Modern Wisdom - #744 - Dr Mike Israetel - How To Build The Most Muscle Using Science

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Dr Mike Israetel is a Professor of Exercise and Sport Science at Lehman College and the Co-Founder of Renaissance Periodization. If you've ever wondered "is this exercise actually working" then you are not alone. However there are now scientifically proven optimal methods for building muscle in the most efficient way possible. And today we get to learn from the best teacher on the planet. Expect to learn the biggest mistakes people make when building muscle, how much stimulation is required to build mass, Mike's top 10 exercises, the best rep ranges, sets, rest periods and timing between workouts all backed by science, how much you should lift for your bodyweight to know if you’re strong, how to maintain motivation in the gym and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get $500 discount on Fountain Life at https://fountainlife.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr Mike Isretel. He's a professor of exercise and sports science at Lehman College and the co-founder of Renaissance periodization. If you've ever wondered, is this exercise actually working, then you are not alone. However, there are now scientifically proven optimal methods for building muscle in the most efficient way possible, and today we get to learn from the best teacher on the planet. Expect to learn the biggest mistakes people make when building muscle, how much stimulation is required to build mass, Mike's top 10 exercises, the best rep ranges, sets, rest periods, and timing between workouts, all backed by science, how much you should lift for your body weight to know if you're strong, how to maintain motivation in the gym, and much more.

Mike is nothing short of a legend. His YouTube channel is completely destroying it at the moment and I'm so happy for him. I love his content, I love his insights, I love the fact that he's evidence based and I love the sus jokes and complete overt flirting that he does throughout today. So yes, strap in for this one. Don't forget, you might be listening but not subscribed and that means you're going to miss episodes when they go up, so make sure that you've gone to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and hit the follow button because that way you'll make me happy and you'll support the show and you won't miss episodes when they go up. So go and do it. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen,

please welcome Dr. Mike Isretel. ["Darkness"] Dr. Mike Isretel, welcome to the show. Chris, thank you for having me. Look at your head in all of its high definition glory. Yes, I believe the folks helping us videotape this had to make 10 adjustments because my head is too shiny, which is a compliment or an insult. I can't quite tell. That sums up most of my life.

Dude, I love't quite tell. That sums up most of my life. Dude, I love your YouTube channel. You are absolutely blowing up at the moment, evidence-based, training, hypertrophy, muscle gain, all that stuff. So I want to do a one-stop shop today of everything that anybody needs to know to get as jacked as possible from an exercise science standpoint. Sounds simple. Let's do it. This is literally what you've been doing your entire life. Yeah, for sure. Something like that. You're a doctor or something, doctor of something?

That's what physiology. Yeah, that. Yeah. I mean, if you don't know, who does? Oh, yeah. Good God. Tons of way more qualified people, but they don't have this beautiful bald head. And that's why they're not in Hollywood. All right. So taking it from the top,

what are the things that you see when it comes to training for muscle growth that are the biggest mistakes people make? Where are people going wrong the most when it comes to this? Thinking all that time in the gym will get you laid. And Chris, let me tell you from a personal story. It just doesn't work. Nothing works.

Help. Anyone who's listening, help. Send me a letter telling me how this whole thing works. On a serious note, if I had to be scientific about it and explain the biggest source of variance in not growing muscle over, let's say, a timeline of about a year, which is a realistic amount of time

for people who haven't seen you in a year to be like, holy crap. It has to be consistency. Because if you just go to the gym and scream a lot and do crappy technique, crappy volumes and crappy loads and do a lot wrong, but you have a requisite intensity that's anywhere north of reading the newspaper and you just show up multiple

times a week over and over, you're going to get some results. If you have the ultimate evidence-based plan from Jesus, Renaissance periodization itself and you've downloaded the RP, I purchased for you up discount code in bio. I don't know, as that's what influencers say. But but you do it intermittently. You do it on and off stuff. You had conversations with people you're like, you know, in the metro, let's say in London, where you're from, I believe all English people are from London.

Yes, of course. And you know, they're asking you tips because they saw that you're jacked. And you start giving them tips and you eventually get into conversation of like, well, so like how many times a week do you lift? And they'd be like, well, you know, it's five. You're like, yes, I see where this is going. They're like, but like lately, you know, my dog's been real sick. So my wife left me. An interesting sounding Londoner hand.

Yeah, right. So Bro Talk is actually universal. It's just one accent everywhere. Right. You could be British English and then the lifting starts and you're like, yeah, man, fucking curls. Like Arnold did it. You're like, Arnold, that's it.

Drop that meme. So yeah, consistency is a big deal. But it's not the only deal. If you do something consistently, my thought on that is you might as well do it pretty well. You don't have to go all crazy sciency like we're going to get into in the next, you know, whatever, half hour, however long it takes you to get pissed and kick me off.

But when you are consistent, it multiplies the emphasis that you should be doing whatever it is you're doing quite well because with you as you're commuting a lot of time to it, a bit of a sunk cost there might as well optimize on the margins and then we can talk a lot about all the details. Okay. One of the first places that people are going to go to and I'm going to guess one of the most common questions that you've got asked, what exercises do I need to be doing?

Yeah. All of them, bro. Right. Yep. That's it. And then I just walk away and they're like, wow, that guy's supposed to be smart or something like that? But then they see the back of my very shiny head

and it makes them happy. Yes. Okay. Which exercises? So there is a lot to say about it, but you can start with the supposition that it's whatever exercise nominally targets the muscle you want to grow. So if you want bigger biceps, you know, some variation of doing this is probably good. And then to be honest, that's maybe 80% of the answer. So if a lot of people, here's why I'm saying that a lot of

people will look at, let's say for quads, they'll look at hack squats, they'll look at leg presses, they'll look at lunges, and they'll look at regular high bar squats. And they'll vex themselves infinitely over the question of which one of these is superior, which is kind of like asking, you know, I need to get to Austin, Texas in two days, which airline should I take? Like you ask someone who works at the airport, like, which airline is like really the one I should be taking? They're like, I mean, I don't know, all of them really get you there.

There are subtle differences, but at least make sure the ticket says Austin, Texas. So if the exercise hits that muscle, then you're good to go. Now, there are ways of seeing which exercises hit the target muscle that you want. A couple of what we RP and RP call proxies for stimulus. So this is something like tension, the perception of a lot of tension generated or exposed in that muscle. So if you're doing chest flies, and you feel a crap load of stretch and pulling in the chest, that's probably good. If you're doing what you think is a chest fly, but you misread the machine's instruction thing and you feel a ton of tension in your biceps or your forearms or your shoulders,

but you don't really honestly feel anything in the chest on a just pure physics perspective because of the mechanics of the movement, your chest has to be getting some exposure. But maybe you could be doing better by actually doing the exercise in a way or picking an exercise that really you feel some tension off. Another clue to if you're stimulating the muscle properly is the burn. And that's seen in a medical context when people don't wear proper protection. I know that resonates with you personally because the conversation we had right before this, I don't need to expose you, but, but Chris, you could just be making better choices.

That's what I'm trying to say. All theoretical. I've never been with a woman as everyone who watches our YouTube knows. But on a serious note, the burn is in especially higher rep sets. When you start feeling the accumulation of metabolic byproducts in the target muscle. So the chest fly analogy, if you're doing high rep pack flies and at the end of that set, your pecs are burning.

Hey, that's probably good. You're probably getting a good stimulus there. On the other hand, if it's just your biceps that are burning, but your pecs don't really feel much, are you getting a stimulus in that exercise? Yeah, sure. Is it guaranteed to be a really robust, really good stimulus? Probably not, because you should be feeling some combination of tension and burn. And then also there's pump.

Again, none of these are mandatory, but together they're kind of like puzzle pieces that take what could be a C plus exercise for you and make it an A plus exercise if you're getting all the feelings right on this. So another one is pump. How much after several sets of the workout or of the exercise, how filled with fluid is your target muscle? So if you're doing pack flies and after a couple of sets, you know, girl walks by and you look, she's like, Oh my God, she runs away.

Yes, that's good. Even though she ran away, but she ran away in a way that she obviously respected your pack size, which is the whole point of the gym. But if you do a bunch of sets of something, um, let's say you're doing peck flies, your shoulders are pumped, your biceps are pumped, even your forearms look more veiny. But to be, can honestly say your chest has changed in any visible or palpable way. No doubt still change your pecks, but maybe not that great. Another one is perturbation, which kind of presents itself in two forms.

One is, is that target muscle feeling really weak? So let's say you do a few pack exercises and you think they're for the chest and then you try to push yourself into your car, like push off your steering wheel and you feel like a profound weakness in that pack. You're like, oh my God. And a really good example is if you're trying to walk down stairs after you hit quads.

If you think you hit quads, but you really hit glutes and adductors, you can hop skip down the stairs, no fucking problem. Are we allowed to swear in here? No, not a good idea. Sweet. Whereas if you're doing this on the handrail. Yes, like desperately cleaning for dear life and your legs are shaky. Another thing with perturbation is crampy.

None of this is required. But if your chest cramps hard when you're trying to pose after a few sets of whatever you're doing, the whatever you're doing, absolutely hit your chest. You know, the thing is weakness too. So if I tell you, Hey, there's mega peck workout, what's your best bench? And you're like, well, it's like, you know, 200 pounds for a set of 10. And I take you through a mega peck workout. After that, if we put 200 pounds on there, if you bench it for any of the close to 10,

your pecks never got very fatigued, which almost certainly means they never got very stimulated. So you should see a pretty big repetition strength drop-off. If you can barely do a push-up after a chest workout, oh, shit, something happened to your pecks for sure, especially if you feel like your chest is the kind of onus of weakness in that movement. So those are all ways to kind of proxy that.

And I would say in another one, again, not a huge deal, not the deal, but a good little additive to the mix is, do you feel any kind of weakness or soreness that persists for hours or days after? So for example, if you do some kind of new quad machine at your gym and two days later, your inner thighs are sore, your glutes are physically sore, your quads aren't either the way you did it, which I'm sure we'll get to technique or just the exercise itself. It says quads, but it's really not quads.

Maybe it is to some extent, but you would expect if you had a novel stimulus to feel some kind of soreness. But if you did something that says quads on it and then the day later, you can barely walk and you're sore to the touch. And you know, you have to have stimulated your quads. There is no alternative. So all those things are in the plus side category. And any exercise that hits a bunch of those check marks for you, man, that's a good exercise for you. And we're all different. So some people respond better to a Peckfly machine, some people to dumbbells,

some people to cables, some people to something in between. Whatever exercise checks those boxes for you really well, that's probably a good exercise for you, at people to something in between. Whatever exercise checks those boxes for you really well. That's probably good exercise for you, at least for the time being. What about stimulus to fatigue ratio? I hear you talking about this all the time. Incessantly. Yep. To the point where people are just done with it.

They're like, shut up. Well, this is a new audience. What is it? Oh, hello. Where are they? We're in an empty room. Oh, there's cameras. That's right.

I know how this works from watching many adult films myself. Just kidding. I'm in no fap for the last several hours. The fatigue part is a big part. So what I just described was the stimulus proxies. Basically like indirect ways to know like, Hey, did I get a good stimulus? But fatigue is important. So another way to categorize exercises, how much fatigue they cause, which can be split up into a couple of different types of fatigue. One is joint and connective tissue fatigue.

If you're doing some kind of skull crusher machine thing or tricep machine, and every time you're like, ow, my elbows, ow, my elbows, ow, this is hurting a lot more. Is this an elbow exercise or tricep exercise? Maybe your technique is off, or maybe that exercise is just not that great. So you want as little joint connective tissue soreness as possible, as little exposure as possible in that regard.

Now humans are robust, adaptable creatures. So zero tendon and connective tissue stimulus of any kind or fatigue, rather it's not the goal. You just want to get really pumped and really sore and really fucked up in the muscle for any degree of joint connectivism. So if squats beat up your knees a little bit, but they fucking wreck your quads, sweet.

But if you have like some kind of weird hack squad designed by people who don't know how to make machines, which is like at least half of all machines in the gym, then you're like, oh, this is like a knee exercise and my quads don't feel shit, that's bad news. Another thing is there's several different kinds of other fatigue. One is called axial fatigue, which is a special kind of fatigue that results from spinal loading. So you'll notice that the amount of fatigue on the system, if you do

a lot of deadlifting, bent rowing and squatting with a barbell on your back, is different and more intense than exercise programs that don't have those. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. More for science to figure out, but it seems like when the muscles that keep the spine erect are active a lot or something to do with the spine, fatigues, let me shit out of you, which almost everyone who's ever deadlifted seriously has reported that the total fatigue tolerance of the deadlift is very low. You can do plenty of leg pressing and it stimulates a huge muscle mass, gets you really fucked up, really sore, tons of lunges. But either of the fatigue is mostly local.

When you do deadlifting, something, something leaves you that you don't quite get back. Systemic. Systemic. And so axial may be a subcategory of systemic fatigue. There are other ways to measure systemic fatigue. Your desire to train. One of the things, one of the reasons that you want to do some exercises you generally like is because your desire to train. One of the reasons that you want to do some exercises you generally like is because your desire to train can stay elevated

and that keeps you coming back for more. If you have a low desire to train, it can actually physically result in the promulgation of more overreaching type of escalating fatigue and then you're just going to be fucking out of the gym because you'll start hating this shit. The stimulus fatigue ratio is kind of like bang for your buck. It's literally and exactly only what that is,

cost benefit, but expressed in muscle terms. I've asked this question of some of the greatest bodybuilders of this era. Chris Bumstead, Phil Heath, asked Ryan Terry who recently won the Olympia. Oh, what a look that was. Yep. And I looked at it for a long time.

I know. He knows who I'm in as DM Oh, what a look that was. Yep. And I looked at it for a long time. I know. He knows who I'm in as DMs. What? If you only had 10 exercises for the rest of your life, to hold on to and build as much muscle mass as possible, what would they be? Yeah, that's a question, huh? So, I would say that I'd have to go muscle group by muscle group to make sure I check off all the boxes. I don't know if there's 10 muscle groups. And some of these, so the caveat is these are just my personal spirit exercises, the ones I really like that doesn't mean they're best for everybody. They can't be, and I can talk about that afterwards of what the stimulus fatigue ratio

actually means. But I'd say high bar squats. Why? Because they hit the quadriceps and adductors and glutes very well. The amount of fatigue you get from them is less than you would with other types of squats like low bar squats. Because until my arms got too big to hold a bar in my back, I fit into the high bar position like a glove,

and I love that. I fit into very few things like a glove, mostly condoms that's like 80 cubic centimeters left of room. But so high bar squats, I would say, I would say the over standing overhead barbell press just because I'm like really good at it and it feels great for me to do until I guess my arms not too big.

I can't do that either. So that's fun. Is there anything in that where the bracing, the midline bracing is good for just other stuff generally? Yeah, it's good for like manhood strength. Like if you can overhead press two plates for reps, like you're serious motherfucker and people shouldn't fuck with you probably. So that's cool for that for sure.

And then I would have to say skull crushers for triceps, barbell, skull crusher. How many are we at? Three. Three. Pull ups for the back, overhand, chin to bar. Why overhand, not underhand? Raw personal preference, I can't rotate my shit in enough to do underhand anymore.

I have slowly become more disabled. I became more jacked, isn't that great? Yeah, there's like an ability curve where you get better at shit and then you get worse at shit. So barbell bent rows from a deficit. Get two for the back. Barbell bent rows from a deficit. Get two for the back. Barbell bent rows from a deficit.

So you stand on a little box and you can go super deep in the stretch and then touch your tummy and come back. Any reason for doing that as opposed to a chest supported or a seal? Manhood, yeah. Yeah, you ever seen a seal and Antarctica they're fucking pathetic.

They always need to be rescued. There's babies and stuff like that. No, manhood shit like an orangutan would do. You don't see him leaning on a fucking tree branch. All right, are we five deep now? I think we're five deep. I haven't been keeping track. I think it's five.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Five more. Let's see what else. Stiff-legged deadlift for the hamstrings. You wouldn't have hit that enough with your bent over rows? No, not even close. Yeah, it's isometric only with bent over rows. You need a dynamic movement for the hamstrings.

It also hits a crap load of your spinal directors and glutes and all this other stuff. Okay, six. Uh-huh. And then we have, ooh, yeah, I have to say, the cambered bar bench press for chest. That's the one that does like this.

It's like a pale. So it allows you to press. It's like a pale. So it allows you to press. It's like a middle ages old and like a young boy carrying milk. Yeah, yeah. Or like a torture device or something they put on a bison. So he goes around in a circle and mills wheat or some shit. Yeah, okay. You know, English people have the last name Miller

cause like that used to be you hundreds of years ago. My words. Why the camber bar? The camber bar allows you to go deeper than your own chest level. And we have lots of research, especially recently, but lots of good theoretical work before that shows us that a deep stretch is a pretty big deal for hypertrophy. It enhances the amount of muscle growth. You get rep for rep.

It also feels fucking amazing and ultra challenging. And if you do bench presses with a regular bar afterwards, you're like, oh my God, the shit is easy as hell because it's a huge partial. So I would say I'll take an inclined version of camber bar bench as an extra, so that's seven. I'll take dips in addition to that for the lower pecs and just overall manliness. Yep, they're sweet. Good amount of triceps as well. I'll take dips in addition to that for the lower pecs

and just overall manliness. Yep, they're sweet. Good amount of triceps as well. We've got long heads on the overheads. And what do we got, two left? Yeah, so what are we missing? If you're bothered about abs, if you're bothered about calves. No, calves, fuck that.

I could say something about calves would fuck that. Have we done that? Yeah, we haven't done side delts yet, I know. So I would say super rom laterals for side delts. You literally made your own exercise, kind of. A few, yeah. I need more ego shit. So let's just start calling them Dr. Mike laterals. Yeah. Dr. Mike everything. Do you see my new drink I came out with? It's the Dr. Mike drink. In any case, it's where you do dumbbell laterals, but you don't stop here.

You just go all the way and kind of touch your palms together at the top. Can you do that? Oh, it used to be able to. With enough weight, I can get it up there. But then I kind of choke myself at the top. So I'll take those for most of the rest of the belt. And I will say the bent rows and the pull-ups

take care of the rear belt quite well. for most of the rest of the belt. And I will say the bent rows and the pull-ups take care of the rear belt quite well. And then I'll say seated, inclined dumbbell curls for biceps. So boom, like that. Again, it's tension at the stretch, great exercise. The shoulder press overhead barbell press is there.

If I was purely aiming for hypertrophy, I would just take it out altogether because it's insanely high axial fatigue as you may suspect. And it just really like, it's nothing it trains that other exercises can't train better, but it's there because of, again, for the soul. And if we're doing something as absurd as restricting ourselves to 10 exercise the rest of our life, I get soul shit. It's like, what meal are you going to eat in your last meal before they kill you? I'm not choosing macros. Fuck that.

I'm just mac and cheese. But what did you say only 10 minutes ago about it's important to have exercises that motivate you to do them more? Yes. And if you enjoy man shit, standing upright, barbell, shoulder to overhead. Have at it. Yeah. Just know the trade off.

Now, uh, I will also say, here's the trade off. The trade off is when you go to the club and you're standing there with your body and he does more scientifically effective exercises and there's a girl like looking at you too. And she was like, I got with your friend because those doubts are like bag. And you're like, God damn it. But spirit energy, she doesn't know about that. Uh, you can't over, I mean, I guess you could overhead press your friend and

throw him away. And she's like, I don't like such a man. And by doing, I mean, have sex in the middle of the club. That's what happens. Yes. I've seen Love Island. I've seen you on that show. I've seen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, get back to talking to Mike in one minute. But first, I need to tell you about element. Element contains a science backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. It helps to regulate your appetite, curb cravings,

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That's how confident they are that you love it. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box, plus that no questions asked refund policy by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. What are the worst stimulus to fatigue ratio exercises? If there were ones where you would say, if you're looking to gain muscle, start sliding these off the edge of the table into the bin.

Yes. What would be in that list? Cat style. Yeah. I'll say a few things before I answer that question directly. One is it's hugely individual. Some people get a big kick out of exercise that other people just don't like. And also any exercise you do for long enough begins to accumulate, we in sports science call,

staleness. And it is a staleness can be put mathematically as the reduction of the stimulus to fatigue ratio. You start with upright rows, you know, like, these are sweet bro, they're blowing up my delts. Five months later, you're like, fuck this. I'm never fucking doing it again. My shoulders hurt. I don't get a connection with upright rows. You know, like, these are sweet, bro. They're blowing up my delts. Five months later, you're like, fuck this. I'm never fucking doing it again. My shoulders hurt. I don't get a connection with my muscles. I'm tired of it psychologically.

So that's the big caveat before splitting exercises generally by their SFRs. So stimulus to fatigue ratios are not a universal concept. You could just apply. They're always and everywhere applied in the moment for the athlete themselves. So if someone's like, hey, what should I do for quads? I'm like, well, what have you been feeling lately? And what do you not like lately? And then we choose an exercise and then we go forward.

Good example that might be moving from walking lunges to box step ups. Absolutely, exactly. You're just forever reason, your joints hurt more and walking lunges, you've been doing them forever. You're not getting as big of pumps, tension. All those proxies we talked about for stimulus are bound and all the fatigue proxies are up.

You fucking hate the exercise or joints hurt, systemic fatigue is higher. So you do what's called exercise deletion and replacement. There is no, this is one of the things there is no one right exercise. Uh, just exactly like there is no one right food for you. Yes. Someone with your favorite food, they're like, uh, mac and cheese with tuna in it. You're like, okay, that's fine. It's a weird choice, but whatever. It can't possibly be your favorite

food for forever because you have to eat it all the time. You get fucking sick of it. And then whatever was your second is now your first. Same thing with women. Am I right? Eh, eh, no, no takers. All right. I'm like a much shorter, less combat trained version of andro-tate. Also, I don't know anything about women, but I've run a few casinos in Bulgaria. People don't know that about me. Isn't that what he does? I'm just going to shut the fuck up. Yeah.

I do have multiple Lamborghinis. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You are spending a lot of your money on Lamborghinis at the moment. It's not a lot of my money. It's a profoundly small amount. I'm dealing with trillions, Chris. I just want people to understand that. Most, well, I'll just say it, regular people, there's wealth and then there's me.

Pete Sautner The unwashed masses. Pete Sautner Elon Musk, I've heard of him. He's a cool guy. He's got some money. Pete Sautner Cute. Pete Sautner It's adorable, really. So, putting all that stimulus to fatigue ratio stuff in context like it's always an individual decision, some exercise on average, just on the mechanics, don't do that great. And I can specify what kind of mechanics. One is if an exercise targets a lot of muscle generally, it can't possibly target one muscle

a lot specifically. And thus for a specific muscle, it has a poor stimulus fatigue ratio, deadlifts, for example. What exactly does the conventional deadlift train? You can't answer that question because that question is an answer of like 80% of the muscles of the body, glutes, sort of hamstrings, maybe adductors, some quads technically, tons of lower back, but not exclusively, depending on how you pull mid back, upper back traps, holy fuck. So if you're really trying to grow, insert any muscle here with conventional

deadlifts, there's probably an exercise that gives you as much stimulus for a fraction of fatigue. Another thing for a fraction of fatigue. Another thing is a range of motion. If the exercise doesn't expose that target muscle into a deep stretch, you could do better. So for example, floor press, I'm sure we'll have a video on the YouTube at some point about this. The floor press is just you hold dumbbells or barbell, you go down until almost you're lying on the ground like an animal.

There's benches for civilized people. My gym are made of gold. No, it's platinum. I think it's diamonds. It's very uncomfortable, but the wealth alone keeps me comfortable. So you touch down here and you can't possibly physically get a big stretch.

So in some contexts, can be a great exercise, but just on the raw probabilities probably isn't that great. So those are some of the exercises that I would say like deadlifts, floor presses, anything you do with a partial range that's not in a length and deep stretch position is probably not ideal for a perforary rack pulls

or another one, but exactly a rack pulls training. Fuck, if I know, I think they train mostly the ego because you load 18 plates on each side that one girl used to look at, she's like, oh my God, you're like a fucking superhero. And you're like, yeah, you want to see me fucking, et cetera. Then you get laid. I think that's how it works.

All right. So that's exercises. You guys, I think, have been, at least for me, one of the main reasons why I've reintroduced tempo into my training. Everything now. everything is tempo. All life. So given that we've, yes, yes, slow in, slow out. That sounds good.

Talk to me about what good technique looks like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great question. So good technique has a huge diversity and variety of expressions. So, you can't really look at a person doing an exercise and for sure be like, that's bad technique because it could be good for them, it could be good for the context. But there are a couple of generalities that apply to almost everyone, to almost all exercises that you can sort of checkbox as saying, if you have these things, probably your technique

is pretty good. If you don't have them as a scientifically minded person or at least one attempting to be scientifically minded, at the very least, if you're doing a technique that doesn't check the following boxes I'm about to talk about, I at least want to talk to you and get some reasoning out of you. Cause you could have good reasoning. Be like, yeah, man, my shoulder's fucking injured. I can't do any more range of motion.

Okay. No big deal. But a lot of times you don't get any reasoning out of people that just it gets broken, what works brother? And you're like, my man, buck thinking sucks, painful. It's annoying. Why do it? So one is a good technique should be focused on targeting a specific muscle or

muscles and by sheer biomechanics, you know, if you're doing this motion, it's not your biceps. So sometimes people will be like, I'm training delts and they'll do like alternating like lifts like this with their fist pointed up. And that hits the front delts, but it can't really possibly hit the side delts. And so if you're like, hey man, I'm trying to get big side delts and you do that technique, I'm going to be like, eh, that cantus that you can do like a, a stick and rope model of the body where you're like, that does not the muscle that does that. So that automatically means like if you want big lats, you're going to do pull ups or rows because it's the sheer mechanics.

And there are more particularities where if you pull out like this, it's probably not as much lats as it is upper back. If you pull down, it's more lats just because of the muscle attach. So that's kind of the king variable of good technique. So for example, if you say you're training your quads, you do a squat that's sumo stance, you're sitting back really far, you're getting a very small degree of knee flexion. Um, there are better ways to train the quads.

That is not the best technique for the quads, almost for anyone, because the better technique would be like, well, we target the quads, that means we expose them, that means we give them a high degree of range of motion, which means like as you squat mostly down, your toes should go over your, your knees should go over your toes rather, and you should go nice and deep. That really biomechanically has to train your quads. So that's number one. Another one is to have a movement that has a considerable degree of stability. So if you're unstable, so for example, if you're doing upright rows and you keep coming up on your toes and you're

wiggling around, that's reducing your force production. So good technique means stable. Because your body will dial down how much force your muscles can deploy if you're stood on a vibrating plate or if you're on a balance beam or if you're on something else. Bowsu ball, yeah. 100%. It happens completely automatically.

I've been directly involved in laboratory testing for something like this. This is an insane study we did. We had lots of spotters. We had people max out in the high bar back squat and then we had them max out on a bo-soup ball. Good news, they only squatted about 60% out of the one rep max. For a max. That's still quite a lot. 60% is quite a lot, right?

But a fucking bo-soup. Totally. But to put it another way, unless you're doing profoundly high repetitions, if you're doing sets of five to 10 with 60% of your true one rep max, what would be instability? You're getting almost no hypertrophy as an intermediate or advanced trainee. This is not, you're learning how to squat on a boce ball, which is cool at parties. You can show off, maybe get laid, maybe not. Um, but it's not, it's no good because you want to be nice and stable.

So for example, if you and I are training together and you start doing incline dumbbell press, but I noticed your feet are hanging off or kind of dangling, there's only two things that can happen. One, you're a short king like me who never grew up to be an adult height, and then I'm just gonna be like, that sucks, but good luck. But if you're a tall king like yourself

or a medium king, how tall are you? Five-ten. Perfect, the perfect man height. I would say, hey, Chris, try to put your feet down and really core screw them into the ground to get that stability. You'll find you'll get more reps and be able to do more weight with inclined

dumbbells, which is a really good thing. So it's stability is a technique universal, generally speaking. When people talk about sort of grinding or grounding themselves into the floor, there's no. Chi that's happening here. This is the body responding to us being more stable and the force, the force production. Yes, I believe, I believe Chi is entirely a myth also, like all pretend things.

If you really want to go down that road, there's a lot of very sad YouTube videos of actual MMA fighters challenging Chi practitioners in China. Fucking them up. I mean, fuck man, one lady thought she could block like a running punch just standing there and the guy just went right through her. I'd stop watching after this very sad. The sad part is that they get physically hurt, but it's more sad to watch their ontological understanding of the world collapse.

Think about it, I must have misaligned my G. That's what happened. Uh, only Steven Seagal can do shit like that. I want to be on the record saying that. All right. Control eccentric. So. Control in general, especially on the eccentric. Most people can't help but control the concentric because it pushes back.

You can only move a concentric so quickly, especially with heavier weights, especially close to failure. So someone can't really spastically do the concentric. They're, ooh, they're pushing against it. It's kind of auto-controlled. If you're trying to gun your car up a really high hill and you have anything other than a Tesla, it's going to be seemingly like you're controlling it, but it's just pushing back. It's auto control. On the eccentric hover on the way down, people a lot of times are like, blah, just let it drop, which again, isn't terrible.

It does marginally increase your chance of injury. But what it does is it takes a very muscle growth-promoting part of the movement, which is the eccentric. And the eccentric actually requires less nervous system stimulus to do the same amount of physical work, which means it's inherent stimulus to fatigue ratio might be higher because it's probably a

little bit more stimulative than the concentric as a phase by itself, but requires less less nervous system fatigue. So over the weeks of controlling your eccentric, you may get more out of your muscles with less payment on the nervous system fatigue side. Well you've got to lift it back up. So it needs to come down.

You've lifted it. It has to come down and you might as well collect all the coins on the way down. You're like, there's free hypertrophy coins, just do it. Yes, yes, yes. It's like watching someone place on at the hedgehog, but they jump over all the coins, at least the Jewish part of myself. I'm like, oh, but you missed the coins. What are you doing?

Reset the level. Oh, yeah, yeah. Just try to pick up. Anyway, this will get us canceled for sure. So control on the eccentric is a big deal. Control in general is a big deal. And then another checklist we want is I used to say full range of motion. And I still think that's mostly correct.

But we're learning there are different parts of the range of motion, which are more or less hypertrophic. And so I think it's mostly full range of motion. It's a good technique. So if I see you like a quarter squatting, I'm going to be like, you probably went lower. That's a good thing. But more importantly, still from an empirical perspective is just not robbing yourself of the deep stretch.

So if I see you do cable flies and you're stopping here, I'm going to talk to you. And I better hope you have two fucked up shoulders. Because if they're totally healthy, I'm going to say go all too deep for that super big stretch. Don't avoid that. What's happening in that deep stretch? Fuck if I know, science and shit. You're the guy.

Yeah, look man, we don't know all of the shit. You know what I'm saying? I've put me on a spot like that. There's molecules in there and cells. God knows what else. So we don't actually know exactly why a stretch stimulates hypertrophy. There are several candidate mechanisms being investigated. And I can regale you with the details, but it's a little bit pointless because all the details

should be totally wrong. It's a candidate mechanism that fails inspection, right? So in a few months, few years, we'll know exactly why that occurs. But we have something better than a candidate mechanism. We have very good control trials where the only difference between groups or applications is one group goes nice and deep and the other does not. We have studies on, for example, the quadriceps where the volume and the load is identical between groups. You even got clever studies where people train one leg with a deep stretch only, bottom third, and the other leg they train only with the top third of leg extension.

That's a big deal because auto control, it's not like genetics doesn't matter, nothing matters. The same body. You've got to split test the right and the right. Amazing. Yeah, how great. So a lot of those studies are showing that the deep stretch just causes more growth. Now, it's five to 10% more growth. So you can do top end partials. You can bench like this and get plenty of muscle growth. Tons of IFB pros and jacked up juice heads do it and they're still jacked. But from an efficiency and effectiveness perspective, all those guys could have been bigger if they went in for that really deep stretch. So to me, that's a big part of really good technique. It's really interesting to look at sort of all of this as a suite, especially when it comes to the technique for muscle growth, that you have this...

If we're looking at stimulus to fatigue ratio, it's something that's important, especially as everybody slowly makes the inevitable journey toward death and getting older. Jesus Christ, man. That's an incredibly macabre way to put it. I'm an apocalyptic guy. I'm British. Yes, of course. Yes. The Battle of Britain never got over that. Death is always imminent. I understand. Everyone's getting older.

Everyone wants to avoid injury by reducing down the amount of weight that you use. This is one of the reliable ways by focusing on a controlled eccentric. That also helps because you're not going to surprise yourself and get into a place or a range that you didn't mean to get into. Totally. Totally. By focusing on deep stretch as well. Also going to reduce down further the amount of weight that you need to get the amount. Absolutely. So yeah.

Stability, unstable exercise is much more injurious than stable exercise. If you have feet quarter strewn in and you're just moving exactly how you want, you're probably not going to fuck up. If you have quite a bit of weight on a bozu ball, I'm sure you've seen YouTube videos of various accidents like, yeah, you can fuck your shit up if you get really unstable. When it comes to tempo, because obviously we were talking about controlled eccentric and concentric that's at least got something behind it. Jeff Nippard did some study, saw him on TikTok talking about it.

How long do I need to take on that eccentric portion? Yeah, it's a good question. The literature we have so far as far as I'm aware of it, and because I am science, I'm very aware of it. It didn't impress you. No one's claimed on your show before that they are science itself. You fused your one. I'll be the first.

Yes. Um, it seems to not matter much. Anything between a repetition that in total takes one second, including eccentric and concentric, and all the way up to a total of nine seconds, which is a lot of pain, it seems to be that if you do more quick repetitions, you can get more repetitions. If you seem to do slower repetitions, you get fewer, but each one has a lot more stimulus. It's kind of like filling up a glass of a certain height. If you go really slow, it takes you longer. You fill up the glass. If you go really fast, it doesn't take as long, fills up the glass. The glass filling is what we want anyway. There's a certain amount of stimulus

you can drive to your muscles. You could do it more slowly. You could do it more quickly. It doesn't seem to matter for hypertrophy. However, under control is the big caveat. So if you just dump the stuff on you and then crank it up and then dump, yeah, that's not going to be as hypertrophic as some modicum of control. Now, if I go down this fast and come back up, I still can 100% control the eccentric. As long as I'm doing that, I can go ultra slow. I can go a little bit more quickly and anything in between, at least tentatively for now, we can say one thing almost for sure, it doesn't make a huge difference. Presumably when it comes to like practically functionally doing this in the gym, focusing on a little bit more of a tempo, let's say maybe a two count or a three count down, ensures that control is something because the difference between half a second down and one second down

in terms of control, everyone's done a one, everyone's thought that they're doing a three count tempo, but it's actually been like a one ish. Yes. And a lot of it is still like, that if you actually hit a two to three count to me, that seems like, all right, I can't escape this. this. I can't escape the degree of control that I need. Yes, that's absolutely true. And I'll layer another thing on top of it. One of my last points for what makes good technique is repetition consistency. Most of your reps should look about the same. It doesn't mean identical. There's actually a little bit of an injury preventative

benefit from exposing yourself to slightly different bar positions. It makes you more resilient. If you're one machine-like thing all the time and you get out of it in real life, you could find yourself a little bit hurt. But mostly the reps should look the same. The ability to make the reps look mostly the same and also move in the movement arc in which you want. Because I remember the first principle of good technique

is like, are you moving in a biomechanical way that targets the muscle? That's a lot easier to ensure if you slowly work into the eccentric hitting the right positions. Like if I just squat down, however the fuck my body tells me, I'll do a fine job. I've been squatting a long time, but maybe I'll sit back a little too far. I won't expose my quads as much. If I can take the time to go a little bit slower on the eccentric, I can actually figure out how my quads feel tension wise while I'm doing it

and regulate my exposure as I'm doing it. I'm sitting back a little too much. I'm like, nope, nope, nope. I sit forward and my quads get fucked up. I can feel the tension right away. Only because I'm controlling the antisentric a little bit longer, am I able to get that feedback right away?

It's like during a football play, the coach can't tell you what to do during the play. You got to play beforehand, you fucking figured out. The ball is fucking hiked and then shit happens. It's too fast. But if you can go a little bit slower, you can auto-regulate your technique and do a better job. During the exercise. During that exercise. And small bonus is your injury probability, at least nominally on theoretical grounds, will reduce. And I'll take anything that reduces my injury probability

by some amount and doesn't reduce the mechanisms if I perturfeed all. So some people say tempo doesn't matter. And I say totally. It's like if you get the same high quality meal at two restaurants, same fucking meal because it doesn't matter which one you go to. Yeah, but what's the price? If one is 75% cheaper, my fucking Jewish ass is there ASAP. I'm there early at the door.

No way that could be investing instead of doing that. In any case, I'm there as soon as it opens, blah, blah, blah. So if you get even a theoretical downside of injury risk that's a little bit smaller, I'll fucking take it. With that in mind, does it make sense for trainers, athletes as they get older to focus more on tempo? As you increase in age, the focusing more on tempo means that you use less weight, reduced injury risk. When you're younger, I saw your video on Sam Sulek, Homeboy's very strong, lifting full stack, all the rest of it, but he's made of rubber and magic. He's 22 or something.

Yes, we were all made of rubber and magic back then. In my case, it was a type of rubber that wasn't able to get erect. Huh? Oh, shit. I'm on set again. Yes. So what I would say is this, it matters for everyone because injuries are no fun in any case. There are also injuries that can go with you the rest of your life. You do a major distal pectoral tendon rupture, fully-evolved, you're just never going to be the same again. We need another 15 years of medical tech to reattach that thing in a way that it doesn't look fucked up or feel fucked up. You don't want to do yourself dirty when you're 22, rip a peck off.

You just never the fucking same. You don't look the same. You don't perform the same powerlifting. It's kind of done for you. Bodybuilding is kind of fucking weird at that point. So when people say, yeah, when you're young, you can get away with shit when you're young, but statistically it's still a downside. Uh, what I will say is I'll put it another way, exactly agreeing with your point.

That's my favorite kind of point, one that exactly agrees with me. Why do you think I'm on the show? I'm just here to feed the ego and be like, yes, Chris, I would, I'd like to feed with something else, but we signed a couple of papers that said I couldn't physically touch you during the show. When you are young, I fucking get it. I get it. I can do this. The fucking bitch over there, seeing you do it, you're getting laid, whatever. Ego shit. Live your life. When you're older, and this is like a particular pet peeve of mine, I see like a fucking balding

48 year old man swinging the fucking dumbbells around about, come here, dumb motherfucker. What are you doing? How old are you? It's like I've talked to, I've actually talked to a few women in my day, nothing sexual. When you're 13 years old, 17 years old, and you have what I would describe as very understandable, but kind of a childlike relation to body image

and stuff like that, like you're unable to go through a muscle gain phase because any amount of extra pudge on you just feels totally wrong. You're 17. Fuck it. I get it. I get it. Fuck and we all had body image issues.

I talked to a 37-year-old woman or a 47-year-old woman who knows she needs to gain muscle but is unwilling to gain an extra half centimeter of pudge. I'm like, look, Linda, how old are you? She's like, I'm 47 years old. What do you do for a living? I'm actually, I'm managing an accounting firm. So you're intelligent and responsible and you can see ahead, right? She's like, well, yes, of course.

I'm like, you can't make the trade off to get a fucking half centimeter of fat on your ass. So you gain more muscle and she's like, God damn it, you're right. So just the same way, if I see an older, you see a younger guy swinging weights around like, whatever, to be 20 again, my man, I see a 40 year old doing it. I'm like, dude, come on. It's like seeing a 45 year old, like just after watching Fast and Furious 18 or whatever, like rev his shit up against a younger guy and the foot the fuck, the fuck, really? This is what we're doing. So it's always good for everyone, but for older people, just have no fucking excuse. Slow your shit down, control your shit.

We talked about concentric, eccentric. You mentioned about stretch at the bottom, pause, pausing reps and isometrics. What needs to be said there? Isometrics just don't seem to be as hypertrophic. Isometrics in a stretch position or planning hypertrophic in a contracted one. They're not. So for example, if you're doing cable flies, if you stop at the squeeze, oh, sorry, if you stop and squeeze, people will give that cue. It's totally cool for variation. It's fun. It's awesome. It grows muscle. But I wouldn't say it's essential. It might be a downside. So all that energy you're spending stopping at the squeeze, you could put into the eccentric,

which probably grows more muscle. So if you were going to do a pause, you're going to be pausing at the stretched position, not at the contracted position. More often, yeah. Pause at the stretch is cool for a couple of reasons. One, it absolutely reduces the injury probability. That reversal at the stretch is the single generally most dangerous time for muscular injury. Right, because you've got weight going down and you're about to contract while it's, yeah, that's how I ruptured my Achilles. Yeah. Oh, I've heard that story. It was terrible. Yep.

The ultimate scary story of warm up for forever if you've coming back to sports. Correct. Yeah. Um, the direct force plate measured pulse of force at the bottom of the movement is the highest it will be in its entire movement, reversing. It's also technically your chest at its weakest position. So it's, if you want to pause there, again, the absolute risk of injury in the gym is fucking tiny. It's way, way less injurious than rugby or tennis or anything like that. It's so funny because like rich people like myself will be like, oh, I'm going to ski

in the veil and they'll see like a lifter lifting 200 pounds. Like, isn't that bad for your back? Motherfucker, you just hit a tree on your last trip There's half your brains out of your fucking face lifting is super super safe So I don't want to be like you got a fucking pause at the bottom or else you're gonna die But on a small relative injury risk, it is reduced when you're pausing at the bottom absolutely and you get more time Experiencing tension in your muscles at that length and position So there's an argument that pausing at the bottom is actually maybe a little bit more

hypertrophic and you need less weight on the bar. So all those things stack up and like the good column is at least as good, probably not much better, but the bad column is a little smaller. To me, it seems like at the very least it's a great option. I'm not going to say it's the only way to try and fuck that, but it's a good option, good idea to try. In other news, this episode is brought to you by a product I've used every single day for over three years now, and that's AG1.

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So you can buy it and try it every single day for three months. And if you don't like it at the end of that three months, they'll give you a money back. Head to the link in the description below or go to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom to get a year's free supply, vitamin D3 and five free travel packs plus that 90-day money back guarantee that's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. Okay, how do we warm up before we start fuck? I know I just get in there and fucking rage, bro First thing when driving to the gym, there are only a few types of music you're allowed to listen to Chris

Let me judge your music soundtrack for warming up. What do you what's in the headphones there for you sleep token at the moment? That's nonsense because I have never heard of it. It must be the wrong thing. Okay. Do you, what do you listen to? Oh, well, dark thoughts. Oh, yes. Always. My psychiatrist says we have to up a few different kinds of medication to make them maybe go away.

Um, blink one 82 really is the correct answer because you reached the age of 13 and never actually aged psychologically. Oh God, I probably of 13 and never actually aged psychologically. Oh, God, I probably never made it to 13. 11, maybe. Yes. So, what kind of music is that?

I'm trying to think of what's the sleep token? Sleep token? Metal. Like half of it. Oh, my man. Never mind. I take back. I thought it was like...

Like, it's kind of in the world of bring me the horizon or loathe, misery signals. Misery signals. Yeah, all of the bands represent the landscape of my mind. Holy shit, it's got dark. Yes, okay, warm-up music aside, there is actually a study that was recently conducted by Dr. Brad Schoenfeld, the world's expert on hypertrophy and his laboratory. And they have illustrated something that most lifters of a certain degree of intelligence level and long time participation have realized. And it's that

there are two different kinds of warm-up. The general warm-up, which is when you go in and you do the elliptical for 15 minutes, maybe you foam roll, maybe do some dynamic stretching, that's all fine and good. And then there's the specific warmup, which is whatever lift you have first in your program, you do it for about a set of 12, very lightweight, set of 12 with maybe your 30 rep max, then you do a set of eight after a few minutes of rest with maybe your 20 rep max, then you do a set of four ish, two to four reps with something like your 10 rep max, then you rest a little bit and then you're ready to do whatever load. That specific warmup is a very good idea from a variety of perspectives. It warms up your tissues.

It makes them more pliable, less likely to get hurt. It also activates and wakes up your nervous system. It aligns your actual muscle fibers more into the direction of pull or whatever exercise you're doing. It decreases the sensitivity of what are called Golgi tendon organs, which are detectors in your muscles for how much force is being transduced. And they start out not warmed up by being like, holy shit, that's a lot of force. And they actually tamper down how much your nervous system can activate.

After a few warm upsets, you literally are stronger. She's why you can't cold-bar your one rep max. Exactly, exactly. The GTOs need to kind of cool down. And after a few reps, a few sets, the progress will be heavier weight. Oh, we're safe here. This is okay.

Yeah, it's fine. Um, okay. So I'm just, again, I'm thinking like functionally when we get into the gym, what this means. Let's say that we're going in to do a chest day. Let's say we're going to do a chest and back day, like just a full, like a push-pull day. this means, let's say that we're going in to do a chest day, or let's say we're going to do a chest and back day, like just a full, like a push-pull day,

you're gonna start off with incline dumbbell press. Does that mean that the 12, 8, 4 method for incline press, do you then need to do the same thing again for back? Yes. Right. Would you do those two together? Would you go, would you maybe alternate from, okay, I'm going to press a little bit and then during my couple of minutes rest, I'll go and row a little bit and or whatever.

What I like to do is I like to warm up for the exercise I'm doing next. Once I warm up, I do that exercise and then whatever exercise I have after is one of two options. One, it's the same muscle group, just more exercise. After incline press, I'm on to pushups or something, same muscle group. Then I only have to do what the great J Cutler actually termed as a feel set. It's like you just put some weight on there, maybe not your working weight, maybe your working weight.

You just do a couple reps, maybe five to 10, maybe fewer, just to feel out, just to get the technique right. So that the first time you're heavy dumbbells on your hand, you're like, what the fuck is going on? Just feel it out. That get the technique right. So the first time you're heavy dumbbells on your hand, you're like, what the fuck is going on? Just feel it out. That's all you need. So between every single exercise, that's not the first afterwards, you just need maybe one set to feel it out and then you go, you don't need all three.

But if it's a muscle you haven't trained yet, let's say we do chest and then we do back, if I just did a whole bunch of bench press and then I'm doing pull-ups. Yeah. It's 12, eight, four on the pull-down or assisted pull-up machine. That last four is maybe four actual pull-ups. Rest, put your weight belt on and then go real quick. The general warm-up, the idea that you come in and do elliptical or whatever. If you take a thorough specific warm-up like a 12, 8, 4 system, that one study

by Dr. Badger-Hollfeld showed that you don't have any benefit performance wise from the general warmup. And unless you really need it, like it's fucking just super cold outside and even a specific warmup isn't good enough, I would say be careful on wasting too much time with the general warmup. One of the things that happens in fitness is there's really good stuff baked into the fitness cake and every now and again we add ingredients just on fluff alone.

They don't make a whole lot of sense. One of the major kind of sources of fluff is increasing the complexity and duration of your general warmup because of reasons. Some guy will, if he foam rolls his elbows, it's night and day and then he can do skull crushers. But that's just that guy's fucked up. You see it and he's an advanced lifter.

You're like, fuck, foam rolling, bro. Everyone's got to do it. You start doing it. You take your general warmup and you do elliptical, then you do some kind of box step ups, then you do some Pilates stuff, then you do dynamic stretching. 45 fucking minutes later, you're like, it's time to work out. Motherfucker, your workout's over already. You got to go back to the office.

So the general warmup is just not necessary if you do a specific warmup. So what I do in the gym, I come in, I do some arm circles, I do because I'm Russian, I got to do some side bends and stuff. And then I just go 12, 8, 4, first exercise. After the first exercise, I'm generally warm as fuck. I'm fucking sweating and then I'm fucking golden. So you can do a general warmup if you want, but I would say for folks listening, you don't have to.

But a specific warmup, 12, 8, 4 or something like it, the basic reasoning is just slightly lighter weights, good to heavier weights, the repetitions fall, then you're ready to go train and get the most out of it. All right. How about rep ranges and how heavy to lift? Yes. For there are recommended target rep ranges for every single human physical

quality that we know. So for example, for strength, basic strength building is like sets of three to six repetitions. You do a whole lot fewer than six. Let's do you do singles. You can get stronger doing singles, but you could have gotten stronger because you would have gotten more volume doing still very heavy weight. If you did like sets of four, it's just not an efficient use of your time.

Still works not as efficient. Can you get stronger doing a sets of eight? Yes. But you get a lot a sets of eight? Yes. But you get a lot of hypertrophy work from eight, but if you do it, your eight rep max, it's just not heavy enough. Like sets of three to six would be for you to get as much strength out of it as possible. So these are all spectrum ranges. There's not like at some repetition and begins before it, you get nothing and then you get all the hypertrophy. And then after you get no hypertrophy, it's kind of more of a normal

distribution kind of situation. But for hypertrophy, it seems that anything roughly between sets of five repetitions that are challenging, close to failure, and all the way to 30 to 35 repetitions seems to be on average for the average person, for the average muscle seems to be on average for the average person, for the average muscle in medium term, several months of testing to promote almost, I'll say it better, undifferentiable amounts of muscle growth. So we got group of people training sets of five to eight, but another group of people training sets of 25 to 28 reps, as long as they go close to failure, and it's the same exercise, they get essentially on average the same results.

Now, within a different muscle, it could be different. Some people's biceps respond really well to heavy shit, sets a five to 10. You do sets a 25 to 30, they just get tired, and they don't have much hypertrophy. It works differently between individuals too, but the overarching theme is anywhere between sets of five and sets of 30 is kind of unlikely to be a ton of really wrong answers. You can gain muscle doing sets of four and three and two and one. It's just going to take a lot more sets to get at them. And obviously your joints and connective tissues are taking a fucking hell of a pound

because that's a really heavy weight. It's not ultra efficient. You're not putting your best cards on the table if you're doing that. Can you get really good muscle growth with sets of 30, 40, 50 plus reps? Actually, yes, but you have to do more sets to accomplish that. And each set is psychologically fucking... Three minutes long. I was, fuck that, right? So you do like 10 sets of 52 reps, the playing card workout, fuck that.

It's a shitload of systemic fatigue, crapload of psychological fatigue for the same growth you could have gotten with just doing, you know, 10 sets of 8, which is way easier on the whole system. So 5 to 30 reps is really good general advice, but experiment on your own time, find out what seems to be giving you great proxies. Pump, burn, tension, soreness, whatever rep ranges give you that, it's awesome. And another thing is try some variety. So if you train back twice a week, have one of the days be slightly heavier, like mostly sets of five to 10, some sets of 10 to 15 reps.

Try the other day being mostly sets of 15 to 20 reps and even some sets of 20 to 30 out of a heavier and lighter. That diversity, there are a few studies that show a diversity in rep ranges, even within several months of time can help you grow. So I wouldn't write that off. And also more sustainable from a joint connective tissue perspective and enjoyment perspective. It's nice to people have some slightly different days. So you know, like, oh, another day of 28 reps, fuck that. But 28, you get sick of after one day, the next day you come in,

it sets of, you know, five to 10, like, okay, fuck, like, this is different, it's cool, and it's equally effective on average. What about weight? equally effective on average. What about weight? The amount of weight that you choose should fall into two categories or two kind of clearance variables to make sure it goes through. One is, can you lift it to with good technique between five and 30 times in one set. And two is that exhibition of your lifting at least within three reps ish of failure. Because people will say like, you give someone 10 pound dumbbells that can lift the 30s and they do five and they put it down.

They're like hypertrophy. I hit five like dip, but the caveat there is that you have to challenge the muscle. So the weight you end up using is whatever weight gets you within five to 30 reps range close to failure. And you have to warm up to find that out. And it's different for everyone. But the idea that you got to go ultra heavy to grow is true, but it's not the only true thing. You can also grow from light high rep shit. You just have to push it close to failure. Why not to failure?

To failure is a totally fine thing as well. There are downsides of going to failure all the time. It seems that as you get closer to failure, the amount of stimulus per set rises. So if you have a set where you stop at two reps shy failure, and another person has a set where they stop just at reps shy failure and another person has a set Where they stop just at failure or someone has to drag the barbell off of them the person who went to failure is gonna grow more muscle That's a good thing, but it's by a small margin. Maybe just several percent more growth The downside is training to failure generates a lot more fatigue Probably not a few percent more, maybe if you doesn't

percent more, which is a big deal. If you're going to use a program which mostly has you do three or two or one rep shy of failure, you'll get great stimulus and you'll be able to recover from lots of sets over the course of weeks and months, which means you'll get a great stimulus and a great hypertrophy result. If you insist on going to failure even beyond in your sets, you can get very good results, but you have to reduce the total volume if you're training because the amount of fatigue you accumulate is going to be rapid. It's going to happen fast. So have you ever heard of like hit training, Mike Menser, high intensity training, HIT,

Mike Menser and those folks were fans of going to failure and beyond with drop sets and crazy shit like that. They got really good results, but they don't do very many sets, a few sets per muscle per workouts, all they do because they realized we can't recover from this. You can recover from more if you stay a little shy of failure. My suspicion is that if you want the best overall muscle growth and you have all the time in the world to train, that somewhere between three and one rep and reserve on average for a program is a really good idea. But you also want to test your shit every night again. It's difficult to say this has two reps in reserve if it's been months since you've

actually gone to failure on that exercise because you can be fucking lying to yourself. Yeah, it's two RIR. Someone puts a gun to your head, literally maybe, and they'll go to failure and you get six more reps. Well, shit. It turns out you weren't even in that best growth zone of three to one. So what I would say is a method that we use at RP, our app does this automatically. It starts you a few reps shy of failure, and then it presents incrementally slightly heavier loads over the weeks or repetition goals that are slightly higher. So takes you from 10 reps to 11 reps to 12 reps, or takes you from 100 pounds to 105 to 110.

Automatically because your body can't adapt that quickly, you're going to reach failure a few weeks in, four to six weeks in, you'll not only have a whole range of going from three-ish in reserve all the way to zero, which means you checked every box, but you'll now know something about yourself. You'll know exactly how high your best performance is. So for the next mesocycle, next program you construct, you can be like, okay, I know how strong I am. Let me start a little bit less than that and progress again to see if I can go

a little bit higher. So I would say going from some number of reps and reserve all the way to failure in a single mesocycle is probably a good practice for many people, but not required. You can always go two or three reps and reserve as long as you do enough sets. You'll get very close to ideal hypertrophy outcomes and you'll do very well in muscle growth. If you just take everything to failure, you just have to really watch your fatigue management and not do too many sets because then you'll burn out.

What about sets? Sets are influenced by a few things. One of the big ones is your proximity to failure. So what I'm going to say next about how many sets you should do is if you go close to failure all the time, you do on the lower end of this range, at least start there. If you do, oh, you know, two or three reps in reserve, you can be on the higher end of this range.

Couple ways to think about sets, there's sets per week and there's sets per session. I like to think of per muscle group per session. Some people get overly obsessed about how many sets do I need to do per exercise? There is an answer to that question. But it's much more interesting to talk about per muscle group, because you can train your chest with three exercises and do two sets each, or you can train it with two exercises and do three sets each. The total amount of working sets is by far the biggest determinant of how much muscle you're going to grow per session. So, in a session, theoretically, you can do anywhere from one set for your muscle, just

one set of curls in the leave, and as a beginner especially, you'll get some robust gains. Or, as someone who's more advanced, if you train your biceps every single day, just one or two sets of curls ends up being a lot of weekly volume and plenty of stimulus and that's totally fine way to grow. On the other end, in the session, you can do as many as 12 to 15 sets for the biceps or for the chest. The downside there is on the higher ends of that spectrum, you are reaching into what's called junk volume, where, yeah, you're training, but your nervous system is so tired, it's not even recruiting as many of the muscle

fibers as you want anymore. It's like it's taken the day off and you're just kind of robotically moving through that 30 rep cutoff, theoretical, very rough cutoff of anything lighter than your 30 rep max, probably won't grow as much muscle. That's always and everywhere your fresh 30 rep max. So if you're on exercise number five for your pecs, you're doing cable flies with 100 pounds for sets of 15, even if it's a failure. That is to failure as we observe it externally.

With this pre-fatigue. But, oh my God. And at that point, your nervous system is fucking checked out. A lot of your faster twitch muscle fibers, the ones that grow the most, they're not even fucking contracting anymore. And you look at 100 pounds and someone's like, how many reps did you do? 15. How many could you have done if you were fresh?

Like, I don't know, 40? Well, let's tan away from 30. That already is starting to get junky. It's just the stimulus isn't worth the fatigue anymore. A couple of studies have been done, actually more than a few, and a lot of good meta-analytic data has been synthesized, probably some of the best of which is by a gentleman named James Krieger who has a lit review, the weightology lit review, I sign up for it, I pay real money for it. My own money, Chris. You know how painful it is to part of my own money? And he has hinted at the fact that close to the best answer, on average, huge caveat,

on average, is something like five to eight working sets per muscle per session. So if you're training your biceps and you do three sets per session, totally cool. You just have to do more sessions per week. If you're doing something like nine sets for biceps, again, totally cool. We just have to train them less frequently so they can recover for a lot of nine sets of work. But if you're doing 15 working sets for just your biceps in one session, the literature would say that's not optimal. And the reasoning would be like your last five sets or just a gigantic fucking waste

of your time. You're just not, you're cashed out. It's like frying an egg after it's already fried. It just gets more burnt and nothing good happens to it. On the other hand, if you're doing just one or two sets for biceps per session, you had better be doing a lot of sessions over the week. And if you're only training once or twice for biceps, you say, look, man, your muscles could take more of a hit, which brings me to my next point.

How do you determine if you're doing the right amount of volume for you? And I would actually keep this relatively simple. However many sessions you have per muscle in a week, which I'm sure we'll get to, how many sessions is a good idea, let's just say it's two. Let's say you train your chest on Monday, you train chest again on Thursday. If after Monday's workout, let's say you're doing three sets of chest, by Tuesday evening, you're like not sore, you're not tired, you're fucking ready to go, your strength is as high as it'll ever be. Someone could ask the theoretical question of,

why the fuck are you waiting Wednesday as a whole day to just go Thursday? You could have already hit it again. So if you're well beyond recovered, next Monday, you can do four sets or five sets for chest to get you close to just barely recovered for next Thursday. If you're just barely recovered, let's say Wednesday, you're still a little tight, a little weak feeling, and Thursday morning, you're really good to go. Perfect. Is that MRV? Yeah. So if you go over that value, you might have exceeded your MRV. Well, there's more technical way to diagnose that maximum recoverable volume, but a kind of way to make sure you're not excessively over it.

So make sure you're healed on time. But if you're healed too early, then you could be at your minimum effective volume or even maintenance volume. You think you're growing, but you're really doing so few sets that you're not accomplishing a whole lot. So the point is to challenge your body such that it is recovering until, gee, a day or several hours before you hit it again. If you do eight sets of chest on Monday, by the time Thursday rolls around, you're still sort of a touch and you're weaker than usual. You're not going to get as robust of a stimulus.

And thus, you next time shouldn't do eight sets, maybe you should do six. So by adjusting the number of sets week over week for any given muscle to challenge yourself to recover close to just on time for the next time you hit it, not too far back, definitely not under recovered, you end up auto regulating yourself into probably close to your ideal volume for how much muscle you can gain. to your ideal volume for how much muscle you can gain. How long do you rest in between sets? Yes. Oh, in between actual sets as you go. Yeah. Okay. So I have a unique take on this. You might not hear it in a lot of other places.

It's just one minute and it's the right answer for everyone. Next question. No, wait, wait. That's not it. A lot of answers you'll get on the internet from folks that also know what they're talking about is some number of minutes. And I understand that answer because it's very usable. Let's say two to five minutes or something like that.

The problem is that is not a theoretically based answer. It's just a notional answer. Like here's the number. You're not really sure why. And there are many exceptions. For example, if you train your calves and calf raises, are you telling me I need to rest five fucking minutes after my calves, 10 seconds after I don't even feel lacked gasset anymore.

I'm fucking totally good to go. So we do it RP as we have a four factor checklist model where if you can checklist four things after your last set is over, you can begin your next set as soon as those checklist items are checked. You can wait longer and there may be some small upsides to it, but someone could say if you wait much longer, you're just kind of wasting time. So here are the checklists. Number one, your cardio can't be a limiting factor.

So if you just did a set of squats and you turn to your training part and you're like, should I do another set? No, because then what's going to stop you in your set of squats is you can't breathe. It's not your local quad musculature that's being brought close to failure. And remember, the local musculature brought close to failure is the way we get the most robust gains. That's the mechanism by which we grow. So that's no good.

So wait until you're back to at least normal-ish breathing. That's checklist one. Another one is kind of your neural nervous system strength, which means do you feel, do you feel strong like in here, you know, not in the pecs, in the heart, which we all know emotion comes from the heart. No wait, it's the brain. If you're fucking like, yeah, let's fucking do this. You're ready. If you still feel like curved up in a ball and defeated, how are you going to push it

close to failure in the next set? You're not. You're going to suck. So number one, cardiovascular system needs to be mostly recovered. Number two, you need to have your neural strength back. You need to be like, yeah, fucking, let's do this. The second to last one is the synergists need to no longer be a limiting factor. For example, in the squat, you can say, OK, after three minutes, I'm breathing normal.

I feel fucking strong again. And my quads feel like we're ready to go. But my lower back is still cramping, still has lactic acid and still weak. If you do another work set, what do you think is going to be the limiting point? It's going to be a lower back, which means your quads are like, did anything happen? Did we just try or what the fuck went on? If your lower back has five good reps in it, but your quads have 10 good reps in

them, it doesn't matter if you tell yourself on one rep and reserve, your six reps and reserve for the quads for the muscle that matters. So the synergists have to be good to go. Another example is forms in the lap pulldown. If your forms are still throbbing and you can't grip anything, it's not time to do lap pull downs again. You got to fucking rest out. Even if your lats feel quite good.

And that last four factor model checklist is does the target muscle have enough recovery in it for it to be able to do at least another five repetitions. Because any set less than five reps can be hypertrophic for sure, but not the most efficient use of your time. You're not sufficiently recovered. So let me give you two extreme examples. One is calf raises just on a seated calf machine, not the one where your legs are bent, but the one where your legs are straight. Bent leg calf raises actually mostly hit the soleus muscle, which is deep to the gastroc. It's not the cool big diamond shaped one.

It just sucks. I learned a lot about this while I was trying to regrow the bottom half of my right limb. Yeah. Yeah. That sucked. Well, it worked. Yeah.

I actually overshot it. I overshot it and had to regrow the other one more. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, yeah. And the third limb looks quite good as well. Ha ha. So calf raises.

Cardio. So calf raises cardio. Uh, three seconds later, you're breathing normally. You might have been breathing normally the whole time. Check. When do you feel strong again? Could be five or 10 seconds later. Again, my calves feel fine. Synergists. There are no synergists.

The thing, the machine starts at your hips and goes down. There's no synergist. So that auto checks itself. And then how long until I'm not feeling like my calves are full of lactic acid? Oh, maybe five or 10 seconds. So there is a world in which 10 seconds between sets is the right amount or a correct amount of time to rest for calves. Can you rest longer?

Sure. No big deal. But you may be taking incrementally, exponentially more time for linearly better gains, which generally is just like, just do another set. And someone's like, well, if I do five sets where I rest longer, I get just as much growth. Is if I do seven sets where I rest shorter. Yeah. But the rest longer takes you eight total minutes to train.

And the rest shorter takes you three total minutes. Why don't you just do two extra sets? You'll be four versus eight minutes wise and get the same hypertrophy. So if a muscle is fucking pretty recovered and you're pretty good to go, I say just go again. And if you need more stimulus, just add more sets. So on calf raises, it could be a correct answer to say it's 10 seconds rest. Warfactor model all checked out on squats for sets of 15. Holy fuck.

I've rested. I did this one thing once, which is on YouTube somewhere, where I did 405 pounds, four plates in the squat, for five sets of 10. And I rested for something like seven to 10 minutes between each set. I also after set three and four and five, I threw up independently after each one of those sets.

So it's gonna take some time. And honestly, it was four factor model based, even though I didn't know at the time I came up with that shit later. But like, it took me four minutes to stop breathing hard. It took me another several minutes for my fucking lower back to be like, okay, I'm healed enough. So very different answers. But generally, the most simple way I can condense this whole conversation, if you're ready to go again, if everything's fucking working and you feel strong, go. If you're not ready, if you're breathing hard, if you still feel weak, if your muscles

start cramping, you have to rest no matter what you saw on the internet. One to two minutes, two to three minutes. Those are all heuristic ideas. This is a theoretical basis that's a bit more sound. Outside of the practicality of people just having lives outside of the gym. Some people that aren't you would know anything about it outside of the gym. Is there a upper bound on how long your session length should be is there some accumulation of something that's happening in there when you just take time in the gym. Yes, it assuming you're going pretty hard.

Jim, yes. Assuming you're going pretty hard, generally what we see is after about two hours of consistent hard training in the gym, the amount of systemic fatigue you're going to have, acute systemic fatigue, short-term fatigue that lasts hours, is going to be so high that you can no longer recruit individual muscle fibers very well for whatever you're training. And it's kind of like it's just, yeah, you're doing training, but not much is happening. You're much better off cutting off that session, going and getting some rest, doing more weekly sessions. Some people be like, I train twice a week, but it's three hours each time. Yeah, but that last hour kind of fucking sucks.

Three times a week for two hours. Better. In most cases. Now, some people can train up to two hours and have really good performance, especially if an intro workout drink with some protein and carbs. I was going to say, obviously, you're going to run out of fuel by this stage as well. Totally. Totally.

It should certainly run down on fuel. There's only sleep token songs or blink one 182 that you can listen to as well. That's right, yeah, you're going through your playlist to see what what fucks. So yeah, generally under two hours, for many people anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour and a half is where their best workouts will occur.

And you can have great workouts that last less than 45 minutes, but I would say is a bit of a technical efficiency question there is especially with people with lives outside of the gym, which is a nominal concept I technical efficiency question there is especially with people with lives outside of the gym, which is a nominal concept I don't know anything about. I've heard of. Allegedly.

If you fucking got to the gym, you went to the locker room, you stared at some dicks, you put on your workout clothes, you came out, it's already such a sunk cost. You might as well go crush out an hour or an hour and a half workout. Maybe you have like a one to one travel to training ratio and time. Yes. And that's for some people, not bad. You just don to maybe have like a one to one travel to training ratio and time. Yes. And that's for some people, not bad. You just don't want it to go much worse than that. Uh, so a lot of times people will say, well, aren't 20 minute workouts

effective? Yeah. If you do many of them throughout the week, sure. If you have really low ball fitness goals, but I would say, yeah, get in there and 45 minutes an hour and a half is a really good answer for many people. If you do much longer than that, the only question I have for you is, do you still have a lot of fucking energy to keep going?

And if the answer is like, dude, I fuck my shit up after two hours and 15 minutes, hey, slow clap. These are all averages. Apparently it works for you. Amazing. But ask yourself, like, am I really doing the kind of work? It's like, you see a guy talking to a girl at the club after five drinks, he's fucking, what is it?

What the kids call it? Riz. He's got the Riz. You've got Riz. He's got. Oh fuck off. No, I don't Whatever that is. I don't have it, but you don't know. I don't know what it is. You might do have it Yeah, oh god. Okay, is there a test I can take for Riz the nurse comes out She just gives you a pamphlet you are positive for it's a death sentence. I'm like, oh I peed blue yesterday

I knew it was bad comes out and tries to tell you that it's terminal, but just gets lost in your eyes. Oh my God. What's terminal again? I'm like, I don't know. You tell me, I try to like do with locks in my hair, but I realize I'm fucking bald. See, that's why I don't have a rhythm. So five drinks in, my man's kicking it.

You ever see someone lay down some game, you're kind of like in the booth next to him, you're like, fuck it and hit it. She's like, oh my God. Ha ha ha. That's you in the gym after an hour, right? After two and a half hours, you're like that guy laying down game after 15 drinks. And you're like, you know, I'm like big on YouTube. And she's like, look, man, I'm going to leave with my girlfriends.

You're great. And you're like, I see you, Kelsey. She's like, it was Karen. She walks off. You're just watching it from the periphery. You're like, that guy should have stopped fucking drinks ago. You know, that's two hours and 30 minutes in the gym guy. And she walks off, you're just watching it from the periphery, like that guy should have stopped fucking drinks ago. You know, that's two hours and 30 minutes in the gym guy.

Just quit while you're ahead. Come back next time. How often should people train each week? Sets, muscle groups, training frequency, et cetera, et cetera. So there are two questions there. One is how often should you train any given muscle per week? And the answer to that is generally anything can work between one and six times. You can train the same muscle even seven times a week if you like.

Generally, you can train it once. Neither one is going to give you the ideal, although six is probably a better answer than one. Muscles just don't take that long to recover. So people say, oh, I just hit my chest once a week. Well, how long were you sore for? They're like, well, halfway through the week I was healed. Did you feel strong after like, yeah, so the fuck are you waiting out of three or four days just leaving?

Like you could be fucking doing it again, but you're not. So I would say anywhere between two and four times a week for the same muscle is a good idea. Two is great for a lot of people. Three and four is more for like specialization phases and folks that just recover really rapidly. Like, yeah, your chest might not heal three times a week from any kind of normal training, but your forearms might heal just fine. You might be able to train him for five days or maybe 18 days a week like you seem to with your fuck. Everyone's got something.

You know what I mean? I had nothing for a long time. I had nothing in no one. That head though. I didn't even have the head back in the day. You know, many when did you get that head when I started doing drugs? I'm kidding. Actually a photographs of myself when I was lifetime drug-free and my head is almost identically shaped quite sad as a matter of fact, um there was a An interaction I had in high school, right?

I was talking to an acquaintance slash friend more acquaintance than friend and I had an interaction with a girl and I was like I did an insanely low self-esteem in high school, right? I was talking to an acquaintance slash friend, more acquaintance than friend, and I had an interaction with a girl, and I was like, I had an insanely low self esteem in high school, and I was like, what did she think about that? And he's like, yeah, she actually thinks you're really cute, other than the way that you act at school, so it's a total introvert fucking weirdo.

She's like, and the shape of your head. And I was like, what the fuck? I didn't even know my head was shaped weird back then. Signed hair and stuff, I was like, what? I just never made sense of it. And then later, the internet't even know my head was shaped weird back then. Signed hair and stuff. I was like, what? I just never made sense of it. And then later, um, uh, the internet told me that my head was shaped really funny. So, uh, in any case, two to four times a week is a great per muscle, uh, session number.

The other question is how many total sessions, how many total times in the, uh, do I go into the gym? So I'll say this for folks that just want to be healthy and already have a decent amount of muscularity, two times a week is totally cool. You train with weights, Monday and Thursday, whole body, you're going to get a ton of great health, a ton of benefits, ton of physique. It's going to be awesome for just general recreational fitness, you know, like fit dad, that kind of body. If you're a professional bodybuilder, I'd like to see you training anywhere between five and that's on the low end and more like six to nine sessions per week.

So Jared Feather, IFP Pro, my biological son, he's currently in Thailand, I think, lost, found in a sense, but also lost. Slowly colonizing. Something like that, being colonized. In any case. Colonizing. Oh, lots of that. Yes. So That's why he's there. So He trains usually nine times a week, which means some days he does two days. He's literally a professional bodybuilder

It's his job to do that. What else he gonna do? He's got nothing else. He sits in his apartment stairs at a fucking wall or he's trained. No, wait, that's me. Jesus He says his apartment with ladies, I've been told. For a serious effort at changing your body composition, at trying to get more jacked and lean, if you've had enough of adult fitness and you wanna be that guy at work that's fucking people are talking about,

three to five times in the gym per week, each of them an hour ish in length, hour to an hour and a half. That's what I call serious effort. So if I'm in the elevator with someone and they make the mistake of talking to me and asking me about workout routines and how they can get more jacked and they're like, yeah, I've been seeing games, blah, blah. I'm going to ask the question of how many times do you go to the gym per week?

If they say two, I'll be like, you could definitely benefit from going like three or four. But if they say four or five, any addition of days beyond that, outside of an attempt at professional bodybuilding, just yields very small returns on investment. So what they're doing within the session that you're going to look at is. That's what happens next. If they say, well, I train five days a week, my next thing is to ask them a series of other questions, which you and I, I think we'll get to at the end of

this is how to troubleshoot because there's a lot. There's a big can of worms. Some of those questions may not even be training related. So automatically be like, how much are you sleeping? you and I think we'll get to at the end of this is how to troubleshoot because there's a lot. There's a big can of worms. Some of those questions may not even be training related. So automatically be like, how much are you sleeping and what's your diet like? And then you get the whole like, well, you know, ever since I started fucking my secretary, I sleep a lot less. And I'm like, hey, my man, but you could do less of that and grow more muscle.

How should people progress weights over time? That's important. For secretaries? Oh, just in hypertrophy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Progression over time, very, very important question. So there are many ways to do it, but some of the ways run into problems. If you just add reps or load when you feel like it,

you could be on to something, but also you could just be being a little bitch, you know? Like when exactly when you're squatting over four plates, do you feel like squatting more than that? Fuck that, never. I feel like not squatting at all. On the other hand, if you go up by very large amounts, you risk some technical decay and some injury probability. Your body's used to squatting four plates, you put a fifth plate on there. Sure, you're still good for a few reps, but that is a very different exercise at that point. Your connective tissues are used to four plates, they're not fifth plate on there. Sure, you're still good for a few reps, but it is a very different exercise at that point.

Your connective tissues are used to four plates, they're not used to five, some shit can go zig when a shit is agged and then you're fucked. So what I would say, the safe bet and a good bet, good bet from the perspective of kind of mandating yourself to progress, safe from the perspective is not extreme, is one of two options, maybe a combination of both. Adding just a little bit of weight to the bar every single week while you're in what's called your accumulation phase until you get tired and need a D-load or adding a repetition, maybe two.

So for example, if you're doing push-ups at home by yourself, where no one loves you, no one cares if you live or die, the mailman might say the smell is bad after a while and your cats have started to eat you, you know, that sort of thing. If you're at home working out with push-ups, you can do a set of 18 fresh close to failure. Next week it's 19, the week after 20, the week after that try 21. When you can't beat 21 and you get 20 and your pecs are so tired and sore, it's probably time for a few days off or a few days of active rest kind of situation, recovery until you come back and start hitting it again.

And then you slowly climb back up 19, 20, 21, 22, all time PR. Amazing. So adding reps is an awesome way to progress. The other way is adding load, small loads, right? The only kind I'm blown nowadays. Hey. Anyone? No one.

All right. So you go 100 pounds on dumbbell press. Then maybe your gym goes up. I will fuck it. Dumbbell press was a terrible up. I will fuck it down. The parcels terrible example. Say why in a sec, uh, barbell regular barbell bunch, press a hundred pounds week, uh, 10 reps week one week two. Try 105 still 10 reps, then 110, then 115, then so on and so forth.

If you can't match or beat your PRs, then you have to take some rest, take it easy, recycle those numbers and then try again. PRs, then you have to take some rest, take it easy, recycle those numbers, and then try again. The trippy thing about lifting and progression and hypertrophy and strength is you progress by these tiny little increments. But tiny incremental progressions over months and months of training lead to big gains. Some people get impatient and they want to slap the wheels on. They've been like pressing four plates for a while, like, yeah, man, fucking feeling it today.

Put five on that motherfucker and it's like, okay, but you could get hurt. We do have smaller plates. We do have smaller plates and you'll be baffled as to why we have them. It's for that slow study progression. Well, there's another thing that happens as well, which is people who are still using the exact same weight that they were 10 years ago. It's my weight that I use. I've heard people describe that like, yeah, I used to replay it on the bench like,

okay, you've attached yourself to a load. Very interesting. I imagine that must happen a lot to you. Attach yourself to a load. Oh boy, Chris, if you saw our dungeon slash gym, you, I get attached all sorts of things through the skin. Do you ever total side note, but there's this thing where people put hooks through

their back skin and they're hanging. I've seen that a few times on the internet, just browsing. That's not what I finished to, but midway through again. Start. Yeah. Midway through. I start with some seduction. It's like a carry session. Midway through and doing that weird shit.

It's like an intro session sort of pick me up. Little break. Yeah. Very nice. Yeah, but people do. like, you know, I mean, this is, we can go on to troubleshooting, but from my side, there's someone who's trained for 15 years and seen from the front line vanguard of the gym floor. Yeah, the fuckery. One of the biggest pieces of fuckery is that no one's

progressively overloading because nobody's tracking anything. Totally. And you go in and it's like a link glow. And it's like a 12 reps at 18 kilos on side laterals. Like that's, you know, that's like on a good day, that's how I feel. And that's what I do. And like you've been locked in there for five years. Yes.

At that weight. Yes. And if you want to just get the same physique at the end of the day every single time, that's a swell way to do it. But most people in the gym to get the same physique, they want better. One of the really cool things about either increasing your load and or reps is it forces you to fucking try. Yeah, a hundred pounds for 18 was something you could do.

This week you do 105 for 18. It might be really close to your limit or not. Kind of two extreme scenarios there. One is like you hit your limit real quick. Hey, congratulations, you were training hard this whole time. Good for you. But you tested it, now you know. The other one is you have 100 for 18 reps.

105, 110, 115, 120. Finally at 135, you hit 17 reps. Guess what motherfucker, I, 115, 120. Finally, at 135, hit 17 reps. Guess what, motherfucker? I got news for you. You've been at 10 reps in reserve your whole fucking life. And all of a sudden, the reason that you haven't been progressing is like, oh, shit, I've never been training remotely hard enough. So that can fix that problem big time.

That's why I really like that kind of a forward-looking progression formula. Yeah, there's feedback in the mix, but you have to challenge yourself in ways that are programmatic, that might not be your preferred thing to do. When I have a leg press session, like so I use the RPI hypertrophy app for my own training, legit. Yes, it's my app, but I actually fucking use it because it's fucking awesome.

It doesn't always give me things that I want to do, man. Last week I did XYZ on the leg press. Now it's one rep more and fucking five pounds more. I don't want to see that shit out there. I'm going to go by feel and go light. But the app's like, hey, science predicts you're going to be able to do this. Mr. Algorithm says.

Yeah, Mr. Algorithm says, shut the fuck up and do it. And then you can find a lot of inner strength if you have a goal that's a little bit outside of your ability, you can find the inner strength to go, you know what, okay, okay, okay, fuck it. I'll try. And then you win. And then you win again next week.

And you win again next week. And when your body is physically too fucked up to keep progressing, you'll know because you'll be unable to match your old rep you are some week before. You did 500 for 19 leg press last week. This week you put 505 on like the thing says, your goal is supposed to be 19 reps. You get to 14 and you're like, oh, shit, help, help. And people fucking press it up for you. You get out.

You're like, huh, maybe it's just a one off. Next leg session, you come back, you do the same thing on hack squat. Your legs are fucking done. They need at least half a week, maybe a whole week of easy time to deal with. But then you've earned your deal. You're not just deluding because you're like, yeah, fuck it. I'm not feeling training. You know, for a fact, objectively, you are no longer able to overload your musculature

because you're not strong enough anymore. You're not making progress. Then it's time to pull back. So you get this amazing thing of, you know, exactly what to do each time. And when you're done, you know you're fucking done. It's like, how do you know, like, how does the hero stop chasing the bad man in the movie that captured a little girl when he gets hit by a fucking truck and he can't walk anymore, you know he didn't give up.

You want to be that guy. Get hit by that truck of just a little bit more weight or load, weight or reps than you could do. How should people periodize the way that they put all of this together? By downloading the RPR Perchfam, Chris. But if you're a person with too little money, I would never associate you with you in person. My butlers might see you at the store or something like that, but they don't generally look in your direction.

So generally the progression should be roughly linear. You add a similar small amount of load over time or repetitions, sometimes both. You keep progressing over time, over some number of sessions, until two sessions in a row, you can't hit that same PR you hit in the last session. You're no longer as strong. That means your current level of cumulative fatigue is too high to present the most robust overload. At that point, you continue to progress linearly until you cannot progress anymore.

Then it's time to do one of two things. One is a recovery half week, which means for half a week, whatever you are going to do, you take that same session and you divide everything roughly by half, half the load, half the reps, half the sets. It's all fucking easy. It's a warm up. The whole workout takes 20 minutes. That lets your muscles recuperate a ton so you have another few weeks of progression

later. If multiple muscles have arrived to that breaking point at the same time and systemically you feel fucked up, your desire to train is really low. You're kind of sore all over and all the joints. Maybe your sleep is kind of thrown off, your appetite is lower. That means you're just overreached total body. Then you probably need more like a week of half of everything. That's called a D-load week. You take one of those and then you restart the progression of starting a few reps away from failure and next week add a little bit of load, add a rep or two, and go up, up, up. So you

go up, up, up, up, up, up, relax, drop the fatigue. How long, how many weeks does this tends to be? Great question. If you're training pretty fucking hard in the first week, which you should be through your upshot failure, at least above your minimum effective volume, something to give you a pump and a little bit of soreness. Most people training that hard, if they train four, five or six times per week, because the systemic fatigue is huge from that much training. Most people can't last longer than about four to eight weeks. If you were a beginner, you could go one year without deloading because you just don't,

you're not strong enough to accumulate enough systemic fatigue. You see a guy squatting 500 or 10, you're like, my mother fuckers going to be feeling. I don't give a shit how good a shape he is. He's going to need a deal load pretty soon. It's so extreme that at the top ends of powerlifting, a very fatiguing lift like the deadlift, some of the world's best deadlifters go heavy in the deadlift, really heavy and hard, once every two or three weeks only. For the deadlift, every other week is a deal load.

Two thirds of the week through the year a deal load. That's how much one week it can fatigue, but that's insanely exceptional. So I'd say for most hard training people, four to eight, if you really know what you're doing, four to six, because if you really know what you're doing and training super fucking hard, you accumulate fatigue faster. If you're a beginner, if you train twice a week or three times a week, if you're training smaller muscles like arms and stuff, you may be able to go 12 or 16 weeks without needing a deal. How do you know that? You keep adding able to go 12 or 16 weeks without needing a D-load.

How do you know that? You keep adding load to the bar or reps and you keep getting stronger. Then you're good to go. Keep going. One thing we haven't spoken about is training splits. Is it chest and back? Is it chest and triceps? What is the, from a science perspective when it comes to splits?

Yes. Let's go to the test tubes and the measuring devices. You know, old science. There are a few things I like to consider theoretically before designing a training split. One of them is within the context of the workout itself when you ask like, what am I doing today? Just make sure whatever you're training

gets high quality training if you pair it with whatever else you're training. Here's an example of when that does not happen. You do legs first, and then you do chest. For many people who are advanced and training hard, you know this, after legs, motherfucking, you ain't doing shit. You might be peeling yourself off the gym floor, the urine stain below you, maybe even a shit stain if you really squatted heavy. You're not doing anything but going home and eating and drinking and recovering. So legs and then chest just might not make any fucking sense.

On the other hand, if you have something like biceps and legs, bicep training doesn't make you that fucked up. It's just not a very big muscle. It doesn't make you systemically tired. You can't do it after legs because you got nothing after legs, but you might be able to do it before. So, you'll be able to do biceps first, legs second, that's a workable split in and of itself.

That's part one. So, muscles need to gel well together. Here's another example. If you do back first and then legs after can be done, but generally your lower back and mid back are now so tired, you're going to be all of your squats in good morning. You're going to fold over because you're back, not your legs. You have fucked up a limiting factor. And now that's the really big problem.

So as long as the exercises play well together and the muscle groups play well together, which is to say you can train everything you want it hard. And the muscle itself is limiting factor. There's no wrong answer. Someone, someone's like, is it cool to like train chest with back or is it chest with quads or, hey, as long as you can fucking hit all the muscles hard's no wrong answer. Someone was like, is it cool to like train chest with back or is it chest with quads or hey, as long as you can fucking hit all the muscles hard, no wrong answers. The other construct that we use in program design is if the muscle has been

trained already, the next time we train it, is it recovered enough to train again? So for example, if you say, okay, here's my program. All right. I'm training three days a week. Okay, great. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. And it's chest, chest, chest. I have to ask you the question of by Wednesday, what is it that you're doing with your pathetically deflated super week chest? No, you're going through the motions, your super fucks are like, ah, this sucks. If you simply move the routine to Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you can hit chest all three days and there's enough time to recover between.

So one thing that I look, if I'm looking over someone's program, I look for what I just generally, like heuristically describe is symmetry. Like where I look for each individual muscle group, like quads, where they at? Quads Monday, quads Thursday, seems to make sense. And then hamstrings, Tuesday and Saturday seems to make sense. But if you look, have hamstrings on Tuesday and then hamstrings on a Wednesday, I'm going to be like, can you at least try to explain that? Does that make sense?

Like it, there's an, uh, an amount of time you want for healing. It doesn't have to be exactly symmetrical, but it's generally stimulate, let it recover, stimulate again. Here's another thing. People say a whole body training doesn't work for me whole body every day. It can, if you lower the volumes of everything. So if I'm doing back five days a week, someone could be like, just bullshit, what if it's three working sets of back? No problem because the stimulus is small, the recovery isn't great. And then the next day

I'm ready to go. But if you're doing eight or 10 sets of back, yeah, you're going to be training back two or three times a week. So with those two constructs is are the muscles getting their due justice, the way you've arranged them in each session. And also is each session sufficiently far apart to get good recovery, but also not sufficiently so far that it's just too much recovery and you're sitting around doing nothing. Those are the two core elements of program design or splits as they're called. There are so many right answers within that universe, but also many wrong answers that I can't say X, Y, Z is the optimal split. So good bullshit detector for anyone listening to this. If anyone talks about like this is the best split for legs,

this would have two options. One, YouTube thumbnail title game, total respect, we play it too, I love it. Or, YouTube thumbnail title game total respect we play it to I love it or Categorical fucking bullshit because there's so many right answers to what's the best leg split so individually based as long as you do Those two checkmarks so splits. I'm very agnostic about there's lots of wrong answers But so many right answers. I can't say this is the best split whole body every day push pull upper lower push legs pull, complex splits. Jared and I, Jared, Father, I, we do multi day splits. We do like chest and shoulders in the AM, biceps and forearms in the PM. Tons of right answers. As long as within each session, all the muscles are getting just desserts.

Like I've hung out with people at the gym or after like deadlifting and squatting, they're over there doing forearm curls. I'm like, how much are you getting that? Like, dude, I'm fucking, I'm not even here. Like it's a ghost curling. It's a, it's 15 reps in a reserve. What's a fucking stupid split?

Whereas here's another example. You really want to beef up your back and you're going to need tons of heavy bent rows because coach said you need to fucking mid and thick lower back. But you do it the day after you've done a crap load of deadlifts and stuff like that. What are you doing? That's the wrong answer. You need to do it three or four days later when your back is

fresh again. So those two things of exercises are getting checkmarked within the session and they're spread roughly evenly or in a way that allows for recovery between sessions. All that everything that lives in that universe is a correct answer to splits and everything else is minor. Why haven't we talked about myore reps or rest pause or drop sets? Why hasn't that factored into this? Is this just sprinkles on the top of topping on the top of cake?

Yes. It's a detail that comes from at least two other variables. One, are you training sufficiently close to failure? Three reps, two reps, one rep, zero, or even beyond failure? That's the first question. The other question is, are you training in a proper repetition range of five to 30 repetitions? If you're doing those two things, there are many different set paradigms to get those two things. Uh, I say the third one is, are you doing the four factor rest model?

So for example, if you're doing myoreps in the curl, you do a set of 12, you put it down. Five seconds later, you pick up and do a set of six, put it down, set of four, so on and so forth. Can we say that you're going close to failure? Yes. Can we say it's the right load selection? We can. What about that four factor rest model? Well, if after you curl for 12 and you're about to pick up and do your six reps,

my reps, if you're like, don't do it, then it's an exercise that's not good for my reps. And you'll notice something you'll see in RP, all of our talk about my reps. We don't often do my rep barbell back squats. There is no my repping that when you go close to failure, fucking done four minutes, you don't just go back and do it. But for calves, you can my rep till you're blue in the face. You can superset, you can do all that stuff.

So if you're bringing the muscle really close to failure, the rep range is appropriate. And whenever you're doing your next work set, be it a superset, my rep, cluster set, occlusion, whatever, the muscle is limiting factor because all the other things are cool. There are like at least eight different kinds of training paradigms, different modalities. You can use straight sets, down sets, drop sets, myoreps, what's it called? Supersets.

There's tons of other options. No wrong answers, as long as, just to reiterate real quick, you're getting close to feeling everything. The load selection is appropriate, not too light, not too heavy. And you're actually targeting the muscle itself as a limiting factor, which means you've checklisted the four factor rest model. What should people do if they're not making progress? They're at a plateau.

They're the guy that's been using 18s on side laterals for five years. Yes. What's the troubleshooting checklist for you're not growing, you might be a bitch or there might be something up with the training. Yeah, just quit, I would say, that's my best. Throw yourself out of window. Fuck it. When has training ever paid off?

Was the number of times stress that you've physically been laid in the gym? To me, it's zero and everywhere else also zero. I don't even know what the fuck we're doing with this anymore. I just anytime people say, oh, I'm really having a struggle in lifting weights, my first answer is just like, just stop. But if they don't accept that, there's a couple other good ideas. The list technically of troubleshooting ideas is kind of infinite, but there are a couple of big picture items you really want to think through or talk through if you're struggling with the soul situation, with gaining muscle.

One of them sounds very pedantic, but nonetheless, it's worthy of repetition. How do you know you're not gaining muscle? I had a very interesting interaction once on social media where this gentleman asked me, how come he can't gain weight even though he's eating a ton of calories. I looked at his calories, looked at his body and I was like, ah, fuck. And I was like, look, man, my number one suspicion is that you're not actually eating this much food consistently. He's like, dude, I'm telling you I am. And I'm like, okay, fine, I believe you.

I'll rule that out. And then it had a being after I thought about it for a bit and asked him a few more questions, he actually was gaining weight, just not as fast as he wanted, but the rate was like half a pound per week. It was totally fine. So his initial submission of, I'm not gaining weight was wrong. But some people, when they tell you, I'm really not putting on muscle size, how do you know that?

There's only really one golden fleece way of figuring it out. Has your repetition strength in the exercises for that muscle group been going up over time or has it been staying really steady? Let's say we're talking about back. How's your one arm dumbbell row? How's your bent row? How's your cable row? How's your pull ups?

How's your pull downs? If they're like, yeah, man, or last year I've really put on fucking just tons of fucking strength onto them. Conversation over mother fucker. Why is it coming from? Of course it's fucking muscle gain at some level. You can't get neural efficiency for that long. But if you are stalled in your exercises, you're stalled in your body weight.

Yeah, you might not be growing. So one big one off that body weight thing is, are you giving yourself enough nutrients to actually gain muscle? Uh, one of my, I'll quote myself, what a fucking egotistical move that is. I do it all the time. My man, quoting me or quoting yourself. Both my man. If you weigh 150 pounds, there's no way to gain, tame or main gain your way to 180.

By the laws of physics, you have to gain weight. And the only way to gain weight is either strangely to reduce your physical activity, which most people won't do, or increase the amount of food coming in. So sometimes people will struggle with muscularity, younger folks, oftentimes males in their 20s, 30s, 40s, begin and I'm just not putting on size. It'd be like, how's your eating? And often you get this like, well, fucking, you know, man. Any sentence that begins with well.

Yeah, here it is already off the cliff. Then you know, my boss is riding my ass. I have a family. I asked about your diet. Right. I didn't give a shit about your boss. You can fucking while you're getting fired, you can eat a burrito.

Doesn't matter. Mars is in retrograde. That's a real problematic one. You know what's funny about astrology? Is it always says something is in retrograde? You know it's not astronomy, because one thing I like to ask astrologers is, so which planets are in an anterograde? And they're like, what's that? Like that's the opposite of retrograde. You know it's not astronomy, because one thing I like to ask astrologers is, so which planets are in an enter grade?

And they're like, what's that? Like that's the opposite of retrograde, you dumb motherfuckers, read an actual astronomy book. Just kidding, people watching this who are into astrology, you know what I'm saying? A lot of finance, white bitches love that shit. Am I right, Chris? Is that your jam?

Dude, at one of my live shows that I did in Austin, I did some work in progress shows. And this girl came up after we'd finished and she was very nice. But I asked her what she did for work. And she said that she uses quantum healing in the fifth dimension to inform her crypto investments. I've been doing it in the fourth dimension this whole time. No wonder my crypto shit is fucked. Damn you, Sam Bankman Freed.

That's intense, man. What did you, what did you say? She was, did you just assume she was- I asked her to say it again. I said, hey, can you tell me that again? She did. And I said, that's the most Austin job I've ever heard of. And she probably danced away on her Bitcoin,

Ethereum carpet, I don't know. Dogecoin. Yeah. Do you have you ever gotten Sam Bankman freed on this show? No, he's in jail. Ah, fuck. Can't you do like a jail episode where you set this whole thing up in prison? I wanted to do it with the guy that run Fire Festival, Billy McFarlane.

Chris, listen, I, I, my brown belt and jujitsu and I'm a little jacked. I'm Russian too. I got the tough guy face. If you have to go to prison to interview him, bro, I'll be one of your security guards, free of charge. I want to meet him. You just want to be around men. Him particularly.

He's out of jail now. So... What the fuck am I doing on a stupid muscle shit on your show? You got a huge platform, interview people that matter. Martin Shkreli. Cancel this episode. Yeah, I'm trying Oh, he's the guy that like did the whole like shorting of

He's on the economics of it. It's actually totally valid what he was doing believe it or not to get Brian Kaplan on here And he'll explain all that. Oh no way. Oh, that's right. I watched him. Are you amongst illustrious? Get him on here again. He is fucking man. Yeah, he's right. I watched him on you. You're amongst illustrious peers. Get him on here again, because he's a fucking man. He's ignoring my emails as usual. The Martin Shkreli guy about our first of all, very unfortunate name. The second of all, the way he phrased everything was like, do you have a PR firm that's working against you

telling you to do this stuff? In any case, fuck did we get on this bullshit. Yeah, 5D, 5th dimension, quantum powered, Ethereum. Crypto trading informs my crypto trading. This is like a... She was great. I mean, she's going to be richer than all of us. Or hopeless and alone with no quantum powers.

Something else I've been thinking about during this conversation, which we haven't spoken about yet, motivation to train. Is that even a thing that's studied scientifically? Yeah. Okay. What's the TLDR? Motivation is something that's spoken about an awful lot. It's kind of like the God of the gaps of a lot of psychology because people want to make doing things that they want to do, but maybe difficult to do easier. And that is motivation for them, for the most part. What does science have to say about motivation?

Yes. If you care, please remind me to come back with no stupid bullshit jokes about the troubleshooting stuff and get back to that. We get that, yes. We do the thing. Yes, yes. So there are a couple of things to say about motivation.

One is motivation itself is technically in the construct of adherence is just one of the parts of it. There's inspiration, there's motivation, there's habit, there is interaction between sort of willpower and all that Goggin's shit, which is super valid in context. And then there's something called passion, which once you have a passion for something, you no longer ask questions of motivation. Like people ask me, like, what motivates you to go to the gym? I'm like, I'm addicted to going to the gym. It's like asking a crackhead, like, what's motivating you to do that?

Light up that rocket. What? It's what I want to do. Right. So there is a whole rich psychology around just the one part we call motivation, but that richness actually informs a lot of the things that it's a good idea to employ to increase your motivation. We're really trying to increase its adherence.

Try to make you get to the gym, make sure you get in there. How you get in there doesn't much matter. So one is having good sources of inspiration. If you surround your social media, if your feed has a lot of people who look like you kind of want to look a little bit like them and they've got a lot of positive and encouraging shit to say and a can-do attitude, that's a good start. Now, it's not going to keep you in the gym, but it might get your ass in there on a fucking rainy day.

Another thing is to set goals. Motivation is in many senses defined as the pull towards a goal. You get rid of a goal, you're technically not motivated to do shit. Like animals in a lab are motivated at a goal based, at least neurochemically, you could have Puberman on here, I'll tell it to you better, is like motivation is goal oriented, even if the goal is equalized this amount of chemical between one brain cell and another. So if you have a goal of like, I want x, y, z amount of reps on my list that's realistic, or even a motivation like I want

to be able to tell myself I'm mad enough to go to the gym four times a week every fucking day this year. That's my goal, a process goal, instead of an outcome goal. That's a big deal. If you are goalless, if you're going to the gym for some very general construct like get fit or have abs or something you haven't really quantified in any way at all or really contextualized, it's easy to be like, eh. It's like you have to be able to answer the question in your head of if you're sitting like you got home after work, tough day at the job, you sit down on your couch, you have to give yourself a reason to get up.

If your reason is nebulous and like, I think fitness is something I told myself I do, you're not getting up. When push comes to shove, you're fucked up, beer and you're done. But if you're like, I told myself, contract with myself, I'm gonna fucking make it four times a week. Awesome. There is another part of this motivation thing that comes in with how easy are you making it on yourself.

You don't want to have a big barrier to entry. Training partners help a lot. You sit down on the couch and your training partner fucking text you and he's like, where are you at pussy? You're fucking probably going to show up. If it's just you, it's going to be tougher. If your gym is 15 minutes away, you'll fucking do this in California traffic for 15 minutes. If it's 45 minutes away, holy fuck, that makes it really tough.

Another thing is doing the kind of stuff at the gym you like. That's where the favorite exercises comes in. If you fucking can't wait to smash some deadlifts, hey, by all means, fuck that optimal shit, go in there and get you some deadlifts. So there's a lot of stuff coming together. Another thing I will say, this is just my own little bullshit spin on it. This is a much richer conversation we could have in great depth. I want to put this in a way that's both charitable and sufficiently comedic to be expressive.

If you have to ask how to get motivated to go to the gym, you don't need to be going to the gym. You don't want it enough. When you're sick and tired of looking and feeling like shit, you'll show up motherfucker, I'll see you there. Cause you're gonna look in the mirror and you're gonna be like, fuck that. You're gonna want to be in the gym. And if you're gonna make this a lifestyle,

you have to lower the barriers, make the gym cheaper, closer training partners, exercises you like, and you have to raise the impetus, goals, inspiration, and fucking goddamn real desire to be there. The people that have no problem showing up to the gym are the people that want to be there and no amount of Rocky Balboa fucking movies are going to get you to that place.

A lot of that is also built with the experience of having the gym be a place where you get results by pushing yourself, winning little mini challenges, and having fun with it. When I think about what does the gym mean to me, I still remember what it meant to me when I was 15 and first walked in. It was a scary place full of scary people that had scary things going on and I was bad at them. I didn't want to be there. After 25 years of training, the gym is my spirit home

anywhere I go. I could be anywhere in the world. One thing I like to do is I come into a gym, let's say I'm traveling, go to Thailand or some shit like that. After enough lady boys, you got to hit the gym. She's not even strong enough to lift them up. Anyway, so I come into the gym

and I've been doing this for a generation. I grab a barbell and I just cinch in like a deadlift grip. It's some kind of fucking spirit connection. I belong in the gym because to me, the clanking and the groaning and the smells and the machines, they are experiential symbols of progress, of love, of passion, positive feedback mechanism. Yes, of a good time. So one thing is get yourself into the gym.

However you see fit consistently, have a good fucking time there doing what you love, push yourself, get those little mini victories, RPI Perchopy apps as you're doing a little better over time, and let that fill you up. Let that grow on you. And then after a while, also it feels great, especially after the workout. You're like after all a really solid leg workout,

someone could punch you in the face. You'd be like, ah, it was pretty sweet. And dolphins. See you next time, buddy. That's it. You don't give a shit. That stress relief. Every you're driving home after the gym, hard day at work, blah, blah, blah.

You're like thankful for shit. It's like a post-mushroom trip clarity every single time. And it's good for your health. It's just all these fucking massive green check boxes all around. You get into that habit and that's good for your health. It's just all these fucking massive green chalk boxes all around. You get into that habit and that's the big part of habit. You get in the habit of doing the gym and it's all this hurricane of positive influences

and reinforcement. You're not going anywhere. Three days after not being in the gym, like, you know, your fucking mother-in-law drags the family to like some fucking cabin in Northern California. It's just us having fun as a family. No gym.

After three days, you're like, you guys, this is going to turn this man's and shit about to get the fuck out of here. You're at the local gym doing this and then everything is right again. So getting up to that point, don't push yourself so hard that you hate the gym. Remember, it's all voluntary. It's all for fun. It's a leisure activity. I have a PhD and a fucking leisure activity.

Some of the PhD in bowling is equally amount of social value. Probably more. So it's all good. Start easy. Get to the gym twice a week, maybe three times. 30-minute workouts, 45-minute. Get some progress going. Get into the habit.

Make it easy on yourself. Once you're in the habit for long enough, you can start to crank up the intensity and you're gonna wanna be there. And you never have to ask yourself the question again of what motivates you to go to the gym because the answer and you're going to want to be there. And you never have to ask yourself the question again of what motivates you to go to the gym, because the answer is that's where I want to be. What else didn't we cover in troubleshooting?

What are the other big ones? Yeah. Um, have you been to our earlier conversation, purposefully progressing in loads or reps? You haven't been pushing yourself. What the fuck is wrong with you? Like one of those guys that you mentioned, like he's doing the 18 kilogram dumbbells all the time.

Have you tried the twenties? Have you tried the 20s? Have you tried doing more reps? So making sure that person has kind of gone to the head treating it as a thing. Another one is where are you on the balance of recovery versus under recovery versus over recovery? If you ask someone like, oh man, my legs haven't fucking grown. Okay. How hard are you training your legs?

Like pretty fucking hard. How long do I get sore for? Like, well, I just don't get so anymore. I got sore for the first couple months of training. Bullshit are you training your legs? Like pretty fucking hard. How long do they get sore for? Like, well, I just don't, don't get so anymore. I got sore for the first couple of months of training. Bullshit. Anyone training legs properly? Properly. Is this going to be sore from when they finish the leg workout or a few hours later until the day before their next leg workout unless it's a deal a week in perpetuity if you train intelligently? That's definitely something I think that people get used to, which is this conditioning to training where you only are sore after the Christmas break.

Yes. You only are sore after the D-Lo Dwee. Yes. And then your background and it's like, oh yeah, you know, like weeks four through eight, I'm fine. I'm just like, I'm just recovered. Ask yourself to the person who is in that position. Ask yourself the philosophical question of is what I do. I've answered that in the affirmative long ago. I tried the whole mirror thing where I looked in the mirror and I'm like, you're a world-renowned power bottom. Still, oh yeah, well that I earned.

Ask yourself a philosophical question. If you're used to some shit, and it's no longer experientially challenging for you, are you really so sure you're growing your best? Overload is a principle in training, but it transfers into psychology as well. Your body's pretty fucking good at detecting what's challenging for you.

If you're psychologically pushing yourself to the limits quite often, you can rest assured you're probably working hard enough. If you've been used to some shit for months and you're wondering why it's not growing you, why the fuck would it grow you? The body generally likes to resist being changed in many ways because in our evolved ancestral environment, we're very resource constrained. You don't want to piss away tons of resource for hypertrophy. You have to continually challenge yourself.

So if someone's like, well, yeah, I'm like, recovery's not a problem. I'm going to be like, try training harder, try training more. If they say, dude, I basically can't recover, I'm going to say pull back. So it's two different answers based on how you're doing it. It's like, it's like if you're helping someone with your area, one of your many areas of expertise,

which is I assume talking to women for the eventuality of getting them to do fun things with you. If a guy's like basically saying nothing and he comes up to you, he's like, what did I wrong? You got to talk, motherfucker. You got to rise it up. But if he sits there like me and he's like, she's like, oh, God, we'll cut you off. Let me keep going.

You're like, come here. You have to talk less. Same with the recovery thing, pluses and minuses. I already mentioned the nutrition, the food thing, sleep is huge. I'll put it very, very simply for sleep. I could talk a lot more about sleep and all the technicalities. I'll say it this way. If you are chronically under slept, I actually don't need to hear about your program or your

diet. I don't give a shit because it's all just downhill. It's like telling me about how awesome your new fighter plane is, but I'm like, what kind of fuel are you using? You're like, we're supposed to put fuel in it. And I'm like, the fuck out of my face. You have to sleep. It's critical. It's the cornerstone of everything.

How do you know you need enough? You're not getting enough sleep. If you can't stay awake throughout your day without like a medical dose of caffeine, you need to sleep more. Could be nine hours for you consistently. Could be six. Ronnie Coleman apparently slept five or six hours a night, more or less this whole life. Looks recovered to me, you know, huge genetic differences there in sleep requisite, but

you have to be getting enough sleep. So enough sleep, enough food, the training has to be sufficiently hard and you have to recover. And then everything else is details. You could play with rep ranges, frequencies, so on and so forth. That's a troubleshooting list that's available on our YouTube channel. There's like an hour long bullshit,

but those are kind of the big pictures that I wanna talk to people about. Dude, you're a legend. I really appreciate what you guys are doing over at RP. It's genuinely, genuinely a big change. I think back to when I first started training, 2006, 2007, scraping the bodybuilding.com forum, trying to find a meme that might have the insight

on how to get bigger. And putting horny goatweed in your custom MyProtein. I still do that. Did I not get the memo? Right, okay. No, it's just, it's really great. I really, really appreciate what's happening with this sort of evidence-based community.

I think that I genuinely think that what you guys are doing is making way more people, way more jacked with way less uncertainty. So if that's not moving humanity forward in a good way, I don't know what is. Chris, thanks so much, man. That really is our shit at RP. Like all the fucking PR and marketing lingo aside and all

my rich guy jokes. We're trying to help intelligent, careful people get the best information and digital tools they need to make their best results because Mr. Nick Shaw and I, the CEO co-founder of RP, we came up in a similar world in which you did where it was all bro science nonsense. We saw that just normal fucking smart people were not getting answers to their questions. They had the money, they had the intelligence, they had the time. There's just too much goddamn bullshit around. So when we start RP, we're like, you know what? We're not going to do bullshit.

Just facts. Sometimes that doesn't sell that well. And some people ask us like, hey, can you put XYZ types of workouts on your app? The answer is no, because they're nowhere near optimal. You want someone to hold your hand and do things that you think are fun? Dope, tons of other great companies to do that. You want results? You come see us and a few of the other evidence-based folks in the space.

Why should people go? They want to download the app? Fuck, fine. Oh, man, I get that shit free. My butler's downloaded for me. Can we get my butlers on the show? Can you imagine like a three-hour episode with one of Dr. Mike's butlers? You're like, what's your name?

He's like, I'm Butler 57. You're like, oh, oh God, you don't have names. No, absolutely not. Sir doesn't like us to look at him in the eye. Yes. Sir doesn't like us to know him by name. Yes. As he answers that, he kind of like tilts his eyes away.

You're like, that is an abused man. I've seen that before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's hot. Honestly, the best place to go is probably just the YouTube. So, Renaissance Predeization on YouTube, if you can't spell that, I can't spell that. RP Strength, if you can't spell that. Dr. Mike, Muscle, Search, the channels in black and red, it has RP. Just get in there, watch the videos.

Great thumbnails, very well optimized. We had some advice from Mr. Chris Williams and back in the day. Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you for coming through. I love being out here. Thanks so much, Chris. Oh, offense. Yeah, oh, offense.

Yeah, oh, offense.