Barbell Shrugged - Glutes, Glutes and More Glutes w/ "The Glute Guy" Bret Contreras

Episode Date: January 24, 2018

Bret Contreras has become known in the strength and conditioning industry as “The Glute Guy” because of his expertise in helping clients develop strong, shapely glutes. He has earned his PhD in Sports Science from the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, and invented a glute-strengthening machine called the Hip Thruster. Contreras is also cofounder of Strength & Conditioning Research Review and founder of Strong by Bret. He currently trains figure competitors, writes programs for clients from all over the world, and consults for various professional sport teams. In this episode, we dive into glute development exercises, functional vs body-part split training, the hip thrust, horizontal and vertical resistance training, and more. Enjoy!

I'm like, thinking about it, I'm like, oh my friend Clay has glutes, Todd has glutes, all these guys have glutes, and I have nothing. I have nothing. So I'm like, if I... This story is way better than I thought it was going to be. If I don't do something about my lack of glutes, I'm never going to get laid. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Blitzer here with Doug Larson, and we have our guest. What?

Guest host. Guest host. Go host. Andrew Varner threw me off. There it is. Usually I'm on the other side. You're usually on the other side. Big day today.

Yeah. We're counting on you. I have the best questions for all the people. Perfect. You're probably way more prepared than we are, for the record. Well, on the first one, it's better to show up. We're hanging out here at the Glute Lab in Pacific Beach, California, with Brett Contreras, the glute guy.

But you said you're more than just a glute guy. I'm more than just a glute guy. More than just glutes. We're going to be talking about lower body strength. And I'm really curious about what are the things that people are missing out on? You know, I think people have a lot of assumptions about just what it means to be have a strong lower body, I want to know what it is that people are missing. Yeah, me as well. You do a lot of unique things that a lot of other people don't do. You pioneered a lot of the ways that people train glutes these days. And there's some controversy there about, probably not in your mind, about the effectiveness of those exercises. But certainly, I know you've got some resistance in the past for your unique and innovative ways of

doing things. So I'd love to get your thoughts on, you know, why you choose the exercises you choose, how they work, the results you've gotten, et cetera, because you've, you've changed the way that people look at glute training. Yeah. I think the thing I'm most interested in learning is we've got the aesthetic side, which your Instagram account highlights the performance side of things. And then there's the glute is such an important part of health longevity and just kind of it's the centerpiece of everything um on the side of health so how do you program how you know training volumes rep schemes do you even care about separating all three of those and that may just take it the full hour yeah from the from the face you just made

Brett what uh what got you into the game in the first place into the strength the strength both I want to know what got you into strength and then why did you gravitate to the ass okay so when I was 15 I was so tired of being skinny. Me and my twin brother were just – back then, there were all these – Ethiopia had all these really, like, deathly skinny kids, and people would call me and my brother Ethiopian. We were so skinny. People probably wouldn't think that. You're not a small human being.

No, you're a big guy. People said your metabolism will change, and you'll have the opposite problem one day. And I'm like, I hope that. Now I miss that metabolism. Yeah, it says the guy who's like 6'4", 240-ish. 250 right now. 250?

Okay, yeah. Too much tennis. Well, it's these California burritos out here. That didn't warn me. But I hated getting bullied. I hated getting picked on. I never pick on anyone. I don't bully anyone.

It never even crosses my mind, but I hate being bullied. So that's why I wanted to start lifting weights. So a kind of funny story. I still remember I was 15 or 16. I convinced my mom to buy me a barbell set. And my workout was military press, push-ups, curls, calf raises and crunches. Nothing from my back or legs. I didn't know how to do anything from my back or legs, but I saw some results. And I remember at one point I weighed 15 pounds more than my twin brother,

and we were sitting there in our underwear, in the mirror, looking in the mirror going, and we had gotten on a scale and we're trying to figure out where these 15 pounds are you couldn't tell i'm like our ankles like traveling up calves are the same so it must just be you get you retain water and get denser at first which there's some research on that but i remember going how do i weigh 15 we can't like i was, you'd think you could ascertain, okay, it's the packs.

No, we look the same. Interesting. And that's why when a lot of women start working out, they start retaining some water, they freak out. You know, they might gain a few pounds of, you know, whatever, from glycogen, supercompensation, or inflammation, whatever is causing that intracellular water retention. But it's a good thing for several reasons.

But that's what got me into strength training. I didn't want to be bullied, and I also wanted girls to like me. And I knew with my current stature I wouldn't be doing too well there. There's always a girl in there somewhere. Always. Yeah, I don't think you're that unique in that respect. A lot of guys start lifting weights because they want to be able to not get beat up and to get ladies. That's pretty normal, I think.

That's all of life. No, but that wasn't good enough. Don't get beat up, get laid. Check. The story continues. That wasn't good enough. So when I was like 17-ish, I think 16 or 17-ish, I was in high school, and there's three girls that I had a crush on, all three of them, because they were all like the popular pretty girls.

I'm listening to them talk. I have a similar problem. I like popular pretty girls. So I'm listening to them talk, and all my best buddies were on the football team. I wasn't because I had really bad asthma. And I wasn't yet, like, big and strong. But I'm listening to them, and they're like, we need to go watch football practice. I love staring at the guys in their uniforms.

They're staring at their butts. And I'm, like, thinking about them. I'm like, my friend Clay has glutes. Todd has glutes. All these guys have glutes. And I have nothing. I have nothing. I have nothing. This story is way better than I thought it was going to be. If I don't do something

about my lack of glutes, I'm never going to get laid. So then shortly after that I'm playing golf with my sister's boyfriend. I'm bending over to swing with the ninth hole and what's funny about this is he's not, this guy wasn't this genius,

but he became so analytical when analyzing my lack of glutes. He's like, you know, Brett, if you look at it, your back goes right into your legs. Most people have a protuberance there where the buttocks muscles are supposed to be, but with you, it's completely missing. And I'm like wow like i i had none i had no glutes so that's a very academic backhanded compliment like not compliment but like yeah wow i'm impressed i'm actually impressed you're missing glute muscles so he was bullying you but in a smarter way right right he was uh intellectually bullying me so. So that's when I started.

I was already reading all the muscle magazines. I wouldn't buy all of them. I'd go to the grocery store or the library. Or no, not the library. The bookstore, back when bookstores were everywhere. And I would just read every muscle magazine. There's muscle and fitness, muscular development, Ironman. What else?

Flex. Yeah, I read every one of them. Flex was my favorite. Flex and muscle and fitness. Flex was always the most extreme. Muscular development was my favorite for years. Yeah, I had really good information. Flex was always like the one that always had like the most enormous,

veined up human being possible on the front of it. And it always said huge in huge letters somewhere on the cover. Yeah, right. But back then you never saw anything on glutes. It wasn't like glute issue. Here's what Ronnie Coleman does for his glutes. It was always leg. You had to figure out what these guys do for their glutes just because that's

what they do on leg and back day. On leg day they do squats and lunges and leg press. And on back day, they do deadlifts and back extensions. But never any, you know. And back then, it was all vertical exercises, vertically loaded, axial loaded exercises. And along the way, so that's when I was 19 years old, my cousin, he was training with me. And for Christmas, he bought me this book, The Complete Guide to Butt and Leg Development. And I'm like, this is great.

Why did you buy it from me? He goes, because, dude, I've never met someone so obsessed with glutes. And now I'm 41. My enthusiasm for glutes has never diminished. The only running theme is glutes. Yeah, it's a constant theme in my life. You'll see a lot of ups and downs, but glutes were always there for me. Glutes are always there.

So it seems somewhere along the way you realize that other people want to train their glutes as well, and you started coaching people? Well, this was 2006. And here's what's crazy about this i'm not religious or spiritual um i i'm just like straight up scientist and look for evidence and um but i actually when when this happened i looked up into the sky i remember it like it was yesterday this is october 10th 2006 i looked up in the sky and I went, oh, my God. From here forward, my whole life is going to be different.

And this is what happened. That's my birthday, by the way. Really? Yeah. I mean, not 2006, but. You're not 12? No. You're not 11?

Do you remember what you were doing that day? 2006. I could probably figure it out. Go on. It'll hit me. Get back to us. So there was a UFC fight. My girlfriend at the time was with me.

We were on the couch watching UFC, and this one was Tito Ortiz and Ken Shamrock 3. That's what I was doing. Yeah. That was it. But I didn't care who won. I just didn't want it to be done in the first round they hyped it up so much and there was such a rivalry between the two i didn't like tito's like attitude but i didn't

care if he won i just didn't want it to go so quick and tito full mounts ken shamrock starts raining down punches and i'm like buck him off like buck him. Like, you know, you gotta try, you got, you can't just lay there. You got to try to get them off of you. But I'm like, why wouldn't he be trying to buck? Maybe, maybe he's not strong from that position. Well, there's more to it in jujitsu. Like you can get your hooks in and it's hard to get, it's hard to escape with at that level. But I had an identical twin brother as i mentioned we were always full mounting i didn't know what it was we just wrestled our whole lives and that's what we would try to get full mount and then like put dig your knuckle into the other sternum and mess with him

we wouldn't punch in the face back then but you you just buck like crazy and get the guy off of you and try to reverse it but i thought as a strength and conditioning coach i'm like is there an exercise that could maybe um you know strengthen that pattern and i'm like okay i can't be like hey andrews come straddle me i'm gonna bust out 20 reps that's a different kind of website you're building there we're not ready for that yet so So I'm like, okay, what could I use for resistance? But you're on the ground. Is there any way I could use more range of motion? Ideally, you'd have that pattern with more range and resistance.

So I thought, hmm, what if I put my back on the glute ham pad, on the pad on the glute ham developer, put my feet up on the reverse hyper. So to this day, that's the same reverse hyper hyper that's the same glute ham raise right there i so i went out in my garage i'm like i asked my girlfriend come help me move this and she's like why can't we just do this tomorrow and i'm like fine i'll do it myself so i moved this across so unsupported yeah little did she know she could have been part of history So I moved this across. So unsupported. Yeah, little did she know she could have been part of history.

So I moved it into place, and I didn't think of putting a barbell there. I just thought about putting a dip belt with, I put four 45-pound plates, because, I mean, that's 180 pounds. That's around what a regular man weighs, because I was still thinking, like, full mount to skate. Right. It was so hard to toggle into position. I used those, like, handles, and it was so awkward. And then I'm like, what if these split apart while I'm doing it?

Like, I'm going to, like, fall on my tailbone and mess stuff up. But anyway, I did. I started sinking down. I up getting uh 15 reps and uh like well i was going for 15 but like the 13th i'm like i actually have to stop my i feel like my glutes gonna cramp up and at that point i had never felt that my glutes got really sore when i do lunges and things i but i never got that cramping sensation that contraction That contraction. Right. Yeah. That peak contraction at the top. Yeah, most people don't train terminal hip extension. Right.

If you're doing squats and deads, then you get peak contraction, peak tension in the middle of the movement when you're still in hip flexion, not when you're almost at full hip extension. Yep. So I thought, oh my God, my whole life is going to change. I'm going to get this movement popular. And then I remember talking to a client that I was training the next day change. I'm going to get this movement popular. And then I remember talking to a client that I, I was training the next day and I'm like, I want to, you know,

write an article for T nation or like, I want to try to get this popular. Um, but how can I, I'm like, no one can buy a, a glute ham developer and a reverse hyper. And what if they split apart? It was dangerous. Plus it's a pain in the butt. This is, it would become a regular thing. So that's when my client was like, seems like you need to make something. And that's what I made right there, the scorcher. And I had it at my gym. And then, then, then two years later, I was like, okay,

I want to get this very popular. No one's going to buy that machine. Look how clunky it is. So I thought I need to teach this way. I need to teach this way I need to teach this off of standard equipment at that point I had never thought of doing it with a barbell and a bench we'd never done any of it at my gym two years we just used that guy but then I realized you can do barbell hip thrust off a bench and just roll a barbell up onto your lap so that's how I

taught it and then it took off um off. And it depends on the gym. Some people, their gym, everyone's doing it. Other gyms, like, not a single person does it. But it's cool because I'm getting tagged in every country, countries I didn't think paid attention to this stuff. You know, I'll get tagged in, like, Pakistan, people doing hip thrusts and stuff. And I'm like, wow, that's really cool. So you find this new crazy movement.

When does it turn into a research project? Good question. So I'm getting asked all these questions, and I hate not knowing the answer. I hate guessing. And back when I first started blogging, I think you're trying to prove yourself. I'm not as good of a scientist. You actually are a scientist, though. You have a Ph.Dd in biomechanics is

that is that correct yeah and you've done probably more emg research on on lower body movements than probably anyone in the world i actually think i i know i have with all the case studies i've done so because i've done so many probably 50 clients where we do like three straight hours of i mean all emg every single exercise they do. And what is that, by the way, for people that don't know? EMG stands for electromyography. It measures the electrical activity of muscles. So when someone says, like, this works the glutes and it works it more than the hamstrings, as an example,

like this is a way to quantify how much activation the muscle is getting. So it's a way to quantify, but there's just a new paper that came out that casts some doubt on everything I've ever done. But no, it's bothered me. Damn, damn. You should leave that out. I don't know. Well, this has always bothered me. Okay, so if I had you guys get down into a deep stretch, a full squat,

and squeeze your glutes it would measure around 10 percent of max maximum voluntary contraction isometric contraction then you stand up flare the feet out just a little bit squeeze the glutes as hard as you can now you get a hundred and i'm like it can't be that different but it's not just about activation it's about there's many other factors that yeah yeah there's range of motion there's uh time on time like the not just time or attention but you need you need a um a long enough contraction for because it all comes down mostly comes down to tension on the on the muscle fibers but muscle damage and metabolic stress contribute as well but tension is the key driver but like plyos have really high activation but they don't lead to as much hypertrophy because it's too fast yeah you don't have the cross bridge formation um to put all the tension on the fibers

so that's why you either have to lift heavy above like say 85 percent of one rm heavy enough to have slower contractions or go to close to failure to where they slow down and you're grinding them out that's why those two methods both build equal you say like the amount of tension is important and then the time under tension or that is that a different concept well because you could do plyos for like two straight minutes but each contraction is too short right so you need like a there's not a lot of total time there needs to be a slow enough contraction to get adequate tension development but uh anyway um god what was the question again research research oh yeah why did i become yeah so you might have to do that with me i go off on tangents and get lost um so that's where the magic is yeah oh yeah people would ask me that without

me people would ask me questions and i don't know the answer to them. And I want, you know, so that's why I got my PhD. It was never to become a research professor. I never intended on, I'm a gym rat. I'm a personal trainer. I love being in the gym. I don't like publishing papers. I don't like responding to peer reviewers.

I don't like that whole game. But like responding to peer reviewers i don't like that whole game but i have published like 42 papers i think i don't like it but i just do it more than most people dozens of times no that's because i'm good friends with brad schoenfeld who we're a good team together i know you guys had him on the podcast so yeah he just called me yesterday and with a new idea. He's curious like me, and we'll call each other and be like, did you see what this person wrote on Facebook? They're so wrong.

We need to do a study on this. We also joke that we're not very good at predicting things because our hypotheses are about 50-50. We're wrong as much as we're right. I think that makes for a good scientist you know i think a lot of scientists they create these studies that uh that you know they could be wrong but then they end up like manipulating it a little bit massaging the data and then their conclusions like don't match like i was like well your methods say that but your conclusions kind of like what and especially if you're at stats you can finagle some things yeah so it's i think it's

impressive that you hear a researcher say hey you know about half the time i'm wrong that's i think that's a good sign you um like stew phillips started coming out with this whole like lightweights builds muscle just as good as heavyweights and brad and i this was you know seven years back we're like no there's no way you can lift lightweights and gain as much muscle as heavyweights and Brad and I this was you know seven years back we're like no there's no way you can lift light weights and gain as much muscles heavyweight we just and we'd be like I like stew but I don't know about this and so then we did our own study and then you know when it's your own study like okay I know I did it right I controlled all the variables and get good methodology and so then you you. Then we're like, okay,

we've changed our mind. We agree with Stu now. It took us a while though. He deserved more respect early on, but he's helped change the game for hypertrophy. You're talking just about building muscle mass, not necessarily about getting strong while building that muscle mass.

You have to go heavy. It's so specific. It's intram about getting strong while building that muscle mass. Strength, you have to go heavy. It's so specific. It's intramuscular coordination. It's a skill. So for strength, you've got to be doing heavy lifting. For hypertrophy, if you don't like heavy lifting, you can go lighter and just rep out. And as long as you go close to failure and do enough volume, you're good. But that's important because some people don't like going heavy.

Also, some people don't like repping out. Like you guys, when you trained at my place a couple weeks back, you do what I do. Like I've written off like 10 rep squats in deadlifts. You do mostly singles, doubles, triples, work up to something heavy. Then you do speed reps. It's great because then you do it frequently and you don't hate it and you'll do it for life and then you can get your reps in with other

movements that aren't so freaking demanding. Andy just came off a knee injury so everything changes. Everyone's healthy and everyone's a superstar until that one day where life kicks you and everything has to change. You have to learn the hard way too.

Because until you get injured, you're like, yeah, these guys have to play it safe, but I'm invincible. Yeah. We actually need to take a break. So when we come back, I want to dig into how we're supposed to actually be training our glutes to optimize the thrust. Thanks for watching the show. If you'd like to learn more about how to improve your snatch clean and jerk,

we have a free 55 page ebook you can get at flightweightlifting.com. Has sample programming specifically for weightlifting, weightlifting how to technique videos and other tips on how to improve all of your lifts. Go to flightweightlifting.com and you can download that ebook for free. Download it now. And we're back.

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like anders buys yeah you go into my cabinet at home there's every single coconut oil that you could ever imagine you buy all the brands i don't buy any of them but it makes you feel great when it shows up at the door and you know that it came from thrive because they've built their whole brand around having healthy food available for people to make it easy. Just one click, and then the guy shows up, and he's got all the healthy fat you could ever imagine. Yeah. We made our own mayonnaise for the longest time because I go to the store, I pick up the mayonnaise jar, and I look at it, and I go, this is like the first thing on the list is some bullshit. And so we made our own for a while, and then i was able to go on thrive market and

what i like about that is going okay whatever's in my pantry there's an actual healthy version of it's there yeah or if it's not there then it may not exist on the planet yeah but uh i always get mayonnaise made with avocado oil now yeah there you go yeah and uh like they have the primal kitchen stuff on there like marks yeah all mark stuff yeah so Thrive Market's a great place to go. Check it out, especially if you live somewhere where you don't have access to high-quality grocery stores. Our other sponsor, Organifi, they make great, and they're expanding their product line all the time.

They have everything from greens drink to a red drink to different protein drinks. What I like about that brand is everything's plant-based, and it's really light. So if I'm doing a post-workout shake that's got protein in it or something like that, a lot of times it's whey protein. For me, for a long time, I would just deal with gut bloat after I worked out, but with this stuff, I just down it,

and it just kind of, I feel like it's absorbing. I don't know. It's not bloating me, that's for sure. Yeah, I always find that it's really easy for me to get the protein and fat that I need in a day. But finding a way to get all of the kind of micronutrients and just vitamins, how do I know what's in what I'm eating? Like, is eating a couple peppers a day enough but go going going to have some sort of supplement there and organifies um green drink the red one's delicious um the red one is really good yeah to be able to get in there and know

you're just getting as the daily allotment and it tastes good yeah i'm a total meat and potatoes type of guy like that's just what I would prefer to eat. Meat, mashed potatoes, butter, sour cream. That sounds like an awesome meal to me. I don't hear any vitamins in there. I eat vegetables because I have to. Some of them I really like, but eating a salad is just not something that I prefer to do. Having a green drink with my meal really just makes it easier to get all the nutrients I need.

You know what you can do? Just add bacon. And bacon. Yeah, yeah. You can do your veggies. Works every time. Brett's like, I don't eat vegetables. I eat steak.

Denny's. I actually get most of my protein through shakes. Oh, yeah? Really? And I do get the bloat, too. And I just. The bloat. That makes you strong, though.

Just hang that bloat. Helps you deadlift. Squatting. Yeah that makes you strong though just hang that bloat helps you dead squatting yeah would you would you like a bottle of canapha i would love it the power belly yeah the power belly you get some rebound off of it but now you're in california yeah so you got the beach there you can't be walking around with bloat yeah but uh yeah it's it's tough because i'm going i mean it's january now and i'm like, when does it start because I need to get in shape, but right now I'm just enjoying the – I mean, there's like – You have until April.

Right, April. So I've got three months, but there's four taco shops open 24 hours right near me, and I'm a night owl, so, you know. Oh, you're in trouble. And then when I finish my stuff, that's the way I reward myself. Tacos. Papers done, California burrito. Papers done, boom.

All right. Well, after the show, we need to smash some tacos because I'm super hungry. So getting back to the research piece, when you look at the glute just as a muscle region, how are you kind of the cross sections of it? You have not just the hip thruster, but I think you've revolutionized whatever this frog pump phenomenon is that's happening. What are the pieces and exercise selection that you go with to kind of dissect the glute a little bit and build as much muscle around that as possible. Okay. So kind of like three main, to simplify, if I'm designing a program for someone,

I try to make sure they get one or two exercises from these three categories. So that leaves a lot of options open. So the first category is your what I call horizontal or inter-posterior movements. These are where you're like supine or prone or if you're standing from a cable column but pulling you back, but it's front-to-back resistance as opposed to squats would be vertical because it's coming from above it's axial loaded when you do a hip thrust or like the top of a back extension it's pulling you down and the vector the force vector or if you were like trace the vector of the loading on you it's

horizontal in nature so we try and do a couple of horizontal well one to two horizontal loaded exercises one or two axial or vertical loaded exercises and then one or two lateral or rotary exercises there aren't there aren't a ton of rotary exercises but um um like this rotary exercise what's the example of that? All right, see that over there, the thing sticking out with the red band on it? Oh, yeah. That, TRX sells that, but it's the rip cord trainer or something, but there's not enough tension on it. For normal people, there is.

For a 250-pound man. TRX didn't have you in mind when they designed it. Mass market. We're going to go meet the half percent of people. No, trust me on this. You guys would be doing it, and you'd be like, it's not. And even you will reach, like you can't just keep stretching. The type of cord it is, it stops.

You can't just keep stretching it. So I replaced that with that, and it's amazing. So you can go out, walk really far out, and just really feel it. And there's a way to do it too. You don't want to get the band too close to your body because then it wraps around. You want it out far from the center line. I've seen cable attachments like that where it's just a big long metal rod with a hook on the end. The cook bar, yeah.

That's right, that's right. So you can do cable resistance or band resistance. Those work well. There's other things like the exercise you were telling me about. bar the clip bar yeah that's right so you can do cable resistance or band resistance those work well there's other things like the exercise you were telling me about you had the mace yeah and you were doing like lunges and things like that but really you want a pure rotary vector meaning like if you were to draw you know longitudinal axis through your body and it's out here yep there's only one company that makes something like that that i've found and they don't sell it's this ground force 360 machine used in research they

only have a few of them but you see these athletes that it's like the thing comes from above and you have this harness and you like twist with it it looks awesome i wish i had one but maybe some companies can develop stuff like that but in you can use the problems with bands. Every exercise has shortcomings. For example, squats at the top, they're easy. You don't have resistance through a full range of motion with exercises. So rotational things, you have a cable, and it doesn't stay this far away from you the whole time.

The line of force will get closer to you and then you don't have torque so um or torque requirements so um but most of the exercises in that category are lateral all the different lateral band walks all the different standing cable exercises their hip abduction movements and you can do two types so we alternate one day we'll do a frontal plane hip abduction movement and then and the next day a transverse plane where you're flexed where you're bent forward so it could be band seated or just from a hip hinge position where you're like that so they work different parts of the glutes and so to so if you wanted so from an aesthetic standpoint let's say you just wanted to focus on your the glutes and so to so if you wanted so from an aesthetic standpoint let's say

you just wanted to focus on your lower glutes axial loaded exercise are best for that squats lunges they still work a little bit of upper but they're the they're they they proportionally activate more of the lower fibers than the upper. That's what we want our ladies doing. Well. Let's see. Probably all of them. You want a shelf. I want to be able to put them up.

There's got to be a shelf. You've got to put the champagne glass somewhere. That's what I started noticing. The girls that I worked with, like I've worked with a lot of the top bikini Olympians. By the way way follow his instagram your insta stories are just just maybe not in public make sure you're people be like i'm on an airplane and yeah people think i'm a creep that's my that's my first that's my first thing in the morning yeah because i the only person that thinks i'm a creep is my wife yeah you're like safe sound

you're cool it's science it's science here so but yeah i i started noticing like my my clients would have more upper glute development because they were just it was popular just do the axial loaded squats deadlifts and yeah i've had them doing hip so the anteroposterior stuff the hip thrust the back extensions the reverse hypers the cable pull throughs all these things they activate really highly activate the upper and lower so they they hammer both regions now if you only wanted upper i don't know why you would only want upper but if say you want to target upper glutes let's do an experiment yeah just do i'm doing upper glutes for the rest of the year yeah 2018 is gonna get weird that looks like yeah you would do frontal plane hip

abduction i'll always tell have people do raise their leg out straight to the side you can poke the upper prod it and see that it's you know contracted hard and then you can um cup the lower region you can see it's flaccid there flaccid the word we'll go with that today hashtag flaccid glutes yeah it's not contracted so um it's dormant there you go so um so anyway so using this knowledge you can make sure if you do so what said, one to two exercise of each category, that leads a lot of options. So one day it could be, there's so many ways to design good glute programs. And I try to work with the person to say, what's your favorite style? Because, you know, you guys like total body training, right?

You guys like total body training. And so if you do a body part split training, you're like, okay, cool. My shoulders are annihilated, but I don't even feel like I did anything. That was so easy. So you're like frustrated. And then the body part split people are like, oh, I just worked my whole body, but I didn't hit any muscle from all the angles. I didn't fatigue any muscle.

So they're frustrated. So ideally you – I don't get frustrated about that anymore. But like you want buy-in because after they've seen success if they've seen good results then they'll do anything you tell them to do but initially you design their program i mean that's the sign of a great coach i mean after some experience you realize yeah you've got to cater to whatever the client yeah meet them in the middle a while yeah especially when they're physique people because i always hate when you have the functional um you know trainers that that like the clients like i i want to work on my arms and

they're like you know i don't we don't do arm exercises here in this facility we do functional exercises only and it's like just throw in the curls and tricep extensions at the end of the workout it's not going to throw them into overtraining mode. They're going to be all right, and it gives them buy-in. It makes them feel good. And we all have things that we want to, you know. For sure. That's becoming more and more accepted in the functional fitness world, by the way.

Like doing your functional fitness-y things and then assistance work at the end of your training, people are starting to see the value in that. Even like high-powered athletes like doing some curls here and there yeah like some shrugs like they it's not throw that in and then they like their workout more so it's it's only it's only bad if that's all you do if all you do is curls and crunches and bench press and that's all you ever do then then that's bad but but treating each individual muscle group as it's you know that considering that has its own importance and then training that muscle group equal to the other muscle groups, I think there's something to that for sure. Well, what I've always done in my programs, I did this in my book Strong Curves.

I do this with Strong by Brett. I say, all right, because my workouts might last an hour long. But I say you have 10 minutes after every workout to add in some stuff you like. So one day it could be some extra arm stuff So one day it could be some extra arm stuff. One day it could be some extra leg stuff. One day it could be some extra delt stuff. But that 10 minutes is cool because they can't get too much in. How much can you do in 10 minutes?

It's not enough to destroy you because you can do too much. You can easily do too much, especially if you – a lot of the single joint exercises can – like if I do too much tricep work, my elbows start getting achy, things like that. So if I do barbell curls, my forearms bones start hurting. So you want to limit it. You want to let them have it, but don't do too much of it, you know. So, but say one day could be squats. That's your vertical, you know know squats or a lunge and then maybe

you do like hip thrusts and you know reverse hypers those are your two horizontal and then you finish off with standing cable hip abduction okay there's one workout maybe that's monday maybe wednesdays is uh start out with barbell hip thrust pyramid or something you know and then then you do a romanian deadlift then maybe a walking lunge so you have your horizontal then two vertical then now you did a frontal plane movement a hip abduction movement the first day so this day you do a bent over one. You could do band seated hip abductions or something like that. So that's how you make a good comprehensive glute training system.

How often are your clients doing glutes? Is that a three day a week? That's the number one question I get from people. How often should I train the glutes? I typically say three days a week. I knew it. Here's what shaped my opinion on this. Should I train the glutes? I typically say three days a week. I knew it. Here's what shaped my opinion on this.

I remember in my first gym lifts, we would just train glutes every day but never go crazy. It was like three glute exercise but nothing, a couple sets of. But then I remember I met Natalia Melo. she had won Miss Bikini Olympia several years back and she's from Brazil and she's like you know in Brazil most of us train glutes every day we have like a special section a lot of the gyms it's just glute stuff and they have heavy ankle weights and they have all sorts of stuff they're like you know light years ahead I've trained with some Brazilians yeah with a couple ladies that all they want to train is their ass yeah that's it nothing else matters she has some of the nicest glutes in the world and she's clearly she's doing some stuff

every day but here's the caveat when i worked with her i'm like she's not you know crushing pr she's not killing herself she's not like going for you know it's a lot of higher reps it's like real quality like you know stuff that you the bodybuilders would do and so that and and it's funny because i this this made impression on me she's like you know this is my my i'm in the fitness field and this is my body and this is my you know my my meal ticket or my this is the money maker i don't want to be careless with it and so as i've become 41 years old now i'm learning that you know i don't if i i've deadlifted 620 if i never pull i always wanted 635 i thought that would be cool because

it's you know it's uh what six plates and uh plates and 25 on each side. But, yeah, if I never do, that's cool. I'm not going to force it. It comes great, but I'm not. I love being healthy, and if you've been sidelined from some injuries, it's not worth it anymore. But that's the way she trained, and it worked for her. If you were to try to do heavy squats deadlifts and lunges like five

times a week you destroy yourself you couldn't do it you cannot do that so yeah me too been there been there too yeah so that's why there's the variety and we throw in a lot of people scoff at my exercises and they it's such an arrogant thing because go look at my i go look at his instagram come on i could say to the whole industry this is going to be cocky but whatever i could say all right every strength coach in the industry throw your before and after pictures together maybe there's a thousand of you and then i'll put mine together and mine will beat all thousand of the top I know it would I get five a day so if they're five before and after pictures a day on my Instagram I know yeah

so I don't post a lot of them because it goes please don't share this but check this out you know can you DM me those ones yeah I'm uh library yeah so I'm not saying like you know i'm not saying i have the best possible way ever it's just that you like that's like the people that rip on louis simmons like come on yeah i agree maybe if you're a raw lifter you should tinker things but you got to give the man some respect um uh and i just believe people should try to learn from other people i learned from everyone i learned from i learned from every coach but i also learned from bodybuilders powerlifters crossfitters olympic weightlifters strongmen athletes different coaches and i love having that's what's nice about it in this gym you can

have people come here and learn some stuff like we all lifted together i'd be like what's this mace thing you're doing and then i'd try it and then if i liked it i'd give it to clients so yeah what uh there's a lot of crossfitters that listen to this show what what do you see are some things that well what have you learned from crossfit and then what do you think could be done better okay so i've worked with a lot of crossFitters who came to me wanting more glutes. So here's the hard thing because a lot of the CrossFitters are training five days a week already, maybe multiple times a day. So what do you do?

Add more stuff in? That's what's hard because I feel like I'm not one of those strength coaches. Like I'm a CSCS and I love CrossFit. I hate – I get embarrassed of my crowd when they, you know, bash CrossFit. I'm always like, what do you think you're going to cause it to go away? It's here to stay. CrossFit is here to stay. Yeah.

It's a sport. Are you going to bash – and then these – you're preparing people for football. Right. You're talking about strength and conditioning coaches that are – There's a sport. Are you going to bash? And then you're preparing people for football. Right. You're talking about strength and conditioning coaches that are coaching pro athletes or coaching Division I teams. They've been in strength and conditioning for a long time, and they didn't like that CrossFit was coming in and taking over. Not taking over, but growing as fast as it did.

In their defense, the only thing they ever saw was the YouTube CrossFit fail videos. Right. That's like cemented in this first generation of Street Riches Mind. I made one of those videos. Really? Not that I created it.

I was actually failing in one of them. Oh, gotcha. You made it in one of them. You were failing because you were doing deadlifts with like 135 and they thought

that was silly. I was going really fast with the lightweight. You were doing it correctly and all that it actually it actually wasn't bad but no it did get pointed out i was like what the fuck yeah but yeah it wasn't the continental lift one where oh no yeah that's good that one went crossfit albany sorry guys but anyway um yeah CrossFit has the best.

You have to look at things and go, why is, in everything, in business, in life, in fitness, you have to look at things and go, why are they so successful? And take from that the camaraderie through the roof. You can't take, back to the videos, you can't take the videos of everyone that does it poorly and then extrapolate that to everyone that does it. You've got to look at the people that are actually leading the industry and say, what are those guys doing? Are they doing it silly or are they actually contributing

and trying to make the whole industry better, which has happened a lot over the last 10 years. Well, you look at there's such a disparity between the top 3% of every profession and the lower 3%. This goes for personal trainers. You go to commercial gyms, and I remember I like having commercial gym memberships. I try to force myself to go so I can stay on top of what people are doing. Right.

Even if it's cringeworthy, you've got to know this. How are you going to help people if you never see it? And if you haven't trained at a commercial gym for, say, you just stick to your own little garage, and you go to the gym you're like oh my god what are they doing it's oh yeah i mean i met that forum and it's good to do that because we get stuck in a bubble yep um and then yeah you go to a regular gym and you're like oh i should be talking about this more online i should be making more posts about this because people are making you know these are very common very common mistakes. Not just form errors, but program design errors for their goals. You're like, that's not a good movement for their goal. But anyway, I've always liked CrossFit. I remember the first time I ever heard about it, I was in an Einstein bagels

like at ASU and I hear people like these two nerdy guys talking about cleans and snatches and I'm like those guys are Olympic weightlifters and I'm like there's no way like there's no way they look so nerdy but they're like I'm trying to get my clean and I'm like and I keep and I hear the word CrossFit then like two weeks later I hear the word CrossFit again I'm like it's getting people to like free weights yeah and the number of people that know what a snatch and a clean and jerk is is incredible now it's not strange to go anywhere and see pretty good form from someone you would never expect to be able to lift weights like why is that lady pulling herself under a barbell it's just that would never happen 10 years ago

yeah i remember i remember the moment i learned what a snatch and clean and jerk was it was summer of 2006 and i remember and i'd been training for almost a decade at that point and if you would have told me that there'd be a ton of people doing it you know five ten years later i've been like you're fucking crazy yeah yeah so uh so you asked what I feel could be improved upon. Yep. And it's funny because there's actually a video I saw. I think it was Greg Glassman was talking to, like, I don't know,

he was giving some speech to, like, I don't know if it was some military, like, Navy or something or Army or something. But at the end of it, he's like, if it was some military, like Navy or something or Army or something. But at the end of it, he's like, if there was a better way, we'd incorporate it. We'd blend it in. And I'm like, I see all these glute ham raises. Glute ham raises are knee flexion. They're not much glute. I've measured the glute activity.

Why would the glutes contract maximally in a glute ham raise? It's knee flexion. What do the glutes have to do? Hold glute hammer is it's knee flexion what do the glutes have to do hold the torso up glutes do hip extension what are the hip extension requisites of a glute yeah you feel them a little bit squeeze but it's not maximal yeah well no one's you really well i won't say no one but a lot of people are just using it for sit-ups the ght sit-ups right yeah but they you know they have the other barbells you're poking the bear but you you've got all the barbell lifts so the good things they're doing, they're focusing on squats, deadlifts, Olympic lifts.

And that's great. And lunges and stuff like that. There's a lot of axial loading. But I'm telling you, it's not enough. When I start working with them, I've probably trained 2,000 people since I was like 20 over the past 21 years. And it's the weirdest thing with hip thrusts um a guy last night that I uh two nights ago I trained uh my friend Paul Ravella he has never done hip thrusts before but he's tall like me and where some people are just well suited for

hip thrusts his very first time he got 405 for six 405 pounds for six reps good form and his glutes he's feeling it in his glutes i've trained other people who so this was when i was in new zealand there was a crossfit gym owner and this guy was from zimbabwe um and jack dude so strong he had like a 455 squat and like a 495 deadlift so i started out with barbell glute bridges and i think i'll put 135 on there this will be easy for him he couldn't budget i had to go teach him body weight and he had a lot of anterior pelvic tilt too so i teach him body weight and he's trembling at the top as if it's like a max effort thing so i gave him body weight glute bridges seven days a week i just said three sets of 10 and these were like max effort for him like he'd be at the top like

and then i also gave him the rounded back back extensions well his deadlift went up 60 pounds in one month from those two exercises because think about it he you know He's so weak up at the lockout. He fixed the deficiency. 60 pounds when you're at 500. Yeah, so he hit like a 640 or, sorry, like a 555 or something like that. And he loved me because – Yeah, for sure. He probably hadn't PR'd in two years. But he had big glutes.

He had big glutes. So this is what – this does not mean he had weak glutes. It means he probably had strong glutes in deep hip flexion and then weak glutes at end range hip extension. So it's kind of like range-specific strength there. But a lot of CrossFitters have a lot of hyperextension-related issues because of all the axial, all the Olympic lifts, all the squats, especially a lot of the females. And they'd crush my girls in squats.

They'd crush my girls in all the squat variations and Olympic lifts. But my girls crush them in all the horizontal-based stuff, hip thrusts and everything. So you don't want that big of an imbalance there you want to be incorporating so if crossfit just started doing some of the there's so many good variations to do but glute bridges hip thrust frog pumps back extensions they should add those in and i feel like people would see that not just aesthetically better results because everyone likes aesthetics for sure yeah we all like being good physiques, and glutes are important, but also from a functional standpoint, the glutes are, like you mentioned,

they're the keystone of the body, and every muscle is important. I don't like to just be unfair with the glutes, but if you look at the connections that the glutes have, I mean, not just with the femur, the sacrum, the pelvis, but also with the fascia. They're connected with the thoracolumbar fascia, the iliotibial tract, even the pelvic floor, the deep fibers. So through the iliotibial tract, they connect to the lower limb, you know, through the thoracolumbar fascia of the upper body and through the core and everything. So it affects a lot of things. So just anecdotally, so many people, when they start doing, adding some of these things in, you start hearing as a

trainer, you start hearing all sorts of things like, you know, from clients, like I'm from lower back pain improvements to hip. i don't have the hip pain anymore when i squat i don't have lower back pain anymore i'm when i can do this hike and i don't develop low back pain like i used to three-fourths of the way up the up the mountain things like that i'm walking i feel like my strides are more powerful those are the things you tend to hear but the one thing i urge people not to do is, like, you see someone hip thrusting 5, 6, 700 pounds these days. You don't realize that I started off with 185 back in the day. It took me a couple years to work up to 405.

And then a couple more, you know, start out with body weight or light loads. Feel the glutes squeeze and then build up gradually with them. Yeah. For someone who is attending a fitness class, you know, and they've just done a bunch of squats and presses, maybe did a Metcon, would you say to do these exercises before or after your workout, or does it matter? I feel like I wrote a blog post once, once like CrossFit needs a glute wad. But if they, if they just did like a,

you know, and I don't know if, if you do it before, it's going to affect your, because glute activation is popular, but glute activation is low load activation. The whole point is quality, not quantity.

You could do a hundred, but you stop at 10. You're looking for quality. Yeah. You're not fatiguing yourself. With this, you are fatiguing. This is an actual workout. But yeah, if they threw in some hip thrusts, but you could decrease volume of certain things and add volume in other things.

It sounds like you could do activation in the beginning, something easy, and on the back end, that's what you just burn it out. I don't really do activation, though, because you're going to get it in the beginning something easy and on the back end that's my clients don't even really do activation though because you're going to get it in the workout so i don't have them do all this activation stuff i have them go into deep ranges of motion for stretching because the dynamic there's studies on this the dynamic warm-up with like lunges and things that those act those get you prepared those improve performance where short-length stuff don't. Like all the glute activation stuff doesn't increase sprinting times like lunges and stuff do because you want to prepare the muscle for longer ranges. So I just don't do those in the warm-up.

But a lot of powerlifters like to do that, I know, and it makes them feel better. A lot of these powerlifters are warming up for 45 minutes. But I think the whole goal is to not have to do yeah to get your body feeling better but when you're so focused on squats and deads that's uh everything's so tight yeah yeah so speaking of you're mentioning how it can help out with aspects of functional fitness so to speak so if you're doing hip thrust you're working on terminal hip extension you talked about how that can help with like the lockout of a deadlift that's why that guy one of the reasons that guy probably hit a new pr but then a second ago you just mentioned sprinting and so if you're running a full speed sprint then terminal hip extension becomes really really

important so someone's trying to get faster if you're a football player or soccer player someone that actually is going to be running full speed i feel like hip thrusts are probably really important for those for those athletes so that's uh that's what kind of sparked my desire to want to get a phd um we did we did all the hip thrusts off that scorcher and in my gym and i had about probably of those two years about 10 different clients that would come to me now none of these were sprinters they were all runners like and not not all competitive runners they were like just people who would run but they knew their times they'd work out with me for a couple months they wouldn't run at all then they'd go one weekend for a run and they'd be like oh my god i smoked my best two mile time and i haven't done any running

and they'd go it's the hip thrust well i started every workout out with hip thrust because that was the center that was like the my gym had one and that's what made me unique um so and that's what got me a lot of clients right off the bat i had so many clients from women would just love that and go you know tell their friends i remember one client got 12 people on her own to train with me so uh i'd say, why do you think it's the hip thrust? We do everything. You know, we do Bulgarian split squats. We do squats, deadlifts, lunges, step-ups, Romanian deadlifts, back extensions, reverse hypers, you name it. We do all these things. Why do you think it's the hip thrust? Well, I feel my glutes working on the ground,

kind of like how I do with that. So that's why I would lay at night and think like, hmm, what's the difference between a squat and a hip thrust? And I remember trying to explain it back in the day before I understood biomechanics. Really, they just have different hip extension torque angle curves. I didn't know how to say that back then, but the curves are different. You have different ranges of motion, but the hip thrust is harder through more of the range of motion, especially at the top. So yes, I do believe that it transfers well to sprinting, but I also believe that the hamstrings are the most important muscle group for sprinting. There's a few studies on hip thrust right now, and the research is equivocal. But this is why it's good to learn about research because you can start looking at them. My study showed acceleration improvements from hip thrust but not from front squats.

But front squats showed vertical jump improvements but not hip thrust. Specificity, right? It makes sense. Two other papers were published showing heavy hip thrust alone did not improve sprint performance. But here's what i say about um that like i came up with this hypothesis with that scorcher and you feel if you've done both of them you feel that way more range way more stretch on the hamstrings way more range of motion but also these protocols didn't have a tapering period and that's what a lot of research you look at a lot of this research

like it doesn't mimic what we do as personal trainers. It's hard. Research is hard to duplicate things. So, you know, Mike, if you're my trainer and you're like, okay, we're going to start giving you some exercises. You're not like, okay, Brett, day one, today we're going to max out, you know, and till you're grinding things out, you you know and then i'm going to take your one rep max and i'm going to take 85 of your one rm i'm going to give you five sets of five three days a week for six straight weeks then the following monday i'm going to retest you on some things we think about we throw these people in and crush them yeah and i don't do that with my clients i get the how's this feel body weight okay i clients. I get the, how's this feel?

Body weight. Okay, I'm going to add 65 pounds. How's that feel? Okay, we're doing high reps, sets of this. They're never in this like stressed out, like, you know, and when you go so heavy, you don't always feel the glutes working much. And you never got into that. I don't know. It doesn't always mimic what we do in the weight room.

What we do as personal trainers. But also you need a tapering period. You know, if you work with Olympic athletes to peak at a certain time, you always know you have to taper. So anyway, so that's why you have to, you know, think about if we relied on research to tell you how to train for the CrossFit games, what would we have? You have to rely on anecdotes.

You have to. That's why coaches like talking to other coaches. And athletes like talking to other athletes. You don't just go by research. Research is important. But I'm so sick of coaches that don't respect research and researchers that don't respect anecdotes. They're both wrong.

We have knowledge out there, and we can gain it. We can gain it through a lot of ways. When you're conducting the research on, you know, a specific movement, where do you kind of draw the line on how long we're testing this? Because if I practice the hip thruster for eight weeks, three times a week,

I'm going to get a lot stronger in hip thrusting just by practicing the movement versus am I really getting stronger or you know at other things yeah yeah yeah good question so this is always as a as a researcher you have to go okay the longer the study the better the more legit right the more valid but you also risk dropouts. So you're like, I don't want dropouts. We don't have these nutrition studies where we have 600 subjects. And strength and conditioning studies are usually like 20 subjects. Two groups are like 10 or something.

Right. And I wish we had more, but it's not easy. You've got to have strength coaches, and the people have to show up at the gym. Training study. When you have cross-sectional studies, like I'm going to do an EMG study, that's easy. The people come once or twice, and you do some stuff,

and then they leave, and you're done with collecting data. When it's a training study, they have to come for pre-testing, eight weeks of training, and then maybe a week or two of post post-testing so you have dropouts and it's the worst they'll drop out like one week before their data collection you're like and for some stupid reason you're like so that's the rub you gotta go okay that's why i likeweek studies, but it's not enough time really. But here's what's crazy. So I conducted a study on identical twins for my PhD thesis. So that's cool.

They're identical twins. That's rare to get like a strength and conditioning study with twins, right? Right, right. Very rare. I should publish it. I don't know why I have all these unpublished things. I want to acquire the knowledge for myself so i can be a better coach and then i i don't like the publishing route so i don't like 42 papers later it's not it's not paying enough i guess

well so well i'm not a i don't have publisher parish i'm not a professor i don't run a research incentives to spend that amount of time doing it. So anyway, here's what was cool. This is where I was like, man, I could probably be a better personal trainer. I had the stopwatch. I did two-minute rest times. Like we'd be talking in between sets. 30 seconds prior, I'd be like, okay, all right, get ready. 30 more seconds.

Okay, 10 more seconds. Okay, go. So we did strict rest periods. I've never done that. And then even after that, I don't. So we probably do too much. I've never done that. And then even after that, I don't. So we probably do too much rambling in between sets, too much rest time. But anyway, that's why I like training groups.

I don't get to ramble and get sidetracked like I do with one-on-one. But I also was down on my knee, ensuring parallel every rep, ensuring full lockout on the hip. So one twin did squats, one twin did hip thrust and uh obviously specificity the the squat twin gained a lot more squat strength the hip thrust twin gained a lot more hip thrust strength but the hip thrust twin this is what was so cool for me so she did her first time squatting she did 95 pounds but it was an ugly 95 pounds, but it satisfied the criteria. You know, when you write down the criteria, you don't say it has to look pretty. It's that they have to get below depth and whatever, you know, whatever you say, how you define it. But her knees

came in a little bit and it was just a little wonky, you know, but she got 95 pounds. Six weeks later, she was hip thrusting and she put hip thrusting. This was a DUP program. And I crushed them. It's funny because after the six, I think if I would have done a seventh week, they would have injured themselves. You can push yourself really hard for six straight weeks three times a week. So it was one day of, like, medium reps, one day of low reps, one day of high reps.

And at the end of the six weeks, she was doing, like, she could do, like, a 335-pound hip thrust. So she went from 195 to 335 on her hip thrust. But she never squatted once, never did, I mean, obviously she stood up from a chair, but she never practiced the squat movement pattern. I did not have that in the warm-up. I picked just lunges. That was their only warm-up exercise because i didn't want

to throw bridges or squats in there to right to confound anything so she had not practiced a squat movement pattern at all six weeks later she does a squat and hits uh 135 with the knees out they didn't cave as much it was beautiful she's like sat back and distributed stress well and i remember going holy crap she went up 40 pounds in six weeks on her squat from not even squatting. Was she doing those hip thrusts with the band around her knees? No. No? Just barbell.

Right. Probably even better if she had the bands around her knees. Yeah. But a recent study, the study I told you about that showed that it didn't transfer well to sprinting, they measured squat and hip thrust one rep max and these were japanese collegiate baseball players they gained 36 percent increased strength in the hip thrust and 31 percent increased strength in the squat so i went converted it from kilograms to pounds because we're american and need to be different.

I'm not good enough with kilos still, like registers. So these college baseball players were squatting. They were naive to the squat. Their one rep max was 185. And then after the six or eight weeks, whatever it was, it was 235 without ever squatting. So then it's so then it's like okay so hip thrusts are probably in the research the best assistance lift like that 31 percent oh yeah i've never heard of anything being so beneficial but i mean i imagine if i've been squatting my whole life and i you know i'm i'm not i found my plateau now i throw in hip thrusts. Maybe.

So here's what I say about that. Like these were beginners. But you cannot deny now with this research published that the hip thrust is a great assistance lift. But you hear power lifters, just like CrossFitters, Olympic weight lifters, power lifters, Strongman time to be like Zivikas. What's the guy's name? Zidrunas. Zidrunas Zivikas. He loves name uh he loves hip thrust loves them they're on his

instagram pounds right but like strong men tend to be open-minded bodybuilders the hip thrust has received a lot of criticism over the years and uh and i've always wanted to debate all these people like bring it let's go i always thought that was so weird like the first time i saw i was like i was like oh okay that makes sense it's a single joint movement you're just going from from hip extension to hip flexion back to hip extension you're basically it's like it's like doing pull-ups and then doing bicep curls and you go squat and then you do your hip thrust it's like it's just working that muscle group to failure you mentioned sprinting but olympic lifting i from coaching a ton of people in Olympic lifting, the hardest thing to get someone to do is to understand the patience to get the bar to your hip and then finish. And it seems like the perfect fit for how do we get actual hip extension into a bar and make you really strong at the same time.

I feel like it's a good assistance for Olympic weightlifting, too. But everyone's so traditional. And think about how many stupid fads we see. We're trained. we're trained we're trained to just go stupid stupid stupid but the hip thrust is different like it really is legit and um but what i what i say about that is what am i gonna do be like um come on guys like it well power lifters the top power lifters in world. Some of these guys are squatting raw, squatting over 1,000 pounds now. And, God, I forget the guy's name right now.

He's probably the best squatter in the world. I have the worst memory. Anyway, he just does the big three. That's all he does. He doesn't do any rows. He doesn't train his back he gets that with deadlifts whatever he doesn't do any other lifts and what am i going to do go say hey you're doing it wrong you should do hip thrusts obviously i want to watch that interaction

think about um think about uh like when you're when you're squatting 1,000. What is your warm-up like, your specific warm-up? Does he start at 135 for 5, 225 for 5, 315 for 5, 405 for 3? You've got to put 100-pound plates. I don't know. I think he probably makes 90-pound jumps. 225's got to be set number one. I don't know.

Whatever it is. Yeah. Frightening. Does he start off with body weight? And how long? then he gets to like what is it like 765 and then that's when he starts thinking yeah like i should probably take this he's using 50 kilo plates then you're like wrapping the knees and like the bell you gotta get psyched walk it out like that's so specific that's so hip thrusts aren't going to help him squat or deadlift more not necessarily they might i don't know but at that point so i can see like powerlifting is a

sport it's a skill you should mostly do those the specific deadlifts and squats and bench in the way that you do them in competition but i know so many guys who started doing dup so many clients when i got into dup they were injury free up until they tried dup it's it's greedy sorry dp was that daily undulated periodization it's like gotcha it's really there's no set but it's like usually people people tend to do it with squats dead you could do it with leg press and chin-ups. They mainly do it with squats, deads, bench, military. And you tend to do things three times a week. You could do it just twice a week, or it could be twice every 10 days.

There's no set. It's just a fluctuating, you know, you're doing different set and rep schemes, alternating between higher and lower. And I think a lot of the – it's seen some success in the research, and I think a lot of it just comes from preventing boredom. Think if you did linear periodization, I'm like Anders. You're going to do one month. You're going to squat three times a week for four sets of ten. Think about you're like starting your fourth week of four sets of 10

three times a week that's five extra pounds on the bar yeah right sweet right and then five pounds a week no matter what yeah no matter what five pounds a week add five pounds of the bar each week i think the dup you'll be in here yeah after while, you end up just kind of getting into a DUP system without knowing that someone put a name on it. Right, right, right. Yeah. Because it's not so boring. Yeah. Like, you'd be excited.

Because say I said squat three times a week. For this six-week block, you're doing four sets of ten. Then you're going to do whatever, five sets of eight, and then whatever. That's boring, but when you do it three times a week in different, like say I had you do, you know, four sets of 10 one day, five sets of three one day, and two sets of 15 another day. On the five sets of three day, you're like, oh, this is my strength day. On the four sets of 10, you know, this is my hypertrophy day or something.

And then there's two sets of 15, you're like, okay, this is my whatever, my high rep, my endurance day. I'm going to, you know, whatever. I'm flushing through whatever we think, whatever our minds. Whatever story you tell yourself. You're really just hitting all the rep ranges and doing it with differentiating weight. And if you are actually good at listening to your body,

you would just naturally do it. Do that anyway. Not just with the reps, but also the exercises too. But anyway, yeah, so I think I've rambled about that enough. When you sit down with a client, I mean, we kind of, you have all of the exercise selection. What is like a loading volume for a week? Does it matter to you, guys, girls? How do you kind of differentiate volume?

So obviously with females, I'm going to... And adding on to that, not just glute training, but how do you get the rest of your body involved in this? Yep. So with the females, what I tend to do is I just do what I told you about earlier with the vertical, horizontal, and then I throw in their one upper body press and one upper body pull. Now, the popular way for a lot of the strength coaches was you need to do a vertical and horizontal press and a vertical and horizontal pull. But if they're training three days a week, doing two presses and two pulls i don't i

don't think it's not necessary it's even can be counterproductive like you know you you don't need to like doing like bench press and military press on day one and then day two doing like incline press and push-ups and then you could just do one press and one pull and if you're doing like chin ups and inverted rows and things like that these ladies will actually they're used to like if they come from a body part split and initially they'll be like i'm used to doing so many more exercises but i get them to where they can do they're doing one chin-up and then in three months they're doing 10 chin-ups some of my ladies do that not everyone of course that's very dependent on a lot of things, your physique and stuff.

But their back gets more muscular from just doing one pull three or four times a week and one press, especially if you get them like push-ups for males are easy, but real strict push-ups for women is a good bench press assistance lift. You know, I remember all my – I had what I call the glute squad. We had like six to eight ladies that trained with me twice a week. And then I'm like, God, their bench press has stalled for like two straight months. No one's said a PR. And I'm – what am I doing?

Okay, I'm going to switch things up. I'm going to just give them push-ups. Push-ups and incline press that month. Maybe I didn't even say six weeks. Coming back, like two of the six girls hit PRs their first session back, but then by the end of the next month, every girl hit PRs. So that's the whole – I love the debate about specificity versus variety, but I'm a variety guy for injury prevention and, you know, like not –

like the joints can handle variety better than just loading one pattern over and over and over. So for a longevity standpoint, but also for like mortals like us, we tend to do better with more variety. But then we can get carried away with variety to where it takes you away from your goal, you know, especially if it's strength related. I tend to think with my own programming and me and me and andrews train a lot these days like i think about everything in categories like you you mentioned with the glue

so there's three main categories you're hitting and then within those categories you have a variety of a variety of different exercises and methods that you can use within those very specific categories so every workout i do even if it's the same workout all the exercises might be different one day i might be doing front squats the other day I might be doing back squats, and then the other day I might be doing, you know, bottom up front squats with chains, or like, I can do so many different exercises to get that variety where psychologically, it's much more entertaining for me to like, to be able to not do the exact same exercise that I did last time, but I know that categorically I'm still hitting the same muscle groups, the same movement patterns, et cetera,

and I'm doing it in a comprehensive way, but it's different every time, quote, unquote. And I like that as your normal base. And then if you ever needed to, like say Anders was like, I'm going to help bench press you six weeks from today. Yeah, right. Six weeks from today. Yeah, right. Six weeks from today. Going on a cycle.

Put it on the calendar. You could say, okay, now I'm going to. I know a guy. You heard of Sarms? So you could then say, okay, I've got six weeks. You haven't been reaping all your specificity gains. You've been doing variety. So then you could say, I'm going to do bench press two or three times a week for the next six weeks.

And then you're always leaving a little bit of room in the tank. But if you're always, always doing pure specificity, then you're not leaving any room for those gains once the time matters. That's why, you know, powerlifters should have an off-season and a competitive, you know, training portion. Yeah, I think a lot of research says that just the more experienced an athlete is, variety is just better for them when we're talking about longevity. It's like you can't just keep doing the same thing forever i don't know if i've seen research on that but i think coaches would agree

yeah but that's the thing about coaching there's a difference between getting athletes good at a sport versus power so initially i think like the olympic weightlifters and powerlifters made for the best coaches because they know how to coach the lifts the best but you get carried away and you can make someone also it's great when you work with high school kids uh you know that's why when i hear some of these track and field people be coaches be like weight training doesn't help and i'm like you freaking moron you that is the stupidest thing i have ever heard in the history of mankind because you're only thinking about max like like 100 meter sprint we're talking about sports.

And you take these high school kids and they take them during an off season. They don't even do any plyos or sprints. And you weight train them for three straight months. They come back and they're jumping one or two inches higher. Their broad jump is 12 to 16 inches further. They shaved a 0.1. And they're bigger and more muscular their agility improved everything improved their rotational power improved they're

bigger stronger faster more resilient it works with everyone and then but then you get the coaches that are too into their uh you know strength sport and that can take away like if if i remember my first article that got popular i was trying to make a big a big entrance onto the scene my first article you know i need to be i need to tell it how it is nine reasons you're an idiot so i said i said like you know i mentioned that Usain Bolt would be faster if he did hip thrusts. Typical cocky rookie, you know, like younger coach comment. But I wanted to say to people. We've all been there.

Yeah. And if I would have trained Usain Bolt back then, I would have been like you. I would have hammered him with too many strength exercises. He wouldn't have been as fresh for his sprinting. And he would have gotten slower. It would have taken me a while to realize, crap i'm doing this wrong and then you know now i would have to i saw your apology on t nation no it didn't work it wasn't there well so yeah it was 2009 you know so yeah but But now that I'm more knowledgeable and also more comfortable as a scientist, you don't have to know everything.

You don't have to be the best at everything. If I had a son that was like world-class sprinting, I'd send him off to some of my favorite track and field coaches. You guys train him. You know more about this than I do. But I'll train your daughter to have the greatest glutes and be a bikini competitor you specialize they're like you stay the fuck away yeah i know maybe that wasn't a good but like i i'm excited to have this lab now because i can train some athletes now and you got to be training athletes to develop systems you know definitely and then working with

that population so i'm excited to have this gym to be able to work with more people yeah you weld that bar all by yourself which this guy here yeah no that's a dead squat bar from uh biotest so it's pretty cool these neurals are very very nurled, but you can rack it. That's what's cool. It's rackable. See right here? So you could do like rack pull, like trap bar rack pulls if you wanted. Wow.

Actually, you know the movie American Sniper? Okay, yeah. He's doing the trap bar rack pulls in the movie. Actually, he did that in his training. Bradley Cooper. I never watched that movie. Jason Walsh. I haven't seen the whole thing.

Oh, really? I saw the beginning of it on an airplane, and we landed, and I haven't watched the rest. His trainer is Jason Walsh, and Bruno, they were prescribing that to him. Okay. And then they had it in the movie. It was pretty cool.

That was cool. Dude, awesome gym. If you're in San Diego, come by there. Well, I don't know. Do you want people dropping in? Yeah, I do. I just haven't figured out. You just don't want homeless people dropping in.

If you have a home, you're welcome here. That's what you just said. You need to have an address. PO Box does not count. Thanks for coming on the show. This is awesome. Where can people find your stuff and more about you? So my name is Brett Contreras, but if you forget it,

you can just type in the Glute Guy into Google, and my website will come up. And then from there, my website can point you to my social media, my Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and my newsletter. will come up and then from there my website can point you to my social media my instagram facebook twitter youtube and my newsletter i never spam people i only send it out like probably like once every six weeks these days but it's just like article things that i've been doing and updates and stuff so that's just type in the glute guy oh yeah thanks uh and uh d Doug and I are expanding some of the stuff that we're doing and what do you got going on,

Doug? Yeah. I'm gonna start doing some seminars soon. Um, might do some seminars with Andrews actually, but, uh, we've kind of gotten away from,

from coaching and leading groups of people through fitness type things since we've been focusing on the show for so long, but I really want to get back to that. So, uh, really excited to be doing some seminars in 2018. So if you're interested in that, uh, I'm going to be running those through my own site, Doug Larsonfitness.com so go over there and check that out and i'll put out more information about the seminars probably in the coming weeks or

months dope dope what about you andrews what do you got going on um come and hang out with us at movement rx um all the strength and conditioning rehab um, low back, shoulders, knees, and strength and conditioning programs mixed with some physical therapy to get you healthy. And Anders Varner on all things social. If you want to get in some weirder conversations with me, go over to thebloodsofshow.com, and we'll have a good time over there. Make sure to hit iTunes, five-star review, positive comment,

and hit over to YouTube as well. Subscribe. We're always putting out some really good videos. You bet. Thanks, Brett. Thank you. Thanks for making it all the way to the end of the show. If you liked the show, which I know you did,

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we talk to the founder of Thrive Market, Kinnar Lovelace, and he tells us about the future of food.