Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1160: Bret Contreras- The Glute Guru

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

In this episode, Sal, Adam and Justin speak with Bret Contreras, inventor of the hip thrust and renowned butt building expert. From a math teacher to glute guru: How did Bret get to where he is today? (2:41) Where did his obsession with glut training come from? (10:17) How he made hip bridges a thing. (14:50) Why it takes a strong woman to date a trainer. (18:37) The importance of staying true to who you are. (20:17) How he considers himself a lifter first, trainer second and then a scientist. (24:35) Why research is important when it comes to the validity of a study. (27:28) The science and studies on machines vs free weights/compound lifts: How all exercises are tools. (41:40) Do something that challenges your end range of motion to see greater muscle development. (1:04:02) The growing disconnects in the fitness industry. (1:08:05) Understanding the frequency aspect of training. (1:12:34) How everyone thinks they are SO advanced. (1:22:30) The importance of learning your own body and listening to it. (1:32:10) Featured Guest/People Mentioned Bret "Glute Guy" Contreras PhD (@bretcontreras1)  Instagram Website Joe DeFranco (@defrancosgym)  Instagram Jay Ferruggia (@jayferruggia)  Instagram Jen Selter (@jenselter)  Instagram Lauren Simpson (@laurensimpson)  Instagram Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D. (@bradschoenfeldphd)  Instagram Layne Norton, Ph.D. (@biolayne)  Instagram Stuart Phillips (@mackinprof)  Instagram Eric Cressey (@ericcressey)  Instagram Tawna Eubanks Mccoy (@tawnaeubanksmccoy)  Instagram   Related Links/Products Mentioned November Promotion: MAPS Performance ½ off!! **Code “GREEN50” at checkout** Glute Lab: The Art and Science of Strength and Physique Training - Book by Bret Contreras and Glen Cordoza Booty by Bret  EFFECTS OF A SIX-WEEK HIP THRUST VS.FRONT SQUAT RESISTANCE TRAINING PROGRAM ON PERFORMANCE IN ADOLESCENT MALES: A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL Squats Versus Hip Thrusts Part II: The Twin Experiment Winning Rugby Players use Hip Thrusters Critical Mass: The Positions-Of-Flexion Approach to Explosive Muscle Growth - Book by Steve Holman The Colorado Experiment: Fact or Fiction

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, ob-mite, up with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. In this episode of Mind Pump, Brett Contreras came down to the studio, met with us, and we had some amazing conversations. Now this guy is one of the best trainers around. He's known as the Glute guy, the Butt guy. He's popularized and invented. This is according to him and actually believe him. The hip thrust exercise and he's an expert

on developing glutes. This guy's also a scientist. He's a PhD in sports science from AUT University. He's also got a master's degree from Arizona State University. He's a certified strength and conditioning specialist from the National Strength and Conditioning Association. He's the author of Glut Lab,

that's a book all about developing your butt. He also co-authored Bodyweight Strength Training Anatomy, the founder of the Glut Lab, this is his facility where he trains people. And he says he's the shaper of thousands of better butts worldwide. He has the best pics. He probably has the best pictures ever on his phone

from clients sent to him. He also has an awesome eyebrow ring. We loved it, Brett. Anyway, this guy's really smart, super hip. Really cool guy. We consider him one of the foremost authorities on just exercise in general,

but definitely on how to develop better glutes, which is important for athletes, but also if you wanna look awesome, like Justin, Justin's got amazing glutes. Now here's the deal, you can go to BrettContrares' website, it's BrettContrares.com. You can also find him on Instagram, it's a great Instagram page. At bretcontraris number one, so it's the number one,

not number one, but one. Of course, I told you about his book. So we think you can enjoy this episode where we talk all about exercise, training, and of course, developing the glutes. Before the episode starts, so I want to remind everybody that this month, maps performance is 50% off.

This is our functional training performance-based workout program. It's a different workout than what you're used to. If you're bored with the traditional workouts and you want to go to the gym and try different stuff, work on your mobility, move better, work on full spectrum, athletic performance, which then contributes to better muscle gain, better fat loss,

then get maps performance, especially right now because it's half off. Here's what you do to get the discount. Go to mapsgreen.com and use the code green50. That's GRE and 50, no space for the discount. Right before we got on air, we were getting caught up with you, Brett, and you were starting to kind of share your story. And I actually don't know this part of you. I followed your content for quite some time.

I know you're good friends with Lane, Lane's a good buddy of ours. But I didn't know kind of how you got into this space, and you were starting to tell me that you were a math teacher. So how do you transition from being a math teacher to one plus one equals glue to shaping asses for the rest of your life. How did that happen? So I was All right while I was a teacher I was so productive like I the students would make fun of me for how fast I walked but I and I would have like

If I could have I'd always go to the counselor and go can you give me as many TAs as possible? I'd have two TAs for every period. So they were my helpers, because I wanted to spend every spare minute I had reading about fitness. That was my hobby. I would read teenation and all the websites. Well, back then, the website, like web, the web, like, before that I read all muscle mags, and I read all of them every month.

But I never had this When the internet came around Then you had all this new information like all I knew was bodybuilding. So now I'm learning from strength coaches and power lifters and people That I didn't learn from before So I would spend my whole prep period and lunch period reading about strength and conditioning, but it was just as a lifter,

I never planned on doing anything with it. How old are you right now in this time in your life? I'm 43 right now. Back then I was 24 when I first started teaching. Yeah, because you went to school, you got your master's, then you start off teaching. Meanwhile, you're reading all this stuff as a hobby. As a hobby and doing some personal training on the side, but not really making a lot of money from it.

And then I got, during my master's program, my, I turned in a project. She, the professor let us do it on anything we wanted. So I picked exercise science. I didn't have to do it on and she's anyway I turn it in she says Brett I need to you know she called me like what professor ever calls you on the phone right she called me up she says life is too short to waste you have to pursue your passion I have no doubt you're a good math teacher but you really need to go into strength and conditioning you You have your master's degree soon. I can hook you up with community college if you want to be a professor, but you really need to do this.

And then I couldn't stop thinking about this. And then around that same time, a teacher, a friend of mine, we were really close. And she comes into my room after school. And she's like, hey, Brett, would you go to this wedding with me, this guy of a crush on, I wanna make him jealous and you're the perfect guy to do so. And I'm like,

it's good to know to be here. Why is that? She's like, well, you know, you're tall, you're athletic, you're a decent looking guy, you're funny, you're smart. Come to think about your only flaws, you don't make any money. Yeah. Yeah.

And Arizona is like 50, back then it was, I don't know if it still is, but it was like 50th out of 50 states and state funding for education. I mean, I only made back then 29,000 I started out at. Then after six years of teaching in a master's plus 24 credits, I was, I was making a 36,000. And if you worked 30 years and got your PhD, you topped out at 59,000 in Scottsdale School District back then. And I'm like, the most I can hope for is not even make 60 grand.

I need to do something. So the wheel started turning. And then my mom had watched that field of dreams movie with Kevin Costner many times. And she's like, kept telling me if you build it they will come and so I decided I and here's the thing which applies to glutes yeah I'm still very frugal like I don't spend much and because the only things I ever want are I don't spend much. And because the only things I ever want are I don't care about cars. I don't wear fancy clothes.

I don't need to eat at fancy restaurants, but I love strength training equipment. And so- You and Sal will be best friends then. Sounds just like him. Yeah, so I had saved up, so I didn't even making such low money. I still had saved up like 20 grand.

So I put in this big order with Elite FTS and bought all this cool stuff from my garage gym, but it was so cluttered. I actually had room for a whole gym if I expanded. So I opened up a gym in Scottsdale and at that same time, that's when I invented the Barbell Hip Thrust. And I was watching UFC fights. This was October 10th, 2006. It was Tito Ortiz versus Ken Shamrock.

Great fight. It was their third fight. And I didn't care who won. I just wanted, I didn't want it to end so quickly. I didn't want one person just to be embarrassed. And Tito quickly gets in Ken's guard and is just ground impounding him. And I'm like, man, you should be trying to do something.

Like, buck your hips, try and escape. I'm like, I wonder if there'd be an exercise that could strengthen that motion. And I'm like, you can't, I can't be like, hey, Sal, can you straddle me? I'm gonna bust out 50 reps, you know? I mean, you can't say you can, I'll say no. I'll film it if you guys want to do it.

You would consider it. It's a viral potential there. I mean, what if we were alone? I'm not the bucket, I'm the bucketer. Oh, is that true? I don't know about that. So it's like, you need to add load, and then, but also, I darn blue bridges

were popular at the time. All the teen Asian guys were doing it. Eric Cressy, Mike Robertson, Mike Boyle, Mark Verstigian, Martin Rooney was doing glute activation with his pro football players. They, everyone was talking about it. And I would do them, but I'm more of a bodybuilder at heart. I'm like, why would I just do 10 of these

when I could do 100? I want it to be hard. I want it to be heavy or rep to failure, but I don't want to do, I hate high reps. So, at that time, all the names that you just dropped, which are all incredible coaches, they're using it more like a glued activation to kind of prime the glutes.

They're not heavy loading. They're doing just more like a glued activation to kind of prime the glutes. They're not heavy loading. They're doing just glute bridges basically so that the science or the guys that are on it understand the value of it but not to the point of loading it. Not for high precision. Not for high precision. It's more of an accessory lift. No, it's low load glued activation and the point, because if you fatigue the muscles, then you perform worse.

So let's say you could do 100, like all of us could probably do 100 glute bridges. Right. They're using it as a primer, right? They're basically... You do it for sets of tan or something before the workout to prime the muscle and theoretically get more performance. The research is kind of mixed on that. I think it depends on the situation. But anyway, a lot of people swear by it, especially power lifters, they swear or their hips feel better when they do some good activation before they squat.

But anyway, I had tried those movements and I liked them. Just like cable pull-throughs, I remember trying those, but I'd put on the stack and I'm like, God, I could do 30 of these. I need more weight, but I tried pinning an extra plate on there. I'm leaning forward so much and it just didn't feel right, but I'm like, I like that in-range glute squeeze that you get. So let me backtrack. The reason I got obsessed with glute training was because I had none.

Like my back went right into my legs and so... Like a frog and suspenders. like a frog and suspenders. Like a frog and suspenders. So, were people making funny or something? Yeah, so in high school, you know, you go, you're going through puberty

and you're getting interested in women. And I remember seeing these three girls, I had a crush on them. And they're like, let's go watch football practice. I love watching the guys in their football uniforms. I love staring at their butts. And I'm like, oh great, if that's important.

I'm talking to you guys. So instead of making a lot of money, you developed your glutes. I got some bad news for you. They weren't talking about money and how to do it. Not quite gold diggers yet. But yeah, I'm like, great. I'm gonna be a virgin for life as I figure out how to. And I remember going, it was funny because I remember thinking,

okay, I do push-ups for my pecs and like bench press and I have those lines that started, you know. I do curls for my biceps. I wish there were something for my glutes that I could do because no one talked about glutes back then. Like bodybuilders don't have a glute day. You're right. And it was just, in fact, Vince Gerand popularized it

where you didn't want your glutes to grow. You do. Secure it, he would say, because it helps with the V-taper. Yeah, in fact, he banned squats. Yeah, and they do like frog squats. They do like narrow stance duck type. That's all quads stuff. Yeah, like trying to make it more like hack squats

and stuff like that. Heels elevated and up on your toes and stuff. So I think a lot of bodybuilders, it's just some weird tradition. They don't talk about glutes much. So I knew that like squats and delus build your glutes, but I didn't feel them as a 16, 17, 18 year old kid. I just folded like an aqua, I mean, I'm tall.

I didn't have good. Were you like you at the top? Yeah. And I didn't feel them working that well. And had had hip thrust been around, I think I could have fast forward my glute development a lot. But I remember thinking like I wish there was an exercise that really focused on glutes that I could do like a push up where I really felt my glutes that I could do like a push-up where I really felt my glutes working.

But anyway, that, and then also I was playing golf and my sister's boyfriend, we're on the ninth hole, I'm about to swing. And he's like, you know what Brett, I'm looking at you and your back goes right into your legs. It's like you're missing the gluteal muscles and he got all scientific, it's funny. He was not a scientific man.

He was like, most people have a protubrance there and you have nothing. It's just like a stick man. And I'm like, no, but Brett, he's just hitting you. He's just fucking hitting yourself. So I was like, especially scientifically. It's like, come on guy. You wouldn't do that.

Like, you wouldn't do that with, I don't know. I'm like, you know, if someone had a small penis, would you be like, that is crazy, I'm looking at it. I'm like trying to see it, but I don't. It's so minuscule, it's crazy, it's, it barely, what a picture. I need, like barely portrays away from me.

They probably lit the fire though, I guess, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was all it took. Do you send them like blue shots and stuff? You know, because now you're like like you got a big ass now. As a first time notice when you walked in the door. Do you send pictures of them? Your ass now? I actually thank you. I said you in was very close for that. So that's why I became like really into glutes. And so then when I ordered all the lead FTS equipment,

because I was following my big influencers back then were Louis Simmons, Dave Tate, Jim Wemmer, Joe DeFranco, Jason Fruge, all these, that given that, all these guys who had gyms and were like bad asses themselves, like lifted heavy and trained a lot of people. And smart guys too.

Yeah, and so I bought, the equipment that I bought was all like this power rack slash platform with every bell and whistle that you could ever want, like all the attachments, and then all these specialty bars and a 45-degree hyper or reverse hyper, a glute ham developer, a prowler. So I had all this awesome glute training equipment. When I thought up the hip thrust, I didn't think of putting a barbell in your lap right away.

I thought of putting a dip belt underneath you, suspended with weights, and putting your feet way up high. Sure. And it took a while to go, oh God, you could just do that off a bench. Yeah. It seems so obvious. But here's another side note. Nowadays, whenever I say I invented the bar by hip thrust, it's so weird.

It's the same thing as, like, later today, I'll have 800,000 followers on Instagram. I have 799 right now. And if I post on my feed, thank you guys so much. $800,000. This is so amazing. I'm so humbled. Like I will lose like 2000 followers. So then it's awkward because I'm like, thank you for 800. And then it's like you look and it's thanks. I'll be back. So I don't post that anymore. It's weird. It's like if you draw attention to it, people unfollow you.

And if I say I invented the Barbarale Hip-Drust, all these people go crazy. And they're, I mean, I just, like they disagree with you. Like they want to claim it or? So they say it's been done since the 60s. My dad's been doing this since since the 1960s, and I always say, that's amazing. I'm actually a strength and conditioning historian. I study the history. So if this was being done, I want to tell people about it.

Do you have any picture or any video from prior to 2006 because I want to spread the word? I'll tell all my platforms, and they always go, no, we weren't carrying around cameras. I'm like, but you can find any black and white picture of dips, bench press, incline press, military press. At the very least, at the very, very, very least, you popularized it.

Nobody talked about it, nobody popularized it at the very, very least. But look, I'm a historian when it comes to fitness too and you're right. I never saw anybody do a hip thrust with the barbell for hypertrophy. They were doing lots of hip bridges Oh, yeah, everywhere now. Yeah, now you see it all over the place

I don't know if you knew this but I am into curls Yeah, nobody did curls before show. No, I'm just kidding I would love to I mean I wouldn't feel bad being like no way they were actually doing this in You know India and you know at 1920s or whatever. Because I'd still be credited for popularizing it, but I'm pretty confident that no one will find a picture of video because before I ever started writing articles for like teen Asian.

You probably were searching and researching, and I would have been. I searched for, okay, it doesn't sound like a lot, but a whole week of my life, but like 12 hours a day. I searched Google, I searched, I read through every one of my, you know, like Zach Zersky and Sif and Ferko Shonsky and all those Russian texts and Google, like I go. Well, even even even even Olympic lifters and power

lifters you found no evidence. No, I found no evidence. So I'm pretty confident. Maybe they did it, but they just don't want to tell anybody. They're embarrassed. It's a big surprise. It's a big surprise. It's because of the hip thrust. It's a huck of a hurry.

That's it. That's it. I was just the first guy comfortable with it. Yeah. It's secure with yourself. It's secure. Fuck it. I want to put this out. It's too good.

Do you find now that when you walk around and stuff, people just stare at your butt? Because you're the glue guy. Do you feel a little bit like this? Well, here's the thing. I don't have, I mean, here's what I try to convey to people. Like, so much of this is genetics. And, you know, some of these girls with the greatest butts, you never know, maybe they have the Brazilian butt lift or something, but also some of them just don't even have to do much.

Yeah. You know, when I give seminars, I always show Jen's shelter and and I show her workout that was on bodybuilding.com. Like they tagged her. So if it was wrong, dog peas and like it's that. I mean, it's like, well, it's, when I do it, it's hilarious because like two of the exercise are hip flexion. They're like kicks, like squat in kick.

Like chair kicks, like that's hip flexion, not hip extension, but it's like 10 reps, two, like one set of 10 with like eight exercises, it's basically a glow load glue activation workout. So, so you, you have a girlfriend now, wife? No, nothing. I'm gonna say because I have a girlfriend, but not a wife. Okay, so you have a girlfriend. So is it awkward that you have, like, probably 10,000 ass pictures on your phone. I'm sure that your athletes send you their ass pics all the time. Yeah, well, before and after.

It takes a strong woman to date me because. Well, I think you take a strong woman to date any trainer. I've always said, if you're a trainer and you're a route, you're gonna be a round women all the time. But I can just imagine this guy's phone getting lit up with a gray, look at my progress. I'm gonna progress, yeah.

Yeah, it's in a thong and I mean, or whatever. Well, what's funny is, I mean, even people, you know, especially like, like there's certain countries where they just has a lot of creepy dudes that write you that are like, how do you not have an erection all day long? They're a glute lab or how do you, yeah, and like, I imagine if you were a balancer at a strip club you just become in you and do it. Yeah, I see this all day long. I've been training the best but for a lot of years now and it doesn't even phase me and honestly you You start seeing a lot of the

Top like a lot of the a lot of the top, like a lot of influencers who have huge followings, men and women, they're so egotistical. And it's so, ugh. There is no substance to them, it's such a turn off. I just assume, you know, and then I meet someone, for example, Lauren Simpson, I follow her, she's from Australia, I met her, she's so smiling and so happy and genuine and real and it's like, oh, this breath of fresh air, but I assume that they're interesting.

Yeah, I was one of the things that we found when we first got into space because by no means were any of us in any sort of celebrities or in big on any other platforms, like it just kind of organically grew for us. And as a show grew, we started to get more and more of these people that came on that had a million followers or 400,000. And I would, I remember we first started, we were so excited to meet some of these people, that much influence and they've grown their page and their networked that much.

And a lot of times, there are, there, there, well, that's a, that's a way, that's one way to put it. A lot of times there are nothing like what's being presented. And we actually started talking about stay authentic. We actually trademarked that a couple of years back because we thought that that would be something that you're gonna hear more and more of

over the course of the next four or five years because we're learning this ourselves just the last couple of years. And I think that we're gonna see this kind of pendulum swing of these people that get so much respect and credibility just because they have 400,000 followers because their body is starting to, people are starting to figure out

that they're not all what they present online. And I think that's gonna be an interesting swing that we're going to see because when we first got in the space, man, the people that are reaching the millions of people aren't the best you know, are the best communicating the best information out there, which is a lot of the motivation that we had to start this podcast was to highlight people like yourself, like the Lane Norton's, a lot of the names that you were name dropping earlier. Yeah, Joe to Frank goes J's like people putting out really good Information but nobody knows because they're not the best at Instagram. You know the best at posting

PIP photos they get attention, you know, I've seen it's it's kind of sad like I've seen all my Like the people I kind of idolized and they didn't embrace Instagram and When it first came out, I didn't want to do Instagram. I mean, I waited a while, but it was my twin brother who told me, Brett, you got to get on Instagram. And I'm like, Joe, I don't do social media for fun. Like, I'm a businessman and I do Facebook, I do Twitter, I do YouTube, I blog, I have a newsletter.

That's it. And if Instagram could make me money, I would do it, but you can't link things. And he's like, just trust me. It's the wave of the future. And I'm like, and it's so crazy because a few years later I abandoned. I don't do Facebook, I don't do Twitter, don't do YouTube, don't blog, don't,

I think I send a newsletter out once every couple months now. I need to get back into that. But I'm doing so well on Instagram. It's like my main, and now I'm nervous. What are the algorithms, James? But that's a reminder of why I think you got to be a little bit older. As I mentioned, I'm 43.

You got to have some perspective. So I lived through the housing market crash of 2007, whenever that was when I just opened up my gym. My gym was killing it. And I was like, oh my God, I'm going to be making six figures in like two more months. And then the housing market crash and all my clients were like, Brett, this is the best part of my day. It's the only thing I look forward to.

But I have to, my husband just lost his job. Our kid is more trying to put him through college. I have to quit. I'd be like, I totally understand. But through no fault of my own, the whole plaza went under at that time. And I was forced to figure something else out. And then when Facebook's algorithms change, I remember going, what is it going on? Like, I used to get, I'd post my blog, a blog post on the Facebook, choose the thumbnail.

You'd get like 2,000 likes and 500 shares. And then all of a sudden you're getting like 300 likes and 30 shares. And I'm like, this isn't fun anymore. So I know they were, I could have figured something out and started advertising there. But it was like an ego thing. I don't want to advertise. I liked that before they tweaked that, you could, and what I liked back then is as a scientist I had power.

If someone was saying some BS, I could write a blog post to counter them, and it would go viral through, through, just stay out of it, and it goes viral because people want to know that, but then after they tweaked with things, and so I always know now, nothing is forever. Things will change five years from now.

Things will be different, and that's why you got to stay humble because, yeah, take away everyone's Instagram followers. And yeah. Well, now speaking to, I want to kind of jump in, you're talking about science. I want to get into the science. Like, you found this new way to develop your glutes, right? Did you immediately then take that and pit it up against the old squat and kind of like see,

you know, which one had the most effect and, and you know, what sort of results were you seeing? So looking back now that I'm a better scientist, and by the way, I should mention that that I'm a better scientist. And by the way, I should mention that still to this day, I consider myself a lifter first, then a personal trainer, then a scientist. But I love science. I always have, even as a kid, looking back, you can always look back at the things I did wrong, or things I should have done better. What I did was I was, I just decided, okay, I'm going to start blog blogging. All right, I'll start writing articles like crazy, but I have no revenue coming in. You know, I need to make some money. So the only thing I did is I wrote an ebook and that was the my only revenue source and I never even promote, I don't think I ever promoted it on social media was just in the corner of

my blog. This was 2009. So I wrote this ebook and I had all these theories as to which exercises grew your glutes the best and which categories. I wanted to, all of a sudden it occurred to me like, I could test this, I could learn EMG and coincidentally, Iraqis and headquarters, they're not in Iraqis and make EMG equipment. They just so happened to be a mile away from me where I lived. Like everywhere in the world, they were in Scottsdale, right where I lived. So I went to them and I'm like, can you teach me how to do this? They're like, yeah, no problem. And they taught me, they're different now.

The company's very different now. But back then, they just trained me for free. And I learned how to do it. And I spent like three months of my life. I was like pretty much when my clients were done for the day, I'd lock the doors, strip down to my underwear, throw on electrodes, and... Go ahead and have a party.

Yeah, have a party. And I learned so much at that time. Last weekend. However, it's funny, because I always, you know how you talked about the pendulum swing. So I started posting a lot about EMG, and my friend Brad Schoenfeld did too. And then I think this pendulum swung the other way and one of them was my intern Andrew Vagatsky. He wrote a couple of publish a couple of articles

talking about how EMG does not infer increased motor unit recruitment. It does not infer hypertrophy. And I was on those papers with him and I agree with it, but I also think people then you see people go, EMG doesn't mean anything, it's stupid. And I'm like, no, it's-

I was just gonna ask you about that actually, because I remember reading the first EMG, I think it was a book, I think it was called, I think it was called Magged to Muscle or something like that. I remember with the title of it, it was a long time ago, I can't even find it anymore. That might have been, was that with, that might have been MRI with purr, tash, or something like that?

I don't remember. Reactivation, but it was with MRI. Something like it was a long time ago. Yeah. It was in the 90s. Purr, tash, yeah. I was a kid. I was like my teens.

And it would say some things about certain exercises like decline bench press activates upper chest more than incline press or reverse grip. And I remember thinking like this doesn't make sense at all, especially when you look at the thousands of anecdotes and the years and years and years of people training. And then the experience you have when you train that I don't think that's true. When I do this exercise, I see where I develop.

So what does EMG then show if it doesn't necessarily show motor, you know, you know, motor recruitment or hypertrophy? EMG is a voltage meter. It's just measuring the electrical juice to the muscles. But what you just said is very important because what I, all right, it's just like I don't like when coaches are like screw the science, I am the science, I am the research, no, no, you're not. Like, when one of our clients sees good results, it could be from what we think it is,

but it's not a controlled setting. It could also be, I see that a lot with powerlifters. There's a lot of individual verification. When I started doing, you know, one arm rose, my deadlift went up, but also you also start doing trend and like yeah yeah or you just got more consistent all of a sudden you're not controlling variables you know so that's why research is important but I I think it's even more egregious because scientists are supposed to know

better when they act like the only evidence on this planet is published research. Beautiful. And it's like, that assumes that everything's been researched and in sports science, in strength training science, the funding goes to things that are endangering lives, diabetes, obesity, things like that. We don't get much funding. And also, so we have these low sample sizes. We have short studies. And you have a little bit of a self-selection bias. You know, 10 college aged males, you know. Yeah, it's because that's the subjects you get at a university. A lot of times it's your, if you're in a PhD cohort times it's your if you're if you're in a PhD cohort. It's your five friends Your nine friends and you all do each other studies with each other and I remember I mean that some of the best science came out of

The former Soviet Union when the you know the iron curtain fell because they they funded a lot of studies on Exercise and what works and what doesn't work. But that was like, they really cared about winning Olympic. They're motivated. And so, but you take everything with a grain of salt. And that's, God, I wish I had in my book, I have this, I wish I had in front of me, because I talk about like the different different forms of like how you would figure out if an exercise is good Here are the different ways, okay? you can you can

Do a bunch of sets and see where you're sore the next day you can do do do some high reps and see where you feel the burn and get a pump you can You can palpate while someone's doing it, see what muscles get the hardest. You can, and like throughout the range of motion where sometimes things shift and stuff, you can perform EMG to get a mathematical quantity of how much activation. And then there's also,

you can use things like ultrasound, MRI, things like that to also get kind of like measures of activation or muscle thickness changes. But anyway, you can kind of perform a functional analysis where you analyze the movement and look at the direction of the fibers and the attachment points and see logically with this, you know, and then you can talk to other coaches and lifters and get their feedback of what they think, what they feel, what they've noticed. And then finally, you have like longitudinal training studies where this was done for 12 weeks.

Here's the effects that it had on these things. But really what you want to do is use all those. You never abandon how you would, you're thinking like a scientist there because you're like decline. I don't think it works more upper pecs. And that depends on the study, by the way. But back then, they didn't have, like when you read that. Yeah, the MRI showed activation of upper chest was higher in a decline.

But sometimes you can get, with EM EMG and that's a pitfall. It doesn't show you the stretch. So like there's a right there's a lot of factors that go into and you know. That's why with EMG it would be effective if you look at similar range of motion. Like let's say you did a lap pull down where your hands were close together. You have this huge arc of motion and you go from fully stretched overhead to touching the top of your chest. And then you do really, really wide grip where it's going to be half the range of motion, but it might activate the lat's more,

but what grows your lat's? Well, ultimately what we want to know is what grows your latats more and I've never seen a longitudinal study on that. So we have EMG to give us clues, but then we have to say, well, are all things controlled and we're not controlling it. And that's a lot of things in the literature like that. In fact, when I defend in my thesis, God, I had this total hate around me,

reviewing my PhD. I thought I wasn't going to get it. Two of them were like, this is the best, one of the best feces I've ever seen. And this other was like, God, he just hated my work. He said, there's nothing novel about this. And I'm like, what?

It's looking at the hip thrust. It's the first evidence on the hip thrust. It's exploring the force vector hypothesis. I also thought of a new way to use a force plate where you stand on it and pushing against a wall to measure horizontal forces, not just vertical forces in the case of like an isometric mid-dipole. So it's way more novel than like, I mean, obviously I'm biased, but it's one of the most novel PhDs of any way.

He was saying, why didn't saying, we had this big argument, and my supervisor was like, it was amazing watching you duel. It was like two men with swords, but I can't, I had to be very respectful. But he was saying, you should have normalized the hip range of motion between a squat and a hip thrust. And I'm like, and you sing all these things.

And I'm like, okay, that's the kind of things that coaches read it. And they're like, that's stupid. Because you what you should do a deep squat. That's the way people do it. You know, if I would in a partial squat, everyone would have been pissed. Or they don't, you don't, you do it. You want ecological validity. So you do it how the first study in my opinion should

always be how it's done in the gym. Yes. In fact, here's what I found during my studies. So you do it how the first study in my opinion should always be how it's done in the gym. In fact, here's what I found during my studies. The hip thrust, compared to a squat, okay? So it's funny. And this is a good example for the listeners of different types of evidence. If you look at my EMG study from my thesis, that one is actually published in the Journal of Applied Biomechanics, If you look at my EMG study from my thesis,

that one is actually published in the Journal of Applied Biomechanics, you would come up, you would say the hip thrust is the superior exercise out of the two because, well, what muscles did I look at? Upper glutes, lower glutes, hamstrings, or biceps, femoris, vastus, lateralis. So quads, quads, hamies, and glutes, okay? And it showed that quad activity was actually pretty similar

into a squat. The squat was superior, but not significantly. And then hamstring and glute activity was superior in a hip thrust. But then again, would it be better for quadipertrophy? No, it's mostly, it's like a quasi-isometric. The knee doesn't move through much range of motion. So the squat will build the quads much better.

We don't have a training study for that, but what we know as lifters, the squats would be better for the quads. Now, but then we looked at another study. I looked at used motion capture and force plate, and we found that the squat utilized more range of motion and also way more eccentric force. So what people do in a hip thrust is they come up and then they kind of like gravity come, you know, especially when they touch down.

They'll just kind of like a deadlift where you just let it gravity do most of it. When you take out the moment like you take out the inertia with a squat, you're only using 10% less force on the way down compared to the way up in a hip thrust. You're only using a third of the eccentric force compared to the concentric force. So because of the low eccentric component in the hip thrust, it got lower, lower total power, impulse, all these things, unless you separate into its concentric and eccentric constituents. But then if you looked at that study, you'd be like, wow, the squat is markedly superior. It also takes longer to perform a repetition because the longer range of motion and the slow lowering, so you get more time under tension.

So you look at that paper and you're like, okay, the squat is better. So if it was EMG, you'd say the hip thrust is better. Well, ultimately, those are called mechanistic studies. They're cross-sectional studies. They're quick. I like these studies because I geek out over the mechanisms and the biomechanics, but ultimately you need a training study then.

And we need a training study looking at hypertrophy. Right now we can just speculate, I would take the hip thrust, other people might take the squat. We need one of those to take place. The problem with hypertrophy studies is, oh gosh, you need a big sample, you know, genetics, you die it. You need a big sample, but also like people will take,

okay, glute, girth, they like, tape measure, you could just gain fat and that would show increase your growth. You can use ultrasound is really hard for the glutes. For certain muscles, like the biceps, it's like you see, because I bought an ultrasound machine, you see like fat, muscle, fat bone, or like sorry, fat muscle bone, you can see the fascia. It's like this is how thick the muscle is. You just measure it with the glutes. There's no bone underneath. You're looking at fascial borders and it's, some people it's really hard to detect.

So with MRI is what you really need. MRIs run about 1.5 million. I want to buy an MRI machine one day, but I gotta save a lot of money for it. That's for down the road. You know what I like about you besides your eyebrow piercing? It is my favorite part. Is that you're a trainer.

You sound like a trainer. And the reason why I say that is, as a trainer, often times you go with the literature and science, and other times you go with what actually happens in the real world. And so you'll see a study and you'll be like, okay, that's nice. I can see, like, for example,

I had a debate with Lane about artificial sweeteners. And he talks about artificial sweeteners are great to help people lose weight. And as well as studies show they don't help at all, it's probably because people replace them with other foods, which is why I don't recommend them. He goes, well, when they're controlled and I said, the average person doesn't track everything,

in which case, and that's just my experiences or trainer, I know in the real world, you can show me all the studies you want in the real world, you have someone just replace their sugary sodas and they end up filling it with something else, which is why I don't use it. And when it comes to training and exercise, there's a lot of muscle building wisdom

that's out there that we still have yet to support with science. Here's a good one. It's common knowledge, I would say, or common wisdom that free weights for the most part for most people build more muscle mass, the machines. Studies show that when you talk about activation and all that stuff, that shouldn't be true. Do you have any theories as to why that may be or do you even agree with that in the first place? That's such a good question. But real quick, I do want to finish off, so let me finish that and then I'll be, this is an important question to me. So I, it's one of my passions,

so I want to get to this. But with my PhD, the final study, well, two studies, I did a case study looking at a pair of twins, and then I also did a study using rugby players. And these showed differential functional performance effects from the squat and the hip thrust. The squat appears to be better at developing your vertical jump and your squat strength, whereas the hip thrust appears to be better at horizontal pushing strength, pushing people forward, and also horizontal jump and sprinting. Interesting. So any logical person would go, okay, you should play do in both.

And it's probably because the squat strengthens the quads more and deep ranges of hip flexion. Whereas the hip thrust strengthens more in range, hip extension. So you need both to kind of develop the full spectrum, glute strength, whatever. But anyway, so that's what's cool is like you had, I had the EMG, I had the force plate, I had the twin K study, and then I had the training study. Even then, that's just on adolescent male rugby players. Does that apply to, so you need, in a perfect world, we'd have 50 studies on every topic, like you just asked about free weights versus machines. We'd have 50 studies looking at different types of machines, looking at different populations,

looking at elderly, looking at bodybuilders, looking at young, and men, women, different anthropometries, and you'd even have review papers and meta-analyses on it to give us real good guidelines. We rarely ever have that. And so, here's what I'll say about machines. I grew up as a strength coach. I have my CSCS. I call myself a strength coach, even though I think, really, to be a strength coach. I have my CSCS. I call myself a strength coach,

even though I think really to be a strength coach, you should be a strength coach for a team. I just like to call myself that because personal trainer gets boring, but now I'm more proud to be a personal trainer, but I think for a while you wanted to be more than that. And I grew up in that world, free weights are best. Now I kind of think that

it's a bias that we have because we are gyms are mostly free weight and we don't want to think that we could because the machines cost like three to five grand a pop and no one has a space and you don't want to spend, I mean you have to spend an extra hundred grand and have this giant facility. So you want to think you're doing your clients the best service. Here's a thing, there's different types of machines. Number one, the leg extension. Obviously, if you just did leg extensions and another group did squats, the squad is going to greatly up. They're going to grow more quad. They're also going to have more performance benefits. Now, here's what people, a lot of people don't know. The leg extension is better at activating the rectus femoris. When you look at extension is better at activating the rectus femoris.

When you look at certain two joint muscles, like the rectus femoris, the hamstrings, during a squat, the rectus femoris would create hip flexion, but you're trying to do hip extension. The hamstrings would create knee flexion, but you're trying to create knee extensions. So, the brain knows this and only activates the muscle at around 20% of maximum capacity. It would be foolish of the brain to say, I'm going to turn on full juice to my rec fam and my hamstrings because you'd be playing tug-a-war. The quads would be playing tug-a-war with the hammies. So that's why the leg extension is valuable. It's also valuable for higher reps to put some people like warming up with them.

So I love all, I'm a biomechanics geek. I love all tools. But free weights, obviously, like my book that I just wrote, it's just almost all free weights. Now you guys have a lever squat out there in your facility that I noticed, okay? I measured the EMG activity of that and it's very similar.

Here's the, so here's how, as a scientific person, here's how you generate a hypothesis, you'd say, look, on the one hand, free weights requires a little bit of stability, and like a barbell squat is stable compared to like standing on a bosu ball or single leg, but it does require stability, whereas the machine stabilizes it for you, okay? Some people kind of get fear when they do barbell squats

and you know, especially when going super heavy or trying one more rep to failure. I make my clients fail like in the power rack or dump the bar Just so they can get used to it. Really. It's not that big of a deal But initially people are very scared of that. They don't want to push in a machine You're not quite as scared you might be able to push harder. You might feel more comfortable You could if you take away your bias is what you've learned you could make a good case for either one and we

Think about this you have this stability continuum. And all the straight coaches and physical therapists, or sorry, personal trainers know that unstable surface training isn't best for building muscle. So unstable is bad, but then machines are too stable. So there's a sweet spot in the middle where it's mostly here, like our barbells, the perfect amount of stability, or are wrong here's the thing all the studies will look

at a squat compared to a leg press or a squat compared to a leg extension or a stiff leg deadlift versus a leg curl I want to see studies looking at a squat compared to a plate loaded squat squat machine because a plate loaded it's awesome yeah well there's no research on that, and then I'll really form a good opinion. Here's a good example of why I'm just kind of reiterating what you're saying about the grain of salt thing. There was for a long time, we were told, don't wear a weight belt when squatting because it reduces the activation of the core.

Then studies come out showing, no, your core is activated just as much with the belt. So, then everybody's like, where a belt all the time. Now, I'm a personal trainer and as a trainer, I know it's different activation. When I'm squatting with a belt, my abs are pushing out against the belt to create stability. When I'm squatting without the belt, it's bracing and creating a different type of stability, which one's more applicable to real life, obviously squatting without the belt, it's bracing and creating a different type of stability, which one's more applicable to real life, obviously squatting without a belt. So using the lever squat, for example, you're going to see similar activation, still not the same.

And then comparing the leg extension, if you train to up most failure and intensity with the leg extension, it's still not going to build the quads as much as a barbell squat. Why is that? Like why as a barbell squat. Why is that? Why is a barbell squat? The barbell squat has more vastest lateralis activation. Okay. And I think you can't maximize it on. It's got to be something where the knees go.

Yeah, so it's going to toes a little bit or travel forward. And that's how you get maximum, in my opinion. Well, then why would it, okay, how about this? So you just use the, you'd really use the like extension to build the rec film. Right. But like with me, you can't even see my rec film that much because I'm not, you know, in bodybuilders that don't matter,

you know. Sure. What about, like a compound movement versus an isolation movement, like why would a fly, not build my pecs as much as a bench press, for example. And when I could stress the pecs, yeah, yeah. Maximally, what is it about compound movements?

Well, what is the CNS? I mean, where does the CNS come into play here as the value that you get from training? Yeah, I think the reason why free weights work so well or compound movements work so well is because, because I've thought a lot about this like What if you had one group one group does mostly compounds and then another group does the same amount of Volume the same well it would be hard you almost need more volume because you need a single joint movement to make up for every

But they just did single joint movements working the same muscle groups The thing is the compounds work so many additional muscles. You're in one shot. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think you forget about that. I also said a deadlift. How many, like I remember putting electrodes on my lats. I mean, I don't feel like I did a lap workout after my deadlift.

So I don't like not like when I do deadlift. Deadlifting built my back more than anything else in my career. But they got sky high like they got like almost Maximall with deadlift so then think about all the traps the rhomboids the There's so many muscles that get worked there some kind of irradiation effect then if you're gonna get a louder signal from more muscles involved The second and like effect like the overall growth. I don't think so like a fact like the overall growth? I don't think so. Like Stu Phillips, this researcher did a good job

of showing, for example, that you can do, like say you have leg press versus leg extensions. The leg press will, because it's more compound, generates a higher testosterone growth home on response, but it doesn't affect the, we used to always say this back, you probably, you guys probably said it to people, and I did it.

In my first gym, I had a piece of paper that I gave to Elga Flyer, that I gave to every person. It was like, you want your arms to grow squat. It jacks up your testosterone growth hormone so you grow muscle everywhere, and that's actually not true. I was bro-sizing the shit out of them. So, it doesn't make the biceps grow.

Yes, you have this transient increase in hormones, but it didn't make the... What about the studies with people where they have them do, they'll do exercises on one arm and find, obviously, most of the muscle gain and strength happening in that arm, but they see a little bit on the other arm too. Yeah, the cross-education effect. Yeah. Obviously, most of the muscle gain and strength happening in that arm, but they see a little bit on the other arm too. Yeah, the cross-education effect. Yeah. And most of the studies are with strength,

but I found one or two of them that showed hypertrophy or like less atrophy on the other side. So I think it has to do with just the loud, the louder the signal, or maybe I'm using the wrong terms, but I think it has to do with just how the body's Activating and the way it evolved to activate you know the body and by the way I'm not making a case to say that isolation movements don't have value I think they have a lot of value but the body didn't evolve to move in isolation

It was move it was evolved to move all together and very efficient kind of ways and I think the body just responds overall efficient kind of ways. And I think the body just responds overall better to that than it does to isolation. I think the best approach is a combination of both. But I'll give you another example. You know, you could test this over and over again. You could squeeze something that measures grip strength. Keep the rest of your body completely relaxed and squeeze as hard as you can. You won't squeeze as hard as when you tense up the rest of your body. It's like this. You you're talking about your radiation that has research behind it.

Also, what's funny with grip strength, the way you look has a effect on that. I don't know that you look, the opposite way your grip is strong, and it's focused on that. Yeah, really? Yeah. So if you look away from it, you can squeeze harder. Yes. I think it probably has to do with maybe like the neural tracks

and the neck and things that, but you're talking about something that is well documented in your radiation. But this is why I love biomechanics. Let's think about a bench press versus a fly. With the fly of the dumbbells overhead, you come down, you come down, you get a nice stretch. That's probably, that stimulus is probably equal

to what you get in a bench press in terms of the bottom of the fly or more. It's probably similar to what you get in a bench and then you come up, you come up and then once you're about halfway up, the tension, the moment arm diminishes and now, you almost shouldn't even do the top half of the movement. Then you come down, then as a set, and this is where you need to have experience. As a set starts going on, you kind of like you find yourself shortening the lever. Yeah, you maneuver and you don't quite get when you do a bench press and some people

don't feel their pecs much in a bench press. Sure. But I always have. But anyway, when you do a bench, it's just a good exercise. And that's one of my problems, like in my book that I just wrote, I categorize exercise like horizontal hip extension versus vertical. And I say that horizontal is better for this. And the hard thing about that is really I'm talking about hip thrust because they're a good exercise. You can't just take any horizontal

like a pull through, like a band pull through. If you were to band it pull through, you only feel it at the top, you feel nothing. It's just a squeeze. It's just a squeeze, it's a kind of crummy movement. So you have to just look at the exercise itself and think I think bench press would grow the pecs better, but obviously bench press will also grow the front delts, the triceps better.

Overall, it's just a better exercise. And getting a way more, and then, but it might have to do with, like, why you get more out of compounds is because, there's, yeah, and this is what's hard. The research is really confusing on this is the volume research out there. I'm on a paper with my friends Brad Shonfield

and James Krieger showing that we did up to 48 sets per week for the muscles and they saw better results. Now there's other studies coming out showing that if you do five to 10 sets is optimal doing 15 to 20 sets if you go to failure greatly diminishes your results. That's what we talk about. That's one training of failure. So it's like how do you look at this research and how do you make sense of it all? I think when you do too much volume, and I don't think this was ever a problem.

I think a lot of people, when I write about, because I caution people on doing too much volume and people are like, what are you talking about? Because they don't know the DMs we get from these spazes out there that think they should be training four hours a day. And they don't understand that a lot of people really overdo it. like you've got the sedentary people who need to be more active Yeah, we have two extremes. Yeah exactly

And that's what's really tough to communicate for all of us who's like and we always I always say depends Yeah, depends on who I'm talking to am I talking to the kid? I can't ever motivate to get to the gym or am I talking to the fitness fanatic that will do whatever I say and we'll go Above and beyond and to take I talking to the fitness fanatic that will do whatever I say and go above and beyond. And to take it back to the fly, I understand that the fly doesn't have much tension once you pass a certain point because you're not fighting gravity directly, whereas with a bench press it's continual. But in that case, then the argument would be made that a cable fly, then should be just

as good. But the cable fly doesn't get you as much in the stretch. It would depend on, because the moment arm would be dependent on the angle of the cables at the bottom and you'd have it, it wouldn't be as great so that the dumbbell fly would get you more attention at the bottom. The cable pect, well, the cable fly would get you more at the squeeze and then theoretically a pect deck because because the torque would pass through the center of the shoulder joint should be equal through the full range.

The problem with that is we're not as strong. You have your internal muscle moment arms and that affects the strength that you have throughout your range of motion. That's why they invented cams to kind of mimic the human strength curve and make it more familiar with the body. But even with cams to kind of mimic the human strength curve and make it more I like it with the body, but even even with cams, because that that was interestingly a huge problem with the NSEA back in the day. You had

Nautilus funding. So they'd have ads in the JSCR, the Journal of Strength and Ignition Research, actually it was I think it was the NSE journal. And then you'd have these researchers like Mike Stone and William Kramer being like, because Arthur Jones was the inventor of Nautilus and he would be saying, because theoretically it makes sense. He'd be saying,

Barbos can't make you have constant tension through the full range of motion. Like a squad is hard at the bottom and then it's easy at the top. You can invent a machine where there has a cam that makes it the right plan to strength curve. Well, did you guys ever use that strive equipment back in the day?

Yeah, you could change it. Like that leg curl, I would put like a 25 on the top peg, a 45 on the bottom peg and a 45, and that was like the perfect, it felt so smooth for me. And I'm like, this is amazing. But I think studies still show, even when you mimic the human strength curve, you do see better results with barbell,

with performance. Now with muscle mass, and now a new study just came out just like two weeks ago showing that a lying squat machine led to better performance benefits than barbell squats. It's the first ever to show this and people flipped out on my friend Brad on Twitter, or what he posted, like,

because it wasn't trained subjects. But I think we need to, I think we need to be more chill out on machines. And let me give you a case study example for me. People hate the Smith machine, okay? I actually love the Smith machine. And I remember my eyes opened to it when, this is before the day. I really love the Smith machine. And I remember my eyes opened to it when,

this is before the day. It's all right. We talked shit about the strip machine. I can't wait for this round. Good, good, good. So, I remember reading, even some of my colleagues, Eric Cressy was basically wrote that article. The only thing it's good for is maybe doing inverted rows or a coat rack.

But I don't like him. But I remember watching this was back when I think it was a tape. I don't even think it was a DVD. It was a video tape. It was this Brent Mikesell. He was, I think the first guy to squat 1200 back, I don't even, this must have been like the year like 2002 maybe or something like that, or, you know, I bought his tape

and he would do his squats and then he'd do Smith machine squats. And so I was like, huh, but I watched the way he did him. And as a scientist, I could say, okay, if I stood on a force plate and you put, okay, if you put your feet way ahead of yourself in the Smith machine, you're kind of doing it more like a hex squat. That's right. Yeah. Okay. But what if you put your feet, you, if you notice next time you

squat, you unwracked the bar and you're kind of leaning forward just a little bit. In fact, I remember Dan Green, I was watching him in a seminar and he's like, I like to lean forward just a little bit because when you get to the bottom, you're going to be leaning anyway. Why not start off that way so that when you're at the bottom, it's not so dramatic of a, you just kind of start there. And I adopted that. So if you set up in a Smith machine with your feet underneath you and a little bit of a lean, and then you go down and come back up,

you can argue that Smith machine takes out the inter-oppostioriior balance component of it, but you can measure on a force plate how much antroposterior forces there are. And if you set it up like a regular squad, you would have such minimal, so then you're like, then why do it when I just squat? Well, when I started doing Smith Machine squats,

I liked the way they felt, it was a little bit different, but I actually felt like they forced me to be, because I'm six foot four. I lean. I'm like laying. I'm a leaner. I mean, I remember when I got my good morning to exceed my squat at one point. When I did Westside training, my good morning got to 405 and my squat was 405. So I have this incredible ability to like lean forward in good morning, my squats. So the Smith machine made me stay a little more upright. But it still looked like my squat.

So I decided to do a, I think it was a six or eight week, just Smith machine squats. But I also did Smith machine hip thrust and deadlifts. Now, my deadlift strength went way down. I ended up losing like 30 pounds off my deadlift, losing like 50 pounds off my hip thrust because they're very biomechanically different. But my squat strength, I actually set a PR. Not even squatting at all.

I did tons of Smith machine squats, and I felt my quads getting stronger, and then I remember, because I hadn't performed a squat in six or eight weeks. And I got on the barbell and I was like, oh, this feels I feel a little bit wobbly. I still set a PR. But people don't, when they talk about the Smith machine, they mean you put your feet forward. The bottom line is is what you said earlier. It depends. People who want a lean, lean, I used it, it forced me to stay more upright. I liked it, I set it up like my actual squat,

and it benefited me. All exercises are tools. And if you find the right use for the tool, they work really well. Some of them have far more uses, a barbell squat, or just a squat in general for the average population, phenomenal exercise.

As long as you do it right, it's a phenomenal exercise. Smith machine squat, probably not gonna be applicable to as many people, but again, if it's a novel stimulus, if it's the right person, it can produce tremendous results. But I still go back to, and this is something I don't know if we'll ever be able to explain away through science. That's for some reason free weights, like a machine curl.

I don't care what machine curl you do unless it's novel and it's new. Just doesn't bill biceps like a Barbara or dumbbell curl. And this is based by the way on my experience training, thousands of clients, either directly through proxy through other trainers. and through my own experience. I have no studies to support this. So there's a lot of that kind of stuff, and this is what I like about fitness right now is that you get science coming out,

but then you've got the old wisdom that you're coming through and saying, well, why is it this stuff? What I don't like about all of us, as quote unquote experts, debating these types of topics is the average consumer gets really lost in the weeds. They hear a statement like, this is better than that.

And then what I know from behavior, from training all these people, they hear that. And now all they do is that. And what I think we would all agree on, no matter which study shows that this is better than that, all of it together and intermittently or phased, you know, and actually working through all of it is most ideal, which what happens to the average person. And I remember being a young kid who was learning all this information, I would read an article or read a study, holy shit, this is the best for that. Then what would I do?

That's all I did for the next six months to a year. And what we know is that if you did that for a good six to eight, maybe 12 weeks, that's great. But then the returns on that sort of diminish, and a more ideal situation would be moving to another movement or exercise similar, but different, right? Even like the EMG studies, they look at a specific muscle at a specific region. Did you have a strip of electrodes over the entire muscle? Could it be that maybe the seated row works a certain

portion of lap more than the pull down? Could it be that seated rows build your rhomboids and traps, mid traps better than the lap pull down? Or, you know, like we need to look at all, like, you all, everybody builder always did a variety of exercise. In fact, for my one minute video, the Instagram tip for you guys out there, I said, you see this, males do this all the time. They're like, they see a woman doing like a cable kick back and they're like, quit doing those stupid shit and just squat, just squat.

I'm like, when, when do you ever hear any bodybuilder say that with any other muscle? Do they get pissed off when people are doing lateral raises and they're like, just military press. Stupid. Like, no, we don't do that. We know that you'll probably get better results in your shoulders doing military press and lateral raises.

But it's the only thing with glutes. I never see someone doing like lying, lying, lying girls, and they're like, you idiot, just deflate deadlift. It's just some weird thing with the glutes. And obviously you'd see better results doing like squats and some hip thrust. On some abduction because people forget

about the upper glutes too. Like the glute medias and the up-supoper subdivision of the gluteus maximus. And I take some women who want that shelf and I prioritize abduction and it grows. Anyone who wants a good upper glutes do more abduction. Also with males who do that for a while, you've built those up and then all of a sudden squatting tends to feel better for some weird reason.

Even though they're not used, I've never done hip thrust for hypertrophy. I always did them for either correctional exercise or for activation. I'd have a client that says, I can't feel my butt when I did left and we do some bridges and then we did left and they could connect a little better or whatever. But for the first time ever, I started doing hip thrust for hypertrophy and my squat and my deadlift are doing better. I'm feeling more solid on them. So there's definitely value to the weighted hip thrust. And that brings up another point like, like, all right. So this exercise makes you feel, but like when you start doing face pulls,

maybe your shoulders feel a little bit better. When you start doing some extra glute work, maybe you feel a lot, but so they can help your squat. They can help lift, they can help your bench press or something, like that's what I start noticing. Like my military press, I started, you know, the bands with the handles on them. Yeah.

I double them up to make it really hard and I would just do these like see-saw presses where I'd hold the top for three seconds and then alternate. And then I noticed my military press, lockout, got, I mean, that was a weak point for me. And then I got to where I could just hold the top, the lockout for a minute if I wanted to.

No, it's interesting. I love the science about around this. And the strength gains that you get from exercises tend to be, there's some general strength gains, but then they tend to be very specific. Even points of tension, you could do the same exercise, but because the tension is highest at a different, you know, like, I remember reading this a long time ago and another book, an old school book, I think

it was called Points of Flection. I think it was a term. Positions of flexion. Ah, see. I'm so happy when I have someone else in here who remembers all the old shit. And it was all about that. It was about exercises that created the most tension in the stretch position, mid-range, and at the contracted position. Ever since reading that, I really understood how to choose the exercises and how to change the angles and say, okay, I want something that's going to give you more resistance in this bottom portion, top portion, mid-range portion.

If you look at really good bodybuilding routines, that tends to be what they focus on. The theory has to do with, I guess, the way that the muscle fibers contract with the slighted philament theory, is that where you would... No, it's really just like, yeah, what a, like, all right, some muscles like this is what's interesting too, because I don't think we don't really know why this happens. If you're training the quads,

they get their most activation kind of around like 70 degrees of knee flexion, all right, biceps. Try and flex your biceps fully flex. It's hard. Try and flex them fully stretched. It's hard. Mid-range is where you get the greatest biceps activation. Tri-ceps are similar. But then with the glutes and the erectors are two of them that come to mind. They get activated the highest in the most shortened position. So like if we're sitting right now and we try and squeeze our glutes, you can't quite get as much activation

as if you stand up and squeeze the block out and say what the erector is, they're like, you wanna do like a Superman pose. I think that all has to do with how we evolved. I mean, think back to the quads, we were designed to walk and run or we evolved to walk and run. Glutes. It could be from evolution.

Yeah. It could be about like the moment arms, like the brain senses. Because like with the glutes, you do have better moment arms at end range. It could be to do with like the resting sarco mirror lengths or something. But anyway, so why wouldn't you want to perform and exercise this stretches the muscle? Why wouldn't you want to do like a lingerie deep squat for the glutes? Why wouldn't you want to like you can still get great? No, the caveat is if you get pain when you do any exercise that's real deep, then quit

going deep, pain and if it's muscle activation, you'll see better results from not doing something that hurts you. But if you can tolerate it, do something that stretches the muscle, do something that do just an awesome compound lift for it, and then also do like a target movement that squeezes the end range portion, and you'll probably see the best overall muscle development. And it probably activates different regions and things like that. And so, I don't think it has to do the sliding filament there as much as, well, because the sliding filament there is like your strongest win, but the thing is all the muscles have different,

they operate at different ranges. So some, so I think that just is like an insurance policy that you're going to, yeah. Okay, interesting. I want to address what we were talking about, this trend of people telling me, oh, stop doing that and only squat, because I think I'm guilty of even saying things like that,

because I remember probably in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, when you started to see, and I don't know who it was, so maybe one of you two who remembers the studies or remembers who was popular at that time. But I used, I made a living off of finding girls in the gym that were doing jump lunges, donkey kickbacks, dog peas, and teaching them how to squat and deadlift

because they were just not doing that exercise at all. And they were doing all these isolation type exercises where they could feel it and feel the burn or feel it in their butt. And they're doing super setting and circuits and high rep. And I thought, man, I know that if I could get this girl to deadlift or squat and go heavy,

I'm gonna blow, I'm gonna blow her butt up. More than she ever has with all these months or years of training this way. So I think a little bit of that is the pendulum swung one way again where it was, you saw there was this, girls were not, girls and guys, but girls especially were not doing low rep, strength training type of exercises for the glutes. It was a lot of circuit, isolation exercises.

And it wasn't, in my opinion, until CrossFit, do we start seeing girls squat and deadlift and do some of these incredible movements for the ass? Yeah, and I think also when it comes to, training, the average person doesn't spend a lot of time or have a lot of time or make a lot of time for working out. So the average person's gonna go to the gym, three days a week, 45 minutes,

I'm gonna make sure that they do the best exercises. So when I see, when I used to have clients that would work out twice a week and then I'd see them do all these isolation cable exercises, I would say, okay, stop. Your waist and your time, because you're not here that much. There's not a lot of volume,

you don't need to add tons of volume if you're not doing the main exercises. And so that would be my argument when it comes to that. What are some of the things that you see? By the way, let me chime in. Oh yeah, so I so agree with you and I did the same thing. Made a living off. I mean, I remember writing blog posts.

I mean, this like, I think this was this. Who did that? Who made it so popular? Like, who was it? Like Jane Fonda on TV doing shit. I was like that, yeah. Jazz or Sized, all that. It's how they got women to work out because they were afraid to get big and bulky.

It's the whole, you see it with everything. Yoga, Pilates bar. They pray on the fears of women. Like, this will get you, like, well, or even if they don't even mention weight training makes you bulky, if you say this gives you long lean muscles. Yeah, the implication is that as opposed to strength training that gives you So they they're not stupid they they and they might not even know they're doing it But they're pinning that form of exercise against

Riz's like every agonist needs a protag or whatever, every hero needs a villain. And so you've got weight training that's popular, so you need these, these other things can piggyback off of them and pit themselves against them. But so yeah, but like the Jane Fonda, that, buns of stealing all that, that probably contributed to it. But you do see so many people, um, I remember this, I was training this competitor back. This was probably to the 2000 and probably 2005 or six. And I'm training this competitor in

this nerdy guy walks up. And he's like, and he has a, he's in a, it's in a hotel gym. All right, and he has a clipboard and he's decked out in like full fitness apparel and has no muscle on him. And he spent the whole hour doing like every arm isolation movement and tricep isolation movement. And I bet you his program was like a five day body part split. Yeah. But you don't need to spend a whole day, a whole day on arms. You need to get strong at the compound lifts

and he went up to her and she was squatting 135 and doing Romanian Devils with 155 for, you know, like three sets of 12. And he was like, I can't believe how strong you are. And wow, you have such nice legs. And I'm like, can't you see the, you see what she's doing? And then why aren't you doing this

if you can read it? It's weird, this disconnect. How long did it take you to piece together the frequency aspect of training? Because I mean, I grew up reading the magazines of the 90s and everything was about, hit a body part once a week, leave it alone, let it rest, took me a long time to realize that if I trained my body parts,

not to failure every time, but train them hard and split up the volume, train them three days a week, my body exploded. It took you a long time to... Same for me, but that was during my body part. The first eight years I lifted, I did just body parts splits. And here was my routine for like eight years.

Monday was leg day because I wanted to build my glutes. And the PNS footy, I'd have my friends come with me or clients that I train and I train with them. And no one could make it through my leg day because it was like four sets of squats, four sets of leg press, four sets of hacks, squats, four sets of stiff leg deadlifts, four sets of leg extensions, four sets of leg curls, and then the abduction and adduction machines. It was just people would puke. And then Tuesday was chest, and then Wednesday was back, and then Thursday was shoulder,

well, sorry, chest and arms, and then back and biceps, and then Thursday was shoulders. But I noticed, I started doing this after a few years. I noticed that I gained more strength when I had that Friday I'd have the three power lifts. So then Friday I'd do bench squat and deadlifts. And I noticed, it's funny, as I was doing that, when I was, you know, 20 years old. And I noticed I needed that extra day, because if a week went around, I didn't gain strength.

I needed more frequency, and it's funny, because I remember when I was in New Zealand getting for the first year of my PhD, my professors like, ready to pick me up. He lives in the Chi Myes, which is kind of where like the hobbits, like that was filmed and stuff. And it's a beautiful area. But we were going for a week, and we were going to be gone for a week. And he's like, I'm going to come pick you. I'm like, hold on, I got to go to the gym real quick.

And he's like, why? I'm like, because I don't want to lose strength. And he starts quoting me, the straight literature. He's like, strength decays at this rate. You have nothing to worry about. I'm like, I know what the average person might do, but I'm telling you, I lose strength. My twin brother is the same way.

Like, we get weak quickly. Even if I bench press once a week, I get weaker. Now, maybe if I did eight sets, I haven't tried that. Anyway, I need more frequency. I realize that for myself long ago, but everyone is unique. But I realize for glues, if I want them to do variety, like one day I like them trying to go heavy on hipsters, but sometimes if you go too heavy, you don't feel it as much in your glutes, and that's what I like about having, and then a lighter day,

where you focus not on progressive overload, but more on the mind, muscle connection and stuff. That's what I like about high frequency training. The problem is, if you try that for every muscle group, you spin your wheels. Yeah, no, but one thing I learned that I implicate, that I use now, and I've used on my clients, it's something I call trigger sessions. And a funny thing is, I've heard other people talk about something similar, they just have different names for it,

but what I used to do is it worked phenomenally, is I'd hit my whole body, relatively heavy, roughly three days a week, but then on the days in between, I'd get some bands, and a few times a day I'd get a pump, and the muscles that I want to really work, and I just get the bands, and I do this three times a day on my off days, boy, my progress explode,

and the intensity's low. It's so funny, I call that the compound bro system. Really? Yeah, and I made that, but yeah. When did you come up with that? I think I started talking about it like three years ago. Okay, so I beat you. Yeah.

I'll pay you some royal deals. He's got you on the hip throw. What I would I would I would I would I realize was like for me, I love training full, but I love the whole Monday, Wednesday, Friday, full body. It's awesome because you get the two days off on the weekend, you come back on Monday, ready roll. There's also leaves a lot of, like if I want to focus on my squad, I can do like a squad on like Monday and Wednesday and then, sorry, Monday, Friday and then Wednesday lead off

with a single leg movement. Sure. I can specialize, I can really build strength on a movement. Um, so I love that, but it's, people like us like to go to the gym. Yeah. And you have to recognize that. So you can theoretically have what's best on paper, but you have to address the psychology. And I have a lot of followers.

I like to work out five days a week. If I don't go to the gym, I feel like I'm, and I'm like, why can't you read a book or watch TV and still like, or do something for your business or film an Instagram thing or something. But no, they wanna go to the gym and I understand that cause I'm the same way. So I start saying either on Tuesday, Thursday, or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday,

go to the gym but do these bro sessions. And with the bro sessions, you just have to learn what exercises interfere with your strength the next day and what exercise don't. You can do some lying leg curls. Now assuming, like, let's say you haven't done lying leg curls in two years and then you go do three hard sets. Of course your hamstrings are sore the next day from novel deeper. If assuming you're doing these movements frequently, you can bust out some leg curls,

some typically single joint movements, but also rows. Like rows don't ever be... Focus sessions. Trigger sessions are focus sessions. This is what's in our program. Yeah. And they blow people away because there's something to be said

about frequent muscle stimulation. You know what got me to this point was witnessing the blue collar workers in my family who never lifted weights. You know, got me to this point was witnessing the blue collar workers in my family who never lifted weights. You know, I'd have mechanics in my family who were like retired at 68 and their forearms were just, and they don't lift weights. And at some point, cranking a wrench,

isn't gonna make you sore anymore. So I'm like, how are their forearms so damn muscular? It's that frequent signaling. And so I just combine that with traditional resistance training, where I'll take bands. And this is what I'll do three times a day. Take five, eight minutes. I'll get a pump and whatever body parts I want to work three times a day on the off days. My recovery accelerated and I built more muscle and I tested it on the clients. Nothing about the bands though. In the bottom position, there's not much. Right. You're not creating a lot of damage. Yeah, no damage. Right.

Or not much damage also, you don't take as, so with the bodybuilders, all the exercise they ever did were hard, mostly like stretch position. Like, think about Chester, it would be bench press, dumbbell incline press, dips and flies. That might retake five days to recover from. recover. I'd rather do a little bit less, and also maybe just do bench press and peck deck because peck deck won't, but then do chest three times a week. And you get better results? I think so too. And I think there's this disconnect

between, it's like the bodybuilders all love body parts splits, but a lot of the personal trainers, because when we take, we're not going to put our most of our clients on a body parts split because they come to us two or three days a week. So we would do full body. I also think though, here's a deal, when you look at bodybuilders, especially high level bodybuilders, you are looking at a very special group of individuals whose muscle building signal after lifting weights probably stays elevated for two or three times as long as the average person.

If I hit a body part once a week, I don't give a shit how hard I hit it, I'm not going to build muscle. In fact, I start to get weaker. Now you might have some people who are just so genetically gifted in that department, they hit their body part hard once during that week. That muscle is building all week long. Because it worked like that for me. What I learned, I agree with you on that.

Well, I don't know about the elevated, I don't have to look into that, the elevated protein synthetic, the time time, like where it drops off. I'm sure there's a genetic component to that, like everything else. Totally. But I don't know a lot of this of this way have like my smart friends,

I asked them these questions, but anyway, but look at what the bodybuilders always did when they wanted to bring up a lagging part. More frequency. Every one of them would say, you know, I remember Tony Freeman back in the days, like I'm training arms three days a week, I need to build up my arms.

Nassar, he used to do back three times a week because he was Arnold. I'm gonna start doing calves, like, you know, frequently to build them up. But the problem is you have to, that's a specialization. You can't do that for every single part, or else. You have to learn how to modify intensity. You have to be very smart with how you, how hard you train, what exercises you pick. The volume, the exercise selection, and the effort that you put in it right.

All that. But what I've learned from training clients and I learned training myself, frequency, that's a wonderful, very underutilized tool. It was all about intensity, forever. It was always a hard, you could train it. And nobody was thinking, wait a minute, if we train, we reduce the intensity, train it more frequently, what's going to happen in my experience, people would get better results almost every single time. It's funny, there's like what we talked about the pendulum swing and this kind of ebb and flow. Even as my experiences as a lifter, I go through phases and it might be related to my work, stress and all these things. But like, I remember when I started more high frequency training, I saw better results, but then I think I got a

little caught up in too much. Well, you get to, I want to train my glutes every session. I want my, I want to train every muscle every session. Yeah, I think with glutes, man. Not just glutes, but I also like delts. Like I want delts every session, you know. My shoulders. Yeah.

And, and because when my shoulders are pumped, like if you could, when I have an awesome shoulder pump, if you said to me, Brett, for $1 million, this will be like you're resting, you're resting, look, I would easily, here, deal. I mean, I would kill to look like how I look with a glute pump, just, I mean, a shoulder pump. I don't pump.

There it is again. I don't do that. For a adult pump. There it is again. For a adult pump. I would do anything to just look like that, probably. Hey, I want to touch on that. Actually, you would be a great person to talk about this because I've never been able to really put words to this. And this is just my own experience with myself and training clients. I neglected heavy strength training for a really long time because I fell I fell in

love with chasing the pump and the hypertrophy side of training forever. And I used to say this in you and I are built pretty similar. I'm six three. Lanky been always a tall, Lanky Kim. Man, if I could just look the way that I was aired up and pumped, I would be so happy. That's the look I want. Cause being a tall, lanky guy, you probably had the same thing too. I grow like two, three sizes in the gym. When I'm waters in me, I'm pumped up.

I'm a lot different looking than what I love throughout the day. And I just, I used to love that. Now, when I started to strength train, I noticed this change in my body. And again, I started to apply this to clients when I started to piece this together. Because a lot of trainers, probably bad trainers like myself early on

your career, you do a lot of the shit you're doing to yourself to your clients. So if you're training yourself not the most optimal, you're probably not training them the most optimal. Of course. What I noticed, and I don't know how to put words to this, when I started strength training, I looked better out. There wasn't as much of an inflated, deflated version of me. When I was only hypertrophy training, I had this huge drastic swing. And I've seen this too in my period. I don't know if you know I'm an IFBB pro. So when I was competing with all my peers, a lot of them still neglect, I don't know, you should know this because you're

you're trying a lot of competitors too. A lot of them neglect strain training. A lot of them think that's powerlifting. I should never lift three to five reps. And so they avoid it. And they only chase the pump, chase the pump. And they look great aired up. But then when they are flat, they look kind of smaller and soft. When I started to strength training, I felt like almost I built dancer muscle.

Should I say that? What do you think that is? So that was this, I mean, that's in the Zatz Yorski text, the MelSiff stuff, like super training. And it talks about two different types of hypertrophy. There's myofibular and sarcoplasmic. And the drawings they did were very dramatic.

Like, here's all the myofibers that you build. And then if it's sarcoplasmic, it's just the fluid inside and the organelles and stuff like that. And then they talked about irrational hypertrophy, which was when the circle plasma outstripped the capacity to feed the myofil, I don't know something like this, something crazy. But then that got scrutinized.

And then a lot of some researchers were like, no, that's not even a thing. They grow at a fixed rate. Like there's a fixed proportion. And then just in the last year, some evidence came out showing that there is a difference. Like you can build a little bit more sarcoplasmic versus myofibraler.

It's just not as stark as people think. But the old, what made it make sense was they'd say, well, look at these power lifters, they're all dense. The bodybuilders look like they're pumped up and full of fluid, they don't look as functional and as dense. Now, I don't think it's as big of a deal as most people make of it.

But I think the thing is the bodybuilders were just on more stuff. They take more steroids than the powerlifters did. And so they think they'd be more filled with fluid and water because they have more water retention because they're on a lot more stuff. Because I don't think you see that much of a difference with natural powerlifters versus natural bodybuilders. But regardless, I totally agree with you.

And this is what I found. Like, so I can mention like one of my clients, Tana, you banks, McCoy, she is a, you know, she finished in the top 10, Bikini Olympian in the last several years. You know, she's a really good competitor. When I started training her, I'm like,

because everyone, like, all right, I get so I'm sure you guys deal with this. Everyone thinks they're advanced. I'm not, this has nothing to do with Tauna right now. Everyone thinks they're advanced. They're like, well, that routine's too simple for me.

I need a multi-man's routine. Oh, hit that. Everyone, and I'm like, oh, you're advanced. How many chin-ups can you do? Why? How many chin-ups can you like one or two? Okay, you're not advanced. I don't mean to be a dick, but like I just get annoyed that Everyone thinks they're so advanced because they've been going to the gym for three years They assume that right right right for three years and half and most of it was unproductive training.

So, but back to Tana, that had nothing to do with Tana. Tana wasn't like, I'm advanced. Tana was came to me saying, I'm fizzled out, I've competed so much, I don't even want to go to the gym. And I'm like, I know the perfect solution, she's been doing body parts split for so long. Strangely, I have her do, yeah, I'm gonna have her do full body

and have strength goals and she's gonna love it. So I said, how many chinups can you do one? I'm like, what are you currently doing? She's like, she does a lot of different types of pull downs. And pull downs are great. I love pull. In fact, I like pull downs more than chinups for me, but I weigh 240 pounds right now

and they just feel better. But with pull, it's the same with leg curls. This is why I like Nordic Ham curls so much. I have a Nordic station. You guys should get one, because you do them way more when you actually have a set dedicated station for them. With the Nordics, you're not going for two sets of 12, or three sets of 12.

You're going for like three to five really good reps, and you're focusing on the lowering phase, okay? You're putting your all into a few reps. Chin ups. I said, Tana, you're, you're a fitness person. You should be able to do 10 chin ups. She got 10 chin ups, like 10 weeks later. Like she got one chin up week one, two on, two on week two.

It was like, literally, she gained a rep every week. And in 10 weeks, she's doing 10 chin-ups. She wasn't doing as much volume for her back. You know, before she was doing more pull downs, but obviously she wasn't giving them a role. When you're striving for performance goals, you're fighting every last, you know, you're like, ugh, fighting for that extra chin-up,

whether you get her or not. And so her back grew and she started taking pictures, like she'd screenshot the top of her chin up, she'd go, what is this? Oh my God, what is this? Look at this back. And her back grew. So we talk about volume, we talk about all this stuff,

but exercise selection is important. And that's why my girls say, with a Nordic, they start sending me, one day I'm in glute squad and I'm like okay we're gonna do hip thrust we do this we're gonna do Nordics and all of a sudden like 10 girls go yes and I'm like they don't even do that with the hip thrust so like I think that's like their favorite exercise right now so I start doing Nordics twice a week with them and all of a sudden they start kind of I didn't think anything of it but all of a sudden they start kind of, I didn't think getting any of it, but all of a sudden they start showing me their competition pictures.

They're like, Brett, my glutes look better, but look at my hamstrings. The only thing I've done different is I started doing Nordics. And I'm like, and they're like, everything well else was the same. And a lot of these girls too, it's really cool because on peak week,

a lot of the bodybuilding coaches, they just, I could go on for a long time about how poor some of their practices are, but they kind of say, oh, quit lifting a month out, you pretty much quit training hard in the week of, you take the whole week off, and I like to push my girls really hard on that Monday, the Monday of peak week, and I like to give them body weight.

So I have so many clients that got their first full range Nordic where they go down all the way and come up. And then like they said, a chin up PR on like the Monday or Tuesday before their competition, it gives them, it reflects and their confidence on stage. They're up there strutting their stuff because they just set a PR. You'll lose absolute strength but gain relative strength. Because your weight goes down on it.

And so anyway, I think with some exercise like that, in these strength goals, but everything we've talked about this ebb and flow, well, I remember earlier, I meant to make the point that I started training too often. And my shoulders start hurting from trying to hit lateral raises three times a week while you're also benching in this. And I chilled out on those. And my shoulder, I cleared up. I think you can get even with strength goals. You can't, I mean, I have to tell people all the time they're like, with strength goals, you can't, I mean, I have to tell people all the time they're like, well, what should I do?

Just go up 10 pounds a week. Okay, those 52 weeks in a year, if you went up 10 pounds a week, you'd go up 520 pounds in a year. If you went up one rep a week, you'd get 52 more reps. It will not happen. If you went up one rep a month, that's 12 more reps. You won't do that with chin ups, you know? So, that's the hard thing about teaching

progressive overload and what it means. And you have to, that's what I like about. And I think that's the hardest thing we do is as the experts or whatever, we do a lot of advice and it's so hard to explain to people when to push it, how to back off, push this exercise then back off and then focus on this exercise more.

There's so many variables and we always answer questions in our question and answer episodes, we'll say, it depends. It tends to be the answer for most things. I can depends, how many times should it work out during the week? It depends. What are the best exercises for quads? It depends. But there's no better time. Like what you said, I just took a, okay, I just started training my client Carly. I've always been accused of playing favorites, even as a teacher and

as a personal trainer. And they're always like, Mr. Kendra, as you play favorites, and I'm like, of course I play favorites. You think I like you all the same? So many you suck and some of you are amazing. This is the real world. You're not gonna, you want me to like you,

you'd be a good student, you know? But even as a trainer, like you pay closer, of course, no, no trainer, every trainer loves a client that follows everything you do. Yes, because it's our way of studying all the time. Right. It's like, I have this idea or this theory. I'm going to apply it. I'm going to apply it to my five best clients who I know we're going to follow it to a

tee, right? So I have this client, Carly and I didn't pay much attention to her and all of a sudden, I gave the progressive overload speech to them. And then, anyway, one day I'm looking at her and she's hip-thrusting, like, someone godly man away, and I'm like, whoa, and she's like, yeah, well, ever since you made that, give us that talk like a month ago, I started pushing it hard. And I'm like, well, what were you doing before? She's like, just doing the same workout every time.

I'm like, what? So I've really started pushing her, and I have to tell her, like, Carly, there's never, you're gonna be spoiled because this is the first progressive overload plan you're on. So, you're not gonna always be progressive. Yeah, two weeks ago,

she sumo deadlifted 245 for five. Wow. And then Monday she got it for 10, or sorry, Thursday she got it for 10. Yeah. Like she doubled the reps that she got and she's just I'm having her squat. She's like clouting right now. Oh, and she's going to be so spoiled when in like three months that comes to a grinding halt and it becomes hard to get another rep. And you're used to going up multiple reps per week for adding weight and it's really hard, but I told her, like, please don't, you're spoiled right now.

You gotta learn how to not be depressed when those gains. I remember one of my powerlifting friends. Be more realistic. My powerlifting friends, he was so strong, and he was a natural lifter, and then he started doing steroids, and he's like, Brad, I don't mean to sound shallow,

but I've never been happier in my life. It is so fun working out. Yeah, every workout I've seen, it works. Every single workout. And then I watched him come to a grinding halt too. After a time when you start, I think he got so strong, his muscles can do the job, but the connective to his you can't. You start getting meetup so bad.

And I mean, he was deadlifting 750 pounds and didn't even weigh 200 pounds, you know, and it was so cool for me to watch that too, cause, and that's what we were talking about earlier with, he would, he, he, he, he's so strong off the floor with his deadlift, but his lockout was weak. And I'm like, I want you to do two exercises,

barbell hip thrust, and then rounded back extensions. But I want you to hold a dumbbell and just really squeeze. Cause when you're on the platform, you know, lift number one and two, you generally hold really good. If you're conventional, zoom out as different. If you're conventional rep one and two, you might hold good posture, but rep three usually round a little bit. And then that makes, that comes

off the floor quicker, but it makes it a lot harder to lock out. So you strengthen the glutes at end range hip extension. And then, you know, he's like two months later, he's like, Brad, oh my god, this is now a, that's no longer weakness. It's a strump my lock getters now a strong point. If I can get it past my knees. I'm locking out now and Then I've watched him his career and then you start battling injuries because he he went up too fast or you got to learn how to I don't know It's interesting to work with that population because they get so strong and then they have to, they can't train as frequently or you've got to do things differently than what you did.

Well, everything works, not everything works all the time and what works now may not work later because circumstances, context, change, age, changes, you know, this is true for nutrition, this is true for exercise and so I think the best advice that I've ever given to clients or the best thing I've ever taught them was to learn how to read their own bodies and listen to their own bodies because we can get really hard-headed with, no, this is the what's supposed to work.

So I'm going to do this the whole time and it's not working for you. So it works great for, well, you know, the period of my time when I saw the best results ever was when I did the one set to failure. I did that for eight months. But you read Heavy Duty, Mike Menser? Not Heavy Duty. I've stumbled upon this forum. It was like the hardgainer with like, he wrote Braun and Braun.

Oh, I know, I know. He's doing McRodwood and stuff like that. But then there was also this cyber pump website. I think it's still there. It was about just doing one set to fare. But the reason it worked so well for me is because for eight years I told you my first eight years I did high volume body parts totally opposite. And I remember going how could you ever get a good workout doing one set. I needed four

or five sets at the time to feel like I got a good workout in. So I was like okay I'm not gonna do one set, I'll do two sets to failure. And then I saw some results. So then I'm like, okay, maybe I'll go to one set. What I learned then is you get really good at it. I mean, I would do like, Ben over Reard Out Rays is with like the 20s, you know?

But when you're only doing one set, I remember I got to where, that was probably the muscle that grew the most was my rear delts back then because I I included a rear delt raise in that During that time and I went from doing like the 20s for four sets of 12 to only doing one heart set But I was like trying to beat the record every time and all of a sudden I was doing them with 60s I'm sure I wasn't I was like betting my arms more but I remember looking like eight months later I was like my real adults have grown a lot but my strength went up a lot and I my physique improved and I think that I was just you know we never de-load we don't we go to the gym every

week we don't I would push it really hard and I was probably over doing it a little too much, and then the dude doing the one set to failure, not only did I have more recovery abilities, because I wasn't doing as much volume, but it taught me how to really push us that hard, where I thought I was going to failure. Well, you get really good at going to failure when you're only doing one hard set,

and also you learn to like breathe. Like, it's kind of like a cluster set or like rest pause training because I would do a set of squats and it would be like, yeah. Yeah. And you'd end up getting,

you know, I'd end up getting three or five more when you thought you were done. It's, I did the same thing. I read the Colorado experiment with Arthur Jones. You know those, the pictures. Yeah, and it's like, and I remember being like, that's it. That's what I'm gonna do.

And it worked because it was novel. Yep. But it stopped working just like everything else does if you don't change it. Same. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, man, I'm really glad you came on the show, dude.

You're a lot of fun. And I really appreciate you communicating the the show, dude, you're a lot of fun. And I really appreciate you communicating the way you do from your perspective. You're very measured and you seem to have a lot of integrity. And I know I've seen you before get into debates and then come back and change your position. And you don't, you always seem like somebody who's, who's willing to do that. Oh, you can appreciate that. You know why? And I think I've never heard you say this until today. You know, you listed yourself off as a, would you say a teacher than trainer?

A lifter? A lifter, lifter trainer. And a scientist. And, you know, one of the things I found with our other scientist friends is not a lot of them have been trainers, or were trainers first. And so they speak from the study all the time. And somebody who's trained a lot of them who've been trainers or were trainers first. And so they speak from the study all the time.

And somebody who's trained a lot of bodies has probably seen a lot of studies kind of debunked right before their eyes. And so I think that's what makes you so special when you talk about this stuff. So it was a pleasure having you here tonight. Yeah, thanks, man. Yeah, thank you very much.

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