side delts yet, you know? So

19:46

I would say super-rum laterals for side

19:49

delts. You literally made your own exercise,

19:51

kind of. A few. Yeah. I

19:53

need more ego shit, so let's just start

19:55

calling them Dr. Mike laterals. Yeah. Dr.

19:58

Mike everything. Do you see my new

20:01

drink I came out with? It's the Dr. Mike drink. In

20:04

any case, it's where you do dumbbell laterals, but you

20:06

don't stop here. You just go all the way and

20:08

kind of touch your palms together at the top. Can

20:10

you do that? Oh, it used to be

20:12

able to with enough weight. I can get it up there. But

20:16

then I kind of choke myself at the top. Yeah. Um,

20:18

so I'll take those for most of the rest of the

20:20

belt and I will say the bent rows and the pull

20:22

ups take care of the rear belt quite well. Um,

20:26

and then I'll say

20:28

seated incline

20:31

dumbbell curls for biceps.

20:33

So boom like that. Again, it's tension

20:35

at the stretch. Great exercise. Um,

20:38

the shoulder press overhead barbell press is

20:40

there. If I was purely aiming for

20:42

hypertrophy, I would just take it out

20:45

altogether because it's insanely high actual fatigue,

20:47

as you may suspect. Um,

20:49

and it just really like is

20:51

nothing it trains that other exercises can't train

20:54

better, but it's there because of again for

20:56

the soul. And if we're doing something

20:58

as absurd as restricting ourselves to 10 exercises the rest

21:00

of our life, I get soul shit. It's

21:02

like what meal are you going to eat in your

21:04

last meal before they kill you? I'm not choosing macros.

21:06

Fuck that Mac and cheese. But what did you say

21:09

only 10 minutes ago about it's important to

21:11

have exercises that motivate you to do them

21:13

more? Yes. And if you

21:16

enjoy man shit, standing

21:18

upright barbell shoulder to

21:20

overhead. Have at it. Yeah, exactly. Just know the

21:22

trade off. Now, uh, I will

21:24

also say here's the trade off. The trade off

21:26

is when you go to the club and you

21:29

stand there with your buddy and he does more scientifically effective

21:31

exercises and there's a girl like looking at you too. And

21:33

she was like, I got with your friend cause the doubts

21:35

are like bad. And you're like, God damn it. But spirit

21:38

energy, she doesn't know about that. Uh,

21:40

you can't over, I guess you could overhead press your friend and

21:42

throw him away and she's like, I got it. Like such a

21:44

man. Let's go. And by doing, I mean,

21:46

have sex in the middle of the club. That's what happens.

21:48

Yes. I've seen love Island. I've seen you on that shot.

21:50

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get back to talking to

21:52

Mike in one minute, but first I need to tell you about

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in the description below or heading to

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www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. What

22:48

are the worst stimulus to fatigue ratio

22:50

exercises? If there were ones where you'd

22:53

say if you're looking to gain muscle

22:56

start sliding these off the edge of the table into the

22:58

bin, what would be in that list? I'll

23:01

say a few things before I answer that

23:03

question directly. One is it's hugely

23:05

individual, some people get a big kick out of

23:07

exercises that other people just don't like and

23:10

also any exercise you do for long enough begins

23:13

to accumulate we in sports science called staleness and

23:15

it is the staleness can be put mathematically as the

23:18

reduction of a stimulus to fatigue ratio. You start with

23:20

upright rows, you know these are sweet bro they're blowing

23:22

up my delts, five months later you're

23:24

like fuck this I'm never fucking doing it again my

23:26

shoulders hurt, I don't get a connection with my muscles,

23:28

I'm tired of it psychologically. So

23:30

that's the big caveat before splitting exercises

23:33

generally by their FFRs. So stimulus to

23:35

fatigue ratios are not a universal concept

23:37

you can just apply, they're always in

23:39

everywhere applied in the moment for

23:41

the athlete themselves. So if someone's like hey what should

23:43

I do for quads? I'm like what have you been

23:45

feeling lately and what do you not like lately? And

23:47

then we choose an exercise and then we go forward.

23:49

A good example of that might be moving

23:51

from walking

23:54

lunges to box step ups. Absolutely,

23:56

exactly. You're just for every reason

23:58

your joints hurt me. walking

24:00

lunges, you've been doing them forever, you're not getting

24:02

as big of pumps, tension, all those proxies we

24:04

talked about for stimulus are bound and all the

24:07

fatigue proxies are up. You fucking hate the exercise,

24:09

your joints hurt, systemic fatigue is higher, so you

24:11

do what's called exercise deletion and replacement. There is

24:13

no, this is one of the things, there is

24:15

no one right exercise. Just

24:18

exactly like there is no one right food for you. You

24:20

have someone, what's your favorite food? They're like, mac and cheese

24:22

with tuna in it, you know, like it's fine, it's a

24:24

weird choice, but whatever. It can't

24:26

possibly be your favorite food for forever because if you

24:28

have to eat it all the time, you get fucking

24:30

sick of it and then whatever was your second is

24:32

now your first. Same thing

24:34

works with women, am I right? Eh? Eh?

24:37

No takers. I'm like

24:39

a much shorter, less combat trained

24:41

version of Andrew Tate. Also,

24:44

I don't know anything about women, but

24:46

I've run a few casinos in Bulgaria, people don't know that

24:48

about me. Isn't that what he does? I'm

24:51

just gonna shut the fuck up. Yeah. I

24:53

do have multiple Lamborghinis, so. Yeah,

24:57

yeah, yeah, yeah. You are spending a lot of your money

24:59

on Lamborghinis at the moment. It's not a lot of my

25:01

money, it's a profoundly small amount. I'm dealing with trillions, Chris.

25:03

I just want people to understand that. Most,

25:05

well, I'll just say it, regular people, there's

25:07

wealth and then there's me. The unwashed masses.

25:10

Elon Musk, I've heard of him. He's

25:12

a cool guy. He's got some money. Cute. It's

25:14

adorable, really. So,

25:18

putting all that stimulus to fatigue ratio stuff

25:20

in context, like it's always an individual decision,

25:23

some exercise on average, just

25:25

on the mechanics, don't do that great.

25:28

And I can specify what kind of mechanics. One is,

25:31

if an exercise targets a lot of

25:33

muscle generally, it can't possibly target one

25:35

muscle a lot specifically. And thus, for

25:37

a specific muscle, it has a poor

25:39

stimulus to fatigue ratio deadlifts, for example.

25:41

What exactly does the conventional deadlift train?

25:43

You can't answer that question because that

25:45

question is an answer of like 80%

25:47

of the muscles, the body glutes, sort

25:49

of hamstrings, maybe adductors, some quads technically,

25:51

tons of lower back, but not exclusively,

25:53

depending on how you pull, mid back, upper

25:55

back traps. Holy fuck. So, if you're

25:58

really trying to grow, insert any muscle here. with

26:00

conventional deadlifts, there's probably an exercise that

26:02

gives you as much stimulus for a

26:04

fraction of fatigue. Another

26:07

thing is range of motion. If

26:09

the exercise doesn't expose that target muscle into

26:11

a deep stretch, you

26:14

could do better. So for example, floor

26:16

press. I'm sure we'll have a

26:18

video on YouTube at some point about this. The floor

26:20

press is just you hold dumbbells or barbell. You go

26:23

down onto your elbows so you're lying on the ground

26:25

like an animal. It's benches for civilized people. My

26:28

gym are made of gold. I know it's platinum. I think

26:30

it's diamonds. It's very uncomfortable,

26:32

but the wealth alone keeps me comfortable. So

26:34

you touch down here and you can't possibly

26:36

physically get a big stretch. So

26:40

in some contexts can be a great exercise,

26:42

but just on the raw probabilities

26:44

probably isn't that great. So those are some

26:46

of the exercises that I would say like

26:48

deadlifts, floor presses, anything you do with a

26:50

partial range that's not in a lengthen deep

26:52

stretch position is probably not ideal for hypertrophy.

26:55

Rack pulls are another one. Exactly

26:57

a rack pulls training. Fuck if I know. I

26:59

think they train mostly the ego because you load 18 plates

27:01

on each side. That one girl used to work out. She's

27:03

like, oh my God, you're like a fucking step a hurl.

27:05

And you're like, yeah, you want to see me buck and

27:08

et cetera. Then you get laid. I think that's how it

27:10

works. All right. So

27:13

that's exercises. You guys, I think

27:16

have been, at least for

27:18

me, the, one of

27:20

the main reasons why I've reintroduced tempo

27:22

into my training. Everything

27:24

now, everything is tempo. The whole life.

27:26

So given that we've, yes, yes, slow

27:28

in, slow out. That

27:32

sounds good. Talk

27:34

to me about what good technique looks like.

27:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great

27:39

question. So good

27:41

technique is a huge diversity and variety

27:44

of expressions. So you can't

27:46

really look at a person doing an exercise and

27:48

for sure be like, that's bad technique because it

27:50

could be good for them. It could be good

27:53

for the context, but there

27:55

are a couple of generalities that apply to almost

27:57

everyone to almost all exercises that you can sort

27:59

of check boxes. saying if you

28:01

have these things, probably your technique

28:03

is pretty good. If you don't have them

28:06

as a scientifically minded person or at least one

28:08

attempting to be scientifically minded, at

28:10

the very least if you're doing a technique that doesn't

28:12

check the following boxes I'm about to talk about, I

28:15

at least want to talk to you and get some reasoning

28:17

out of you. Because you could have good reasoning, be like,

28:19

yeah, my shoulder is fucking injured, I can't do any more

28:21

range of motion. Okay, no big deal. But a lot of

28:23

times you don't get any reasoning out of people, but just

28:26

it gets book and what works brother. And you're like, my

28:28

man, buck thinking sucks. Painful. I do it. So

28:32

one is a good

28:34

technique should be focused on targeting

28:36

a specific muscle or muscles. And

28:40

by sheer biomechanics, you

28:43

know, if you're doing this motion, it's

28:45

not your biceps. So sometimes

28:48

people will be like, I'm training delts and they'll

28:50

do like alternating like lift like this with their

28:52

out with their fist pointed up. And

28:56

that hits the front belts, but it can't

28:58

really possibly hit the side belt. And

29:00

so if you're like, yeah, man, I'm trying to get big

29:02

side belts and you do that technique, I'm going to be

29:04

like, that can't is that you

29:07

can do like a stick and rope

29:09

model of the body where you're like, that does not the

29:11

muscle that does that. So that automatically means

29:13

like, if you want big lats, you're going to do pull

29:15

ups or rows because it's the sheer mechanics. And

29:17

there are more particularities where if you pull out like

29:20

this, it's probably not as much lats as it is

29:22

upper back. If you pull down, it's more lats just

29:24

because how the muscle attached. So that's

29:26

kind of the king variable of good

29:28

technique. So for example, if you say

29:31

you're training your quads, you

29:33

do a squat, that's sumo stance, you're

29:35

sitting back really far, you're getting a very

29:37

small degree of knee friction. There

29:41

are better ways to train the quads. That is not

29:43

the best technique for the quads, almost for anyone, because

29:45

the better technique would be like, well, we target the

29:47

quads. That means we expose them. That means we give

29:49

them a high degree of range of motion, which

29:52

means like, as you squat mostly down,

29:54

your toes should go

29:56

over your, your knees should go over your

29:58

toes rather and you should go nice and

30:00

deep. deep, that really biomechanically has to train

30:03

your quads. So that's number one. Another

30:06

one is to have a movement that has a

30:08

considerable degree of stability. So if

30:10

you're unstable, so for example, if you're doing upright

30:12

rows and you keep coming up on your toes

30:15

and then you're wiggling around, that's reducing your force

30:17

production. So good technique means

30:19

stable. Because your body will dial down

30:21

how much force your

30:23

muscles can deploy if you're stood

30:25

on a vibrating plate or if you're on

30:27

a balance beam or if you're on something

30:30

else. Bosu ball. Yeah.

30:33

It happens completely automatically. I've

30:36

been directly involved in laboratory testing for something

30:38

like this. We have, this is an

30:40

insane study we did. We had lots of spotters. We had

30:42

people max out in the high bar back squat, and then

30:44

we had them max out on a Bosu ball. Good

30:47

news. They only squatted about 60% out

30:49

of the one-rep max. For a max. That's

30:52

still quite a lot. 60% is quite a lot, right? But a fucking

30:54

Bosu ball? But to put it another way, unless

30:57

you're doing profoundly high repetitions, if you're doing sets

30:59

of five to 10 with 60% of

31:01

your true one-rep max, what would be instability? You're

31:04

getting almost no hypertrophy as an intermediate or

31:06

advanced trainee. This is enough. You're

31:08

learning how to squat on a Bosu ball, which is cool

31:10

at parties. You can show off, maybe get laid, maybe not.

31:15

But it's no good because you want to be nice

31:17

and stable. So for example, if you and

31:19

I are training together and you start doing incline dumbbell press,

31:21

but I notice your feet are hanging off or kind of

31:23

dangling. There's two things that can happen. One, you're a short

31:25

king like me who never grew up to be an adult

31:27

height. And then I'm just going to be like, that

31:29

sucks. But good luck. But

31:32

if you're a tall king like yourself or a medium king, how tall

31:34

are you? About 10. Oh, perfect. The

31:36

perfect man height. I would say, hey, Chris,

31:38

try to put your feet down and really

31:40

course crew them into the ground to get

31:42

that stability. You'll find you'll get more reps

31:44

and be able to do more weight with

31:46

incline dumbbells, which is a really good thing.

31:48

So stability is a technique universal, generally speaking.

31:50

When people talk about sort of grinding or

31:53

grounding themselves into the floor, there's no chi

31:56

that's happening here. This is the body

31:58

responding to us. more

32:01

stable and the force of Lee the

32:03

force production as I believe I believe she is

32:05

entirely a myth also like

32:07

all pretend things there

32:10

if you really want to go down that

32:12

road there's a lot of very sad YouTube

32:14

videos of actual MMA fighters challenging Chi practitioners

32:16

in China fucking them up I mean fuck

32:18

man one lady thought she could block like

32:20

a running punch just standing there and the

32:22

guy just went right through her I'd stop

32:24

watching after this race that is it the

32:26

sad part is that they get physically hurt

32:29

but it's more sad to watch their ontological

32:31

understanding of the world collapse because I must

32:33

have misaligned my chi that's what happened only

32:36

Stevenson Gallic can do shit like that I want to be on

32:38

the record saying that all right

32:40

control eccentric so control

32:43

in general especially on

32:45

the eccentric most people

32:47

can't help but control the concentric because it pushes

32:50

back you can

32:52

only move a concentric so quickly especially with heavier weights

32:54

especially close to failure so someone can't

32:56

really spastically do the concentric they're pushing

32:58

against it is kind of auto-controlled if

33:01

you're trying to gun your car up a really high

33:03

hill and you have anything other than the Tesla it's

33:05

gonna be seemingly like you're controlling it but it's

33:08

just pushing back that's auto control on

33:10

the central cover on the way down

33:12

people a lot of times are like

33:14

yeah let it drop which again isn't

33:16

terrible it does marginally increase your chances of

33:18

injury but what it does is it takes a

33:21

very muscle growth promoting part of the movement which

33:23

is the eccentric and the

33:25

eccentric actually requires less nervous system stimulus

33:28

to do the same amount of physical work

33:30

which means it's inherent stimulus to fatigue ratio

33:32

might be higher because it's probably a little

33:34

bit more stimulative than the concentric as a

33:36

phase by itself but requires less less

33:39

nervous system fatigue so over the weeks of controlling

33:41

your centric you may get more out of your

33:43

missiles with less payment on the

33:45

nervous system fatigue side well you've got to lift

33:47

it back up so it needs to come

33:49

down you've lifted it it has to come out and you

33:51

might as well collect all the coins on the way down

33:53

that we're like there's free hypertrophy coins just do it yes

33:55

yes it's like watching someone place on a hedgehog but they

33:57

jump over all the coins at least the Jewish part of

33:59

my I'm like, oh, but you missed the coins.

34:01

What are you doing? Reset the level. Oh, yeah, yeah.

34:04

Just try to pick up anything. This will get us canceled for sure.

34:07

So control on the eccentric is a big deal. Control in general

34:09

is a big deal. And

34:12

then another checklist we want is I used to

34:14

say full range of motion. And I still think

34:16

that's mostly correct. But we're learning

34:18

there are different parts of the range of motion which are

34:20

more or less hypertrophic. And so I can't

34:22

say is mostly full range of motion is good technique. So if

34:25

I see like a quarter squatting, I'm going to be like, you

34:27

probably went lower. That's a good thing. But

34:29

more importantly, still from an empirical

34:31

perspective is just not robbing

34:33

yourself of the deep stretch. So

34:35

if I see you do cable flies and you're stopping here,

34:38

I'm going to talk to you and I better hope you

34:40

have two fucked up shoulders. Because if they're totally healthy, I'm

34:42

going to say go ultra deep for that super big stretch.

34:44

Don't avoid that. What's happening in that deep stretch? Fuck

34:47

if I know science and shit. You're the guy. Look,

34:50

man, we don't know all of the shit. I'm

34:52

saying I've put me on a spot like that. There's

34:54

molecules in there and cells. God knows what else. We

34:58

don't actually know exactly why

35:00

a stretch stimulates hypertrophy. There

35:03

are several candidate mechanisms being investigated.

35:06

And I can regale you with the details, but

35:08

it's a little bit pointless because

35:10

all the details should be totally wrong. It's

35:13

a candidate mechanism that fails inspection. Right? So

35:15

in a few months, few years, we'll know exactly why that occurs.

35:18

But we have something better than a candidate mechanism. We

35:21

have very good control trials where

35:23

the only difference between groups or applications is

35:25

one group goes nice and deep and the

35:27

other does not. We have studies

35:30

on, for example, the quadriceps where the volume

35:32

and the load is identical between groups. Even

35:35

got clever studies where people train

35:37

one leg with a deep stretch only, bottom third,

35:39

and the other leg they train only with a

35:41

top third of leg extension. That's

35:43

a big deal because auto control. It's not

35:45

like genetics doesn't matter. Nothing matters. The same

35:48

body. You've got the split test. Right?

35:51

On the right. Amazing. How

35:53

great. Now

35:55

it's five to 10 percent more growth. So

35:58

you can do top end partials. You can bench. like

36:00

this and get plenty of muscle growth, tons of

36:02

IFD pros and jacked up juice heads do it

36:04

and they're still jacked. From an

36:06

efficiency and effectiveness perspective, all

36:08

those guys could have been bigger if they went

36:10

in for that really deep stretch. So to me,

36:12

that's a big part of really good technique. It's

36:17

really interesting to look at sort of

36:19

all of this as a suite, especially when it comes

36:21

to the technique for muscle growth, that you have this...

36:25

If we're looking at stimulus to

36:28

fatigue ratio, it's something that's important,

36:30

especially is everybody slowly makes the

36:32

inevitable journey toward

36:34

death and getting older. Jesus

36:36

Christ, man. That's

36:38

an incredibly macabre way to put it. I'm

36:41

a apocalyptic guy. I'm British. Yes, of course. Yes.

36:45

The Battle of Britain never got over that. So death

36:47

is always imminent, I understand. Everyone's

36:49

getting older. Everyone wants to avoid injury by reducing

36:52

down the amount of weight that you use. This

36:54

is one of the reliable ways by focusing on

36:56

the controlled eccentric. That also helps because you're

36:58

not going to surprise yourself and get into

37:01

a place or a range that you didn't

37:03

mean to get into. Totally.

37:06

Totally. By focusing on deep stretch as well, also

37:08

going to reduce down further the amount of weight

37:10

that you need to get the amount of movement.

37:13

Absolutely. Stability. Unstable exercise

37:15

is much more injurious than stable

37:17

exercise. If you have feet corsed

37:19

and you're just moving exactly how you want, you're

37:21

probably not going to fuck up. If

37:23

you have quite a bit of weight on a Bosu ball, I'm

37:25

sure you've seen YouTube videos of various accidents like, hey, you can

37:27

fuck your shit up if you get really unsteady. When

37:31

it comes to tempo, because obviously we're talking

37:33

about controlled eccentric and concentric that's

37:35

at least got something behind it. Jeff

37:40

Nippard did some studies, saw him on TikTok talking about

37:42

it. How long do I

37:44

need to take on that eccentric portion? Yeah,

37:46

that's a good question. The

37:48

literature we have so far as far as I'm

37:50

aware of it, and because I am science, I'm

37:52

very aware of it. It

37:55

didn't impress you. No one's claimed on

37:57

your show before that they are science itself. You

38:00

fused all at once? Yes. It

38:04

seems to not matter much. Anything

38:08

between a repetition that in total

38:10

takes one second, including eccentric and

38:12

concentric, and all the way up to a

38:14

total of nine seconds, which is a lot of pain, it seems

38:17

to be that if you do more quick repetitions,

38:19

you can get more repetitions. If

38:21

you seem to do slower repetitions, you get fewer, but

38:24

each one has a lot more stimulus. It's

38:26

kind of like filling up a glass of a certain

38:28

height. If you go really slow, it takes you longer.

38:30

You fill up the glass. If you go really fast,

38:32

it doesn't take as long. Fills up the glass. The

38:34

glass filling is what we want anyway. There's a certain

38:36

amount of stimulus you can drive to your muscles. You

38:38

can do it more slowly. You can do it more

38:41

quickly. It doesn't seem to matter for hypertrophy. However, under

38:44

control is the big caveat. So if you just dump

38:46

the stuff on you and then kind of crank it

38:48

up and then dump, yeah, that's not

38:50

going to be as hypertrophic as some modicum of

38:52

control. Now, if I go down this fast and

38:55

come back up, I still 100% control the eccentric. As

38:59

long as I'm doing that, I can go ultra slow. I

39:02

can go a little bit more quickly. And anything in

39:04

between, at least tentatively for now, we can say one

39:06

thing almost for sure, it doesn't make

39:08

a huge difference. Presumably when it comes

39:10

to practically, functionally doing

39:12

this in the gym, focusing on

39:15

a little bit more of a tempo, let's say maybe

39:17

a two count or a three count down, ensures

39:19

that control is something.

39:22

Because the difference between half a second down

39:24

and one second down in terms of control,

39:26

everyone's done a one, everyone's thought that they're

39:29

doing a three count tempo, but it's actually

39:31

been like a one-ish. And a

39:33

lot of it is still like, mmm, mmm, mmm, but

39:36

that, if you actually hit a two to

39:40

three count, to me, that seems like, all

39:42

right, I can't escape this. I can't escape

39:44

the degree of control that I need. Yes,

39:46

that's absolutely true. And I'll layer another thing

39:48

on top of it. One of

39:50

my last points for what makes good technique

39:53

is repetition consistency. Most of your reps should

39:55

look about the same. It doesn't mean identical.

39:57

There's actually a little bit of an injury

39:59

preventative benefit. from exposing yourself to slightly different

40:01

bar positions. It makes you more resilient. If you're

40:03

one machine-like thing all the time and you get

40:05

out of it in real life, you could find

40:07

yourself a little bit hurt. But

40:10

mostly the reps should look the same. The

40:13

ability to make the reps look mostly the same

40:15

and also move in the movement arc in which

40:17

you want, because remember the first principle of good

40:19

technique is like, are you moving in

40:21

a biomechanical way that targets the muscle? That's

40:23

a lot easier to ensure if you slowly

40:26

work into the eccentric, hitting the right positions.

40:28

If I just squat down, however the fuck my body tells

40:30

me, I'll do a fine job. I've been squatting a long

40:33

time, but maybe I'll sit back a little too far. I

40:35

won't expose my quads as much. If

40:37

I can take the time to go a little

40:39

bit slower on the eccentric, I can actually figure

40:41

out how my quads feel tension-wise while

40:43

I'm doing it and regulate my exposure

40:45

as I'm doing it. I'm

40:48

sitting back a little too much. I'm like, nope, nope, nope. I sit forward

40:50

and my quads get fucked up. I can feel the tension right away. Only

40:53

because I'm controlling the eccentric a little bit longer

40:55

am I able to get that feedback right away.

40:57

It's like during a football play, the coach

40:59

can't tell you what to do during the play.

41:02

You've got to play beforehand. You fucking figure

41:04

it out. The ball is fucking hiked and

41:06

then shit happens. It's too fast. But if

41:08

you can go a little bit slower, you can

41:10

auto-regulate your technique and do a better job.

41:13

During the exercise. During that exercise. And

41:15

small bonus is your injury probability, at

41:17

least nominally on theoretical grounds, will reduce.

41:19

And I'll take anything that reduces my

41:21

injury probability by some amount and doesn't

41:23

reduce the mechanisms of hypertrophy at all.

41:26

So some people say tempo doesn't matter.

41:28

And I say totally. It's like if you get the

41:30

same high quality meal at two restaurants, same fucking meal,

41:32

but it doesn't matter what's when you go to. Yeah,

41:34

but what's the price? If one

41:36

is 75% cheaper, my fucking Jewish ass is

41:39

there ASAP. I'm there early at the door.

41:41

No way that could be investing instead of

41:43

doing that. In any case, I'm there as soon as it opens, blah,

41:45

blah, blah. So if you get even a

41:47

theoretical downside of injury risk that's

41:49

a little bit smaller, I'll fucking take it. With

41:51

that in mind, does it make sense for trainers,

41:55

athletes as they get older to focus

41:59

more on tempo? As you

42:01

increase in age, focusing

42:04

more on tempo means that you use less weight,

42:07

reduced injury risk. When

42:09

you're younger, I saw your video on Sam

42:11

Soolick, Homeboy's very strong, lifting full stack,

42:13

all the rest of it, but he's made of rubber

42:15

and magic. He's 22. Yes, we

42:17

were all made of rubber and magic back then. In my

42:20

case, it was a type of rubber that wasn't able to

42:22

get erect. Huh? Oh,

42:24

shit, I'm on set again. Yes,

42:27

so what I would say is this, it

42:30

matters for everyone because injuries are no fun

42:32

in any case. There are also injuries that

42:34

can go with you the rest of your

42:36

life. You do a major distal pectoral tendon

42:38

rupture, fully vulgium. You're just never going to

42:40

be the same again. You need another 15 years

42:42

of medical tech to reattach that thing in a way

42:44

that doesn't look fucked up or feel fucked up. You

42:46

don't want to do yourself dirty when you're 22, rip

42:48

a peck off. You just never the fucking same. You

42:51

don't look the same. You don't perform the same powerlifting.

42:53

It's kind of done for you. Bodybuilding is kind of

42:55

fucking weird at that point. People say,

42:57

yeah, when you're young, you can get

42:59

away with shit when you're young, but

43:01

statistically, it's still a downside. What

43:04

I will say is I'll put it another way exactly

43:06

agreeing with your point. That's my

43:08

favorite kind of point, one

43:10

that exactly agrees. Why do you think I'm on the

43:12

show? I'm just here to feed the ego and be

43:14

like, yes, Chris, I'd like to feed with something else,

43:17

but we signed a couple of papers that

43:19

said I couldn't physically touch you during the show. When

43:23

you are young, I fucking

43:25

get it. I get it. I can do

43:27

this. The fucking bitch over there seeing you

43:29

do it, you're getting late. Whatever. Ego

43:32

shit. Live your life. When

43:34

you're older, and this is like a particular pet

43:36

peeve of mine, I see like

43:39

a fucking balding 48 year old man swinging the

43:41

fucking dumbbells around him, but come here, dumb motherfucker.

43:44

What are you doing? How old

43:46

are you? It's like I've

43:48

talked to a

43:51

few women in my day. Nothing sexual. When

43:55

you're 13 years old, 17 years old,

43:58

and you have what I would describe as very

44:00

understandable but kind of a childlike relation to

44:02

body image and stuff like that. Like you're

44:04

unable to go through a muscle gain phase

44:06

because any amount of extra pudge on you

44:08

just feels totally wrong. You're 17! Fuck

44:11

it! I get it! I get it! Fuckin' we all had body image

44:13

issues. I talked to 37 year

44:15

old woman or 47 year old woman who

44:17

knows she needs to gain muscle but is

44:19

unwilling to gain an extra half centimeter of

44:21

pudge. I'm like, look, Linda,

44:24

how old are you? She's

44:26

47 years old. What do you do for a

44:28

living? I'm actually a managing

44:31

and accounting firm so you're intelligent and responsible

44:33

and you can see ahead, right? She's like,

44:35

well, yes, of course. I'm like, you

44:37

can't make the trade-off to gain a fucking half centimeter

44:39

of fat on your ass so you gain more muscle

44:42

and she's like, goddamn it, you're right. So just the

44:44

same way if I see an older, you see a

44:46

younger guy swinging weights around, I'm like, whatever, to be

44:48

20 again. My man! I see a 40

44:50

year old doing it. I'm like, dude,

44:52

come on! It's like seeing a 45

44:54

year old like just after watching Fast

44:57

and Furious 18 or whatever,

44:59

like rev his shit up against a young guy

45:01

and the fuck, what the fuck, really? This is

45:03

what we're doing? So it's always good for everyone

45:05

but for older people, just have no fucking excuse.

45:07

Slow your shit down, control your shit. We

45:09

talked about concentric, eccentric. You've

45:12

mentioned about stretch at the

45:14

bottom, pause, pausing reps and

45:16

isometrics. What needs to

45:18

be said there? Isometrics just don't seem to be

45:20

as hypertrophic. Isometrics in

45:23

a stretch position are plenty hypertrophic. In a contracted

45:25

one, they're not. So for example, if you're doing

45:27

cable flies, if you stop at the squeeze, sorry,

45:30

if you stop and squeeze, people will give back

45:32

to you. It's totally cool for variation. It's fun,

45:34

it's awesome, it grows muscle. But I wouldn't say

45:36

it's essential, it might be a downside. All that

45:38

energy you're spending stopping at the squeeze, you could

45:40

put into the eccentric, which probably grows more

45:42

muscle. So if you were going to do

45:44

a pause, you're going to be pausing at

45:46

the stretch position, not at the contracted position.

45:48

More often, yeah. Pause at the

45:50

stretch is cool for a couple reasons. One,

45:52

it absolutely reduces the injury probability. That

45:55

reversal at the stretch is the single, generally

45:57

most dangerous time for muscular injury. because

46:00

you've got weight going down and you're about to

46:02

contract while it's, that's how I ruptured my Achilles.

46:05

Yeah. Oh, I heard that story. It was terrible.

46:07

Yep. This is the ultimate scary story of warm

46:09

up for forever. If you've coming back to sports,

46:13

the direct force plate

46:15

measured pulse of force at the bottom of

46:17

the movement is the highest it will be

46:20

in its entire movement, reversing. It's also technically

46:22

your chest at its weakest position. So it's,

46:24

if you want to pause there, again, the

46:27

absolute risk of injury in the gym

46:29

is fucking tiny. It's way, way less

46:31

injurious than rugby or tennis or anything

46:33

like that. It's so funny because like

46:36

rich people like myself will be like, Oh, I'm going

46:38

to ski in the veil. And they'll see like a

46:40

lifter lifting 200 pounds. Like, isn't that bad for your

46:42

back? Motherfucker. You just hit a tree on your last

46:45

trip. There's half your brains out of your fucking face.

46:47

Lifting is super, super safe. So I don't want to

46:49

be like, you've got to fucking pause at the bottom

46:51

or else you're going to die. But

46:54

on a small relative injury risk, it is reduced

46:56

when you're pausing at the bottom. Absolutely. And you

46:58

get more time experiencing tension in your muscles at

47:01

that length and position. So there's an argument that

47:03

pausing at the bottom is actually maybe a little

47:05

bit more hypertrophic and you need less weight on

47:07

the bar. So all those things stack up and

47:09

like the good column is at least as good,

47:12

probably not much better, but the bad column is

47:14

a little smaller. To me, it seems like at

47:16

the very least it's a great option. I'm not

47:18

going to say it's the only way to train

47:21

and fuck that, but it's a good option. Good

47:23

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48:23

modern wisdom. Okay. How do we warm up before

48:25

we start? Fuck follow? I just get in there

48:27

and fucking rage, bro um First

48:30

thing when driving to the gym there are

48:33

only a few types of music you're allowed to listen

48:35

to Chris Let me judge your music soundtrack for warming

48:37

up. What is what are you? What's in the headphones

48:39

there for you sleep token at the moment? That's nonsense

48:41

because I have never heard of it It must be

48:43

the wrong thing. Okay. Do you what do you listen

48:45

to? Oh Well

48:48

dark thoughts, oh, yes always

48:51

my psychiatrist says we have to up a few different

48:53

kinds of medication to make them maybe go away um

48:58

Blink-182 really is the correct answer because you

49:00

reached the age of 13 and

49:03

never actually aged Psychologically. Oh

49:06

god. I probably never made it to 13 11 maybe yeah Yes

49:12

So what the fuck kind of music is that I'm trying

49:14

to think of what's the toad sleep token metal like how

49:17

oh my man Never mind. I take back I thought it

49:19

was like trick bring me the her like it's kind of

49:21

in the world of bring me the horizon or loads misery

49:23

signals misery signals

49:26

Yeah, all of my all of the band's Represent

49:29

the landscape of my

49:31

mind. Holy shit dark Yes,

49:37

okay warm-up music aside there

49:40

is actually a study that was recently

49:42

conducted by dr Brad Schoenfeld the world's

49:44

expert on hypertrophy and his laboratory and

49:48

They have illustrated something that most

49:50

lifters of a certain degree of

49:52

intelligence level and longtime participation Have

49:57

Realized and it's that There

50:00

are two different kinds of warmup. The general warmup, which

50:02

is when you go in and you do the elliptical

50:04

for 15 minutes, maybe you foam roll, maybe do some

50:06

dynamic stretching, that's all fine and good, and then

50:09

there's the specific warmup, which is whatever lift you have

50:11

first in your program, you do it for about a

50:13

set of 12, very lightweights,

50:16

set of 12 with maybe your 30 rep

50:18

max. Then you do a set of

50:20

eight after a few minutes of rest with maybe your

50:22

20 rep max, then you do a set of four

50:24

ish, two to four reps with something

50:26

like your 10 rep max, then you rest a

50:28

little bit and then you're ready to do whatever

50:30

load. That specific warmup is a

50:33

very good idea from a variety of perspectives.

50:36

It warms up your tissues. It makes them more pliable,

50:38

less likely to get hurt. It also activates and wakes

50:40

up your nervous system. It aligns

50:42

your actual muscle fibers more into the direction

50:44

of pull or whatever exercise you're doing. It

50:48

decreases the sensitivity of what are called Golgi

50:50

tendon organs, which are detectors in your muscles

50:52

for how much force is being transduced and

50:54

they start out and not warmed up by

50:56

being like, holy shit, that's a lot of

50:58

force. And they actually tamper down how much

51:00

your nervous system can activate. After a few

51:02

warmup sets, you literally are stronger. Why you

51:04

can't cold bar your one rep max. Exactly.

51:06

Exactly. You, the GTOs need to kind of cool

51:08

down and after a few reps, a few sets

51:11

of progress will be heavy to weight. Oh, we're

51:13

safe here. This is okay. Yeah, it's fine. Um,

51:16

okay. So I'm just, again, I'm thinking like functionally when we

51:19

get into the gym, what this means, let's say that we're

51:21

going into do a chest day, or let's say we're going

51:23

to do, um, uh, a chest and back day, like just

51:25

a full, like a push pole day, um,

51:28

you're going to start off with incline

51:30

dumbbell press. Does

51:32

that mean that the 12, eight,

51:35

four methods for incline

51:37

press, do

51:39

you then need to do the same thing again for back? Yes.

51:43

Right. Would you do those two

51:45

together? Would you go, would you

51:47

maybe alternate from, okay, I'm going to press a little

51:49

bit and then during my couple of minutes rest, I'll

51:51

go and row a little bit and or whatever. What

51:54

I like to do is I like to warm up for the exercise

51:57

I'm doing next. Once I warm up,

51:59

I do that exercise. And then whatever exercise I

52:01

have after is one of two options. One, it's

52:03

the same muscle group, just more exercise. After

52:05

incline press, I'm on the pushups or something, same

52:07

muscle group. Then I only have to do what

52:09

the great Jay Cutler actually termed as a feel

52:12

set. It's like you just put

52:14

some weight on there, maybe not your working weight, maybe

52:16

your working weight. You just do a couple reps, maybe

52:18

five to 10, maybe fewer, just to feel out, just

52:20

to get the technique right. So that the first time

52:22

you're heavy dumbbells on in your hand, you're like, what

52:24

the fuck is going on? Just feel it out. That's

52:27

all you need. So between every

52:29

single exercise, that's not the first. Afterwards,

52:31

you just need maybe one set to feel it out.

52:34

And then you go, you don't need all three, but

52:36

if it's a muscle, you haven't trained yet, let's say

52:38

we do chest and then we do back. If

52:40

I just did a whole bunch of bench press and then I'm

52:42

doing pullups. Yeah, that's 12, eight,

52:44

four on the pulldown or assisted

52:46

pullup machine. That last four is

52:49

maybe four actual pullups. Rest, put your weight

52:51

belt on and then go real quick. The

52:53

general warmup, the idea that you come in

52:55

and do elliptical or whatever. If you take

52:57

a thorough specific warmup, like a 12, eight,

52:59

four system, uh, that one

53:01

study by Dr. Bachelfeld showed that

53:03

you don't have any benefit performance

53:06

wise from the general warmup and

53:08

unless you really need it, like it's

53:10

just super cold outside and even a specific

53:13

warmup isn't good enough. I would

53:15

say be careful on wasting too much time with

53:17

a glennal warmup. One of the things that happens

53:19

in fitness is there's really good stuff baked into

53:21

the fitness cake. And every now and again, we

53:24

add ingredients just on fluff alone. They

53:26

don't make a whole lot of sense. One of the major

53:29

kind of sources of fluff is increasing

53:31

the complexity and duration of your general

53:33

warmup because reasons some guy

53:35

will, if he foam rolls his elbows, it's night

53:37

and day. And then he can do skull crushers,

53:40

but that's just that guy's fucked up. You see

53:42

it and he's an advanced lifter. You're like, fuck

53:44

foam rolling, bro. Everyone's got to do

53:46

it. You start doing it. You take your general warmup

53:48

and you do elliptical, then you do some kind of

53:50

box step ups, then you do some Pilates stuff. Then

53:52

you do dynamic stretching 45 fucking minutes later. You're like,

53:54

it's time to work out motherfucker. Your workout's over

53:56

already. You got to go back to the office.

53:59

So the general warmup. is just not necessary if

54:01

you do a specific warmup. So what I do in the

54:03

gym, I come in, I do some arm circles, I do

54:05

because I'm Russian, I got to do some side bends and

54:07

stuff, and then I just go 12, 8, 4,

54:10

first exercise. After the first exercise, I'm generally

54:12

warm as fuck. I'm fucking sweating, and then

54:15

I'm fucking golden. So you can do a

54:17

general warmup if you want, but I would

54:19

say for folks listening, you don't have to.

54:21

But a specific warmup, 12,

54:24

8, 4, or something like it, the basic reasoning

54:26

is just slightly lighter weights, go to heavier weights,

54:28

the repetitions fall, then you're ready to go clean

54:30

and get the most out of it. All

54:32

right, how about rep ranges and how heavy

54:34

to lift? Yes.

54:36

For, there are recommended target

54:39

rep ranges for every single human physical

54:41

quality that we know. So

54:43

for example, for strength, basic strength

54:45

building is like sets of three to six

54:48

repetitions. You do a whole lot fewer

54:50

than six, let's use, you do singles. You

54:52

can get stronger doing singles, but you could have

54:54

gotten stronger because you would have gotten more volume

54:56

doing still very heavy weight if you did like

54:58

sets of four. It's just not an efficient use

55:00

of your time. Still works not as efficient. Can

55:03

you get stronger doing sets of eight? Yes. But

55:06

you get a lot of hypertrophy work from eight.

55:08

But if you do your

55:10

eight rep max, it's just not heavy enough

55:12

like sets of three or six would be

55:14

free to get as much strength out of

55:16

it as possible. So these are all spectrum

55:18

ranges. There's not like at some repetition and

55:20

begins before it, you get nothing. And then

55:22

you get all hypertrophy and then after you

55:24

get no hypertrophy, it's kind of more of

55:27

a normal distribution kind of situation. But

55:29

for hypertrophy, it seems that anything roughly

55:32

between sets of five repetitions that are

55:34

challenging, close to failure and

55:36

all the way to 30 to 35

55:38

repetitions seems

55:41

to be on average for the average person,

55:43

for the average muscle in

55:45

medium term, several months of testing

55:47

to promote almost, I'll say it

55:50

better, undifferentiable amounts of

55:52

muscle growth. So we got a

55:54

group of people training sets of five to eight, got another group

55:56

of people training sets of 25 to 28

55:58

reps. As

56:00

long as they go close to failure, and it's

56:02

the same exercise, they get essentially, on average,

56:05

the same results. Now, within a different

56:07

muscle, it could be different. Some people's biceps respond

56:09

really well to heavy shit. Sets of 5 to

56:11

10, you do sets of 25 to 30, they

56:13

just get tired, and they don't have much hypertrophy.

56:15

It works differently between individuals, too, but

56:18

the overarching theme is anywhere between sets of

56:20

5 and sets of 30, it's kind of

56:22

unlikely to be a ton of really wrong

56:24

answers. You can gain muscle doing sets of

56:26

4 and 3 and 2 and 1. It's

56:28

just going to take a lot more sets to get at them,

56:30

and obviously your joints and connective tissues are taking

56:33

a fucking hell of a pond because that's a

56:35

really heavy weight. It's not ultra-efficient. You're not putting

56:37

your best cards on the table if you're doing

56:39

that. Can you get really good

56:41

muscle growth with sets of 30, 40, 50 plus reps? Actually,

56:45

yes, but you have to do more sets

56:47

to accomplish that, and each set is psychologically

56:49

fucking three minutes long. I was like, fuck

56:51

that, right? So you do like 10 sets

56:53

of 52 reps, the playing card

56:55

workout, fuck that. It's

56:57

a shitload of systemic fatigue, crap load of psychological

56:59

fatigue, so the same growth you could have gotten

57:01

was just doing 10 sets

57:04

of 8, which is way easier on the whole system.

57:06

So 5 to 30 reps is really good

57:09

general advice, but experiment on your

57:11

own time. Find out what

57:13

seems to be giving you great proxies.

57:15

Pump, burn, tension, soreness, whatever rep ranges

57:17

give you that, it's awesome. And another

57:19

thing is try some variety. So if

57:21

you train back twice a week, have

57:24

one of the days be slightly heavier, like mostly sets

57:26

of 5 to 10, some sets of 10 to 15

57:28

reps. Try the other day

57:30

being mostly sets of 15 to 20 reps and even some

57:32

sets of 20 to 30, kind

57:34

of a heavier and lighter. That diversity, there

57:36

are a few studies that show a diversity

57:38

of rep ranges, even within several months of

57:41

time, can help you grow. So I wouldn't

57:43

write that off. And also, more sustainable from

57:45

a joint connective tissue perspective and an enjoyment

57:47

perspective. It's nice to be able to have

57:49

some slightly different days, shall I go, another

57:51

day of 28 reps, fuck that.

57:53

But 28 you get sick of after one day, the next day you

57:55

come in and it sets of 5 to 10, like

57:57

okay, fuck, this is different, it's cool. equally

58:00

effective on average. What about weight? The

58:05

amount of weight that

58:07

you choose should

58:09

fall into two categories or two kind of

58:11

clearance variables to make sure it goes through.

58:14

One is, can you

58:17

lift it with

58:19

good technique between five and

58:21

30 times in one set? And

58:24

two is that exhibition of

58:26

your lifting at least

58:28

within three reps-ish of failure?

58:31

Because people will say like, you give someone

58:33

10-pound dumbbells that can lift the 30s and they

58:36

do five and they put it down. They're like, hypertrophy,

58:38

I hit five, but the caveat

58:40

there is that you have to challenge the

58:42

muscle. So the weight you

58:44

end up using is whatever

58:47

weight gets you within five to

58:49

30 reps range close to failure.

58:52

And you have to warm up to find that out

58:54

and it's different for everyone, but the idea that you

58:56

got to go ultra heavy to grow is

58:58

true, but it's not the only true thing. You can

59:01

also grow from light high

59:03

rep shit. You just have to push it close

59:05

to failure. Why not to failure? To

59:08

failure is a totally fine thing as well. There

59:11

are downsides of going to failure all the time.

59:14

It seems that as you

59:16

get closer to failure, the amount of stimulus

59:18

per set rises. So if you

59:21

have a set where you stop at two reps shy of

59:23

failure and another person has a set

59:25

where they stop just at failure or

59:28

someone has to drag the barbell off of them, the

59:30

person who went to failure is going to grow more muscle. That's

59:33

a good thing, but it's by a small margin,

59:36

maybe just several percent more growth. The

59:38

downside is training to failure

59:40

generates a lot more fatigue, probably

59:43

not a few percent more, maybe a

59:45

few dozen percent more, which is a

59:47

big deal. If you're going

59:49

to use a program which mostly has

59:51

you do three or two or one rep shy

59:53

of failure, you'll get great stimulus

59:55

and you'll be able to recover from lots of sex

59:58

over the course of weeks and months, which means you'll

1:00:00

get a great stimulus and a great hypertrophy result. If

1:00:03

you insist on going to failure even beyond in

1:00:05

your sets, you can get very good results, but

1:00:08

you have to reduce the total volume of

1:00:10

your training because the amount of fatigue you

1:00:12

accumulate is going to be rapid. It's going

1:00:14

to happen fast. So have you ever heard

1:00:16

of like hit training, Mike Menser, high intensity

1:00:18

training, HIT, Mike Menser, and

1:00:20

those folks were fans of going to failure

1:00:22

and beyond with drop sets and crazy shit

1:00:24

like that. They got really good results, but

1:00:26

they don't do very many sets, a few

1:00:29

sets per muscle per workouts, all they do

1:00:31

because they realized we can't recover from this. You

1:00:33

can recover from more if you stay a little

1:00:35

shy of failure. My suspicion is that if you

1:00:37

want the best overall muscle growth and you have

1:00:40

all the time in the world to train, that

1:00:42

somewhere between three and one rep in reserve on

1:00:44

average for a program is a really good idea.

1:00:46

But you also want to test your shit every

1:00:49

now and again. It's difficult to say this

1:00:51

as two reps in reserve. If it's been months

1:00:53

since you've actually gone to failure, that actually, because

1:00:55

you can be fucking lying to yourself. Yeah, it's

1:00:57

two IR, someone puts a gun to your head,

1:00:59

literally maybe, and they'll go to failure and you

1:01:01

get six more reps. Well, shit, it

1:01:03

turns out you weren't even in that best growth zone of

1:01:05

three to one. So what I would say is a

1:01:08

method that we use at our PR app

1:01:10

does this automatically. It starts you a few

1:01:12

reps shy failure, and then it presents incrementally

1:01:15

slightly heavier loads over the weeks or repetition

1:01:17

goals that are slightly higher. So it takes

1:01:19

you from 10 reps to 11 reps to

1:01:21

12 reps, or takes you from a hundred

1:01:23

pounds to 105 to 110 automatically

1:01:25

because your body can't adapt that quickly. You're

1:01:28

going to reach failure a few weeks in

1:01:30

four to six weeks in. You'll not only

1:01:32

have a whole range of going from three

1:01:34

ish in reserve all the way to zero,

1:01:36

which means you checked every box, but you'll

1:01:38

now know something about yourself. You'll know exactly

1:01:40

how high your best performance is. So for

1:01:42

the next muscle cycle, next program you construct,

1:01:44

you can be like, okay, I know how

1:01:46

strong I am. Let me start a little

1:01:48

bit less than that and progress again to

1:01:50

see if I can go a little bit

1:01:52

higher. So I would say going from some

1:01:54

number of reps in reserve all the

1:01:56

way to failure in a single muscle cycle is probably a

1:01:58

good practice for many people. but not required. You can

1:02:00

always go two or three reps in reserve.

1:02:03

As long as you do enough sets, you'll get very

1:02:05

close to ideal hypertrophy outcomes. And you'll do very well

1:02:07

in muscle growth if you just take everything to failure.

1:02:09

You just have to really watch your fatigue management and

1:02:11

not do too many sets because then you'll burn out.

1:02:14

What about sets? Sets

1:02:16

are influenced by a few things. One of the big

1:02:18

ones is your proximity to failure. So what I'm going

1:02:20

to say next about how many sets you should do

1:02:22

is if you go close to failure all the time,

1:02:24

you do on the lower end of

1:02:27

this range. At least start there. If

1:02:29

you do two or three reps in

1:02:31

reserve, you can be on the higher end of this range.

1:02:34

A couple of ways to

1:02:36

think about sets. There are sets per week and

1:02:39

there are sets per session. I like to

1:02:41

think of per muscle group per session. Some

1:02:43

people get overly obsessed about how many sets

1:02:45

do I need to do per exercise. There

1:02:48

isn't answers to that question, but

1:02:50

it's much more interesting to talk about per muscle

1:02:52

group because you can train your chest with three

1:02:54

exercises and do two sets each, or you can

1:02:56

train it with two exercises and do three sets

1:02:59

each. The total amount of working sets is by

1:03:01

far the biggest determinant of how much muscle you're

1:03:03

going to grow per session. In

1:03:06

a session, theoretically, you can

1:03:08

do anywhere from one set for

1:03:11

your muscle, just one set of curls and a leave, and

1:03:13

as a beginner especially, you'll get some robust

1:03:15

gains. Or as someone who's

1:03:17

more advanced, if you train your biceps every

1:03:19

single day, just one or two sets of

1:03:22

curls ends up being a lot of weekly

1:03:24

volume and plenty of stimulus and that's a

1:03:26

totally fine way to grow. On

1:03:28

the other end, in the session, you

1:03:30

can do as many as 12 to 15 sets for the

1:03:32

biceps or for the chest.

1:03:36

The downside there is on

1:03:39

the higher ends of that spectrum, you

1:03:42

are reaching into what's called junk volume

1:03:45

where, yeah, you're training, but

1:03:48

your nervous system is so tired, it's not

1:03:50

even recruiting as many of the muscle fibers

1:03:52

as you want anymore. It's like

1:03:54

it's taking the day off and you're just kind of robotically

1:03:56

moving through. rep

1:04:00

cutoff, theoretical, very rough cutoff of anything

1:04:02

lighter than your 30 rep max probably

1:04:04

won't grow as much muscle. That's

1:04:07

always and everywhere your fresh 30 rep max.

1:04:09

So if you're on exercise number five for

1:04:11

your pecs, you're doing cable flies with a

1:04:14

hundred pounds for sets of 15, even if

1:04:16

it's a failure, that

1:04:18

is to failure as we observe it externally with

1:04:20

this pre fatigue. But oh my

1:04:22

God. And at that point, your nervous system is

1:04:24

fucking checked out. A lot of your faster Twitch

1:04:26

muscle fibers, the ones that grow the most, they're

1:04:28

not even fucking contracting anymore. And you look at

1:04:31

a hundred pounds and someone's like, how

1:04:33

many reps do you do? 15. How many

1:04:35

could you have done if you were fresh?

1:04:37

Like, I don't know, 40. Well, that's 10

1:04:39

away from 30. That already is starting to

1:04:41

get junky. It's just the stimulus isn't worth

1:04:44

the fatigue anymore. A

1:04:47

couple of studies have been done actually more than a few

1:04:49

and a lot of good meta analytic data has been

1:04:52

synthesized. Probably some of the best of which is by

1:04:54

a gentleman named James Krieger, who is, has lit review,

1:04:56

the weightology lit review. I sign up for it. I

1:04:58

pay real money for my own money. Chris, you know

1:05:00

how painful that is to part of my own money?

1:05:03

And he has hinted

1:05:06

at the fact that close

1:05:08

to the best answer on

1:05:10

average, huge caveat on average

1:05:12

is something like five to

1:05:14

eight working sets per muscle

1:05:16

per session. So

1:05:19

if you're training your biceps and you

1:05:21

do three sets per session, totally cool. You just have to

1:05:23

do more sessions per week. If

1:05:25

you're doing something like nine

1:05:28

sets for biceps, again, totally cool. We just have to

1:05:30

train them less frequently so they can recover for a

1:05:32

lot of nine sets of work. But if you're doing

1:05:34

15 working sets for just your

1:05:37

biceps in one session, the literature

1:05:39

would say that's not optimal. And the reasoning would

1:05:41

be like your last five sets are just a

1:05:43

gigantic fucking waste of your time. You're just not,

1:05:45

you're cashed out. It's like frying an egg after

1:05:47

it's already fried. Just gets more burnt and nothing

1:05:49

good happens to it. On the

1:05:51

other hand, if you're doing just one or two sets

1:05:53

for biceps per session, you had better be doing a

1:05:55

lot of sessions over the week. And if you're only

1:05:57

training once or twice for biceps, you say, look, man,

1:06:00

your muscles could take more of a hit

1:06:02

which brings me to my next point. How

1:06:04

do you determine if you're doing the right

1:06:07

amount of volume for you? And I would

1:06:09

actually keep this relatively simple. However

1:06:12

many sessions you have per muscle in a week, which

1:06:14

I'm sure we'll get to how many sessions is a

1:06:16

good idea, let's just say it's two. Let's say you

1:06:18

train your chest on Monday, you train chest again on

1:06:20

Thursday. If after

1:06:23

Monday's workout, let's say you're doing three sets of

1:06:25

chest. By Tuesday evening you're

1:06:27

like not sore, you're not tired, you're fucking

1:06:29

ready to go, your strength is as high

1:06:31

as it'll ever be. Someone

1:06:33

could ask the theoretical question of why

1:06:35

the fuck are you waiting Wednesday as

1:06:37

a whole day to just go Thursday.

1:06:39

You could have already hit it again.

1:06:42

So if you're well beyond recovered, next

1:06:45

Monday you can do four sets or five

1:06:47

sets for chest to get you close to

1:06:50

just barely recovered for next Thursday. If

1:06:52

you're just barely recovered, let's say Wednesday you're still

1:06:54

a little tight, a little sore, a little weak

1:06:56

feeling, and Thursday morning you're really good to go.

1:06:59

Perfect. Is that MRV?

1:07:01

Yeah, so if you go over that

1:07:03

value you might have exceeded your MRV. Well,

1:07:06

there's more technical way to diagnose that maximum recoverable

1:07:09

volume, but a kind of way to make sure

1:07:11

you're not excessively over it, so make sure you're

1:07:13

healed on time. But if you're healed too early

1:07:15

then you could be at your minimum effective volume

1:07:17

or even maintenance volume. You think you're growing but

1:07:19

you're really doing so few sets that you're not

1:07:21

accomplishing a whole lot. So the point is to

1:07:23

challenge your body such that it is

1:07:25

recovering until, gee, a day or

1:07:27

several hours before you hit it again. If

1:07:30

you do eight sets of chest on Monday,

1:07:33

by the time Thursday rolls around you're still sort of a touch. And

1:07:36

you're weaker than usual. You're not going to

1:07:38

get as robust of a stimulus. And thus

1:07:41

you next time shouldn't do eight sets,

1:07:43

maybe you should do six. So

1:07:45

by adjusting the number of sets week over

1:07:48

week for any given muscle to challenge yourself

1:07:50

to recover close to just on time for

1:07:52

the next time you hit it, not too

1:07:54

far back, definitely not under recovered. You end

1:07:56

up auto-regulating yourself into probably close to the

1:07:58

end of the week. to your ideal volume

1:08:01

for how much muscle you can gain. How

1:08:03

long do you rest in

1:08:05

between sets? Yes. Oh, in

1:08:07

between actual sets as you go. Okay. So

1:08:10

I have a unique take on this. You

1:08:12

might not hear it in a lot of other places. It's

1:08:14

just one minute and it's the right answer for everyone next

1:08:16

question. No wayways. That's not

1:08:19

it. A lot of answers you'll get

1:08:21

on the internet from folks that also know what they're

1:08:24

talking about is some number of

1:08:26

minutes. Can I understand that answer because it's

1:08:28

very usable. Let's say two to five minutes

1:08:30

or something like that. The problem is that

1:08:32

is not a theoretically based answer. It's just

1:08:35

a, it's just a notional answer. Like here's

1:08:37

the number. You're not really sure why. And

1:08:40

there are many exceptions. For example,

1:08:42

if you train your calves and calf raises,

1:08:45

are you telling me I need to rest five

1:08:47

fucking minutes after my calves 10 seconds after I

1:08:49

don't even feel lactic acid anymore. I'm fucking

1:08:51

totally good to go. So we do

1:08:53

in our P is we have a four

1:08:55

factor checklist model where if you can checklist

1:08:57

four things after your last set

1:08:59

is over, you can begin your next set as

1:09:02

soon as those checklist items are checked. You

1:09:04

can wait longer and there may be some

1:09:07

small upsides to it, but someone could say

1:09:09

if you wait much longer, you're just kind of

1:09:11

wasting time. So here are the checklists. Number

1:09:14

one, your cardio can't be a limiting factor.

1:09:17

So if you just did a set of squats and

1:09:19

you turn to your training partner, you're like, can I

1:09:21

do another set? No,

1:09:23

because then what's going to stop you

1:09:26

in your set of squats is you

1:09:28

can't breathe. It's not

1:09:30

your local quad muscle chair that's being

1:09:32

brought close to failure. Remember the local

1:09:34

musculature brought close to failure is

1:09:36

the way we get the most robust gains. That's

1:09:39

the mechanism by which we grow. So that's

1:09:41

no good. So wait until you're back to

1:09:43

at least normal ish breathing. That's checklist one.

1:09:46

Level one is kind of

1:09:48

your neural nervous system strength,

1:09:50

which means do you feel

1:09:52

strong? Like

1:09:54

in here, not in the pecs, in the heart,

1:09:57

which we all know emotion comes from the heart. No,

1:10:00

wait, it's the brain. If you're fucking

1:10:02

like, yeah, let's fucking do this. You're ready. If

1:10:05

you still feel like curved up in a ball and

1:10:07

defeated, how are you going to push it close to

1:10:09

failure in the next day? You're not, you're going to

1:10:11

suck. So number one, cardiovascular system needs

1:10:13

to be mostly recovered. Number two, you need to

1:10:15

have your neural strength back. You need to be

1:10:18

like, yeah, fucking, let's do this. The

1:10:20

second to last one is the synergists need to

1:10:22

no longer be a mini factor. For example, in

1:10:24

the squat, you

1:10:26

can say, okay, after three minutes, I'm breathing normal. I

1:10:29

feel fucking strong again. And my

1:10:31

quads feel like we're ready to go, but

1:10:34

my lower back is still cramping, still has

1:10:36

lactic acid. It's still weak. If

1:10:38

you do another work set, what do you think is going to

1:10:40

be the limiting point? It's going to be a lower back, which

1:10:42

means your quads are like, did

1:10:44

anything happen? Did we just try? Or what the fuck went

1:10:47

on? If your lower back has five

1:10:49

good reps in it, but your quads have 10

1:10:51

good reps in them, it doesn't matter if you

1:10:53

tell yourself on one rep in reserve, you're six

1:10:55

reps in reserve for the quads for the muscle

1:10:57

that matters. So the synergists

1:11:00

have to be good to go. Another example

1:11:02

is forms and the lat pull down. If

1:11:04

your forms are still throbbing and you can't

1:11:06

grip anything, it's not time to do that

1:11:09

pull downs. Again, you've got to fucking rest

1:11:11

out, even if your lats feel quite good.

1:11:13

And that last four factor model checklist is

1:11:15

does the target muscle have enough recovery in

1:11:17

it for it to be

1:11:19

able to do at least another five repetitions? Because

1:11:22

any set less than five reps can be hypertrophic

1:11:24

for sure, but not the most efficient use of

1:11:26

your time. You're not sufficient with your comfort. So

1:11:29

let me give you two extreme examples. One

1:11:32

is calf raises, just

1:11:34

on a seated calf machine, not the one where

1:11:36

your legs are bent, but the one where your

1:11:38

legs are straight. That leg calf raises actually mostly

1:11:41

hit the soleus muscle, which is deep to the

1:11:43

gastroc. If not the cool big diamond shaped one,

1:11:45

it just sucks. I learned a lot about this.

1:11:47

I was trying to regrow the bottom half of

1:11:49

my right limb. Yeah. Yep. That sucked. Well, it

1:11:51

worked. Yeah. And I actually overshot it. I overshot

1:11:53

it and had to regrow the other one more.

1:11:56

That's awesome. Yeah. Well, yeah. And

1:11:58

the third limb looks quite good as well. Ah,

1:12:02

so calf raises. Cardio.

1:12:07

Uh, three seconds later you're breathing normally. You

1:12:10

might've been breathing normally the whole time. Check.

1:12:13

When do you feel strong again? Could be five or 10

1:12:15

seconds later. Again, my calves feel fine. Synergists.

1:12:17

There are no synergists. The thing, the machine

1:12:19

starts at your hips and goes down. There's

1:12:21

no synergists. So that auto checks itself. And

1:12:24

then how long until I'm not feeling like my

1:12:26

calves are full of lactic acid? Oh, maybe five

1:12:28

or 10 seconds. So there is a world in

1:12:30

which 10 seconds between sets

1:12:32

is the right amount or a correct

1:12:34

amount of time to rest for calves.

1:12:37

Can you rest longer? Sure. No

1:12:39

big deal. But you may be taking incrementally

1:12:42

exponentially more time for linearly

1:12:44

better gains, which generally is

1:12:46

just like, just do another

1:12:48

set. And someone's like, well, if I

1:12:51

do five sets where I rest longer, I get just

1:12:53

as much growth is if I do seven

1:12:55

sets where I less rest shorter. Yeah, but the

1:12:57

rest longer takes you eight total minutes to train

1:12:59

and the rest shorter takes you three total minutes.

1:13:01

Why don't you just do two extra sets? You'll

1:13:04

be four versus eight minutes wise and get the

1:13:06

same hypertrophy. So if a muscle is pretty recovered

1:13:08

and you're pretty good to go, I say, just

1:13:10

go again, and if you need more stimulus, just

1:13:12

add more sets. So on calf raises, it could

1:13:14

be a correct answer to say it's 10 seconds

1:13:16

rest. War factor model all checked out. On

1:13:19

squats for sets of 15. Holy

1:13:21

fuck. I've rested. I

1:13:24

did this one thing once, which is on YouTube somewhere where

1:13:26

I did a 405 pounds,

1:13:28

four plates in the squat for five sets of

1:13:31

10 and I rested for

1:13:33

something like seven to 10 minutes between each

1:13:35

set. I also after set three and four

1:13:37

and five, I threw up independently after each

1:13:39

one of those sets. So it's

1:13:41

going to take some time. And honestly, it was four

1:13:43

factor model based, even though I didn't know at the

1:13:45

time I came up with that shit later, but like

1:13:48

it took me four minutes to stop breathing

1:13:50

hard. It took me another several

1:13:52

minutes for my fucking lower back to be

1:13:54

like, okay, I'm healed enough. So very different

1:13:57

answers, but generally the most simple way I

1:13:59

can. to condense this whole conversation. If

1:14:02

you're ready to go again, if everything's fucking working

1:14:04

and you feel strong, go. If

1:14:06

you're not ready, if you're breathing hard, if you

1:14:08

still feel weak, if your muscles start cramping, you

1:14:10

have to rest no matter what you saw on

1:14:12

the internet, one to two minutes, two to three

1:14:14

minutes. Those are all heuristic ideas.

1:14:16

This is a theoretical basis that's a bit

1:14:19

more sound. outside of the practicality of

1:14:21

people just having lives outside of the gym. Some

1:14:23

people that aren't you wouldn't know anything about that.

1:14:26

Outside of the gym. Is

1:14:29

there a upper bound on how long

1:14:31

your session length should be? Is there

1:14:34

some accumulation of something that's happening

1:14:36

in there when you just take

1:14:38

time in the gym? Yes.

1:14:42

Assuming you're going pretty hard, generally

1:14:45

what we see is after about two

1:14:47

hours of consistent hard training in the

1:14:49

gym, the amount of

1:14:51

systemic fatigue you're going to have,

1:14:53

acute systemic fatigue, short-term fatigue that

1:14:56

lasts hours is going to

1:14:58

be so high that you can

1:15:00

no longer recruit

1:15:03

individual muscle fibers very well for whatever

1:15:05

you're training. It's

1:15:07

kind of like it's just, yeah,

1:15:10

you're doing training, but not much

1:15:12

is happening. You're much better

1:15:15

off cutting off that session, going and

1:15:17

getting some rest, doing more weekly sessions.

1:15:20

Some people be like, I train twice a week, but it's three hours

1:15:22

each time. Yeah, but that

1:15:24

last hour kind of fucking sucks.

1:15:26

Three times a week for two

1:15:28

hours. Better. In most cases. Now,

1:15:30

some people can train up to two hours and have really

1:15:32

good performance, especially if they're into a workout drink with some

1:15:34

protein and carbs. I was going to say, obviously, you're going

1:15:36

to run out of fuel by this stage as

1:15:39

well. Totally, totally. It should certainly run down on

1:15:41

fuel. We're going to be telling you sleep token

1:15:43

songs or blink one, two, the eat and lick

1:15:45

and two as well. That's right. Yeah,

1:15:48

you're going to your playlist to see what fucks.

1:15:50

So yeah, generally under two hours for many people,

1:15:52

anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour and a

1:15:54

half is where their best workouts will occur. And

1:15:57

you can have great workouts that last less than 45 minutes. But

1:16:00

I would say is a bit of a technical

1:16:02

efficiency question there is especially with people with lives

1:16:04

outside of the gym, which is a nominal concept.

1:16:06

I don't know. Allegedly. If

1:16:08

you fucking got to the

1:16:10

gym, you went block room,

1:16:13

you started some dicks, you put on

1:16:15

your workout clothes, you came out. It's already such

1:16:17

a sunk cost. You might as well go crush

1:16:19

out an hour, hour and a half workout. We

1:16:21

had like a one-to-one travel to training. Right. Yes.

1:16:23

And that's for some people not bad. You just

1:16:25

don't want it to go much worse than that.

1:16:27

So a lot of times people will say, well,

1:16:29

aren't 20 minute workouts effective? Yeah. If you do

1:16:31

many of them throughout the week, sure. If you

1:16:33

have really low ball fitness goals, but I would

1:16:36

say, yeah, get in there and 45 minutes, an

1:16:38

hour and a half is a really good answer

1:16:40

for many people. If you do much longer than

1:16:42

that, the only question I have for you

1:16:44

is do you still have a lot of fucking energy to

1:16:46

keep going? And if the answer was like, dude, I fucked

1:16:48

my shit up after two hours and 15 minutes, Hey, slow

1:16:50

clap. These are all averages. Apparently works

1:16:52

for you. Amazing. But ask yourself, like, am I really

1:16:55

doing the kind of work? It's like, you

1:16:57

see a guy talking to a girl at the club

1:16:59

after five drinks. It's fucking, what is it? What the

1:17:01

kids call it? Riz. He's got the Riz. You've got

1:17:03

Riz. Oh, fuck off. No, I don't. Yeah. Whatever that

1:17:06

is. I don't have it, but, uh, you don't know.

1:17:08

I don't know what it is. You might. I do have it. Oh God.

1:17:10

Okay. Is there a test I can take for Riz? The

1:17:13

nurse comes out and she just gives you a path. What do you think?

1:17:15

You are positive for Riz. It isn't a death sentence. I'm like, oh, fucking

1:17:17

God. I knew it. Oh, my God. Is it terminal? Oh,

1:17:19

God. The doctor. I peed blue yesterday. I

1:17:21

knew it was bad. It comes out and tries to tell

1:17:24

you that it's terminal, but just gets lost in your eyes.

1:17:26

Oh, my God. What's terminal again? I'm like, I

1:17:28

don't know. You tell me. I try to do it with locks

1:17:30

in my hair, but it really doesn't fucking ball. See? That's why

1:17:32

I don't have Riz. So, five

1:17:34

drinks in, my man's kicking it. You know, you ever see

1:17:36

someone lay down some game, you're kind of like in the

1:17:38

booth next to him, you're like, fuck it and hit it.

1:17:40

She's like, oh, my God. That's you

1:17:42

in the gym after an hour, right? After

1:17:45

two and a half hours, you like that

1:17:47

guy laying down game after 15 drinks. You

1:17:50

know, I'm like big on

1:17:52

YouTube. And she's like, look, man,

1:17:55

I'm going to leave with my girlfriends. You're great. And

1:17:57

you're like, all right, see you at Cal stations. Like

1:17:59

it was Karen. She walks off, you're

1:18:01

just watching it from the periphery, you're like, that

1:18:03

guy should have stopped fucking drinks ago, you know?

1:18:06

That's two hours and 30 minutes in the gym, guy. Just

1:18:08

quit while you're ahead. Come back next time. How

1:18:11

often should people train each week? Sets,

1:18:14

muscle groups, training frequency,

1:18:17

etc. So there are two

1:18:19

questions there. One is, how often

1:18:21

should you train any given muscle per

1:18:23

week? And the answer to that

1:18:25

is generally, anything can work between one and

1:18:27

six times. You can train the same muscle

1:18:30

even seven times a week if you like.

1:18:33

Generally you can train at one. Neither one is

1:18:35

going to give you the ideal, although six is probably

1:18:37

a better answer than one. Muscles

1:18:39

just don't take that long to recover. So

1:18:42

people say, oh, I just hit my chest once a

1:18:44

week. Well, how long were you sore for? They're like,

1:18:46

well, halfway through the week I was healed. Did

1:18:49

you feel strong after? I'm like, yeah. So

1:18:51

the fuck are you waiting? Three or four days? You're

1:18:53

just leaving like you could be fucking doing it again,

1:18:55

but you're not. So I would say

1:18:57

anywhere between two and four times a week for the same

1:18:59

muscle is a good idea. Two

1:19:01

is great for a lot of people. Three and

1:19:03

four is more for specialization phases and folks that

1:19:05

just recover really rapidly. Like, yeah,

1:19:07

your chest might not heal three times a week

1:19:09

from any kind of normal training, but your forearms

1:19:11

might heal just fine. You might be able to

1:19:13

train them for five days or maybe 18 days

1:19:15

a week like you seem to, but

1:19:18

they're fucked. Everyone's got something. You know what I mean? I

1:19:20

had nothing for a long time for us. I had nothing

1:19:22

in that one. That head though. I

1:19:24

didn't even have the head back in the day. When

1:19:27

did you get that head? When I started doing drugs. I'm

1:19:29

kidding. Actually, I photographed myself when I was lifetime

1:19:32

drug free and my head is almost identically shaped.

1:19:34

Quite sad. As a matter of

1:19:37

fact, there was an interaction I had

1:19:39

in high school. I was talking to

1:19:41

an acquaintance slash friend, more acquaintance than

1:19:43

friend, and I had an interaction with

1:19:45

a girl and I was like, I was insanely low

1:19:47

self esteem in high school. And I was like, what

1:19:50

did she think about that? And he's like, yeah,

1:19:52

she actually thinks you're really cute other than the

1:19:54

way that you act at school. It's

1:19:56

a total introvert fucking weirdo. She's like, and the shape of

1:19:58

your head. I was like, what the fuck?

1:20:01

I didn't even know my head was shaped weird back then.

1:20:03

It's like hair and stuff. I was like, what? I just

1:20:05

never made sense of it. And then later, the

1:20:07

internet told me that my head was shaped really funny. So

1:20:11

in any case, two to four times a week is

1:20:13

a great per muscle session

1:20:15

number. The other

1:20:17

question is how many total sessions, how many total

1:20:19

times do I go into the gym? So

1:20:21

I'll say this. For folks that just want

1:20:24

to be healthy and already have a decent amount

1:20:26

of muscularity, two times a week is

1:20:28

totally cool. You're trained with weights Monday and

1:20:30

Thursday, whole body. You're going to get a ton of

1:20:32

great health, a ton of benefits, ton of physique. It's

1:20:35

going to be awesome for just general recreational fitness, you

1:20:37

know, like Fit Dad, that kind of body.

1:20:40

If you're a professional bodybuilder, I'd like to

1:20:42

see you training anywhere between five and that's

1:20:45

on the low end and more like six

1:20:47

to nine sessions per week. So Jared

1:20:49

Father, IFB Pro, my biological son. He's

1:20:53

currently in Thailand, I think, lost,

1:20:57

found in a sense, but also lost. Slowly

1:20:59

colonizing. Something like that

1:21:01

being colonized. In any case,

1:21:04

colonizing, lots of that. Yes.

1:21:07

So that's why he's there. So

1:21:11

he trains usually nine times a week, which means

1:21:13

some days he does two a days. He's literally

1:21:15

a professional bodybuilder. It's his job to do that.

1:21:17

What else are you going to do?

1:21:20

He's got nothing else. He sits in his apartment, stares

1:21:22

at a fucking wall, or he's training. No, wait, that's

1:21:24

me. Jesus. Jesus' apartment with ladies,

1:21:26

I've been told. For

1:21:29

a serious effort at changing your body

1:21:32

position, at trying to get more jacked

1:21:34

and lean, if you've had enough of adult fitness and

1:21:36

you want to be that guy at work that's fucking people are

1:21:38

talking about, three to five

1:21:40

times in the gym per week, each

1:21:43

of them an hour-ish in length, hour to

1:21:45

an hour and a half, that's what I call a

1:21:47

serious effort. So if I'm in the elevator with someone and they

1:21:49

make the mistake of talking to me and asking me about workout

1:21:51

routines and how they can get more jacked, and they're like, yeah,

1:21:53

I haven't been seeing games, blah, blah, blah, I'm going to ask

1:21:55

the question of how many times do you go to the gym

1:21:58

per week? If they say two, I'd be like, you... you

1:22:00

could definitely benefit from going like three or four. But

1:22:02

if they say four or five, any

1:22:04

addition of days beyond that outside of

1:22:06

an attempt at professional bodybuilding just yields

1:22:08

very small returns on investment. So what

1:22:10

they're doing within the session that you're

1:22:12

going to look at is... That's

1:22:14

what happens next. If they say, well, I train five

1:22:16

days a week, my next thing is to ask them

1:22:18

a series of other questions, which you and I think

1:22:20

we'll get to at the end of this is how

1:22:22

to troubleshoot because there's a lot. There's a big can

1:22:24

of worms. And some of those questions may not even

1:22:26

be training related. So automatically be like, how much are

1:22:28

you sleeping and what's your diet like? And then you get

1:22:31

the whole like, well, ever since

1:22:33

I started fucking my secretary, I sleep a lot less and

1:22:35

I'm like, hey, my man, but you could do less than

1:22:37

that and grow more muscle. How

1:22:40

should people progress weights over

1:22:42

time? That's important. What are

1:22:44

secretaries? Oh, just in hypertrophy. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

1:22:46

yeah, yeah. Progression over time.

1:22:48

Very, very important question. So there are many ways

1:22:50

to do it, but some

1:22:52

of the ways run into problems. If

1:22:55

you just add reps or load when you

1:22:57

feel like you're squatting over four plates, you could be

1:22:59

on to something, but also you could just

1:23:01

be being a little bitch. You know, like when

1:23:04

exactly when you're squatting over four plates, do you

1:23:06

feel like squatting more than that? Fuck that. Never.

1:23:08

I feel like not squatting at all. On

1:23:11

the other hand, if you go

1:23:13

up by very large amounts, you

1:23:15

risk some technical decay and some injury probability. Your

1:23:17

body's used to squatting four plates. You put a

1:23:19

fifth plate on there. Sure. You're still good for

1:23:22

a few reps, but this is a very different

1:23:24

exercise at that point. Your connective tissues are used

1:23:26

to four plates. They're not used to five. Some

1:23:29

shit can go zig when a shit

1:23:31

is zagged and then you're fucked. So what I would

1:23:33

say, the safe bet and a good bet, good

1:23:36

bet from the perspective of kind of mandating

1:23:38

yourself to progress, safe from the perspective of

1:23:40

now extreme, is one of two options, maybe

1:23:42

a combination of both. Adding just

1:23:44

a little bit of weight to the bar every single

1:23:46

week while you're in what's called your accumulation phase until

1:23:48

you get tired and need to deload, adding

1:23:52

repetition, maybe two. So

1:23:54

for example, if you're doing pushups at home by

1:23:56

yourself, no one loves you. No one cares if you

1:23:58

live or die. A mailman might say the smell is

1:24:01

bad after a while and your cats have started to eat you,

1:24:03

you know, that sort of thing. If you're at

1:24:05

home working out with pushups, you can do a set of 18 fresh,

1:24:07

close to failure. Next week it's 19,

1:24:10

the week after 20, the week after that, try 21. When

1:24:12

you can't beat 21 and you get 20 and your

1:24:14

pecs are so tired and sore, it's probably time for

1:24:16

a few days off or a few days of active

1:24:18

rest kind of situation, recovery, until you come back and

1:24:20

start hitting it again and then you slowly climb back

1:24:22

up 19, 20, 21, 22, all time

1:24:26

PR, amazing. So adding reps is an awesome way

1:24:28

to progress. The other way is adding load,

1:24:30

small loads, right? The only kind

1:24:33

I'm blown nowadays, hey, anyone? That

1:24:36

one, all right. So

1:24:40

you go 100 pounds on dumbbell

1:24:42

press, then maybe your gym goes up,

1:24:44

well, fucking dumbbell press was a terrible example, I'll say it in

1:24:46

a sec, barbell, regular barbell bench

1:24:48

press, 100 pounds, week 10 reps,

1:24:51

week one, week two, try

1:24:53

105, still 10 reps, then 110, then 115, then

1:24:57

so on and so forth. If you can't match or

1:24:59

beat your PRs, then you have to take some rest,

1:25:01

take it easy, recycle those numbers and then try again.

1:25:04

The trippy thing about lifting and

1:25:06

progression and hypertrophy and strength is you progress

1:25:09

by these tiny little increments, but

1:25:11

tiny incremental progressions over months and months of

1:25:13

training lead to big gains. Some people

1:25:15

get impatient and they want to fucking slap the wheels

1:25:18

on, like they've been like pressing four plates for a

1:25:20

while, like, yeah, man, fucking feeling it today, put five

1:25:23

on that motherfucker and it's like, okay, but you

1:25:25

could get hurt. We do have smaller plates. We

1:25:27

do have smaller plates and you'll be baffled as

1:25:29

to why we have them. It's

1:25:31

for that slow steady progression. Well, there's

1:25:34

another thing that happens as well, which

1:25:36

is people who are still using the

1:25:38

exact same weight that

1:25:40

they were 10 years ago. It's my weight that

1:25:42

I use. I've heard people describe that, like, yeah,

1:25:45

I use three plates on the bench, like, okay,

1:25:47

you've attached yourself to a load, very interesting. I

1:25:49

imagine that must happen a lot to you. Attach

1:25:52

yourself to a load. Oh boy, Chris, if you

1:25:54

saw our dungeon slash gym, you, I get

1:25:57

attached to all sorts of things through

1:25:59

the. You ever, you ever

1:26:01

total side note, but there's this thing where

1:26:03

people put hooks through their like back skin.

1:26:05

Yeah. I've seen that. I've

1:26:08

seen it a few times on the internet. Just,

1:26:10

just browsing. That's not what I finished to, but

1:26:12

midway through. Yeah. Yeah. Midway

1:26:15

through. I start with some seduction. It's like

1:26:17

an intro session sort of pick

1:26:19

me up. Little break. Yeah. Very

1:26:22

nice. Yeah. But

1:26:24

people do like, you know, I mean,

1:26:26

this is, well, you go into troubleshooting, but from

1:26:28

my side, as someone who's trained for 15 years

1:26:30

and seen from

1:26:32

the, the frontline vanguard of the fuckery of

1:26:34

the gym floor. Yeah. The fuckery.

1:26:37

One of the, one of the biggest pieces of fuckery is

1:26:39

that no one's progressively overloading because nobody's tracking anything. And

1:26:42

you go, we have enough of that. And it's

1:26:44

like, it's linked below. And it's

1:26:46

like, uh, 12 reps at 18 kilos

1:26:48

on side laterals. Like that's, you know, that's like

1:26:51

on a good day. That's how I feel. And

1:26:53

that's what I do. And like

1:26:55

you've been locked in there for

1:26:57

five years. Yes. At

1:26:59

that way. Yes. And if

1:27:02

you want to just get the same physique at

1:27:04

the end of the day, every single time, that's

1:27:06

a swell way to do it. But most people

1:27:09

in the gym to get the same physique, they

1:27:11

want better. One of the really cool

1:27:13

things about either increasing your load

1:27:15

and or reps is it

1:27:17

forces you to fucking try. Yeah.

1:27:20

A hundred pounds for 18 was something you could

1:27:23

do. This week you do one Oh five

1:27:25

for 18. It might be really

1:27:27

close to your limit or not. Kind

1:27:29

of two extreme scenarios there. One is like you

1:27:31

hit your limit real quick. Hey, congratulations. You were

1:27:33

training hard this whole time. Good for you, but

1:27:35

you tested it. Now you know. The

1:27:37

other one is you'll want to 100 for 18

1:27:39

reps, one Oh five, one 10, one 15, one 20. Finally

1:27:43

at one 35 to hit 17 reps. Guess

1:27:46

what motherfucker? I got news for you. You've been

1:27:48

at 10 reps in reserve your whole fucking life.

1:27:50

And all of a sudden, the reason that you

1:27:52

haven't been progressing is like, Oh shit, I've never

1:27:54

been training remotely hard enough. Uh,

1:27:56

so that can fix that problem big time.

1:27:58

That's why I really like that. kind of a forward

1:28:01

looking progression formula. Yeah, there's feedback in the

1:28:04

mix, but you have to challenge yourself in

1:28:06

ways that are programmatic, that might not be

1:28:08

your preferred thing to do. When I have

1:28:10

a leg press session, like so I use

1:28:13

the RP Hypertrophy app for my own training,

1:28:15

and legit, yes, it's my app, but I

1:28:17

actually fucking use it because it's fucking awesome.

1:28:20

It doesn't always give me things that I

1:28:22

wanna do, man. Last week I did XYZ

1:28:24

on the leg press, now it's one

1:28:27

rep more and fucking five pounds more. You see

1:28:29

that shit on there? I wanna go by feel

1:28:31

and go light. But the app's like, hey, science predicts

1:28:33

you're gonna be able to do it. Mr. Algorithm says.

1:28:35

Yeah, Mr. Algorithm says, shut the fuck up and do

1:28:37

it. And then you can find a lot of inner

1:28:39

strength if you have a goal that's a little bit

1:28:41

outside of your ability, you can find inner strength to

1:28:43

go, you know what, okay, okay, okay, fuck it, I'll

1:28:45

try. And then you win, and then you win again

1:28:47

next week, and you win again next week. And when

1:28:50

your body is physically too fucked up to

1:28:52

keep progressing, you'll know, because you'll be unable

1:28:54

to match your old rep PR some week

1:28:56

before. You did 500 for 19 the

1:28:58

leg press last week. This week you put 505 on

1:29:01

like the thing says, your goal is supposed to be 19 reps. You

1:29:04

get to 14 and you're like, oh shit, help, help.

1:29:06

And people fucking press it up for you. You get

1:29:08

out, you're like, huh, maybe it's just a one off.

1:29:11

Next leg session you come back, you do the same

1:29:13

thing on hack squat. Your legs are fucking done. They

1:29:15

need at least half a week, maybe a whole week

1:29:17

of easy time to deload. But then you've earned your

1:29:19

deload. You're not just deloading because you're like,

1:29:21

yeah, fuck it, I'm not feeling training. You know

1:29:24

for a fact, objectively, you are no longer able

1:29:26

to overload your musculature because you're not strong enough

1:29:28

anymore. You're not making progress. Then it's time to

1:29:30

pull back. So you get this amazing thing of,

1:29:32

you know exactly what to do each time. And

1:29:35

when you're done, you know you're fucking done.

1:29:37

It's like, how do you know, how

1:29:39

does the hero stop chasing the bad man in the

1:29:41

movie that captured a little girl when he gets hit

1:29:44

by a fucking truck and he can't walk anymore? You

1:29:46

know, he didn't give up. You want to be that

1:29:48

guy, get hit by that truck of just a little

1:29:50

bit more weight or load, a weight or reps than you

1:29:52

could do. How should people periodize the

1:29:54

way that they put all of this together? By

1:29:57

downloading the RPR Percocat, Chris. But

1:30:01

if you're a person with too little money, I would

1:30:03

never associate you with you in person. My butlers

1:30:06

might see you at the store or something like

1:30:08

that. But they don't generally look in

1:30:10

your direction. So generally

1:30:12

the progression should be roughly linear.

1:30:15

You add a similar small amount of

1:30:17

load over time or repetitions, sometimes both.

1:30:21

You keep progressing over time, over

1:30:23

some number of sessions, until

1:30:26

two sessions in a row, you

1:30:28

can't hit that same PR you hit in

1:30:30

the last session. You're no longer

1:30:32

as strong. That means your current

1:30:35

level of cumulative fatigue is too high

1:30:37

to present the most robust overload. At

1:30:40

that point, you continue to progress

1:30:42

linearly until you cannot progress

1:30:44

anymore. Then it's time to do

1:30:47

one of two things. One is

1:30:49

a recovery half week, which means for half

1:30:51

a week, whatever you are going to do,

1:30:53

you take that same session and you divide

1:30:55

everything roughly by half. Half the

1:30:57

load, half the reps, half the sets. It's all

1:30:59

fucking easy. It's a warm up. The

1:31:01

whole workout takes 20 minutes. That lets your

1:31:04

muscles recuperate a ton so you have another

1:31:06

few weeks of progression later. If

1:31:09

multiple muscles have arrived to that breaking point at

1:31:11

the same time and systemically you feel

1:31:13

fucked up, your desire to train is really low,

1:31:15

you're kind of sore all over in all the

1:31:17

joints. Maybe

1:31:19

your sleep is kind of thrown off, your

1:31:22

appetite is lower. That means you're just overreached

1:31:24

total body. Then you probably need more like

1:31:26

a week of half of everything. That's

1:31:28

called a deload week. You take one of

1:31:31

those and then you restart the progression of

1:31:33

starting a few reps away from failure and

1:31:35

next week add a little bit of load.

1:31:38

Add a rep or two. You go up, up, up. So you

1:31:40

go up, up, up, up, up. Relax. Drop

1:31:42

the fatigue. How long does this tend

1:31:44

to be? Great question. If

1:31:46

you're training pretty fucking hard in

1:31:49

the first week, which you should be, through your upshive

1:31:51

failure, at least above your minimum effective volume, something to

1:31:53

give you a pump and a little bit of soreness,

1:31:56

most people training that hard, if

1:31:59

they train for five or six times per

1:32:01

week because systemic fatigue is huge from that much

1:32:03

training. Most people can't

1:32:05

last longer than

1:32:09

about four to eight weeks. If

1:32:12

you were a beginner, you could go one

1:32:14

year without deloading because you just don't,

1:32:16

you're not strong enough to accumulate enough systemic fatigue. You see

1:32:18

a guy squatting 500 or 10, you're like, my motherfucker is

1:32:20

going to be feeling, I don't give a shit how good

1:32:22

a shape he is. He's going to need to deload pretty

1:32:24

soon. It's so extreme that at

1:32:27

the top ends of powerlifting, a very fatiguing

1:32:29

lift like the deadlift, some of

1:32:31

the world's best deadlifters go heavy in the deadlift,

1:32:33

really heavy and hard. Once every

1:32:35

two or three weeks only. For

1:32:38

the deadlift, every other week is a deload. Two

1:32:40

thirds of the week through the year, a deload, that's

1:32:43

how much one week it can fatigue. But that's insanely

1:32:45

exceptional. So I'd say for most hard

1:32:47

training people, four to eight, if you really know

1:32:49

what you're doing, four to six. If

1:32:51

you really know what you're doing and training super fucking

1:32:54

hard, you accumulate fatigue faster. If

1:32:56

you're a beginner, if you train

1:32:58

twice a week or three times a week, if you're

1:33:00

training smaller muscles like arms and stuff, you may be

1:33:02

able to go 12 or 16 weeks without needing a

1:33:04

deload. How do you know that? You keep adding load

1:33:06

to the bar or reps and you keep getting stronger.

1:33:09

Then you're good to go, keep going. One

1:33:11

thing we haven't spoken about is training splits.

1:33:13

Is it chest and back? Is it chest

1:33:16

and triceps? What

1:33:19

is the, from a science perspective, when it comes

1:33:21

to splits? Yes. Let's go to

1:33:24

the test tubes and the measuring devices. You know,

1:33:26

old science. There

1:33:28

are a few things I like to consider

1:33:30

theoretically before designing a training split. One

1:33:33

of them is within the context of

1:33:35

the workout itself, when you ask like, what

1:33:37

am I doing today? Just

1:33:40

make sure whatever you're training gets

1:33:42

high quality training if you

1:33:44

pair it with whatever else you're training. Here's

1:33:46

an example of when that does not happen. You

1:33:49

do legs first and

1:33:51

then you do chest. For

1:33:54

many people who are advanced and training hard, you

1:33:56

know this, after legs, motherfucker, you

1:33:58

ain't doing shit. If you might

1:34:00

be peeling yourself off the gym floor, the

1:34:03

urine stain below you, maybe even a shit

1:34:05

stain if you really squatted heavy, you're

1:34:07

not doing anything but going home and eating

1:34:09

and drinking and recovering. So legs and then

1:34:11

chest just might not make any fucking sense.

1:34:14

On the other hand, if you have something like biceps

1:34:18

and legs, bicep training

1:34:20

doesn't make you that fucked up. It's just not a very

1:34:22

big muscle. It doesn't make you systemically tired. You can't do

1:34:24

it after legs because you've got nothing after legs, which you

1:34:26

might be able to do before. So maybe we'll do biceps

1:34:28

first, legs second. That's a workable

1:34:31

split in and of itself. That's

1:34:33

part one. So muscles need to gel well together.

1:34:35

Here's another example. If you do back

1:34:38

first and then legs after can be done, but

1:34:40

generally your lower back and mid back are now

1:34:42

so tired, you're going to be all of your

1:34:44

squats and good mornings. You're going to fold over

1:34:46

because you're back, not your legs. You have fucked

1:34:48

up a limiting factor. And now that's the really

1:34:50

big problem. So as long

1:34:52

as the exercises play well together and the muscle

1:34:54

groups play well together, which is to say you

1:34:56

can train everything you wanted hard and the muscle

1:34:59

itself is a limiting factor. There's no wrong answer.

1:35:01

Someone's like, is it cool to like train chest

1:35:03

with back or is it chest with quads or

1:35:05

Hey, as long as you can fucking hit all

1:35:07

the muscles hard, no wrong answers.

1:35:09

The other construct that we use in program

1:35:11

design is if the

1:35:14

muscle has been trained already, the

1:35:17

next time we train it, is it

1:35:19

recovered enough to train again? So

1:35:21

for example, if you say, okay, here's

1:35:23

my program. All right. I'm

1:35:25

training three days a week. Okay. Great. Monday,

1:35:29

Tuesday, and Wednesday. And

1:35:31

it's chest, chest, chest. I

1:35:33

have to ask you the question of by Wednesday,

1:35:36

what is it that you're doing with your pathetically

1:35:38

deflated super week chest? Now you're

1:35:40

going through the motions. Your superfuckers are like, ah,

1:35:42

this sucks. If you simply move the routine to

1:35:44

Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you can hit chest all three

1:35:46

days and there's enough time to recover between. So

1:35:49

one thing that I look, if I'm looking over

1:35:51

someone's program, I look for what I just generally,

1:35:53

like heuristically describe a symmetry. Like where I look

1:35:55

for each individual muscle group, like quads, where they

1:35:57

at quads, Monday quads, Thursday. It seems to me.

1:36:00

sense? And in hamstrings, Tuesday and

1:36:02

Saturday. It seems to make sense that if

1:36:04

you have hamstrings on Tuesday and then hamstrings

1:36:06

on a Wednesday, I'm going to be like,

1:36:08

can you at least try to explain that?

1:36:10

Does that make sense? There's

1:36:13

an amount of time you want for

1:36:15

healing. It doesn't have to be exactly symmetrical, but

1:36:17

it's generally stimulate, let it recover, stimulate again. Here's

1:36:20

another thing. People say, well,

1:36:22

whole body training doesn't work for me whole

1:36:24

body every day. It can if you lower

1:36:26

the volumes of everything. So if I'm doing

1:36:28

back five days a week, someone could be

1:36:30

like, just bullshit. What if it's three working

1:36:32

sets of back? No problem. Because the stimulus

1:36:35

is small, the recovery isn't great. And then the

1:36:37

next day I'm ready to go. But if you're

1:36:40

doing eight or 10 sets of back, you're going

1:36:42

to be training back two or three times a

1:36:44

week. So with those two constructs is are the

1:36:46

muscles getting their due justice, the way you've arranged

1:36:48

them in each session? And also is

1:36:51

each session sufficiently far apart to get good

1:36:53

recovery, but also not sufficiently so far that

1:36:55

it's just too much recovery and you're sitting

1:36:57

around doing nothing. Those are the two core

1:36:59

elements of program design or splits as they're

1:37:01

called. There are

1:37:03

so many right answers within that

1:37:05

universe, but also many wrong answers

1:37:08

that I can't say XYZ is the

1:37:10

optimal split. So good bullshit detector for

1:37:12

anyone listening to this. If anyone

1:37:14

talks about like, this is the best split for

1:37:16

legs, this would have

1:37:18

two options. One, YouTube thumbnail title

1:37:20

game total respect. We play it too.

1:37:23

I love it. Or

1:37:25

categorical fucking bullshit because

1:37:27

there are so many right answers to what's

1:37:29

the best leg split so individually based as

1:37:31

long as you do those two check marks.

1:37:33