Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 536 - Bro Science Vs Real Science For Muscle Growth Dr. Brad Schoenfeld

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

Dr. Brad Schoenfeld is one of the world’s top researchers and educators on building muscle and fat loss. He is the author of “The MAX Muscle Plan” as well as “Science and Development of Muscle Hypertrophy”. He is also an associate professor at Lehman College where he is the graduate director of the Human Performance & Fitness Program. Get Dr. Shoenfeld's book, "The M.A.X. Muscle Plan" here: https://amzn.to/3gtr3AY 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! ➢Eat Rite Foods: http://eatritefoods.com/ Use ode "POWERPROJECT25" for 25% off your first order, then code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off every order after! ➢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 ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Piedmontese Beef. And Seema, let's tell the people about how we've been getting a little bit leaner lately. You know, it's really, really awesome because with Piedmontese, because there are a lot of their cuts of steak that don't have a crazy amount of fat. They do have some cuts with good amount of fat, right? If you're doing keto or whatever, but if you're trying to diet, they have a lot of great cuts of steaks that are pretty lean. So you can eat multiple steaks, right? And get really full, get a lot of protein, but not to get a crazy amount of fat. So if you're actually trying to diet and get leaner, which has been happening to me,

I've been getting leaner without really trying just because I've been intaking a crazy amount of fat because all I eat is Piedmontese. Yeah. Same here, dude. It's been awesome because, you know, I'll come home and, you know, like, like most people I'll be like pretty, you know, not run down, but you know, enjoy it. And I've, I have been really enjoying it. I've been having a lot of flat iron steaks, a lot of Bovets. And I look in the mirror and I'm like, all right, like what's going on here? Like, you know, I, I've noticed that there's been a change in my physique and it's like, wow, like, okay. Like the scale is not like going

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And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Highly recommend it. Head over there right now. Maybe he's born with it. Maybe it's Piedmontese. What up, Power Project crew? This is Josh Settledge, aka SettleGate, here to introduce you to our next guest, Dr. Brad Schoenfeld. Dr. Brad Schoenfeld is one of the world's top research and educators on building muscle and fat loss. He is the author of The Max Muscle Plan, as well as Science and Development of Muscle Hypergrophy. He is an associate professor at Lehman College, where he is the graduate director of the Human Performance and Fitness Program.

In 2011, he was named Personal trainer of the year by the National Strength and Conditioning Association and is an elite level lifetime drug-free bodybuilder. Dr. Schoenfeld is also the founder of the site lookgreatnaked.com. On his site, he posts many articles and discussions about the secrets of maximizing muscle growth, as well as whether or not you need to train to failure. But that is a different story because you guys probably don't want to learn about building more muscle and getting more jacked. So please enjoy this conversation with our guest, Dr. Brad Schoenfeld. All right, kind of in conjunction with today's guests, we were just kind of conversing about, you know, how important the science is. And then we kind of got on the topic of hard gainer.

And I sometimes wonder hard gainer or somebody saying that they're fat and their whole family's fat. You know, I, I, I have a hard time losing fat when somebody says these things. How much truth is there to it? I'm sure there's some truth to it because we see genetic differences in people they're they're wide right the genetic differences in people and then we also hear people saying hard gainer but i wonder uh how much is that environment so andrew if you can kind of continue on some of what you're saying there yeah no i was just i mean everyone if you follow the podcast then you've

heard some of my story but like yeah i i was training for about bless you about five or six years before i ever met mark and came to st and you know like in my i've heard people say like oh i've been in the gym for x amount of year like two three years and like they look amazing i was far from it and then i would look at my brother who was an athlete he never stopped sports all throughout his entire you know like uh first through 12th grade um after he kind of pursued a little bit but he was always moving always doing something i don't remember diet wise because i didn't care anything about it so he was maybe moving a little bit more through some exercise and maybe you were yeah i was just moving less yeah yeah after like on a previous podcast like after like sixth grade

it was this i played basketball in junior high for a little bit but that was it you know because like i said everyone got way too big and strong and it just i you know i cowered away from it instead of like you know embracing it So he definitely moved a lot more. So he developed a lot of muscle way quicker than I ever did. I would say my dad was kind of the same as well. But long explanation short, I would have considered myself a hard gainer, and I have for a very long time. myself a hard gainer and I have for a very long time. And it seems like at like, again, like maybe year six, seven of training, when I got here, when I started doing it a little bit better, I started seeing a lot more progress, especially like the last two years and then even more so

like this year. So I don't know if I can say that I'm a hard gainer today. I don't know if it's like, there's a certain breaking point when you're having a hard time gaining and you just identify as a hard gainer. And then one day you wake up and it's like, oh wait, I'm actually seeing a lot of progress. Am I now a hard gainer or, you know, you know what I mean? Like, can I still say that and like claim that so I can have an excuse to be small or am I now just a regular dude just trying to make gains? And some of us might be hard gainers in some different ways. And something else that we do know that is fairly factual is that when you do stuff when you're young,

you seem to adapt to it much easier, such as learning a second language or even a third language. You do that stuff when you're really young. It doesn't even seem like you have to try. It just kind of is implemented into your life. And next thing you know, you know multiple languages. It's hard to teach someone that's already kind of been down a certain path and already has a certain biology to kind of say, hey, okay, now we have to signal the body in a completely different way.

And this is what we're doing. Whereas somebody that's exercising all the time, the body's getting the message every day, we're going to take in energy. Every time you take in glucose, we're going to burn a lot of it up. We're going to utilize these calories every day. Instead of the reverse of that, it's like, hey, we're going to be sedentary. We're going to not really move around much. And your body doesn't have the signals that it needs.

And also some people can end up being in some positions where they're not healthy. So I think there's a big factor of people training when they're young or starting some nutrition when they're young is a huge factor. I think for me, you know, I squatted, you know, a thousand pounds, you know, and I did so routinely week in and week out and I didn't have any leg muscles to be found anywhere hardly. I mean, there was some thickness to them, but they didn't, and they weren't even really that big. Um, I would say the difference between my legs when I squatted 700 versus my legs when I squatted 900 really wasn't that much different. I weighed more. So the hard gainer thing is really interesting. My point there being, I didn't have a centralized focus on trying to hypertrophy my legs. I wasn't really paying attention to them because it didn't seem problematic. I was getting stronger. That was

my goal. My goal was to get stronger. My goal was not to necessarily have bigger quads. But whenever we had bodybuilders come in, I'd always be jelly because I'd be like, damn, how do they get their legs to look so good? I want to, you know, I'm lifting really heavy. So different people respond to different things. Maybe one person lifting heavy would be the very stimulus they need to make the legs grow. And maybe somebody else would need something different you know what um an interesting thing i didn't watch the video you know johnny candido i do yeah he uh had a video recently and his thumbnail of the video was

him he's smaller now physically you can tell like he had a picture from a few years ago where he looks jacked big arms big shoulders strong dude yeah and but now he's smaller but he's stronger and my assumption is that he's been moving less overall training volume for a lot of maybe his accessories and he's been really focusing on his strength and his compounds and yeah he may have lost a little bit of muscular size but he gained muscular strength so there's something there because you'll see a lot of power lifters that they don't look massive they're in shape they don't look massive. They're in shape.

They don't look massive, but they're very, very strong individuals. Right. I mean, I noticed this kind of the opposite way because a majority of my training before I started power lifting, I was doing a lot of hypertrophy work. And I was able to get pretty big and pretty sizable. But when I added in focus strength work with that hypertrophy work that I was doing, it's like my body changed and got to a different level because of the additional strength that I was able to gain. So I think that there's a really good way to marry these two to help you. Because you notice the same thing. You start focusing on maybe, I don't know, what exactly changed in your training that got your legs bigger?

Was it more volume for bodybuilding work? What was it? So I think that this is interesting, too. it more volume for bodybuilding work? What was it? So I think that this is interesting too. I think maybe different body parts respond different ways. And even deeper than that, maybe even different body parts respond differently for different people. Maybe student A has more X fibers in his legs and maybe student B has more X fibers in his upper body. Just a random example.

X fibers don't even exist. I'm just making shit up. But so to answer the question more precisely, something that I've noticed in powerlifting in general and not always, not always, but it's really, really rare to see someone that benches big weights that's not fairly jacked. Yeah. Now we do see deadlifters that sometimes aren't jacked at all. Great leverages. Sometimes they don't really look like much. They have great leverages.

Their central nervous system is cranked way up. But for some reason, the intersection of your central nervous system and your muscular system, for them, for that particular lift and that particular event, it didn't need to come together quite as much as for the person benching. Now, the person benching could be lacking some legs, but they usually have some traps. You know, 500-pound bencher, you know, show me 500-pound benchers that don't have 18-inch arms. You know, show me 500-pound benchers that don't have a pretty thick neck, that don't have pretty good traps. I mean, they might exist.

I'm not saying they don't exist at all, but normally they're fairly jacked. So for me specifically, I had to take a lot of the stuff that I was doing for upper body and I was just like, Oh, I just need to do that for my lower body because I've been doing this my entire life, but I didn't really even notice it because my squats were, you know, one to five reps. My good mornings were one to five reps. Leg curls, yeah, I would throw them in here and there.

Dragging the sled, I'd throw that in here and there. But it was like heavy, you know, heavy deadlifts, heavy squats, heavy good mornings, heavy stiff leg deads. How many sets, how many reps? Versus, you know, uh, twice a week, bench pressing one time a week, I'd work up to like a max effort weight. Then I'd have a secondary barbell movement where I would do three or four sets of five to eight reps. After that, I would

do dumbbell work. I would do flat, I would do incline, and then I would usually finish with something to kind of make sure that the chest is, you know, staying together, I guess you'd say. And I would do flies or cable crossovers or something like that. And I would do a little bit of bodybuilding type stuff. I would do some arms and some shoulders. And if I didn't get all that stuff done, I would even come back to the gym on another day and do a full upper body accessory day. Meanwhile, with the legs, I was training a little bit like an idiot because I wasn't really paying attention. But the main reason that I wasn't doing that is because I was really taxed. It's painful. Yeah, I was really taxed. It's painful. And I didn't really

truly always know what I was doing. I was just, it was working, right? Or at least I thought it was working, but could have it have worked way better if I would have practiced lunges, if I would have knew about ass to grass lunges, and if I would have known about even something like some squats on the slant board? As silly as that might seem, what if I worked my way into being able to do four sets of 25 reps with a kettlebell in my hand with moderate rest? What would that conditioning, what would that extra leg size do for me? Maybe I would have squatted 1,100 pounds. I don't know.

But yeah, my point there just being that I needed to kind of shift and train my lower body the same way I was training my upper body, which was with a lot more volume. Yeah, and it's like even without realizing it, you were avoiding leg volume because leg volume is painful.

It hurts. High volume leg work. Jesus Christ. This is going to be great. I think we're good to go. The hypertrophy lords are here now and we can get this going on. We got you. What's going on, man?

Yes. Yeah. Great to have you on the show today. We're super hyped up and super excited. And Seema over here is a big fan, so I'm going to let him kick things off because he's fired up. I'm super excited. I can't wait

for you to poke holes in a lot of the stuff that we may think and do. But I think the most fun part about training for most people, especially in this day and age, when you see a lot of young guys train is going to failure a lot. People love it. People like the way it feels. And what I want to ask you is this number one, how actually useful is it for a person that's really trying to gain as much size as possible through their career? How useful is going to failure? And is there a way that we can structure it in a smart way into our training so that we're not just shooting ourselves in the foot trying to progress by using failure too much?

That's a great question. And when we look at research, so we actually recently did a meta-analysis on this topic and basically did not find much. It showed that as long as you're training fairly hard, stopping within a rep or two short of failure, repetition reserve of let's say two or so, even that was difficult to quantify. There didn't seem to be much difference. However, there's a lot of nuances. We did show that, or the literature did show that in trained subjects, there seemed to be more of a benefit. So the more training experience you have, but there really wasn't much, there haven't been many studies carried out in trained subjects. So I can tell you, I can give you my perspective on it. So that's kind of what the literature says, but we always need to look past the literature. You have to look at the strength of what the evidence shows and then kind of use our own expertise to draw conclusions.

The people that just try to say, well, let's just go to the literature for everything are really missing the boat. You know, in an applied science like exercise, in particular exercise nutrition, it's essential to understand the limitations of research and use our practical expertise. So number one, really every study on the topic has looked at all sets to failure versus no sets to failure. That's simply not the way we need to do it in the gym. I mean, as you guys know, you don't necessarily have to take every set to failure versus no sets to failure. So that starts to bring up, well, if you're going to go to failure, how many sets might you need to use? And again, this just hasn't been studied. My own personal belief is that in novice subjects and those who are intermediate, I would say, you know, with six months or so, maybe a year of training fairly consistently, it's not going to make much difference. If you're stopping a couple of reps short of failure on every set, it really, you'll make the vast majority

of gains, if not all of them. I do think that, although again, hard to discern from the literature, think that, although again, hard to discern from the literature, that as you start getting closer to your genetic ceiling, there is a more of a need to take your body to challenge it beyond its present capacity in a manner that would really require some use of failure training. And while there's no set, obviously set way to go about it, my general default is, let's say, the last set of an exercise. And I do think there is some benefit, just personal anecdote, in periodizing this. So maybe having short blocks of training where you're going to failure more often, and then pull back where you, for a period of time, don't even go to failure at all. So this is where the nuances come in, and you have to really know your trainee, if you will. But again, this is where you're not

going to get answers from the literature because there's too many variables, too many ways you can manipulate that variable. So along with that, I guess still in line with failure, you have individuals that do a lot like forced reps. So you have your training partner helping you out with that and assisted reps. Um, does this come in line as being beneficial at all? Or is it just a training technique that might feel really good? Or what, what are your thoughts on that? Cause I don't think studies have been done on that necessarily, right? There've been a few, but just, it's certainly not enough where we can draw strong and good and strong conclusions from it. Again, that's where there's a gray area. And I

would say, could there be a benefit to occasionally using that? Yes. I do think that you have to understand your, your trainee. Look, I've consulted with many of the top bodybuilders and their ability to withstand fatigue varies. These are top levels greatly. I mean, I know I've, I've worked recently with a top bodybuilder who's, this is pro card is IFBB pro classic. I mean, and it was, he's approaching 50 years old and he could just 50 years old and he can crush it with the weights and never, I mean, force reps on multiple sets and just keep popping back. Whereas other people literally get crushed if you just do this occasionally. So I think there's a high amount of inter-individual variability that always needs to be taken into account. And I would also point out that to me, it's best to err on the side of caution in these types of things, to experiment and do it in a very cautious manner. Because once you overdo it, once you go over the top, it's hard to reverse. Whereas not pushing someone enough, you're still going to make really good gains where if you end up pushing them too much and they devolve into an overtraining state, trying to reverse that course requires a lot of

undoing. Yeah. I find the whole topic really fascinating because, you know, uh, you know, reps one, two, three, and four of set one, uh, you know, what are their purpose? Like they feel easy, especially, you know, given something that you're doing like a set of 20 on. But now if we try to do, you know, four sets of 20,

now we end up with multiple repetitions that get to be challenging. And I think that we want them to be challenging, but we don't want them to be so challenging that our form and technique breaks down. And this is where something like a forced rep could be beneficial where the other person does. The person lifting doesn't have to put themselves into a compromising position. This could be something where like rest pause or something like these, you know, these other ways of training where you just rest a bit and then you finish out your set. where you just rest a bit and then you finish out your set.

You could fatigue yourself more by having less rest in between the sets to get those last couple reps to fatigue you even greater. But in the end, it kind of appears to me that strength training and even hypertrophy training kind of fall in this category of we have to use like small words in order to get to the bigger words. And the bigger words are where we're going to learn the more complex things. But without the shorter words to get there, we can't learn about like quantum mechanics without is and the then.

Those words being there in front of it for us to kind of make sense of the whole sentence and then therefore make sense of the whole paragraph and then to kind of digest and take everything in and have it actually mean something to our body where it's given our body a meaningful message that says, yo, I think you should grow. I think that's a great analogy. Yeah. And by the way, one of the points I want to make and just kind of summing this up is that going to failure too often can have negative effects on your volume load. Because when you let's say you're doing four sets, if you're crushing it on your first set, you're going to have to if you're going to have to take a huge rest interval after that set, let's say five minutes, or you're going to have to drop the weight. I do studies like this all the time. And you ultimately have to drop the load. If you're going to have, let's say, a two-minute rest interval, you cannot use the same load and get the same number of reps. Either you're going to use the same load and get fewer reps, or you have to drop the load. So again, leaving something in the tank for your future sets can maintain that volume load.

And there is something to be said just for the stimulation, the mechanical tension on the muscle without going to failure still is signaling the cells to adapt. So again, this is something I think over the next decade or so, I would hope, I know that might sound like a long time, but in the overall concept of research, it really isn't, that we're going to be able to piece these things together to a much greater extent and to have a real greater fundamental understanding of the relationship between fatigue and stimulus. In your time studying all this, has there been anything that you learned or has it been kind of a futile attempt? Because I think we've known for a really long time that when you train heavy, you need a little bit longer rest. We've had the Weider principles around forever. They seem fairly effective.

Three sets of 10. Do a couple of exercises per body part. Maybe work a body part twice a week. Has there been some things that you found in your research where you're like, ah, okay, I think we had this wrong for a long time and now I can start to apply some of this? Absolutely. I would say that half of the things that I used to believe in some of the old, I was a gym bro from the nineties, you know, going up with the Weider mags. And I'll give you a few. Number one was go heavier, go home was the rule. There was that hypertrophy range. Our own research from our lab, as well as

that of others have, I mean, really conclusively shown that you can grow muscle over a very wide spectrum of loading ranges up to around 40 reps or so, at least, where assuming you take it close to fatigue, as long as you're not just lifting, let's say 40 reps where you could have gotten 60, where those last repetitions are getting difficult, a very wide spectrum of loading ranges can produce muscle growth. There was the, and this was actually somewhat shown through research, that short rest periods jack up your acute hormonal response, your testosterone, your growth hormone levels. So it was trained with very short rest, your 60 seconds rest intervals. That actually has been debunked.

And the reason, kind of going back to the failure, is that it compromises volume load. of going back to the failure is that it compromises volume load. At least that seems to be the effect or the reason that if you're going to do, let's say, 60 second rest intervals versus two or three minutes, you're going to have to reduce the load substantially more on your successive sets. I was a big believer that, well, and this one actually is still kind of going back and forth, but that bro splits were the be all end all. And certainly I think there's good evidence now that you can, frequency is not a modulator, that specific modulator that you can actually use total body workouts just as effectively as splits, depending on the volume that you're going to have. I think where frequency starts to come into play is when you're doing the higher volume routines and you want to split up. Really, it starts to become necessary to split up that volume over multiple sessions during

a week if you're doing more than, let's say, 10 sets per muscle or so. I mean, I can go on. There's been so many things in the field that research really has helped to clarify. What do you think might be wrong with go heavy or go home? Or even these like, you've mentioned rep ranges, eight to 12, and then you said 40 reps. You know, if somebody does three sets of 10,

they're doing like 30 reps. They do four sets of 10, they're doing 40 repetitions. Go heavy or go home is like an interpretation. so even if you did do 20 reps of something it might be heavy ish uh for those 20 reps like don't we need something that challenges us like still don't we end up going back to bro science in the end or what what have you found that's distinctly different well so again now there's caveats to this, of course. So number one, for strength, clearly you're going to need to lift heavier. If you want to maximize your strength, we're talking hypertrophy now.

So you do 40 reps versus doing three RMs, you're going to get a lot stronger, at least in the lifts that you're doing, you know, in the dynamic lifts. If you start, actually, it's been kind of interesting that when we use a neutral testing device, like an isokinetic dynamometer, isometric dynamometry, which tests, let's say a specific muscle strength, there still seems to be some advantage, but it gets much less in terms of the loading ranges. But that begs the question, is there, I do believe that there's benefits to having cycles where you train for strength, which will then help to drive hypertrophy. So I'm not saying that you should always be training light. And by the way, there might be fiber type specific

differences where you're getting more type one fibers with the lighter loads. This is on a whole muscle level, we've shown this, but it might be that your type one fibers are more responsive to lighter loads or type two heavy loads. So there are nuances that potentially might come about. Do we go back to bro science? I don't necessarily think that's the case. I think, look, I'm a big, I'm still a bro at heart. And I and I'm not disparaging that there are certainly, there is validity to a lot of what we've learned through trial and error, through bro science. But I do think that we also need to move forward with science. And I think what this has taught us is that, number one, there's a wide spectrum of loading

ranges that can be used. It doesn't mean that you should be using one or the other, but also it opens up possibilities if you have, let's say you're training around an injury, or you have, as you get older, to be an older lifter. I guess all of them, maybe not you, but as I'm getting older, you might have some arthritis or other issues that warrant training somewhat lighter. And you can certainly gain muscle across a wide spectrum of loading ranges and do it similarly to using heavier loads.

And if you're asking why that might be the case, there's several potential explanatory reasons. I think the most logical is that mechanical tension is what is the primary driver of hypertrophy, meaning that it's the force that's acting on the muscle through the load that you're using, through the resistance. And when you're doing the, let's say you're doing a 20 RM, the first few reps of the 20 RM are really light. But as you're getting to your 14th rep, your 15th rep, your 16th rep, that in effect is creating a lot more mechanical tension because it's bringing you closer to a fatigue standpoint. So ultimately you are creating that mechanical tension. It's taking you longer to get there, but you're still creating that mechanical tension on the muscle.

there, but you're still creating that mechanical tension on the muscle. Anyway, that is, I think, a logical explanatory reason. So I know we're discussing with muscle growth in mind, and you had just mentioned that these short rest periods aren't effective because it might be pulling away from that next set. But does your heart rate play a role in any of this because i know like when we've done like some full body workouts we're kind of more you know like i said just doing a full body workout for just general um like gpp but like does the heart rate come into play when it comes to muscle growth when it comes to muscle i'm not sure comes to muscle, I'm not sure I understand the question. When you say what, does the heart rate come into play as far as what?

Yeah. Is it going to take away as well? Because what we're saying is that if we do a short rest period, it's basically going to pull from that next set as opposed to getting a full rest and then being able to hit the next set in full as opposed to taking a short break. So we're going to, like I said, pull away from that workout. So does the heart rate come into play at all? Because I've heard that keeping your heart rate at a certain level will help burn more calories and that sort of thing. But is that also going to take away from the muscle growth? Yeah. First of all, the heart rate burning calories, there's a lot. We can unpack that, but that's a slippery slope. As far as does it have effects on muscle growth, I think the issue would be, if I'm understanding your question properly,

that there's an oxygen debt, that anything that is going to, let's say, take away your wind, where you're going to be able to train effectively is going to have negative effects on performance, which in effect will have negative effects on your hypertrophy. So yes, if you are, let's say doing 20 rep squats and you're really winded, and then you try to get back after 60 seconds, it's going to have some effect. You're not going to be able to use the same load to get the same number of reps. But it all comes back to that same premise that it's affecting your volume load. Anything that ultimately affects your volume load, the ability to perform the same amount of work

in subsequent sets will potentially have negative effects on hypertrophy. And we can change the game up a little bit if we're going from our squats to maybe leg curls or something like that, right? And having maybe 90 seconds rest in between each, we can get kind of more work done maybe in a condensed period of time and maybe pack volume in in a short period of time,

but still in a reasonable way that's not compromising our oxygen and not compromising the load that we'll be able to use. Does that sound about right? Yeah, so it's actually another really interesting area of research, agonist-antagonist supersets. We don't have enough of it, but our group just carried out a study. Didn't seem to show that it had any benefit, but it didn't compromise growth. So yeah, it actually is a way to get greater training density in, to your point, and thus accomplish more in less time without compromising results.

Could there be potential benefits? We still need to explore it to a greater extent, but yeah, it gets you out of the gym quicker and that is a potential benefit to many people. And just to push on what we're talking about here, if some of you guys don't understand, an agonist or antagonist is maybe doing something like a push in a pool um and doing them back to back while taking minimal rest could save you some time in the gym yeah and or things that have nothing to do with each other like curls and uh standing calf races or something yeah right that and agonist antagonist would be like biceps triceps right but you could do completely

different muscle groups as well exactly you could do biceps and calves. That wouldn't be agonist antagonist, but that would be another way you could do, let's say an upper body than a lower body exercise and get a similar effect where you're not assuming that it's local issues. So if you're a compromise, let's say through a squat, that's going to take away your wind completely. And that, that can affect other exercise regardless of what you're doing to a lesser extent if you're doing let's say a curl but um but if you're doing let's say a calf raise and you're getting that burn for the lactic acid building up in your in your calves and then do a biceps obviously it's not going to have that effect in your bicep so if you're going to do an other calf exercise you'd have to wait to clear

the lactate out uh the lactic acid and anyway that would be a recommendation yeah there's there's a crazy amount of stuff that so many things i have listed down that i want to talk about um but you brought you brought something up um and we had doug brignoli i don't know do you know doug brignoli is know him well i i don't know him personally but we've communicated through uh online and really good guy and a guy i respect yeah we had him on our podcast who's great i have his book andrew has his book um he's big on the biomechanics of movement and utilizing movements that are going to allow you to have as much attention on the specific muscle group you're trying to work doug hates squats. He's like, you don't need a squat.

It's useless for the legs. He's a big fan of the sissy squat and more isolated movements that will give you as much attention on that specific muscle group, correct? But I'm curious if you can kind of help some of our audience and even ourselves weed through this because utilizing some of those movements in a workout it's great um but i still like to squat a lot of people still like to squat for their legs a lot of people have built a great set of legs using the squat and using movements that would not be as potentially ideal as like for example doug also has the example of the decline dumbbell

um bench press as getting the most activation of the pecs because of the range that you're in it's going to give you the most tension on the pecs versus obviously something like a barbell bench press right for hypertrophy so with that being said for someone who's trying to build the most muscle possible and let's say that they like doing some of these compound movements which doug would not be a fan of how can they weed through that and still get as much from everything as they can from these different movements because it's like people feel like they need to be in one side or the other like if you're squatting for leg growth that's not that's stupid you shouldn't be doing that then there's some people who are like no you have to squat for leg growth

how should people be parsing this information i can just give you my perspective on it. And I don't necessarily agree if that is what Doug said. I don't necessarily agree with that. I'm a firm believer that you can use a vast, a wide array of exercise that almost all exercises have utility. I do think that, and this isn't even that I think, I know, it's certainly been shown that some people have a, are better suited to certain exercises than others. There's certain genetic factors, anthropometric, et cetera, that will make you more or less predisposed to getting benefit from a certain exercise. And that's an individual that can, no one can ever tell you or no one can ever give a cookie

cutter prescription for what that is. But I am a firm believer that there is no exercise you have to do. This is where my opinion comes in. I don't believe there's any exercise that you have to do. And for the vast majority, 98% of exercise, don't believe there's any bad, quote unquote, bad exercises. I think for given people, you need to, especially in bodybuilding, if you're looking from a hypertrophy standpoint, you need to look at your structure.

You need to look at your genetic weak points and your strong points and then use exercises that will best target them based on your own genetics. So I think there's wide arrays of choices. I think that using on a general cookie cutter type of guidelines, using combinations of different modalities, so machines, free weights, cables are beneficial, single joint, multi joint. The more you can mix these types of exercises, the advantages of one is the disadvantages of the other. And then thus by combining them, you're going to get a lot of stabilizer muscles that you just are not going to be able to hypertrophy with using single joint movement. So it would be very difficult and also, if nothing else, extremely time inefficient to try to build your body with just single

joint movement. So that's my perspective on it. Does it appear to be true that we need to have changes in order for our body to continue to change and grow? And I know some people are, you know, they're like, oh, the muscle confusion stuff is BS or whatever. But I'm not really talking about, you know, changing the exercises real drastically or anything like that. But there's changes in like tempo, you know, to the exercise, changes in rest periods, changes into frequency. Like there's a lot of different changes that we can make. So what have you seen in your research? Does it appear that over a long period of time that we need to make some changes? And if so, how often should we be looking into making changes?

That's a great question. So here's what I would say. If you want to look at it just from a fundamental standpoint, the body adapts to a stimulus because of survival. Our bodies don't care about looking jacked in a tank top or a woman in a bikini. Damn it. All the body cares about is survival. And that is a stimulus. If you keep giving the body the same stimulus,

it doesn't have any impetus to adapt. So just based on that concept, it just logically follows that some type of change over time is necessary. And yes, so has there been any concrete research that's been done that gives us insights. Not really. I do think we actually carried out a study on the quote unquote muscle confusion concept, where basically an app just gave random workouts in each day, and it actually had somewhat negative effects. But that's not smart training. So I wouldn't take out of that that variety isn't good. And I would say variety is good. The question then becomes, how often should you change? There's no cookie cutter answers to that. I do think there, from an exercise standpoint, my own personal belief is that we should

maintain certain core exercises, particularly those that are more difficult to complete. exercises, particularly those that are more difficult to complete, that have more complex movement patterns. So if you're going to do a squat, you'd want to keep that in your routine. If you're not going to do a squat, then that's fine. But things like squats and rows and presses, there's technique aspects that if you do them once every three months, you're just not going to be efficient in that movement pattern. It's going to hinder your ability to get the most out of that exercise. So you'd want to keep that in your routine, you know, at least on a weekly basis, if not biweekly basis over time. Whereas if you're doing the machine, I could get on a chest press,

hammer strength chest press and not do it for three months and do the exact same form perfectly as I did three months ago. So I think there is where you can start to achieve novel stimuli through exercise selection. When it comes to other variables, again, like you're talking tempo, I'm not huge on manipulating tempo. I'm not saying there might not be something to that, but I'm more a believer in mind-muscle connection and letting that dictate tempo and just really getting a feel for the movement rather than trying to say, I'm going to do two seconds up versus four seconds up and then controlling the negative. But other things like

volume, I believe in periodizing. Here's another important concept that I think often goes unspoken, that the body is extremely resilient for short periods of time. We can adapt and thrive when we are hit with a very potent stressor over short periods. But if you continue that stressor over longer periods of time, ultimately we break down. that stressor over longer periods of time, ultimately we break down. So if you're, let's say, going through a bad relationship with your girlfriend and you're fighting all the time, you can adapt, you could thrive for that for short periods of time. If that happens over six months, you're not going to be doing too well in general. And exercise is a stressor. So that's obviously somewhat of an out-of-context example, but a stress is a stress when it comes down to it. They're all stressors. And really, if we're looking at, let's say, volume, which is a stressor, if you're going to

do higher volumes, if you're going to do high volumes over months at a time, ultimately, it's going to cause you to break down. Everyone's going to have different abilities to recuperate from that volume, but it just makes logical sense that having some type of periodized strategy where you're going from somewhat lower volume to somewhat higher volume and you ultimately peak at a given volume, then come back to a lower volume to reset or resensitize your body just makes logical sense. Can you define volume and intensity for us in case the listeners are like, man, he keeps mentioning that word. I got no idea what's going on. Yeah. So volume is several ways we can look at volume, but volume generally is sets per muscle

and usually per week. So let's say you're going to do 10 sets of your chest exercise per week. Your volume would be 10 sets. If you're going to do 20 sets, it would be 20 sets per week. There's other ways to look at volume. We can look at repetition volume. So if you're doing sets of 20 versus sets of 10, your repetition volume is going to be higher for the sets of 20 than it is for 10. You can also look at volume load, which I mentioned before, where we take the load into play, where you have to then multiply the repetitions by the amount of load that you're using. And that's the function of the work that you're carrying out. From a bodybuilding standpoint, the most researched and generally the way that the bros have been looking at it over the years

has been through sets per muscle per week. So that's kind of my default in that context. And intensity is how hard you're training. You can look at intensity of load, like percentage of one RM, but when I'm referring to intensity, I'm referring to the intensity of load. So how hard you're physically working out. Brad, can you help us kind of parse out this idea of progression and volume? Because we know that volume is going to be a big driver for hypertrophy over years. Having progressive volume over years is going to allow you to grow. But it's not like your volume is going to continue to go higher and higher and higher. You're not going to be bicep curling 100 pounds in 10 years because you bicep curl 30 pounds now.

Right. So with that being said, when, when lifters are looking to increase their volume, increase their volume, increase their volume, when do they know, or like what's a way for them to figure out that, okay, I don't need to be working with this crazy high training volume. Like some people can actually probably make the potential same amount of progress with less overall training volume. How do you, how do you structure that? Cause we always keep hearing volume, volume, volume, but it can't just be throw more volume at the problem. Well, again, so it's an excellent point. And, uh, volume is not a static number though. So people who are looking at volume, but you can't, like you're saying,

if you're just continually increasing volume, you're going to be overtrained very rapidly. And that's why I said, we should be looking at volume more contextually over time so that it's cyclical, that we don't necessarily look at it, that you're doing, all right, 10 sets, now I have to increase it to 15, now I go to 20.

That can be done for short blocks, but then you need to recycle and resensitize. And here's the other thing that I think needs to be put into context, that when we look at volume, you don't necessarily have to do the same volume for every muscle group. First of all, different muscles are going to get ancillary work. Your biceps, for instance, are getting tons of extra work with the lat pulldowns, rows, et cetera. Your triceps with chest exercises, shoulder presses, et cetera. So do they necessarily need to have the same volume?

No. And my other, I think this is where I've come a lot. And I think research has helped to clarify this over time is that we can also look at it for a given muscle group that really looking at total volume for your whole body. Let's say you're going to do a hundred sets per week of all the muscles in your body. You don't have to do partition it evenly across your muscles, but you can say, my chest is lagging. I'm going to use some of that volume, more of that volume for my chest and thus decrease. Let's say your back is a strong point. I don't need to do as many sets thus for my back. And that way, again, I think there's no exact formula that can be, if you're asking, everyone wants that 10 commandments of volume

or of hypertrophy. And that it's just not possible because people respond differently. Everyone responds differently. You have to be, I can give guidelines on these types of things. I can give my own insights as to what I've seen in the field and certainly what we've shown through research. But ultimately when I work, when I consult with high level athletes, it's always a feeling out process. Everyone ultimately becomes their own N equals one experiment based upon what we know through the research and based on our own personal expertise.

Okay. So, okay. So I, first off, there's this conundrum that's going on and we've talked about this a lot on the podcast, right? I, a few years ago when it comes to the evidence-based crowd, I paid so much attention to guys like yourself. I still do, by the way, like yourself, Lane Norton, um, Lyle McDonald, uh, Eric Helms, Trexler, all those guys. I pay attention to everything. Right. And I found myself in a place where like, I was like, well, the research says this, so I have to do this. And I was like, so focused on that, that I was like, if somebody said something else, I'd be like, but the research says, right. Even though it could be contrary to what the research says, it could work for you. Right.

So I started doing all these like off kilter things to see how they how they work for me. And some things work pretty well and some things didn't. So can I feel like a lot of people on the evidence based side of things get pissed off and people on the bro science side of things because they're like, oh, these bros and they're dogmatic, whatever. Right. But then they don't even realize how dogmatic they're being by only doing what the research says. So for the individual who's now just trying

to pay attention to this information, they're like, I want to just get big and strong. And they want to pay attention to evidence-based people. They're now just kind of putting themselves in a box of research and not allowing themselves to try anything on the outside so how would you being a former bro and still a bro but also an amazing researcher how should people like look at this stuff how should people tell that line because you don't just ignore the research but you can't live by it right so if you are just basing your uh opinions on research you are not an evidence-based practitioner. An evidence-based practice in its purest form has three pillars. It has what we know,

the synthesizing, the total body of research, so the research-based evidence. Then you have to combine your own personal expertise, and then you have to take into account the needs and abilities of the individual. So I've said this over and over. I post this and I will sing it until the cows come home, that research never will tell you what to do. Research gives you general guidelines. It basically gets you into the ballpark as to mapping out a plan for how you might start out going about setting out prescription. Then you have to take your own personal expertise into account,

and you have to then take the needs and abilities of the individual. And there's so many gaps in the literature. When we look at research, especially applied research like exercise, Research, especially applied research like exercise, most of it has so many gaps, so many holes, that if you're just thinking the research, you're basing certain premises on really flimsy evidence, if that's going to be your goal. Where we might have one or two studies on a given topic, and some of them might not even be very well carried out. They might have used, let's say, the bod pod. They might have done biceps curls and used bod pod for lean muscle mass. And you're looking at your total muscle mass where you can't really draw conclusions from something like that. So again, if you don't really understand what the research is telling you, and that is a big problem that we have today. People call themselves evidence-based practitioners,

but they don't even understand really how to scrutinize the body of research. They don't, they're abstract researchers. Basically, they look at an abstract, they look at the statistical significance and they think they understand. They think they have the conclusion of what the study showed when you really have to delve into these studies. So in my long-winded way, I would just really implore that the bro science and research really should combine because the best studies come from the field. I think one of the reasons, a primary reason that I've come, my research has become

quite popular is that I was a personal trainer for many years before I became a researcher. And I'm a kid in the candy store because I'm researching everything. All the questions that I had as a personal trainer, I'm now able to research. And I think other fitness professionals appreciate the practicality, what's called the ecological validity of the studies that I carry out, because they have real practical value. They're intended to answer specific questions that are, I think, very pertinent to hypertrophy. Yeah, I think someone like Ronnie Coleman, when people talk about evidence-based stuff, I'm thinking picture this picture, Ronnie Coleman in his prime sitting in court. I don't think he would get thrown, thrown in jail for a lack of evidence on his ability to create hypertrophy.

Does evidence-based science, does it, does it allow room for you to look into, you know, bodybuilders and power lifters, just like like, I guess, what people have been doing versus just the research? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, we've carried out, when I say we, in the field, they've carried out surveys of bodybuilders to get, that's, I think, a very important component is to understand what bodybuilders are doing and have done. So you carry out surveys to understand the practices of bodybuilders. We do case studies. I, our group just carried out a case study in a naughty bodybuilder. It was a 12 month really in depth study where we, we looked at everything. We had every meal that he

ate. We, you know, we got food diaries of every meal that he ate. We had him come in every month. So we did testing for muscle mass. We did testing for force production, for body composition, body fat, et cetera, just so many different studies. And you get a real sense as to how on an individual level, what happens during the course of a bulking and then a cutting cycle for bodybuilders. So yeah, I think it's really important to further our understanding of not only what bodybuilders do, but how to research it. We need to really have a great understanding of what's being done in the field. Has there been any research on, you know, kind of going back to the volume and intensity, if it differs for different body types,

I mean, I don't even know if body types are actually a real thing, like the ectomorph, mesomorph, that sort of thing. Or even male versus female. Yeah, yeah. Is there any research showing that that intensity and volume should change depending on the person's body type?

No, body type is not really pinned. Now, it's not been well studied, but from the studies we have, and I just think from what we know, it's not really a great gauge. Now, someone who's a real ectomorph generally is going to tend to be a hard gainer and they're going to need to eat more. And someone who's an endomorph is going to have issues in terms of storing body fat. So, I mean, we can kind of just get general inferences as far as their fat mass goes, but from a hypertrophy standpoint, it does not seem to have much utility. Trying to assess just from looking at someone, their ability to gain mass generally doesn't work out well. And from everything I've heard, Frank Zane, when he first started out training was a twig and didn't do too bad as a bodybuilder. So,

you know, you, um, earlier, you kind of, uh, alluded to when Mark was talking about using a, maybe tempo as something to make training a little bit harder.

You mentioned that you kind of like to lean towards an individual's mind muscle connection in terms of the way that they're like a shoulder press, instead of doing two down, two up, you just feel and make sure that you're actually working that area. Well, right. Nowadays, when you hear people talk about the mind muscle connection, there are some people out there who are like, Oh, that's BS. It doesn't exist. How, how are people, how can people think about the mind muscle connection? connection and how can you is there some people like Andrew you mentioned there are certain exercises you do in the gym and you're like I can't feel my lat or I can't feel my rear delt or I can't feel this always the rear delt always

through here tell right so this this idea of my muscle connection because over years of training now I can feel a lot of different muscle groups that I can feel working that I didn't used to feel in the past. How can somebody improve that over time and get the most out of it? What are ways that you can even manipulate that to get the most out of it? Yeah. Another great question. And by the way, I'll give an anecdote. You guys probably know Dave Tate is. So yeah, Dave's a really good dude. And I remember talking to him at a conference and he confided in me that he never really was able to grow until he was able to get a real good mind.

He always trained like a power lifter. Obviously, he was one of the top power lifters in the world. And when he switched over and did a bodybuilding, he said really when he was able to grow was when he was able to connect with his muscles and take out that power lift of mine instead of just getting the weight up and getting the mind muscle connection. But we carried out a study on this and actually showed greater biceps growth using a mind muscle versus not. And it was actually quite substantial. It was double the growth.

Interestingly, in the legs, we didn't show any differences. It was double the growth. Interestingly, in the legs, we didn't show any differences. It was kind of interesting. But our reason, interestingly, what we surmised, and it's not what you can't really tell, but what we surmised might be a reason for this is that our subjects weren't able to connect as well with the legs, mind-muscle connection with the legs as they're on the biceps. it's much easier to get a mind muscle feel. But to say, how can you improve that? It just comes down, again, from my own perspective, I had trouble with certain muscles and it just is practice. I know that might sound cliched, but you just have to get in the gym and you have to keep saying, think of the muscle, think of the muscle,

think of the muscle, you know, and just try to visualize it. You might want to palpate it, or let's say if it's in an area, you can have someone else palpate it. Let's say your pec muscle, you know, you can have your partner just put his or her hand on your chest and say, feel that muscle so that it gives you a greater sense of where the muscle is and how to feel it. But it does take practice. And I'm now able to connect really with all the muscles in my body. Some of them took a lot longer than others. Do you think if we're prescribing to having a couple reps in reserve on most sets and if we're trying to have good form and technique, that kind of on a scale of 1 to 10, that it's reasonable? form and technique that kind of on a scale of one to 10, that it's reasonable that we're just,

when we go to the gym, we're not really trying to put in a level 10 in terms of intensity. We don't really need to smash ourselves. The effort's still there. You still care about what you're doing. You're still very into what you're doing. But in your own professional opinion, do you feel like it's probably more important to put up sixes and sevens every single day so you can come back days later, keep your frequency high, keep the reps where they are, continue to make progress? Do you think if we're trying to strive for those tens all the time that maybe we're just kind of just, you know, we're beating the crap out of ourselves? Maybe it might feel good. It might be fun to do here and there, but maybe it's a little overkill. Yeah. Again, this is where I don't think we should be looking at it in binary terms, either crushing it or not crushing it, but there's room for both

where you can have certain cycles where you're training harder and certain cycles where your intensity of effort is lower. And even just, let's say you might, during certain cycles, you might be taking only the single joint exercises that like a squat's going to crush you more than a leg extension will. So this is where, again, it's not a, and this is one of the issues with research is usually research is looking at this or that when in practice, it doesn't have to be this or that when in practice it doesn't have to be this or that so uh i think we need to when we take the research into practice and just start thinking practically we need to open our minds up and our concepts up to changing things uh not looking at it binary and changing things over time this is what actually made i i want to know if you can help, help me kind of figure out what might be going on here or what, what has gone on here.

From like, from the ages of 13, I think I did, I started 5-3-1 when I was like 19 years old. So 13 to 19 or 13 to around 20, I was doing primarily bodybuilding style hypertrophy work because I just wanted to get bigger. And that was my style of training. style hypertrophy work because I just wanted to get bigger. And that was my style of training. When I started, when I brought straight training into the mix and I started getting stronger in terms of my deadlift, my squat and my bench, it's like my physique just got something different. And I just like that strength that I was able to gain, it played a role in me getting stronger in a lot of my accessory movements, but it's like something changed and it was very noticeable for me. And I've also noticed it's not just with myself, but many other athletes that don't like many of the athletes that don't take foreign enhancing drugs that do

focus on strength and hypertrophy. There seems to be like that they're able to gain something there that they weren't getting from just bodybuilding volume, volume, volume style training. What's going on there? Because like some people are like, yeah, I don't need to worry about gaining strength. I don't need to be worrying about compound movements, et cetera. I can do all of this through bodybuilding work. Are they missing out on something by not trying to get stronger with some of these big compounds by not trying to move more intense loads?

I believe so. So again, if you're asking, is there any research on this? Not really. There was a recent study that did lend some suggestion that it is beneficial, but it does have a good logical basis. And again, this is where if the research doesn't show something, there's a lot of stuff that haven't even been studied. We need to then take, you default to your logical reasoning. And so that's kind of the next level in your hierarchy. And what I would say is that we know mechanical tension, as I mentioned earlier, is the primary driver of hypertrophy. So creating tension, stress within a muscle

and the more stress you can create, conceivably, the greater your hypertrophic response can be. you can create, conceivably, the greater your hypertrophic response can be. If you then get stronger in a given lift, that can translate into greater loads that you're using, let's say, at moderate loads or even lighter loads, and thus you're creating more mechanical tension at a given repetition range. So let's say if you were using 100-pound dumbbells for your chest presses let's say if you were using a hundred pound dumbbells for your chest presses at 10 reps, you might be able to use 110 pounds by getting stronger in your, let's say doing sets of three or five and thus create greater mechanical tension at that given loading zone and thus enhance your hypertrophic response. So if you're asking again, has that been shown conclusively in research? No, that really hasn't been studied. But there's a very good logical

basis for it. And that's why we really should be studying these types of things. There was a recent study that showed preceding a hypertrophy routine with a three-week strength cycle had greater effects on hypertrophy than just doing eight weeks of hypertrophy. It appears that more advanced lifters can maybe perhaps get more out of less, but is that true? Again, that's certainly not something that we've studied, but yeah, I would say that, look, when you're more advanced, one of the issues, you can say that more advanced lifters need to be more cautious in their use of intensities and even volume to some extent, because they're using heavier, as you get more advanced, you're going to be using heavier loads, which is going to crush you more when you're taking it to higher levels of fatigue, higher levels of failure.

So, yeah, I think they can get more out of less if that was the question in the sense that they're already, number one, they generally are going to have greater ability to connect with their muscles. Their response in that respect can be heightened through their ability to connect. So I think a multitude of factors does enhance that. I think maybe in a general form of reasoning, sometimes when you see like a pro athlete perform a drill, they could do a drill at 60 percent, but because their footwork is so immaculate and because it looks so perfect, they're probably moving just as fast as somebody that is trying to work harder that's not advanced. And what I've seen from just my own just meathead view of things is under normal circumstances, it does appear that

someone can go in the gym, that bench is 405 and they can use 225. And the way that they move the weight is more advanced. They have a lot more practice and they can therefore squeeze that 225 flex to 225, maybe turn 225 into 295. I don't know how they're doing it or what, or what they're doing exactly. Maybe it's a mind muscle connection, uh, but maybe get more out of you know the lifter that's right behind them who maxes with you know 275 uh is kind of struggling with the 225 not able to move it in the same way and therefore they're getting a totally different stimulus than the person that can lift more yeah i'd agree and i want to because it's funny because literally when mark asked that first question i was like i, I was, I was literally

just thinking about this. I'm curious because when we were talking about that, my muscle connection thing, um, like I can, when I go into the gym, I'm surprised sometimes these days in these past few years, because like I can do certain movements, like a tricep push down or a rear adult type movement with light loads. And I, the stimulus I can feel from that. It's like, um, i feel like i can get a lot from it whereas in the past i wouldn't be able to do that and when i look at people are

gonna people are gonna roast me for this but when you look at somebody like mike o'hearn and sometimes you see the light loads that this man uses on specific movements but he really focuses on these small little inches like just small muscle groups that people don't think about. And when we trained with him before, like we were doing really weird movements, but he's like, focus right here, focus right here.

He'd be tapping focus right here. And you'd feel just this wild shit like with such light load. That's why I'm, I'm just wondering, you know, I know there's been no research on it, but what, what,

what can you help us maybe get an understanding of when you do get more advanced and you are using these light loads, but you're getting a lot out of it, right? What is that necessarily? So that again, I would go back to the mind muscle connection. If you can create more tension in the muscle that you're looking to hypertrophy, you're going to conceivably, you're getting greater results in that muscle, greater hypertrophy. So let's say you're performing a bench press, like a typical power lift, it does, you're generating a lot of momentum in that lift, you're not focusing, the muscles themselves are not necessarily maximizing their force output, the tension that is being activated within the muscle. You're dissipating a lot of the force throughout the momentum and other factors.

Whereas if you are really focusing, let's say, on that chest press where you're squeezing the muscle as you're coming up, you're creating more mechanical tension within that muscle. So like you said, and we haven't studied this, those who are looking for the research on it are going to be disappointed. Because first of all, it's really difficult to study these types of things. So you'd have to hook someone up to know what they're actually thinking. You'd have to hook their brain up to a MRI or some type of EEG apparatus to, I guess, get brainwaves and try to ascertain what they're thinking. By the way, that's a limitation in the study we did. Although we found greater, we told one group, focus on the muscle. We told the other group, get the weight up. And every time they would do a rep, we'd say, focus on the muscle, focus on the muscle. And the other group would say, get the weight up. And every time they would do a rep, we'd say, focus on the muscle, focus on the muscle.

And the other group would say, get the weight up, get the weight up. But do we know that they actually were doing that? Could they have been thinking about, could the group that was supposed to focus on their muscle have been thinking about what they were having for dinner that night? You know, potentially they were. So it, again, has a gap in the literature. But yeah, I, again, really am a big believer that if you can create force within a muscle, maximize, if you're thinking about a muscle and creating force

within that muscle, you're going to maximize the tension within that muscle and thus maximize the hypertrophy within the muscle. Somebody who works on maximizing the muscle and maximizing that tension, can this be hurtful to somebody that is trying to be in a sport like MMA or jujitsu? We've heard people say when someone's muscle-bound that they're going to maybe run out of oxygen more. Have you seen anything debunk any of this? Or what's your own personal opinion on you know somebody who that trains uh with strength and does some bodybuilding type stuff do you think that's harmful in any way to maybe what they're going to be able to perform in a sport or do you think it's mainly helpful uh you're saying to having muscle yeah to having more having more muscle but like kind of like

that training that mind muscle connection i'm wondering like if you train to flex that hard all the time and this is the way that you always train yourself maybe when you get into other situations maybe it's harder for you to calm down i don't know uh well not not necessarily that but yes uh what i would say is is that if you're training for a sport you should if you're training for hypertrophy now the hypertrophy phase of a sports for of an athlete's routine can use a mind muscle connection. But if you're training specifically to get better at a given sport, let's say MMA, you'd want to be training explosively. And you actually would be looking to have the opposite of a mind muscle connection, which is an external focus of attention. And

that's been studied extensively, by the way, that a mind-muscle connection actually has negative effects on sport performance. And it's, I think, almost incontrovertible at this point. So yeah, if you're looking, let's say if you're MMA, if you're a basketball player, you want to be thinking explosive training. You want to be thinking about the outcome of that lift that you're doing or the drill that you're doing. So you want to be thinking about, let's say, if you're doing a jump squat, you want to be

thinking about hitting your head through the ceiling, not about pushing through your legs, having your quads contract. Why do you think that is? Because the outcome is what's important there. And there's something called the constrained action hypothesis, where when you're thinking about the muscle, it is hampering your ability to achieve that explosive contraction where you are, you're actually having the negative effect.

You're taking your, the intent of the movement out of the equation, putting a governor on it. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes me really curious because so,

so you mentioned different phases. So, so I wonder like for an athlete, like a jujitsu athlete or a basketball player, because when you do your sport, like let's actually use a basketball player because I think this is a better example. as big as possible. But if that basketball player had a phase of training or part of their training was structured so that they could legitimately build bigger muscle, but then they had other aspects of their training that were spent trying to now use all of this newfound muscle to go through whatever explosive type jumping, like side to side movement, use that to express. Wouldn't that be a better outcome than always focusing on training purely for explosion because if you're a little bit bigger you then have more capacity for more explosive ability right or am i wrong exactly and that's why i said we can't think of these things in binary terms so the majority of training if you're looking for a sport specific outcome you want to focus on what your the outcome

of the sport is but if that sport requires a hypertrophy aspect, let's say you're a power forward in basketball, you want to have some hypertrophy. So parts of the training cycle can be devoted to mind muscle, have a mind muscle connection to maximize the hypertrophic response. It is not just doing some mind muscle training is not going to obliterate your gains that you achieve through the other training yeah so yeah it's uh it's a uh you're walking fine lines in certain contexts but that's where your expertise needs to come in no study is going to tell you this and even no body of

research is going to tell you this what can we get away with what's the least amount of work that we can do to get the best results what have you seen like in terms of let's just say strength? You know, when it comes to strength, what's the lowest percentage available to most of us? I realize it depends on the person. What's the lowest percentage that you've kind of seen result in strength where you're like, oh, that's a weird study. I didn't really think that 70% the guy would get stronger with that weight. 70% of what? Maybe their one rep max. Oh, well, if you're saying get stronger, we've had research showing that at 30% 1RM, well-trained, but trained subjects, trained individuals, college-age guys will get stronger. They just don't get as strong. You still will get stronger. They just don't get as strong. You still will get stronger. Now, if you're a power lifter, if you're a Mark Bell, I mean, training 30% 1RM at your level is not going to do that. So if you're getting really

close to your genetic ceiling, that's not the case. But for your average guys in the gym that have been training a few years and that have decent muscularity, you can still get strong or stronger with very low percentages, relatively very low percentages, doing 30 reps. But if you're doing 10 reps or if you're doing five reps, it's going to get you better results than 10. And if you're doing 10, it's going to get you better results than 30. But I mean, we see, you know, significant, good, significant strength increases, even at very low percentages of one RM. What's the laziest we can be for hypertrophy? Like how long, you know, you know, work out three times a week? Like what have you seen that's obviously if it's someone that's completely

untrained, but what are some examples maybe that you've seen? So I will say that you'll get the majority of your gains from doing single set training. If you're just the average Joe or Jane who wants to gain some muscle, you'll certainly get more than 50% of your gains just from doing a two or three day a week single set close to failure routine. If you want to maximize your genetic potential, you're going to have to train more. And then it comes down to individual variability that there are some people that thrive on fairly low volumes on, you know, just a few sets per week and others need substantial, much, much more. So, and even

with that, like I said before it also then you have to look at certain muscle groups. If we're looking to bring up a lagging muscle group, often that's going to require a greater volume for that given muscle group. So I do think it's important to say, and this is why to me, getting people to train is the most important thing that the vast majority of the population doesn't lift. So it doesn't, it takes very little. I mean, literally an hour a week, you can make really good gains in the gym from an hour a week of training. So one set, but maybe like one or two warmups just to kind of get you in a position to where you can handle a decent amount of weight so that you can cause a

response correct and you know what i think the warm-up start when you're talking about let's say 10 to 15 rep sets uh we've actually done studies and you know especially if it's if you're going to do squats then you probably warm up is going to be beneficial but on a machine or a lat pull down don't need much don't really don't even need a warmup. Okay. I'm okay. There's something that we were talking about earlier when we were talking about just increasing volume forever. You can't do that.

You have to have phases where you desensitize and then you can then start making progress again. First off, my question is for some people, what does desensitizing look like? Does that look like, you know, four weeks of just lower volume training, easy work? But then also, I wonder about this. You know those situations where someone just totally stops training? Let's say they have an injury for a year. They lose a lot of muscle.

Then they get back in the gym and they're able to gain a majority of that muscle back in a few months. It's pretty crazy. But now their volume capacity is not near what they had a year prior like they can't handle those training volumes that they did last year or two years ago when they were training but they're almost as big or just as big as they were does that mean now could an individual potentially start making progress again with potentially half the training volume that they used to train with like you see where i'm going with here like could an advanced trainee that lost a lot of muscle that gained it back now start making even more

muscular progress and get bigger with way less training volume than they did in the past yeah so there's a couple things to unpack there number one uh we have what's called a muscle has memory quote-unquote memory and uh i don't know how in depth you want to get with this, but there are, we have what's called satellite cells, which are muscle stem cells. And satellite cells basically are the muscles way of helping to regenerate or to enhance your capacity for. or to enhance your capacity for, and again, I don't want to get too far into the weeds with science here, but nuclei, which are within the muscles, we have nuclei, which create, they transcribe proteins. So without getting too much into this, the more nuclei you have, So without getting too much into this, the more nuclei you have, the greater your capacity for producing proteins. And when you gain nuclei from satellite cells, so satellite cells donate nuclei to the muscles.

Those nuclei stay with you. It's been shown over time. Generally, you're not going to lose nuclei even over the course of a year or more. And thus your capacity to gain back that muscle that you previously had is substantially greater than when you first started because you have these nuclei now that are facilitating that capacity. The other thing that I think goes to what you're saying, which I think is where the confusion comes in to some extent, but you can maintain muscle on much, much lower volumes than you can. Once you gain muscle, it is really easy to maintain it, particularly for young people. It gets somewhat harder as people get older.

You need to bump up the volume somewhat. But I mean, there's been studies showing that one ninth of the volume, that cutting volume to one ninth, actually just did her post on this recently. So it was like they cut it from 27 sets to three sets per week. And they were able to maintain, for the most part, the muscle that they gained over the first 12 weeks of the study, just doing three sets. Now, they weren't gaining more. So that really, when we're looking to desensitize, resensitize,

that comes into your capacity or your desire to continue to grow muscle. If you're happy with what you have, and you just want to gain pain, if you will, If you're happy with what you have and you just want to gain pain, if you will, you can do that with very little time spent in the gym. What do you think is harder, training, research, and science, or nutrition, research, and science? Nutrition, because it's just very difficult to control. So with training, I mean, I would say they're somewhat interactive because your nutrition is going to affect your training, which is always an issue. But if you're doing pure nutrition research, it's so hard to know what people are really doing once they're at, like with training, we control everything that these subjects do in the gym. So we have basically

their personal training. So every rep of every set is personally supervised with nutrition that we're giving them food diaries to understand, unless you're going to take them into a metabolic ward, uh, which, you know, good luck with that. If you know, with the budgets, unless you have a, uh, you know, six figure budget to work with, you're not getting a metabolic ward study done. Uh, you're relying on what people are, their honesty in terms of what they're eating. And we know through research that that actually is, their honesty is very poor for the most part, that people tend to underestimate what they are actually eating.

Yeah, it seems very difficult to have well-conducted studies and then to have them done for a certain duration seems to be a little bit tough. And then even when they're done for 12 weeks or three months, four months, the study is not necessarily over because like, I don't know what happens to that guy when they go back into doing whatever it is they're doing. So maybe, you know, during the testing, it was kind of shown to be ineffective that they switched to this one rep max style of training, but maybe when they came out of it, maybe eight weeks later, maybe they were stronger than ever. It's hard to know, right? It's a great point. And that is again, limitations with research.

So there's certain things you can glean from research, certain things you can glean more than others. So some studies will leave things to be desired. Every study is going to have limitations. Unless you understand what those limitations are, you're not going to be able to draw proper inferences from those studies. What have you seen from some things that are really, really high reps, like 50 reps, 100 reps? some things that are like really, really high reps, like 50 reps, 100 reps. Do these things, do they help with tendon strength or do they help repair injuries or anything like that? What are some things you may have seen with that? I haven't really seen much with that, but we did one study where we looked at 80% 1RM, 60% 1RM, 40% 1RM,rm and 20 1rm so the subjects so it was an interesting design but they were given four different uh intensities and we saw roughly similar growth between 40

to 80 1rm once we brought it down to 20 1rm which was like 70 reps uh they got half the uh hyper they still did get some hypertrophy these were untrained subjects uh but they got half the, uh, hyper, they still did get some hypertrophy, but these were untrained subjects. Uh, but they were much less, it was roughly half the hypertrophy of the 40 plus, uh, percent one RM group. When people do pay attention to studies, um, what do you think is the strength of actually seeing these studies with untrained individuals? Because sometimes when people think like when people in fitness and, and guys that train think about that, they're like, well, you know, they're untrained or whatever. They look at that as a limitation. Number one, like what kind of limitations and strengths does that show? And then also, are most studies done on fairly untrained individuals and

there are much fewer done on individuals who are actually in the gym doing the thing? much fewer done on individuals who are actually in the gym doing the thing? Yeah. So again, good questions. To take your first question first, untrained studies can be, in certain instances, they will be a substantial limitation. It doesn't mean they have no, I mean, people are people, so you're going to certainly be able to draw something from it. But as you start getting more untrained to trying to draw inferences in what a bodybuilder is going to respond, the generalizability of that study is going to be much less, obviously. But it really depends upon what you're studying. There's certain things that would be very pertinent that really would not conceivably have differences in an untrained individual versus a

trained individual. I don't see why a, let's say a mind muscle connect, if you're going to be, assuming you're able to have the mind muscle connection, I don't know why a untrained subject would see less growth from, you know, why that would be a confounding variable in a study like that. So it depends upon what you're looking at. But what we do find often is that it ultimately doesn't end up mattering. These studies on untrained subjects, originally all studies with light loads were on untrained subjects. And I had actually, interestingly, when I came into the field,

one of my hobby horses was to start looking at research and training subjects. So, yes, certainly when I came into the field, and this is going back now almost a decade, virtually all the vast majority of studies were in untrained subjects just because they're easier to get. But I made it a point to say, look, I care about what I'm a trained individual. I'm a former bodybuilder. I want to see what happens in trained subjects and made that my hobby was. So I remember a colleague of mine carried out this study that was getting a lot of press in untrained subjects and he used 30% 1RM and showed that it got the same hypertrophy as 80% 1RM. And I remember saying to him, it was Stuart Phillips, a really great researcher out of Canada. I remember saying to him, Stu, you're doing this in untrained subjects. They get jacked from cardio.

And you just did leg extensions. And I was kind of proposing the study. I said, I'm going to do this in trained subject. You're going to see they need to use heavier loads. I did that study and lo and behold, zero difference. Multiple studies have been carried out since then, trained subjects, no difference. So can it be a variable that you need to take into account? Yes. But does that necessarily mean there's no relevance to it? No. And I do think that it is necessary to carry out studies in trained subjects. And that's why the vast majority of studies that my lab has carried out has been in trained subjects. If at all possible, I tend to gravitate towards that. Do you think there's anything to nutrient timing?

You know, we see a lot of, there is studies that are done where, you know, subjects have, you know, a post-workout shake and things like that, but do you really think it matters much if the individual is already consuming reasonable amounts of nutrients throughout the day? Do you think this is really resulting in anything much greater, much having a really big impact of a post-workout shake as opposed to just having carbohydrates and protein throughout the day? The short answer is no. So would I say there's zero benefit to it? No. And this is why, again, it starts with the nuances.

So we've actually done quite a bit of research in this area, our group. And by the way, that's another area where you say is research shown. I was a big believer in nutrient timing. I wrote a book called The Max Muscle Plan almost 10 years ago now, and I championed the importance of nutrient timing in that book, and I've kind of almost done a 180, certainly like a 100 at least in terms of my opinion on the topic. But will it make a big difference? I'd say the compelling evidence shows no. Might it make some difference? No, provided that you are taking in sufficient daily protein. So if you're getting roughly 1.7 grams per kilogram or more, 2.0 grams per kilogram per

body weight of protein per day, it's going to make little difference. If you're a bodybuilder, do I recommend it? Yes, because can I conclusively say there's no difference? No, there did seem to be potentially a slight benefit to it. And if you're a bodybuilder, that could be the difference between winning and losing a competition. you're a bodybuilder, that could be the difference between winning and losing a competition. So I do think that if you're a bodybuilder, it makes sense to consume some protein fairly quickly, as quickly as possible after a workout. You don't have to slam a shake the second you put down your last set. But I do think within a half hour, an hour is just a good rule of thumb.

It covers your bases. Something that I noticed, and it could just be because there's flavor to it. So like having aminos during a workout, it seemed to give me a little extra push in a workout. And I've done, you know, where I've had aminos and carbohydrates, it certainly is not any highly conducted study, but especially I've kind of noticed when it's hotter out, it's probably due mainly to the hydration, but I've noticed that of noticed when it's hotter out, it's probably due mainly to the hydration, but I've noticed that I've been able to work out a little bit harder, kind of push through that secondary part of your workout where sometimes otherwise you're like, it's time for me

to go home. Yeah. A colleague of mine, John Meadows, you probably know, I know he's a champion, the intra workout nutrition, and we don't have a lot of research on that. I will say I'm skeptical of it, but could it be a placebo effect? Yes. And if that placebo effect gets you a better workout, go for it. People say that, well, it's placebo effect. If the placebo effect does get you better results, then I think it's positive. I don't think anyone can argue with that. I'm also curious about this because I'm going to make this quick. About two and a half, three years ago, I started utilizing some fasting. And initially, I just wanted to be able to focus better during the day on the work I was doing. But I did notice it gave me better

food habits. So it gave me better control over, uh, over myself when I got hungry. I no longer felt like an emotional response. I didn't have to eat. I was just like, ah, I can go without eating for a little bit. I'll eat my calories at the end of the day. Cool. Great. Now I'm curious too, because you, you, you have this back and forth where we know that, you know, for ideal muscle protein synthesis, you do want to have more even protein feedings during your day but if we compare somebody and let's not do the the bodybuilder who's going to be stepping on stage who needs as much muscle as possible let's just look like someone who's trying to get jacked gains muscle get big for that individual um is the difference substantial if for example they need to eat 200

grams of protein and instead of having four even feedings during the day, they choose to have two 100-gram feedings at some point in the day, still getting the same amount of protein. Will the difference in their muscle gain be that substantial where they definitely, absolutely, you need to have your four even 50-gram protein feedings? What is your thoughts on that? How can people parse through that? Short answer is no. We do have some quite good research on intermittent fasting. What is your thoughts on that? How can people parse through that? a 16-hour fast versus an even, fairly even distribution over the day. Now, again, so I would say with good confidence, with good confidence that it's not going to make much difference. Might it make some difference if you're a bodybuilder, a small difference?

I still think there is that. Logically, it makes sense because if you're catabolic for long periods of time, you're not growing. So it just makes logical sense. And again, sometimes these studies are difficult to carry out. We talked before about nutrition. Are these people sneaking in meals when they're not supposed to? We just don't know these things. But I would say with good confidence that it's not going to make a big difference. And that any difference it does make probably only matters to a bodybuilder or someone who is really concerned about maximizing their genetic muscular potential.

Let's take it one step farther. How about an individual who's like, I want to eat one massive meal a day and I want to have my whole protein feeding in that meal and I want to have all my calories in that meal. How about there? Because again, you have some people on that side and then you have the people on the other side saying, you can't absorb all that protein in one meal. What, what, what, what are we thinking there? So there was a study showing, uh, it looked at a four 20, uh, fast where you're got all the food within four hours and then 20 hours fast. And that actually did show a negative effect on muscle mass. Now, again, for the average person, is it going to matter? That's where it comes down to who you are and

what you're... So when we look at research, they'll look at statistical significance and other factors, but the practical meaningfulness is always going to be specific to the individual. Can you still gain muscle on that? Yes. Will it compromise it to the extent that someone like yourself might not be happy? Potentially. Okay. Good to know. What about carbs? I mean, we've heard the traditional bro science is like you need carbs in your diet if you want muscle gain. But we have animals like these two over here who don't consume a lot of carbs, and I would swap my body with either one of them. So what is your take on carbohydrates? Yeah, this is something that's actually surprised me somewhat as well,

that our group has done now several studies on ketogenic diets as well as others. And I would have thought it would have had a more detrimental effect on muscle mass, and it really has not. So here's what I'd say. If you want to maximize muscle growth, again, a ketogenic diet is not generally going to be ideal for that purpose. But you certainly don't need a lot of carbs. Having, I would say, very moderate carb intake, let's say 30% of total carbs is probably sufficient to maximize what you need. There probably is some degree of inter-individual variability here as well. But glycogen depletion doesn't seem to be all that even over higher volume training. So I do think that for the most part, a ketogenic diet

can be a very viable option for gaining muscle. I think if you're looking to bulk, it's not your best bet, but certainly in your cuts, ketogenic diets can be just as effective as higher carb diets for maintaining muscle mass. What do you see from things like drop sets? Like a drop set seems in a lot of ways to make a lot of sense because you can get more intensity from those first couple reps. We talked earlier about the first couple reps being fairly easy. Now, if we're doing a set of 15 we can have all 15 reps have a decent amount of uh intensity to it what what's what's the research show uh when it comes to drop sets yeah we've carried out research on this as well as others um they don't

well i'll give you a caveat so i we do have a actually a uh a study in review i'll give you a scoop on this. We have a study on drop sets in review where we showed that the drop sets actually increase regional hypertrophy to a greater extent of the quads. But with that said, there's been other studies that have been carried out. And I would say that certainly not going to be a huge difference, but here's what it does do. On a volume-equated basis, it allows you to get out of the gym quicker. So you could do one drop set and substitute, let's say, three regular sets and get out of the gym in half the time. So I think it is more of an

efficiency technique than a hypertrophy, than something that's going to get you more jacked. Although this is the other caveat, which again is where gaps in research exist. What we don't technique than a hypertrophy than something that's going to get you more jack. Although this is the other caveat, which again is where gaps in research exist. What we don't really have is whether you might be able to use it as a way to get more volume in. Let's say instead of doing five sets, you'll do three sets. And then the last set of drop set that hasn't been studied. Basically what we've looked at to this point is three sets versus one drop set. But it hasn't been looked at as a way to get extra volume just doing three sets or three sets with an extra drop set. Does that get you more results because of the added volume?

What about like pre-fatigue on something similar like a superset? You do a different exercise, but for the same muscle group, you go from doing bicep curls with a curl bar to doing hammer curls with dumbbells. Again, that has not been shown. These are all things that I grew up with and used extensively in my previous life, but research really hasn't shown that they mean much in terms of adding to growth. They don't seem to be detrimental. that they mean much in terms of adding to growth. They don't seem to be detrimental. They, again, pre-fatigue because you can cut rest intervals with that. They don't seem to have negative effects on growth, which from an efficiency standpoint, from a training density standpoint, can help, but does not seem to have much of a positive impact on muscle growth.

But again, just to reiterate what you said in the beginning, if we are negatively impacting the weight that we use and we're, uh, because we're cutting the, uh, time in between sets way down, then that might be detrimental to some of our gains. It could. No, I will say this, that, that, uh, uh, pre-exhaustion has not been that way. It's been studied a lot acutely, meaning that they've done EMG studies, but we can't extrapolate those types of studies into muscle growth. To actually try to gain the insights to muscle growth, you have to carry out a study that measures muscle growth over time. And there's just not a lot of research. So these are, when I talked before, the absence of evidence, it's just weak evidence that I just wouldn't use to make much strong conclusions from what we have in any of what we do in drop sets.

We have now, I think, four good studies. Our study will be the fifth that's come out, and there's just been differences in them. Pre-exhaustion is even less research. them pre-exhaustion is even less research so you need a fairly large body of studies to start seeing patterns and to in my opinion to be confident in uh inferences that you draw and just the basics of it is you know if you're going to do a super set a drop set a power lifting set a bodybuilding set any of those sets whenever the set is completed uh use appropriate rest so you can get back to using a similar weight so that the weight's not descending downward, the reps aren't descending downward in some unusually quick

fashion, right? Yeah. And here's, so when we talk about rest intervals, we looked at three sets of three minutes rest versus one minute rest and showed a detrimental effect of one minute rest. That was in a total body training, though. There is some evidence that your single joint exercises, you don't, the differences in volume load, you don't lose that much. So if you do, let's say leg extensions, you're not going to decrease the amount of load that you're lifting to nearly the extent that if you're doing, let's say leg presses or squats. So if you're doing leg presses, the amount at one minute rest, the amount of weight that you're going to use is going to fall precipitously. Whereas if you're doing, let's say, a fly versus a chest press,

you're going to lose a lot more volume load in the chest press than you are in a fly, meaning that you can do shorter, tend to use shorter rest intervals with your single joint exercise without really compromising much and thus get out of the gym quicker, which again, doesn't mean you're going to gain more, but it does give you more training efficiency, which is important for many people. Yeah. You basically just don't want to wear yourself out before you can get to some decent weights at each workout. Correct. Is there any benefits to pyramid sets then? So we've actually looked at, so it depends what you mean, pyramid sets over versus what,

but we've done some work on reverse pyramids. So 15, 10, 5, and showed that it resulted in greater hypertrophy than 10, than just straight sets of 10. it resulted in greater hypertrophy than 10, than just straight sets of 10. Now, could that be because we're using different loading ranges and that there might be a fiber type specific benefit to training across varying loading ranges? Or could it be the novelty effect that we mentioned earlier?

Like a honeymoon period? Correct. It depends what you're comparing it to and over what time period. Since we're kind of talking about rest periods and maybe recovering from set to set, I'm curious about if you have any thoughts of anything, number one, when it comes to breathing and exercise and breathing and training, because let me give you a little bit of why I'm asking this. bit of why I'm asking this. I started, I've been doing jujitsu for almost six years now. And we had Patrick McKeown on the podcast. He's a big fan of nasal breathing, right? Started practicing that within that sport. And I, my gas tank or my ability to recover went from here over time to here. So I don't get gassed holding as much muscle. I do because I have better breath control and I pretty much only breathe through my nose. Now that made me wonder if we were to now apply different breathing practices to what we do in

the gym, we do know that if you have better cardiovascular capacity, you can recover better from session to session in the gym, right? At least I think that's the case. But now do you know anything as far as maybe the way an individual is breathing while they're working out as far as recovery, not just from set to set, but now from workout to workout, and maybe how people can get the most out of that when it comes to their training? So there's really not a lot of research that I'm aware of in that context, but I default to the general recommendations for... Now, when you're getting towards your sticking point, that kind of changes things. But on a general level throughout a set of exhaling on the concentric and inhaling on the eccentric and changing that, one of the issues can be that

you can end up getting lightheaded if you're breathing, just resistance training causes blood pressure changes. There's certain intensity aspects that causes the potential, at least, to get lightheaded. And I think that playing around with breathing in that context can be problematic. And I have not experimented with that personally and kind of just default. I think the default to breathing out on the concentric

and in on the eccentric is just a good strategy. And potentially using a Valsalva maneuver where you're pushing out against the closed glottis if you're, let's say, going towards failure at a sticking point to get that last rep out and to push through. Because especially in like a squat or something that needs core stability. Got it. And now I want to know about this because we, we were all talking about this. A lot of people, when they talk about bulking nowadays,

right? The dreamer bulk, some people take it too far where they're just like, I'm gonna eat as many calories. I'm a grow. So they put on a crazy amount of body fat. And then there's some people in the camp of let's just slowly, slowly gain, not put on too much body fat, And then there's some people in the camp of let's just slowly, slowly gain,

not put on too much body fat, but gain. I think that we've all had phases. Like I had a phase where I did that dreamer book. I got myself up to like 270 or whatever. Like we all have, a lot of us have had phases, but when we look back at it, we're like, we could have done that better. Is there an advantage though to doing that? Is there an advantage to just not bulking irresponsibly and getting to 30, 35, but bulking and trying to really get kind of heavy at least once in your training career rather than taking the moderate approach? I would say the moderate approach is better, but what are your thoughts here when it comes to that realm? What are your thoughts here when it comes to that realm? I tend to gravitate towards the more moderate approach. Now, there are some things from the research which we can try to extrapolate. Certainly, none of this has been done in bodybuilders. But if you gain too much fat, at a certain point, fat cells do multiply.

You get what's called hyperplasia of fat cells. Once those fat cells do multiply, they are there for life and it can be more problematic. Now, if you go to the sumo camp where you're just going to gain massive amounts of weight, where you're 50, 100 pounds overweight, could that cause a hyperplasia of fat cells where it makes it more difficult for you to lose weight in the future? Potentially. And I've read some research suggesting that it might be specific to individuals, that some people might have a predisposition towards fat cell hyperplasia. Again, trying to extrapolate studies from just sedentary obese people to a hard training bodybuilder who's gaining a lot of weight can

be somewhat problematic, just like extrapolating from a newbie novice, untrained individual to a well-trained trainer in training studies. But I do think, and look, the other problem is that once you gain massive amounts of fat, you have to lose it slowly or you're going to lose a lot of your hard-earned muscle mass along with it. So it'll take you forever really to get down to your goal weight. So I just think it's more, this is more opinion now. I just think it's more efficient to do it in a more systematic, slower fashion. It doesn't mean you have to inch your way up, but I don't think gaining massive amounts of fat is certainly not appropriate. And I think that keeping it within a moderate range at most is the more, is just the better approach. We've talked a lot on this podcast about sleep. We've talked before about supplementation and using creatine and

these different things. Have you seen sleep have a big impact on hypertrophy? Have there been studies or research or does it just make sense that if you're sleeping well that you would probably grow a little bit better? Just makes sense. The studies that have been carried out have been, I don't want to say they're poor studies, they're good studies, but you can't, they've been like been done in rat and rodents. So we have rodent studies, but if we're talking, they've done sleep deprivation studies. Obviously, if you're going to deprive yourself of all sleep, that's going to have, and it has negative effects on anabolism. That's different than if you're sleeping five hours a day versus seven hours a day. So this starts to get into this gray area as to how much deprivation of sleep is going to start to make a difference. And I do think logically that makes sense, but I think it certainly also

logically makes sense that it would be inter-individual. Some people need more sleep than others. And then at what point would that deprivation start to impede your gains? I think that would be highly variable. And also, is it every day over eight weeks, 10 weeks, 12 weeks, or is it one day a week or two days a week? And what is the effect? So these are all things. There's so many variables with sleep that it's hard to give, at least for me, hard to generate an evidence-based opinion on it. What about drinking alcohol or smoking weed or things like that?

Have you seen any research on that showing it may have a negative impact on muscle growth? Pounding drinks certainly does. So there's good evidence that muscle protein synthesis levels plummet when you drink a lot of liquor. But having a drink or so a day, I've not seen any evidence that that's negative. Smoking weed is something that has not been well studied. I'm sure we're going to get more studies on that coming up. It would be an interesting study to carry out. Hopefully those are well supervised.

But there really has not been good research on that for me to draw out. Hopefully those are well supervised, but there really has not been good research on that for me to draw evidence. What I feel like we should have gotten to this sooner, but as far as potential male and female differences when it comes to training, like, is there anything that, because is there anything that women can do differently to, I guess, have more progress or make different types of progress than men, like things that they can get away with more in their training? Are there sex differences that we need to be aware of? Yeah, the primary one is that women have, and I'll give you where the potential caveat

to this is, but they generally seem to have greater recovery ability, particularly within a set and even within workouts to some extent, but certainly like within sets. So they're able to come back and have the same endurance that they would, or better endurance than a male. Now, this has been attributed to the fact that women generally lift with lighter loads on average. So if you're going to train with heavier loads, it's going to at least theoretically take more out of you and make it more difficult to come back. But it does seem that women, cutting rest intervals to some extent and still being able to maintain their volume load. On the other hand, there might be a hypertrophic benefit to it because you might be able to increase what's called metabolic stress. And there is at least a rationale whereby

metabolic stress, which is up of metabolites, particularly lactic acid, but there are other metabolites, which can be achieved through shorter rest periods. If you're maintaining your volume load and you're increasing metabolic stress, conceivably there might be, not saying there is, but hypothetically there might be a hypertrophic benefit to that. Actually, I'm curious about that. You said there might be a hypertrophic benefit to that. So actually, I'm curious about that. You said there might be a

hypertrophic benefit to increase metabolic stress. What other potential stressors can allow, can lead to progression? I know we kind of talked about like, you know, I think Mark, you kind of tried to mention tempo earlier and we've talked about volume, but what other stressors can people utilize in their training other than just volume increases to help with overall growth? One strategy that I do think is effective and that I recommend an advanced training strategy is heavy negatives. So accentuated eccentrics, if you will. And what's interesting is that eccentric exercise, um, eccentric exercise when it's super maximal, basically you can use 120 to 140% of your concentric one RM. So let's say you can

bench 200 pounds. Uh, you can do 20 to 40% more. Uh, so somewhere like 40 to 60 pounds more, uh, you know, with your, just on a, on lowering. So if you were to, let's say, use 110 pounds, 110% of your one RM and get, let's say a few heavy negatives after finishing up, or even just force, let's say, have someone bring up the weight and then just do a force negative, if you will. What's been shown, and this is interesting, is that the eccentric exercise, number one, integrates different pathways, intracellular anabolic pathways compared to concentric exercise. And conceivably, that will have greater hypertrophic effects. But on long-term studies, conceivably that will have greater hypertrophic effects. But on long-term studies, it's been shown that eccentric exercise increases distal hypertrophy. So if we look at the muscle,

let's say the quadriceps more towards the knee area, that it's able in the vastus lateralis, this has been shown, the hypertrophy in the distal portion is greater than in the concentric portion. And similarly, it's been shown in the biceps, biceps brachii. So it seems to be a way to augment the hypertrophic response in ways that you're not going to get through traditional training practices. Wow, that's exciting. I haven't done heavy negatives in a while. Great, right? Yeah. Yeah. It seems like... You got to be... Go ahead. Oh, that's exciting. I haven't done heavy negatives in a while. Great, right?

Yeah. Yeah. It seems like... You got to be... Go ahead. I was going to say, you got to be careful, again, doing it too much because these advanced strategies also can burn you out. So that's where we discussed earlier, you got to be careful in terms of the integration. Yeah.

Yeah. I was going to say that it seems like every question we throw at you, you can reference a study or research that you've done yourself. Is there anything that quite hasn't been done that you're excited about or maybe looking forward to doing yourself? Yeah. I mean, so many things.

It's just a number one, the time to do them. So a lot of them are just more taking certain studies to the next level. So each study begets another study, really. I'd like to get more into the fiber type specific adaptations of light load versus heavy load training. So there's been some studies that have been done on it, but they've been somewhat limited in my opinion. And there's just things that I want to see done on it. I want to do, we actually have a study that's in development in looking at the effects of metabolic stress, which would be exciting if we can show that. And this would be in humans. There's rodent studies that have been done that seem to show certain things

that we have, I think, a really good concept to carry out in humans, which would have really important implications, if true, for training. But yeah, there's just so many. I have so many studies lined up. I would point out another really interesting study we recently published. We have another one in review, looks at differences in range of motion. And what we recently showed,

just published a month or so ago, was that doing the, what's called training at long muscle lengths. So we did this in leg extensions. And by the way, this is a study, it was an untrained subject. I have no reason to think that I don't see why this study would make any difference if it was in trained subjects. But what we showed was that in the initial phase, we had them do the, let's say 90 degrees, where it was like 110 degrees to 60 degrees. So the first 50 degrees range of motion versus, was 100 degrees to 50 degrees versus 50 degrees to zero degrees. So the first, so when we're talking about the starting position of a leg extension, and then just going halfway up to 50 degrees versus 50 to starting at 50 degrees versus starting at 50 degrees and then going up to zero, so full extension,

substantially greater growth in the initial, what's called the long length phase when we're training at a long muscle length, so the initial phase. And interestingly, in some of the muscle measurements, we looked at quadricep growth in the rectus femoris and the vastus lateralis, we looked at proximal, mid, and distal levels. We looked at all different levels across the thigh, across the muscle. And at multiple muscle measurements, it actually had even greater growth than the full range of motion. So we compared it also for full RM. him. And it shows that I would say that this gives us evidence that potentially doing either some partials in the initial phase, or this is a strategy that I have, and we're going to be

carrying out a study come the fall in this that I think will be really interesting in looking at static holds. So let's say doing a set, we're going to look at this in the calves. So let's say doing a set of calf raises and then keeping at this in the calves. So let's say doing a set of calf raises and then keeping the stretch position for a period of time, just holding the loaded stretch position. So keeping the weight on, let's say in a standing calf raise, keeping the pad on, keeping the weight on, and then just holding that for a given number of seconds in that stretch position, does that augment hypertrophy and i think it'll be exciting to see the results on that so wait when it comes to this let's say someone wants

to put this this range of motion or partials into practice let's let's use biceps for an example right would it be doing partials here partials here then full would that be like what would be a way of practice and putting this into practice? 21s. That's what I was thinking. I was thinking 21s. I was going to say the old 21s, but you could just do regular, you don't even need to do 21s.

You could do, let's say, some sets of regular full range of motion bicep curls, and then just the seven, the first seven of the 21s, you know, in the initial, because what we actually showed was that there didn't seem to be any benefit to the last, to the final range of motion. That showed no benefit. I don't want to say it had detrimental results, but that its results were always worse than either full range of motion. In every instance, the results were worse than full range of motion or the long length, the initial range. And by the way, we have another study. So we did that. We showed that in the quads. We have another study coming out and shows that in the biceps as well. So you guys got another scoop. So man, this is amazing. So let's use shoulders as an example. So obviously in the beginning part of the movement, you could potentially load a little bit heavier because it's harder to get to lockout.

So would an individual maybe load a slightly heavier disposition and do partials here for some of their sets and they could gain some benefit there? That's what we're talking about here? Correct. The bench press, the stretch position, just doing the initial phase of the bench press, correct? Yeah. And one and a quarter rep type things have been around for a long time. And I love when stuff like this comes up because I have referred to things like this as like a bodybuilder bench press or a bodybuilder squat, where bodybuilders, they kind of do like a very squatty version of a squat where their knees are bent the entire time. And they're really just focusing on kind of this mid range squat where they're just really encouraging a lot of muscle tension.

And then Eric Spoto famously broke the all time world record in the bench press. And he would do these little tiny reps where you're like, what the hell is this guy doing? But he would do like 60 reps with like three 15 and eventually ended up doing a 716 pound bench press. So it's interesting that some of these folks, Ronnie Coleman comes to mind again.

They just kind of stumble upon these. Ronnie Coleman was asked, hey, why don't you lock out your heavier dumbbells? And he's like, it hurts my elbows. And there he is getting just massive as hell. And so it's interesting the way that some of these folks have kind of come to some of these conclusions. Yep. And so it's interesting the way that some of these folks have kind of come to some of these conclusions.

So is it like to have anything to do with the time under tension when it's just down here back and forth as opposed to like full lockout where you kind of catch a half second break if you're kind of cheating through it? Yeah. Does time under tension mess with any of that? Well, mechanistically, there's been a couple of theories proposed. Number one, there has been shown to be greater force production. So when a muscle in a stretch, when you stretch a muscle, there are length tension. They're called length tension benefits to that range where there's greater force within the muscle and the muscle produces greater force. That's been one theory. There also seems to be greater muscle disruption or damage in that position. And there's some evidence that at least mild muscle damage might increase the satellite

cell response and potentially have some other benefits towards hypertrophy. So it's not clear. benefits towards hypertrophy. So it's not clear. I don't think the time under tension is really the effect because full range of motion generally is going to have greater time under tension. We looked at the same number of reps. The full range is going to have

greater because you're going through a longer range. So it'll have greater TUT than the partial. The mechanical tension might be increased because you're at a mechanical disadvantage. You know, if you were to think of like a stiff leg deadlift where your hamstring is totally stretched at that bottom position, well, you don't have to come up very high on a stiff leg deadlift. You don't have to stand up all the way to get the benefits of it. You can do partials and your hamstrings will light up like crazy and your butt even. Absolutely. Wow. This is awesome. Um, so, um, I'm curious about something too, uh, because this is something that you see floating around social media a lot. Um, and it's,

especially coming from the younger crowd, because the younger crowd is very focused on the genetic limitations, you know, trying, you know, getting to their whatever. And, you know, you hear people say that you're going to gain a majority of the muscle that you're going to gain through your life in your first hard three years of training. But also, I mean, you have people that have been training for decades and it's not that they're just exponentially getting bigger, but their physique continues to change. For some reason, we have that look of muscle maturity and that look a lot of people, because they're like, I've been training for three years or I've been training for five years, I haven't seen much more progress. I need to start hopping on something. And the individual is like 21, 22 years old. You know what I mean? Can we talk to those

guys and girls and kind of speak to them a little bit? Yeah. So your progress will substantially slow down. And there's no doubt about that, that everyone has a genetic ceiling, but here's the rub. So people talk, well, I've reached my genetic ceiling. I'm of the opinion, no one ever reaches their genetic ceiling. The genetic ceiling is a hypothetical ceiling, a hypothetical threshold where you don't know, no one could ever say you've reached a ceiling because there's many other things you could potentially do that could get, you've reached your ceiling with done. You know, if someone's not making progress, it doesn't mean if they would try something different. I will tell you this. I've worked

with again, numerous bodybuilders, high level bodybuilders. I've never had someone that over time, I couldn't help them take their physique and get them more muscle. Now, again, numerous bodybuilders, high-level bodybuilders. I've never had someone that over time I couldn't help them take their physique and get them more muscle. Now, again, it might be a pound over three months or six months even in someone who's at a very high level. But you can consistently make gains. And that's where your knowledge of research, of nutrition, of training, of being in the trenches. I mean, to me, the true best practitioners, if you will, and coaches are ones, number one, who have walked the walk, who have been in the trenches and trained, and especially if you want to be a bodybuilder, that have actually done it, as well as understand the literature. So they have a real understanding of what is known through research and also can

understand. This is another huge issue that I see with a lot of coaches is that they know what worked for them, but they can't empathize what happens with other people. And by the way, I think some of the best bodybuilders in the world aren't great coaches because they grow so easily that they can't appreciate the hard game and they have a tough time in using their, what they've learned and applying that to people that don't grow as well. So again, I think having that combination of the empathy and the understanding of what works for or what can work for other people and how to manipulate that in combination with your own expertise is ultimately what makes the best coach. What have you seen in terms of hypertrophy when it comes to performance enhancing drugs? Have those been studied well?

Yeah, they've been studied. Now, not to the extent that most. Yeah, they've been studied. Now, not to the extent that most, so we've carried out studies where we've looked at bodybuilders and we've gotten an itinerary of what they've used and then tracked them through it. But you're never going to get a study where you're going to say, all right, guys, we're going to give you GH and IGF-1 and 1,200 milligrams of tests, you'll just never get that by an IRB. That would be potentially harmful to the individual. And that's one of the most important thing in research is that you can't do harm to a person, a potential harm.

So those things can have potential ramifications. So you can only study that in an observational standpoint and try to glean from that. We do have some studies that have looked at giving young individuals 600 milligrams of tests per week, and it shows very substantial muscle gains over short periods of time. So anyone who wants to say that steroids don't do anything, and that's nothing compared to what is, I'm sure you guys know, what the pros are using. I mean, so yeah, the pharmacological enhancements that we have now, just look at the differences in the physiques of the 70s, the Arnold era versus what we have now. It's not because the training practices have gotten that much better. Now, we have improved in that, but many of the pros aren't even using any they're

doing everything that the arm was doing they're doing the same things and they're they look quite different and it's not because of their training why why do you propose that uh steroids or even testosterone causes muscle growth like what's the mechanism like what is it and some sort of anabolic environment or like what lends itself to allow for hypertrophy in those situations? Yeah. I mean, it sets off intracellular signaling cascades in the body that will downregulate catabolic signaling, intracellular signaling, and it'll upregulate anabolic signaling and basically put you in an environment where you're always anabolic. You're always producing muscle proteins throughout the day. So the more you can maintain anabolism, keep your anabolic environment high, the greater your

ability to produce those proteins and grow muscle. And you can even gain muscle without going to the gym, right? You can, but you will not gain. Obviously, yeah, they actually have shown that, that you just don't do anything. You gain some. I find that really fascinating. We actually did a meta-analysis on cachetia, which is muscle wasting.

So the use of steroids in cancer patients and HIV, and when combined with... So even just giving steroids without resistance training in those muscle wasting diseases helps these individuals. So this is a real clinical. I mean, these are important clinical findings, not people who want to get jacked, but that when you gave these cancer patients, et cetera, steroids in combination with resistance training. I mean, they gained substantial muscle. How do you train now? Myself? Yourself, yeah.

I have much less time. So my training is more maintenance at this point. So I just have so many things going on. I'm not looking to step on stage anymore. So my workouts are relatively short. They last 45 minutes to an hour and I do usually four days a week. Uh, so I get into the gym. Uh, I like training, so I could probably get by even unless, but I just like to feel like getting a pump, but there's still relatively short workouts. So three, four hours a week, uh, usually four days a week. I do an upper lower split. Still eat good. And you know,

I still got some, some decent. Oh shit. Yeah. That. Okay. You know what? I don't know why this came to mind,

but I've been seeing videos of people doing this. I'm just like, okay, that's odd. Have you seen people using those? What are they like? Eat not there. They're like a tens unit type of deal. Have you seen people using those tens units are they like? Eat not there. They're in tens unit type of deal.

Have you seen people using those tens stimulation stuff while they're training? Yeah. EMS, the electro muscular stimulation. Yeah. And maybe variations of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's been around for a long time.

So they're effective in those who are like immobilized. So when if you're immobilized, they can help to maintain muscle. I've not seen good evidence. I'm willing to change my opinion on it, but I've not seen good evidence that they help to enhance gains in combination with resistance training. It's not been well studied from what I've seen,

but I've not seen any good evidence that they are effective if you are training hard. I wanted to mention, I almost forgot this. It's my understanding that eccentric training can help quite a bit with rehabilitation of injuries. Is that right? Eccentric training? Yeah. Yeah. Many things can help. So can blood flow restriction training is another technique that's been utilized for that. But yeah,

eccentric training has been used in rehab and has been used quite effectively. Great. We don't want to take up any more of your time for today. You've been absolutely amazing. You taught us so much and thank you so much. And we were throwing some tough questions your way and we thought you did a great job responding to it. So thank you so much. My pleasure, dude. And questions your way and we thought you did a great job responding to it.

So thank you so much. My pleasure, dude. And your film was one where I guess your brother's absolutely one of my favorites, man, really groundbreaking movies. So great stuff.

Yeah. Thank you so much. Where can people find you if they want to find out more information about what we were talking about today? I'm all over the internet. So I have a website called lookgreatnaked.com. Not look good naked, look great naked. I deal in some prelatives.

But I mean, social media, I'm on Instagram, I'm on IG, I'm on Twitter. I still use Facebook occasionally, but mostly IG and Twitter and just Google me. You'll get more than you need. Lots of books. Lots of great books. Yeah, don't be need. Lots of books. Lots of great books. Yeah. Don't be afraid.

Don't be afraid of TikTok doctor. Yeah. Thanks again for your time. Have a great rest of your day. My pleasure guys. Thank you, sir. Yo, that was sick.

Hey, yo, that was so good. And we got so many scoops, bro. I got super happy a couple of times when he's talking. I'm like, Oh my God, I'm such a nerd.

Yeah, absolutely. I have so many things highlighted. I'm like, I think I'm just going to break down literally every segment and make it its own video. Because it has to be, you know, like the full length podcast will do well. But I think every section, it just needs more exposure. Because that was, dude. You did a great job explaining studies too. So I hope that, you know, people don't take that particular study on that shorter range of motion and think that's the only way to train all the time.

He did mention a lot of different things that go into a study. You have to keep in mind you can only kind of, when you do a study, you can only kind of hone in and focus on kind of one thing. And also leg extension, you know, it's like a leg extension is in terms of exercises for the legs, like in my opinion, it's down there pretty low in terms of great exercises for your legs. Not a bad movement, but it's just not a great movement. And a lot of times when they do studies,

they study on shitty stuff like a preacher curl. It's like, I don't care what the results are on a preacher curl machine necessarily. You know what I mean? I'd rather know more about a barbell curl. I'd rather know more about a free squat. But they're going to study stuff that's easier to study because they can kind of control more variables about like a free squat, but they're going to study stuff that's easier to study because

they can kind of control more variables on these machines and stuff like that. So it's always good to keep that stuff in mind, but then also take that information and say, hey, I wonder how I can help that. I wonder how I can use that to help benefit me further. Yeah, because these are techniques that you've been seeing a lot of bodybuilders use for long periods of time. Like you see videos like Arnold and a lot of those guys doing some partial range type movements, right? But then when you now see that, okay, he also said there's effectiveness in bicep or bicep growth and that's coming out too.

And then you see that it's like what we've been seeing a lot of the times, yes, there are some studies that refute things, but there are some studies that just kind of put strength behind things that have been being done for years. And that's why I think it's so, it's so dope that we had him on because like, you don't want to be too dogmatic about anything, you know, like you don't want to be too much on this evidence-based side where now you think that's pure gospel and you can't do anything outside of that. You don't want to be too much on this side where you think all the evidence is BS and there's no reason to pay any attention to it. I love how he said he wanted to marry the two.

I did also like the fact in the beginning he kind of said that there were a lot of things dispelled, but then when we walked through it again, they didn't seem like they were dispelled at all in my opinion. Like, go heavy heavier go home i still think like if if you're gonna go to the gym like just showing up to the gym is an okay moniker to have when you're just getting started after that it's like you do need to kind of bring it otherwise you should go home because you should go and rest and or you should go and eat yeah if you go in the gym and you start to move around you're like, I really just don't want to be here, then I would restart, man. Fucking leave. Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is walk away from it and just say, I don't really feel like being here.

I'm going to walk away. Or give yourself something real small and quick and easy to do and then get out the door so you can feel halfway uh decent about it but it is really interesting that lifting weights has become so scientific and also uh nutrition which they both seem pretty basic you know people used to just pick stuff up we didn't used to have like benches you know when you'd go to a gym there wouldn't be like a there was there was just to think back you know like i don't know 50 60 years before i was around but like there's pictures where they have a bench and then someone would hand them a barbell when they're on a bench press because they didn't have a bench press that had a spot for the barbell to go

as weird. So it didn't have any posts if you can kind of picture that. Right. Because it was just the utility bench and they would use it for dumbbells and they would use it. So two individuals would have to hand the, the barbell to somebody if they were using heavier weights. And so we've just gotten into a, so we went all the way from that into having,

you know, a peck deck in every gym and a preacher curl machine, a leg extension and a leg curl machine. And Arthur Jones made all this stuff popular. But if anyone who doesn't know who Arthur Jones is, you need to know who Arthur Jones is. But Arthur Jones was also a guy that talked about doing one set. And he talked about it like 50 60 years ago i feel sad that i didn't know he's all he's the guy who created nautilus he created cybex he fucking created everything he created i think his son is still around maybe we should try to get him on the podcast um there's a he made all the cams and stuff that are in the machines he he made the um the original like the guy is amazing

like back then the the mark that that guy made in fitness will probably never be matched again no one will ever make more money than arthur jones did he fucking crushed it he had like nautilus gyms like so all the gyms in the country had nautilus nautilus equipment because he was smart enough to recognize other people are going to knock this stuff off. But if I have my own equipment and it just has a certain style to it, then we can kind of have a brand name out there and it will draw people to the gym. So people wouldn't even go to a gym unless it was like a Nautilus gym.

Like, oh, they don't have Nautilus. I'm not going there. And what the fuck? Oh, it happened. And like some of those Nautilus gym like oh they don't have nautilus not going there and what the fuck oh what happened like some of those nautilus like machines were like some of the best ever but like they're hard to find yeah i think company got sold and so forth but yeah they had like the chains and all that stuff right like they're chain driven yeah yeah the chain wild that chain driven that that chain leg extension that's at Gold's Gym in Venice is torture. That thing is crazy.

And the leg curl, too, which I think you and I have done with O'Hearn before. I don't know which one that is. It is brutal. And the pullover is the greatest machine of all time. That's the one. Yeah. I've heard about the pullover. We were talking about that yesterday, actually.

Is it like a pullover? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. Yeah. It's sick. And I think the chain hamstring, it's like in the dark over there near like the hack squatting inside gold's like it doesn't get any any fancy lighting it's just back there kind of just hanging out man that's exciting all this stuff that he shared today was so good just awesome guys this is like this is a

this is a you need to have him back on and ask him about like cardio and burning fat and stuff like that a little bit more because i mean i'm pretty sure i know his answers would be that he's probably not a huge fan of cardio unless it's for just training your heart but follow up and email him it would be fun to like hey you can run that ped test over here at st yeah right exactly won't tell anybody but you would have the answer when somebody asks you that question again. Yeah. I'm the only one here to take stuff, though, so he wouldn't have any luck. The gym's not great like it used to be.

Yeah. Well, maybe he can bring steroids in. This place used to be great, I swear to you guys. I promise you that it was. That's the whole point. And now it's all going to hell. Everyone's natty. Everyone's natty. everyone's running around all natty and stuff half natty hey it's all good hey how's someone gonna be big and strong and jacked without stuff i don't get it right you

can't do that i don't know right you can't bodybuild into jujitsu. I mean, that's never going to work. Are we doing this? Your mind muscle connection is too great. You're going to get tired. I love how we talked. I love that. We just like fucking, that was good.

She had good followup questions on that. I thought that was cool. I'm so happy that we went on that because so many people have been talking so much BS and have been just kicking the mind muscle connection in the ass. And I'm just like, yo, ah, this, I feel so good. This is a good one, man. I think a lot of the misconceptions that I've seen over the years, I've seen certain athletes, especially when it comes to UFC, I've seen certain athletes get really, really jacked out of nowhere.

Yeah. Like they were pretty jacked before and then they got jacked and you're like wait okay what happened then the guy gets knocked out like two fights later you know three fights later and you're like oh okay but then people are like oh well it's because his gas tank is compromised because he's so big well now we're starting to talk about a lot of different things at one time here you know we don't know what the implications are of somebody that was previously, maybe they were natural. And now they made a commitment to taking PEDs. We don't know what the ramifications of those particular PEDs are.

Maybe those PEDs, maybe it's detrimental to your endurance with some of these things. Or maybe it's just the fact the guy gained 25 pounds and he's not used to that body weight yet. And maybe he needs to take, you've been living in this body your whole life. Yeah. And you were heavier at one point. So it's not like, it's almost the equivalent of when you were 275,

it wasn't hard. You were still doing pull-ups with weight around your waist. Yeah. Wasn't hard for you. You're used to your body weight. Your strength to weight ratio is really good. But when somebody takes anabolics and all of a sudden they gain 20 pounds out of nowhere, their body doesn't have really time to catch up.

Now, every time you do a lunge, every time you do a body weight movement, you're now burning excess, more calories. It's going to take more work from your heart because your, your body now just is walking around with an extra 20 pounds on it. I mean, it only makes sense. I've seen it happen with Vitor Belfort and a couple other great UFC fighters where you're like, what happened to this guy? And then everyone wants to say, oh, it's because he's jacked. He doesn't have any wind because he's jacked. And you're like, well, no.

First of all, he's clearly on performance enhancing drugs. And then secondly, like that is an extreme example. well, no, first of all, he's clearly on performance enhancing drugs. And then secondly, like that is an extreme example. The guy gained 40 pounds out of nowhere. So even if he did it with or without drugs, if you don't keep the weight on, like Bones Jones is really smart. He's not fighting anytime soon. I think he's pushing this fight way back because he's like,

I want to wear this weight for a while because I don't want to be all blown up when I fight. He needs to know how to use that body but like that's the thing that's the people that that's the thing that people get twisted because that's one reason you see a lot of guys they have like these just crazy muscle tears super fast after they maybe they hopped on something and they gained a lot of weight because your joints your tendons they they're not prepared to handle that much force that that muscle is now creating on that joint you can't handle it yet your body isn't used to dealing with that yet. So then when you tear a quad or a pec pops out or whatever, it's like.

It's hard to override what the body naturally wants to do. Yeah. And a lot of the things is, I mean, you can, you can take a bunch of chemicals and you can look jacked. You can certainly go that route, but there's a lot of, there's still a lot of limitations on it. What if you just take a little bit? Yeah. not 40 pounds maybe 10 pounds you can take a little bit and you can get jacked and if you're smart with your training you don't have to get hurt for it

either that's true um most pec tears that we've seen um i'm not going to say all because there's been a couple where we've i've had who, at least my understanding was they were natural. Um, but it's seems to be pretty rare. Um, I seen a lot of hamstrings regardless of whether someone's like on shit or not on. Sure. I've seen a lot of hammy, uh, tears. That is something we didn't get to with him, which I wanted to ask him. with him which I wanted to ask him but when he talked about having the mechanical tension I did want to ask him about

swimming versus running versus sprinting versus jumping type of stuff but I think I kind of know some of the forces on a sprinter are way more demanding so that's why they're way more jacked and it's just interesting though with sports because when you see Josh Settlegate at Super Training, and he's with his group of wrestlers, there's some people who've responded great to wrestling that are pretty jacked. Most of his guys are fit. Most of his guys, especially for their age and stuff, are pretty jacked.

But it's interesting the different responses. One guy will have a real thick neck, and the other guy might not. One guy might have bigger legs. Another guy might not have hardly any like Tom wrestled a lot. He doesn't have big legs. It just has a different response on each on each person. It's very interesting. Everybody's going to develop differently. But at the end of the day, they're still going to get stronger. They're still going to get a little bit bigger. And I do like how we were able to clarify that aspect of athleticism. Every athlete can benefit from getting a bit bigger. But if they can then just transfer that to their sport, they're going to be perfectly okay.

But if you're only doing bodybuilding training and then trying to get better at basketball, that's where we kind of run into a little bit of a problem. I love that he kept it simple with what volume is because that can get to be, you know, people are multiplying the reps and the sets times the weight. And they're like, I lifted 5,000 pounds today. And those, those metrics can be, uh, useful, can be really useful when you have a coach and the coach, you know, can guide you and say, okay, we're going to incrementally go up this way and then we're going to ladder it back down. Then we're going to come back up and yeah, you can guide you and say, okay, we're going to incrementally go up this way, and then we're going to ladder it back down, and then we're going to come back up. And, yeah, he can help you navigate. He can help you kind of track exactly what you're doing.

But from his standpoint, he was like, yeah, it's just how many sets you're doing per body part. He just left it right there. I was like, oh, my God, that's brilliant. you could say it's you know three sets of 20 for this plus you used 100 pounds per set and you can you know you can start to make it kind of complicated and overanalyze it too much yeah it's funny oh go ahead i was just gonna say it's funny when um you had brought it up mark but like we can't say that um peds don't do the work for you because you can literally take them and you know get gain muscle i thought that was so funny to me you could sit down gain muscle yeah i was just imagining people you know keyboard warriors like see i told you guys the internet is so funny there's like this there's this trend going around

um on tick tock where people are like there's a point in your training career when you've matured and if you realize that uh 4, four by 12 training is useless. Like there are a lot of people who are like believing that and spreading that. And it's just so funny. Like when you look into like, what are teenagers thinking about lifting? What are early twenties guys thinking about lifting? And you're just like,

Whoa, like that's a thing. People really think that it's, it's, it's crazy. And like, they're like, that's,

that's why I asked Brad about the, you know, the development thing and the genetic ceiling. Yeah. Because there are a lot of guys out there who are like, after you train for three years, that's pretty, that's your physique.

Pretty much. You can't really get more much. People believe that, you know, it's just, it's shocking. It's amazing. Your physique can improve all the time.

You know, strength is kind of a different thing, but you can get stronger in different ways. I've heard people say, oh, man, when you lose weight, you lose so much strength. And I'm like, how many pull-ups can you do now versus when you started your weight loss journey? And they're like, oh, I could only used to do three. How many do now? I could do like 15. You're like, okay, you didn't get weaker everywhere you know

they could do more push-ups they could do lunges better they could walk more so it's like you're gonna lose in one area and maybe gain in another and our guest today uh brad he pointed that out when you're doing compound movements sometimes versus some of these isolated movements the benefit of the compound movement is also the very thing that leads it to have some holes in what it can do for you. And same thing with the isolation movement. The isolation movement is great, but the very thing that makes it great for you is also the thing that makes it miss out on some of the things that a compound exercise can have

for you. So we want to use a little bit of both. And when it comes to high reps, you know, should we do high reps or low reps? Yes. We should do both. You know, we should do set to five.

We should do set to 25. We didn't, we should do set to 10. You know, you don't have to like have this attitude that you're going to like mix everything up so much all the time. Because what he did say, I also found really interesting and we didn't like

sit on it that long but the you know the body adapting to stuff is really really amazing but it doesn't adapt to stuff that you don't leave there for a minute and anyone that's done 531 knows like I remember I remember doing like some of the west side stuff and initially louis would say hey let's you know leave in your max effort exercise for like three or four weeks if you're new because you don't need to change stuff up that often and i remember i would do a floor press one week and just a hypothetical random example but i would use like i'd do 315 for like a set of three and it was really really hard the next week i might use like 335 and i'm like like a set of three and it was really, really hard. The next week I might use like 335 and I'm like, wow, that set of three was a lot easier. The next week I might use 355 for a

couple of doubles. The week after that, I might use 365 for a couple of singles. Well, I didn't really exponentially get a crazy amount stronger. I did lower the reps, but I also got more used to the exercise. So my, I guess like my muscular, like practice in that particular movement also got my muscular coordination got better, not just my strength levels, but because my muscular coordination got better, now we can have more mechanical tension. Now we can build more muscle. Every time that you gain a little bit of strength, you're just opening up another door of opportunity for you to get

stronger and not only get stronger, but also to gain muscle mass. Absolutely. Like that's why, like, you know, okay. So this, this, for some people, this is going to be a little bit of a reach, but let's say that you, you've been bench pressing for a long time, but you've never really taken time to do overhead presses, right? Let's say you just take some time, you do some overhead pressing, you fill some holes in with that movement, you get stronger with that movement, and then you don't totally get rid of bench press, but you come back to bench press later. It could yield some benefit, some type of benefit to what you're doing when you're bench pressing. Maybe some small muscles that you're now utilizing when you're over at pressing you're now using more of those muscles when you bench press again you can start to make some progress especially if you stink at them if you suck at them you know if you can only handle you know 50 pound dumbbells

and you're trying to have a 405 bench there's something sounds way off like you should be probably closer to the 110s or the 120s If you're trying to bench in the fours, something of that nature. Absolutely. That's why it's like, it's, it's good in the gym, find movements and plug your holes.

Like, uh, and, and I'm, I'm really happy that we talked about Doug Bregnoli. And when we brought that up, because again, guys,

we love Doug. We love what Doug does. We love the movements that he has, but like what I personally am not the biggest fan of is when people hear, you know, that message, they then want to just get rid of all these other things because it doesn't bring as much attention to that set muscle group. Well, if you can get better at some of these movements, you can fit, you can build some holes in your training. You can work these smaller muscle groups that might not being worked, be being worked during like a sissy squat or a very isolatory movement, which can allow you to make more progress over time.

Mix the two ideas. I got really good news for everybody. I think the three of us are at particularly different ages, right? And we're particularly different ethnicities. And we particularly train quite a bit different. Our diets are probably a little similar. Your diet train quite a bit different our diets our diets are probably a little similar your diet's a little bit different all three of us are making pretty damn good progress since this podcast started and i'm i'm in my i'm getting into my mid-40s uh and sema just

turned 21 yeah yeah just turned 21 but uh you know we're we're all we're all making a lot of progress and it just and and we've been training for a different amount of time we've each one of us have a different amount of consistency behind us each one of us have a little bit of a different story and i just think you know don't really it's great that it's great to listen to resources, a lot of great resources online, but try not to extrapolate one thing from one person and try not to extrapolate one study from one study and think that that is something that you need to like hold on to and believe forever. Cause I continue to get in better and better shape all the time. I think, I feel like I'm getting in better shape all the time. I feel like I look better than I did around this time last year.

And I'm still in pursuit of that. But even with my effort, my effort at the moment just feels like a six or a seven on a scale of one. It doesn't feel, you know, my bodybuilding show stuff. I would just say, you know, perfection is something I don't even ever aim for. But it was probably like a nine. You know, my commitment level was really high. I didn't miss workouts and 90 minutes of cardio that I was supposed to do and stuff like that. I made sure I did. I think I missed one 30 minute session, but everything else was pretty on point food wise. Um, I might've had a

day or two where I remember, Oh my gosh, I kind I kind of overdid it food-wise. But for the rest of the nine weeks or whatever it was I was doing it for, I stayed pretty true to it. At the moment, this feels more effortless. This feels easier, and I continue to get in better shape all the time. I think you feel the same way, and I think you feel the same way, right? Yeah, well, I do too. Go ahead. No, absolutely. i mean i am training hard i do jujitsu and i do train hard but like i don't feel like i'm beating myself into the ground every day to make progress um everything feels really really good we've added

a lot of additions from a lot of people that we've had on the podcast and i think one really cool thing that brad said that is just it's it's really dope is as far as like you know as you get more advanced you get better mind muscle connection you're able to activate said muscle groups better you can and you will get away with not get away with but you can do more with less you can do more with lighter weight you're not just perpetually lifting heavier and heavier and heavier you can then you can get more with less weight that's why our boy andrew's been more heavier you can then you can get more with less weight that's why our boy andrew's been more consistent because i think you're having more fun with it because it feels good right yeah when you put it the best like you know you're not if i

go in and try to get a 10 like i'm gonna probably just get hurt like if i'm being honest like i'm gonna do something stupid um but yeah putting up these fives and sixes on the board has been so much more beneficial because I'm doing that like Monday through Saturday as opposed to a 10 on Tuesday. And then I'll be back next week. Right. Like, you know, if we can do stupid, simple math and be like, well, a bunch of fives, you know, it's going to be 25 versus that one 10, you know, like it's not going to really matter. But that for me, that's been like huge. Maybe like three sixes and a nine. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the problem with the 10 sometimes is that you might spend too much time in the gym

that might pull from your at home time that might pull from, uh, you, you know, having dinner the same way that you normally do with your family. It might pull from the time that might pull from you, you know, having dinner the same way that you normally do with your family. It might pull from the time that you take a shower, whether it be in the morning or at night, and it might shift your, it might bump your whole next day. And it's, it's almost like drinking alcohol or being addicted to anything where, Hey, like let's walk through this. What's it mean to be addicted? Has it ever, has it ever made you late for work?

Has it ever impacted your relationships? Has it ever compromised your next day? You're like, yup, yup, yup. It's like, fuck, man. All right, well, how do we, okay, the addiction can be healthy, but how do we just kind of just, let's pull back a little bit

so we don't compromise our sleep. We don't compromise our relationships. We don't compromise when we're supposed to eat, we're supposed to shower we get to places on time and so forth and then you have less stress and the stress that you're uh demanding of yourself and training will be better received by your body your sleep will be better i mean everything kind of improves when you're able to kind of handle and deflect your stress uh each and every day a little bit better yeah that's what i've been trying to tell our boy Nico. You know, I'm like, the way that I work.

I thought you were going to say your baby. Well, soon, someday, yeah. Yo, Aurelius, here's how it goes, buddy. Yeah, for reals. Go hard or go home. And if you don't go hard, don't come home. But no, I just tell him like, hey, these workouts are not going to pull away from the rest of your life because he just has he had a newborn baby as well. I'm like, these workouts are just going to improve everything else.

And it was funny the other day. He's like, dude, I can't do like butt kicks right now because we worked quads. And he's just like, is this what chasing the pump is like? I'm like, yes, that's exactly what it is. So certain days we only have enough time to literally just chase the pump we're not worrying about range of motion we're just like hey like let's get the blood flowing to that muscle group and then that's it and then just doing that yeah i'm not gonna it's not gonna make me stage ready or anything but it sure is hell gonna keep me like in shape and making me feel good you know like it's been it's been awesome.

And, you know, the whenever we have high level people, we always like, oh, how do you balance training, work and family and this and that? And for me personally, that's what it's been. It's been my workouts are only adding to everything else. They're not pulling away from any of it. And if some days that means, you know, baby woke up or the dogs are going nuts or whatever, and I can only get in half an hour, then so be it. Because again, fast forward to the next day and I'll probably have a really good workout like I did today. Too much sense? So much sense.

Too much. Yeah. Take us on out of here, Andrew. All right. PeteMontes.com. Check the links down in the description below. Promo code PowerProject will get you 25% off your order and free shipping on any orders of $99 or more. Please make sure to find the podcast at MarkBell's PowerProject on Instagram at MBPowerProject on TikTok and Twitter. My Instagram and Twitter is at IamAndrewZ and TheAndrewZ on TikTok. And Sima, where you be? And Sima Nyang on Instagram and YouTube at NsemaYinYang on TikTok and Twitter's at I am Andrew Z and the Andrew Z on Tik TOK and SEMA, where you be and SEMA and Yang on Instagram and YouTube at and SEMA, Yin Yang on Tik TOK and Twitter, Mark at Mark's Millie bell on Tik TOK,

Tik TOK, Tik TOK, Instagram and Twitter. Uh, I just want to mention that I had about a steak this morning and a bunch of eggs and it was freaking unbelievable once again, but I screwed myself because I'm only once a day. And so I ate in the morning.

But it's actually kind of a funny strategy because I eat at night, I get pretty damn full, and then I'm like, when in the morning, I'm actually not hungry, but I still want to eat just because I'm fat, and so I'm like, I'm just going to go for it, and so I did it, and now I've got to wait it out until tomorrow night. I'm just going to go for it. And so I did it. And now I got to wait it out until tomorrow night. It's going to be crying the whole time.

Shoot. Anyway, get some Piedmontese. You guys will love it. You'll enjoy it. Strength is never weak. This week, this never strength.

Catch you guys later.