Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 517 - Ditch The Barbell - Doug Brignole

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Doug Brignole schooled us on bodybuilding physics and explained why Powerlifting isn't helping you grow and SO MUCH MORE! Links to Doug's books below! Doug Brignole is a veteran competitive bodybuilder, biomechanics expert, author and public speaker. Throughout his 40+ year competitive career he has won numerous bodybuilding titles, including 1982 Mr. America and 1986 Mr. Universe. Buy Doug's, "The Physics of Resistance Exercise" Now: https://amzn.to/2QAYUiK More info on Doug: https://dougbrignole.com/ His Online Training Certification Program: https://smarttraining365.com/ Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Bro, guess what? This year has gone by so fast. We're already in the fourth month of the year. It's getting warmer. We're in April. Do you know why April is so significant? Well, it's warmer, meaning you're going to be eating more fruits, oranges, limes, watermelons. Ooh, watermelons. Funny you say. Yeah. Anything specifically special about watermelons? Well, I gave you two of the Element watermelon packs because you didn't have any.

And their new watermelon flavor is out. It tastes absolutely amazing. If I were going to compare it to something, it would probably be like a watermelon sour patch kid, except not unpleasantly sour. It's refreshing. Got it. Yeah. So I did have a couple here. I finally dove into one of them because you gave me two.

I was too stingy to even crack one open because normally normally what i do is i have uh element electrolytes with my workouts i wanted to sit back and actually enjoy you know like actually taste every little sip of this you're right dude it's really freaking good um i do kind of like sourness so like i want to see if i can make it with like less water to kind of get me there but But I think it's just, you're right. It's actually really freaking good. It's not overbearing. Super refreshing. Highly recommend it.

And it's available right now. Yes. April, I think. Today's the 13th. So, this officially dropped today. You guys can head over to drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. Pick yourself up a value bundle. I highly recommend that you guys pick up a bunch of the watermelon flavor because this

thing is bar none. Like this really is probably the new number one for me as well. The next element pack I get, I'm going to get four watermelons. Four watermelons. I don't want any other flavor but watermelon. Okay. So he's going to get four watermelons. He's only going to pay for three.

That's what happens when you get a value bundle. You pay for three boxes and you get the fourth one absolutely free. Again, that's at drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. Head over there right now. Pick yourself up a Element value bundle right now and include the watermelon flavor for sure. What up, Power Project crew? This is Josh Sutledge, aka SettleGate, here to introduce you to our next guest, Doug Brignole. Doug Brignole is a veteran competitive bodybuilder, a biomechanics expert, author, and public speaker.

He's been in competitive bodybuilding for over 40 years and has won numerous bodybuilding titles, including the 1982 Mr. America and the 1986 Mr. Universe competitions. 1982 Mr. America and the 1986 Mr. Universe competitions. He has authored numerous magazine articles and co-authored a university sociology book called Million Dollar Muscle. In his most recent book, The Physics of Resistance Exercise, is endorsed by 10 various PhD professors in exercise science, physics, neurobiology, biomedical engineering, and paleoanthropology. Doug has also developed his own very specific system of training around maximizing muscle growth without using any heavy loads. But that is a different story for a different time, maybe one that you guys aren't that

interested in. So please enjoy this conversation with our guest, Doug Brignoli. I heard like the number one thing that middle school kids want to be nowadays is an influencer. Yeah. You heard about that? Yeah. Is that true? Yes, it is.

Is that real life? Because everyone that they watch is like a YouTube star and TikTok star. And they see everyone making money. When I was in middle school, I never saw anybody making money on that stuff. Yeah. Well, we saw people making money in professional sports, so we thought we would do that. Yeah, exactly. We were under the impression that we might be able to figure that out someday.

And I think one thing about being an influencer that I'd say where I would have some caution against is like, I don't know. And I guess you can make the same argument for professional sports. I don't think that's something that you try to do. I think it's something that you end up becoming because you're already like skills at something. You have like maybe genetics because you're six, six or whatever. And then you have a really good skill set and you catch on early on. I think that that would be. And I think that that would be, but with an influencer, I think, I guess with the exception of people that just kind of like mess around on there and kind of have more comedic stuff, you need to be like a material expert at something, fixing cars or, you know, do it yourself type stuff around the house or cooking or something to be an influencer but then there's even like the skill set of like uh just i don't know doing like fun weird stuff because there's like a lot of weird stuff on youtube uh there's a lot of people that are like in their 20s and 30s that really appeal to like

younger kids and they have you know just like fun silly weird information and that's a skill set in and of itself but i don't know how you would try to become that other than just uh maybe messing around with some stuff like that you film it kind of like we heard the story from bart and then you just end up in it well i mean that's the cool thing because like let's talk about what some people would look at somebody who's just like funny or whatever and be like oh you could just funny. But it takes a lot to be like really funny all the time and being able to entertain people continuously. It's a skill set. That's a skill set. And that's a skill set that a lot of people have as people like to call it influence or whatever.

But I can't replicate that. Nope. Other people can't replicate that. If they could, they'd probably be doing it. Which means that there is a skill, like making people laugh continuously, bringing that type of energy into other individuals to make them smile and laugh and feel good. That is a skill, right? And we tend to, you know, tend to get kind of jealous of somebody. We're like, this guy's famous

for no reason. It's like, you can't really be known for no reason. Yeah. Can't really be known for no reason yeah can't really be known for no reason at all i mean i guess i guess if you were like born into like the royal family and people knew your name without you ever even doing anything maybe we could make an argument if you're like lebron james's baby or something or son or daughter or something like but uh aside from that i think that some of these people that we hate on there like they end up being known for something but that guy only lives on the internet he doesn't even compete in power lifting it's like uh he's still really strong yeah he still looks great yeah and

let's talk about this real quick because i've always found this kind of funny um you mentioned lebron james kids right but people like will smith's son jaden smith great artist like his music is actually really good it it hits um same with willow smith right and i remember when i heard jaden smith's album and i was playing it for a friend they're like uh well it's just because he's will smith's son and you know he had all this like type of whatever he had these teachers and whatever so that's why like, like, I'm just like, so because he's Will Smith's son and he maybe did have some advantages, you're going to take away his actual skill that his music is good because he had opportunities that other people didn't have. Like you're legit going to take that away because of

that. You can't just see something that's good as good right it's people are always trying to discount something from people something else that people are doing it's it's just it's stupid and lebron saying lebron james kids you know his son's good at basketball but some people are gonna be like well it's because he's lebron james son not because he practices on the court every fucking day yeah maybe maybe his son could get looked at. Maybe his son could get a little bit better coaching, but it's not LeBron shooting three pointer for him. It's not LeBron dunking for him or playing defense for him.

It's him still. And I think, you know, it's interesting, our vantage point on some stuff. And we have a great guest. We're going to be talking about hypertrophy and nutrition and all kinds of stuff. So I know we're talking a little random here, but I wonder if people would have the same vantage point if, you know, you're talking like thousands of years ago when maybe someone's dad was a great hunter or a great warrior, a great barbarian. And then you're like, well, the other guy's only a good barbarian because his dad was. You know what I mean? Like, it's just, it's kind of silly, right?

Yeah. Put it in that perspective. Oh, here we go. I like the backdrop. Here we go. Hey. Hey. Hey.

Whoa. Hey, hey. Doug, please. Sir. Damn. Settle down over there. I wasn't expecting. Look at you guys.

You guys are good. I wasn't expecting the all out assault with the guns there right off the bat. Save it for later. Looking amazing. Appreciate you being on the show today. Thank you so much for coming on. It's an honor. Thank you.

Recommendations from Ron Penna and from my buddy, Carl Lenore. They said nothing but good things. So we're going to find out if those things are true or not today. That's very nice of them. I have to thank them. How long have you been training for? How long you've been kind of in the bodybuilding and strength training world? I started in the age of 14. I started at 14 at my home. And then at 16, I start at 15. I started at Bill Pearl's gym oh wow well you know a big question that we have for today uh because a lot of our guests are fans of powerlifting a lot of

our guests and our listeners do uh you know they compete in squat bench deadlift and or just like to do it at the gym just to be strong and like to you know deadlift 500 pounds and stuff like that and uh what I'd love to hear from you is is some of your insight behind something like a squat. I heard you talking on Carl's podcast about, you know, loading the spine with 200 pounds just to get minimal effect on the quads. And I found that to be really interesting because I have not really heard anybody put it so plainly. And I thought that your perspective on that was great.

All right. I can explain it to you. Like from a physics perspective, you'd be blown away. Yeah, let's do it. All right. Am I in the center of the camera? Yeah, you are. Yeah, you're dead center.

Looking like a million bucks. So when it comes to something like the squat, why would the squat maybe not be, maybe not the end-all be-all that maybe people make it out to be when it comes to having hypertrophy in the lower body, the quads, the glutes, the hamstrings, stuff like that? Well, you want me to wait until we're on? Oh, we are on. We're on. We're rolling.

Oh, we're on. All right. All right. Here's the thing. We're rolling. Oh, we're on. All right. All right.

Here's the thing. The first thing you have to understand is that all levers are neutral when they're parallel with gravity. Right. If a pendulum is hanging from a grandfather clock, it's saying hanging neutral. Right. A park swing at the park is hanging vertically. It's hanging neutral. Right. If you were to take that, let's say, pendulum, that clock pendulum, and you move it over, it's going to want to come back to the neutral position, right?

The farther away from the neutral position you move it, the more force it will have going back down to the center. That means the horizontal position is the max position. If you kept pushing that lever up, it would be 50% lever here, 45-degree angle, and then it would be neutral again here. That's why, you know, support beams and buildings are vertical. So imagine you're watching someone squat and you're looking at them from the side. You look at their lower leg, you look at their upper leg. Both of those are levers. The lower leg is the lever of the quadricep. The upper leg is the lever of the gluteus. Okay, you start to descend. The lower leg dips forward 30 degrees, only 30 degrees from the neutral position,

does not even reach halfway to the max position. So that means you're getting a percentage, a reduced percentage of the load that's on your back. You're getting about 30% of the load that's on your back. Okay. So you say, well, but look at the upper leg bone operated by the gluteus. Does that mean that since that lever is horizontal, that you were getting more glutes than you are quads? Well, yes and no. Because it's horizontal, it is a max lever, but it has been shortened by the fact that your lower leg is doubling under it and shortening its length. And two things magnify resistance, right? Length and angle relative to resistance.

So instead of having, let's say, an 18 or 19-inch femur, now you've got basically like a 9-inch femur, right? So now you're getting half the load on your glute that you could be getting if the force was being applied at the very end of that femur. So since you sense that you can handle more weight, you put more weight on the bar, it further compresses your spine, but you're still getting reduced percentages on both your quads and your glutes. So see, the mistake people have made is they've all assumed that the amount of weight you're actually lifting is directly and exclusively related to how much load is on the operating muscle. But that's completely false because muscles never pull directly on weight. They pull on limbs that are pulling on weight. So you can literally quantify,

you can literally do the math. And you can say, if you have a 200-pound barbell on your back, and you weigh 200 pounds, that's 400 pounds, and you descend, the quad load you're getting is about 957 pounds. But if you did a body weight sissy squat at 200 pounds, you'd load each of your quadriceps with about 1,240 pounds just because your lower leg is getting horizontal. That's why sissy squats are so hard. It's physics. And then on top of this is the fact that there's a neurological thing that's happening, and that is called reciprocal innervation. So reciprocal innervation basically means that when you activate one muscle, the muscle that operates that same joint in the opposite direction shuts off. Okay, that's nature's way of making us coordinated, right? So when you activate your bicep, your tricep shuts off.

When you do curls, you don't care that it's shutting up. You don't even know that it's shutting off. But at all times, when any muscle contracts, something on the opposite side is shutting off in order to allow, to not interfere with that other muscle functioning. So when you load the glutes, which is a hip extension muscle, you're deactivating the hip flexors, which includes one part of the quadricep, the rectus femoris, because it has two functions. It crosses two joints. So here you are trying to max out quadricep development. And not only are you getting a reduced percentage of the load you're actually using, but you're also literally

disconnecting the rectus femoris, which is about 20% of your quadricep. So if your goal is to build quads, squats is not the way to do it. But what happens is most of us are so egocentric that we want accolades. We want to be admired in the gym. And so rather than worrying about how much load the muscle is getting, we're worried about how much weight we're moving because we want to be known as being in beast mode. We put 1,000 pounds on the leg press. Because we want to be known as being in beast mode, right? We put a thousand pounds on the leg press. And since we don't know the physics, we don't know the math, we don't know that we're actually sometimes.

In fact, can you hold on a quick second? I'm so sorry. It's mind boggling right out of the gate. This is fantastic. This is what I love. Yes. I think we'll get into it more about, you know, how he does utilize a squat. I doubt that he like hates squats and so

i don't want to paint a picture of like we're saying to never do these exercises we'll get more of his thoughts on it but um it's more about like just what's optimal so what happens it's it's sort of funny because you know when people focus on how much weight they're squatting um what they don't know they're doing is they're using an exercise that allows them to use a lot of weight because of these reduced percentages of load. But the reinterpretation of that is it's an exercise that forces you, requires you to use a lot of weight in order to get adequate load. You don't get adequate load if you use a moderate weight because everything is reduced. You got a reduced lower leg quadricep lever and a reduced upper leg glute lever.

A quick example would be like a wall sit. You don't need any weight for that. Well, a wall sit is an isometric exercise. So that sort of disqualifies it from the perspective of being isometric. Speaking of a wall, now listen, in my book, I talk about directions of resistance, right? So just like I was just talking about the pendulum, right? So it's all about direction of resistance. At all times, we have to ask ourselves, what is the direction of resistance and how does that apply to the lever that belongs to your target muscle, right? So

when you're doing a wall sit, you are no longer dealing with a straight down direction of resistance because now you're leaning against the wall. You're actually pushing against the wall. So now you have this thing called friction force. If the ground was slick with oil, your feet would slide out right from under you. Evidence that you're actually pushing forward with your lower leg. You're not pushing straight down anymore like you would if you were balanced over your feet so now the direction of resistance is invisible of course but it is completely different than

vertical now you're going like this so now you say why do i feel this so much in my quads and the reason is because now you're actually pushing in this direction of resistance, which is much more perpendicular to your lower leg than a squat would be. Doug, I'm curious about this because hopefully we can stick on this compound movement part for a little bit. First off, where would you find the use case for an individual that they're not focused on being a powerlifter? They're not focused on strength. an individual that not, they're not focused on being a power lifter. They're not focused on strength, but, um, is there a place for some of these big, like, you know, squat bench deadlift, is there a place for that in a good training program for them? And number two, this is a more, um, something that happened with me because for many years throughout my training career,

I was very focused on bodybuilding. That was like my focus. So I wasn't really focusing on squats or deadlifts. I do them, but I really wouldn't like focus on them. Right. But what I did find was when I did not like shift my focus totally to getting stronger, but I did start like adding that aspect of getting stronger with those big compound movements, my training, it's like another level of thickness came on my physique within the next few years that I didn't used to have because of the strength gained in those movements, along with continuously doing these smaller movements like leg presses, lunges, all those movements. I continue to keep them in, but it's like those big compounds gave me a level of thickness

that I did not have before that I wasn't developing. So is there anything to that? That is a two part question. So is there anything to that? That is a two-part question. So I'm sorry about that. Right. Let me start off by saying that any muscle that's on your body knows what its job is. So let's just say your quad's job is to extend the knee primarily. And so when your quad is working during a squat, it has no idea that the glutes are also working, that the erector spinae are also working. It's just doing its job. It just does what it wants to do.

So a muscle gets stronger when it's asked to work hard, right? So a muscle gets stronger whether you're moving a lot of weight or not. It's getting stronger because of the amount of force it's required to produce in its little isolated world. So the problem is that we tend to equate strength with total weight moved, even if it's a result of multiple muscles working at the same time. In my book, what I explain is if you've got, let's say 10 men carrying a log overhead, we make the assumption that all 10 men are producing the same contribution, right? There could be one lazy guy that's doing nothing, right? And there could also be that everybody is putting in the same amount of

effort, but they have different strength capacities. So the guy who has less strength capacity is working harder than the guy who has more strength capacity. So that's what happens during a compound exercise is the muscles that are being used are being used to the degree that the physics of that movement requires, not to the degree that each muscle has capacity for. So a good example of this is, let's say, parallel bar dips. So when you're doing a parallel bar dips, the physics, the mechanics of that exercise is that the front deltoids will be most loaded. Most people don't do parallel bar dips for front deltoids. They do it for pecs or for triceps.

But let's do the math on triceps. Because of that forearm lever being the tricep lever, being mostly vertical, you dip down, that thing moves to about 11 degrees from the neutral position. So you're getting about 11% of the load, which is your body weight. Let's just say you weigh 180 pounds. You have two arms, 90 pounds per arm. The length of the forearm is the magnifier. Let's just say it's a 12 to 1 ratio. So you say 90 times 12 times 11% equals about 119 pounds of load per tricep. But you can go lie down on a flat bench with a pair of 20 pound dumbbells, and you'd get 240 pounds of tricep load with a total energy cost of just the 40 pounds,

because that forearm goes horizontal. It goes to 100%. It's 20 pounds times 12 times 100%. So muscles get stronger exclusively based on how much load they get. So when you're doing a power lift, that's the thing we have to focus on is how much each muscle is getting. When you're doing parallel bar dips, one of the rules in biomechanics is that muscles always pull toward their origin. hips, one of the rules in biomechanics is that muscles always pull toward their origin, right? So imagine that you are the origin of a pectoral fiber standing on a guy's sternum. And so you're holding this fiber like a rope, and it's going across, crossing this guy's shoulder joint, tying into his upper arm bone, and you're going to pull this bone toward you, right? Well, it's going to pull toward the midline of the body because that's where the origin is. But that's not what you do

when you do dips. You go like this, right? So you're doing mostly parallel to your torso. You're not moving toward the origin. So are the pecs involved? Yes, they are, but they're not doing what they do primarily. So you're getting very little pectoral work. You're getting very little tricep work because of the physics. You're getting a ton of front deltoid work because that is the upper arm bone is getting horizontal and that is operated by that front deltoid. You can equal the strength that you'd get from compound movements by doing isolation movements, but you wouldn't know it unless you're comparing like with like. If you compare two people doing tricep extension or curl or side raise or whatever it is that you're doing, a flat dumbbell press for the chest, if you compare apples with apples you're fine but but people have have determined that squat overhead press bench press these are the barometers these are the measuring devices of strength yeah and so they go how much you bench well i would like to say how strong are your pecs as measured with an equal pectoral exercise. But we don't do that. And so that's the mistake.

In my book, I talk about literally the history, the evolution of bodybuilding, and how it started from circus acts, then it went to strength man exhibitions, then it went to powerlifting, and then it went to bodybuilding. In fact, the early publications, what they called the physical culture magazines, were strength and health. Strength and health. And then in my book, I show one cover that in little tiny cursive letter, it says bodybuilding form in the back. It's like, because it was considered vain to care about how you look. But the fact is, you cannot build a muscle without challenging a muscle.

And if you challenge a muscle, the muscle gets stronger. It's not just a cosmetic thing, right? Muscles get bigger when they get stronger because you load them and you work them under load. So it's sort of like semantics. It's like when people think they've gotten stronger because they're moving more weight in a squat. Okay, so each of the participating muscles have gotten stronger, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't have done the same thing with isolation exercises. The problem is that people typically do isolation exercises for high reps and low weight because

they think they're shaping exercises and they do the power lifting exercise for heavyweight low reps. So they become strengthening by default, but it's not the exercise that's doing it it's the fact that you're applying it differently you're applying heavyweight low reps if you did four reps of tricep extensions or four reps of side raise or four reps of leg extension you'd get the same strength increase and potentially more it could actually be more depending on the physics. Yeah. Yeah. So can we get, can we get strong by doing some of the things that you mentioned as it

pertains to the main lift? So as it would pertain to say a squat, a bench or deadlift, like in some of the scenarios that you're laying out of training, the triceps differently, you know, people, they spend a lot of time like trying to load up like a weighted dip. And from my understanding of some of the stuff you're saying is like, that might not be in

your best interest. Like there might be better ways of doing it. And if you're trying to have some transfer over into some lifts because you're a competitive power lifter, do you feel that you could potentially do some of the exercises that you're talking about and get strong just from using them without really utilizing a bench squat or deadlift? Yes, you can actually increase your power lift by strengthening the contributing muscles individually.

And I would say that's a great strategy if you're a power lifter. If your goal is to compete and you're going for a trophy and you're comparing your squat or your deadlift or whatever with someone else's squat or deadlift, then these are good strategies for increasing those power lifts. Yes. The problem is that people are doing power lifts and they're not competing and they're doing power lifts for the wrong reason. Right. So I'll give you an example. Let's just say you do the deadlift. Okay. The first thing that's wrong with the deadlift is that we've been told to use this opposite grip. Right. And the reason we do the opposite grip

is because you're not supposed to have any assistance like straps when you're competing right and and when you pull on the bar this way it rolls it this way so you want to roll the other one the other direction so the ball does the part doesn't roll out of your fingers that's fine if you're power lifting if you're limited by the fact that the rule says you can't use straps fine if you're just doing a deadlift and you're powerlifting. If you're limited by the fact that the rule says you can't use straps, fine. If you're just doing a deadlift and you're never planning on competing, then you're taking a risk on tearing the bicep of the hand that's palm forward because people tend to sort of want to curl with that arm. And that's how biceps snap during deadlifts.

So look, there's no reason for you, if you want to strengthen the muscles that are involved in squat, there's no reason for you to risk tearing your bicep. That's the first thing I'd say. Use straps. That's number one. Number two is when you're doing a deadlift, the main joint that's working is the hip joint. That's you're standing up like this. Right? So yes, there's a little bit of knee involvement, of course, which means there's

quadricep involvement. But if you look at someone from a profile when they're doing a squat, the torso starts at a mostly horizontal angle. Well, horizontal is the most active angle, right? So now if the spine was a solid bone, like the forearm is a solid bone, because you could almost say that a skull crusher is kind of like a deadlift, right? And the spine is kind of like the forearm, but the spine is not a single bone. It's multiple bones, right? And so as a result of that, you're relying on your erector spinae. Bo, can you hand me that silver thing right there? The tube? The tube?

The flexible tube? No, no. The silver thing. There you go. Okay, so this is kind of a spine, right? So you're trying to keep a neutral spine when you're deadlifting, but what's keeping your spine from doing this? The erector spinae. The erector spinae don't have anywhere near the power of the glutes, right?

So that means that when you reach capacity for the glutes, you've exceeded capacity for the erector spinae, right? So what happens? The spine starts to fold forward, and you start risking herniation of the discs. Right. So I'm not saying no one should do deadlifts, but I'm saying your limit on a deadlift should be your ability to keep your spine in the neutral position. Yeah. That will underwhelm to a degree the hip extension muscles, the glutes, the adductors, the hamstrings to some degree. Because if they work to capacity, you'll overwhelm the erector spinae and then you have a huge risk. Now, you've all seen this, right? You see a guy doing his deadlifts. He starts off in his early sets. He's got perfect form. And then as he gets heavier and heavier and heavier, he starts being unable to keep his spine fully arched. And little

by little, he starts to herniate. Now, when a disc herniates, it doesn't do it all of a sudden. he starts to herniate. Now, when a disc herniates, it doesn't do it all of a sudden. You may not know what happened. You see a guy with a rounded spine. He gets it up. He might have just herniated a disc. He doesn't even know it. There's a bulge coming out of the side there. It's maybe three centimeters away from the nerve everything's fine two centimeters away from the nerve one centimeter all of a sudden it starts touching the nerve and oh shit what's wrong with my back this is the problem is people think oh no i'm doing deadlifts to strengthen my back but if you're doing it so heavy that you're herniating discs you're defeating the purpose the other thing that's important to note is that the participation of the erector spinae

during deadlifts is isometric. It's just holding tension. So we know that that's not the best way to develop strength, right? You know that you're not going to develop best biceps by holding a barbell curl or by holding a tricep extension or by holding, let's say, a one position static on a squat, right? Full range of motion has been shown time and time again to not only increase muscle growth the most, but also to increase that muscle strength to the entire range of motion and not just in that one spot.

So how many people do dynamic erector spinae exercise? Almost no one. Give us some examples. Well, what's funny is let's just say that you are your typical bodybuilder and you do your low pulley row and you do your, let's say front raises and you do your barbell curls. All of these front load the spine. All of these would pull you forward. If you're at your spine, it wasn't maintaining you. So you're doing isometric. You're even putting plates away and dumbbells away. You're using your rectus spinae isometrically every day. And then lower back day comes.

And what do you do? Hyper extensions and deadlifts, which is more isometric. What? And now it's lower back because you're calling it lower back, but you're doing the exact same thing you were doing before. So what you need to do is you need to do something that looks like this. Ooh, and would you like find a way to load your upper back with something when you do that well the first thing i'd say is um when you do that you will find that oh shit this is much harder than it looks now do like 20 reps with that full range all the way to stretch all the

way to contract i've done exercises like this before with a band and it works really good And you go and you go wow, this is much more fatigue Than I ever thought I'd get with something like that You add a 10 pound plate to your chest or and all of a sudden it's magnified so much more. You can't even imagine. Yeah So that is the way to work the erector spinae because you're going to get dynamic muscle growth. You're not going to get isometric muscle growth. And not to mention the fact that, you know, when people say, I want to work my lower back, the lower back muscle isn't itself a muscle. The erector spinae goes from the back of the pelvis all the way to the top of the, to the base of the skull.

spiny goes from the back of the pelvis all the way to the top of this to the base of the skull so it's an all or nothing thing but you can only see the lower back as it peeks out from behind the lats i have a question since we're since we're on the topic what is your opinion on the jefferson curl what do you think which one is that um it's the movement where like you let's say you have like a dumbbell or weight and you purposefully round from the top, going all the way down with a rounded back with a, not a crazy heavy load, but it's fairly like a kettlebell or something perhaps. And you go down and you come up back into that position. You're intentionally rounding. You're intentionally rounding, not with crazy heavy load, but you're intentionally rounding

going down. Oh, so a Jefferson curl is not for the bicep. It's for the lower back. It's for the erector spinae. Yeah, it's pretty much for the back. Okay, well, a couple things. Number one is I didn't see you arch, which means you didn't contract the erector spinae.

And if you did, it would have been at the very top. Yeah. And that means now you're vertical. Now you're in the neutral position. So you're contracting it, but unloaded. So that's why the idea is to stay horizontal when you're vertical. Now you're in the neutral position. So you're, you're, you're contracting it, but unloaded. So that's why the idea is to stay horizontal when you're arching so that you're arching against resistance, you're contracting against resistance.

So what you were just doing there was rounding, which is stretching, but you don't, you can't build the muscle either strength wise or growth wise, just with stretch. You need to contract it. You know, I love a lot of the stuff you're saying and i i wish that a lot of the things you're saying i wish they weren't new to me i wish that i knew these things uh earlier but a lot of what you're saying is probably fairly new because you have unconventional thought but i want

people to people that listen to this i really hope that they listen to it with an open mind i hope they don't shut it down and say this guy is wacky i don't know what he's talking about because it is different for a lot of people but i want people to poke holes in training and the philosophies that have been i mean look at nutrition nutrition has exploded in the last decade or so with us poking holes in the food pyramid and things like that let's poke as many holes in our lifting as we can. Why do we deadlift at the height that we deadlift at? It's because someone decided to manufacture a 45-pound plate that just so happens to be at that height, right? And someone just so happened to, yeah, it's completely random.

And who knows if it's in our best interest. I love what you said earlier about circus lifts. And I actually think that that's an important reference because, and I don't want to mock anything that anyone's doing, and I love powerlifting and I always have, and I always will. But you have to kind of like think of the context of what it is that you're actually trying to do. So if you're, you know, working on lifting the most amount of weight, there might be some challenges in there where you're going to have to not only challenge just the muscles that you're trying to target, you might have to challenge the entire body. You might have to challenge the nervous system. You might have to challenge your mindset.

You might have to challenge kind of everything. That's sort of part of that sport. But if you're just trying to get in better shape and you're trying to be bigger, I would love for more people to question why they're trying that 405 pound deadlift. I'd love for them to throw more conjecture at it and start to think about it a little bit more. In some of the stuff that you're talking about, I can't imagine that you would pull squats, deadlifts, bench presses away from people completely. How do you like to see people maybe execute these movements?

Are you more in favor of them potentially maybe doing these later in the workout so that they use less weight? Or do you do modifications of those exercises so people can get more muscle tension? Well, the first thing that I'll say is that we have to sort of recognize that we have an addiction to a type of validation. No, we don't. No, we don't. We don't have an addiction. It's not a problem.

After this next workout, I'm going to stop lifting heavy. I promise. Just one more week. One more month. You know, when you think about, you know, when someone says, I love powerlifting, and you are a very thoughtful person, right? So you're able to sort of break down what about powerlifting do And you are a very thoughtful person, right? So you're able to sort of break down what about powerlifting do I love? What are the things that I recognize? And maybe sort of think about there's a possibility of things that you don't recognize. And maybe you

think it's this, but it's actually something else. In fact, I would go so far as to say, would you enjoy powerlifting as much if you did it all by yourself and there was nobody else in the gym? Nobody knew you do it. And it's like, does the log make noise if it falls in the forest, right? It's like, if no one knows you deadlifted, you know, 800 pounds just now, would you feel just as good if you told no one and no one saw it? Certainly not. I love the attention of it. Right.

So there definitely is a validation thing that we're seeking. And it's so subconscious that we're not even really aware we're doing it. Right. You're you're in the gym, you're squatting, you're you're deadlifting heavy and someone pats you on the back and they go beast mode, dude, beast mode. Wow. That is a drug. That is a drug to us. We love them. We were in we're in social media world. Right. We're all about likes now. now, right? We're all about impressing people. We're all about getting a following. How do we get a following? By getting admiration from people, right? But the question is, is that admiration correct? Is it, is it, you know, I'm sure you saw that one video of that guy trying to do a leg press with a thousand pounds and his knee went back the other direction and it folded back. Right. So this guy just freaked out. I mean, you can, that guy might've had to have his leg amputated because he probably tore every nerve, every, every artery, every, I mean, it's not just about the bones, right?

You'll never be right again. If he's, if he even has that leg. Yeah. And it's not just about the bones, right? He'll never be right again if he even has that leg. So the first thing I would say is that it's important to understand that, again, muscles do what they do in their own little world. Quadriceps extend the knee. Bicep flex the elbow. Tricep extends the elbow. All of these things can be worked just as hard with an isolation exercise but they don't fit into the little mold that we've made of like you know the measuring device that allows us

to compare so the question is if you want to do power lifts um and you want to combine that um the first thing i would say is first, you should question why you're doing the power lift at all. Once you understand that every muscle that contributes in that power lift can be worked as well or better isolated. That's number one. You can be just as strong. The sum of its parts can all be equally strong, strengthening. When a muscle works, let's say you're lifting a car. That's just, you know, you got to move, you got a buddy, you're moving the car over. Okay, well, all those muscles that you worked in isolation will all work fine together when they need to. They're not going to say, hey, I don't know how to work together. I've been working

alone all this time. They know how to work together, right? So there's no actual justification for doing a power lift. But I will say there may be, there is a huge psychological component to embracing the idea that you don't actually need a compound movement. And the way you do that is by saying, okay, I'm going to do the compound movement, but I'm going to give things equal time. So let's just say, whereas I might've done, let's say, you know, tricep extensions and close grip bench press for triceps, excuse me, parallel bar dips and close grip bench press for triceps. Both of those have the forearm in a mostly vertical position, which means that they're getting a much lesser percentage of the load. So now you say, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do skull crushers for half the sets and dips for the half the set. And then I'm going to do, let's say three sets of dips and seven sets of skull crushers. So little by little, you sort of

wean your way. And along the way, you ask yourself, how do my triceps feel am i losing size in my triceps am i losing strength in my tricep i mean this was even in my case like i remember when i couldn't let go of t bar row even though i knew that i was already working my lats better by doing one arm pull-ins and scapular retractions for the middle trapezius. And so I weaned myself because I was afraid to let go. And then what do you know? My back is just as good, just as big, just as strong as it was before, if not more so. And I don't have the rear deltoid pain, the teres major pain. I don't have the joint pain. So it's kind of a discovery thing. You have to sort of explore a little of this and mix it up a little bit. But the only reason a person should do a compound lift truly is if they're competing

in compound lifts. Otherwise, there's no real justification for it in terms of the strength you can build and in terms of the amount of muscle size you can produce. So even when we look down, like let's look downstream from the main powerless. When we look at things like a barbell seal row, penalty row, et cetera, all these things have their place. But in the context of what we're speaking about here, would you say that there are much better things to use or much better ways to build your back than loading up and doing a barbell seal row or a pendlay row etc because there are a lot of with what you're saying yeah there are a lot of other movements you could do that are isolatory for for those muscles but would you say that that's a better option than doing the pendlay barbell row etc yes okay so let's just look at the bent over barbell row as a perfect example. Cool. Okay. People love that and they love it because quote unquote, it's an old school exercise.

People love the idea of old school, quote unquote, basic military. They love that idea. It's very masculine. But let's look at the physics. Number one, you're in a bent over position your torso is bent over which means your erector spinae is is very loaded let's say you're holding let's say a 150 pound barbell now the barbell that's in your arms is meant to load the muscles of your upper back but the lower back is holding not only that weight, but the weight of the torso plus the magnification that the length of the torso is putting on that 150-pound barbell. So you're actually getting far more load on the lower back than you are on the muscles that are holding the barbell, right? Because your lower back is holding the torso and the barbell.

Okay. So you're doing the bent over barbell row and you're doing it for your, quote, back. What is the back? Well, the back is actually two and only two primary muscles. It is the lats and it is the middle trapezius. If you Google anatomy of the musculature of the back, you will see that the biggest muscle of the back is the lats. And the second muscle is the middle trapezius. What else is there? Well, there's a little tiny teres major that I kind of call the little mini lat, right? Instead of going from the humerus to the spine, it goes from the humerus to the scapula. But it runs the same direction. It does pretty much the same thing. So anytime you work lats, it works. You don't need to do anything separate for that.

It also works when you do rear deltoids because it's so close to the rear deltoid. You've got an infraspinatus, which are these two circular things on your shoulder blade. They don't pull at all. They rotate. It's an external rotator, right? So you're not working that when you're rowing. So all muscles pull toward their origin. The lats are located, are originated on the lower two thirds of the spine, the back of the pelvis, and then they move diagonally up to the upper arm bone. So when those muscles contract, they pull the upper arm bone toward the lower spine and the back of the pelvis. That means the lats is a pulling down and in muscle toward the spine. That's what the lats do. Bent over row isn't that. Number two, what does the middle trapezius do? The middle trapezius starts on the spine,

goes out to the outer edge of the shoulder blade and stops. It doesn't even connect to the arm. So when you're doing all this arm work and a bent over row, the middle trapezius is only concerned about what the shoulder is doing. And that's the incidental part of any row, actually, unless you make it much more dramatic, which is what I recommend. So the next question is, do either the lats or the middle trapezius pull the elbow behind you toward the back of the room? No, because they're pulling from the spine. They can't pull in that direction. So what muscle is doing that? The rear deltoid. So here you are in a bent over position. You're maximally loading your lower back. You're mostly working the rear deltoid, but you're neither doing a lat motion, nor are you doing a scapular motion.

Then you get these people that, let's say they do, you know, six or seven exercises for their back every time they work out. They're juicing. They've got good genetics. They've got a massive back. They say do bent over barbell rows to put slabs of muscle on your back you believe them because they've got a massive back but the but but the physics says otherwise the physics says well you're not even pulling toward the origin of those muscles you're not even doing the motion that those muscles do i love some of what you're

saying because we do so many different things in the gym. It's hard to equate any one thing to anything. It's true. It's a mixed experiment. Yeah. And when it comes to powerlifting, we're like, yeah, these compound movements make you huge. But like what a powerlifters usually do, they're usually like in a perpetual bulk, right? Yeah. They don't look like bodybuilders. Yeah. Yeah. They're lifetime bulkers. Right. And then on top of that, they're doing a lot of other exercises to promote hypertrophy. A lot of, a lot of power lifters understand that it's a good idea to do some leg extensions and leg curls and leg presses and lunges and things like that.

So I, I really, I like a lot of what you're saying. What if we take some of the exercises that we're mentioning that maybe you're not huge fan of for the application of like in the case of the bent over row, building up the lats. What if we take an exercise like that, but we have really good execution? Do you think that that changes it?

Because I know some of what you're talking about is like kind of guys getting excited and loading up heavy ass weight. But what if we're trying to do these things with picture perfect form? Does that matter? Are we able to kind of, I guess, recruit more muscle fibers in the area? Or is it still kind of like the physics of it make it nearly impossible to get to the muscle? It really is.

I'm sorry, you wanted to say something? And the mentioning, like, I'm wondering with what Mark's saying, you said something like make it more dramatic. I'm wondering if this is falling in line with what you guys are talking about there. Well, okay. First of all, we have to recognize that we've been seriously brainwashed by the magazines, right? We watch a guy, a really muscular guy, ripped, doing parallel bar dips with a big fat chain around his neck. And we just make the leap of faith and assume that he looks like that because of that exercise.

And like he did nothing else, right? Like he hasn't done any other exercise. That's all he's done. And that's a complete illusion, right? And so most of us are operating with a very, very deep-seated bias, misimpression about what it is that builds muscle. Because we've been watching these magazines and the magazines have to make what they're doing visually exciting, right? It's not exciting to see isolated exercises. It's not dramatic. There's not weight moving. There's nothing that would

appear to be Herculean. That's what readers want they want herculean looking things and and then they want to emulate that now i have to say there is some degree of positive in all this because this is i when i was a kid and i was growing up but this was very motivating to see these exercises makes you want to just work your ass off. Well, that's a plus. But the problem is then you go do these exercises and even if you're doing perfect form, it's like I'm doing perfect form on a really bad exercise. Right?

On an exercise that just from a, because here's what is important to understand is that physics determines where the load is. So when you're doing parallel bar dip, there's just no way that you can change what muscle is worked harder because the load will be determined by the direction of the resistance, always, no matter what. I'll give you an example of that. Let's just say you're facing a mirror and you're holding a pair of 20-pound dumbbells and you push them

toward the mirror, right? And you're doing the motion that is pectoral movement but the direction of resistance for a pectoral movement should be opposite the forward thrust but now because you're standing resistance is down here so you're loading the deltoids that's what's keeping your arms from collapsing right but you're doing a movement for the pecs that is unloaded for the pecs i'll give you another example let's just say you're doing a movement for the packs that is unloaded for the packs i'll give you another example let's just say you're doing a torso rotation with a medicine ball let's say this thing weighs 20 pounds yeah you're moving horizontally but the resistance is vertical it wants to fall toward the ground your deltas are holding this bar up nothing is challenging your left to right movement. Nothing. Zero. Right.

That would be like lying down on your side with a dumbbell and doing a dumbbell curl while lying on your side. Right. The rule is for alignment to be correct. Resistance must always move directly opposite anatomical motion. You're challenging the motion is what you're doing. Right. So if you're not using an opposite resistance, you're not the motion is what you're doing right so if you're not using an opposite resistance you're not getting loaded so that's why these exercises that are compound they're going to load what they're going to load regardless of what you do yeah it's the physics that determines the load this is uh amazing stuff i know mark just keeps saying he he loves it uh this is new to me

also and i am freaking absolutely, this is an amazing conversation. And it's funny because Mark and I were just talking because I recently, I've been trying to repair my back. So I've been going super light with everything. And I'm noticing that my physique is actually changing and it's, I'm feeling good and I'm looking better and I'm telling him, I'm like, yeah, but at some point, you know, I gotta go heavy. Like I have to. And he's like, well, do you? And I'm like, well, you know, exactly like what you just said. I see, you know, videos of Ronnie Coleman squatting. I'll see Jake Hutler loading up the, you know, leg extension or, uh, leg press and, you know, I'm like, yeah, that, that's how you get like this, the deep, you know, muscle tissue and the muscle density and all that good stuff. So at some point, I mean, does the lighter stuff, like, is, are we seeing this because they've already gone through all of that with the super lightweight doing the body weight

sissy squat and then now they are doing the actual, you know, leg press. Um, it, did we just miss all that or at some point to get that that real deep hardcore muscle density do you have to lift some heavy ass weight no here's the thing i i you know this subject is is fun for me in a way because because it's people have a real resistance to breaking the habit, breaking the conventional beliefs, right? So,

and this is true in every field, right? Whether it's politics, religion, whatever you want to, any kind of philosophical stuff, you know, when we,

when we, when we, when we have in large part base our identity on our lifts, the idea of giving up a lift makes us feel like we're, Parts part base our identity on our lifts. The idea of giving up a lift makes us feel like we're asked to give up part of our identity. Right. And not to mention the fact that we've been teaching this stuff. Now we also have the sort of I don't know what you want to call it. The guilt, maybe I've been teaching these people this thing for the longest time.

Have I misled them? Most people in a very subconscious level would rather believe that I'm wrong and they're right so that they can't face. The possibility that they've been wasting time, wasting energy, misleading people. But here's the thing is, and I want to be very clear about this because this is important. People kind of want to say very clear about this because this is important. People kind of want to say that it's either or. It's either powerlifting or it's isolation. It's percentages. It's percentages of good. Okay. So when you're powerlifting, when you're doing compound movements, every exercise can be rated on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the most productive and one being the least productive.

And you can literally evaluate every single exercise. Once you under there are 16 biomechanical factors. Once you know what those are, it's like a checklist. Once you go through them and you say, if it qualifies on all 16 factors, then it gets a 10. If it qualifies on half, it gets a five, depending on some are more important than others. Maybe this one is a three. So all exercises that are resistance-based have some degree of good. And when you do enough diluted, low-grade exercises, you'll still get a good result.

But it takes more work. It takes more accumulation of those lower percentage of benefits in order to get there. So imagine that I'm going to go to a destination and I take this road. I think it's the only road. It's really bumpy. It's really rocky. It's really muddy. My tires are spinning. My car is going back and forth. I'm getting bumped up and bruised up. I arrive at that destination. You're there waiting for me. And you say, hey, glad you came. That proves me and you say hey glad you came that proves the road you took was was a good road but in fact there was another road right over there that was smooth and dry you would have gone there just the same with less effort so getting there isn't proof

that the meth that you got there was good you know this really does make me curious in terms of you yourself on the way that your training has transformed over the years because you're extremely jacked it's it's amazing and you don't look your age so congratulations thank you yeah 61 yeah man that's insane did they already see my biceps was that off camera let's see it again i'm down to see it again. Yeah, look at that. My God. That's awesome. Dude, about how much do you weigh, Doug? 201. Oh, nice. 5'10".

This is what I'm curious about. Through your training career, how did your training evolve? Like, have you, a majority of your training career, were you training like this? Obviously, there was a point where you were probably doing a lot of compound movements and stuff. But then versus now now do you personally you're not a power lifter you focus on bodybuilding do you use any compound movements in your training for anything um or are you focused on working specific muscle groups in the best most optimal way possible i don't do any compound movements at all. In fact, I basically do 20 exercises.

And that's it. I competed in 2019 for the AAU Drug Free Universe. I took first place in the Masters Division and in the overall with 20 exercises, none of which included upright rows, deadlifts, squats, leg presses, overhead presses, no barbell exercises at all i love it so give us the 20 exercises well let me give you one thing that's going to blow you away sort of a random thing but not entirely getting back to this thing that all muscles pull toward their origin right um and and and it with the way i explain it so people can really visualize it as if I give you a rope and I tie the other end of the rope to a heavy box and I stand back and I say, pull on the rope. There's no way that that box can go in any direction other than toward you.

You cannot pull it over there. You cannot pull it over there. It's going to go toward you. So let's look at the highest pectoral fiber on the sternum. Right. And that's going to pull on this at the highest pectoral fiber on the sternum. Right. And that's going to pull on this bone the highest. This is the upper pec. What happens when I do an incline press? There's no pectoral fiber on your chin. Right. Every gym in the world has an incline bench and every time you do it you're moving

your arm in the direction of your chin or somewhere above your clavicle and there's nothing there okay so that means that when people do incline presses and like i'm sure this has happened to you get off the incline press you're checking your pump what do you do you bring your arm low to check your pump you don't bring it high to check your upper pipe up you know where that pectoral muscle contracts you know it yeah and yet you do these things because you think and arnold did it and samir banu did it and all and franco colombo did and all these guys with great upper pecs. Of course, that's not all they did. Right? They did other things.

If you look at someone who's very lean, because, you know, we have these clavicular fibers too, right? That's about 10% of your pecs on the inner part of your clavicle. That when you raise your arm up, the clavicle actually turns and then that arm moves toward the clavicle. So, literally, you're getting clavicular and the fibers on the upper when you're doing a flat press. In fact, when you're doing a flat press, you're not even moving toward the center of the sternum. That would be a slight decline. If you move toward the center of your sternum in a slight decline angle, now you're moving your arm, which is the insertion of the pectoral muscle, toward the area where the largest percentage of muscle fibers, of pectoral fibers are.

That would be the singular best exercise you could do because you're moving toward the majority of the fibers. Your packs, our packs, are 100% below our arm line. Zero percent above the arm line. We evolved as a quadruped and then little by little walked more and more upright. We never, in our evolutionary history, never had to move our arms in an incline angle. The shoulder joint did not accommodate that. The musculature did not accommodate that. There's no reason for us ever.

But that's a hard habit to break, right? There was a time when I thought my upper, my pecs were always my weakest part, but there was a time when I thought my upper my pecs were always my weakest part but i there was a time when i thought i'm gonna do nothing but inclines for a year nothing but inclines right my pecs were never worse they were the worst they ever were it is not a good movement it simply isn't what about the reverse of that what What about a decline? Declines are awesome. Varying degrees of decline. I mean, frankly, I think even the flat angle is too inclined. I only do a decline dumbbell press.

Why dumbbells? Because you get full range of motion. You don't get stuck out here. Right? It's full range of motion. And you can do the same thing, by the way, the same motion you can do with a cable machine. If you're sitting upright and the resistance is coming from behind you. So that's the motion. That is the motion of the packs.

Let me ask you this. So let's, since we're talking about this, one of my favorite movements for my pecs, um, was the, or is still the like single arm cable fly inwards. Because like you can literally,

I can feel all of that contract. So how do you feel about a movement like that okay good question yeah so here's another one of the 16 factors and that is the resistance curve and the resistance curve has to do with the strength curve of the muscle yeah so the strength curve of most muscles is that they are stronger when they're elongated and they're weaker when they're shortened. And that's because when a muscle shortens, the actin filaments slide over each other and then they bunch up and they run out of contractile force. So the more elongated they are, the more recoil they have. Right. So the right resistance curve for a muscle is always to have the early phase more loaded than the late phase.

is always to have the early phase more loaded than the late phase. So that's why a flat dumbbell press is great because you're opening up. The upper arm bone is entering an increasing resistance because it's getting more perpendicular with gravity precisely as the muscle is elongating. And then when you bring it together, the muscle shortens, weakens, and the resistance diminishes. So when you're doing a cable work is fine, by the way, but if it's coming straight from the side, that means it's parallel to your upper arm bone. That means you're getting nothing. And as you come forward, it's increasing the resistance as you're getting weaker and it's decreasing the resistance as you're getting stronger. So now you say,

hey, I really like this because I can feel my muscle contracting. Well, what you're actually feeling is resistance and opposing resistance at the point of contraction, which you wouldn't necessarily get with a flat dumbbell press or a decline dumbbell press. But that's an illusion. That doesn't necessarily mean that's going to cause more growth, right? Growth comes with weight, with challenge, and you're not going to be able to use nearly as much weight

when the resistance is light in the beginning and heavy at the end. In other words, you're leaving the important part of the range of motion unresisted, unchallenged. So the single-arm cable fly, I'm not talking about stand, I'm talking about on a bench, right? At the end range, when you're out here you're saying that there's no resistance on the pec or what i'm saying is what i'm saying is it depends where that pulley is uh okay so if the pulley is straight out to the side yeah

then the cable is parallel to your arm and that's the neutral position but if the resistance is coming from slightly behind you, now it's not parallel to your arm. Now it's perpendicular. So the more behind you they are, the more perpendicular they'll be to your upper arm bone, to your pectoral lever. Okay, good. And that's what I recommend. Okay, so that would be the most ideal is to move forward of the machine a bit. But how far in front of it do you get?

Because if you're using the traditional cable crossover machine and the pulleys are like eight feet apart, then you're not going to be able to get far enough in front of that thing to use both arms. You can shift over to one side and stand in front of it because it has to come from right about there. It can't come from like back there right so so um all of you at some point can just ask yourself how perpendicular

is this cable to my upper arm in the standing position yeah if it's totally perpendicular starting position great if it's parallel to your upper arm in the starting position bad okay what about like uh i guess just getting like bang for your buck and so let's say that somebody just uh they want to get in some good training and they just don't want the training to take you know long periods of time and so they're going to utilize some compound movements uh in an effort to kind of work the full body like work the entire body and not necessarily, they're not really super worried about like targeting the quads or targeting specific muscle groups. They want to get some good exercise in,

some good resistance training and some good strength training. Do you think it'd be wise for those people to utilize, you know, we kind of hear people say like, I utilize a bench squat or deadlift because it has the most bang for its buck. It reduces the amount of time that I need to be in the gym. And I get kind of a full body exercise out of it because something even like bench pressing, which kind of seems like it's for the chest, works the entire body. So what are some of your thoughts on that? Okay, so let's just say you've got a compound exercise. Let's just say parallel bar dips.

And you say, I'm working three body parts. I'm working my pecs, my triceps, and my front deltoids. And if it were true that the triceps, the pectorals, and the front deltoids are being worked as well as would be worked if you worked three different exercises, one for each of those groups, be worked if you worked three different exercises, one for each of those groups, then it would truly be a great time-saving exercise. But that isn't the way it is. You're going to get not only too much load on the front deltoid, you're going to get too much stretch on the front deltoid when you go low, right? Because that's way farther back than you ideally should go, right? The elongated position for the front deltoid is only about like that. When you're going like that, you're really stretching that front deltoid.

And where does the front deltoid contract? Right about there. But you're not finishing a parallel bar dip there. You're finishing way short of that contraction. So you're not, even though it's the most loaded, you're not actually doing what is most productive for the front deltoid. You're not doing what's most productive for the tricep. You're not doing what is most productive for the front deltoid. You're not doing what's most productive for the tricep. You're not doing what's most productive for the pecs. So a bodybuilder who does that exercise still does a chest exercise, a tricep exercise, and maybe a front deltoid exercise. So they haven't actually saved time at all because they haven't replaced those

other three exercises and they haven't gotten full benefit for any of those muscles over here. So if your objective is to get a semi-good workout for the triceps, pectorals, and front deltoids, and your priority is to save time, then great. Go ahead and do the parallel bar dip, even though it's got a high risk of injury for the front deltoid. But most people would say, well, I didn't know I was getting a reduced benefit. I didn't know that I had an increased risk. If I can just do those three exercises over there and get max benefit, no risk of injury, I'd rather not do the dips. So it's not an apples and apples comparison. about something like how many sets and stuff because it seems like you're finding a great way to get uh optimal stimulation very quickly because of the way that you're thinking about the exercises

so do we still need to do three sets five sets and in addition to that how many different exercises would we need again because if we're targeting the muscle very directly, maybe perhaps don't need as many reps, as many sets and so on. It is true that when you have an exercise that rates a 10, that you're getting more bang for the buck with that one exercise than you would with other exercises. But the thing that's important is that one of the things that a muscle needs for growth is volume enough sets, right? So now we're going to start getting into a little physiology.

Now this is kind of leaving mechanics and moving into physiology. And studies have shown that you can make a muscle grow one of two ways. You can make it grow with very, very high fatigue, i.e., lighter weight, higher reps, or you can make it grow. You can stimulate recruitment is what it's called. You can stimulate recruitment also by using a very high weight that is a high percentage of that muscle's maximum effort. Okay. So if you were going to do one set, 50 reps over there, six reps over here, one set, 50 reps over there, six reps over here. Over here, you're going to go to failure because that's what fatigue growth requires, going to failure. So now you've done that and now you're going to go over here, you're going to do one set of six. Let's just say you could

have done seven, but you stop at six. You didn't go to failure. You didn't fatigue out. Every one of the six reps you did over there produced growth because every one of them was heavy enough to recruit a significant number of fibers. Over here, you didn't get growth producing reps until you got near the end. Right. But along the way, you produce a lot of lactic acid. You also produce a lot of systemic fatigue. Okay, so now both of these people, let's just say, got the same amount of growth, one set each. Each person says, but I want more growth. Okay, fine.

This guy over here maybe can do one, maybe two more of those 50 rep sets before he's wiped out. This guy over here can do 12 sets, so he gets more growth. And he never even went to failure. And he never had systemic fatigue. And he never had huge amounts of lactic acid. So when someone says, well, how did Arnold and those guys get so big back then? And I would say, well, it's sort of an accident. They did four exercises per muscle group, five sets per exercise, 20 sets per muscle.

Right? So if you ask them, why do you think you grew? They say, well, because I did a variety of exercises. No, it's because most of those exercises were seven on a scale of one to 10, eight, maybe one was a 10, maybe one was a two, but you did a lot of sets. And so you got a lot of growth. So I'm not saying you need 20 sets, but 10 sets of super efficient exercises will give you the same or more growth that 20 sets of a mix of exercises that included a lot of not so efficient exercises. So you still need sets. You still need volume. yes i mean the this is this is actually a good thing for us to talk about here because when a lot of people um are thinking about doing bodybuilding movements a lot of people really overuse failure they feel that when they go to failure um yeah you reach mechanical failure and towards the end of a set you are recruiting more muscle fibers but they feel that since they feel that way that they're growing um whereas if you were to have every set be kind of close to failure, you'd be able to do a substantial amount of more work. So with that being said, for you and your

training, or maybe the way that you structure things, where does, if it even comes to play, where does failure ever come in? If it does. Right. That's a great question. And this is, this is actually the heart of the argument. This is the crux. This is where, I mean, there's a lot of people doing exercises that are not great exercises, but most people think that a set that's not taken to failure is wasted. And, and I've done, I've made all the mistakes. I've learned the hard way. I've done breakdown sets. I've done, you know, super setting exercise for the same muscle group. I've done, you know, four straps, done super setting exercises for the same muscle group. I've done forced reps. I've done short rests. All of these things are fatigue oriented. And so if we believe that those are growth producing sets, then what we believe is that fatigue is the only or primary simulator of

muscle growth. When in fact, it not only isn't the primary stimulator of muscle growth, it's also to some degree inhibitory of muscle growth because every set that you take to failure forces you to compromise on the next set to four or five sets. In other words, you'll end up doing fewer sets because you are able to do. You can't do more sets. You're forced to do fewer sets. You also lose your ability to contract. Right? So you can't use as much weight. I mean, everything gets compromised once you go to failure. So here's the thing. Let's just say that you're going to ask yourself kind of a philosophical question. What do I have control over? If I want to grow the most possible, what do I have control of and what don't I have control over? Right.

Well, you know that once a muscle reaches maximum fatigue, you do not have control to continue. Right. So fatigue is not something you can control. What about the amount of weight? Well, you know that there's only so much you can lift. Maximum is maximum. And beyond that, you don't have control over, but you could always do more sets.

How about now? Yeah. There we go. Yeah. So you were just saying, you're finishing up saying you could always do more sets. And then you went on probably a really awesome rant and speech and we missed it. We all missed it. I can't remember what it was now.

No. Yeah. I mean, you can get more growth with more sets of 95% effort than you can with fewer sets of 100 or 110% effort. But people feel guilty putting the weight down. And may I also say that all of us remember, well, they're not doing it so much anymore, especially since there's very few printed bodybuilding publications anymore. They're not doing it so much anymore, especially since there's very few printed bodybuilding publications anymore. But most of us remember that picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger doing that low pulley row and he's screaming. Right. We think that's how we're supposed to train. We think that we have to go and Tom Platt, same thing. We think we have to go beyond human capacity.

Platt, same thing. We think we have to go beyond human capacity. And when we look at these guys, and they're so muscular, we think that must be the key. And it's easy to believe that there has to be a very, very, very high price to pay in order to get muscle growth. And it can't possibly be easy. But yet you could have a fantastic workout without ever having to scream, without ever having to fail, without ever having to quiver, right? You can literally walk away from the workout, not feeling like you got hit by a truck. And yet knowing that muscle went as far as that muscle could go,

because there is eventually a natural limit to how many sets you can do especially at 95 intensity yeah it's really interesting how we perceive you know how lifting has to be and how gaining success and lifting has to be whereas if you saw someone driving a really nice car you say say, hey, man, that's a beautiful car, you wouldn't be like, what kind of intensity did you have to have in your life to be able to... Like how much labor did you have to put in to buy that Bentley? It's like, no, I worked smart. I didn't work heavy.

Yeah. I used my brain and I learned what's going to be optimal for me to maximize my earning potential. It wasn't... You weren't screaming like Arnold in a board meeting or something like that. Right. Now, look, there are a lot of illusions that take place, right? When you squat to the point where you have to lie down on the ground panting, as we've

all done, we think that is essential. That is what it takes, quote unquote, unquote what it takes if you ask ronnie coleman right now about his training he would say i know i paid a heavy price but it's what it takes it's the price you have to pay no it's the price you have to pay when you don't know a better way yeah i like i like that you know you mentioned tom Platz, and I think someone like Tom Platz and some of these guys that had great leg development, I think it's worth noting that the 30% that you talked about earlier that somebody might have on, they might have 200 pounds in their back, and they're only getting 30% of that to their quads due to various reasons. And potentially a lot of people could be getting a lot less percentage because they just have an issue with squatting with any sort of proper form.

You know, maybe they fold over a lot. For me, once I get down in a squat, I start to kind of lean forward and I use my lower back more. So I think what you're touching on, I think, is amazing. And I'd love for people to really learn to digest some of this. And for some people that can squat really, really well with good upright posture, it's possible they're getting a little bit more recruitment from their legs and the next person. And then same thing could be looked at for something like a deadlift or some of these other exercises. If someone can move properly, have good mobility, and they know exactly what they're working and how they're doing it, then maybe they have an ability to kind of fine tune

the movement. There's also like all sorts of little variations within an exercise where somebody might do a set of squats, but they might kind of do a little pulse at the bottom where they just come up three quarters of the way and they end up, guys like Charles Glass and some of these people end up with real specific ideas and concepts. And I know it's not necessarily based on some of the stuff you said. And I understand your point about pulling the box. It's like, we can't really, we can't change that no matter, no matter what you think or how you're doing it. But I think it's important for people to understand if you have poor form in a squat, uh, a horrible way to try to build

your quads would be to squat. A better way would be to find some exercises that you're able to lock into a lot better with a lot better form and technique. You'll be saving yourself a ton of time too, because in some cases it takes months. And in other cases, it takes years to learn how to squat properly. You know, there's a, I'm sure you've seen, there's a squat university website. And they teach proper squatting. But here's the thing is, let's just say that you're going to do a squat with relatively bad form, right? And maybe it has nothing to do with, you know, sloppiness or not caring. It's just your mechanics and your lever

lengths. You lean farther forward than the average person. Well, your torso is also a lever in the squat action, right? Your lower leg is a lever, your femur and your torso. And you've got this barbell on your shoulders, which is at the top of the torso. And obviously the torso lever is longer than your lower leg lever. So you've got this longer lever, which already magnifies weight more, and you're leaning farther forward than the lower leg is leaning forward. So you've got two magnifiers that are creating more load on the spine and the erector spinae than you're getting on your quadriceps. But somehow you're able to figure out a way, maybe just call this a front squats.

You figure out a way to keep your torso more upright. What you've done now is you've alleviated some of that erector spinae load, but the angle of your tibia doesn't get any more horizontal than it did in the regular squat. And so that is going to determine how much quad load you're going to get. So at all times, you ask yourself, what is the direction of resistance? Of course, gravity is invisible. What is the direction of resistance relative to the lever, the limb that's being operated by my target muscle? And when you do any kind of squat, barbell, we'll talk about a hack squat machine in just a second. But any kind of free weight squat, you're going to have significantly less than even a 45 degree angle. In my book, I talk about vertical being a neutral lever, horizontal being a fully

active lever, 45 degree angle being, let's say, a 50% active lever. It's half active. And if you did the actual calculation on that, you'd find it's not quite exactly that, but we don't want to complicate things more than it already is, right? So when you're squatting, your lower leg doesn't even get half active, which means your quadriceps is getting less than half the load it could get if the direction of resistance was perpendicular to your lower leg. That's why when you do a sissy squat and you let that lower leg go all the way horizontal or at least certainly more horizontal than what happens during a regular

squat you get a much bigger percentage of your body weight and so you can actually get more load on the quadricep because you're getting a bigger percentage of a smaller weight than the smaller percentage of the bigger weight so here's the thing is that good form doesn't change anything good form might keep you from getting injured, but physics will ultimately determine how much load you're getting. So if you did, let's say, a sissy squat with a cable machine and you held a cable handle on each side that's going down to, let's say, a low pulley close to the ground,

you lean back and you keep your hips forward, you can use, well, you can't use too much weight, although I was demonstrating it yesterday. If you do a bodyweight sissy squat, it'll actually be harder than it would be with a cable sissy squat with maybe, let's say, 100 pounds. And the reason for that is because as you lean back, you're sort of counterbalancing some of the forward pull so you can actually neutralize some of the weight you're using by your leaning back

which by the way makes it much easier to keep your heels on the ground and much easier to balance yourself you don't need to like hold on to anything to keep from falling but anything over you know 80 or 100 pounds 120 140 160 just goes all to your quadriceps and just demolishes you. I mean, literally, if you do leg extensions, either with a machine or with cables, because I work out in the garage and I do leg extensions with cables and sissy squats with cables. And my quads get as good a workout. And I'm 61. I've got amazing quads right now. I mean, I wish I'd known this 30 years ago when I was young and you could do more with it.

But the thing is this, is that now you're not getting any glutes. When you do squats, you're getting glutes. Not great glutes, but some glutes. So now you have to work your glutes separately, which I recommend the multi-hip machine because now you can put that roller at the end of your femur, right behind your knee. So you're using the entire femur length and you can do a full range of motion. You get 110 degrees range of motion on that hip angle. And on top of that, you're using one leg. So you're eliminating one of the 16 factors, which is bilateral deficit. Bilateral deficit is a slight weakening on both sides when they're both working simultaneously. That's why when you work one side at a time, you can use slightly,

like imagine curling a pair of 30 pound dumbbells versus doing alternating 30 pound dumbbells. You said multi-hip machine? A multi-hip machine, yeah-hit machine yeah or a hip rotation machine that's the one that has a single pad on it and you can like put your leg over top of it if you want or put your knee underneath it to work the hip flexor and so right exactly you stand alongside the machine's pivot great piece which is right next to your your hip which is your pivot and then you have the same length machine arm to your your femur right and so then you rotate now here's the thing is again you could do the math on this you can take let's say 200 pounds

on the multi-hip machine with one leg and because you're using your entire femur length you get no reduction in the length of that femur and you're putting nothing on your spine there's no compression at all and you've eliminated bilateral deficit so you're getting all the power potential with one leg you can get far more glute load than you can with a deadlift or a squat but who's going to admire you when you're looking at how you're doing the multi-up machine? No one. Not many people, by the way.

Yeah. Plus you also get resistance through the entire range of motion. Even when you go to the back and you're contracted, that thing is still pushing against your femur. That doesn't happen when you squat or deadlift. Don't worry about getting the attention while you're on the machine. You're going to get plenty of attention when you throw on a pair of tight jeans, right?

Oh yeah. Yeah. And not only that, but you spare your back. You spare your back. Look, I really think we have to get away from the mentality of exhibition lifting in the gym. Half of our motivation is to go there and have our buddies cheer us on. So with the levers and everything and the physics behind the movements, which is starting to make sense and I kind of cross off a bunch of my silly questions, but is it because of the time under tension?

And I ask this because our buddy Mike Izzertal, he's Team Full ROM. I'm not sure if you're familiar. I know the name. Okay. So everything he does, he preaches the fact that he accredits a lot of his success to full range of motion. But after what you're saying, it seems like at the beginning and the end of some of these full ranges, there's not any tension there according to where the levers are. So is a lot of this accredited to just the time under, or is there just more to it than just simply saying that? There's more to it.

Time under tension is really just another way of saying volume. Because at the end of the day, the muscle needs volume. So time under tension, when you're trying to do continuous tension, you're going to get more fatigue. And more fatigue could inhibit. So there's nothing wrong with a momentary reduction or elimination of resistance. Because ultimately, what's going to matter is how many times did that muscle contract with the kind of reps that qualify for recruitment, either high, high, high fatigue reps or high weight reps, right? So it's not important to get continuous tension. This idea that you want to keep tension on the muscle, don't let it rest,

don't let it rest, don't let it rest. That's not smart. That's ultimately going to force you to do fewer sets. Full range of motion is good. And I should qualify what full range of motion is. Full range of motion doesn't necessarily mean 100%. In fact, in most cases, not all cases, but in most cases, the first 10% and the last 10% are potentially dangerous and not potentially growth producing. So that middle 80% is what you want to get to, right? So if you're doing, let's say, a curl and you have your forearm go down to the neutral position at the bottom, then there's no risk in going 100% range of motion. But you do a full lockout on a preacher curl, now you cannot do full range of motion. In fact, on that one, probably you shouldn't even do 70% range of motion. In fact, on that one, probably you shouldn't even do 70% range of motion.

And there's another thing that's in the 16 factors, which is mechanical disadvantage, and it's why biceps tear during preacher curls, but that's another subject. But the point is, and I agree with Mike Israele in terms of full range of motion, I think volume is what matters, and maybe he's approaching volume from the perspective of time under tension but time under tension cuts both ways it can also inhibit how many sets you can do because of the fatigue that you're building up so actually you know on the topic of muscle tears it's like you mentioned biceps but i think in your book you talk about like biceps hammies lats and pecs like these are oh you got my you got my book. Got your book. Yeah. Atta boy. Yeah. We, we, we, yeah. So as far as those muscles concerned, why are those like,

why are those muscles, muscles that tend to have lifters? They always get injured on like hammy injuries, lat injuries, pecs, biceps. Why? What are they doing wrong? So here's the thing is that when I do my seminars, I explain what mechanical disadvantages. And the way I do that when I do my seminars, I explain what mechanical disadvantage is.

And the way I do that is I took a seated calf machine and I chopped off the seat and I chopped off the thing that holds your knees, right? So all that was left was just the lever, the pivot and the pedestal. And across the top of this thing, I welded little circular things and I put a 10 pound weight on the holder. And I say to the audience, imagine this is your forearm, this is your elbow over here. I've just put a 10-pound weight in your hand. How much is your bicep holding when that forearm is horizontal? Some people guess 10 pounds. They know it's a trick question, whatever. I take the scale and I put it where the wrist would be and I pull up and it says 12 pounds because I'm not pulling directly on the weight. I'm pulling slightly

farther back. And I keep moving down the scale until I get to the point where the bicep actually connects to the forearm, which is very close to the elbow. And now it's like 112 pounds. All right. So now what I've proven is that the length of the lever magnifies the resistance. But in all of these cases, I was pulling perpendicular to that lever. When I pull at a 45 degree angle to that lever, which is halfway between straight up and straight in, now all of a sudden it's doubled. Now it's 220 pounds of force that I have to pull in order to get that lever arm to lift off of its stand. Why? Because I still need 112 pounds going up, but now I'm not pulling up. I'm pulling halfway up and halfway in.

So now I have to pull with twice as much force. Well, when you pull at a parallel angle, right, you have to pull with about nine or 10 times more force. So here's the example that I use right here. Let's just say this is your elbow. This is your forearm. This is where your bicep connects to your forearm, right? So when you're going to do a regular curl, you're going to do this, right? All right. Well, that's fine because this mechanical disadvantage, this secondary magnification that's occurring because of the biceps inability to pull on this forearm from a perpendicular angle is compensated for by the fact that the forearm has now diminished its load because it's more in the neutral position. But if I put my arm on a table like this,

and now my forearm is in the horizontal position, the fully active position, that same 10 pounds that's over there will be multiplied by 12, a 12 to one ratio, the length of the forearm, plus 10 times that. Right? So that means you've got, let's say, you know, a thousand pounds of bicep force. This is why people tear their biceps when they're deadlifting, because the amount of weight you're deadlifting times 12, the length of the forearm, times the percentage of angle that you've got on your forearm, which might only be 5% when you're deadlifting, adds up to 1,500, 2,000 pounds. I mean, you're not supposed to be curling when you're deadlifting, right? But since that

forearm, since that palm is forward, that's the tendency. You don't have that tendency with the arm that's doing this, but the tendency is to pull with everything you've got. And then you see that bicep tear. So it's a combination of those three things, the angle of the forearm relative to the resistance, the amount of weight you're using, and the degree, the angle at which the bicep is pulling on the forearm. I think we… And there's only a few. Back to your thing. There's only…

Not all muscles flex. Yeah. That happens only in flexion muscles. That happens only on biceps, lats, pecs, hamstrings. The other muscles are extension muscles. They're always pulling from a mechanical disadvantage, so they've adapted in a common. That's why triceps are cross-hatched.

That's why quadriceps are cross-hatched. That's called pennate muscle. They've adapted to being able to produce more force because they don't ever get a break, whereas bicep pretty much adapted for us to use that when our elbows are bent what about a pec is the pec in there too or because people take it and that's why people tear their packs yeah you probably saw that video recently of that guy tearing his pec on the

incline press yeah that was brutal um yeah so when it comes to you know we you're bringing up a lot of great points and i think what we learned today more so than anything is that we need to do a series with you because there's so much to learn from you. I'd love to have you here at super training gym sometime in the near future. So you can break some of this down and, and where are you located? We're in Sacramento. Oh,

I can just fly up to you, buddy. Yeah, that would be, that would be fantastic. You know, when we're looking at like barbell exercise, we talked about a little bit earlier.

It's like somebody just decided to make a stick that you can throw some weights on the side. They made these wheels that you throw on the side, right? And we've been lifting with those things forever. Dumbbells actually seem to make a little bit more sense because they're kind of connected to our hands. And then some of the machines and stuff make sense because they isolate the movements and they kind of idiot proof the exercises to some extent. You just kind of hop in there and you do a bunch of reps and then you get a pump, right? But a lot of these machines are probably designed, I mean, they're designed by really intelligent

people. These companies have a lot of money. And so you would figure that they would say, hey, let's figure out the most optimal way to work the muscle. But I don't think that they're thinking that way. I think they're thinking, let's get people to be really excited about these pieces of equipment. So we're going to make our leg press this way so that people can stack on tons of 45s on top of there and just feel like an absolute beast. And so maybe these things aren't made super optimally. Is that kind of what you've seen in the fitness industry? Well, exactly. But let me just touch real

briefly on the difference between a barbell bench press and a barbell dumbbell press. Okay. So when you're doing a barbell press, if you put oil on that bar, your hands would slide out. Okay. That means that what you're actually doing is not pulling toward the center. You're not pulling toward the midline of the body. That's what the pecs do. You're actually pushing in a different direction. So even though it looks like you're doing a similar movement, you're actually doing a very different movement in terms of physics, right? So the pecs are trying to pull that humerus toward the midline, right? But what's happening here is you're actually using your

triceps to push out. I mean, I've had a couple of buddies that have torn triceps while benching, right? So yes, the pecs do participate, but they participate less than they do with dumbbells because they're not able to do what they're able to do when you do dumbbells. So getting to machines, you're exactly right. Manufacturers of machines do not build machines based on what is best for the anatomy. Why not? Well, in part, because they wouldn't be able to come out with a new model every other year. Right.

The body doesn't change its mechanics every year, every other year right the body doesn't change its mechanics every year every other year right but it's more commercially viable to make a new machine every couple of years and and and and users at the gym typically say hey this machine looks fun oh look i can use a lot of weight oh look the seat moves while i'm doing this it's like a Disneyland ride. Right. So those pieces of equipment are really interesting. Yeah. These are the things that manufacturers do to sell machines. Right. But I'll give you an example. The lats, again, as I said before, all muscles pull toward their origin. So the lats pull from the out to the in. I've seen rowing machines that start in and go out. You're going in the opposite direction. You're working your rear deltoids by going in out.

Right? So they don't call it a rear deltoid machine. They could. It wouldn't be a bad rear deltoid exercise machine, but it is certainly not a bad machine. So the whole industry, and by the way, this is another thing that sort of bothersome to me is that gyms equip their facilities to please members and also to create a system where there's smooth flow of traffic. That way, not everybody's used to they've got TRXs over here. They've got these cable things over here.

They've got their kettlebells over there. They've got all these things. And they want a lot of people in that space doing something different. things and they want a lot of people in that space doing something different well if you went according to my rules you'd have like nothing but three or four pieces of equipment and you'd have 10 of them wow now that wouldn't look very interesting and not it wouldn't look very fun but in fact it would produce a better result let's rewind real quick because you you when we were talking about squatting you mentioned something about the hack squat and you're like i'm going to come back oh yeah yeah but yeah what

were you going to say well this gets back to what i was saying about the when you were doing the leaning back against the wall in a static squat position in other words you're pushing forward with your feet that's what you're doing with a hack squat machine when you put your feet out in front of you like that you're actually pushing forward because you're pushing your back against the backrest of the machine, right? So now you are getting a more perpendicular direction of resistance against that lower leg because of that friction force that you've now added, right? So even though the trajectory of the hack squad machine looks to be like this, that isn't the direction of resistance that's being applied to the lower leg.

That's a little bit of an illusion. And that's why it's important for you to understand all the components of biomechanics. When you're pushing forward, here's another example. You know, people say, you know, that machine you use where you stick your feet under and behind these rollers that are in front of your ankle but it's in front of the one that's at the top of your calf and you do a sissy squat with it yeah yeah yeah right now you can do it with your torso upright or you can lean back right so someone says well your lower leg is vertical there it's neutral why am i getting quad load well it's because it's not a free weight exercise anymore. Now you've created it into a rotation exercise, right? So now it is basically a leg extension,

right? So it's really just your knee. Okay. So this is what a leg extension looks like right here. Mm-hmm. Right? So that's exactly what your knee is doing when you're doing that hack squat machine. And as the quadricep is straightening the knee, it's basically carrying the torso. The hips are rising,

and so it's just carrying the weight of the torso straight up. You're not actually involving the torso or the hips or the glutes. This is just rising, and the torso is going along for the ride. Wow. Okay. Right? And the farther you lean back,

the more you magnify the load because you're using a longer lever. The sissy squats that you were talking about that you like to do earlier in the show, how are you performing them? Just by holding on to something or do you have that foot thing that you're talking about? Well, if I'm going to do a

regular free sissy squat without any apparatus, then I'm going to try to use some kind of slant board so that my heels are elevated, but my foot is flat. Like, you know, some of these gyms have these stretch boards for your calves. Right. I turned it around so that instead of my heel being lower, I have it so that my heel is higher. And then, you know, I just lean back and I just balance myself. But it is much better to do it with a cable machine in part because you have control over the resistance but also because it balances you literally you don't have to hold on to anything how's it done with a cable machine

well you just stand in front of the cable machine you can either use one cable or a double cable you hold on to the handle you maybe hold on to a bar and then you lean back and you keep your torso in line with your femur and the only thing that bends is your knee uh it's hard yeah i understand when you do a squat you're basically trying to keep your uh shoulders in line with your hips the entire time as you're driving your knees forward and downward is that fair to say your shoulders in line with your hips well i time as you're driving your knees forward and downward. Is that fair to say? Your shoulders in line with your hips. Well, I would say that I try to keep my spine parallel to my femur. Got it. Here's kind of what it looks like. Maybe I can show it.

First ever sissy squat on the show. Oh yeah, we'll be able to see it. Yeah, it's like you're actually your shoulders get in line with like your heels and some knees over toes yeah he doesn't have his headphones on yet but yeah I'm not gonna ask you and did I get it yeah you got it

now a quick question do you when you do the sissy squat with the cable machine do you use the slant board along with that or do you not? Yeah, I do. You use the slant board. In fact, what I did last night was I took one of those Reebok steps, the long one, not the single one, and I just put a four by four underneath one side of it. So that's my slope.

I can't wait to go into the gym right after this. But you can even use a two by four because the fact that you're leaning back a little farther since you're opposing the frontward pull, you have less need to elevate your heels. A little less need to elevate your heels. Yeah, your heels don't have to be elevated super high, it sounds like. Right, right. But boy, there's just nothing like that quad work. Nothing like, and by the way, the quads don't give a shit if your hips are working at the same time, if your glutes are working at the same time. There's no benefit to the quads to simultaneously activate the glutes. There's no reason why we should do a compound movement for the quads.

When it comes to machines, you said your ideal gym would have maybe four machines. What are some of your favorite machines? When we had this lockdown, I was working out at Equinox. It closed. So my training partner and I built a gym in his garage. So we have an adjustable decline bench. We have a free motion dual cable machine. We have a multi-hip machine from tough

stuff. We have dumbbells from two and a half pounds to 60 pounds. And we have two benches, one bench that we use. It's solid upright. It's not adjustable. We use that for seated cable crunches. We can use that one for our cable presses, our front presses for our deltoids. We do a tricep pushdown. It has the resistance coming from slightly behind you. We can use that for seated alternating dumbbell curls, hammer curls.

And then the other bench is one I created for chest-supported scapular retraction. So you just sit there and it holds your chest while you do your cable middle trapezius exercise. But you can do that with that same seat. If the seat is low enough and you can get your collarbone over the top of it and just, you just have to open your legs a little more and put your chest against it.

So it can be done that way too. By the way, scapular retraction doesn't need chest support as much, but I go pretty heavy on it. I mean, I go heavy enough that eight reps is challenging. Yeah. And you're going to get some forward pull with that, and you don't want to be distracted by what your lower back is doing

while you're doing that. What about in your ideal gym? Is there any room for any cardio machines? I see a lot of bodybuilders on step mills and stuff like that. Well, yeah, we don't have room in there for a treadmill, but I would certainly, if I had the room, I would add a treadmill and a stationary bike. And by the way, I got leanest not doing cardio.

And the reason I got leanest not doing cardio was because I tend to be ectomorphic. And so people that are ectomorphic tend to adapt very well to cardiovascular exercise such that your metabolism literally slows down to accommodate the need. So you can check your heart rate. Let's say if you're going to do a three-month pre-contest cardio thing, your heart rate might be 115 with X intensity. By a month or two later, it's 92, it's 88, even though you're using the same intensity. So I found that my body was learning how to conserve fuel.

You want to be fuel inefficient when you're trying to burn fat. So you're actually going to get more fat loss by being fuel inefficient cutting back your calories and burning all your calories with with resistance exercise than you would if you tried to bring now that's not true for the endomorph the guy that's more of a slow metabolism guy he'll he will benefit fat loss wise from doing cardio But I do think everyone should do cardio for cardiovascular health. I would imagine nowadays you just do some here and there just because, right? Yeah. I mean, it does increase your HDL and lower your LDL. And also, I like the idea of just maintaining that function, maintaining the capacity. If I go for a hike

or a bike ride with a friend or something like that, I don't want to poop up because I never do any cardio. You ever have an opportunity to utilize bands or chains on the bar? Even elastic bands, right? Yes. The elastic bands have a different thing. They increase the resistance as they get longer, and they decrease the resistance as they get shorter. But when you're doing an exercise like that, you're going to be increasing resistance as they get shorter. But when you're doing an exercise like

that, you're going to be increasing resistance as you get weaker and decreasing resistance as you get stronger. So what you find when you do that is the early part of the range of motion is never enough resistance. And the later part of the range of motion is always too much resistance. And so it is certainly better than nothing. If I've got nothing else, if I don't have pulleys, for example, then I will put an elastic band over there and over there and I'll do my scapular retraction with an elastic band because it's better than nothing. It's much better than nothing. But if I have the option of using cables, I'd rather use cables. Have you ever had an opportunity to put them on the barbell as some power lifters do? Have you ever had a chance to try that? Well, again, I don't use barbells, right?

Right. But here's the thing is when you're doing something, let's say putting an elastic band on a barbell, you know you're going to have an increasing resistance as you lower it because your arms are getting more horizontal. That means that it's going to get lighter as your arms get more vertical and then by adding the resistance that increasing as the other weight is decreasing now you're making it more of a continuous tension thing so then you have to ask yourself i'm making more continuous tension is that good well uh it might be good if you were doing let's say dumbbells right and if in other words it'd be better to end with some resistance rather than no resistance It might be good if you were doing, let's say, dumbbells, right? In other words, it'd be better to end with some resistance rather than no resistance.

But if you're having so much resistance at the end of the range of motion that you can't finish the range of motion, then that's not necessarily a good thing. But elastic bands can be done, can be used, not necessarily productively, but they can be done with barbells. It's pretty awkward to do it with dumbbells. What about in the case of something like a row? Do you think that it might add some value to it? If you had, you know, you're pulling like a, let's say, low pulley row and you figured out a way to put some bands on there as well. So now you have the way the weight normally works. But in addition to that, it's adding some resistance as you pull the weight towards you?

Okay, the first thing that we have to ask is, is the rowing motion a good motion? And if so, for what muscle, right? So when you're doing a rowing motion, you're pulling your arms toward the back of the room, and you're pulling against a resistance going straight to the front. Okay, so in my book, I explain the principle of opposite position loading. What I explain is that the tower of Pisa, leaning tower of Pisa is over there, and it's going to fall. It's going to fall north. Today's the day.

You can save it. You're strong enough to do it. Here's a rope that you can attach to it. It's strong enough to hold it. It's falling north. On which side of the tower would you have to stand and attach? On the south side. That's strong enough to hold it. It's falling north. On which side of the tower would you have to stand and attempt? On the south side. That's where the load is. Where's the load on a frontward pulling resistance? On the rear deltoid. That's where the load is. So you're

pulling with your rear deltoid. Once your arm gets to the side of your body and beyond, 100% rear deltoid. there is no other muscle that pulls your elbow behind you other than rear deltoids and terry's major and that's not the objective of your exercise to begin with while you're doing rowing so the fact that you're going to add an elastic band to increase the load at the end of a range of motion that isn't even for the muscle that you wanted to work is is is by the way keep in mind that when you row that upper arm bone which is being pulled on by the rear deltoid is entering a more and more perpendicular resistance to resistance position to resistance as you go back so you're getting more load back there anyway

when you're like this it's parallel to resistance so you're getting more load back there anyway. When you're like this, it's parallel to resistance, so you're not getting anything. You're going to get more resistance when it's perpendicular to the lever. So you're already getting increased resistance at the rear. It wouldn't do you any good to add more resistance to the end of the range of motion. You know, kind of on the, let's talk about this because I'm assuming, you know, with the exercises that you choose, right, they are very specific to the muscle group that you're trying to work. A lot of lifters, when they're going through a lot of exercise in the gym, they're like, oh, I can't feel this in this muscle group or I can't feel this here. So, you know, first off,

what do you think about the idea of the mind muscle connection, whatever, right? But then also, how do you help individuals? And what's your advice to people for being able to get better at actually focusing on and activating certain muscle groups? I mean, I know you're probably going to talk about pick the right exercises that really work the muscle groups, right? But a lot of lifters still find that they have problems really activating, right? So what are your thoughts on that? Well, it is true that some people just inherently are less connected to their body. I mean, I've been training clients for years and I often ask clients, where do you feel this? And they'll say, I don't know. You don't know where you're straining where are you feeling the

strain well somewhere right around here somewhere i don't know so you know you're never going to be able to rewire their brain but um again as you said physics will determine what muscle is going to be loaded whether you're thinking about it or, and you can't redirect the load just by thinking about it. There are some exercises that, well, maybe all exercises would benefit by being aware of what you're feeling and where you're feeling it and making slight accommodations. So for example, let's just say you're doing a one-arm pull-in and part of the latissimus fibers attached to the bottom tip of the shoulder blade, which means they actually help pull the shoulder down. So when you're doing this, it helps to lower the shoulder. Now, how much does it help? Maybe eight, 10%.

It's not going to make or break the exercise, but it is going to feel more gratifying to raise that shoulder blade up as you bring the arm up and to bring the shoulder down. And so that mind muscle connection does help bring gratification and fun and pleasure and just a sense of just gritty, fuck, I'm feeling this in my lap like I've never felt before, right? That's important. When you're doing certain, let's say, shoulder raises exercises, if you're shrugging your shoulder up, you're going to diminish the ability of that delta to shorten and contract. But if you're not aware that you're bringing your shoulder up as you're doing it, you're going to basically have an origin and muscle origin

that's retreating away from the opposing insertion and preventing that muscle from contracting right so these things do matter but that's just paying attention that's just being in tune i think that's also where like working with loads that are way too heavy and then using a lot of momentum and adding all these factors into the training can have lifters get away from being able to really even pay attention to the muscle group that they're working. Because when you start lifting heavier, a lot of people start moving a lot and all these other muscle groups are getting whatever and they feel good in a way, but it pulls away from, you know, what they're trying to actually do. Right. I'll give you an example of like, you know,

let's just say you're doing skull crushers and, and it's very tempting to keep up with your training partner. It's very tempting to, to get a new record, right? You've been doing it with, let's say, 100 pounds. You want to get to 110 pounds today. And not that 110 pounds is a magic number, but it's more than 100 pounds. And so it makes you think that you're moving forward. You're investing a lot of time and effort and energy in this thing. And you really want to to grow so you add weight to your barbell or your dumbbells even though you knew that if you did it strict you wouldn't be able to do it yeah so now you

start to sort of throw this way you start to use your lats right well maximum effort by a muscle is maximum effort by a muscle there's no such thing as more than maximum, right? If you're doing a strict tricep extension and you know that four reps is all you can do with this particular weight, adding weight is foolish. Throwing momentum in there is the equivalent of you adding weight to then subtract the weight by throwing your lats in there, weight to then subtract the weight by throwing your lats in there, right? So your triceps are at the very least no more loaded, possibly even less loaded, but you've created this illusion now that you've worked your triceps harder when in fact all you really does is engage your lats in a way that isn't really productive for the lats and also increases the risk of injury and wasted effort. But this is

part of like, there's a huge psychological component as we know to working out, right? So much of it is us being so zealous to give it all we've got, right? To walk away from the gym thinking we left nothing on the table right but but that's an illusion that's not what the muscle is experiencing a muscle knows exclusively how much effort it put into the work and it has no idea how many other muscles might have assisted in that process so like i think this is also a good place for us to stick because, you know, let's say that, you know, people leave the gym and they're like, oh, I have the craziest back bumper. Oh, my quads are blown up. Right. You have that feeling. Right. And, you know, let's ignore, you know, we talked about failure and all that, but they have the feeling, right, that those muscle groups have been worked drastically, even if they weren't working in that way. Is that something, like, is that still worth paying attention to? Well, you know, Lee Haney used to say, stimulate, don't annihilate, right? And we've had this idea that it's an emotional idea.

It's not an intellectual idea. It's an emotional idea that we have to give it all we've got, that we have to really just let that muscle go limp. And that's what's going to give us maximum growth. Well, in fact, there is such a thing as overtraining. Right? So it is ridiculous to think that the harder you work, the more growth you get. you work, the more growth you get. Now, there are people like Tom Platz who had an amazing physique and they go out and they do their seminars and people want to know, okay, Tom, how did you do it? You think he's going to talk about physics? You think he's going to talk about neurology,

You think he's going to talk about neurology, reciprocal innervation, bilateral deficit, active insufficiency? No. He's going to say you have to work your fucking ass off. You have to dig deeper than you ever dug before. Because that's what he knows. That's his message. If there's one thing Tom Platz does is he inspires. but he doesn't teach mechanics. He doesn't teach science. Right now, I'm not belittling him and I respect him, but the people that are listening for something from a message from a person who's done this before, who's been there, who achieved this thing, they want to know what's your secret.

who's been there, who achieved this thing, they want to know what's your secret. What do you know that I don't know? What do you have that I don't have? What can I get from you that'll help me? Right? And some of these people say, well, you've got to eat 20,000 calories a day. Well, no, you don't. Because yes, you cannot let your body think that there's a calorie shortage. It's not going to give you muscle growth if it thinks it can't afford it. But if your metabolic rate for that day is 4,000 and eating 5,000 or 6,000 calories a day is more than enough to make your body feel that it can afford muscle growth, eating 20,000 calories a day isn't going to make that better. If X amount of intensity is enough to make that muscle grow, using three times that intensity isn't necessarily better. We have to be smart about how we eat and how we train and understand that there is such a thing as the right amount of intensity, the right amount of muscle fatigue.

You're too logical, I think. And when it comes to, you know, when it comes to exercises and things that you've seen maybe over the last several years, like what are some things, you seem to be very level-headed, but what are some things where you're just like, what the hell are these people doing? Like, why is everyone doing this exercise? Have you had any exercises or are there any exercise that are kind of pet peeves of yours where you're like i just can't i can't afford to see it one more time i'm gonna uh drive off a cliff well look i know the answer to that

is no i mean i i i understand why people are doing what they're doing you know and i and i tell people all the time look even trainers you trainers, we can all be forgiven for having done it the old school way. None of us knew any better, right? I mean, a lot of us have gone... Look, I was certified with the American College of Sports Medicine. They taught no biomechanics. They might be doing it now, but when I was certified with ACSM 30 years ago, they taught no physics. And yet, it's safe to say that all of the people that were being certified with them were using resistance exercise as part of their training. And yet, resistance exercise is all about physics. It's all about mechanics.

It's all about neurology. It's all about physics. It's all about mechanics. It's all about neurology. It's all about, you know, low muscle load and safety. Look, I mean, you get people that are doing trainers that tell clients when you're squatting, don't let your knees go over your toes. Okay. So that means that if you're squatting, you have to shift your hips way back in order to try to keep your tibia relatively vertical, which automatically forces you to bend over forward and get your torso more horizontal, which automatically loads your erector spinae more. They miss that part. They're so oblivious to anything other than the knees as if somehow letting the knees go over the

toes is the worst concern, nevermind the spine, nevermind the lower back, right? But here's the thing. So if we look at it from a physics perspective, you say, what is the difference between me letting my knees go over my toes and not? Well, it is keeping my lower leg vertical, i.e. neutral, i.e. no load on the quadriceps You're telling a population of people Most of whom have no knee problems To not load their quadriceps And you don't even know why

The industry told you to do it that way But here's the trick Knees bend normally That's the way they bend Those same people that are telling you to not let your knees go over your toes then tell you to do a side plank. What's a side plank? Knees way over the toes trying to bend your knees sideways. There's this massive inconsistency. Why would you tell me to do something that's totally safe, but don't do that,

and then tell me to do something that's unsafe over here, and you're oblivious to the physics involved in that and the fact that the anatomy, the knees don't bend sideways. It's not safe to apply sideways pressure to your foot and then create a bridge that's trying to bend your knee sideways. Now, chances are you're not going to snap your knee sideways when you're doing a side plank. And that's your tendons and ligaments, by the way, that are keeping it together. There's nothing else doing that, right? But if it's safe to do a side plank, it is certainly safe to let your knees go over your toes when you're squatting. What about something like a glute bridge? You know, I've seen like over the last several years, people like using a lot of weight on that exercise and they even made machines for it.

Do you think this is a decent practice to actually help activate growth in the butt? Well, you know, glute bridge is hip extension, right? So that is what the glutes do. The problem with a glute bridge under normal circumstances, some of these machines minimize this problem. But if you're just doing it from the ground, you're only going to get about 20 degrees range of motion. Right? In other words, your femur or your hip angle doesn't come anywhere near where it could. I mean, your hip angle goes like this. That's the range of motion of the hips. When you doing glute bridge you're not doing that right you're doing 10 of that maybe 15 of that yeah you're far from the right range of motion so

yes if you put your back on a bench you can create more hip angle but now what you're doing is you're using your spine as a bridge and so you're putting what you're doing is you're using your spine as a bridge. And so you're putting all that pressure on the upper part of your spine. And so there's some pressure on the spine and your end phase loading, the resistance gets heavier at the end, lighter at the bottom, which is the opposite of the strength curve of the muscle. If anything, you want to early phase load it and not late phase load it. On top of that, you're having to use the lower leg. Now, if you put oil on the ground, your feet would probably slide out from under you, right?

That means you're activating your quadricep. Activating the quadricep deactivates the hamstring. What happens when the hamstring is deactivated and you're asking it to contribute to hip extension? It cramps up. That's why some people feel a cramp in their hamstring when they're doing glute bridges, because you're getting reciprocal innervation. You're getting a nerve cutoff, a relaxation synapse sent to your hamstring because you're activating your quadricep by the friction force of you pushing forward on the ground. So I say, and then you

have the bilateral deficit. You have both hips working at the same time. All you have to do is walk over to that glute machine that's over there, assuming it's there, right? All you have to do is go over there and you can get so much better range of motion, elimination of bilateral deficit, nothing on your spine. You see girls all the time going into the gym and they're doing five and six different glute exercises. All of them are hip extension, but all have differing degrees of effectiveness when all they have to do is one exercise. The best one. Why mess with the little ones? Are you talking about the same one that's on the multi-hip machine? Yeah.

Multi-hip machine. Yeah. Okay. I mean, if you don't have that, you can do a back lunge and you can get decent glute activation. A backwards lunge? A back lunge. You step back. Yeah.

When you step forward, the forward momentum of your body activates the quadriceps more. When you step back, the momentum activates the glute more. It puts more load on the front leg. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. I think you crushed it for us today and and uh opened people's eyes to a lot of new ideas you have another question what because everybody everybody

has all these you mentioned an ab movement where you're uh on a straight bench you have the you know the kid behind you right everybody has all these different ab movements that they love, like ab roller or cable crunches or leg raises, right? But from, again, from what you know and then biomechanics, the way the abs work, what would be your favorite go-to ab movements that you think all the lifters that are listening right now should be doing and that they're probably ignoring? Okay. Well, the first thing that I want to say is the abs are probably one of the simplest muscles to work. It's just like a bicep, right? It does one thing. It moves the origin and insertion closer together, which creates spinal flexion. That's what it does. You know, leg raises are one of the most ridiculous exercises you can do for

your abs. For starters, your abs don't even connect to your legs, right? So when you're doing your hanging, you're straining your arms, you're straining your hands, and maybe you've even added a weight to your ankles. And so you say, well, you look at an anatomy chart and you say, well, it's obvious that the rectus abdominis goes from the pubic bone of the pelvis to the bottom part of the rib cage. Doesn't even cross the hip joint, has nothing to do with the hip angle, zero. So then you say, well, then why have we been doing it? Well, we've been doing it because you know that there's a thing called backfire. If you shoot a gun, it recoils, right? When you thrust your legs forward, your tailbone will recoil.

It would kick back. Your abs keep that from happening. Your abs keep your spine steady while another set of muscles, the hip flexors, performs the primary movement. That's like doing standing barbell curls and calling it a lower back exercise. Yes, my lower back is keeping me upright because I would fall forward otherwise, but the isometric work is being done by the lower back, by the erector spinae and the dynamic work. The heavy lifting is done by the bicep, right? So when

you're doing leg raises, you're doing a hip flexor exercise and you're using your abs to stabilize. Now, some people say, well, let's do it for the, I do it for the lower abs. Well, first of all, there is no lower ab. It's one muscle. It starts here and ends here. Now, they've done EMG studies on those uppers and middle and lower parts. And they've noticed that there's always, regardless of what you're doing, always more contraction in the upper part than in the lower part. And the reason for that is simple. And this is the reason why we have those dividers, which are called tendinous intersections. If you look at a side view of an anatomy, you see that the spine goes like this, and then it curves back to the tailbone, right? So that means this part right here is the part that is more able to flex.

The part that goes like this toward the tailbone cannot flex as much. What's right across from that lumbar? The upper abs. Our anatomy is designed to allow the upper abs to flex slightly more than the lower abs. That's just the way we're built. So you cannot separate. You cannot preferentially stimulate more the lower part of that. And if you could, nothing would happen. Why would nothing happen? Because those tendinous intersections were there since birth. What you have in terms of your dividers have been there forever and they will be there forever. When you look at, I've

done cadaver dissection. When you look at a cadaver and you look at these things, you notice, first of all, they're not even symmetrical, right? None of us have a perfectly square division, right? They're always a little bit, sometimes they're not even even, right? I've got a little bit of a fourth ab on the left side, but I don't have a fourth ab on the right side. Of course, nobody notices that, but it's just a little indentation. We cannot add, if we have a four pack, we can't make it a six pack. We can't make it an eight pack.

You also can't reduce the fat in the lower portion of the region because you can't make it a six pack. We can't make it an eight pack. You also can't reduce the fat in the lower portion of the region because you can't spot reduce. So there's literally nothing that you can possibly do to change the appearance of the abs by somehow changing the exercise. It's impossible. Let's just say someone says, well, when I do leg raises, I try to bring my tailbone forward. All right. So what you when I do leg raises I try to bring my tailbone forward All right. So what you're actually doing is you're trying to bring the origin more toward the insertion Than the insertion toward the origin But that's like a tug-of-war if two men are pulling on a rope

And this guy over here is winning and the rope starts to move this way The tension on the rope is still going to be the same as if it goes the other way Right. So tension is tension. It's only being held on two ends, right? And so you can't change attention by way of exercise, but even if you could, nothing would change. It's a ridiculous thing. Also, getting back to your question, the best exercise then is spinal flexion,

which is a crunch. And the best kind of crunch is the crunch that allows you to have the right amount of resistance. And the right amount of resistance has to do with the direction of the resistance. So if you're doing a flat crunch like this on a floor mat and your torso is horizontal in the maximum angle, right? Perpendicular to gravity, that might be and usually is too much resistance for your abs to do a full range of motion for enough reps so get on a little bit of an incline now you've created less of a perpendicular angle to your torso you've subtracted about 20 percent

of your body weight if you need more than that go a little higher and then focus on bending the spine in the middle of the spine, bringing the rib cage towards the pelvis and treat your abs like you would a bicep. You don't try to do a hundred little itty bitty reps for bicep. That's what people do with abs. They go, you know, and they do and they go burn, burn, burn, burn. Yeah, yeah, yeah, burn, burn, burn, burn. Yeah, yeah. That's nonsense. You don't build muscle with burn and you don't yeah burn burn burn burn yeah yeah that's nonsense you don't build

muscle with burn and you don't dissipate fat with burn but people are gratified i do 100 crunches a day it's okay you have bragging rights but it's useless what you're better off doing is i use a cable machine because then you can use progressive resistance. You can start off with a resistance that allows 30 repetitions, add a little more weight, do 20 for the next set, add a little weight, do 15, add a little weight, and then do 10 sets of 10 reps. Full range of motion, holding the contraction. You're building the muscle.

You're deepening the little space. You're making the, you know, in between the tendon and the central section, you're making that little bit of muscle fuller. That creates the illusion that those notches are deeper. Right. And then you get rid of the fat through diet and you've got amazing abs. There we go. That moon bench type of thing probably is pretty effective.

Have you seen that piece where the cables are behind you and stuff? That probably works pretty good, right? Well, I like the fact that the resistance is coming from behind you and stuff that probably works pretty good right well i like i like the fact that the resistance coming from behind you i don't think that extending the spine in that arch position is that productive or that necessary and and and some people potentially uncomfortable potentially injurious that's not so bad because it's it's uh because it's supported but if you're doing let's say um, if you're doing a kneeling cable crunch and you're really trying to arch, then you could get into a little bit of spinal discomfort.

Well, it feels good on the abs, certainly because you're feeling the abs stretch, but it's not critically important. I just do a regular cable crunch with a flat back seat, and my abs have always been great when i get on stage did you say you do it off of a inclined bench or just or i'm sorry it's a seat it's a flat seat with a with an upright back okay and then i and then i put the pulley behind me about head height and then i grab a couple of ropes perfect cool cool and curls aren't going to want to do that

because it'll mess up their hair. And then we can plug the book as much as possible right now because I'm going to have to pick up my own copy. I was going to wait for it and see if it would be done. No, it's not going to be done. I know. It's going to be a minute, so I'm going to have to get it my damn self. So I'm assuming all this is broken down in the book as far as each muscle group, like the, um, you know, the, the opposite of the origin of the muscle, like is kind of break it down. Cause, uh, someone like me, I'm going to have a hard time, like, okay, he said, let's all go this way. But then, you know, where my chest,

like I wouldn't have thought to push like, uh, downwards, like a, like a decline bench. Um, so is that kind of all broken down in the book? Yes. And listen, the first thing I'll tell you is, even though this stuff sounds complicated, the thing that I've been sort of lauded for is that I've been able to take these complex concepts and simplify them and illustrate them in ways that make it very easy to understand for the average person. So it's written in simple language. The first 16 chapters basically talk about principles, mechanical things, neurological things. But then the 17th chapter is kind of like a little bit of a synopsis of that

and talks about some myths about how important it is or actually how not important it is to rotate your exercises all the time. This muscle confusion principle is nonsense, and I explain why. And then starting with the 18th chapter, 18 through 25 are body part chapters. Pecs, lats, middle trapezius, side deltoid, front deltoid, rear deltoid. And then I identify what that muscle does, what the ideal range of motion is, therefore, the best exercise, the best one or two exercises would be this and this. Second would be this. Third might be this.

Fourth best might be this. Fifth best might be that. Worst might be this. Body part by body part. And then chapter 26, which is the final chapter, talks about basically how we wrap our minds around this. The fact that this is so new, so different than what we've been told, but we owe it to ourselves to allow ourselves to be sensible and logical,

to not be dogmatic, to not be closed-minded, and to just put your toe in the water a little bit. Just try a few of these things out and then maybe mix it in with what you've been doing. And then as you explore that, just move these more in and move those more out and you'll discover that it feels and produces a better result.

And then do you outline the 20 exercises that you utilize? If you email me, dbfitness at aol.com, I will send you the list of the Brick 20. Perfect. But I coined it the Brick 20 after the book was published. So it's not called that. But every chapter, every, excuse me, every body part chapter says this is the best one or two. This is the best one or two. The Brick best one or two. The break 20 are those. Those are the best exercises for those particular muscle groups. So when, if you email me and I send you the list of the break 20, then you can see all this matches perfectly with the book. Fantastic. Where can people find it and where can they purchase your book?

You can get the book. If you want me to sign it for you, you can get it from my website, DougBrignoli.com. If you are not, well, I can ship this book anywhere in the world. It just depends on, to some degree, what your mail service is like in your country. So like in South Africa, it has been difficult to get some books in South Africa, and there's some other countries too. But if you have, because we ship at USPS, United States Postal Service, they take it to the country of destination and give it to their postal service. They finish the process. If that process is bad, it might take longer, but it's the most economical way. We can ship at fedex it costs more but but usually nine times out of ten this is fine usps is fine um if you want to sign that's the best way to go you can get it through amazon.com if you want the digital virgin version

you can you can uh is there such a thing yeah you could uh you can uh you can get it from the publisher, which is healthy learning dot com. And you can get the EPUB if you prefer an e-book. And then I also have a smart training 365 website and the smart train 365 website. I do in conjunction with my associate, Mo Larby, and we do online courses and videos that show the brick 20 and show there's all kinds of videos that we've done like true bodybuilding and things like that where we talk about everything like diet and we talk about posing trunks and how to prepare your posing routine and how to match your music and all of that stuff so if you go to smart training 365 you'll see all kinds of even certification if If you're a trainer, you want to be certified in this program. We do that as well. What's the name of your book? I think you

have more than one books. What's the name of your books? Well, my primary book is the resistance of resistance, excuse me, the physics of resistance exercise. That is the how to book. The other book that I'm associated with, I co-authored. It's called Million Dollar Muscle. It is a sociology book. I co-authored it with a professor of sociology, and we were looking at the fitness industry from a behavioral standpoint. In other words, where's the false advertising? Where are the myths? Where are the trends? What are the false beliefs? What about women bodybuilding? What about steroids? What about this? What about that? So it's sociological. It's not my book entirely. It is a university book. It is used in university classes. And I'm now also being invited to write a university

biomechanics book, which would be good because now I can talk about the physics of movement rather than just the physics of resistance exercise. If you're a student and you want to learn about physical therapy or you want to learn how is this going to help me with, I'm training someone to do javelin or pole vault, or I want to reduce injury in the workplace. Same physics, same biomechanics applies. So I'm working on that right now.

Hopefully these things take a long time, but hopefully it'll be done in about two or three years Thank you so much for your time today We appreciate it, have a great rest of your day Thank you so much, you too Bye guys We got some good stuff today We got schooled Big time

That was so sick I really like though, because it's like, like this thing, like when I talk to, to athletes that don't compete and they're like, yeah, I want a bench where I'm less like, but you want bigger pecs, right? Yeah. And I, the bench isn't comfortable for you, right? No fucking bench. Like there's so many other movements that you can get big pecs with, without hitting

the bench press or without squatting. Like there's so many movements you can get big pecs with without hitting the bench press or without squatting like there's so many movements you can do and like i still like my barbell movements but a lot of those movements like you don't have to do to achieve a certain result and i love that kind of message that he was putting forward this doesn't mean that i think people shouldn't squat or deadlift or whatever i still like deadlifting i'm still deadlift, but maybe not have that be your whole workout. People really struggle with even getting rid of the exercise for like a week or two.

Sometimes someone's like, my shoulder's really bugging me, you know, and it's bothering me on bench. And I'll say, well, get rid of the bench for a month. You know, and they're like, what? They get so fearful of it. And you're not going to get weaker're not going to get weaker yeah um i think the attachment to power lifting i think you think you

have to do the exercise all the time i remember when the squat everyday thing kind of came around and when people were talking about just squatting really often their training some people were like if i don't squat i really lose my rhythm with the weight and i'm like i was thinking like this is absurd what are you talking about like you could, you should be able to go like at least a month without losing any, I mean, you should kind of still know how to do it. So I never really understood what the hell they were talking about when people would talk in those terms, but like, yeah, if your knees killing you and, and you don't, you know, or your back and you don't feel like squatting or deadlifting, like, I don't think there's any reason to feel bad about it.

I think it's actually great opportunity to explore some other things. Like Doug said, put your toe in there and kind of check it out and start to learn things that could be possibly more valuable for you in the long run. I think one reason why people do tons of like, you know, a lot of the big compound movements is because those are the movements that you're much it's much easier to see progressive overload in action uh and what i mean is this it's like when you're doing a bicep curl uh you'll get strong initially but then there's going to be a point that you hit where it's just like getting five pounds on that bicep curl is very difficult to do like going from 50 to 55 to 60

just like there is a stopping point for the amount of load you're going to be able to do but when you're doing like a big compound movement where all these other muscle groups are involved i know that i know what doug's saying where all these other muscle groups are involved but the ability to see strength progress with that over time is very rewarding, right? So I, and I mean, again, it's like the, he was mentioning that there are more optimal ways to build muscle, but by having that progressive overload, these muscles, all of these muscle groups are continuously getting stronger to move that big load. So inherently you will get bigger and you will get stronger.

He's just mentioning that there are much better ways to target those muscles specifically and maybe do this faster if your goal is just purely your physique and getting these muscle groups bigger. I like what he said about the kind of lower percentage. He's like, you know, a squat is hitting a lower percentage of your legs and it's hitting a larger percent or larger percentage of most of your body. And so therefore to get a similar result on your quads in particular, you would have to use a lot more weight. And it's kind of nice that those exercises lend themselves to allow you to use weight. So they work out kind of, they work out pretty well,

but at the same time, you know, are you running yourself ragged with those weights? Like, are you finding that you squat on Monday and, you know, Wednesday, Thursday, you're still dragging around from crap. There's, there's maybe not a lot of good reasons to continue to still lift those weights like that. And for me, you know, I want to just, I'm working on wanting to feel better all the time. And more recently I started running. Um, I feel an all the time and more recently i started running um i'm feeling awesome with that and the type of lifting like i dragged a sled the other day and i did uh 10 plates i did forward and backwards and i'd like worked up progressively pause did you did you say that correctly 10 plates on your sled drag on my sled dragon walking okay it was it was uh it felt

well anyway my point is is like, it didn't take anything to recover from it. Like I thought I would wake up today and be like, oh, I felt fine. You know, I have been doing the backward sled drags and stuff for, you know, a month or so, two months, however long it's been. So I conditioned myself to it a bit, but had I squatted, you know, real heavy or something like that, I would be like, oh my God, like everything would be all tight. And I would maybe not be that motivated to,

and we hear people all the time talk about motivation and they're like, how do you stay motivated? Well, one way to stay motivated is not trained like an asshole. If you pour so much in sometimes there's nothing left for the next day. It's's it's going to be very difficult to recover so uh i i really liked a lot of what he said i think i think sometimes people can the pendulum can swing uh you know really far in the other direction and someone could say i'm never touching another barbell you know ever again and i think for a lot of us that takes out too much fun like like there is fun things have to hit they have to hit some like pleasure sensors otherwise i mean we know how to eat yeah you know we know what we're supposed to

eat to be really really lean but we don't want to only eat that all the time because it just gets to be fucking boring yeah same thing with your training like you want to just switch shit up every once in a while i'm laughing at that statement because this we're going to come back to what we were talking about. But when I was a trainer at 24 Hour Fitness, there's this trainer there. His name was, people might know him. There was a trainer. There was a trainer. He was this older, older, older black gentleman. And I was dating someone at the time and he was like, how can you do that? It's like, don't you want to have some pizza? You know, you're eating a burger every single day.

Don't you ever want some pizza or some ice cream? Like switch it up. I was like, bro, come on, man. So that was just, uh,

that was funny. Anyway, I understand. Yeah, you understand. Um, but yeah, no,

like the, and this is the thing that we, we talked about too a lot. It's like, you know, if you are doing, if you are doing compound movements, be smart about it.

You know, it's like, it's not necessary to load up as much weight as possible and mess yourself up for days or injure yourself. You got to be smart with what you're doing in the gym. But maybe like, yeah, a lot of people are like, oh yeah, after deadlift day, I'm fried for a few days. Are you, I think he hit on something super important. Are you a competing power lifter? This is the big thing. Are you? Maybe if you're not, maybe you don't have to be going towards those strength goals as intensely as

competing powerlifters. It's not your sport. Yeah, you hit it perfect on both accounts because you brought it up about what is the goal here. Doug's talking about he doesn't even touch a barbell. because you brought it up about like, you know, kind of like what is the goal here? You know, Doug's talking about he doesn't even touch a barbell. So his goal is not to have the best deadlift in the gym. So somebody might be hearing this and thinking like, oh, that guy's full of shit or whatever he's talking about. It's not going to work for me.

It's like, but what is that goal? And if it is that deadlift, maybe mixing some of this while still maintaining some of your important compound movements and some of those accessories. Yeah. And if you're not competing, then exactly what Encima says. Don't fucking try to be the coolest lifter on Instagram and wonder why. Unless you enjoy, like, this is the thing. I think, like, there is an enjoyment thing here. Interest level, like we talk about all the time. If you're interested in it, you might want to let it rip here and there.

But I think we've said this many times on the show. What I would love to see people do is I would love for people to train their deadlift. They're training it here and there, maybe not super obsessed with it and getting carried away. They're still doing other exercises. They're practicing just being healthy in general. getting carried away. They're still doing other exercises. They're practicing just being healthy in general. And then, you know, one day they, they do a 365 pound deadlift and they're like, oh wow, like that actually felt really easy. I think I'm going to go up to 385. They go up to 385, they nail that. And they're like, shit, I'm, I'm close to four plates. Like this is super

exciting. I'm going to, I'm going to let it go for today. What I'd like to see people do is that you are kind of almost like unaware that you're even that strong. And you're probably more capable of like 425, 435, or maybe even beyond that. So when you go and attempt the 405 for one out of nowhere, it's probably, you know, it should be the case that it's very uncommon for you to go for a single rep max. Therefore, you don't really have any idea of how much stronger and how much better you got. And then when you go for it, you're like, holy shit. Or maybe, you know, to kind of touch upon that same scenario, maybe you do hit 365. It feels really easy. And then you're like, I think for the next three weeks or so, I'm going to push it a little bit and start to lift a little heavier so I can concentrate, so I can knock that 405 out, something like that. I think that's the way that your strength training

should look. Otherwise, most of the time you should be, you know, working on your technique, trying to get as much muscle stimulation as you can and not really being overly concerned about how much weight is on the bar. And then on occasion, just because it's fun, let her rip and go for it. By the way, peeps, a new video on the super training And then on occasion, just because it's fun, let her rip and go for it. By the way, peeps, a new video on the super training channel on mind muscle connection. I asked Doug about that because I was just really curious in his thoughts.

And when he mentioned the peak contraction thing, that's a big thing that I really like, like, like people to kind of pay attention to doing. Like if you're doing a lat movement or something, hold the, hold the muscle that you're at the peak contraction where you you actually feel that because that'll actually allow you to be more aware of what's actually going on. And one cool thing that he, he mentioned that we, we both

talked about the other day is like when you're doing a, a pull movement, a lot of people have their elbow come past. Right. But when we were talking about it, elbow doesn't come past. This is where you have peak contraction of that muscle group here. It's like it, there's nothing there. Right. Right. So yeah, I dug this one a lot.

I dug this podcast with Doug. Doug, take us on out of here, Andrew. I will. Thank you everybody for checking out today's episode. Uh, please share it with somebody that absolutely needs to hear it.

Somebody's struggling in the gym, trying to get jacked and they can't figure out why the deadlift's not helping their lats i don't know whatever it may be uh so please share this with them we would sincerely appreciate it and shout out to everybody that has been reviewing the podcast on itunes and simo put out the bat signal and you guys responded quickly we appreciate that if you haven't done so please do so i just hit up our itunes and find us on there if you're not already subscribed on there uh and drop us a rating and a review go and type something out there that actually like stands out a little bit better uh please make sure you find the podcast

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You're helping us move on up to the east side and see my in yang on instagram and youtube and tiktok and see me yin yang on mark strength is never weakness weakness never strength catch you guys later bye