Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 278: How to Do Cardio AND Keep ALL Your Gains with Bryan Boorstein

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

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Hey, everybody, welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. This is episode 278, and I will be joined today by my new friend, Brian Borstein. Brian is a fitness fanatic, enthusiast, and professional, somebody who has actually been there and done that. A gym owner, an athlete, somebody with extreme amounts of experience with hypertrophy training, 25 years. Dude's a literal OG in the fitness game. He's been there. He's done that. We talk about cardiovascular health, mitochondrial biogenesis, how to use cardio to develop a better and more robust aerobic system, hypertrophy training basics, hypertrophy training specifics, and what you need to do to build muscle

across the lifespan and stay strong. I think you'll enjoy this episode a ton today. Brian is an amazing guest. He's got a ton of content. You can find him primarily on Instagram, Brian Borstein. He is the founder of Paragon Training Methods, Evolve Training Systems, and the host of the E-Train Prosper Podcast. Please check Brian out. Link to him in the show notes below. Enjoy the episode. Please learn something and share this with somebody you love. Have a good one. This episode is brought to you in part thanks to some of our amazing partners like LMNT. LMNT makes the best electrolyte product on the market. In fact, I've actually started drinking my LMNT each and every morning before I have coffee so as to optimize my circadian biology, make sure that I'm hydrated,

and make sure that I'm getting ahead on my water intake throughout the day and not reliant on stimulants, but instead being somebody who's reliant on hydration and the proper balance of minerals and electrolytes. If you want to feel your best all day, mentally and physically, it's imperative that you stay hydrated. LMNT provides a balanced ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to support brain and body hydration. This combination of electrolytes improves health performance, body and brain performance. Mind you helps to reduce cramps and soreness and get you more hydrated. There's no sugar. Elementia is sweetened with stevia. It's perfect for exercise and perfect for the sauna because the flavors are natural,

tasty, delicious, and not overpowering. And if you're like me, you'll use them multiple times a day across your training sessions to get hydrated early, to replenish after sauna use. And again, it's not just me. LMNT is the official sports drink of Team USA Weightlifting, and it's used by athletes in the NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball, as well as athletes like you and I looking to take your fitness to the next level. My favorite flavors are definitely the raspberry and citrus. When I put a box together, I try to load up on raspberry and citrus. And when you put your box together, you can get a free sample pack containing all of Elements' amazing flavors like mango chili, citrus, raspberry, orange, and more.

To get access to this free gift with purchase, scroll down to the show notes and check out using the special link for Dynamic Dialogue listeners. Brian, my friend, how are you doing? I am great. I am very happy to be here and get to connect with you, man. I'm looking forward to it too, man. I've been following your work for quite some time in preparing for this podcast. I listened to a few podcasts you've done. I've perused through your content and we were talking a little bit off air. I kind of gave you the, let's say compliment, if you will, of being very, very well-rounded from a fitness perspective. So for those of you who aren't familiar with Brian

and his work, he's been in the game much longer than I have, and he's really gone deep in a lot of different areas. And I'd say right now, it looks like he's going quite deep with aerobic health and wellbeing and hypertrophy, which are two things that I'm super excited to learn more about. So I'd love to open the floor off first with this question, which is for somebody who is very, very interested in developing muscle, but also wants the benefit of aerobic health and longevity and mitochondrial health, how much fear or trepidation should there be around losing one's gains from including cardio if your goal is primarily muscle growth? Yeah, it's a good question. I feel like if you would

have asked me this question like three or four years ago, my answer would have been almost 180 degrees different than it is now. Because I think there was like this big kind of scare tactic in the industry that if you did concurrent training, essentially with lifting weights with like a cardiovascular pursuit that it would eat into your gains, that the cardio was going to be catabolic. It was going to sacrifice muscle mass. And these days, it seems like the interference effect, as they call it, is much more diminished. And so I still don't think that you can necessarily attack both with full fervor and be like, I am

going to be an aerobic beast and I'm going to step on the bodybuilding stage with like the best physique I've ever had type thing. I think you kind of have to pick and choose which one is going to be your priority. And as long as you know that one is your priority and one is your like, call it 1A and 1B, then I think you can construct a really intelligent program that allows you to benefit from both of those stimuli. I'd agree. And would you say for most people,

if you had a 1A and a 1B, that your 1A might be resistance training because the ability to cultivate muscle tissue from a lifespan perspective is probably going to make it easier to live the way you want to live. But your 1B is probably going to be something aerobic, so you can actually live long enough and not croak from like a cardiovascular condition. Or how do you position those in terms of importance when we're talking about the average individual? Yeah, I mean, I think for me, you're here spot on. Like I have always I've been training 25 years. And so for the first 23 and a half years, hypertrophy was really the thing

that I wanted. And granted, I had a six year hiatus where I went into CrossFit and then it was kind of like this weird hybrid mix of, of everything. But, uh, for the most part, it was really hypertrophy and muscle mass. And how can I get as jacked as possible as naturally, uh, as a natural athlete? Um, but I think that that question differs depending on who you are and where you are in your life and, um, specifically where maybe you're limited. So like, it's an interesting question because for me, I have a ton of muscle mass. That's not something that I need to worry about.

And so there's a large piece of me at this point at 40 years old and 25 years of training where I'm considering making my one a into this cardiovascular pursuit more just because, you know, it's now, I guess if I backtrack a little bit, I've been pursuing cardio as my one B, um, now for seven or eight months, like really, really hard dedicated, uh, starting in, when I turned 40, I just something flipped, switch flipped. And I started thinking about the longevity thing. It's like, in my 20s, I live the same way that like a teenager lives to where you feel like invincible. And no matter what you do, you're gonna be fine. You have so many years ahead of you that

you don't even need to worry about it. And then even into my 30s, I still lived with that mindset a lot. And then I had my first kid at 35. And I think that started to shift a little bit. But I didn't really quite understand the importance of cardio in longevity. I really thought that just doing steps and lifting weights was going to get me all of the longevity benefits that I needed. And then around 40, it's like that, like I said, that switch flipped. And it's kind of like the analogy I use is the climbing of the mountain and you reach the kind of precipice, the top of the mountain, and then you kind of start this journey down. And while I don't believe that I'm

going to die at 80, I do feel that 40 represents some sort of important point in your life where you can really use it as an opportunity, like a jumping off platform to shift your priorities and your perspective on things. And it really, it really was that for me. Um, and so right now I am still at this point, uh, one a is, is my hypertrophy training. That's where my business is. That's how I make money. That's really the, the form of fitness that I enjoy the most. Um, but I, you opened this, uh, podcast saying that I am aerobically fit and And I maybe compared to like the average American, I'm aerobically fit, but I am not aerobically fit when it comes to athletes in general. And it's actually been my aerobic fitness that has held me back in sports all the way from

I played high school basketball, and I was always the defense was my Achilles heel, because I would just get tired. And I never quite understood why I was always the defense was my Achilles heel because I would just get tired. And I never quite understood why I was in worse cardiovascular shape than most of my friends. And then I tabled that and went to college, drank a lot, party, did the whole thing, started CrossFit in 2009. And again, I wondered, why am I so poor at cardiovascular? And all my friends are lapping me in these workouts and I'm stronger than them and I have more muscle than them, but I can't seem to keep up with them in these conditioning workouts. And now to this day, man, it's the same thing. Like I've been doing this dedicated hardcore, uh, zone two zone five, like really going after all these different

cardiovascular energy systems. And my improvement has been like the pace of a turtle. I mean, it goes, it improves a little, then it kind of backslides and then it improves a little more and then it backslides and I can't seem to get past whatever block is, is kind of stopping me. So, uh, so yeah, I don't know what I need to do at this point. Maybe it's like, I've heard that you need a minimum of four dedicated zone two sessions a week to start seeing changes. And I've been doing two to three sessions a week because

I'm also, you know, training four days a week with weights. And so I'm wondering if maybe shifting that one a and one B to maybe lifting weights three days a week and doing four to five days of cardio might be the catalyst to elicit that change. But I'm not a hundred percent sure at this point. I'd imagine too, that having the amount of skeletal muscle tissue you have, um, making a being aerobically efficient might be more challenging than somebody who's a little bit lighter. Um, and then one thing I've also heard is, you know, it's easier to lose anaerobic adaptations than it is aerobic adaptation. So maybe you just have to keep chipping away for a couple more

months and you'll start to turn a corner on it and then you'll be able to maybe pump the brakes a little bit. But it could, it could be that you're going to rotate your one B into your one a spot. Cause that's just what it's going to take. I'd imagine that genetically, if you've been training for 25 years now and you have a killer physique, you probably have at least decent genetics, but maybe not elite genetics, but you're jacked. So maybe you just have a genetic predisposition for more of the fast twitch muscle fiber that tends to be bigger and maybe isn't as aerobically economical. But when I said that, it kind of reveals my own lack of aerobic fitness, I should say, because anybody who does any cardio to me appears to be quite aerobically fit because I am Mr. Let me get my 12,000 steps

a day and then I'll do two 60-second sprints on the assault bike, like at the end of each upper body training session and call that my zone five cardio and, and call it good, which I think is a really good segue to discussing the cardiovascular zones for general health. And we'll try to detach this from the like cardiovascular zones that you see endurance athletes use. from the like cardiovascular zones that you see endurance athletes use. And we'll just talk about like the traditional heart rate zones of one through five, that if you were going to be lazy and do the Carvonin method and take your age or 220, subtract your age and multiply it by some

percentage, you'd end up in zone one, two, three, four, five. And I, you said something that I thought was interesting, which is hammering zone two and kind of touching on zone five. Do you believe that for most people who want to improve their aerobic wellbeing, those are the two zones they ought to focus on? And why are those two so important? I think zone two is probably the most important. And I think zone five is just important because once a week, it's probably a good idea to push the threshold of what you're capable of briefly. And so your 60 second sprints on the airdyne bike are going to be like, they're going to fit that prescription of getting you extremely out of breath to the

point where you're gasping for air. You're making your heart really, really work. And so I think just a small dose of zone five is going to be plenty for most people. Because especially when you look at the applicability of zone five in daily life, as we age, if you don't play a competitive sport, when are you ever going to get your heart rate up to 90% of its max? Like, man, the example I always hear is, well, you're in the airport and you have two bags that you didn't check. And the really long escalator is broken and you have to somehow get to the top. And you're like, yeah, but like, I don't know if that's ever happened. And I fly all the time. So I really don't know that zone five has any applicability in daily life aside from just, you know, get out of breath, push your heart to its limit and get the health benefit associated with that. Zone two, on the other hand, has all of these adaptations that really improve health long term.

And so the the key word is mitochondria, which I think you said earlier as well. And so zone two work, which we can call something between 60 to 75% of your max heart rate. I think that that really depends on how fit you are. So somebody that's pretty aerobically fit can probably zone to at about 75% of their max heart rate. And somebody that's not so fit would probably be around 60 to 65% of max heart rate and somebody that's not so fit would probably be around 60 to 65% of max heart rate. Um, and like Jordan lips and I were talking on his podcast and he's great. So, uh, what we were saying is like the, the general recommendation for zone two is you take one 80 minus your age, and then that's your zone two. But I think that if you, if most people people take 180 minus your age, that's going to put you higher on the spectrum of that 60 to 75% than on the lower end. And so what we've determined through assigning this zone to work to ourselves and to clients over the last few months is that 180 minus age is just a little too high for most people without like a cardiovascular background.

Yeah. Cause the aerobic basis is probably substantially more decondition than we might think for somebody who's otherwise fit resistance perhaps wise. Yeah, correct. Exactly. And, and anybody that trains like myself, if somebody were to say like 180 minus your age, but because you're not aerobically fit, discount that 10 beats. I'd be like, no, I'm cool.

Like I walk 12,000 steps a day. Like I lift like I'm aerobically fit, you know, but clearly I'm not. So, so Jordan and I kind of changed this to 170 minus age. And we find that to be a much better starting point. Just like the analogy Jordan used was if you're dieting, you're not going to go to the lowest amount of calories immediately. You're going to start higher, see what you can do. And then once you realize you're not losing weight anymore on X calories, you can drop them. And so it's just a prudent move to start your aerobic journey a little bit easier as well.

Because essentially, zone two is defined as the point at which you are sort of indefinitely sustainable. Like lactate would be the official way of doing that, but people don't actually like prick their finger and check their lactate. So essentially what we're doing is we're trying to teeter on the edge of sustainability, but not teeter over the edge of sustainability. So you should be able to keep the pace that you're doing for two to three hours, even though you're only going to do it for one hour, one hour, one hour is the goal, but you could inevitably sustain this for another hour or even another hour after that. And so, um, for me, like it really was more like that one 25 to one 30 heart rate range, which is in that like 60 to 65% of the max.

Um, and that's where all the mitochondrial benefits happen. So by, by push, by being at that threshold, but not teetering over the edge, not actually accumulating fatigue, just letting yourself like ride right on that edge. That's where all the mitochondrial stuff happens. So it increases the number of mitochondrial stuff happens so it increases the number of mitochondria you have it increases the density of them and then most importantly i think it increases their flexibility and so we all hear the the cat the key phrase metabolic flexibility as if this is like the holy grail of health and it is in many ways like if your body

is able to utilize either fat or glucose carbs carbs to get you to through your activities, then then that is going to keep you healthy in the long term versus people that are more metabolically diseased, they're going to use almost primarily glucose and not be able to utilize fat for their energy source. And so that's where the benefit of zone two really comes in. And I think where zone one fails, um, not to say that, you know, you can't get the majority of your health benefits by lifting weights and going for walks. Um, I just think there's like a small piece of that that you'd be missing out on. Yeah. And I think that that's a great point. You know, you ask most people, you know, do you, what do you want out of whatever time you're willing to allocate for your fitness,

you will probably be able to give them what they want with mostly lifting weights and going on some walks. But when you talk about living a long life and hopefully preventing disease, I do think we're learning more and more about the specific importance of our vascular tissue. I mean, I shouldn't say we're learning more. I will say as a fitness professional you? I mean, I shouldn't say we're learning more. I will say as a fitness professional, who's been heavily biased towards resistance training. And, you know, we've had an interesting nutritional movement over the last, let's say five to eight years around saturated fat. You know, and I tend to just pay attention to what the smart people say and then ask other smart people what they think. And I've probably changed my tune on blood lipids 10 times in the last three years. But it seems to me to be pretty damn true

that if you don't do a good job keeping your blood cholesterol and blood lipids in check, you don't train your heart, you don't train your vascular tissue, and you're a dude, walking and lifting probably ain't going to protect you from a lot of the metabolic dysfunction and cardiovascular disease that we're going to face. So you'll want to trickle up into that zone too. You're going to get the additional benefit, which you hit on, of, I don't know if this is the right term, but mitochondrial biogenesis, like making new cells in your tissue that literally give your body energy. And when we talk about the most important element of our energy production, those are the smallest single

element. It's that mitochondria. And so I'm curious if in doing more zone two cardio and working towards improvements in your aerobic health, have you noticed better energy throughout the day? Have you noticed better energy in your hypertrophy training and trying to get people to want to do this? I feel like you almost have to sell them on like, look, I know I'm asking for 10 more beats per minute here, bud, but it's worth it. Like what are the big benefits that you've noticed so far in adding this work and not that you weren't already, but really being deliberate. Yeah. You know, I, um, I tend to run pretty chill. Like I'm a pretty tight B personality. Uh, but having a five-year-old and a three-year-old can make anyone into a hothead at times. And, um, prior to my cardio, I had many more outbursts of headedness with my kids.

Wow. And, and literally since, since implementing this cardio a number of months ago, I find, uh, I find myself much more, more even keeled.

Um, it is, isn't it? Yeah. And so, um, I also like as the nerd that I am, I take my blood pressure every morning and every night just cause fuck.

I like data um and so when i was just lifting and walking my blood pressure would teeter right around the 120 over 80 but there'd be times where it'd be like 125 over 85 stuff like that and since doing the cardio i haven't seen anything over 120 over 80 in the last five months. Like it's always, you know, 112 over 74 or something along those lines. And, uh, and so I think that's significant just in itself, because we know as we get older, that blood pressure generally goes up. And that's one of hypertension being one of the things that will get us at the, in the end at some point. Um, so, so that has been huge. Um, you talk about like energy or mental clarity or anything like that. Like, yeah, for sure. I

have much better energy and focus. I, um, I used to need caffeine a lot. Like I would start with 300 milligrams in the morning and then usually by 11 or 12, I'd have another two or 300. milligrams in the morning. And then usually by 11 or 12, I'd have another two or 300. And in the last, even before I started the cardio, I started kind of weaning myself down on that. But now I don't even think about it. I wake up in the morning and I have 200 milligrams, maybe at most, and then I don't touch caffeine the rest of the day, which has then had the trickle down effect of helping my sleep. Although it's hard to say whether the sleep was is improving because of the the cardio or because of the caffeine earlier in the day, or just a combination of both of them. But sleep is better, which then improves energy and focus throughout the day. And so it's this huge big circle of life where everything affects everything.

Yeah, you know, I wondered if that conversation might naturally segue towards caffeine, just because when we talk about, uh, I have found compounds that have the ability to, uh, let's say adjust my irritability. Caffeine tends to be like the number one. So like hearing like the, the irritability has decreased with the cardiovascular activity that in and of itself makes sense. Because I have heard, and again, I'm no expert here physiologically speaking, but I have heard that cardiovascular exercise, zone two, zone three, zone four, zone five, specifically the higher you go, the greater the likelihood of this happening. You kind of start to tap into catecholamine a little more quickly. You can kind of burn it off if you will. So if you do

have circulating epinephrine and norepinephrine, you'll burn through them a little more quickly if you're more active, particularly aerobically, or you're doing something like a counselor I had a very long time ago was like, look, if you're anxious, you should go exercise because your body is essentially experiencing fight or flight. So you should go burn some of that off, give it some fight, give it some flight. You know, that's how we evolved. And I think that a lot of people start their day slamming caffeine, jack up their irritability and catecholamine, and then don't do anything but sit at a desk all day. And they're like irritable and they're edgy. And so just randomly 20 24 days ago, I decided to pull out caffeine

and completely just go cold turkey just to see what happened. And I can totally say that I've experienced some of those same kind of level, that level headedness that I was like, man, I know I need to work on this, but I'm not sure how. And pulling caffeine really helped. And now I'm like, hmm, maybe adding some cardio will help even more because I would love to tap into a little bit more of that relaxed state. And I think men in general, whether they're in their 20s, 30s, 40s, you'll probably always wish you started doing this kind of aerobic work earlier. Because I think most of us are going to get to a point, and it sounds like you did for sure,

where you wake up one day and you're just like, yo, my priorities are shifting. Either because I hit 40 or because I have kids now, it's really important to me to take better care of my health. And I don't think you need to do too much zone two. If you want to max it out, how many minutes a week are we really talking about? Yeah. I mean, the CDC recommendation is 150 minutes a week. When you hear Peter Atiyah talk about it, who's, you know, he's done the cutting edge of longevity science. I just finished his book. Yeah. I mean, it's so good. I'm like halfway through it right now. It's just so well-written. I recommend everybody check it out. But yeah,

his recommendation, which he got from Inigo San Milan, who is... Great name. which he got from Inigo San Milan, who is a great name. Great name. Also, really just astute scientist in the field of mitochondrial metabolism and cardiovascular health. He's the one that basically stated in like a three hour long podcast with Peter Attia that he doesn't see in his clients, the real benefit of zone two, doing it two or three times a week, unless you're extremely unfit going into it. He said that four times a week is where the benefits really start to shine. And so that's kind of been in the back of my mind as I

ruminate on why I don't seem to be improving in my cardiovascular fitness and why I mentioned that, Hey, I'm doing it two to three times a week, but maybe I really need to make that more my priority and up it to like four or five times a week. But like for your general person, that's not trying to maximize cardiovascular health, but just looking to get a lot of those benefits that you're talking about, like cerebrally and, you know, better energy and sleep and all that stuff. I think two or three times a week, that 150 minutes a week is probably a pretty good recommendation. Okay. Yeah. That, that seems, that seems manageable. And like for people listening that are like, okay, I let's say you have a average base of aerobic fitness and I'm going

to assume that sprinting puts me in zone five and walking puts me in zone one. What are the typical activities? Because I'm like, hey, go do 150 minutes a week of X that'll put most people around zone two. Yeah. That's a good question because the choice of equipment or modality is actually pretty crucial because zone two has a pretty tight heart rate spectrum, right? If you want to be around 65% of your max heart rate, say you have like five beats on one side, five beats on the other side. For me, that's at this point somewhere between 128, 138,

or 130, 140, something like that. It's really easy to get too low or too high and bounce in and out of that range. And then you lose a lot of those benefits that we're talking about, about trying to teeter on the edge of that spectrum without actually falling over the cliff of fatigue. And that's why you might check for something like lactate, because that's going to be telling you, hey, you're using the wrong energy system,

or you're starting to tap into a different one. Okay, now I'm tracking a little bit with you guys' scientific experiments. I love it. So as far as modality goes, most people are inefficient at running and at rowing. Yes. Not that everybody is inefficient at those things because there are really good runners and there are really good rowers, but your average person is going to be pretty inefficient at those. And it's going to be really, really hard for you to stay in zone two. And as an anecdote, a personal experience with this, I tried running just because I was curious. I wanted to prove it to myself that I can't run. So I went out and I just started running at what I considered was

a slow pace. It was a nine and a half minute mile. It felt really slow within two minutes. My heart rate was in zone three, but it did not take long for a nine and a half minute mile to put me in zone three. Um, but so then I started, I realized I had to, I did it again and I have to run an 11 and a half minute mile, which is like shuffling. I mean, that's like almost a walked. It's almost like a really fast walk, but it's like so fast that I can't really walk that speed. So it's like a jog, but it's like the slowest jog. It's just uncomfortable to be honest. One Olympic sport that looks like you have to shit.

That one that we are. I think it's called race walking. Yeah. Speed walking. Yes. Yes. That's what it looks like, guys. If you want zone two, just walk like this guy. No, I'm kidding. So running and rowing are out for most people.

I actually happen to be a pretty good rower from all the years of CrossFit. I actually got some like kind of higher education on rowing technique. So I personally love rowing, but most people are incapable of using that. So what do we have left? The best options are, I think, using a fan bike that has arms that move because then you can utilize your entire body at once. I've personally tried doing it on a stationary bike without arms that move. And I cannot get my heart rate into zone two without my legs accruing so much lactic acid that I feel like I'm teetering over that edge. And it's not even that my heart rate is teetering over the edge. Cause I can't get it there. It's literally my legs

trying to produce huge pump. Yeah, exactly. So, so for me, stationary bike was no good. Um, the one that I'm really looking forward to trying once go rock gets their stuff back in stock is to, to start rocking. So they make these really cool, uh, like military style backpacks that have a chest strap and a hip strap and these special plates that they load in so that it distributes the load evenly across your back and your hips. Um,

and you can literally go the, the one I want is the 25 liter pack, which allows you to put up to 70 pounds in it. And so you're supposed to go rock with, uh, between a quarter and a third of your body weight in there, which for me is going to be. Yeah, right around 50 plus pounds of weight in there. And you just literally go walk around. And most people find that to be one of the best ways to do zone two, because just having that extra weight on your body makes walking compatible with getting your heart rate high enough. That's perfect. Yeah. Other people have found incline treadmill walking to be good. Like that's exclusively what Jordan uses. He puts

the treadmill on like, I don't know, a 10 or a 12 incline at like a 3.2 speed or something along those lines. And he'll just walk for 45 minutes and that'll be his zone too. So you, you kind of can experiment and play around with it, but you just want to find a modality that allows you to stay in that heart rate zone without oscillating up and down too much. A question that I have, I think that is a good general question. And I think it's also for anybody who's like, I really want to go do this. To what degree or to what, like, to what amount are we giving credit to these wearable devices for being able to accurately assess this? I have a polar chest strap that I've had forever and it still works great.

And these aren't very expensive folks. If you want a chest strap heart rate monitor, they're 60 bucks. They're not expensive. But do you think people can try to eyeball this using wearables? Or if they really want to go for it, would you recommend a chest strap? Well, I do have an answer to this. But I think that before I get into that, I think RPE might just be the best way to go. Oh, cool.

Even easier. Yeah, exactly. Because a lot of people have problems with the the wrist watches sure um and i wasn't sure how much how accurate mine was so i just pulled out my old polar h7 chest strap that i have from like 2015 or something and and i put that on yesterday for the first time and i also wore my apple watch and i compared the data at the end of my bike ride to see how close they were. And they were almost identical. I literally couldn't believe it because everybody else that I've talked to, and I've talked to like 10 different people about this, they said the data has been outrageously different.

It's interesting because I've heard that the caloric expenditure estimates are so wildly terrible that it kind of just made me think all of the wearable data capabilities are pretty low level. But I have heard a number of people more recently say like, yo, the watches are getting really good with heart rate. They're getting really good with tracking heart rate. So maybe they're leveling up. Yeah. I was really surprised. And I think maybe just to put a little more nuance on it. A lot of the people I talked to that had issues with the comparison were females. And I'm wondering if there's something about the watch not fitting their smaller wrists quite as tightly or quite as quite as well, or the face of the watch not hitting the right spot on the wrist or something along those lines. Um, but yeah, for me, it worked, it was super clean, like literally within

two beats, a heart rate was, it was off and the caloric expenditure was identical, like to the calorie. Um, and the distance accumulated was the same, like all the metrics were basically spot on. Um, but going back to kind of the RPE thing, when you're in zone two, and you want to like not teeter over that edge, there's kind of two ways or three ways you can look at it. One is that infinitely sustainable pace where it's something you could do for two to three hours, but you only do it for an hour. Another one is the talk test. And so I used to say to people, a semi-stressed conversation until I talked to people that were having a semi-stressed conversation, but they were in zone four. And so, so now I say a barely stressed conversation. So it's literally like you and I could be talking on a podcast, but you would barely be able to detect that I'm exercising. So maybe certain words I'm like, like I kind of you hear me take a deep breath before the sentence, but there's no restriction to me completing an entire sentence or something along those lines. So so I think that's a pretty good metric.

And then just to not feel fatigue accumulate. So in each 10 minute period of your hour, you should not feel like that 10 minutes was harder than the prior 10 minutes. And the next 10 minutes is no harder than the 10 minutes before that. And so if you're in tune with your body, then you can kind of use those those RPE metrics to give you a pretty good estimation. What's going on guys taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training. We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology and best user interface possible. or you can train from home with bands and dumbbells, or Elite Physique, which is a female bodybuilding-focused program where you can train at the gym with equipments designed specifically to help you develop strength, as well as the glutes, hamstrings, quads, and back.

I have more teams coming planned for a variety of different fitness levels. But what's cool about this is when you join these programs, you get programming that's updated every single week, the sets to do, the reps to do, exercise tutorials filmed by me with me and my team. So you'll get my exact coaching expertise as to how to perform the movement, whether you're training at home or you're training in the gym. And again, these teams are somewhat specific. So you'll find other members of those communities looking to pursue similar goals at similar fitness levels. You can chat, ask questions, upload form for form review, ask for substitutions. It's a really cool training community and you can try it completely

free for seven days. Just click the link in the podcast description below. Can't wait to see you in the core coaching collective, my app-based training community. Back to the show. I love that. One question before we segue to some anaerobic stuff, I'd love to pick your brain on. Are there benefits to zone three and four that aren't captured from just combining one, two, and five? So I think most of the benefits from zone three and zone four, I think are going to be driven by performance. So it's for athletes that have performance goals. I think that those zones have much more applicability to improving your general output. But as far as health goes, and if you're a hypertrophy or a strength or an aesthetic based athlete, I don't think you need to concern

yourself with zone three and zone four too much. Perfect. So let's talk about then hypertrophy and aesthetics-based athletes. And just, I love the kind of pathway we took from aerobic fitness to talking about like the general benefits of aerobic wellbeing, but you're 40 now and you said you've been lifting weights since you were 15, so 25 years, basically. Yep. In that 25-year time period, compared to your peers, friends, contemporaries, what are the biggest benefits of sustaining and having maintained a resistance training practice? Just purely anecdotal, before we dive into it, because I always love to ask this question of people who've been really at it for a while, because there's still this notion that, oh, lifting weights is a young man's game. And this is certainly not the case. And you're certainly not old. But from a standpoint

of like, I'm in my late 20s, you're in your 40s. I've got clients in their 60s and 80s. I love to watch how resistance training across the lifespan separates people from their peers. Like how has that made your life better? And what have you noticed is missing in the cohort and contemporaries you have that don't do that? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's endless. Like it's, it's such a good question.

And I don't even really know to where to begin because it's just, it's so important in, in who I am and like where my life is. Um, confidence is for sure. One of the big ones, I mean, like being, I was, I was late to the puberty train. Um, I was, I was really late, man. And so I was 15 when I started lifting. And the main reason I started lifting was... It was two... It was threefold. I got in a small skirmish with a kid at school. And he called me the Pillsbury Doughboy. And I was like, fuck, I don't want to be that anymore. And then I also wanted to get the attention of girls, of course.

And I wanted to improve my performance on the basketball court. And when you're a prepubescent 15-year old, trying to make varsity strictly based off skill and not size, um, you need every advantage that you can get. And so, um, starting to lift weights allowed me in those first three years from 15 to 18 to make varsity, grab the attention of girls and not have to fight anybody anymore. So, so that was huge for me. Um, I think, you know, it just goes so far beyond that because I, I relate it back to purpose and I literally wake up every day excited to attack the day for something as silly and menial as the workout that I get to do that day. I still have days where if I think about the workout I have to do tomorrow too close to

bed, I have a hard time sleeping because I'm excited about it. Yeah, dude. Yeah. And so, man, so many people of my peers are purposeless. The people that work the corporate job, they live for the weekends. They can't wait until Saturday so they can drink all day and watch college football and then drink all day and watch pro football on Sundays. And I like both of those things. Be careful now. I love them too, man, but I don't live for it you know what i mean and and

then they they go to bed sunday night and they're dreading what the next five days holds um uh that that's the the big psychological benefit that i think is is unmatched um other benefits that come along with it are uh the ability to eat much more of the foods that i enjoy and uh going back to the health thing you know you have enough muscle mass you just absorb glucose like you you eat whatever you eat and within two hours your body just gets rid of it it absorbs it it gets rid of it it stores it whatever it does it doesn't just sit there and turn to metabolic disease like it does with most people yeah and so um i have a sweet tooth and i have a fried food tooth dude i am the same way most people are one or the other right but um but i love them all man like my favorite meal is is a

footlong cheese steak with double meat and then follow it up with some sort of like cookie or brownie or something are you from philadelphia or East coast? I'm from DC. Okay. All right. There we go. It's going to say a cheesesteak out here on the West coast. It's like they don't exist. So there's a, uh, there's a place in San Diego where I was for 12 years called a steak and fries, and they only serve two items on their menu. And, uh, and the guy who opened it moved from Philly five years ago and then opened this little hole in the wall steak joint in Pacific beach, San Diego. And it is, man, it is phenomenal. So every time I go back to San Diego, that's like the one thing I crave because out here

in Colorado, we don't really have good cheese steaks either. But, um, but anyway, so, so I love food and I think that that's one huge benefit that my peers don't have as well that don't work out. What else? I think that's probably like that covers a big, large chunk of it. Those are the big ones. And I like to hear that, man, because, you know, I think we're all anybody who works in fitness is on a journey of some sort to connect people who need it the most with the shit that they'll actually do. sort to connect people who need it the most with the shit that they'll actually do. And it's really hard to get people excited about mitochondrial health or about not dying of cardiovascular disease because humans are inherently bad at making short-term trade-offs for long-term gains. And so when you hear people say like, yeah, well, lifting weights literally lets me eat more of the

food that I want without getting fat or feeling metabolically sick. And I'm confident because I like the way my body looks. That is so much more beneficial than me being like, oh, it'll make you more insulin sensitive. It's great for your bones. That just doesn't quite work as well. So take me through your weight training journey. I know you're a young basketball athlete. So that could essentially be the beginning of your aer weight training journey. I know you were a young basketball athlete, so that could essentially be the beginning

of your aerobic fitness journey. But if you're like most young basketball athletes, it probably looked something like the minute I was done because I was so sick of getting punished with conditioning. I just stuck with lifting and kind of took it easy on the conditioning. And after typically, did you play in college? No, I had the option to play at a couple of different D3 schools, but I ended up choosing to go to division one school and not play. Perfect. Perfect. So like, as is the fate for most moderate to even highly athletic average to below average height, white guys around the end

of your high school careers, when you hang them up more seriously and typically pursue lifting as a kind of primary exercise. That kind of the pathway for you? Yeah, exactly. So I actually, like I said, I picked up lifting when I was 15 to get better at basketball, but it really quickly became the overriding passion. I struggled with that 1A, 1B thing with lifting and basketball a lot toward the ends of high school. Same. Especially, you play basketball too. Yeah. Baseball, basketball, and football. And like by, by my senior year, I wanted to be Mr.

Olympia. I was like, fuck all this. So I would come home from basketball practice, you know, two hours and 6 PM after a long day of school. And you would find me on message boards back in the day before there was social media it was like uh bodybuilding.com forums yeah bodybuilding.com uh t nation and then i was on a one called power and bulk which was never even heard of that it's easy board uh so it was another one of those like boards that existed but uh, the big voice in the power and bulk forum back in 1999 was Paul Carter. Oh, okay. And now we know Paul Carter as Mr. Lift run bang on Instagram. And, uh, so Paul was the, the big voice there. And his advice to me at the time was to just stick with big compound movements, like the squat bench dead overhead press

bent over row and basically just get stupid strong at those before worrying about any of the more acute you know specific bodybuilding style movements i've talked to him since then and he actually told me he thought that was terrible advice but that's that's interesting because you know like i i hear that now knowing everything we know about hypertrophy, it's changed so much since 1999. But I still don't think it's the worst advice ever. I don't either. Just because I'm a firm believer. And look, I'm not the biggest guy in the world, but I'm a firm believer that a basis of strength and movement efficiency is so critical.

And I do think that while intellectualizing things is always a good idea, a lot of the younger lifters out there over-intellectualize before they actually learn how to work and actually understand how to put more weight on a barbell or train close to failure. So that's not a bad place to start. No, I agree. And I actually credit that as really good advice. I actually wrote him when he told me it was bad advice. I wrote him and I was like, Hey, dude, thanks for that advice you gave me back in the late 90s. And he was like, that was terrible advice. I was like, I don't know. I kind of like that advice. But that idea of... A number of people have proposed the idea. Ian King out of Australia,

another one. But basically looking at movement patterns and taking a horizontal push, a horizontal pull, a vertical push, a vertical pull, a hip dominant movement, and a knee dominant movement. Basically, 6 movement patterns. And then building your routine around those 6 movement patterns. I think that's phenomenal advice. And that's still the advice that I give to people that are, you know, starting their journey into fitness. But that's where I started. And then I got to college and I wasn't playing basketball anymore. So I was like, well, now I can bodybuild. And suddenly I went to a bro split. So I went from like this really intelligent, like three times a week, full body program to like chest on Monday, back on Tuesday, shoulders, Wednesday, arms Thursday, and sometimes legs on Friday. Um, and that was like, that was literally the

routine through all of college. And it actually, you know what legs were on Wednesday if I did them because arms had to be on Friday because I was always hung over. Yes. I was going out Thursday night. I was hung over. So I had to be able to do I was always hung over. Yes, I was going out Thursday night. I was hung over. So I had to be able to do arms on Friday and then go out again Friday night. So that was the split basically for like five or six years through college. I followed a program called Max OT, which was actually a really solid program. Most people probably don't know it because it died around the early 2000s.

But it's a bro split. It's just heavyweights to failure, relatively low volume. And I really liked that. I responded well to it. After college, I got a real job. I graduated in exercise science. But at the time in 2006, what do you do after college with an exercise science degree? Well, she become like a assistant strength coach at a university or something like that. In 2006, you don't have nearly the same landscape of opportunity that you do in 2023 with that. Yeah. So I was like, I can make $32,000 right now doing what I want to do, or I can kind of do what all my friends are doing right out of college, making

60 grand a year. So I went into government contracting. I did that whole thing for a number of years, uh, moved out to San Diego for a girl in 2007. Uh, she's now my wife. So I guess that was a good decision. Very nice. And then in 2009, my college roommate moved out to San Diego as well. And we opened a gym called CrossFit Pacific Beach. And we crushed it in CrossFit for a number of years. We were early enough into the CrossFit space that we were one of the top gyms in SoCal, which was the most competitive region. It's all it takes, baby. Yeah. And then I started in the online coaching space in 2011. So that whole thing started way before most people did. And we sold the gym in 2016.

Great timing. Great timing. And then I moved fully into the online space in 2017 and kind of maneuvered back into this hypertrophy physique style world and away from the whole CrossFit thing. That seems... So I love that. And my path was super, super similar. I don't want to say super similar in that they were essentially different decades. similar. Like, I don't want to say super similar in that they were essentially different decades, but like, dude started with wanting to get big for girls and attention and to compete at the level that I wasn't capable of competing in sports at my size. I started doing what I thought was

like relatively intelligent training. And then for like two to three years, my training just got increasingly more and more stupid because of like being, just being exposed to like, and the infancy of fitness YouTube and the very infancy of like the bodybuilding.com forums and deciding that instead of just listening to like one person, I'm just going to combine as many of these things as possible. Like I joke that like my, like for the first three years of training, I thought the best way to grow my chest was to do flat incline and, and decline barbell press. And then immediately supersetting each one of those with the dumbbell equivalent. So I, and then I remember getting like super galaxy brain to be like, what if I superset decline barbell with incline dumbbell?

It's just like literally every angle. The lengths to which I went to try to build muscle were oftentimes not helping me build muscle at all, probably keeping me weak and keeping me under recovered. And so now I feel like it's more a game of efficiency. And I understand hypertrophy more as really being able to apply specific stress to the specific tissue frequently enough that you can still recover, but also make gains. And I find the way that you're training right now to be super fascinating. I feel like you're focusing a lot on optimizing for mechanics, making sure that you're loading the tissue you want to load. And you're playing a lot with things in the lengthened position, which the more podcasts I listened to, the more people I talked to,

it seems like that might be the new kind. I don't want to say like cutting edge because if you've ever trained through a full range of motion, you've taken advantage of the lengthened position. If you've ever done lengthened biased exercises, you've done this as well, but there's a lot more people who are like, yo, so magic is happening here in these lengthened positions. So what is this? What are you learning in this new chapter of your training? Because I'm pretty fascinated watching from afar. Yeah, man, totally. So I think it's important to first take a step back and let people know what exactly these resistance curves and strength curves are. Good point.

So think of a movement like an RDL. If you go to the bottom of an RDL, the hardest point of that movement is right there at the bottom where your glutes and your hamstrings are lengthened. When you come up to the top of your rep and you're standing with your hips open, there's no resistance on your body. So that would essentially be the short position, but there's no, there's no resistance there. So when you think about a different style movement, think about something like a, uh, maybe a hip thrust is a great example. Yeah. So at the bottom of the hip thrust, it's not hard at all. You can get that thing moving really easily, but the, when you get to the top where your hips completely open up, that's going to be the short position. That's going to be the hardest point.

The example I always like to use with this is either like a dumbbell curl or some sort of row. I think a dumbbell row might actually be the most applicable example. Um, because if you're doing a set of rows and you go to failure, your failure is going to essentially be the point where you can't get your elbow to or past your torso anymore. But if you were to do a little experiment with yourself and see how many more like mini reps, partial reps you can make once you can no longer get your elbow past your torso, you would be able to get like 12 more. Like there's an insane amount of reps that you would be able to do beyond the point where you can't get a full rep. And so that's the perfect exemplification of what I consider a short overload movement

where you fail the short position, but you can still keep accruing rep upon rep upon rep. When you get to the bottom of your RDL, you do the last rep that you can do where you stand up and say, it's like a really slow grinding rep. What happens when you go back down for another attempted rep? Yeah. You fail. You can't get back up again. Same thing as a back squat. If you make a really tough grinding rep and you stand up and you're like, whew, that was hard work. Let me do some partials now. And you go down, there's no partials. You're just getting pinned and that bar is coming off your back. Right. Um, so that's really the distinct difference between a short overload movement and a lengthened one, a short one, you can keep going a lengthened one. You're just done. Um, and so the way that I approach this

is, is I don't change anything in the way that I perform lengthened movements because they're already overloaded lengthened. There's nothing that needs to change. They're already hard lengthened. We know the length and stuff is good for you. It's going to produce more muscle. That's why these big compound movements that we were discussing before are so great because most of them are inherently lengthened overloaded. Generally why training through a full range of motion tends to be better than a partial because you don't get the exposure to the lengthened position. If you half rep everything, right?

Right, right, right. Exactly. As long as those half reps, half reps are at the top. So what I've been doing is experimenting with doing these half reps at the bottom. So you can think of your leg extension, your leg curl, your dumbbell row, that example, I just used your bicep curl, any of those movements that are hardest at the contracted position, you have so much more that you can give at the bottom of those reps that I'm trying to take advantage of that. So, um, so that's really where, where this length and stuff comes from is let's try to get more out of the

movements that no one actually gets more out of those positions. Like when, when people fail dumbbell rows, they just fail their full rep and they're like, Ooh, that was a tough set game over. Well there's so much more that you can give that movement. And I think it's unfortunate if you don't, especially given like what you alluded to with all the new science and stuff. There's nine studies now in the last three or four years that compare in some manner, training at long muscle lengths to short muscle lengths or training, overloading the length and

position versus overloading the short position. And eight out of the nine of these studies have shown convincingly that the overloading lengthened or training at long muscle lengths is going to be more beneficial to training short. So in essence, like what I'm getting is you like to train the movement through the fullest range of motion, but once you've achieved failure and inability to get all the way into the shortened position, you like exercises that allow you to keep going in that lengthened position or to overload it further. Like a chest fly where you can't maybe get it all the way past your rib cage, you can

continue to work when you're really in a lot of abduction. And just something like that could be. Yeah. So they would be, it wouldn't apply to a dumbbell fly because in a dumbbell fly, you're, you're, you're fighting gravity, right? So it is a lengthened movement inherently, but yeah, if you're talking about cables or bands or something like that, then yeah, exactly. You'll reach a point where you can no longer get your cables together at the front of your cable crossover or whatever you're doing, but you can still work that lengthened position, um, toward the bottom of the rep where your chest

is stretched out and you can get a ton more reps in that position. So I wouldn't say like what you said is that I like movements like that. Um, I still think most of my training is biased toward movements that are inherently lengthened, overloaded, like squat patterns and RDLs and things like that. But for movements that aren't inherently lengthened, overloaded, like a cable chest fly or like a dumbbell row or a cable row or a bicep curl or whatever, any of those short overload movements, yes, I will take advantage of the fact that you can continue to accumulate reps in the length and position. And then I'll even take that a step further. And because I know the importance of

full range of motion, and I think there's some orthopedic benefits to getting to the short position. Yeah, no doubt. So I will actually do one full range of motion set where I'll just go to failure of full range of motion. And then I'll add about 20 or 25% load to that weight, rest two or three minutes, and then do another set with this heavier load. And what you'll find when you do the heavier load is that you may only get one, two or three full reps. And then you'll quickly find that range of motion falls off. And you'll get a lot more benefit by using a heavier load for the more lengthened ranges of that movement. Gotcha. One thing that I've noticed when people tend to,

not necessarily intentionally, but they just do partial reps, they tend to bias the shortened position. I never see anybody doing partial rep lengthened bicep curls? Like every half rep that was ever done kind of biases the shortened position. Cause I think it's a little more comfortable. And I heard this once, I don't remember. It might've been Eugene Tio. Somebody was saying like, yeah, we like shortened work. Cause you get great contractions and you get great pumps and lengthened work scares the shit out of you. Cause a lot of those positions where you're fully lengthened, you're like, I might die. But if you select for the right movement and the right resistance profile, oftentimes machines, cables, the right free weight movements, I think you can benefit a lot from those lengthened positions. I think it builds tissue resilience. I think you should always

train through a full range. But like you said, eight studies in the last three years showing there's something specifically hypertrophic about these long muscle lengths. What do you think that is? Do you think it's at the level of the actual muscle tissue? Do you think it has something to do with like myokine release at these long muscle lengths, more muscle damage, all of the above? What's causing this? So muscle damage is definitely something that is going to come along with training at long muscle lengths. That's just inevitable. But muscle damage hasn't been shown to actually be hypertrophic on its own. It's just kind of like a byproduct. From what I understand, and this is definitely not my area of expertise, but it has to do with the Titan protein. And, um, so when you put your muscle under an extreme stretch under load, it essentially opens up the, the, the muscle receptors of sorts. And I like to think of it almost as this, like it becomes porous and then all of the blood and the protein can kind of pour into the muscle that makes a shit ton of sense you should whereas

yeah whereas when when you get short so say you're at the top of a bicep curl where your arm contracts then there's all this cross bridging happening and when that happens you can't actually flood the muscle with all of these different like proteins and blood and molecules that you want to get into the, to the muscle. So therefore at the length and position, when you, when you literally pause at that super stretch position and your muscle is like being pulled apart, you just get a little bit more of that influx of those proteins that are going to be hypertrophic. That's brilliant. I actually like, it's funny because that immediately sends me back to like 2015 YouTube of like FST7. You probably do not remember this. I've heard of it. I've heard of it. So FST7 was Hany Rambod, who anybody who's not super familiar with bodybuilding, like

he coached Jay Cutler and Phil Heath in the late 20s, like 2009 to like 2000, let's see, 2005 to 2016, when those two dudes won pretty much every Mr. Olympia. And his claim to fame protocol was this FST-7, which stood for fascial stretch training. And the idea was these big, long, eccentric seven sets. And in between each set, you were to isometric flex the muscle as hard as you could for a minute and pump the blood into it. And I'm like, now I'm thinking, you were good with just the fascial stretch. That contraction was locking it out. It was squeezing all of it out. So that makes a lot of sense. So essentially what we're talking about is in that lengthened position, we're opening the tissue in

some way for better nutrient availability, maybe doing some more damage and growing. And you're experimenting with this yourself literally right now, right? Yeah. I mean, I've been experimenting with it for two plus years i uh the first study that came out that was kind of the the big one on this whole stretch mediated hypertrophy thing was a 2018 or 19 uh i think it was mayo and colleagues and they compared a seated leg curl to a lying leg curl and so this isn't a perfect study for what we're talking about because it is training at long muscle lengths. Essentially when you're doing a seated leg curl, you're starting in, in hip flexion. And so it's kind of like that old sit and reach

tests that you would do in, in high school or middle school or whatever. Um, so you're essentially pre-stretching your hamstrings by being in a seated leg curl. Whereas when you're in a lying leg curl and your hip is open, there's no pre-stretch on the hamstring. And so they found in that study that the seated leg curl produced significantly more growth across the board than the lying leg curl. But in that same study, they also found that the sartorius muscle, which is kind of a weird muscle that wraps around the medial inside of your knee and then up into the top of your quad, they found that the sartorius muscle grew better from the lying leg curl. And that's because it

actually gets stretched better in the lying leg curl, whereas the other three hamstrings get stretched better in the seated leg curl. And so other three hamstrings get stretched better in the seated leg curl. And so this study showed two things. It showed, well, it really showed one thing that stretching the muscle, uh, long muscle lengths is, is more beneficial. And the fact that the sartorius grew more from the lying leg curl is just like a cherry on top of proof for concept. Right. Um, and then since then they've done a number of other studies. The most prominent one that I like to refer to is a Pedrosa and colleagues. And that one followed the, the hamstring curl study. And they took, uh, people and they had them do leg extensions in five different ranges

of motion. Um, but I'm just going to talk about three of them because those are the important ones. So they had one group do a full range of motion leg extension. Another group did just the top. So they would stop the leg extension halfway down and then go back up and then halfway down and go back up. And then the third group did just the bottom. So they would stretch the quad at the bottom of the leg extension, but then only come up halfway and then go back down and then come up halfway. And the group that did just the bottom half grew more than both the other groups. Um, the full range of motion group was close

to the bottom half group because they're hitting the bottom half. Um, the group that did just the top half of the leg extension grew very little compared to the other two groups. And that makes sense, but it's confusing to the layman, uh, participant because they're like, well, I feel my quad so much when, when I extend it and it flexes, like that's where I feel all the good stuff. And that's very confusing for people because what you're feeling is actually lying to you. It's not the contraction point. That's going to be the important part for growth. It's going to be that bottom point where your quad stretches and all the Titan flows in. And you get that stretch mediated hypertrophy down there. So those are the two really like first two studies on it. And then the other ones have all just flooded in over the last

two years from there. I saw one about calves just sitting with one calf flexed and then the other leg just relaxed for eight hours a day. And now people are trying to build the same mechanism they were using in the study because the stretched calf grew. 15%. It grew 15%. Yeah. So if you have small calves, which fortunately my short Italian genetics have not predisposed me to this. I have friends who have small calves. It's like a desperate race to get anything out of your calves. I've seen people now building calves, stretching apparatus for their work desk. It seems that the world has caught on. And in knowing that you've gone through this 25-year hypertrophy education, quite frankly, and you're one of the leading experts in the world on

it, if you had to break it down succinctly, how would you tell people to train to build muscle? Yeah. I mean, I think for most people, they're probably fine just biasing most of their training to movements that are inherently overloaded lengthened. So we're talking like your RDLs, your squats, your dumbbell bench presses, shoulder presses. The area where I really, really think this kind of lengthened muscle lengths stuff really shines is in back training. Because back training is the one area of the body where there is not a single movement that you can do that is inherently lengthened overloaded. Wow.

There just isn't one. Yeah, I guess you're right. I mean, I'm trying to think of one, but I can't. Yeah, there just isn't any. So if we want to maximize back growth and lat growth, rear delt growth, any of the muscles of the upper back, lower back musculature, or not lower back so much, but mid and upper back and lats, then I think using these kind of lengthened sets or overloading the length and position, it really, really has some benefit that I just think it's probably something smart to apply to your training.

That is, uh, that might be worth a study on, uh, in and of itself. I might try like a block of, uh, intentionally looking to bias more of my back training, uh, to, or just to include more of this work and see what it does. Cause I don't, I don't know if my back is a lagging body part per se, but it's not up to speed with my chest. So if you want to keep those two symmetrical, that's usually what you want to do. That, that could be fun. I might play with that brother. Okay. But before I let you go, I typically, before I have guests on, I will peruse their social. And I'll often go to Twitter looking for hot takes or interesting takes. And I noticed that you don't have any Twitter activity.

But in 2016, you were stuck on who to start in your flex between Jordy Nelson, Devonta Adams, and Frank Gore. And I want to know, do you remember who you started that week? Oh man, I don't. I really don't. I want to say that that was towards the tail end of Frank Gore's career. And so I think that I probably veered away from Frank Gore and went Devante and Jordy, but I really couldn't tell you with any confidence. and went Devante and Jordy, but I really couldn't tell you with any confidence. I laughed at that. I was like, I can't wait to ask that question. I am a diehard fantasy football fan. I live for it. And so I was like, oh my God, this guy's into fantasy football back in 2016.

We are going to get a great conversation. Who's your team? Do you have a pro team? Yeah, I'm a Redskins slash Commanders fan, unfortunately. It's okay. What do you hope they do at 16 in the draft? I don't know, man. We need everything. Yeah, exactly. I mean, really, the big problem, we need a new owner. Gotta sell it. Gotta sell it. Yeah, we need a new owner.

The quarterback thing has been just a disaster now for decades. In 2000, what was it? And sometime in 2000, something we drafted RG three 2013. And we gave up three first round picks and a second round pick for him. And that just like crushed our entire future. I just, it's been really hard to recover from. And we haven't had a single good quality quarterback since then. Even quarterbacks that were good, like

Kirk Cousins was, he's good on Minnesota, but wasn't so great for us. So I don't know, dude, we have an awful organization. And the only reason, well, aside from growing up in DC in 1991, I was nine years old. And it was the first year that I actually watched football and the Redskins won the Super Bowl. And so, man, I was forever screwed. Forever cursed. No, dude, I always laugh. I love to connect with people in the space on things outside of fitness. And I found it increasingly more difficult to find sports fans in the fitness space because a lot of people are finding fitness that weren't inclined to be athletic in their younger years. So there's a lot of

brilliant minds who are just like, yeah, no, I don't like sports. I like anime and other things. If anybody wants to talk football, I'm around. Dude, the anime stuff, it's so over my head. I haven't even tried. I remember specifically being mortified when I was in high school of anybody finding out that I liked anime and dudes in posing shorts. And now that apparently makes you cool as fuck. So I missed my window big time. So I don't even, I'm pretty much exclusively like sports 24 seven with a little pinch of, you know, movies here and there, but almost all of my non-fitness content is sports content, brother. So thank you so much for coming on, chatting aerobic health,

chatting hypertrophy. I learned a shit ton from you today. I'm sure everybody else did. Where can they find you, find your work and keep educating themselves? Yeah, totally, man. It was a pleasure. I'm at Brian Borstein on Instagram. I have two companies that we do group programming between $29 and $49 a month. So Evolved Training Systems is my original brand. And that's... It's even mixed male and female. And then my other company is Paragon Training Methods. I partnered with a lady named Lori Christine King. She handles the nutrition side. I handle the training side. And this is a little bit more geared toward females. And this is a little bit more geared toward females. Although my personal program that I follow called Brian's program is actually hosted on the Paragon Training Methods app.

So those are my two companies. And then I podcast. So I have a podcast called Eat, Train, Prosper with my co-host Aaron Straker. And we talk about a lot of nuanced hypertrophy talk, like a lot of stuff on lengthened overload, stretched mediated hypertrophy, and more recently, health and longevity and cardio and stuff like that. I love it, dude.

Well, thank you so much for coming on and we'll have you on again soon for sure, bro. For sure, thanks. you