Barbell Shrugged - The 20-Rep Squat Method with Scott Charland, Doug Larson, Travis Mash & Dr. Mike Lane #841

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

In this episode, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, and Dr. Mike Lane sit down with longtime strength coach Scott Charland to unpack what it really takes to build athletes and build a sustainable career in strength and conditioning. Scott shares his path from collegiate strength coach to leading one of the most unusual and impressive sports performance models in the country at Parkview Sports Medicine, where a team of 24 strength coaches works alongside athletic trainers, physical therapists, nutritionists, and mental performance coaches to serve high schools, colleges, and youth athletes. The conversation highlights a major theme early: the high school setting is not the bottom of the profession, it may be the place that most needs elite coaches, clear boundaries, and a better quality of life. From there, the group digs into one of Scott's signature training methods: a brutal but highly effective high-volume squat progression built around sets of 12, 15, 17, and eventually 20 reps in the back squat. Rather than rushing young athletes into heavy percentages, Charland argues that most high school and college athletes need more practice, more muscle, and more time under the bar before they ever need max-effort work. The crew breaks down why high-rep squatting can build technique, hypertrophy, work capacity, bracing, confidence, and mental toughness all at once. They also explain why so many coaches make the mistake of chasing record boards, maxes, and flashy methods too early, when what most athletes really need is development. Finally, the conversation broadens into a bigger critique of the strength profession itself. Scott makes the case that many of the profession's problems come from poor boundaries, ego-driven career decisions, and a culture that glorifies burnout. Instead, he argues for clearly defined roles, better pay floors, healthier schedules, and more realistic career paths, especially at the high school and private-sector levels. If you care about athlete development, coaching careers, or how to build stronger athletes without skipping the foundation, this episode is a direct and practical reminder that more muscle, better movement, and smarter systems still win. Doug Larson on InstagramCoach Travis Mash on Instagram  

Shrug family, Doug Larson here. And today on Barbell Strug, we're joined by Scott Charlend. He's a long-time collegiate strength conditioning coach who now leads one of the most impressive high school and sports performance systems in the country. We get into why high-rep back squats are one of the best tools for building muscle and ingraining high-quality technique. We also talk specifics regarding Scott's brutal but highly effective 20-rep back squat progression and why hypertrophy is the number one priority, especially for young athletes. And so if you coach athletes, especially high school athletes, and why a better framework for developing strength and athleticism, This show is for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Barbara Shrug.

I'm Doug Larsen here with Coach Travis Mash and Dr. Mike Lane. I'm here with longtime strength coach Scott Charlin. And Scott, we were talking before the show. You've been having that you have a program that you've been doing for many years on 20 rep back squats, which I definitely want to dig into. I have my own history with 20 rep back squats. And I know Mass does as well. Mike, I'm assuming you do too because you guys had worked together.

At one point, which we'll hear out here in a second. What's your background? And how did you get into the world of strength and condition? Sure. So my background primarily is as a collegiate strength and conditioning coach. So I was a collegiate strength and conditioning coach for 20 years. Actually got my undergraduate degree at Florida State in the early 90s. And as not a student athlete of any kind, I really didn't even know about the profession. So my career kind of took me into corporate fitness. So for the first couple of years of my career, I was, you know, teaching aerobus classes and putting ladies through the Kaiser Circuit and all that kind of stuff. And then, This is pre-Internet days. As the internet became available, stumbled across the NSCA and was like, now this is really what I want to do.

So did my graduate assistant strength and conditioning work at the University of Alabama, Birmingham under Stacey Torman, who is still there. She's been there for 30 years. She was the first female master strength and conditioning coach in the collegious strength and conditioning coaches association. So I had a great experience there. From there, went to the University of Alabama,

Tuscaloosa to do my internship with the CSCCA and then had an opportunity at Birmingham Southern College. So my wife was the volleyball coach at Birmingham Southern College. They were transitioning from NAA to Division I. And so they didn't have a strength coach. So I started working with her team. And then the basketball team started seeing me do that. And then they got on board.

And eventually it worked into me being the first strength coach there. And in all honesty, I was making thoughts. $10,000 a year per team, so that was $10,000 to be the head strength coach there. But had a chance then to go to Ohio State. So I was an assistant strength and conditioning coach at Ohio State 2005 to 2008. But as great as that was to be an assistant, worked under coach Anthony Glass, who I feel is the best strength conditioning coach in the country. I wanted to run my own program again like I did at Birmingham Southern. And so I had the opportunity at St. Louis University to do just that, which is where I met the ying to my yang, Dr. Lane over there.

And so had a blast there for five years. And just kind of in trying to work my way up the ranks, you know, at St. Louis, I had one graduate assistant, but needed to get, you know, more staff under control and more supervision. So I went to Temple University where I had two full-time assistants and two G.E. was there for two years. Butler University then is a head strength conditioning coach. And finally, now I'm at Parkview Sports Medicine. So Parkview Sports Medicine, we are the sports medicine provider for Parkview Health. Parkview Health is Northeast Indiana's largest health care provider.

At Parkview Sports Medicine, we provide athletic training services, physical therapists, strength and conditioning coaches, mental performance coaches, and sports nutritionists to over 80 high schools. five colleges and universities and 10 youth sports clubs. So right now I oversee a staff of 24 strength and conditioning coaches. Twelve of those are embedded in our high schools. Five of those are embedded in our universities. And then the rest of us operate two private sports performance facilities. So think of like a D1 sports or what velocity sports used to be.

We also manage two of those I oversee just in our club athlete training. We train about 1,500 athletes a week during the winter. And, you know, we're super busy, and I've been doing that for seven and a half years. And it's one of the most unique jobs in strength and conditioning. And it's absolutely wonderful. That is unique. Wow. Very cool.

So you have that whole team of various experts, physical therapists, nutritionists, strength condition coaches, set of that work with high school athletes. And like they have access to not just one professional, like the whole team that all work together as a unit. Right. So like I mentioned. We have over 80, 90 athletic trainers. Every school that we have, every high school that we have, like I said, which is like over 40 and then the five universities,

they have an embedded athletic trainer in there. Not all of them have the strength and conditioning coach with us, but the embedded athletic trainer. And so the athletic trainer will refer them then to those physical therapists, the college athletes, those physical therapists ask they go on campus twice a week during the school year to work with the athletes. So it's an integrated system from athletic trainer to physical therapist to strength and conditioning to sports, nutritionist, mental performance. It really is a professional level of service for high school and collegiate athletes in Northeast Indiana.

How did you find that position? It's on the NSA website. Yeah. So I started, well, I didn't start it. Parkview started it. But I was the first essentially higher to oversee the program. They had the concepts of a plan, as we say. They had a concept of what they wanted to do.

do. And then it was kind of up for me to lay the foundation and see what we wanted to do and get it working right. And I had been in the profession for a while. I had young children at the time kind of of the age that this would have been something for. And just quite frankly, had the vision to see what this could become. We started with four employees. Now we're at 24. We started with, you know, about $100,000 that first year in sales. We're now over half a million. So it's just one of those things where my experience and having kids and all the steps along the way allowed me to do this. And then again, in just a little bitty town like Fort Wayne, Indiana, where you would not think something like this is going on. We truly have the largest strength and conditioning staff probably in the country.

We have 24 CSES that I manage that's larger than any university. There may be some other health care system, Sanford Sports out in the Dakotas that are as big. but we may be the largest strength and conditioning staff in the nation. Definitely sounds familiar. Have you ever heard a performance course? It's like a group out of Dallas in the Dallas area, but they work with weirdly 80 different high schools in the Texas area. Yep.

I don't know that they do the, I know they do the certain condition coaching. I know they do the mental performance. I don't know that they do the athletic training. Yeah. Our whole system's kind of revolved around the athletic training. to get the student athletes captured. And then once they're, hey, you know, the athletic trainer can refer them to PT, can refer them to one of our orthopedic surgeons, can refer them to sports nutrition,

can refer them to mental performance coaches. And then we kind of come alongside in the strength and conditioning. You know, if the athletic trainer sees them fumbling around at their school, are the football coach is doing it, are the gym teacher doing it? They're like, hey, we have this service. Then they get in contact with me and we see if we can make something work. Yeah, man, I would definitely like to maybe off to the air too. Like, we're trying to do something similar in the area in North Carolina.

And so, you know, Gino, the guy who started the performance course is kind of helping us. But I would love to get your input too. Absolutely. Because, you know, the schools need it. I think what you're doing. Oh, bad. Yeah. The service you're providing is like, I feel like it should be like, it should be in a perfect world mandated.

Because what we all see on Instagram and God, I'm not. This is not me knocking on high school coaches, but they're doing their best. But when you tell the high school football coach, hey, you have to be the high school fifth coach and he doesn't know what he's doing when you're going to give it to your good. Yeah. Well, and I always say, you know, this is another topic, but it's kind of like a Pandora box. Say we did that and put a strength coach at every high school.

How many high schools are there in the country? Are there that many good strength coaches? No. Yeah. We may be, you know, like, oh, we could solve this problem and then we have to go higher 5,000 strength, and it's like, ooh, we got over our shoes a little bit. Oh, yeah. Catch 22.

You know, we want to help these kids. But then it's like, who's going to do these jobs? And there is a finite number of good coaches. And everybody says, well, you know, high school strength and conditioning, it's kind of the bottom, and then you go to collegiate and then professional. I disagree. That couldn't be more wrong. You need the best at the high school level.

They're dealing with the most athletes. Dealing with the most distracted athletes, the most variety, boys, girls, in season, out of season, good, bad. That's a big time, responsible job that you can't just have somebody fresh out of undergraduate, put them in that position and think they're going to be successful. Well, the coaches, I was able to lecture to a few of those coaches in Texas, and the majority of them had been Division I. They just didn't want to do the whole move around the world thing. They wanted to have families. And now in Texas, these guys were making a really good living wage. So there were several of them making six figures or more at the high school level and able to keep a family, not move around.

You know, you move 24 times in your kids like high school career. That's no good. 100%. And I've hired a bunch of ex-college strength coaches into these high school positions because the job, as you met, it's well-paying. going to make, you know, like the head football strength coach Alabama is going to make, but you're going to make more than a living wage. And your job is basically eight to four. You know, my guys get on campus an hour before school starts. They're there on campus an hour after school ends. They never work past 430. They never work weekend. You know, they work

four days over the summer. The quality of life in strength and in high school strength and conditioning destroys collegiate strength and conditioning. I mean, it's not close. So for folks with families, I might will attest to this, 20 years as a strength coach, I never once had dinner with my family. This is like, are you, you know, don't even ask that question. How could that, you know, with the exception of weekends, that's just ain't going to happen. Where these guys are so many divorced coaches, you know. Yeah, 100%.

I'd be one of them if my wife wasn't a total saint because I moved her around the country all over the place. When she was, when I took the Ohio State job, she was two months pregnant with our son. And when I took the St. Louis job, she was seven months pregnant with our daughter. And I was like, see ya. Figure it out. Get us moved and over here. You know.

Well, it seems like there's more and more people coming into the world of strength and conditioning. Because there's more and more people that have now grown up lifting weights. Yeah. It's just that much more popular in across the board. More and more people have grown up in crosswood gyms and the McCain CrossFit coaches or whatever, you know, or similar gyms where they're actually learning to lift weights from the early age. There's more high school strength coaches now. So they're doing strength conditioning in high school.

They'll graduate and they'll have a strength coach in college. Like that whole cycle is growing more and more strength coaches over time. So hopefully down the road, like there really are enough strength coaches and enough interest to not just go through every high school, but really work our way back down to having a strength coach in junior highs as well. Or like they're good strength to your point. Like the best good strength coaches are paid well enough to actually want to be a junior high strength coach and to teach people good movement from, you know, the age of 12,

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It's about unlocking your full potential and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best, physically and mentally, when the stakes are the highest. To learn more, visit areteelab.com. That's A-R-E-E-E-Lab.com. Now, back to the show. Yeah. That's the thing that you were talking about, about, you know, that there's not enough.

But, man, every single year, we lose so many strict conditioning coaches to, like other careers and they just give up. You know, they start something conditioning and they have this dream of wanting to lead, you know, have a team and they can't get a good job or like, you know, they have to do three free internships. Who's going to do that? Like, why are we the only profession that has to spend years, you know, doing slave labor, you know, but like there, if we have high school career, I think that could help that. Yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, as much as you're willing to, I think a lot of that is for those coaches that burn out or leave, I think it's almost a product of their

own making because I have to be a division one strength and conditioning coach at a power for school and if I'm not, I'm a failure. And I will say this, when I hire for positions in Fort Wayne, you know, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, very low cost of living, eight to four job, you have a strength coach that is your manager, not some, you know, assistant athletic director who's never been in the weight room, I scrape by to try and find anybody to hire because they're just not willing to move to Fort Wayne. They're not willing to become a high school strength and conditioning coach. They're not willing to humble themselves to do that. They'd rather be, you know, the third assistant at UNC Asheville making 25,000 than to come to Fort Wayne make 55 as a high school

strength coach and never work a weekend. And so some of that burnt out in the field, I think, is a product of our own, of a strength coach's own making and our ego, right? Like, hey, I have to be a D-1. And myself as well, it was humbling to take this job. I was a head strength coach of Butler. people knew my name and then it's like well what what am i what's my business car going to say what's the logo on my shirt going to say when i go to the conference you know and yeah and that doesn't matter because i would rather look at my bank account now than when i was doing that that's um that's the number that's the most important see the thing is they have that cared out there there's one or two guys making a million dollars you know right like there's one or two you know i mean like

And there's thousands of people who are doing exercise science right now. So like, you're the math boys. It's like, to Doug's point, I think if you broaden your horizon and hey, high school, or now tactical or private sector. Tactical. Sure. Yeah. If you would just look past Division 1, Power 4, you'd probably find a better job and be happier

and not have to move around the country 100. And you get to keep your wife. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. If that's what you want. I mean, that's what I want. And the thing I would also add is it also is the culture that you're being taught within, because a lot of it is appealed to tradition.

I mean, it was not Scott, but another we will say person I worked with when I was going through my GA ship, genuinely said, if you don't hate your job and want to quit every day, you're not having a GA experience. And like, stay toxic, boys, you know, whereas Scott would be like, hey, it's summer. You're going to have the team from this time to this time. I've got, you know, time from this time to this time, don't be here. You know, same thing. You know, like when it's time when you've only got eight athletes left, you don't need to have two coaches in the room. You know, one of us could go home.

Exactly. You know, it's like that you're going to be there at 5 a.m. And we don't leave until 9 p.m. You have to go home and hate your life. Like, what? I just want to look at those same dudes and be like, you know, if you really actually learn to coach, you wouldn't be doing that. You're more worried about, you know, causing these guys that I'm nervous of breakdowns. actually learn the coach because I go in those rooms, that same person can't know I'll teach

a back squat, you know, so, but yet they'll make some poor kid hate their life. Come on. There's so much more to worry about that bullshit right there. Yeah. And I'm the same way. I mean, it's hard in collegiate athletics to have a great work life balance, but it can be done. And, you know, when I see like the 4 a.m. staff lift, and it's like, what are you guys doing? They're like, oh, we got to be here all day and we can't go home. And there needs to be, you know, three coaches when the cross-country team is in here. It's like, you know, you've lost kind of the site of the forest for the trees. Just because you can do that doesn't mean you should.

And we have to prioritize our mental health and time better than that. Or again, we're just going to burn out and that doesn't do anybody any good. So we've kind of been talking a lot about the way it used to be in the way that we certainly don't approve of it sounds like. Right, obviously. In your mind, like, if we were to like redesign this whole thing and you may be doing much like what what is the optimum way to structure these roles and these these these these positions yeah yeah well the first one starts with clear boundaries clear

expectations of what this position entails so take our high school strength coaches so when we agree negotiate these contracts with the school or the school district I we put in place like hey here's what is here's what they're going to do they're going to be there an hour before school they're going to teach six of the seven periods during the day they're going to be there for an hour after school. That's it. They're not going to be warming up the basketball team before the Friday night game. They're not going to be warming up the football team before the Friday night game. They're not going to be there on the Saturday with watching film with.

So just clear guardrails and expectations. Hey, in the summer, we're on campus six hours a day and not on Friday, just Monday through Thursday. So we set those clear expectations. So everybody knows what to expect. And then the same thing at the collegiate level. Hey, what teams am I working with? What are my responsibilities with those teams? Am I supposed to warm the team up?

Do I have to travel with the team? Do I have to, you know, am I in charge of the nutrition and stuff like this? And I'll take this to another role. And as challenging as the strength industry profession is, think of athletic trainers. Athletic training really never put guardrails on the profession. They never said no. So when it became, hey, do you want to work evenings? Yes.

Hey, do you want to work weekends? Yes. Do you want to travel with it? Yes. Do you want to get another team? Yes. Do you want to do it all for $45,000? Yes.

And they never said, no. They never put the guardrails on anything. And likewise, you know, so a good example at our schools, you know, we have, most of our universities are NAA. So they'll add men's volleyball or they'll add, you know, these kind of bowling or these more different unique sports to increase the enrollment. And we can always go back in our contract. and I said, well, we agreed to train this many teams.

Now you're adding another one. Are we going to pay more? Are we going to take one away? Is there going to be an additional staff member in this? Just, again, by setting these clear boundaries and expectations of what this role is, and we all agree on that. When that role changes, then, we can go back to the negotiating table and see, hey, here's what's going on. You know, what we initially signed up to do isn't the case anymore.

We want to help you out. but something is going to have to change. If you just have this kind of nebulous on the strength coach, well, then it's always going to be more, more, more, more, until you just are absolutely drowning and you're going to have to leave and go somewhere else. I love this. Where was this when I first started this?

This is the guy I've called every single time. I've been applying for jobs and, like, how should I negotiate this? because I think a lot of strength coaches are like, I got a job offer. I'm going to go, yeah. I've got a job offer. You're going to pay me 20 grand a year and I can go eat the table scraps in the trash before they throw them out. Like, this is great.

He's like, no, dude. And I get to watch the head coach's shaker bottle. Right, yeah. And so for me, it's valuable for me as a former strength coach, like I said, who worked, you know, for $10,000 a year as a head strength coach. It's important for me in the profession that, that, that, we evolve past that. And a lot of strength coaches, what if this, I had to do it, so you had to do it. You know, I worked for nothing. So I did three internships for free, so you have to do. Evolve. Right. Evolve. You know, we shouldn't have to be working for scraps. And when you have a

strength coach like me in a leadership position that can hire and, and negotiate the pay of these positions, it just raises all tides of the boat. Similarly to the strength coach, you know, making a million dollars, that brings everybody up, but that's just at the top levels. But if we can say, hey, you know, every strength coach that we hire in Indiana is not going to make less than $55,000 a year, well, that, again, that lifts some of the other boats in there. And being able, you know, to do that for the profession and understand and make people know the value around what we do is very important. as opposed to like how cheap can we find somebody for that nobody in this that should not be the goal of anybody in this profession so you run you run a whole team as you said do those team members

ever like cycle in and out of various schools and whatnot like if there's a single high school that has a strength coach is that he's the strength coach for that high school or is he sometimes a strength coach for the high school but if he needs to like go on vacation then he'll be replaced with another person or is it is it a contract of the company or is a contract with the individual person. They work for Parkview Sports Medicine. They don't work for the school. So unless, excuse me, until that person wants to leave or they need to be removed for whatever reason by me, they're the strength coach at that school. That's just, they're totally embedded at that school. Most of the student athletes at that school wouldn't even realize

they're not a Wayne high school employee. You know, they're an actual PSM employee. The students there wouldn't even realize that because they're totally embedded in that school. And then my job is just, again, hiring, onboarding, making sure everything goes okay. If those coaches at the schools do run into problems with the student athletes or with the coaches or with the administrators, and I can come in, lend my experience or play bad cop to their good cop and say this is what we're going to do and just make their lives easier. I tell this once our coaches are hired, I mean, my job is simply to make your life as easy as possible. Take all the nonsense off of your desk. so that you can just train the student athletes.

And that's what my job is. And that's what I like to do. You know, I don't work much with student athletes anymore. I do a little bit in the winter when we're super busy. So, you know, my goal is not to change the lives of student athletes anymore. My goal is to change the lives of strength and conditioning coaches. And we've been able to do that at Parkview Sports Medicine. Man, there's so many Smith coaches out there.

I bet when they run it to you, they're just like so happy. I try to be a life preserver. I do. And there are certainly, I always am kind of looking on on Instagram or Twitter. That's essentially where I do a lot of my hiring is because I'm looking for the burnt out strength codes. And you can just, you can see in their posts,

you know, if they're just fried. And, you know, there's sort of a thing. Yeah. And those are the ones that are on my radar screen because then when I have something come open,

I'll reach out and I'll be like, hey, want to introduce myself, here's what we have going on, blah, blah, blah, and just offer them a life preserver. And it's been life changing for more than a handful of coaches. So you hire them online, and then again, you have to move them. Well, yeah, I mean, I identify them online. And then there's obviously the interview process. But again, it comes down to, hey, but yeah, you're going to have to move to Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Nobody on this web call or listening to this podcast is like, yeah, I got. to go to Fort Wayne. It's not Nashville. It's not Louisville. It's not Charlotte. It's not Atlanta. It's a very mid-sized rust belt town. That being said, it's not Afghanistan either. So, I mean, you can make a quality of life here. You can still buy a home in Fort Wayne as a strength coach, as a single strength coach, you probably can't do that many other places. You can still, based on what we pay you, take a nice vacation. You can have a child without being. You can have a child without being like, oh my God, how am I going to pay for this? So there are some benefits to a small Midwestern city,

but that being said, it's supposed to snow on Monday. So you got to take the good with the bad. I grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. That's no big deal. Yeah, similar. But you'd be surprised how very few people are willing to, I don't even know if humble themselves as the word, but it's like, eh, no, not for it. Thanks. But, you know, like I said, I'm going to keep working for $25,000 as the professional fellow at Louisville.

Good luck. Yeah. What about that 20-wreps squat thing? Yeah, okay. So I got this program when I went to Ohio State with coach Anthony Glass. Like I mentioned, it's fantastic best-drain coach I ever was around. And he used it as a pre-season conditioning protocol for his, uh, men's hockey team there. And so he would use this the month leading into preseason training. So it's a high volume squat training program.

And I looked at it and, you know, as kind of, as we all were, you know, a disciple of, you know, pretty much straight linear periodization. Hey, we're going to do our hypertrophy. Then we're going to do our strength. Then we're going to do our power. Then we're going to do our peaking. I was like, man, I don't know about this. But my squat was no good. So I was like, you know what?

I'm just going to give this a try. And so basically how this works is the first four weeks, and you can write these percentages down to see how challenging this is. But you're basically, your percentages are 57, 62, and 67% of your unbelted one rep max. Don't don't use your belted one rep max because you're not going to use a belt during this program. So 57, 62, 67% of your unbelted one rep max. And I'm going to be honest with you, these are college age athletes. I used it mostly with our exclusively with freshmen and sophomore.

So they're relatively untrained. Again, I was on the Olympic strength and conditioning side. So all your female sports, your soccer is not football, you know, very, very untrained athletes. I can't tell you the number of athletes I did this, that their squat max was 100. But 57, 62, 67% of their one rep max. And the first week, they're just doing 12 reps at each of those percentages. Second week, they're doing 15 reps at each of those percentages.

Third week, they're doing 17 reps at each of those percentages. and the fourth week, they're doing 20 reps at each of those percentages. So what does that do? You know, when we, again, especially on the Olympic side, especially a decade ago when I was doing it, and their high school strength inditioning wasn't very prevalent, and these athletes that we get just their training age was zero. They had no hypertrophy, training age was zero,

technique on the squat was terrible. And if we asked them to do a more linear program, they just got to heavy weights too soon. They just weren't comfortable handling the load. And so by this program, what we did is it really introduced practice and technique. All right. And I always say, hey, if you want to get better at shooting free throws, you know, you're not going to tell your kid, like, hey, go in the driveway and do three sets of five.

I ain't going to make you any better. You need practice. You need time. You need repetition. You need exposure. And so, you know, three sets of 12 and then three sets of at a weight you can handle. So again, if this is a girl, a largely untrained female athlete, her weights are basically 55, 60, 65 pounds.

But with that, she can squat to great depth. She's not cutting her reps short or high because the load just isn't there to handle. Her core can adapt to it and her bracing and all that stuff can come into place. And we just take our time. And so by the time we get to 20 reps, I always say this. Well, say this girl now is doing, like I said, 55, 60, 60, 60,

pounds for 20 reps. 65 times 20 is like 1,300 pounds. Yeah, it's the load. Yeah. So what's more? You know, trying to do three, you know, three sets of three at 90%. Her 90%, again, if her max was 100, is 90, because she's did 270 pounds. Well, we just did 1,300. Where is the development?

Where is the hypertrophy? Where is the growth occurring? It's through us. And because the weights are light, she's going through a full range of motion. develop in the hamstrings, develop in the glutes, let alone the GPP, the cardiovascular, the endocrine response, all of this stuff is happening with these high rep sets. And more than anything, just the practice. Right.

And so we do this the first four weeks, and then the next four weeks, we kind of start back over, but just raise the percentages up. So instead of 57, 62, 67, we're going 62, 67. percent for three sets of 10, then three sets of 12, then three sets of 15, then three sets of 17. And we keep repeating this cycle of dropping the lowest, the lightest percentage of reps, taking it down a step off the repetitions, and we'll end up with, you know, what would be 67, 72, 77 percent for eights, tens, 12s, and 15s. And that's generally what we're able to get through in an off season.

Sure. But I'll be honest with you, the hypertrophy, the work capacity, the technique that we were able to develop through all this stuff. Instead of just, you know, three sets of three, four by four, even five by five. Man, these athletes, they just needed more time. They needed more practice. They needed more reps. And they're building up just this great, you know, erector strength and abdominal strength. And again, like I said, there's no belts where no one cares how much we're really,

lifting weights, but the physical development, the total physical development that they're getting from this program was amazing. And so I did the program myself and went from like, again, I was, I became once I met your co-host here much stronger. But I could squat like 405 and it was crappy and, but I did this whole program and went to 440 for three. And I was like, man, something going on here. And so started doing it with my athlete. and I did it from, you know, 2007, at least until my last time at Beller was 2018 with thousands of athletes. And, man, it just worked to put on hypertrophy, to put on technique and strength all over their body. And because of that, then we had great squatters.

We had athletes that could lift. Their technique was good. We weren't trying to always double back. Ah, you got to get lower. Well, shoot, we got to go to a box an hour. or, oh, well, sit to the medicine ball so you know what your death is. And we had great, great squatters. And in addition to this, I mean, we were overhead squatting and front squating,

but the heart of this program was that 20 rep squat program. It's a dandy. But it's totally outside the kind of confines of, you know, you don't read about it in the NSA textbook. It's kind of almost reverse periodization. But I did it with a lot of athletes, and it worked. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, yes, Michael Yes, just did the whole one by 20, you know, with, he would do it like several different exercises, but the whole point was like getting, you know, more of that neuromuscular coordination, you know, like getting better at the movement. So you do that, you know, you do a squat 20 times, you get better at it, you know, if you shoot a foul shot 100 times, you get better at foul shooting. Yeah, they got to get really good at the movement before you're going to really actually load it. Otherwise, you just load this functional movement, that. And I think that the, I think that I did a presentation with Mike on this, but I think the trouble we get into right now is we've just glorified, you know, max effort training.

And as great as Westside is and all those things, it's like, yeah, but we're talking about high school kids here and college kids here. And they they don't have the foundation that those guys had to earn the right to do max effort training. And so even my high school strength coaches, I'll go around and what's the sets and reps? And we're doing three sets of five. We're doing three sets of three. And it's like, what's the rush? Like what are, you know, this, this, these, you look at these kids and they're skinny and they don't have great technique.

And it's like, why are we driving? We got to get some horsepower in this car before we can hope to have any kind of performance. I don't, you know, if you only have a two Cc engine, a V6 is always going to beat you. And so we're just trying to put some more horsepower in these engines. Then, you know, a couple of years down the road, then we can start trying to get the power out of it. But if we rush into one-rep maxes or we rush into max effort training too soon, we're really just skipping development. And I think, again, for the high school and honestly, most collegiate athletes, development is still the name of the game. Totally agree with you.

Yes. We did the German volume training with all of our, same concept. We did it with all, you know, when I was at Lenore Ryan University, we had a, you know, I started the Olympic waylifting program there. And like we had all right incoming freshmen all did the German volume for two different blocks. And then we won the national championship my first year. Yeah.

And I think volume, you know, high volume, high repetition training. Oh, that's bodybuilding. Oh, you're just doing bodybuilding. You know, that's not. No, we're not. Yeah. And it's like, well, yeah, but at some point... I mean, yeah, there is not perched to be, but yeah. But at some point, you've got to develop the base.

You got to build a strong foundation. The peak can only get as high as the base is wide, you know. And if we rush that, then we're robbing it from the student athlete. Why? What's the hurry? Again, one of my major relevations at the collegiate level is, you know, you get those freshmen in the fall. And you think, boy, we've got to get them strong and fast and powerful and then peak five. by that first Christmas break. It's like, no, you know, and you got four years.

And again, especially at the high school level, like, what's the hurry? Take you time. Build some hypertrophy. And then down the road, everything becomes so much easier because they actually have muscle. They can actually develop and transition to power. You can have that phase where you're actually transferring things to power. They have muscle. They have technique.

You're just making your life easier as opposed to trying to rush and get everybody to see if we can take a, you know, a boy with a 135 pound back squat and make him squat, you know, 145 in three months. Mm-hmm. Who cares? You know, take your time and put some muscle on this guy. And muscle is the limiting factor of performance. Totally. Unless they're really a fast Twitch athlete.

And those are going to stand out. Those are going to scream at you. Unless they're a super fast twitch athlete, muscle is the limiting factor of performance, period, in discussion. And anyone who's ever worked with athletes with a athlete's, agree. It's only the people who have it that wouldn't say anything. Yeah. But again, if we don't do West Side, then we feel like we're bodybuilding. And we don't train like bodybuilders. That's it. We don't train like meatheads, you know, and it's just, you know, West Side Barbell,

what's their best guy? Chuck Vogelpooh, I beat him three times. I don't care about West Side Barberville. Well, and I'll always, you know, people that bring that point to me, I'll always say, well, think of the volume they're doing to get to their actual work set. Right. You know, that's their volume training. You know, it doesn't take a lot of volume for you to get to your 155 for three working set on bench press. Right. If you follow Louis, he even talks about the repetition method, agreed with him to sit with you. He would say the first three years, he would 100% agree with everything you're saying. Yeah. It's only after that. Does he start to get, you know.

But again, how many videos of high school kids do you see with 95 pounds on the bench press and chains? And it's like, Stephen, come on, man. I mean, I see it all the time. You know, it's like, why are we doing dynamic effort for a kid that can't bench his body weight? Exactly. It looks cool. Well, it does look cool. I mean, there's something to that.

If it's cool and exciting, then they might actually do it and do it more often than they would otherwise. There's something to that. But even at Westside, after they do all their dynamic effort or max effort stuff, they're going to do a whole lot of volume the rest of the day. Everything else they're doing is higher repetition and for all the assistance work. So they're still doing volume. They're not doing it on their primary movements. Yeah.

And what a lot of people don't, they also have the two lower body days. You know, so that's, maybe on any one singular day, it doesn't look that. But you're doing it twice a week as opposed to, hey, I'm just going to do, you know, leg day once a week. There, and I said this in the presentation, every low repetition or that we think max effort program, there's a lot of volume in there that you're just not accounting for and you're kind of ignoring. Because, and, and this program's the same. Like, if, if, if you, if you, if you, if you're, you're just If you could do three sets of three or three sets of 20, what are you going to pick? You can pick three sets of three all day long.

All day long. Five-volume training is miserable and uncomfortable and it's brutal. And so I don't want to do that, so I'm not going to make student athletes do it, but, boy, it's what they need. And I've gone through the program, Mike's gone as a kind of a right of passage before you ask these student athletes to do it. But, yeah, so I'm a proponent of five-volume training. And, you know, even lunges and step-ups and reverse hypers and glute hands. and presses and rows for our first two years at the collegiate athletes it was a very high volume training then their junior year they'd switch to more of a five three one well if you go

back and look at really look at the dynamic effort like especially towards the end of his life louis he did it was like week one it was 75% for five by five then we go to 80% for four by five then it would go to 85% for five by three and so like that's really not dynamic there's no there's no real like stress speed in there at all. That's all accelerative speed, you know. Yeah, and they're trying to tap into the bigger, you know, high threshold motor units. All he's saying is pushing as hard as you can. He's like, and then they would have some, you know, phases for the really advanced athletes

where they might go a little faster, but really that was it. Yeah. And on the strength and conditioning side, you know, people would look at the, well, there's no, you know, and we were doing RDLs and instead. well, there's no dynamic. Well, we're sprinting and jumping. You know, that's where we did the explosive stuff was sprinting and jumping, which those athletes are plenty of custom to because that's their sports.

Sure. Yeah. I want to go back to the German volume. Right. But once you have some muscle and some people, then you can start to do cleans or snatches or jumps with weight and then or unloaded jumps. There's other ways. But at first, yes, you're 100%.

Like they're going to be limited by the amount of, peak force production potential. If you don't have any muscle, you've got zero potential. So there it is. So comments on German volume, just for the listeners at home, that is a 10 sets of 10 in a movement,

which usually limits of graduate. And, you know, because Scott and I work together, when he says the yin to the yang, it's more of like public enemy. He was Chuck D and his Flav of Flav, which personality-wise is pretty accurate.

So the key thing is, but who's Chuck D? Who's Flav and Flav and Flav? Oh, Scott was the straight man. He was the Chuck D. You know, I was the side show. Where the clock? All right.

But at the same time, when you're doing these three sets of 20, I mean, when you're going from 20-ru-up squatting, those sets might easily last, you know, two minutes apiece. But including the warm-ups, because, again, these athletes were not very strong to start. You're talking about you put this massive amount of volume, and that will take you 12, maybe 15 minutes out of a 45-to-one-hour session. So you still have another 45 minutes, 30 minutes, not including your warm up, not including your cool downs.

10 by 10, there's, you know, how much left. The German volume is great, but the simple reality is, if the coach says, hey, we got half an hour for weights, you know, we can do this 20 rep squat program and they can spend the last 10 minutes crawling around the floor wishing for the sweet embrace of death. Whereas with, you know, German volume, they might be like set number nine and it's 30 minutes up. And they're just like, oh, thank God, saved by the clock again. Those were such quiet days.

It was going to take all day, for sure. Nobody talked the entire time. It was survival. Everybody had their towels with their heads, and it was 100% complete survival. And I think one of the things that made it, just like you, Coach Mash talking about that, one of the things that made us successful

across, whether I was at Birmingham, Southern, or Ohio State, or anybody can be successful at Ohio State. Like, that's not a trick. St. Louis or Temple or Butler, is these athletes in the Olympic, sports against you're thinking soccer you're thinking basketball volleyball field hockey lacrosse track that that aren't typically like going to go in the weight room and attack it like we trained hard like they were not just clown around sessions and a lot of the stuff I see it's like well

what's your training philosophy well we want to talk about minimum effective dose and we're going to ask like what you see the least that you can do like let's in the off season I'm not talking about in season, but in the off season, I'll say this is straight up. Any one of my athletes could have walked into any division one. We could have gone to Missou, we could have gone to Ohio State football, and while not using the same weight, the effort, the attitude, the intensity was there, whether it was soccer or boys volleyball or synchronized swimming or men's tennis.

It didn't matter. Like we flat out got after it and trained. And that mentality to get through that 20 rep squad thing, just like your German volume training, there's something to be said for that. Like, you're not going to quit, you know, and what your definition of hard work actually changes. And it's like, well, that's not so bad.

Right. This ain't something like, I mean, it was definitely more than a ride of passage. Like, we noticed that for two different blocks it worked. So we would do, you know, the beginning of the first semester, beginning of second. And every time within two to three weeks after doing the German volume for six weeks, they would PR. You know, but then after that, you know, now remember, these are weight lifters.

So they're coming in, having done weightlifting. So, you know, they have some training. But then after that, they just started refusing. Ryan Grimslet and my top Adelaide, he eventually said, I'm not doing that. Okay, you're about, you know, we're trying to get you to Olympics. You can say that. Yeah. Same thing. We would do it for the off season, the off season of their freshman year, the off season of their sophomore year.

And then I'm the same way. I felt too, I couldn't ask them to do it again. It was too hard. I've done the program twice myself. I'll never do it again. Hell no by doing either one of those. I'm not doing 10 by 10 or three bucks. No chance. When I was a freshman in high school, I was very fortunate that I had a strength coach that when I was 14, 15 and he's still a good friend of mine to this day. And he gave me super squats when I was in high school. school and we did the 20 rep squat many variations of it but I remember being nervous every Monday because that was the day that we had to go five pounds heavier than last week and I would walk around like nauseous like oh fuck like this is going to be rough and and I remember putting on over the course of I don't know how many how many months about a hundred pounds total on my 20 rep back squat from 155 to 255 and in the process I put on like 20 pounds muscle you know I went

from rustling 168 to rustle 189 and I remember thinking during football practice that other kids were weren't trying as hard as they used to try. And I, because I didn't realize that I got bigger and stronger. I thought they were going easier for some reason. And so I totally agree. Like, I didn't really do a lot of like top end strength work back then. But after putting on 20 pounds of muscle doing high volume training with 20 or back squats for single sets, but also we did five sets of 20.

And then we'd follow up a five sets of 20 on on RDLs plus the lunges and all kinds of other shit. And I remember just being brutally sore at times, probably unnecessarily sore in retrospect. but to your point about about both muscle being like the key driver like I got so much stronger and more powerful even I wasn't training specifically for strength or power and I didn't have to do a bunch of dynamic effort anything I just got bigger and stronger and went you know went from 160 something to 190 almost and everything changed do you guys Steve jack you ever had a guy I mean he's an old school guy Steve jack he wrote this book stone it was all about lifting the

ever stone uh anyway I had a chance to lift this guy and he did bill stars like the two by 20 and like in my whole goal we did it for several weeks and the goal was I just wanted to do it to see if I was mad enough to do it my goal was 500 for 20 and so and I got to I did 475 for 20 and then the next week like you said my goal was 500 for 20 and I can't I don't think I made it but it was really close and then the whole goal was drinking gallon of milk and all that bull we play that game too. I threw up that final day when I tried the 500, like I'm pretty sure I almost died because like I was in bed for a couple of days. Yeah. Well to be to your point about the the effort piece,

like that was my first exposure to like real barbell centric strength training. And that was the first thing I ever did. And I was like, oh, this is what strength training is. And then yeah, everything I've ever done since has been like down to add in comparison. Right. And back to Doug's point about, you know, we didn't really worry about one rep max strength. We just built it up. You know, we have a quote that we like where, you know, one repetition max training, you know, is the refuge of the poor strength coach. Like, if that's all you're focused on is, again, trying to get the kid who benches 155 to 160. And in doing that, you, you know, think that you're a good strength coach. That's not it.

Like, develop the athlete. The one repetition max will come. But we lose the force for the trees where we think, hey, our goal is to increase their max on the bench and squat. It's not. It's to develop them as athletes. And those things will happen as a circumstance. But so many strength coaches are just, we got the record boards.

And boy, if we don't have, you know, four guys squat over 500 pounds and the squats are just atrocious, then I'm not a good strength coach. And it's just... I'm not having that. I am not sending one athlete to a college. And the college coach is like rolling eyes to me. Not one will I sit.

I won't let it happen. They go somewhere else. But like, we use... I can monitor with velocity if they're getting stronger or not. I don't need to actually test it. You know, like, why do I need to test? I know that, you know, at 0.5, they're handling more and more and more weight. So guess what?

If we know the relationship between force and velocity, it's going up too. But why don't we need to test? When I test, nothing good happens. All I'm doing is putting it at the bigger risk. So I'm not trying to hurt anybody. Yeah, when I go into a school or a college weight room that has record boards on the wall, I'm always kind of like, oh, boy. Got it.

Here we go. Let me guess you don't wear sleeves on game day. I get it. Right. How widely is velocity-based training implemented into a high school setting these days? High school setting, I can only speak for us. Not a whole lot just because of the cost, quite frankly. But if you have a coach's eye, you know, can you see the speed on the bar?

Can you see, you know, the clean or snatch is moving with more snap than it did before? or are they able to coach MASH's point? Can they just handle 90% or 85% with more speed than they did in the past? So while we would like to have a tender or a perch on every unit, it's just not. Or Jim aware. Feasible or Jim Aware for sure. Yeah, it's just not feasible. But a good coach can observe that.

We had them at the collegiate level, I would say they're very prevalent. And I loved them because athletes that weren't really, you know, what does a woman's field hockey player really care what her back squat maxes. But if she can look at, oh, well, that was 0.8 and that's, they get competitive with that number more than they get competitive. They at least love that here. And their parents love that too. Especially I tell them we don't have to max.

The parents love it. Yeah. And seeing that number go up and higher, it's very motivating for athletes that couldn't care less what the back spot max is right the majority of them unless they're a football player they could care less right wrestlers they kind of dig it but but most people most is guys they just will this make me faster they do ask that nowadays um yeah the answer is yes for most people yes so they're asking you know speed is the tide that lifts all boats you know sure should be what they're asking there there are and i'm not trying to sell you at all but like there are cheaper units nowadays

His purse is so expensive. And even Jim Aware is expensive, but now they make a flex unit. It's a lot. It's like in the hundreds. It's like lower. And they even make a high school package that's even cheaper because they, for high school, for high school, strength coaches. Well, we went up here every spring with about 45 high school strength coaches.

So I'm going to reach out to Jim Aware and see if you guys want to come up and. Well, you can reach out to me and I'm telling you we will want to come. Okay. We'd love to have it. Yeah. I would love to come up there. So, yes. Got somebody to go to Fort Wayne, man, you, you are quite the salesman, Scott.

I got to give you that. I grew up in Italy, Michigan. Like, Fort Wayne is awesome compared to that. Yeah. Is the, you know, the squad is one of the few movements you can really do crazy high repetitions because you can recover a bit in between repetitions. Bench press, you're screwed. There's really no resting. It's just you're going to go until you hit the wall.

Yeah. It's just going to make hours more times. And the other is, I mean, I've applied this when I've had to come back from surgeries. Like, it's been great because it's something to just build your feet underneath you, so to speak, for something like the squat. And these are getting my labor repaired from too many years of college cheerleading. So I will admit that fact. And so you put an SSB on your back and you just, you don't have to worry about going too heavy. You're not trying to latch on a belt when you only got one arm that works.

But you can go and really give yourself that really big stimulus so you can get at least the muscle mass back under you until you can actually get your hand back on the bar and stabilize and heavy loads again. I'm going to try your program with overhead squat. I mean, that's a lie. Overhead press. What am I talking about? Overhead press. It's because it's just something I've fallen back in love with. I feel like all my other lifts have had so much volume in the past.

This one hasn't. Gosh, it's so awful because you can't rest either on that. If it's on your chest, you can't breathe, it's over your head. It's like your arms are shaking. It's all pure hell. I can imagine 20. I think I just kind of like the, you know, the. The only other thing I've ever done,

it with was trap bar deadlift and it was okay but your grip is a limiting factor and to Mike's point there's with the barbell back squat while it's just being supported by you your your whole system very few exercises are like that there's going to be some kind of limiting factor that's going to that's slow you down and burn you out on 20 reps so it's not to do it on squat you'd never do it even probably maybe you could do it on goblet squat but there's just very few exercises you could do it for Throat squat, I feel like you pass out. I've done it to go to sleep. I've tried some high volume front spotting and it didn't work out well.

Yeah. You can do it, but it's not the same. Like I remember many times on backspots, like once you get like reps 15, 16, 17, 17, like maybe taking two, three, four, five, six big deep breaths in between that and the next rep. And you can really recover just enough to eke out that next rep and grind through it. And so you get to 20. Maybe it's a little bit of a bump from your spotter if you have one.

Yeah, but the physiologist, to me is just thinking like that time that's teaching that athlete how to tap into all of those exhausted motor fibers and maybe finding a couple more they're not used to diving into because that's the thing is like that's the other problem when you jump ahead to immediately going linear periodization and go too heavy too fast they don't really know how to turn on those high threshold fibers synchronized that well with the rest of them so that they're going to be able to get that max force but if that bar is slow and you've got reps 16 17 18 was it was it rip at toe or some other person that's like how many breaths should you take in between each rep when you get there and he's like i don't know

whatever jesus tells you so like once you get that far into the deep waters it's it is it's so you're learning things about yourself in reality that you do not otherwise learn until you get there 100% um yeah before we shut it down here you're you're about to release an e-book with this whole program at some point or has that been on like for 20 years that's the key term i yeah i mean hopefully we We'll lay the whole thing out at some point. My kids, I have a sophomore in college now and a junior in high school. So as my responsibilities, quite frankly, with them decrease a little bit, Mike and I sometime will. And the book is probably 70% done, but we just got to do the finishing touches.

And life has a way of getting in the way of some of those things. Sure. Right on. When the time comes that you release that book, where can people find you and hear about the launch and all that? I'm on Instagram, but probably the best place to see what we're up to is just PSM performance. PSM performance on Instagram. That gives you an idea of all the things that we have going on. That's probably the best place.

Otherwise, again, me on Instagram, just my name. But those are some good places. Sounds good. I appreciate it coming on the show. Thank you guys for having me. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, me too, man. Masterlead.com and go to Instagram, Matchel leap, before.

Thanks for having us. Thanks for coming on. Dr. Mike Lane. Yeah, Mike Lane, PhD on Instagram. Feel free to send me message. All right. I'm on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson. We are Barbell Strug, a barbell underscore shrug. And if you want to work with Dr. Mike Lane, Travis Mash,

Dr. Andy Galpin, and the whole team at Rapid Health Optimization, you can go to Artaelab.com. A-R-E-T-L-A-B.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.