Modern Wisdom - #112 - Brett Jones - What Is Strength?

Episode Date: October 17, 2019

Brett Jones is the Director of Education at Strong First. For every article suggesting one-per-week heavy lifts there's another advocating daily top end strength work. Today we get to hear the opinion of Brett, a man who has spent most of his life working out how to make people strong. - Extra Stuff: Check out Strong First - https://www.strongfirst.com Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh yes, hello friends, welcome back to Monum Wisdom. Before we get into today's episode, I wanted to give a big shout out to everyone who's gotten touch over the last week and a half or so after I reposted a video I did on depression on the Monum Wisdom YouTube channel and then subsequently the episode I did on Monday with Christoph about mental health in the world of DJing. It's obvious that there is quite a big hunger out there for people to think and learn and have the opportunity to reflect on others' experiences when it comes to things like depression and anxiety. And with that in mind, I'm going to make a concerted effort to try and find some more guests and have some very interesting discussions centered

around that. So yeah, it's really cool to hear people resonating with the content and the stuff that we put out. It really does, it helps me to understand where I'm adding value and where people need to learn more. So thank you very much for getting in touch. On to today's episode, it is with Brett Jones, who is the director of education at Strong First. And today we're just talking all things strength. Brett works under the legendary Pavel Tatsuleen. I'm going to have butchered that surname, but you'll know who he is, legendary strength coach. And Brett's knowledge is really impressive today, talking about a lot of implications for your training, for your programming, the way that you look at cycling through different periods within strength

training. Here's analogies across from CrossFit and Weightlifting and some really good advice to do with kettlebell movements as well. So there's loads of stuff in here. Lots more episodes coming up soon as well. Lifehack 110. Ah, who else have we got? Sonny Webster. Mr. Sonny Webster is back. He will be back next week. I've already recorded that video. Guy Dean will be putting it together. So, expect some big episodes coming up soon.

But for now, please welcome Mr by Brett Jones, Director of Education at Strong First. Brett, look at the show. Excellent, it's great to be with you today and really looking forward to speaking with you and your audience. Yeah, me too. We haven't touched on strength that much yet. Not in its purity. We've circled around it a little bit, but we're talking all things strong today, right? Absolutely. There's strength has been it's been a something I pursued for most of my adult life in various forms and I look forward to the conversation on it. Yeah, it's going to be good. We'll have some CrossFit, some Powerlift is tuning in amongst people that just want to be able to lift a shopping a bit, the shopping a little bit heavier I guess as well.

They might benefit as well. Absolutely. Talking about Strength, how do you, as someone who spends his entire time thinking about strength, how do you define strength? So strength can be, so if we first go with this, this idea of physical strength, that can be your ability to produce tension, your ability to produce force against an outside object or to manipulate your own body against a given leverage or position. So it's the ability to produce tension to produce force against an object and manipulate an object or your own body, like I said. So that's kind of the

the 30,000 foot view. If you get into the mechanics of it, there's obviously a lot more going on. When you go beyond physical strength, and that's within strong first, we actually have a code of conduct where students of strength were quiet professionals, and we believe the strength has a greater purpose. The mission of strong first is to pursue, promote, and practice strength, because we believe strength has a greater purpose. That greater purpose obviously transcends physical strength into many other areas. My grandmother is one of the strongest people that I know of on the planet, and she's never

lifted a weight in her life. And so we're not just referring to this concept of physical strength. We do believe that building physical strength can provide a window into greater strength in one's life in many areas, not just the physical. I understand. So yeah, you've touched on one of the two tag lines, I suppose, or one of the two major elements that Strong First has, which you strength has a great purpose and strength is the master quality. development for all qualities of physical development. So I remember being in a talk with Eric Cressy years ago and Eric gave a great analogy. People have tried to give me credit for it.

So every time I get an opportunity, I give him credit for it because it's where I heard it. But basically, you said, you know, strength is the glass. Every other quality you want to develop goes in that glass. And so the bigger your glass, the more of those other qualities you can develop. And so strength maintains a focus and a foundation for people's training. And it's interesting right now as physical training has become more, I'm going to go old school here for just a second. So if you look at some of the ancient training systems and I'm drawing back to the Greeks and the German-Ternenverreine system and some of the other old training systems

which primarily came from training military and warriors and things of that nature. They really had three main components to them. There was a martial component which was your ability to respond appropriately to aggression and you could easily look at that from a martial arts or military perspective, and that makes very good sense. There was a restorative component, because learning the martial tended to knock you out of center, and so you needed techniques for health and recovery and regeneration to be able to go do the other stuff again. And then you had a pedagogical body of knowledge that supported the other two.

Fitness has become our martial art. Fitness has become the thing, so our pillars of training have switched to where now our training, our fitness has become this thing that we do for itself, whereas we used to get fit to go do other things. The restorative component in the ancient systems was meant to just allow you to go practice the martial stuff more. I'm a very exciting guy. I enjoy hiking. So, my training at this point supports my hiking and not in addition to my own training

and training of my students and the teaching that I do at search and things of that nature. So since fitness has become this martial art, this thing in and of itself, that's changed some of our relationships with some of these modalities, strength training being one of them. With in a competitive environment, with an environment where people are using fitness as this display of what they've accomplished, then you start using the tools of barbells and body weights and things like that for either higher

repetitions or for conditioning or for these other aspects of physical development and the strength training kind of gets can get lost a little bit. That's interesting that fitness is now for fitness is sake rather than in service of another purpose. That is an interesting way to frame it. Going back to one of the things that you said at the beginning about strengthening the cup and everything else filling it, would you be able to explain how you would see something most people probably wouldn't link with strength like endurance capacity, perhaps.

How do those two link together? So one of the easiest examples that I can give is if it takes you at this point, a thousand motor units to accomplish some movement, and that could be a whatever you want it to be, and we're just talking in very broad strokes and generalities, right? So, we're just going to say, let's say, everyone knows the deadlift, let's talk about that. So, let's say for the deadlift, you have to recruit at this point, a thousand motor units to accomplish that movement. If I increase your strength, your neural efficiency,

your recruitment, your structural ability, your ability to produce tension in that efficiency, because we do look at strength as a skill. in that efficiency because we do look at strength as a skill. People, very few people look at somebody shooting free throws and go, wow, he's a really good free throw shooter, but he just has good technique. They just say he's a good free throw shooter. Within strength training, there can be the excuse, well, he's not that strong. He or she is and that strong, they just have good technique.

But strength is a skill. And there are, we'll talk about it more later, but there's people that spend the lives 20, 30, 40 year careers trying to get better at one or two or three exercises. So it's not, it is a Y-Flong pursuit. So let's say due to our training and everything, I take that 1000 motor unit requirement and I drop it to 500. How would you do that? Via good strength training.

So, you become broad strokes. You become, well, yes, because if neural efficiency increases, if my ability to recruit, and we're gonna sound like I'm going to sound a manic here for just a second, but let's take a little side journey. We refer to being a strength professional. And when you look at, let's on the bench press and they've actually done this with some EMGs and looking at this efficient transfer between muscle groups during something like the bench press. When a strength professional gets wedged in and they begin their bench press, there's this really smooth transition from lats to pecs to shoulders to triceps. from lats to pecs to shoulders to triceps. And it's like being in a Formula One race car, right?

Boom, boom, boom, boom, you don't even feel the gears change, you just go faster. Compare that to somebody who's learning how to drive a stick, right? You're gonna get whiplash and damage your neck because they're shifting gears and it's really herky-durky. You see that in somebody who's a novice at the bench press. They'll bring it down if they don't bounce it, then they'll bring it down, and then there's this big push and there's nothing coming behind it. It fails and comes back down or it fails.

Then the second muscle group kicks in or however you want to phrase it. And so the strength professional has learned how to have these really smooth transitions throughout a range of motion, displaying, producing force against an object or whatever. So yeah, that efficiency leads to the ability to have greater tension, greater efficiency throughout the movement.

So I am kind of staying away from some of the mechanical properties at the moment and referring more to the neurological. So through good strength training, I make you more efficient. And now I get to the point that as a result of increased better recruitment, better efficiency, potentially better quality of the tissue, now that 1,000 motor unit effort is a 500 motor unit effort. How many more times are you going to be able to produce

that 500 motor unit effort? Because now you have 500 motor units in reserve. Okay. So as those initial 500 fatigue, you just start tapping into the 500 we now have in reserve and your endurance has increased by means of increasing your strength. So the work capacity's gone up because it's less effortful to achieve the same movement. Yes. Okay, that's interesting.

So we've kind of circled around it for a little bit. How do you contextualize strength or what are the components of strength? Wow. That's a, that's a broad topic. Fair point. Fair point. So, because if we're sticking with the physical, then there is, so let's break that into the

neurological, which is the patterning, the efficiency between muscle groups, and really, you know, having a really high level of skill in that movement. And when you dive down and you really dig into something like a deadlift or a bench press or a squat or a clean and jerk or whatever you want to dig into, a one arm push up, whatever a case may be, that neurological aspect, your ability to bring your intra-addominal tension, your high-tension

techniques, your efficiency transitioning through the muscle groups, that neurological aspect is really key. And that means one of our key programming principles is we keep a continuity of the training process. So if I'm going to look towards building strength, I'm going to be doing the same exercises for a good period of time, to allow time for this learning and efficiency and gaining of skill. If I'm switching exercises every four weeks, I doubt there's been enough successful Olympic lifter that has changed exercises every four weeks.

They may be modifying their routine within the context of trying to optimize the clean and jerk and the snatch, but they're gonna work on the clean and jerk and the snatch. And then highlight areas that need attention. So this continuity of the training process is gonna stick with us. So from a neurological standpoint, we're really focused on this concept of the training process is going to stick with it. So, from a neurological standpoint, we're really focused on this concept of strength

as a skill and practicing and pursuing our strength over time via the continuity. From a more structural standpoint, now we're talking about the tissue quality and there's all of these things that happen within a muscle that produce movement. You can go down to the muscle fibers and look at the cross bridges and actin and myocinase and you've got the calcium going in and out. You have this really complicated physiological thing. physiological thing. And of course, the energy to do that via the ATP and the mitochondrion, all of these things. So there's these two. I prefer to treat the physiological aspect as kind of a black box, where we do things and we get

a response and I don't necessarily need to understand all of the details that's happening in the black box. And actually, from a computer standpoint, there's a lot of artificial intelligence algorithms and things like that that are basically treated like a black box. They actually don't understand what's happening inside the AI box, but we get results. So the input's controlled. The output is what you want and the process in the middle doesn't really matter so much. I don't suppose as long as the output is what you wanted. Yes, I like it. So we get kind of bogged down into the physiology because it's fascinating. I mean, you talk about one of the things that we work on is this balance of tension and relaxation. And so it sounds weird for a guy that's all about this balance of tension and relaxation.

And so it sounds weird for a guy that's all about strength to be talking about relaxation, but if you're not able to relax, you can never fully bring your strength to bear. And from an athletic standpoint, if I'm walking around half tight all the time, I'm neither efficient or fast or powerful. So I have to be able to relax. Well, relaxation actually takes more energy in the muscle than contraction. Is that true?

Because now you have to pump out the calcium that gave you the cross bridges and the contraction. Now you've got to pump that out in order to create the relaxation. And so there's this balance to be achieved and your skill at relaxation can enhance your strength and your ability to produce power and force and things of that nature. But that's complicated. There's a lot going on in there. And I'm just a good old knuckle dragger. I like lifting and doing the fun stuff. And while

I have gone down some of the rabbit holes of the complexity, you can still read the research and see how conflicted we still are on things like hypertrophy and other aspects of muscle development. So there's a lot going on there. So I just kind of treat that as a black box. And like you said, the input, the output, and the magic happens in the black box. Yeah. Honestly, one of the problems that I found when I was a young guy and learning about lifting and stuff, some going back to probably 2007, which is like bodybuilding.com days, like quite heavily foreign based. And it was so broad sciencey. And for every, for every article that you read that said one thing, you could find one

that said the opposite. And the same is still true now. Like for every person for whom keto works amazingly, there's another person for whom high-car books amazingly. And then someone will do intermittent fasting and someone will stick to a more consistent, steady grazing style sort of typical bodybuilder's diet. You know, it really is a case of trying to find the principles, I suppose, and moving those forward.

So, I've got a couple of questions. I've got one question for you, which will come up in a little bit, which I think might be like you trying to choose your favorite child. For now, when we're talking about strength, is progressive overload king? Yes, however. There's always a caveat. Brent, there's always a pretty caveat, isn't there? I know, and it would be, life would be much simpler

if we were able to just give absolutes, but only siths deal in absolutes. So we'll stick with the asterisks and the caveat. Yes, progressive overload is the key, but within strong first, which we call ourselves the School of Strength, we specialize in Ketabal, Barbell, and Body Weight, not only from a technical standpoint, but from a programming standpoint. And Pawel's recent work within Plan Strong and Strong Endurance, in particular,

has with his new book Quick in the Dead, you can get a window into some of our new conditioning and strengthening research and work that we've been doing. The fourth branch of the school of strength is programming. And in the development of Plan Strong, when Pavel took a step back and he looked at the most successful Olympic lifting dominance of the Russians. And you can make all the comments you want about the pharmaceuticals that may have been involved, but everybody was doing it and the Russians were still dominant. And not only were they dominant, they were dominant over years.

Olympic lifting is not considered a, it's a young person's sport, right? Well, they had Russians setting world records in their 30s and late into their 30s and still winning world records, our world championships and Olympics and things like that. So when you really look at their programming, yes, it's progressive over time. But we tend to treat that as this linear relationship, where we're always going up. When you look at a very successful program like the Russians had, what you see is that.

There's a lot of variability. And actually, about 80% of their work happened around 70% of their 1RM. So there was a tremendous amount of work happening at a very accessible effort level, which you can recover from and you can build skill with and you can have all these great results. And then you're doing some work in the top end, a little bit below that. But about 75, 80% of their work happened in this, about 70% 1RM sort of area. What's the, what's the rep range on that if you were to go to failure, probably about six?

And yes, but here's the thing, we're never going to failure. So, yes, 70% might get you six to eight, and there's a tremendous variability in how people line up on those rep charts. I was always able to operate, actually, at a pretty high percentage of my 1RM, but then if you looked at the charts, I should have been lifting way more.

Yeah, that's me, that's me, unfortunately, can rep out something, can rep out 80, 80% or 70% for ages, but then just the top end of that curve, flat and soft, there'll be a lot of people at home that are the same. Yeah. So what you're looking for is the progression over time, but you and I just wrote this article for strong first, you have this waviness in the short term. So you're always manipulating that variable

and yeah, like I said, we're progressive over time. We're not progressive in a linear standpoint. So kind of I have the stock market. If you look at a day by day, it's doing this. If you look at it over time, it does that. But if you just try to do this and be purely linear, you're going to run into problems. Why? Well, if that was true, if I could simply go down to the bench and add a pound every day, I'd be 365 pounds heavier in my bench, year after year after year, which obviously just doesn't happen. So you fatigue out, both from a central nervous system standpoint, because of the skill driven

and neurological driven aspects of strength, and you burn out from a physiological standpoint because tissue adaptation, tendons and ligaments are kind of the slowest to adapt. We'll build some big old muscles, and the tendons and ligaments are like, dude, we're not ready yet. So you have to allow time for overall tissue adaptation, and that also responds very well to having this variation in what you're doing so that you will allow time for all of these things to come together. I suppose that cycling through different movements, as you said, is well in sticking to maybe two months with one particular routine or three months with one particular routine, and then periodizing it to something else will probably allow you to achieve that as well. So, right, I'm going to, I'm going to ask you the most

difficult question that I can ask you. You're only allowed to do three exercises for the rest of your life. What are they? So, yeah, you're right. It's like choosing children. So I'll give two different answers. Such a politician's answer. But I told you what I was going to do. I didn't dodge the question. I just said I was going to give you two options. For me personally, I am a squadaholic. I love to barbell squat. Because I do a lot of swings and a lot of kettlebell work, I don't have to do as much work on my deadlift because I do a powerful hip hinge on a consistent basis. So I personally like to squat. And I think for the individual, it's finding which are you.

Do you need to squat? Do you need to deadlift? Because both of those are going to give you mileage for a long time. If you're not swinging and working on a powerful hip hinge, then you probably need to be deadlifting instead of squatting. Interesting. If that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does. Why would you put the deadlift ahead of the squat in isolation?

So there's a couple of, and I'm putting it ahead of that because if I'm swinging and producing a lot of power in my swing, then I'm already doing all the strength work I need for my hinge. Quotation marks, Calia. So that's why I put it, if you're not going to swing, you definitely need to build your hinge and work on your deadlift. And that's not achievable just with a squat. I don't think so. I think there's aspects of the deadlift as far as the inclusion of the upper body via the grip and the l in a unique way. So there's different aspects involved in building that squat, pardon me,

which I think make the deadlift a better choice over time for a broader swath of the population. So that's kind of the, from a symmetrical stance standpoint, you need to figure out whether you need a squatter deadlift. Yep. We got to push, we got to do some sort of press and military press or bench press.

So I told you I was going to give you two options. Military press incorporates the standing posture. You do need to have a very stable midsection, the ability to resist extension and maintain your position under that overhead load. The military press has, I'm going to say, higher requirements than the bench press. Globally. But the, globally. But the bench is a great way to produce upper body strength. And the way we teach it, and really, you bench from your feet. And looking at a good lateral arch, not necessarily an AP arch, you set a foundation via the feet and the lateral arch to really

drive through the upper body. So you're going to build more upper body mass and strength via the bench press. You're going to build upper body strength via the military press. So picking which one you need there, make your choice. And we're sticking with strength training here. I do think you need some sort of pull such as a pull up. I think the lats are such an important tie-in from upper to lower body and for everything we wanna be doing, whether it's running or deadlifting or squatting

or benching or pressing, I think the lats deserve their moment, kind of the upper body squat as it was once known. I get it. Well, one thing I'm interested in is your inclusion of kettlebells because it's only been recently for me that I've seen kettlebells really kind of come into their own.

Guys like yourselves and on it, companies that are really, really pushing the sort of kettlebell movements, not just as, his kettles, maybe for me 10 years ago would have been part of a Bums & Tums class for like my mum to go and do, you know what I mean? Maybe like a two and a half kilo kettlebell or something like that and it's kind of just there to make someone feel like they're lifting away. Whereas now there's much more sophisticated public knowledge about around the training for that. Can you talk through your vision and your views on cattle bell training overall? Absolutely.

It's something that I've been, I first got certified with Pawel in February of 02. I started teaching with Pawel in April of 03. So literally for 16 almost 17 years, I've been traveling the US and the world teaching Ketabell training and certifying others in the use of the tool. So the Ketabell for me represents such an excellent entry point to the world of strength and a bridge towards the world of conditioning and power work that make it a really unique and really a tool that I think belongs in everybody's program.

And everybody, quotation marks, caveat, because that's no one thing for all people. Yeah, yeah. So I think the thick handle and offset center of mass make it a very different and alive tool in your hands where now you're controlling this rotation or movement of the center, displaced center of mass or that displaced center of mass is actually guiding you into better positions during the movement. So it requires an increased level of alignment with integrity under load. And I'm grabbing that from Great Cook, one of my other mentors. And so via the get up in the press and things

like that that take advantage of this offset center of mass, you have this alignment with integrity under load, which builds this kind of great postural control, which helps set the foundation for a lot of the strength and the power work that you want to be doing. And so the kettlebell in my mind and what I've seen over the last 17, 18 years of using the tool myself, I think it it really fits a need for people that a dumbbell, a barbell kind of don't provide because that weight centers with your grip instead of being offset. An old joke for us is you can't swing a barbell between your legs, more than once. And so the kettlebell allows you to achieve this really unique loaded eccentric position,

which has tremendous carryover for anything athletic and from a power standpoint. I think Zatziorski and others would put it in a power metric category, not plyometric, but it still produces, I can produce 3, 3 and a half times body weight, eccentric load at the bottom of a 24 kilo kettlebell swing. Because it's so dynamic, right? Exactly. And that load of eccentric really is unique. So I think kettlebells fulfill, check a a lot of boxes and you'll see this if you

look at Quick and the Dead. Once you've built a base of strength, power training has a lot to offer. And you have to be strong enough to be powerful. And so we're still not forgetting that strength is the foundation. But once you have achieved a base level of strength, that power work really delivers across multiple spectrums of physical development, whether we're talking about endurance, power, strength. What's the difference between power and strength? So power is how quickly you can apply your strength. Okay, yeah.

Strength is how much force you can produce. So it would be the equivalent of horsepower versus torque. Yes, I'll go with that analogy very easily. Yeah, that's a torquey engine might not be quite so fast, but can pull a very heavy load. A high brake horsepower engine can go very quickly, but might not be able to pull such a heavy thing. And then in between the two,

you have a midpoint. Okay. Okay. So we will have a lot of CrossFit and other strength athletes listening, but CrossFit is especially we're about to enter the open, which is a period during which there will inevitably be kettlebell swings. Would you be able to talk us through how you see the optimal kettlebell swing or what the some of the coaching cues are that you look for that you think most people might might mess up with? I think if I were to give one piece of advice, well, we'll make it too. Well, we'll make it too. Number one is patience. True power means you're patient enough to allow that power to come to fruition.

So it means at the top of my swing, and if it is the games and you are doing the overhead swing, fine, you got to do what's required for the competition. It's waiting for those arms to re-pull my camera off the... You have to wait for those arms to reconnect to your ribs before you hinge. Then you have to allow yourself the time to hinge before you hit the quick turnaround, and now you've got to be patient keeping the arms against the body as long as you can, so you have this full transfer of energy from the hips and midsection to the arms in the bell. And so what I see a lot of people do is they rush that.

They hinge too early on the way down. They're trying to come up too quick on the way up and they're letting the arms disconnect before they've fully express the power from their hips. So if they would display patience at those three stages, wait long enough for the arms to reconnect on the way down. Give yourself time to hinge and then keep the arms against the ribs as long as possible as you're producing power through the ground. You're going to find a much more powerful swing and better transfer of energy. So that more than anything if people would display some patience, they're going to be they're going to be a lot better off.

I can definitely feel in myself when I'm doing a heavy kettlebell workout, especially when we are going to the overhead standard from CrossFit. I can tell when that excitement during a workout takes over my form, and I know that when that's happening because my traps get pumped, And it's because I'm going to guess because I'm upright rowing that that way up and over head, that pull and pop, pop as opposed to allowing myself to swing through and then to get from there. That's interesting. And that's so when you look at it from a timing perspective, and it sounds like, you know, oh, he's saying, you know, be patient. It's the every rep's going to take so long. And it's not.

It's just being patient enough to allow those things to happen in the proper timing and sequence. You'll actually, you know, the rep speed will be not that much different, but it will be that much more powerful and efficient, because now it's happening in the correct sequence. That's a hell of a lot of time. You don't have to put the dumbbell down. You don't have to take as many, like half as many breaks, perhaps, because you're moving

better. Okay, so that's the first one. What's the second cue? Well, I went so long into the first one that I'm I'm okay sync your breathing Okay, so interesting now and There's I'm gonna give you the kind of there's a we'll call it a boy or a plate answer and then Knowing that there's techniques and strategies to optimize the breath during an extended effort. So we have a competition within strong first called the TSC, the tactical strength challenge, and one of the aspects of that competition is a max snatches in five minutes.

So, and we have people that will achieve with a 24 kilo bell and some with a 32 kilo bell will have people achieving 120, 130, 140 reps within five minutes. It's awful. As soon as I recover from it, I'll do it again. But so, the sniff in to have good intraddominal pressure and bracing during the hinge, and then having the forced exhale match with when the hips finish, that syncs your power, so that your power is efficient

over a number of reps. Okay. So what happens is during a sustained effort, you will reach a time point where the need for oxygen becomes great. And so that breathing pace needs to change. One of the easiest ways to change with that, especially within a five minute effort, is the double inhale. So during the hinge, instead of having a single inhale, you have a double inhale. And so you're actually kind of filling the tank and topping it off, and then having the exhale synced with the hips.

And then there's ways to have multiple breathing cycles within every rep. And so there's double breathing. We're really good at it. I'm gonna get ready here then, I guess this is how you get a good name. Exactly. 130 catabas, not choosing five minutes up.

Right. And that's why I prefer the boiler plate answer. Yep. Because getting into the double breathing gets a little more complex. Complex, yeah. So what we're talking about is that you're going to breathe out as your arms are releasing contact with the body

on the way up, is that correct? Yeah, I would sink it more with the finish of the hips. Okay, rather than thinking about the arms. But you are not releasing the arms from the ribs until the hips finish, so. It's that. Yes. Understood.

Okay. And then as you're coming back down, you're taking the breath in just before you begin to hinge. Yes. So when you hit the bottom, you've got that bubble of inter abdominal pressure that gives you something to then produce force against on the way up. Yes. There's definitely been times I can think of, I'm sure that the listeners will be able to sympathize as well when you are breathing too much and you just get out of time and you're fully exhaled at the bottom as you're swinging a kettlebell through your legs

and it feels like someone's come up behind you and kicked you in the middle of the arse and you'll really fall forward into the workout, which is not nice. Not great. No, no, no, maybe fall forward into the workout, which is not nice. Not great. No, no, no, but again, as you say, a lot of the people that will be listening, maybe doing these under fatigue, you know, if you're a cross-fit athlete and you've got this in amongst a bunch of rowing and potentially pull-ups or something else and your grips

going and everything else like that, you do need to be, you do need to be delicate with that. So I suppose trying to adhere to that as closely as possible is not gonna be a bad idea. Definitely. And that would lead into a potentially another podcast on the concept of the difference between your training and your testing.

And the fact that your training does not always have to look like your testing. And you build capacity and minimize fatigue, rather than always trying to, because conditioning, and I know we're getting away from the strength message, but the conditioning has kind of fallen into the primary camp that conditioning has fallen into, is building tolerance. Basically, this is going to suck, so we're going to do it, and

over time, it will suck less because you are a better tolerance to this. There is another way in building capacity, your ability to handle the energy production and the byproducts and the efficiency of the organism versus the tolerance of the organism. And so, again, you look at quick in the dead and Pobbles new stuff, you'll see a lot on this. You can build a lot of capacity and have better health, kind of lower injury, better performance, and test better. But if you're always testing yourself and you're burning that candle hard, it's like having a nose, it's like having nitric oxide on your car. Well, if you're using that to go pick up a loaf of bread, you're going to burn out your car. You want to save that for that one moment where you need that extra boost. Is that where the 70% or so window appears to be optimal?

Is that one of the reasons why that will be in there as well? It is. It's interesting, because again, around a lot of Crossfitters, but I'm just around a lot of athletes who like to go hard as well, whatever their particular given field. There is a subgroup that train in our gym who are just sadists and they enjoy, they enjoy getting into that 190 BPM heart range. Like that's what they live for.

And you know, it is very unique in the fitness world, based on what I know, having spoken to guys like Dr. McGill, Brian Carroll as well, these sorts of guys who talk about embedding the movement and grams in as perfect a way as possible, especially if we're talking about, you know, big lifts that need to be perfect and doing those under fatigue appears to be a very, very dangerous way to train. Yes, I would agree with that.

And I think that there's one reason we prefer something like the cut-of-bell swing, cut-of-bell snatch as our display of maintaining our skill over time under fatigue, because there's different ways to look at this. And as we're building, pardon me, as we're building these patterns, I have to load you to find out if that pattern is going to hold up under the load. And then I need to, especially if I'm training an athlete or somebody, I'm going to have to push you into some fatigue to see if that pattern is going to hold up under the fatigue. And it's my job as a coach to know when to pull back because you're not handling the fatigue and the form or the load and the form.

And so that's where my skill comes in to say, that's enough for today. Or yes, you can push, go a little further. So definitely, yeah. Can you suggest any heuristics or rules that people who don't have a coach that's on hand can use? So it's really, I would, I'm gonna couch this in a couple of different ways.

I would say that rest is the single most abused training variable. We don't rest enough. And I remember years ago when the high intensity interval training really became popular and was basically a response to this idea that nobody had time to train. And so here comes this high intensity interval sort of protocols and Tabata, which nobody's ever done Tabata outside of the original Tabata research. It's a miserable thing to even think about, much less in-door, and just cause you're doing, you know,

burpees for 20 seconds or on 10 seconds off, you're not doing tabata. It was a completely different thing. But anyway, you know, here comes this message that you have this high intensity with short rest for a compressed period of time, and you accomplish all of these great things. That's, yes, you will for a little while, and then the wheels will fall off. Why? Because it's like a crash diet. You just can't maintain it. It's, you know, if you're, if you're doing the cabbage soup diet, you know, we're going to lose a lot of weight and accomplish some great short-term results and then we're not going to because nutritional deficiencies and problems will set in. When you burn the candle to both ends and in the middle and you're burning the naws every

time you go into the session, the car eventually falls apart. You just can't handle that level of stress over that period of time, you exceed the ability of the organism to compensate and recover from that stress. And again, we're back into the capacity versus tolerance discussion, and I would rather build capacity and have this health aspect to my training. I'm an ancient 48 years old and I can tell you that I enjoy the health aspect of my training. From a strength standpoint, as the 11th guy in the world to bend the red nail, I've accomplished a good number of grip strength feats, some decent, not great power lifting numbers, raw.

And so I've built my strength and I've worked on that end of things. I've snatched a kettlebell a bunch of times and worked on the conditioning end of things. But the only place health comes before, or fitness comes before health is in the dictionary. Your training should be driving you towards a better standpoint as far as your health is concerned.

And we may sacrifice that from time to time in order to accomplish a performance goal. Certainly, if your goal, I was working with a guy at a workshop and his goal was to bench 500. And he was doing whatever it took. And you can read into that whatever you want to. He was doing whatever it took to get to 500. And I gave him a couple of mobility techniques and things to work on because he was really suffering with his shoulders. But he was going to do whatever it took to accomplish that goal.

As long as he's willing to change goals, once he's accomplished that and regain the health of his shoulders and body and think of that nature fine. Like, we make these decisions from time to time. If you're going to run a marathon, get ready to spend a lot of money on treatment and survive, I've aimed the training in the marathon, and then hopefully you get healthy on the back into that. So, we make those decisions, as long as those are conscious decisions and think that we've factored in, if the only thing we know how to do

is burn ourselves to a frazzle, be forced to take time off either due to illness or injury, and then burn ourselves to a frazzle again, I think there's a better way. Reminds me of Eddie Hall hearing him talking about the way that his body was and how he felt around about the time when he won World Strongest Map. And he was talking about the fact that his marriage was falling apart and his barely seeing

his kids. kids and he was so heavy that he could, I think he's like 190 kilos and he's like 5, 9 or something or like 5, 10 or something like that, that's some inordinate size. He's as wide as he was tall and he was talking about all of these different things. But as you say, he said, I wanted to be the world's strongest man. I was prepared to do whatever it took to do that. But one thing I've got massive amount of respect for 84 is seeing the transformation that he's undergone after he completed that goal.

So he did complete that goal. He got where he wanted to. And he has taken a complete step back from the professional side of that sport. Now he's doing other stuff. He's doing a lot more varied fitness challenges. I think he's like swimming and stuff at the moment, which was because our site to see him and a pool.

But yeah, you know, you're right. People are prepared to make sacrifices for things that they deem to be valuable to them, given their values in life. They think, are prepared to make sacrifices for things that they deem to be valuable to them, given their values in life. They think, this will make me feel satisfied and give me a sense of accomplishment if I X run this marathon, deadlift 600 pounds, bench press 500 pounds, whatever it might be. There is a treadmill that people can get on where they don't realize that if there isn't a goal at the end of that, if it's just fitness for fitness is sake, if there's no endpoint,

if there's no periodization, that's when you get people that do get severe burnout or they end up with a very serious injury. So yeah, you mentioned about one of the ways that people can self-judge when they're pushing themselves too hard and when they potentially need to move back towards capacity. So, um, so with, let's go within a session, because I think that's important. If your rep speed is slowing down, if your, so your tempo changes, and I have a very easy metric on that, if I'm doing swings, and I know 10 swings takes me roughly 17 to 18 seconds. If that 10 swing starts taking me 20, 21 seconds, I'm slowing down. I am beating the proverbial dead horse. It is time for me to stop or increase

my rest periods. So seeing tempo change, exceeding about an 8 out of 10 on an RP, So seeing tempo change, exceeding about an 8 out of 10 on our P, unable to catch your breath. You're not able to recover before the next set. I've been a slave to the clock for years. You can have over the last couple of years to work very hard to free myself from the clock and allowing myself better recovery and not surprisingly seeing better results in my training.

So those are just some easy kind of stop signs that we talk about within strong first, that within a session, within a set, within a training session, we look for those things. I think it's very interesting. I was asked one time in a podcast what my favorite recovery strategy was. And I think it's interesting that we have an entire cottage industry of recovery strategies that have grown up around this idea of how do I recover from the training that I'm doing. Well, my answer was proper programming. If I have myself programmed appropriately,

if I am taking into account the organism and my overall stress, nutrition, sleep, ability to handle work, and the environment, my programming, and things of that nature, if I've got those two things taken care of, and I have done well with this environmental consideration of the program, then I should be recovering from my training. I shouldn't be always trying to figure out how I'm going

to recover. Probably one of the easiest answers to people who are always trying to figure out how to recover from the training is do less. Yeah, you're right. If you're constantly having a flappy wings so hard to stay afloat, it's probably just time that you need to reassess the program overall, decide that you're going to just take a little bit more rest time, whatever it might be. And that's, I think, because we are exposed to the work rate of everybody else online with social media and being able to now see a window into the lives of professional

athletes, a semi professional athletes or just, you know, your normal gym athlete who happens to have a ridiculous work capacity. Because you're able to see them, you use the canary in the coal mine for how hard are you working, is how hard are they working? And that can lead to people setting themselves a standard, which is unreachable given their physiology. There are some people out there who's ability to recover. They can recover fine from a really hard workout on seven hours sleep. There's some people who require, you know, 10. And I guess that's a decision you need to make yourself. It is. And if you're mindful of your recovery and your health and things of that nature, and

if you're constantly dealing with a quotation marks injury, you have a pain problem or thing that you're constantly having to manage. You're probably pushing too hard. If illness is a repeated thing for you, you're probably pushing too hard. And you have to take in overall life stress into consideration. If you're sleeping four hours a night working two jobs and you're having a lot of interpersonal stress, yet you're not going to be pushing very hard on your training because your recovery ability is already taxed by this lifestyle stress. Or if your simply your diet simply doesn't support your training, then expect to suffer and have trouble recovering. This classic type A mentality though, isn't it?

There are some people for whom you tell them to do A and they will do 10. Well, why did you do 10? I told you to do 8. Well, I just thought more is better. And then if you roll that out, if you scale that across someone's entire life, yeah, you end up with that. So, final question that I wanted to ask. And I spoke to Brian Carroll about this and I thought it was really interesting. I know that Dr. McGill agrees with this. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. For strength athletes, powerlifter, weightlifter, Brian and Stuart are of the opinion that training the movements once per week is optimal for them to cycle for most athletes. What's your stance on that?

Depends on the athlete. For the broadest cross-section of athletes that you know, what would you say? So it's almost impossible because where that athlete is on the spectrum, where that individual is on the spectrum matters. If you're reaching a true physiological peak, where your strength is really based on your structure and anatomy and ability to recover and everything is actually reaching a physiological peak and you're able to push yourself to that limit. Then yes, you can train less frequently. But if you look at the Russian powerlifting team, they bench seven days a week.

No way. Yeah. They benched. But every day. It's because it's because they're and multiple, sometimes multiple sessions in a day. It's because they're training is very wavy and very... Right, for the wavy stuff. They bench days every day of the week for the Russians. What's going on?

If you look at Shaco and the Russian Powerlifting team, they do a lot of work. And so there's kind of this classic American powerlifting sort of mindset, Ed Cohn, Marty Gallagher, Krooski, a lot of classic American powerlifting that is very linear, it is working each main lift once a week. There's the Russian method, which has multiple sessions per week, both have had their success stories. It's figuring out

which one you tolerate and where you are on that spectrum that would dictate those decisions. If I'm working with a younger in their progression, if I'm working with a younger physiological age, athlete, and that can happen at any age, I could be working with a 50-year-old who's just getting into strength training, and they're at a very young physiological age. That individual, I might want to deadlift five days a week because I'm building that pattern and they're still grooving it, practicing it once a week is not going to get them to a skill level where they can actually build an appreciable level of strength. But yet if that's the 30-year-old athlete who really has been pushing hard and is nearing a physiological peak,

yeah, I might be deadlifting them once a week. I love how Russian the Russian approach is. It's like the most we do bench today. And tomorrow, like everything., we do bench today. And tomorrow, like, everything. What do we want to get better at? I want to get better at bench. Guess what we're going to be doing? If we bench it. We're going to be benching.

So yeah, it is a very utilitarian, minimalist sort of mindset. And we get into muscle confusion and all of these different things and the pursuit of building strength actually means dedicating yourself to a very narrow window of things that you're going to be doing. Now, you look at something like West Side where Louis Simmons not only had, and there's West Side's very interesting, but they were trying to optimize three lifts. But Louis has like 200 assistance exercises for the bench because he would spot a weak

spot in your bench and had a drill to address that weak spot. So it wasn't variety for variety's sake. It was variety meant to progress you in that main goal, but the goal never changed. The continuity of the training process was always there. And that strength training means dedicating yourself towards a goal of building strength and doing that over time and having this continuity of training process that leads to success? Isn't it interesting that there's so many different paths to achieving the same goal that you have Russians competing with Americans stepping on to the same platform within minutes

of each other, but some training methodologies that couldn't look more different in some ways, or the other guys from Westside and the equipped leagues who are going up against other people who may never do anything other than big compound lifts that their accessory work might be pull-ups, and that's it. Right. It's so, I find it fascinating that there are all of these different routes. And it comes back to what we said at the very beginning, right? Where it's like, you can find proof for effectiveness or proof for ineffectiveness for pretty much everything.

So at the end of the day, this is a nice way to round it off. I suppose does the training methodology that you choose come down to personal preference for the one that you can adhere to the most and that feels the best for you and how are you supposed to select? I have this myriad of training opportunities in front of me. How do I choose? So I think to get started, what's start there, to get started, the basics work. Three to five sets of three to five reps,

three to five days a week, just to keep it as simple as possible with some variation in what you're doing. That will build strength. And for the beginner, I don't wanna say almost any program will work, but almost any program will work for the beginner. program will work, you know, for the beginner. It's when you have built a base of strength and you're trying to specialize and aim yourself

in a particular direction that then the next training protocol carries more weight, strength training joke, carries more weight in how you're going to succeed in that. Keeping in mind health and progress, as long as you're being mindful of those, then you've got to know when to stop a routine and make a change. You don't want to, and I know, I've seen it referred to a struggle porn where there's this message out there that you got a grind and you're going to grind and you're going to grind. And you put all these hours in and you grind and believe me, I put in the hours and that's not a problem for me.

But you can grind too far and too deeply and cause yourself problems. You don't want to quit before the process comes to fruition, but you got to know when the process isn't going to come to fruition and you got to make a change. So kind of a dichotomy there to work with. So figuring out whether you're a high volume or low volume athlete, I think is one of the most important distinctions from a strength training standpoint.

And I have friends of mine that can handle a very high number of lifts per month. I am not that person. I am not a high volume trainee. If I do a high volume routine, it needs to be six weeks to eight weeks, and yeah, small windows, and then get away from it because the siren song of volume becomes a little too strong if you overload yourself. Exactly. I love it, Brett. Thank you so much for today.

It's been great. If the listeners want to find out some more info info what's the book's been that we've cited today and where else can they head? So if you go to strongfirst.com you'll find everything there from the community forum, our articles and things of that nature, a lot of information available there. The book is quick in the dead, the quick in the dead, and has some tremendous information in it. You'll see our Barbell kettlebell and body weight sort of modalities represented on the

website and on the forum. So kind of a one-stop shop, a lot of information to be gained there. I love it. Thank you so much for your time. I'm hoping that we'll make some people a little bit stronger. Any questions that you have, feel free to throw them in the YouTube comments below, and I'll try and hassle Brett if there's anything specific that I can't answer myself. But for now, Brett, thank you very much.

Beautiful. Thank you, Sarah, it was great to have the opportunity. you