Barbell Shrugged - Episode 22 - Bigger Muscles, Certifications and Training "Arms" & "Legs"

Episode Date: August 23, 2012

Hey guys, this is CTP with Barbell Shrug. For the video version of all these podcasts, go to our website, fitter.tv. That's F-I-T-R dot TV. Check out the video version of all of them. They're a lot cooler. They're super juicy and tasty. Mmm. All right, guys.

Episode 22, Barbell Shrug. Strength and Conditioning Podcast. Did you make that number up, or is that the number? Do you go back and figure out how many we've done? It's on the website. Is it? Mm-hmm. Chris doesn't get to the website

the last one was 21 so I'm assuming today's 22 which one was that one with the one that didn't record no we skipped that one okay because it didn't record theoretically we've done like we did a whole podcast and none of it recorded there's a whole there's a whole treasure trove of ones that have not aired that's true there'll be a special DVD release of raw, unedited. Yeah. Can't listen with your kids. Podcast. I still haven't watched the pool party one that we didn't post.

Yeah, we need to watch that. Maybe we'll post that. Girls in Bikinis. After we edit out all the ridiculous parts. Right. I'm Mike Wetzel. Somebody was being ridiculous. I've been running

CrossFit gym for about five years, faction strength conditioning at home of CrossFit Memphis. All sorts of awesome experience so far. That was very specific. We do a lot of,

we're very weightlifting oriented, strength oriented, and we usually do pretty good regionals. But we still like our fitness. We all hear fitness, don't we? We're all about the health and fitness, a little bit of performance. And not about doing dumb things.

I'm here with Doug Larson and Chris Moore. They're going to tell you about themselves. I'm Doug Larson. I'm one of mike's business partners uh he's he actually started the gym and then i i came in a little bit uh after he kind of got it off the ground but been working with mike for a couple years um just training folks and trying to learn about business in the process and now we've been doing pretty well so we're trying to give back by doing a podcast we talk about all the things we've learned over the years chris yeah

i've been hanging out in the gym as long as bless has had it open uh training and coaching and then having fun representing uh doing some things like a little writing here and there sharing whatever idea i can share that can be useful we feel as a, we've tried and done most things to various degrees of success and terrible failure, so we can have quite effective exchanges about what you probably should consider doing and what you should probably consider not doing.

That's true. A ton of mistakes have been made, and we won't repeat them. Hopefully you won't either. Well, we'll just repeat the fun ones. That's right. All right. What's a penicillin can fix um yeah uh we're gonna go over a few topics today we're gonna talk about muscle actions in regard to weight lifting conditioning tempo training plyometrics

and injuries uh we're also going to talk about muscle building for crossfitters versus uh strength uh talking about a little bit about certifications what certifications you might want to look at getting um and then also uh it's been brought up a little bit in our gym lately i'm not sure it i'm not sure uh how much of our audience is going to be on board or know about this ahead of time or not but we're gonna talk about training arms and uh training legs like leg days, arm days, stuff like that. So we've gotten a few questions about that. Your traditional approach to lifting weights that most every high school guy thinks is the way to go or the only option.

Yeah. Sneak peek. That's not true. We tend not to think about bodybuilding so much anymore, but still there's tons of bodybuilding magazines out there, and people still read them. Yeah, the bodybuilding magazines are the ones that are. Remains a dominant culture. They've probably done the best job of marketing

and putting someone on the cover but if you look at like muscle and fitness you know the guy they had on the cover of the magazine five years ago compared to the the guy they have in the cover now i remember two years one or two years ago rob orlando got put on the cover and they didn't put him on the cover before that because he was too small. You know, he wasn't big enough or something. And now they've had

the value. I think now Rich Froning has been on the cover who's much smaller than relatively smaller than Rob Orlando even. Flex remains devoted to that.

I was just about to say that. Flex is ridiculous. It's like 100 page magazine. What is Flex going to go out of business? It's a 100 page magazine. Flex has monsters on the cover. 50 pages of that magazine are for the latest ridiculously stupid supplement at least

that probably costs 100 a jug five cents worth of stuff flex will be around as long as there's fraternities and then there's always that featured program from bodybuilder XY who shows you his blasting glute program. That's just everything for three sets of 15. It's like 45 exercises with three to five sets of 10 to 15 written next to it. That's always the program. It's just nothing. You forget people...

We have even simple ideas about how we program and push people towards goals you realize that most people when they look at those goals or they look at those programs for bodybuilders they don't see there's literally no plan there's just go into the gym work isolated movements till you can't move anymore douse yourself with drugs that's the program come back pretty good covered destroy yourself douse yourself with drugs that's just day-to-day week-to-week that's the program. Come back before you're covered. Destroy yourself. Douse yourself with drugs. That's just day to day,

week to week. That's the program. Yeah. Especially for everyone in that magazine specifically. Yeah. Now, muscle fitness has kind of

shifted away from being like flexed to more kind of like men's health. Yep. Men's health has always had like fit but like relatively thin people on the cover.

Right. Flex is the exact opposite. It's always just these huge bodybuilding monsters. Wearing zoo baths yeah that's right yeah they have to special order like all their clothes because they don't fit into any normal normal people clothes you know what's funny is uh just the other day uh facebook won't leave me alone i keep saying they suggest that i become friends with bob harper because i'm because i have a lot of friends that are friends with bob Harper on Facebook. He's like,

you should be friends. I was like, fine, I'll just send a friend request. And, uh, but I was looking at his profile picture and the guy is skinny. Like he's not really even that muscular, but I was thinking like this guy is what people are looking up to now for.

That's the fit guy. And I remember when I was, you know, years ago, he wouldn't know where, you know, he's, and he's lean,

but he's not like 4% body fat lean. He's like 7. He's probably the most famous health and fitness guy amongst the community of people who spend their nights watching reality TV, which is like 90% of the country.

He quite obviously has latched on to this because it's a marketing thing for him. But he's quite good at that because he's a world famous personal trainer. I don't respect those guys at all because they get very big people on the shows like jane and i watched this and couldn't believe you just don't respect the show well i mean well i mean he's on twitter he's gladly cashing the checks and and training people to on this show so as would i i've got a problem with it but he had a a guy who was like 480 pounds who has who's complete

you know sedentary on every level this guy doesn't even walk he just sits in couches all day doesn't work doesn't do anything and they gave the big do you want to change your life do you want to change your life forever give him a big motivation pep talk yeah yeah i want to do it okay so we'll do is fucking prowler pushes your first workout until you fucking die that was the transition and the guy's like i can't do it i fucking gonna have a heart attack this is just weakness you're gonna push through it no he could really die he has done nothing and he's doing prowler pushes for the first workout and then they it's just it's just a little too much man man. It's just completely. You can have an entertaining show, but also have some sort of safety in mind or some sort of prudency for what's acceptable.

Yeah, that's definitely not what I would do for it. Have you ever watched The Biggest Loser? It's pretty intense. I've seen one episode. McGoldrick told me about the beginning of one of the seasons where they lined everybody up and their first challenge or whatever was to run a 40 yard sprint and they're all three four hundred pounds like you're saying and they're trying to run a full speed 100 sprint in a race from dead cold they're just like all right welcome to the show we're gonna run a 40 line it up they start screaming

at yeah someone pulled their hamstring which was was inevitable. Other people were tripping and tumbling. It was hilarious and probably got great ratings. It's not intelligent at all, which has nothing to do with why they made the show. I don't give anybody a pass on that kind of stuff because some unfit person will go out and give that a go. They're doing that on TV. I need to be doing that.

A lot of people copy what they do, which is amazing. The innocent ignorant out there will go out and try that. Yeah, a lot of people copy what they do, which is amazing. The innocent ignorant out there will go out and try that. They'll realize it sucks and they go, well,

I've tried the training. I can't do that. So I will pursue other things like have my stomach stable together because I can't train because I've tried things that just are not working.

So no, Bob and his fancy $800 haircuts doesn't get a pass. He's a nice enough guy. Lord knows I'd like to have the money he has, but I wouldn't try to do it that way. So whatever.

Yeah. I remember later in that same episode, they were trying to hold front planks. And they're like 400 pounds. Can you even get into that position? And I remember thinking about how they were editing the show. They would show the people for like half a second in the front plank and then back to the guy screaming at him show, they would show the people for half a second in the front plank and then back to the guy

screaming at them and then back to the people. It's like four different cameras from four different angles where they caught these people for a quarter of a second in that position and then they edited it together. It looked like it happened for 10 minutes where they were screaming at them and they were all sitting there like,

oh my God, it burned. It's probably like 30 seconds. At the absolute most. If you can watch it recognizing that it's not reality, it's Yeah. At the absolute most. If you can watch it recognizing that it's not reality, it's fine. But a lot of people still think those shows

are based on reality. Like people who, somehow people watch the Keeping Up With The Kardashians and don't blow their heads off. I don't know how that happens. I hope that people are starting to at least

come to the realization after what, 10 years of reality shows that they're not reality. So hopefully that's, hopefully that's the case, but there probably is a large segment of the population. People still love professional wrestling.

They love it, but I don't know. Hopefully they're not trying to take it home. That's probably our off-topic introduction of the day. Yeah, right. We got a couple of questions from some people in the gym. Yeah, I got one question from... Or the Googles from the internet community. Richard,

we started talking about, uh, eccentric, uh, loading, um, and how it can be beneficial for training. So,

so what does that for everyone in the audience that doesn't know what eccentric loading is? Eccentric loading. Uh, that is a muscle. The muscles contracting against the force and it's actually lengthening while it's contracting. Uh,

and so there's three different types of muscle action you have eccentric uh isometric where the where the muscle is contracting to fight against uh a force but it's not moving at all and then contraction where the muscle is getting shorter so it's actually moving a load so some practical examples of each one of those. So, uh, well, practical example, uh, a plank would be an isometric hold. Uh, a, uh, iron cross would be an isometric hold. And then, uh, eccentric loading is usually just the, uh, say when you're doing a squat while you're going down. So we go down and squat really slow.

Uh, I don't know if you're doing, uh, negatives on negatives on pull-ups, you jump up, chin over the bar, and then let yourself down slowly. So it's the down part of the movement. The down part of the movement. Also, when you jump off a box and land, there's a brief, very forceful eccentric contraction. Right. And then concentric is when you're going up. It's when you're pulling yourself up on a pull-up bar.

When you're at the bottom of the squat and you're going up. It's when you're pulling yourself up on a pull-up bar. When you're at the bottom of the squat and you start moving up, when you bench press, the bar is moving off your chest up. So that's a concentric load. So there's three different types, and one of our guys read an article talking about the benefits of eccentric loading. And this is a guy that runs who's trying to get better at running 400 meter 400 meters at a time and he doesn't want to gain weight so in his case i would recommend not doing as much you know don't go not going out of your

way to do eccentric loading because we don't want to put on muscle mass and stuff like that he's trying to do a 400 meter sprint yep so um that's a that's another eccentric he doesn't he doesn't want to put on weight and he just wants to he really just needs to move faster yeah there i think there are two ways to approach it and before anybody goes okay here's chris blabbering again about something i actually i did my thesis on this topic so give me a break okay what was your thesis on like well the efficacy of eccentric loading to improve concentric performance okay so what we tested was people we used weight releasers it's like a big metal hook that goes over the barbell you've seen it but i'll describe them for the sake of the audience like it's a a pole a little base

plate that holds weights you attach a hook to it you can put that hook on a barbell and it's designed as such actually louis simmons let me borrow his pair to use in the study it's pretty cool he's like take them you know whatever just tell us how they do so they're designed so when you unrack a barbell let's say for a squat you squat down and you adjust it to where right when you get to the bottom you range in motion the plates hit the ground, the tip of the plate, and it sort of makes the hooks pop off the bar. So when you go to raise the bar, you have anywhere from, in my study, it was something like 20% of your best squat to like 80% of your best squat would pop off the bar, and

then you would jump with a much lighter load. Oh, the eccentric load was 20% to 80%? Yeah. Okay. The concentric was maybe like 20% or 30%. Okay. Your typical jump squat a light load that you could push against but it wouldn't really freak you out so you start at the top you go down

with 400 pounds and then 200 pounds pops off and then you try and jump with a lighter load or 170 or something whatever yeah so it's pretty it was pretty novel pretty extreme little protocol the idea being there's lots of evidence that shows if you increase that loading performance goes up but the key finding that study was actually that there wasn't a big effect of the loading um you had a little bit of a sloppy technique on the heavy loads but it didn't really help jumping much and my conclusion from that was that what really mattered wasn't the amount of the load it was how quickly the load was applied because if you look at people in athletics or in any kind of testing environment,

if you have them jump from the floor onto a box, they can jump so high. If you have them jump from a box onto the ground, onto another box, assuming that they're fit enough to be able to absorb that force and reverse it, they can jump higher. It's the same as if you squat down,

pause, and then try to jump jump that's a lot harder than just dipping and jumping that's because the the amount of force and the speed at which you're producing that force is so high it's stretching the tissues you get a little elastic rebound you're propelling yourself up so what really mattered wasn't how much it was just how fast so i think the important thing to consider here would be, one, if you want to gain muscle size, regardless of what you're trying to do, things like pulling a deadlift and then lowering the deadlift

would be very important for you to have more eccentric loading in your back and your hips. Squatting down, like most weightlifters do, and then getting a rebound and coming up would probably be a good way to build leg size because every whale in the world has huge legs if they're qualified and advanced.

You probably get a lot of benefit out of squat cleans because you have a huge eccentric loading component at the bottom and you can pop up, bench press, lower down, controlled, pause, push. That being said, if you want to be the best athlete possible and you want to be able to be very strong and explosive, then your eccentric action should be fast.

So we talk about things like tempo training and lowering the bar for a specific count. I'm going to lower it down. One, two, three, four, five, pause. One, two, push, one. That kind of shit, I i think is completely stupid you should lower and reverse weights as absolutely as fast you can like if you look at really qualified weightlifters the most impressive thing about them and what i wish i could go back and change

in my own training was learning how to essentially fall quickly under a high load and reverse it explosively if you can do that you're probably prepared for most athletic activities you're going to face and that's why weightlifting is it can be really good as opposed to just doing back squats yeah or or when powerlifters train that way like they train the squat probably if i could go back in time i wouldn't do i would do far more learning how to rebound at a bottom stuff like that so that's one thing that's unique to weightlifting heavy loads bouncing on the bottom that is really useful okay that's that's my high level take on it and you're talking about you're talking about you know what chris is talking about

is like loading during training and i think i think one of the things that we were what i was kind of thinking about when i heard the question was was do we want to do a lot of training that involves eccentric loading? And what's the effect of eccentric loading? Like if you do a lot of negatives or eccentric, any kind of movement, the – So if this guy wants to run faster, he should – like anybody who wants to be, like Doug says, the key for him is just trying to be more athletic in a gym.

That will include fast, forceful eccentric contractions. If he was to do a lot of purposeful eccentric loading, he would probably have a little extra soreness. He probably wouldn't be training as fast as he should, and he may not get the result he wants for his sprinting. What I don't like about eccentric loading or added eccentric loading for this guy is it's going to cause more muscle damage so uh eccentric is going to cause the most muscle damage isometric the next and then concentric is going to cause the least amount

of muscle damage and anytime you train you're causing damage to your muscles and it takes time to recover that's why you wait a day or two to train again and uh for this guy i would i don't want to do a bunch of eccentric stuff, like purposefully, so that he can get back in the gym and train again. Because if we can increase training frequency, that would be a lot more beneficial to him being a better athlete.

So I don't want to focus on eccentric or even isometric a whole, whole lot. I mean, that's going to play a part in the programming. There's balance there. But if you're doing a whole lot of eccentric loading, it can be good for making muscles bigger, because you're wiping them out, and they're going there's balance there. But if you're doing a whole lot of eccentric loading, it can be good for making muscles bigger because you're wiping them out, and they're going to come back bigger. That doesn't necessarily mean they're going to come back stronger.

So if you're trying to become a bigger, stronger guy, there might be a phase of training that you want to dedicate to a lot of eccentric stuff. You want to cause a lot of muscle damage. I was thinking, instead of letting my deadlifts down quick or dropping them completely, I will lower them. That's really all the detail you probably need to add for most people.

You don't need to think about intentional tempo or intentional negatives because those things are maybe not required, but for a few special people who might be able to do that usefully. In my opinion, tempo training probably should be saved for bodybuilders and maybe really advanced athletes that need to possibly go through a phase of training where they're trying to make their muscles bigger to raise the potential for strength. Outside of that, I'm not sure. I've actually heard of people getting rhabdo from doing tempo bodyweight squats.

Really? Yes. There was a case. I was talking to one coach. He was talking about this. Coca-Cola urine. I think they were taking an advanced training technique and applying it to a first-timer type of thing.

That's the cardinal rule they break, is that people associate complexity and fanciness with efficacy and training and so it's and it's the easiest mistake for anybody to make we still we still probably will be attracted by shiny pretty things in the gym cool toys and cool ideas but there's a good reason why the most impressive people in the world do the simplest things because those still are the things that just work i mean we we would like for that not to be the case we would love to develop fancy proprietary techniques for training then copyright them and implement them and whatever but damn it the the truth of it is you can't get better than just barbells i would like it not to be the case i would like for

fancier things to be thought about conceptualize experimented with we get some cool result we can sort of tinker and do all that i wish it was like that like a true experiment but still the best things to do are jumping and pull ups and cleans and squatting i mean i i wish it wasn't the case but damn it it just is true yeah it's like the earth is round. It's true. It's true. No matter what idea you have in your mind differently, you can't change fact.

So keep that in mind. I was talking a little bit about how concentric causes the least amount of muscle damage, and that's why we weight lift so often is because you can do snatches, cleans, and jerks, and there's not a lot of eccentric loading going on you're not spending a lot of time in the eccentric portion of the movement so you can train it more frequently incur less muscle damage but be training your muscles to move faster and be stronger so that's that's one reason you can weight lift and why weight lifters are you know they're in a squat position five or six days a week and they're just fine and that's because they don't spend a lot of time in eccentric motion and the eccentric loading exercises are with joints that are a little more robust the hips and knees

you can like me i i'm a huge proponent of squatting heavy three days a week as a minimum uh but for bench i'm i'm i'm i'm experimenting a little bit with a little higher frequency and pressing exercises but to do it heavy you can't replicate the same kind of results yeah you gotta be careful with how you try to implement eccentric training so you will get a mean cure your waylifting advice about being able to pull multiple days a week don't don't apply that to deadlift no no just because it's not only doesn't mean you can do it deadlifting is not weightlifting my rule on my deadlifting like i think glenn pindley said at best that if you are good at deadlifting you can do it more often because your body is the mechanics are probably favorable for it for you so you could probably pull heavy every week and maybe do other training with features

of deadlift during the week. But if you're not built for deadlifting and you particularly aren't very good at it, your leverages are bad. It means you're going to put a lot of load on your lower back, for instance. It means you can probably pull heavy. My approach I'm trying now is in a three

week cycle there's going to be one heavy pull only in there. I get in trouble of getting a little froggy. I want to pull more often. There'll be one pull for reps, and there'll be one pull. One of those weeks will be focused on just quick pulls. If you're pulling over 500, 600 pounds, then you're going to pull a lot less frequently than someone who's brand new to it.

If you're pulling under 300 pounds, you could probably pull at least every week, if not biweekly. Yeah, so how do you train your deadlift? My current thinking is I really like squatting all the time, basically. That's going to help you. And then you can do good mornings and RDLs as they should be done,

probably just about every day. Meaning, if you do them with a good back position and you're not trying to cheat, you're trying to do actual good morning and RDL, every day you could probably do those exercises in some way. For a couple sets of five, six, seven, eight reps, it's not going to be a big deal. You're going to train the muscles that are going to do the pulling and squatting.

But heavy deadlifts are a beast, man. Another place that concentric only training is really convenient is conditioning. You were talking about prowler pushing earlier. yeah prowler person's fantastic like you you could push the prowler every day if you wanted if you could emotionally handle it yeah you know you extend your legs and you contract the muscle but then there's no downward portion you just cycle back with no load and put your foot back on the ground and so you can run prowler sprints you know every single day yeah so if you're if you're a strength athlete who wants to work on his conditioning but doesn't particularly like the idea of getting weaker,

then sled pushing is brilliant for you. If you think you want to go do sprints, you're going to suffer at least a little while because all that loading is going to cause you soreness that's going to detract from your squats and your pulls and everything else. The prowler is brilliant because it will smack you down to the ground and you can recover, be recovering fine in 10 minutes

after you're done. I've actually heard of people getting sore from doing sled sprints. They're like, I pushed a prowler, I got so sore, I'm like,

you are out of shape. You're brand new to training. Yeah, like if you've been training for a while, sled sprints should never make you sore. Yeah,

the sled is just acutely terrible. But after that, you're fine, you're 100%. Yeah, so if you're getting sore from itely terrible but after that you're fine you're 100 yeah so if you're getting sore from it you're just it's just because you're still new same with the same with the the concept two rower yep all that stuff is gonna be if you want to get in better shape raise your work capacity do those things all the time do it in the morning before you go to work go in for lunch do some rowing at the end of the day do some rowing if you want to

lose weight do those things you can do all the time. Yeah, rowing, sled pushing, airdyne's another great one. I'll count swimming and shit in there. Those basic activities that are going to build your general work capacity and not take away from you.

They're just all, basically just adding to your goals, not taking away. Yeah, they're not going to beat you up at all. Most of them are super conservative too. If you've got a competition coming up in a week and you're just like man i i've had a bunch of injuries in the last couple months and i just don't want any of them to flare back up sled pushing and

airdyne like work your system super hard without beating up your joints or tearing down any muscle mass in the process i remember uh you and i did an experiment on ourselves with a carb loading before that marathon okay and uh we uh did you do it with me or is it just me by myself i think we did you just did it well i did do it i just wondered why why you're saying it oh because well one of the one of the things that we did was we did a lot of things that were concentric only leading up to that because we didn't want to cause muscle damage we ate no carbohydrates for like three days did a lot of glycogen burning type activities like pushing the sled, but didn't cause a lot of muscle damage

because we didn't want to be jacked up before we ran the race. It's hard to store carbohydrates in your cells if all your cells are torn apart. Yeah. That's true. Yeah, it makes sense. We spent three days trying to find ways to do concentric only movements so we could waste all the glycogen. And then we spent, what, 24, 36 hours replenishing.

So that's a proper carb load. You do a deplete and then a replete. Most people that do carb loading just do a replete, which is technically not a replete. They eat a big pasta meal the night before and that's it. Yeah. You've got to make sure you get rid of all scraps of carbs before you try to load, or else you're just a fat guy.

We made one tactical error in the experiment because we didn't train to run at all. So our limiting factor had nothing to do with glycogen and everything to do with... Being completely unskilled. Like just tearing up our lower legs running on concrete for 26 miles. had nothing to do with glycogen and everything to do with being completely unskilled uh like just tearing up our lower legs running on concrete for 26 miles so that was our tactical error we're like oh man i didn't see that coming oh shit i forgot that there was a marathon in this experiment

oh god oh my feet felt like they got beat with a hammer for like two weeks yeah it was bad it was bad yeah a lot of healthy activity all, let's take a break real quick, and we'll get back to some more questions. We're going to talk a little bit about muscle building for CrossFitters, but we'll extrapolate a little more on that. That's the wrong word to use there. And then we'll talk about shirts and training arms and legs. All right.

Well, maybe we're doing a little bit of that, and it's working. They sound complicated. They must be smart. They must be really smart. We're trying to avoid that. Must be super smart guys, bro. All right, guys. Welcome back.

We're going to talk a little bit about next kind of – Well said. My brain just farted. All right. Muscle building for CrossFters versus strength i think we kind of covered that already talk a little bit just in short say your little thing about gymnastics and weightlifting how about that that works oh yeah um well i was gonna talk about that with arms and legs people are like what do you do to train your arms yeah just wrap those up in the

same thing yeah i'll go ahead I'll just hit that first. We have members, usually they're relatively new. They haven't been in the gym for years and years and years. And they go, well, what do I do for arms? Or, you know,

I used to do leg day, but now we kind of squat and then we do a bunch of other stuff too. And so, you know, Doug asked a good question. He's like, well, what do you want your arms you know look around the room and whose arms do you want to have type of thing but kind of start talking

about how usually gymnasts have the best upper bodies you're like oh i'd love to have an upper body like a gymnast i wouldn't want their lower body it's usually you know legs pathetic. But then, what I was saying was that gymnasts have probably the best upper body strength and look the best, and then weightlifters have the best lower body strength and look the best. And that's one reason we do CrossFit, is because

we do a lot of gymnastics and weightlifting. There you go. If you want a better looking upper body if you want good looking arms you know maybe you should start working towards the progression of the iron cross and the rings a good start would be learning how to do a muscle up so i know that if i do 30 muscle ups for time my biceps and triceps are pretty blasted and my pecs are all swole and i feel pretty good about myself and then i have to get a squat make my

butt bigger even everything out so okay just for those what about people who can't do a fairly muscle up so what'd you have them do bro a progression because i cannot do uh you would for sure not you would do a progression towards getting a muscle up there's a lot of progressions out there um but you know if if the technique is what eludes you, then just doing a lot of ring pull-ups and ring dips can be very helpful. Or bar pull-ups, bar dips. Use your arms to move yourself. Yeah, I promise you're using them.

Using them will make you better. If you've been doing curls for the last 10 years and you're addicted to doing curls and you just love doing curls, there's nothing wrong with adding some curls to the end of your workout but still go do your your ring pull-ups and your your ring dips and handstand push-ups do curls i commend you biceps should be completely exhausted i will laugh at you yeah don't do curls and then try to get better pull-ups no no that you're doing it backwards you're doing it all wrong but if you do like just

just like if we're talking about like uh squats if you squat the way you should squat you shouldn't have much energy for doing other things right and if you do then you can just do them you know with a little bit of effort that's fine like but you wouldn't do wouldn't blast yourself with leg curls then try to squat same thing goes for pull-ups. If you do them right, there might be a little energy left over for some curls, and that's fine, but don't do curls for max and then try to do pull-ups. It's just not going to really work. I can't imagine how ridiculous it would look to watch somebody go pull 500 pounds

on a clean and jerk and then walk over and do leg extensions. Right. For like three sets of 10. The Chinese do that kind of stuff. Well, there's a video somewhere of a Chinese weightlifter doing it. That doesn't mean they do it. I don't know what their approach is. They have a whole myriad of

things they do for recovery or just as assistance or when they do it before or after. It's a very minor part of the program. I totally jacked up my hamstring. Instead of not doing anything, why don't you do some leg extensions? I could see that happening.

Everything has its place as long as you keep it in its proper place, which is not replacing things like really hard pull-ups with really easy curls. Go find one of those gymnasts with big biceps and ask them if they go and do bicep curls. I'm pretty sure they're going to say no. No, I do a bunch of muscle-ups. Actually, they don't bunch of muscle-ups and actually they don't do muscle you know they do muscle-ups all the time so they can do their other stuff like muscle-ups for them are like walking up five stairs just sort of like you you do that every day it's just something you do yeah you can do 20 planche push-ups in a row which are push-ups without

your feet on the ground then your shoulders don't need to do front raises with 10 pound plates that's a waste of time at that point that wouldn't add anything for you nope yeah i remember i heard uh i have no idea who this was but he went and bench pressed like 700 pounds and then someone someone said what are you gonna do for your triceps and he goes i don't know what i'm gonna do for my tr. That didn't just do. I just pressed 700 pounds. I'm going to go do skull crushers and tricep kickbacks for 10 minutes. There's nothing wrong with all those little exercises, but my opinion is if there's more energy, you could bench more often.

It would probably be a way to get your bench up. When I bench, I'll bench and do a few sets, and I get up. My triceps are usually like, they're done. I'm doing it right, too. So you could be doing it wrong. Like, oh, I don't feel in my triceps at all. I still think one of the better exercises for assistance for weightlifters is just like a little incline press. You don't have to stand up with it. So, you know, you give your legs and lower back a little bit of a break from holding weight over your head,

but you're still pushing weight overhead, and you can probably do a little more than you can on the press, of course, which is just standing on your feet and trying to lift the bar over your head, so you can train your arms a little better. That's the rationale and the place in your programming. Tricep extensions. I like close grip for that. When I say close grip, I don't mean like, you know, thumbs distance part. I'm talking like, you know, shoulder width.

Close grip, steep incline presses you know shoulder width close grip steep incline presses are really fantastic not too bad on your shoulders it's a lot less painful than a bench press you don't get a whole lot of adverse forces cranking on your shoulders but you really work your arms really hard that's not a fun exercise to do to do that for two three four sets of five to ten reps after you do some other more important stuff that's way way better than extensions or push downs and all that kind of crap absolutely that's something too that would be pretty novel to most crossfitters at this point there's not a whole lot of incline pressing in the crossfit world but i found it's a good way to get better at at pressing and push pressing and jerking.

That's a really good exercise to help you on that because you're putting a weight over your head repeatedly. And you have to focus on extending. You don't have to worry about your legs and everything. Right. Yeah. It's very nice. Most definitely. Doug, you put something up here about muscle building for CrossFitters versus strength.

Well, we've had a lot of people come in the gym and they you know they're just starting out and they're not really that strong yet and they're say they're 165 pounds maybe they came from the the distance running world they want to get in the cross or they heard was a great way to stay in shaping and they heard across the athletes are you know some of the most fit people in the world and they associate fitness with pure cardiovascular capacity and so for for those guys i think you know they don't even need to focus on cardio at all that's all they've been doing for the last 10 years and they want to be competitive as crossfitters they need to put on some muscle mass and gain some strength and a lot of times those go hand in hand

but i think at least initially they they need to focus on actually gaining the size and the strength will come with it but they need they need to focus on actually gaining the size. And the strength will come with it. But they need to get bigger. If you're 165 pounds, you're not going to be a competitive crossfitter on the national or world scale. You have to gain some weight. Yeah, on those odd sled pushing or lifting tasks, you're just going to get manhandled. Yeah. You can't do it.

You can't push a 400-pound sled if you're 165 pounds as well as someone who weighs 210. If you could do it as well, you'd be a very special guy. Yeah, there's not that many people out there like that. I mean, Spear is probably the biggest example of a guy who used to be smaller and had to get bigger with the times. As it got heavier every year at the games, he had to keep putting on the weight and putting on strength in order to stay competitive. From what I understand, he does conditioning twice a week.

And the rest of his training is just trying to get bigger and stronger. He's so good at conditioning. Yeah. Supposedly, I guess he wrestled way back in the day. And it's one of those things where he's just a metabolic mutant is what they called him or something. I don't think he did too well on that little marathon they had, right, at the games. Oh, yeah? He got beat up a bit on that.

He probably didn't train for it. Yeah. Like I said, he's probably doing conditioning twice a week. All the barbell for rep stuff, he's probably not going to have much of a problem with. He looks like a totally different person now than he did like three years ago. He's much bigger.

Yeah. So you're saying, you know, if you're starting CrossFit and you're not 200 pounds, your first goal might be to get to 200 pounds, and I agree. Or at least 185 or so. Well, I say get to 200 and then start on the conditioning back in, and then you'll be at 185 after that. And then know that you've got to commit to developing your body for a couple years,

which is a flash in a pan. That's really quick, actually. But you've got to have patience to sort of cultivate these abilities. Right. And grow yourself in the right way. Eating decent quality food, being patient, letting things develop. Don't just think it's going to happen in a month. You've got to think about things in phases.

It used to be like, oh, you're a pretty strong guy. You can prep for the 2008 games starting six months out. But now it's one of those things where, you know, you've got to go through phases of training. All right, let's go through a phase where we're getting really strong and we're planning for two years out. Like if someone starts CrossFit now, it's like, I wouldn't even think about going to regionals this year. If someone came to me today and was like,

all right, we'll start looking at 2015. You know, let's get you really big and strong. And then we'll, you know, you'll always be doing some conditioning kind of like what you're talking about during your seminar you're talking about you know spinning the plates and really focusing on you know this one aspect of here you're never going to stop spinning these plates over here you know you have to gain weight it's okay if you gain weight and your conditioning suffers a bit in the short term because of it one thing needs to happen at a time you can't gain weight and stay optimally conditioned right you can gain the weight come back a little bit once you get a little to where you want to go a little past it come back a little bit and then you can reintroduce and refocus you can't do those things at the same

time and you feel like you're getting out of shape that's okay yeah if you're really strong it's really easy to get in shape. It doesn't take that long. But if you're in shape and then you decide you want to get strong, that's a much longer process to get strong. It's going to take you years to get strong. The strength takes focus. I went through a phase this year where I wanted to do the cross-fitting for a while,

try that out, and then knowing that the strength would dip. And the strength did dip, but not terribly. But you do enough strength to keep it where you can keep it, and you put the focus on trying these WODs and stuff. And now I'm kind of interested in, okay, well, if I can get to 275, which since I did the simple strength seminar, I would be a 35-pound drop. When did we do that seminar?

Was that beginning of May or very end of April, right? I think it was April. I was gone the whole month of May. Yes, I'm coming up on a 30 pound drop since then and my strength's improving now, but I can't do 100 meter sprints for 10, 15 reps while I try to make my squat go up

while I'm also dropping weights. Pick what's most important to you now in a reasonable amount of time and focus on it. Fuck us, as my boss actually says. He's French. We must fuck us on our power. Got another question in from Brad. He was asking about certifications.

He mentioned ACE and NSCA the NSCA is CSCS Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist those of us sitting in this they all sound very fancy the three of us sitting in a circle I mean we all have several certifications

USAW NSCA CrossFit I'm probably leaving some stuff i don't know i've got a certification in medical publications which has nothing to do with what we're talking about but we all are certified in very numerous things aren't we that's right we're all very skilled in what we do but i want a coffee certification like like a barista certified specialist. We should just start. And that's actually really interesting. That's how a lot of these certifications get started is someone goes,

I'll just make a certification. We'll build a website. We'll make a test. And now you're – Boom. That's kind of how CrossFit started. Like, oh, we'll hold a weekend seminar, charge $1,000, and now you're certified. Congratulations.

Now you can put this at the end of your name. There's no one stopping anybody from starting a certification process. Now, it being accredited is a different story, and I'm not sure everyone knows this, but CrossFit was not even accredited until about two years ago. So they were doing certifications.

Accrediting is good. That means that there was a third party that came in and made sure that you were going through some kind of standardized process. Yeah, you're testing appropriately and you're doing it the right way. You can actually certify as people are meeting a standard. Right. You're not just like, you know, just handing them out in exchange for money.

Right. So, I mean, there's nothing stopping people from doing certifications that aren't accredited. So you might want to look for that if you're looking to get certified. As far as certifications go, this one person was asking me about ACE versus NSCA. It always just comes down to it depends on which certification is the best. You just go online and take a 20-question test or something. No, I think ACE is a little more advanced than that now. Hopefully.

I think every certification started off like that and then they've all gotten better. And there's nothing wrong with a lot of these certifications. I actually, we were at a conference a couple weeks ago and I won the ACE certification and they gave me all the textbooks needed for it. And I started looking through it and I was like, this is actually really good.

Stuff that's not going to get covered in a CrossFit certification. there's a lot of kinesiology and a lot of uh stuff like that that if you didn't have a degree in exercise science this would probably be a really good resource for you to go oh this does this this does that um talked a little bit about energy systems and stuff like that on a really basic level but most people have never been exposed to it like that and so i think asus could that text was really good i'm not certified in that so i don't know um but uh it kind of depends on what you want to do if you want to go work for a college in the sports department you have to get nsca they're probably not going to take anything else if you want to work at a crossfit gym or open a crossfit gym you need to get crossfit certified you know if

you want to run a weightlifting club get usa weightlifting you know certified so um there's a lot of certifications out there and i don't know of any where i'm not going to bash any or anything like that but i personally got not sure try to figure out what your potential boss has and right go that route yeah exactly um and i personally like if i'm just seeking out seeking knowledge i think the best one that i went to that was a weekend certification was the crossfit certification i enjoyed it too it's really good it's really good certainly have the most practical application the stuff you're going to use and do every day you actually have to do the stuff as you go through a lot of sorts are heavy science focused kind of like you were

saying a second ago. You got this textbook for the certification, and it was nothing but kinesiology and anatomy and stuff like that, which is good. I'm not saying you shouldn't know that stuff. I love all that stuff, but most people aren't really going to use that on a day-to-day basis training clients.

You'd be much better off if you wanted to just have one weekend cert where you're doing it for the knowledge to go to a CrossFit cert, and they'll teach you exactly what to show the people that you're going to train the next day. You can use all of it immediately. If I'm introducing somebody to training new, I'd rather have someone CrossFit certified than somebody with a biology degree. Obviously, the person with a biology degree understands adaptation and stimulus and all this stuff, but they all have no idea how to apply it. And that's what's important. The CrossFit one is probably the most expensive one.

But a cool thing is, one, the quality, like you're saying, the quality of the education is pretty good. The material is good. It's presented really well. And they actually do a really good job of bringing in the best people they have to where you are to deliver the information. Like you may show up and Chris Spieler really good job of bringing in the best people they have to where you are to deliver the information.

Like you may show up and Chris Spieler may be your instructor for the weekend. You'll probably get one-on-one personal time with him if you wanted during at least an hour of that. And he'll be there teaching you how to do every lift you need to learn for the whole weekend. That's if you put it in perspective, if you're coached by one of the best athletes Crossfit has produced and you want to get better at crossfit it's probably worth investing in it so he can be paid to fly from utah to memphis wherever you're at to give you that education

so put everything into perspective and keep in mind that you know you're willing to put you know 1200 a year into your phone bill that's not as important to you as CrossFit, so you might want to invest in yourself if you want to get really good at CrossFit. Yeah, and you pay for what you get. I guess for everything, including certifications, you spend $100 on a certification that you take online,

you're going to get a $100 certification. We said that before about why people will complain sometimes about the price of CrossFit memberships and stuff. I go, well, it's about who, between their phone and their TV, if they're spending $200 a month to sit for an hour a night and be entertained, you'd probably want to pay $100, $150 to have your life completely reinvented and have your fitness given back to you.

It's kind of a ridiculous line of reasoning to go down. Oh, it's so expensive to have the life I want. Invest in yourself and what's important to you. It's okay to spend lots of money on things that are really important to you. Don't blow money on stupid shit that's not important to you. That's rule number one of economics in my life.

If it's important to you, it's okay to spend money. If it's not, don't spend a fucking penny on it. Get rid of the things that aren't important to you i'm with you on that one make some decisions in your life yeah it's all about priorities you know someone sorry sorry to curse again i think i've said that if someone says something's too expensive it's just to me it's just a matter of priorities you know oh it's too expensive like oh you just don't value that as much as the other stuff you're spending money on and that's okay and that's that's you and then someone else come along that has a different set of priorities and they'll they'll line up better with what we're doing so yeah the budget idea is very interesting because one it works very well in your life you ask

yourself what's important to me i will go through my house and say yes or no this thing important to me no is there a subscription fee associated with this thing yes get rid of it is it sitting around and clogging up my closets yes it is i need to throw this away it's a very powerful thing to do in your life very satisfying a great book on that is the power of less you ever read that book no but i agree with it already but that this idea we're talking about is the same with training if you consider your your resources are finite you have an hour to train your body has a limited ability 100 recovery tokens to recover from whatever you choose to do uh you want to leave at some point to go see your

so there's this is a finite time i can only do so many things should i curl no should i squat squat should probably be included should i clean yes like what do i want to get better at i don't really want to get better at jerks i want to get a big bench press okay well most people would say jerks are sort of quantitatively better and qualitatively better because they're more athletic but if you're trying if you want to do a power to meet the that changes for you. So asking yourself what you want is very important. I love CrossFit. Do I want bigger arms? Yes.

Add in some curls. That's as simple as it is. Ask yourself what's important to you. If you're thinking about what you did today, and you did a list of things that took 45 minutes, and those things weren't important to you, you wasted 45 minutes of your time. You'll never get it back. Never. You'll die. Time the only finite resource, as Paul likes

to call it. I think that's a really great thing to keep in mind. Great summary, Chris. We're going to wrap up the show now. Yes! I summarized things. Make sure to check out Fitter.tv. Check out the shop. Make sure to check out uh fitter.tv uh check out the shop and uh and check make sure

to check out chris's strength seminar uh a lot of people are enjoying it you can read some good uh testimonials about it on the website and uh check out our what technique quad too right you sound like you're not sure what's on the site what's on technique log tomorrow or on uh what are we posting next do we know i haven't planned the next one yet well we'll plan that later i'm not sure what do you get what do you guys want to see on technique log that's a good question hit the contact button on the website shoot me an email and uh we'll try to make sure to get you got your what you want to see on there. And if we don't know

what you're talking about, we'll try to find somebody. Tell us what you'd want us to talk about. We'll talk about it. Oh, yeah. Mobility Seminar should be hopefully posted to the site

pretty soon. Yeah. Looking forward to that. CTP's cranking it out. Mm-hmm. And you got a blog you want to promote, Chris? Yeah. It's thechrismoreblog.com.

Go by there. There's some cool ideas on there. Stuff that occurs to me to say, I say it on the blog. Go read about it. My mom happens to love the Chris Moore blog, by the way. She eats it up. Oh, really? Yeah, she does.

That's cool it's fine i wish i could do more like 10 page storytelling on that blog but i think well people always love is just like the the pithy diagrams i've done occasionally the diagrams i like yeah so i'll probably start doing more like diagrams i'll probably make my stories one paragraph because people just like punchy information so i'll give it to them yeah it's gonna be all memes starting in like six months nothing but memes here's a picture of a cat with some one line of training wisdom all right guys thanks for tuning in see you next week yeah thanks guys