Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Austin Current on Understanding the Science of Strength Training

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

In this podcast, I chat with Austin Current all about the science of strength training. Austin recently released a book called the Science of Strength Training, which is a visual encyclopedia and comprehensive resource that dives into the nitty gritty details of resistance training. Specifically, it covers physiology, anatomy, how muscles work, exercise selection, and much more. Austin’s book will help anyone understand what happens in our bodies as a result of strength training and why it’s so beneficial. And the book is visually captivating to boot! In our chat, we talk about the main drivers of muscle growth (including mechanical tension, muscle damage, and metabolic stress), sarcoplasmic and myofibrillar hypertrophy, workout programming, the importance of deloads, and cardiovascular fitness. And we only scratch the surface of what’s in Austin’s book. If you’re not familiar with Austin, not only is he an educator and author, but he’s a coach and co-founder of Physique Development, a coaching collective that works with everyday fitness folks and competitors alike. Not only has Austin had a successful competitive career as a natural physique bodybuilder, but I was impressed by his ability to break down complex topics into actionable information that anyone can use, which is why I wanted to get him on the podcast. So if you want to learn about the physiology of muscle growth and how we can use science to tweak our workout programming, check out this interview! Timestamps: 32:21 - What are the mechanics of muscle growth? 32:43 - What are the three stimuli that contribute to muscle growth? 34:29 - What is the hormonal cascade that occurs from resistance training? 41:05 - What is muscle damage and how much does it contribute to muscle growth? 47:02 - Should you try to maximize muscle damage in your training? 53:18 - What are the signs you're creating enough muscle damage? 1:02:23 - Should you incorporate deloads? 1:08:44 - What is metabolic stress or metabolic fatigue? 1:11:54 - Are styles of training that prioritize metabolic stress useful? 1:23:44 - The importance of cardiovascular fitness and the aerobic system. Mentioned on the Show: Bigger Leaner Stronger: https://legionathletics.com/products/books/bigger-leaner-stronger/ Beyond Bigger Leaner Stronger: https://legionathletics.com/products/books/beyond-bigger-leaner-stronger/ Shop Legion Supplements Here: https://buylegion.com/mike Science of Strength Training - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0744026954/?tag=mflweb-20 Austin’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/austincurrent_/ Physique Development - https://physiquedevelopment.com/

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I'm Mike Matthews, and thank you for joining me today. And hey, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast, take a moment to subscribe to it in whatever app you are listening in for two reasons. One, it'll make sure you don't miss new episodes because then the new episodes will automatically download and be queued up, and you may get a notification as well, depending on the app that you are using. And two, it's going to help me because it helps boost the rankings of the show on the various charts. And that, of course, helps other people find my podcast and hopefully they like it as much as you do. All right. So in this episode, I interview Austin Current about a new book that he just released that I am impressed with, I highly recommend, called The Science of Strength Training.

And it is a visual encyclopedia and comprehensive resource on all of the important details and aspects of strength training. It goes over physiology, it goes over anatomy, it goes over how muscles work, how you should choose exercises, how you can build different types of workout programs, and much more. Again, I'm impressed. A lot of work went into this book and there are a lot of visuals, which really helps when you are getting into the nitty gritty details because without those visuals, you can get pretty confused pretty quickly because you're trying to visualize these things in your mind's eye. And if you're really good at it, then you may get it right, but you may not. And you may wonder if you're getting it right. Are you seeing this correctly?

Are you understanding these words correctly? Are you translating that description of how a muscle cell works correctly in your mind? It helps a lot to have accurate images. And again, this book is full of great visuals and full of great information. So if you are a regular here on the podcast, I promise you, you are not going to be disappointed by this book. And that's why I wanted to get the author of the book, Austin, on the show to talk about, not the book, but to talk about what's in the book to share helpful information like how do muscles work? What are the mechanics? What is muscle damage? And how does

that relate to muscle growth? Does it directly contribute to it? Or is it more just a side effect of mechanical tension, which we know of course contributes to muscle growth or is something else the case. We also talk about another factor related to muscle building, which is metabolic fatigue. And Austin explains whether it directly contributes to muscle building, or again, is just more of a side effect of proper hypertrophy training. And we get into other little tangents about the theory and practice of getting bigger and stronger. And in case you're not familiar with Austin, he is an educator, obviously. He's an author, but he's also a coach. And he is the co-founder of Physique Development, a group of coaches that works with everyday fitness folks and competitors alike.

And he himself has had a successful career as a natural physique bodybuilder. And he also is very good at breaking down complex topics, making them easy to understand and actionable. And that is a skill that I appreciate because it is something that I am always trying to get better at myself. That is my primary goal in all of the stuff that I produce, all of the educational material that I produce. I want anybody to be able to read it or listen to it, understand it and use it and get results. Also, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company, Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you is the leading brand of all natural sports

supplements in the world. And we're on top because every ingredient and dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends, for example. And everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. So that means no artificial sweeteners, no artificial food dyes, which may not be as dangerous as some people would have you believe, but there is good evidence to suggest that having many servings of artificial sweeteners in particular every day for long periods of time may not be the best for your health. So while you don't need pills, powders, and potions to get into great shape, and frankly, most of them are virtually useless, there are natural ingredients that can help you lose fat, build muscle, and get healthy

faster, and you will find the best of them in Legion's products. To check out everything we have to offer, including protein powders and bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more, head over to buylegion.com slash Mike. That's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N dot com slash Mike. And just to show you how much I appreciate my podcast, peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 20% on your entire first order. Hey, Austin, thanks for making the time to come teach me about getting Jack,

the art and science. Absolutely. My pleasure, man. Yeah. I think it's gonna be a great one. Uh, this is, this is like maybe my fifth video interview too. I like this. I was doing just audio for a while and I've, I've posted audio tracks to, to YouTube for a while, which of course is not how you do YouTube. That's, that's, that's actually the worst way to do YouTube so much so that so that most people would say, don't even bother. You're actually probably just, you're tainting your account to where if you ever get around to doing YouTube correctly, all of the metrics are going to look so bad that YouTube will never give you a single eyeball. But ironically, just posting audio, my account has continued to grow on YouTube.

So I guess I'm doing something right. But I figured, you know, I'm doing these interviews. I should make them YouTube friendly and get on camera, right? I think so. You're an internet guy too. I think you should play by the rules. And I don't think anyone knows really what the rules are. And I think we're all just kind of stabbing at it. But I would say that YouTube being a visual platform, let's, let's go. Probably should have some visual stimulation. Probably. I actually do want to get around to doing YouTube, uh, better correctly. And, uh, that'll probably be later in the year because it's going to require, I'm going to need a good videographer, I guess would be the term. And I'm

going to need a good editor. Maybe it's the same person, maybe not. Those are different skills entirely. But I would like to, because I produce a lot of educational material, and it wouldn't be that much more work for me to repurpose that into YouTube-friendly and, uh, and me on camera explaining things. And, uh, you know, I'm not a, I don't spend much time on YouTube and I generally don't like social media, but if I can use it, like I couldn't, I couldn't motivate myself to want to vlog. For example, I just couldn't do it. I'm not a vlogger. It's not me. And also my, if I'm going to honestly vlog, it's not going to be very exciting. It's going to be the same exact thing every day. And it's going to be me sitting in my infrared sauna reading, me working out, me working at my computer all day, me eating food, me taking bathroom breaks, me taking water breaks, me reading, and me going to bed. And then maybe some stuff that I couldn't show with my wife and

a little bit of time with my kids. And that's it. Rinse and repeat. It's not a very exciting vlog. Right, right. Dude, I remember one of my favorite vlog series was actually Mike Vacanti's a few years back. He did in like 20, I think 2017 or so. Yeah. I mean, it was, I mean, a guy like the Conti is a super regimented guy, right? You know, you might, you know, and super regimented guy. And, and honestly, man, I enjoyed that part of it. Cause it's like, I don't know, man. I enjoyed that part of that. Well, probably resonated. Cause you're probably similar. So I'm similar. Yeah. Like i see my life is like yourself just super just regimented boring and um you know i i've it's funny man we all kind of trade like when you first start you kind of try to take on

personas right and you're trying to fake it till you make it early on before you realize that that's not quite the best way to do it when there's other options available. Right. So if you have a, if you have the lever to pull that is, you know, intellectual property or understanding things a little bit better than others, that way you can explain it back to them in a way that helps you understand it. Right. Which is a lot of education. You know, I didn't know that was a lever to pull at the time and And I didn't necessarily have that intellectual property yet. So I was trying to kind of like fake it. So I made it.

So I kind of like purposely left out some old YouTube videos and they are horrendous to go back and watch. Cause like, it's like that terrible YouTube voice, you know, you're trying to like, what's up YouTube. You're trying to have a personality. And it's like, now if you, now, if you watch my Instagram story, I'm as enthusiastic as I am right now. And you know, it's just kind of like, yeah, you watch my Instagram story, I'm as enthusiastic as I am right now. And it's just kind of like, yeah, all right, there's a podcast.

Go listen. That's all you're going to get from me. But usually, honestly, if you see my story or meet me in real life, there's not much discrepancy past like, oh, you're actually like this. It's like, yeah, I'm actually like this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I get the same. Ironically, I don't get many people, you know, coming up to me. I'm not a celebrity. Oh shit, man. I'm not, I'm not a celebrity. I'm not going to say that, but. So, so I don't, it doesn't happen often, but it does happen here and there. Ironically, it happened today and people are usually pleased to see that I'm the same person in person as I am in my podcast or just my persona, quote unquote. The only difference, the only things that I hold back are I have a bit of a wacky kind of twisted internet sense of humor. of humor. And so, so there are, there are some off color jokes that I might make with my friends that I'm just not going to make publicly because some people will take it the wrong way. And so I do hold some of that back. Although not, not, not all of it. I just do it with tact. Whereas again, if I'm hanging out with my brother-in-law who was my best friend before my brother-in-law,

I've known him since I was 16. It's going to be different. There are things that he understands, certain types of interactions and jokes and things that if somebody were to just meet me, they'd be like, wait, what did he just say? There's an understanding of, there's a sort of like an understood preface to the conversation, and I think that's missed in mass media. And honestly, man, I think that's something that I enjoy to keep separate. I think there's a place where not everything should be on the internet, not everything should be on social media. And there's so many intimate parts of yourself and your personality that should only be experienced sort of in real life. that should only be experienced sort of in real life, right? That you're- And it may take context and it may take time. Like even a rule that I try to live by is to try to treat people the way

that they would like to be treated and to try not to do things that they can't comfortably experience. Now, sometimes it's appropriate actually to transgress against that rule, but I think more often than not, that's a good way to behave and it makes people feel better for having interacted with you rather than worse. And so to that point, there certainly are things that if I were to just make an offhand remark that I may make to somebody who knows me well,

that may not create a good reaction in somebody who doesn't know me well. And so I'll save that stuff again for the people who can experience it comfortably. You know what I mean? And I know I'm making this sound mysterious and extreme, not at all, but in today's environment, particularly, I mean, there are a lot there are some people who are very sensitive about a lot of things. And I'm not a sensitive person. And I really, I do think I can say I'm not a hypocrite. Like I am not easily offended. And so I may say some offensive things sometimes, but I can take it too. Like people can come to me and they could really say, Hey Mike, I think you're an idiot. And let me

explain why. And my instinctive response would not be to jump to my own defense. Actually, it'd be like, really? I'd be intrigued. I'd be like, I gotta hear this. This sounds interesting. Right. So, so I do, I do try to keep, uh, I think that it's important if you're going to, uh, give it, you gotta be able to take it as well. Hypocrites are those, those are the worst. Yeah. And I think, um, just to, to kind of like expand on that, it's especially on social media, like be the reason that someone has a better day than they're yeah they were having before right like there's just no reason with how much is you know us all drinking from a fire hose every day i don't want to be that water droplet that was the the catalyst to you having a worse off day because i don't need to be that in your life like i'm not here to do that that's not my goal in real life but but especially not on social media, especially when it's like, I just want to teach you about

some stuff you may be confused on. That's about where I'm going to leave it on social media. You know, like I'm a pretty private guy. I don't personally like social media. I don't use it outside of my work functions, which is again, sharing educational, sometimes trying would, would be inspirational, maybe trying to be inspirational stuff, at least the stuff that is, is interesting to me at least. And then, and then answering DMS and answering people's questions. And I think that that is not maybe the best way to build a big following. There are certainly, cause if you're going to just go after getting followers, then you want to do things that are extreme, that are different,

that are contrarian. You want to stir the pot because that creates emotional responses in people. And then that leads to more sharing and that leads. So that's that game. So the game I'm playing isn't as good for exponentially growing my following. But I would say, one, it's more in line with my ideals and my values. And two, at least I am attracting people for the right reasons. Then I'm attracting people who do appreciate the learning and they are there to get motivated to train harder and better and learn how to train harder and better.

And so I'd say that I would rather, I'd rather have a smaller number of those people than a larger number of people who could care less really about that stuff and are just there with the popcorn, you know, waiting for the fireworks. Yeah. The armchair quarterbacks. Yeah. It's, it's interesting to me, right? I'd love to hear your thought on this really quick, but I would almost argue,

cause I have the same approach, um, just in general. And I would go to argue that that, if you have products to sell or you have a message to sort of get out there or education to be sort of told, I would argue that that's a better game plan going into your season, right? Your season on social media, because the type of people you're going to attract in that, those individuals have adjacent qualities that are going to really help your message get out there more, right? Because they're going to be a better conversationalist and asking better questions on average.

They're going to be less probably sensitive to just calling you out on like, hey, why is that stupid keyboard in your background? Like, I hate keyboards. And it's like, dude, what are you talking about? What kind of comment is that? Like, I'm talking about muscles. Like, you know, there's those people on YouTube and in social media, right. And those are going to be the people that, you know, like you were saying, and I share that those people are going to be the ones,

I think who are going to give you a better quality word of mouth, which as a business owner and one of the very, very successful businesses, I think you understand that aspect of word of mouth and how important that is, right? So how many, would you rather have, you know, the first camp, which I'd say you and I are both in, you know, which you explained talking about your Legion supplements, or would you rather have the second crowd talk about Legion, right? It's definitely the first one. It may be less of them, but let's say a hundred thousand people talk to their four or five

closest friends about it in a high quality manner versus, you know, a half a million people who talk about it negatively or don't talk about it at all because it's their kept secret on the internet. And that's how they view life as like the scarcity. I have it. You can't have it sort of mindset. Right. And so I'd be interested sort of like, where is the value?

Right. And so I I'd be interested sort of like, where is the value? Right. Cause sometimes things sort of work against our, our initial intuition of like, it should work this way. But actually, if you really think about the underlying mechanisms of how that would spread positively, it could actually benefit us to be the first one a little bit. Right. And I may be wrong on that. That's just kind of how I think about it. I just think that that accelerates maybe slower over time in a more linear way. But I think the growth over time, if you looked at it on a graph of like positive impact plus growth, that's, I think it's a way better way to go about it, in my opinion.

Yeah, I agree. I agree for talking about extremes, like kind to go about it, incorporating some humor. I try to do that in my captions and show a bit of my personality. And sometimes it hits the mark. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's a dad joke. Yeah, whatever. I try, though. I try though.

I try. But I would say more often than not, it adds to the appeal than it detracts from it. And so if I were to put more time into social media, it would be doing more of that kind of stuff. doing more of that kind of stuff. It'd be figuring out how to take the educational core here and then kind of envelope it in a nice, tasty, funny, or entertaining presentation. And that would do even better. And again, I've seen it. I've done it enough now over the years. Some of those, because I also use them as emails in other communications, even podcasts sometimes. So I get a fair amount of feedback on things. And when it strikes a chord, it does really well. I mean, people will, I'll get a lot of replies to the emails,

people saying how they love them and they send them around. You're not going to get that from just sharing boring, bland, vanilla, hey, here's how you do this, here's how you do that. I mean, well, you're not going to get as much of that. If you have good, clear information, and that's something I've tried to produce, that's really my focus is just to try to make things as simple to understand and as practical as possible. I'm not trying to write above my head. I'm not trying to appeal just to scientists and the intelligentsia of the space, not at all. I'm doing the opposite. And so that appeals to a lot of people because often experts, people who do actually know things and can help you. They have a hard time communicating in a way that everyday layman can understand. I mean, they have a hard time just explaining mechanics in simple terms. Like, okay, you have to explain how this stuff works,

but you can't rely on jargon. Let's just start there. And any kind of terms of art, any technical terms you have to define, like you would have to actually, if you're, if you have to use a technical term or you think just adds a little bit of flavor, um, then you do have to define it. You have to tell people what it is. You can't think that they're going to go off and Google and read Wikipedia article to understand, uh, even something like what I want to talk to you today about mechanical tension. You can't just throw that out there and assume that people know what that is. And so, yeah, I think that, again, sharing good, clear, practical information that people can

immediately put to use and get results with, that's the core of the value of, I think, both of our personal brands. That certainly has been mine since the beginning. And more recently, I've done a little bit of it in the past, but more recently, it has become clear to me that if I can inject more personality and humor in particular, humor writing is tough. It's something that doesn't come easily to me. I do have to get into a certain mind space and look at different swipe. And it doesn't just flow because it's new to me. But if I could get good at that,

at least let's say approximately as good. And I think I'm pretty good. I don't think I'm great, honestly. By my standards, I'm pretty good at explaining how-to stuff. If I could get pretty good at humor, that would take, I think, my personal brand to the next level because we all just love, if something makes us laugh, we are much more likely to share it. We just are. Yeah. And that's something like Neil deGrasse Tyson, I've heard him say many

times, is people learn better when they're laughing or smiling, right? And I take that home. And he's someone I really respect. You're someone I really respect. You do a great job, man. Um, and making things simple. Uh, I think there's a reason your books sell so well and are shared so vastly across the world. Um, it's that people can finally understand it for the way that it meant was meant to be understood by the 99% of people, which is, you know, when we talk about more about the book and muscle growth and stuff it's, that was really my mission is like the 1% is pretty much taken care of here. I'm not necessarily talking to them. I'd like to segue right into that. Yeah. What we, what we actually want to talk about.

Yeah. It was a good preamble, a good warm up. Yeah. But yeah, if you want to mention quickly, so your book, the title, and then let's talk about muscle growth. Let's talk about the mechanics of muscle growth, the pathways, if you will, and if you want to break down what they are and kind of what the latest, I would say, maybe weight of the evidence is on how important each of these are. And then I'll probably follow up with some questions in terms of maybe what does this mean in programming and so forth? Absolutely. So the book, I did

actually have it prepared. So Science of Strength Training. Nice. What is the subtitle? Understand the anatomy of physiology to transform your body. So it looks great. It's a high quality presentation. Oh, thank you. Yeah. I was really such an opportunity to do it. And the illustrators were so, so, so talented to work with or so talented in general. So great to work with. And this book was one of those books where obviously all of this is in my head and it sort of needed to get out, but the, this book would never existed, never would have existed without the publisher and their resources. It's one of those books where it's like this, if I had to self-publish this, this never would have happened. So, um, yeah, a lot of work went into it. That was very clear

when I looked at it and yeah. Yeah. A lot of work that, that. That was very clear when I looked at it. Yeah. A lot of work. That goes without saying if you're going to write a halfway decent book, but then some books take longer than others. Some books require more man hours than others. Yeah. And this one, honestly, most of the man hours went into chapter two, where is, you know, you have over a hundred exercises sort of laid out their anatomy used cues, technique, execution cues and stuff like that, that are all written out for you. And then stage by stage, how to perform it and all that stuff like that, that section, that chapter, chapter two took the longest by far. the back and forth with everybody involved, a 10 person team spanned across the world during a pandemic. It was like, I guess we'll see if this happens. So to transition- I understand firsthand. I just wrapped up, I'm at the end of this Muscle for Life book I'm doing with Simon & Schuster, 40 plus men and women, very newbie friendly. And the chapter that has all the exercises and

has instructions, I was surprised. And it's not as in detail as yours. And that was by design, not that I knew about your book. But again, this book is specifically going to be for people who, so it has a beginner, intermediate and advanced program. So the beginner program is really for like, take a 55 or 65 year old man or woman who has never done any of this stuff before. Maybe they've done a little bit of exercise of some kind in the past. They're not doing anything right now. And let's say they are very overweight, maybe not hugely obese, but they're overweight. They need to lose a lot of fat. And it wouldn't really be appropriate for me to take that guy, for example, and just put them on Bigger, Leaner, Stronger. He could learn a lot from that book. But would I really, if I were coaching him one-on-one,

would I really tell him like, all right, we're going to start squatting and deadlifting heavy weight? No, I wouldn't. We would work up to that. Right. So, so this book, uh, it can bridge that gap for these people by giving them again, the beginner program much it's, it would be challenging for that person, but actually doable, uh, not inappropriately difficult and then work them up to something that is kind of like a light version of what's in my, my, my flagship books. And so anyway, the, um, the chapter with all the exercise instructions, it took a lot of drafts and I kept on finding things. It's like, how am I still finding things that how did I not catch this? You know what I mean? It's the smallest things that get thrown

off that you're like, please use this word. And so my publisher is based in London. And so even the, you know, British English to American English is vastly different. Right. And so there were little nuances within language where it was like, you know, when we were talking about an exercise, they, you know, sometimes they would, they would put a word in that that was like, and hold your prose and hold your, and it's like, one, I would never speak like that. And two, that word doesn't make sense. It may technically be the right literary word for this. But if it's, if it's British slang or a British saying, there are so many of them that we don't say, nobody says. I've never said that in my life. Yeah. Even the literati, you know, trying to flex in the Atlantic

won't use it because nobody will know. And then you go to the dictionary and you're like, oh, that's lame. It's some British thing that nobody says. Come on. That's yeah. Yeah. So it was those little things where you're just, every time you read through it, I read my book in different pieces so many times and it was just like, how am I still finding things? I know it's, it's a never, it never ends. That's what I've accepted after doing many of these projects is, um, it a Picasso quote I don't remember I'm gonna I'm gonna it's probably Einstein honestly yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah or Adolf Hitler I don't know maybe yeah yeah but but it's that art is never finished it's only abandoned basically is the concept and that's so true it's so true that is you I really do think that that you could almost do subsequent drafts indefinitely

and still feel like you're making improvements. I mean, some things you might just be getting to the point where you're just making changes for the sake of making changes. And that doesn't make sense, but no, where you're legitimately finding maybe after 10 drafts, you're no longer finding typos, but you may find, oh, just syntactical, not blunders at that point, but inefficiencies, right? Just words that you don't need and, oh, you could kill that or even entire sentences or passages even. I don't need any of that actually. And then find little chinks in your train of thought and how you were laying things out. And it didn't occur to you that you actually,

people are probably going to be wondering about this. You probably should put, you know, you just do that almost indefinitely. So there is a point where you just have to say, all right, I've suffered enough to make this good enough to put out in the world. And that's at least that's how I approach it. Yeah. I think that's a great way to approach it. And it's again, like we've already made a few word adjustments here and

there in the book already to, to get, go into the next printing cycle. And so again, it's kind of like a never ending thing where you're just, I'm constantly revisiting constantly. And I'm, you know, I would assume like yourself, very hard on myself in terms of like, man, this could, this could be better. This could have been better. I'm already making notes for a second edition. Like, you know, I'm going through, I've done three official editions of Bigger, Leaner,

Stronger and Thinner, Stronger. And I've done many editions in between because they're self-published books. I can update it as much as I want, which actually has been a bit of a, it's, it's a curse. It's a mixed blessing, right? But now I'm going through and I'm doing what really should be a fourth edition, but because of my agreement with Simon & Schuster, I agreed that I'm not going to do any book releases leading up to their book. And then I have to wait six months after. So what I'll end up doing is just pushing all of it live, probably just as the third edition. And going forward, people are going to get a book that is fundamentally the same.

But I think it's much better. I think it's better organized. I think I'm doing a better job explaining certain concepts. I think that I am doing a better job just in my prose. I think I'm a better writer now than I was then. And I've been working on this material now essentially for two years because I did the third editions of those books. Then I did this Muscle for Life book.

That was a year back and forth. And that was similar material that I had to now mold for a different crowd and take stuff out and put stuff in and blah, blah, blah, but similar material. And then roll right into these fourth edition. So I feel like maybe a photographer who's been retouching the same 10 photos for like two years straight, where I'm just like, I have to finish this. I I've got to that. I've reached that point. It's kind of like when you're, you've been lean bulking for like six months and you're force feeding yourself every meal, you just feel gross. And yeah, you're just gutting, gutting it out. Please let me just like, what am I really, what am I really doing? Yeah. Yeah. You get to that point where you just kind of lose your way what am i doing you start asking yourself what am i doing am i fighting

for micrograms of protein yeah like micrograms of muscle it's like is that worth it probably not yeah yeah but i'm pot committed i can't pull out now so yeah i'm gonna get no you're in yeah yeah you're in the deep end yeah you can't anyway so so's, let's talk about muscle growth. Let's talk about the mechanics of muscle growth, um, and, and how they work and, um, and then, and then maybe some practical implications in terms of, of programming, how to, how to turn those into effective programming. Absolutely. So I'll start with, um, sort of an introductory to, um, you know, so we have the, we have the three main types of, of, or the three stimulus through stimuli that they sort of an introductory to, um, you know, so we have the, we have the three main types of, of, or the three stimulus through stimuli that they sort of contribute to muscle growth. Right. Um, and these are ever evolving. Um, we've kind of landed on these three. Um, but it seems that these are always sort of moving around in terms of their, their

importance level of importance. Some have a two-way relationship. Some are a one-way street, some are a two-way street sort of thing contributing. But, right, so we have the first one, which is mechanical tension, which we mentioned, right, which we know is sort of the main driver of what sort of leads to muscle growth. Then we have muscle damage, and then we have metabolic stress. Okay. So those are going to be the three main stimuli that we're working with, right? So I'm going to introduce mechanical tension here for us. Um, so basically for muscle growth to occur, there must be a mechanical stimulus or stress that happens, right? That's the mechanical tension. So this mechanical

stimulus is referred to as mechanical tension or muscular tension, right? More colloquially. And when you contract your muscles against resistance, you create mechanical tension via the force being placed on those muscles, right? So once those receptors within the muscles, right? Those mechanoreceptors is what they're called within the muscle detect that tension. There's a cascade of chemical reactions that basically lead to muscle growth down the line, right? And that process is that, that process of

mechanotransduction, which is basically taking physical stimulus or resistive work and making it more of the biological response or chemical response in the body that then relays the message down the, down the chain, if you will, of command. Um, so that's, and, and without, um, getting too far into the weeds, what does that, what does that hormonal or, or chemical cascade look like just in terms of components? Yeah. As far as, um, that chemical cascade, I mean, you're, you're looking at, um, you know, a word or a phrase that we would be familiar with is muscle protein synthesis, right? So there's that, there's that physical stimulus that turns into a chemical one that then leads down the chain of, of muscle protein synthesis being the response,

right? And then we have to sort of have a certain threshold of stimulus to then sort of lead to that cascade, actually trigger it. Right. Um, and then the amount or duration of the time that that system is turned on or switched on, if you will, um, then we kind of get into, um, things that are nutritional and protein-based, right. Which is why protein intake and other macronutrient intakes, such as carbohydrates and fats that help fuel that process, right? So we need a certain thing to trigger it and a certain threshold to trigger it, but then, or switch it on, if you will, kind of like a light switch. Yeah. I use the obvious metaphor in some of my writing is like muscle building machinery, basically. Sure. Yeah, yeah. It kind of just sits there latent until it gets kickstarted into action.

And then it runs until it stops for various reasons. And then again, it waits for its next stimulus. Yeah, exactly. That's a great way to put it. And so basically that's the machinery we're working with, right? And so there's obviously a threshold, which strength training is such a good way to trigger that, respond to that. And that's a safe and

effective way to make that happen. Right. And we can target tension and certain muscle groups to, to have that response in those muscle groups specifically, right. Which obviously, if we're looking to craft or, you know, grow a physique that we want to, or maybe improve our arms or our back or our chest, right. That we need to be able to, we can't just squeeze our entire body or just go for a run and hope that our chest grows, right. We need, we need a stimulus on that muscle tissue on those muscle cells, um, or those muscle fibers to actually make this happen, right. Especially in those specific areas, right. So there's very specific sites, right. And these all work

sort of by themselves, but collectively, but also kind of in their own camps, right. You've got to think of chest as a different, completely different muscle is obviously your arms or, or your legs or something like that. Right. And this, and the way that this is going to function and work. Yeah. And just a quick note on that point that I think many people listening probably are aware of, but some people may not be aware of is in terms of volume that you can, you can be so volume for people listening, you could measure that in different ways one easy way i like to do it is is is and i'll give greg knuckles credit for this um hard sets sets taken close to muscular failure um so you can do a set of bench press and that obviously is direct volume

for your chest your pecs that's how most people are going to think of the bench press but that also does provide volume certainly for your triceps, also your shoulders, at least your front deltoids, your anterior deltoids and your biceps, maybe a little bit. I probably wouldn't if I were going to be real nitpicky with counting my volume, I wouldn't give that a one to one. And I don't get into like fractional volume and say, oh, well, that was half of a set for biceps. No, but it may actually make a decision. set for biceps. No, but it may actually depend. It may actually make a decision if you're in the weeds and in the nuance of having to make strategic decisions from an exercise selection standpoint, it may, depending on the load and intensity you're working at that bench press, obviously the biceps are going to have a role stabilization of the shoulder and elbow joint

during the bench press. So are we going to do something that is going to be heavily dependent on the biceps right after that? Maybe not. Right. Cause that we could have some, some overlap there, you know, it's not direct volume, but it's, it's, it's sort of, what is that synergistic volume in a way? I just call it indirect. I know it's not a technical term. I just try to try to make it simple. Like, okay, we have, we have exactly what we're focusing on good way to put it but then but then but then we have these other muscles that are involved and and and uh the reason i brought that up is is that is uh helps explain why the big primary lifts the compound lifts are are so efficient because when you do a squat, when you do a deadlift, when you do an overhead press, when you do like a vertical press of any kind, you a horizontal press,

you are not just training, uh, the, the muscle group that maybe you feel it the most in you're engaging a lot of other muscle groups and you are accumulating volume, uh, in those, even it may be indirect. And again, if you were, if you were going to be very specific with, with tracking your volume or planning your volume, you may not count it one to one. Um, like you may not count even a deadlift as one set of direct volume for your biceps because of the isometric element of it. It's not going to be as effective for training your biceps as a biceps girl, but it's not nothing. And so, you know, you are going to get, you are going to get, uh, uh, between a squat and a, and a deadlift that you're going to get a, uh, a muscle building stimulus in,

in pretty much about it. Most of not your press muscles, maybe not your triceps and your, your pecs, but in many other, maybe not your shoulders so much, but in many other muscles in your body, you're getting a lot of muscle building bounce for the house, so to speak. And then you can supplement some isolation work because you know that if you just did your heavy pulling and your heavy rows, if you're a guy and you want to have big biceps, probably not going to be enough unless your biceps are just hyper responders, right? That are, you're very detrained, right. Or very new. Yeah. Right. And so, I mean, I mean, you could look at a photo of Harry Houdini, that dude was jacked, right. And he

wasn't in there doing bicep curls. I can, I can tell you that. So how's that dude have feathered quads and, and he's jacked, right. And has dealt caps and whatever else. Like, I don't think he's doing isolation curls and leg extensions. You know, there's, there's a certain threshold of, of stimulus that has to occur, right. To turn this machinery on. And then based off some genetics and stuff like that, that some is a little bit more responsive than others. Right.

Yep. Okay, good. So that's mechanical tension. And then let's move on to muscle damage. And what is that? And also, how much do you think that contributes to I know, this is an ongoing discussion? Yeah. Or is it more just a byproduct of training properly of reaching that mechanical tension, that appropriate level that promotes maximum protein synthesis without going so far that you're now beyond diminishing returns. You're actually not gaining muscle and strength faster. You are just making it harder to recover from your training. Yeah, it's a great way to sort of introduce it. So muscle damage, basically the micro tears to the muscle fiber and disruption sort of within the functional unit of a muscle, the way that it contracts, right?

So it's kind of that disruption of that machinery or physical makeup of that muscle. But also those really micro, those small micro tears that we always kind of hear about correlated with muscle damage, right? And the main role of muscle damage or the main thing is going to be a byproduct of muscle contraction right it's sort of a accumulation of waste and there's different mechanisms here but the main one um just being sort of those micro tears and ultimately a byproduct of this process and there is there does seem to be and especially in my opinion this as you mentioned this is an ongoing debate and ongoing discussion.

Um, and we're trying to learn more. It's, it's pretty miraculous. I find it miraculous that as much as we know about muscle and as much as we know about the human body, we still don't know as much as we could. And there's still a lot more that we can find out. Right. Which to me is exciting. I mean, especially if we talk about other stuff like the brain yeah oh it's wild yeah and and and consciousness even what is the nature of consciousness yeah maybe i read a

lot of yeah yeah i don't know in our lifetimes i don't know hopefully you'll know more than we know now i'm not sure that riddle unless like benevolent aliens come and share the secrets of the universe. So I don't know if we'll see that resolved in our lifetime. Yeah. And do we even, I think the question is there, do we even have the language capacity of intelligence to comprehend it? Right. I don't know. We're smart animals, but are we as smart as we need to be to figure it out? True. I don't know. And that also depends of course on cultural paradigms even like what's acceptable and what's not obviously materialism is is uh in vogue right now but but what if consciousness isn't material uh in nature and that's just taboo

you know if you have any sort of non-materialistic hypothesis, you're never going to get attention. You're never going to get published. No one's going to care. I mean, it's naive to be naive to think that politics and that just meaning the games that relate and the ideas that relate to power and status and so forth, it would be naive to think that that doesn't operate in the sphere of science as well, especially with controversial things that you could say have paradigm shifting potential like this. I mean, you could imagine if there were scientifically verified breakthroughs that confirmed that, and just imagine whatever that might be, that confirmed that consciousness is not, there is something immaterial about us. What would that do?

I mean, well, you got it. This happens in history all the time, right? Oh, sure. If we don't update certain viewpoints because it does play with the status

quo of the current, current understanding of something. So it's easier just to kind of like, yeah, I get it, but like, that's probably true, but it's easier if we just don't say it because then it's going to be this whole thing and people are going to lose tenure. Or you just kind of memory hole the evidence for it, the anomalies, the things that don't add up with the current orthodoxy and just go, and there's probably a good explanation. I'll let somebody else worry about that. Yeah. And then there's just a generation after generation. That's just like, eh, you know, and it's like, well, you may never get there. I don't know. Um, anyway, but to the threshold of muscle damage, um, you know, like

we were kind of talking off air about this a little bit and it's, to me, it's past the point of being a product. There's sort of past the point of being a by-product of muscle contraction, right? So that, that we, right. We, we contract the muscle, we create mechanical tension on the muscle. We create this cascade, but when we do contract, right, there are positive things that happen, but just like anything, they're sort of, there's negative things that occur during that process in terms of metabolic waste and waste products from that machinery working. So if a machine is working in it, let's say your engine, it's working and it heats up. A byproduct of an engine running is heat. And so you have to have some sort of machinery to regulate heat.

And so there's, you have to have some sort of machinery to regulate heat, right? And so that's just a by-product that more or less making the comparison to a by-product of a machine working, right? So a by-product of muscle contraction is therefore damage that can occur if we have too much mechanical tension happen or too much intensity of it for a long, too long of a duration, right? And this is where we get into the field of an adequate amount of training volume, right? We need hard sets, but how many hard sets do we need relative to our training age, relative to our training abilities, right? How much volume were we doing before then, right? So there's some good stuff.

Our lifestyle as well. Lifestyle is a big one. Nutritional status. Sleep. Yeah, sleep, all that stuff, right? So all this is playing into this. It's not just a black and white thing. So yeah, go ahead. I'll just throw this question out here.

And then if you wanted to continue with that thought and jump over to it, but something that I've been asked over the years is, should I be, this would be a person asking, should I, should I be trying to optimize my training for maximum muscle damage? And, and you've already alluded to the answer to this, but I think it's worth mentioning, um, just specifically because I know that if I think back to my, my, my experience, my own fitness journey, there certainly was a time. I like to think that the, the, um, the, the, the meta, so to speak of fitness is shifting, but maybe I'm just my own bubble. So, you know, I don't know exactly, but there certainly was a time when it was very much that bomb and blast. And, you know, if you weren't extremely sore from your training, then you probably should

have trained harder. And I know there isn't a perfect correlation between muscle soreness and muscle damage, but generally speaking, yeah, that's if you do a ton of volume in a training session and it's at least halfway close to muscular failure, you're going to get more sore than if you did half of that volume. What are, what are your thoughts on that? Because again, what, what, what people who maybe would think that muscle damage is a major contributor to muscle building would do then is say, Hey, well, I should make sure that I achieve a lot of muscle damage. Like first and foremost, damage the muscles a lot, you know? Yeah. And this is where, you know, any old trainer can make you sore. Um, you know, that's kind of where that adage came

from because it's, I can make you sore doing a lot of heavy eccentrics. We'll just do, we'll just do a bunch of that. You're going to be, there's certain things. Yeah. Drop sets continue like just super long, uh, metabolically stressful sets things that that create a lot of metabolic waste muscle damage with is within that um they disrupt a lot of things within the cell right um there's things that there's it's helpful to a degree and then there's obviously a point at which it's not helpful anymore right there's a lot of you know to make a metaphor to life there's a lot of that in our in our everyday life it's like a little of that would have been helpful, but this is too much, right. It's becoming unhelpful up to this point. Right. And that kind of answers your question.

One mask in the beginning. Yeah. That makes two masks outside. What are you, what are you doing? Come on, man. Yeah. So within, within that muscle damage, there is a point of it being too much. Right. And, and like I was saying, um, off air, you know, in our conversation was there seems to be sort of, in my opinion, there's sort of a, uh, there starts to be a benefit of, of muscle damage early on, maybe in a training phase or, or a new movement. Right. So we know when things are novel and new. So if we try, let's say we try a new movement, we haven't back squatted before, or we new movement, right? So we know when things are novel and new. So if we try, let's say we try a new movement, we haven't back squatted before, or we haven't bench press before.

I safety bar squatted for the first time actually in this training cycle, just because I was never in a gym that had a safety bar. And yeah, it was a little bit wonky at first. I mean, I quickly got into the groove because it's maybe a little bit, feels a little bit more similar to a front squat than a back squat or something right in the middle. But those first couple I mean, I quickly got into the groove because you know, it's maybe a little bit, feels a little bit more similar to a front squat than a back or something right in the middle. But those first couple of weeks I had that, I felt, I felt a little bit new again. I was like,

yeah, I have to actually pay attention to my form and I'm like a little bit off. And yeah, well you're, so you're, we're always working through different movement patterns, right? So our nervous system understands what patterns are most advantageous to getting this load from point A to point B safely and effectively, right? And there's a point at which we understand that. And there's a point at which we want to, you know, follow along with that. And our nervous system is very smart. It's constantly learning each rep it's learning. And so that's why it's good to have like a training technique, for example. So like each bad rep could be training a bad way of, you know, a bad movement pattern that is. So we don't, I think that's one of the benefits of just doing a few warmups sets. I mean,

there are other benefits, but even just practicing proper form with lighter weight that allows you to really pay attention to what you're doing as opposed to those heavier working sets. And especially now you're, you're getting down to your last couple of reps and it can be hard to pay attention to much of anything other than just. Yeah. Well, it's a fundamental skill, right? And I, I want to get into that a little bit later on after we, we, I want to finish muscle damage really. So I don't want to lose my train of thought. Um, but within muscle damage, um, there seems to be that, that little bit, right. There there's like, we're like talking about off air. It's sort of a proxy where it lets us know where we're placing tension in the right spots, right. It lets us know that

we achieved a certain threshold that we hadn't achieved before, right? And we know with progressive overload, and that's an important bit of training, periodization and programming and progressing on our muscle growth journey, right? We need progressive overload. We need a progressive stimulus of some kind to further along an adaptation that we want to happen, right? Because once we adapt to a certain stress, we're pretty covered with that, right? You get really good at running a mile, a mile is not going to be too difficult any longer, but then you take that mile and make it two miles. Okay. Now we got some adaptation to happen,

right? We have a progressive stimulus there. Same here, the same thing here with, with strength training, with, with creating tension and with muscle damage, right? So I do think, you know, I wouldn't shy away from maybe creating a little bit. Um, and, you know, right? So I do think, you know, I wouldn't shy away from maybe creating a little bit. And, you know, or if you come up, if you come happen to come by it, don't think of it as like, oh, my gains are gone. But think of it as too far, right? There is, and it's important to note, and I say this in the book, exercise induced muscle damage, right? Is what we're talking about specifically here, because there's also muscle damage right is what we're talking about specifically here because there's also muscle damage due to trauma right and there's different levels of soreness right and there's

actually i put a continuum in the book on muscle soreness talking about kind of where it sort of can be a positive thing and where it gets into a negative thing and also where you should seek out professional you know health profession or health professionals that are trained and qualified, like physicians and stuff, physiotherapists, if you come across too much trauma, right. Or what is, what has been official? So, um, where, where is that point generally of diminishing returns for people wondering, okay, so they're thinking, how do I know then

what's, what are, what are some of the signs that I'm doing it right? That I'm stimulating enough. I'm creating enough muscle damage to get the most out of that pathway, so to speak, or even if it is just a by-product, then it would be a sign that I'm creating enough tension or enough metabolic stress, how would that look? Yeah. So as far as I kind of equate it, it's kind of a feeling thing a lot where I separate tension-based soreness with like trauma-based soreness, like you've gone too far. Right. And so like, to me, an easy example to me is like a little tension based soreness is like you were sitting down and you went to get up and you're like, Ooh, my quads are kind of sore.

You know, you kind of stretch them out. There's, there's some tension in there. You're like, Ooh, that's kind of, I don't know if I could squat today. You know, um, too far is like your partner looks at your quads and you're like, don't even look at my, don't even act like you're going to touch me. Don't look at them. You know, don't get near me. Cause you might bump into my legs. You know, it's like you were in a car wreck, right? It's like a trauma, right? And that can happen from strength training. It can happen from X, you know, exercise induced muscle, muscle trauma, right? It's, you know, if you've never, go do some German volume training and see how you

feel. Oh, you'll feel like you got in a car crash. Go do, go do 10 by 10 on the squat rack. And, and then I've never been so sore. The first time I ever, uh, this was 2013. I was first introduced to, I was in prep. Um, and I was first entered, which is the worst time to see this. Uh, I was first introduced to German volume training and, um, you know, I did 10 by 10 with, I think two 25 or a little bit more. And the next morning I felt like I got hit by a train, you know? Um, and it's like, I'd never trained before. It was, it was absolutely wild. Um, and that stuck around for seven to 10 days. Right. And that's, that's where it really goes too far, right. Where it starts to impede your other training, or it starts to, to leak in and impede or

work against the next training session where you're going to be training that muscle group. Right. So, you know, I think a productive level of muscle soreness can be upwards of a day, you know, 24 to 36 hours. You know, sometimes depending on the intensity of the session, this, you know, 24 to 36 hours. Um, you know, sometimes depending on the intensity of the session, this, you know, certain, you know, if you're in a really intense high volume hypertrophy phase, right. Um, you're gonna, you know, you're probably gonna be sore for a couple of days, you know, that's just the way of doing tens in my, in my programming. So I start with, uh,

tens at, I guess it would be 70% or is it 75? I'd have to look at my spreadsheet and, you know, it's pretty hard ending, ending at least a first, first rep in reserve. First set reps in reserve is probably two, maybe three, but probably two final set is, is probably a solid one. And, uh, and that's, I still, I still get sore from that. It's hard. I've been doing, I've been doing that style of training. So again, it's my, it's, it's beyond bigger than you're stronger. I have a book for intermediate and advanced weightlifters. And so over a year, two years ago, probably is when I started putting it together. So I started training that way then, and you know, I enjoy it and I'm still making progress with it. So I just have stuck with it, but it still gets me those.

Yeah. It's going to get you. Yeah. And I think that's all right. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I don't think, right. And there's different camps here, right. Cause you know, there's sort of that minimum effective dose camp. Um, yeah. Who would say don't really, you don't ever want to be sore. Like don't ever be sore, just do full body training and just do like three sets max per muscle group per workout. And then just do that every day and you'll never be sore. I mean, can that work? Yes, it can. But is that the best way for everyone to train under any circumstances? No, because actually there is no, I don't believe there is one true way to train again for everybody, all circumstances, all goals. But I'm curious to your thoughts on that.

Yeah. Same, same. I think obviously there's a genetic factor there. There's going to be a certain threshold of stress that you're a bill. You have the ability to handle, right. And some of this, like, you know, if you're, there's a reason bodybuilders are so chill, you know, stress is stress. And if you have a life that's super stressful, your work is stressful. Your relationship is stressful. You know, your, your relationship with your parents is emotionally distressful to you. Like nothing specific there, but just in general, like if you have a lot of stress, there's not going to be much room for a training stimulus to happen there. Like there's not much more in that bar graph of like, well, it's, I only have a little bit to give here in the training

department, but if your life's pretty chill and you don't have too much stress outside of what you can really handle just fine, you know, you can handle a lot more stress within training in my opinion. Right. So, and I've seen this with clients and you've seen, I'm sure you've seen this with people too. So, um, I've experienced it myself. Yeah. Same levels are higher. Oh, I can go right into my, uh, into my, my, my spreadsheets where I track all my workouts and I could show you periods where I'm like, you know, there's just a lot going on. And, uh, I mean, I guess you could, you could, you could, you could call it stress, even though, I mean, it is there's stressors. Let's just say there are a lot of stress stress, even though, I mean, it is, they're stressors. Let's just say there are

a lot of stressors, even though I generally don't get stressed out. I'm not prone to anxiety or any serious symptoms of stress, but what I've found, and this is an unfortunate fact of being human, is when it's maybe more of a, it feels like a quantity factor rather than a quality. It's just, you stack enough stressors up and my training stagnates, weights start feeling heavy, like training weights that maybe in the previous mesocycle, because I note down my reps and reserve as well, just because I think it's smart to track that as you get toward the end of your muscle and strength gain journey. Right. Cause, cause first, first you gain a few reps and reserve, and then you gain some reps and then you can gain weight. And so I'll, I'll see that, well, shit, I did the same weight as two mesocycles ago,

me one mesocycle ago, but my, my, I hit my sets, but my RIR like collectively went down, my, I hit my sets, but my RIR like collectively went down. You know what I mean? Instead of a two, two, two, one, it was like a two, one, one, zero one, which I wouldn't even necessarily, you know what I mean? So I've noticed that. And also that will impact my sleep, unfortunately, where, um, I won't have trouble falling asleep, but I will wake up several times in the night. And I have, there's nothing I've been able to do to resolve that other than just bringing stress down. Unfortunately, I wish, I wish that weren't the case because. Well, we're human, you know, we're a biological system. It's obnoxious that that, cause that one in particular, I would take, there are so many

other negative side effects that I could experience, I would take, there are so many other negative side effects that I could experience that I would take over that one because sleeping poorly, it just messes everything up. Oh, it's the governor of life, right? It's, yeah, it's your central control unit failing, right? In a very crucial situation. And it's without that, you're kind of lost, right. But yeah. Right. There's a, there's a productive amount of it. And then again, like, I don't, I don't believe I'm not necessarily on the side of, I don't really, I'm Switzerland in all equations. I always say that, like, I'm just in the middle, I'm here to just make the best of what we have. And I don't really

live in any extreme. And so I don't, you know, I don't think to kind of expand on that, the minimum effective dose thing, you know, I think if you're really, really new, you're, you know, let's say you're middle-aged or older and you're not really looking to like, cause I don't, I don't believe strength training sole purpose is to gain as much muscle as possible either. Right. So there's, there's a lot of benefits that extend beyond muscle growth here, right? It's just a helpful by-product of strength training, right? That we get bigger, stronger, we adapt, um, and sometimes leaner and, um, but also I don't, I don't, yeah, I don't think that, um, you know, we should go for just bludgeon ourselves

with, with trauma, either physical trauma, every training session, right. Where you, you can, you know, yell at me that Arnold did it. So you're blue in the face, but you're not Arnold dude. Okay. Yeah. Um, I'm not Michael Phelps. I can swim, but I'm not Michael Phelps, right? Like you're not that.

Remember, I'm sure you did this. You remember trying his workouts from his encyclopedia? Oh, miserable. Yeah. I mean, if I remember correctly, I don't remember how many tiers there were. There were at least two, if not three, but even the first tier destroyed me. I was like, yeah, I'm just like, I'm done. Yeah. I can't, I can't do this. I can't. No, it's not possible. I'm done. Yeah. You're done after that. So yeah, there's obviously that stress factor that plays into all of it. So, and this is where kind of deloads come in, right? You hear about deloads and pulling back on training volume and training stress and you got to periodize things, right? You got, there's times in your life where you

got to pull back on things, maybe go on vacation or holiday, spend more time with your family and kind of take a load off, do it, kind of recharge yourself. Same thing goes with training. You know, it's an ebb and flow of a biological system, you know, and it's the same thing. We're not machines, whether you speak in ones and zeros or not, right? Totally. If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company, Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world.

Yeah. Deloading is something I've become more disciplined about as time has gone on because, I mean, there was a time when I would deload because i would get sick or yeah or maybe there would be a vacation or something i'd always put it off yeah you're like ah i'm going out i think i'm fine i'll do it i'll do another week i'll do another week or maybe try to like selectively deload because i still want to do my deadlifts and stuff all right i'll do like less of this other stuff. But I've now, and this is in the program that in Beyond Bigger, Leaner, Stronger,

we are deloading every fourth week. And that may sound too frequent for some people, but I mean, again, I have decent genetics for this kind of stuff. I have apparently good DNA for recovery. Like there's, I, again, I, I've, I've decent genetics for this kind of stuff. I've apparently good DNA for recovery. Like there's, um, I took one of those tests and there was one in particular, one expression of, of a gene that was associated with, again, um, very good recovery. Like apparently they see it in a lot of athletes.

Right. And so, and I've been able to do pretty good, pretty, pretty well in my training, but, um, So, and I've been able to do pretty good, pretty, pretty well in my training, but, um, that, that fourth, every fourth week deloading, given the volume and the intensity of the program, which is not crazy, but you're doing probably about 15 hard sets per major muscle group per week. Um, that would include indirect volume and which I think, I don't know if you really can go much beyond that unless you're like a super freak and you're 19 years old and you're just invincible, period. But for anybody listening, I challenge anybody to try to do 20 hard sets. You go into Excel and you lay that out.

You can count the indirect volume where it makes sense. 20 hard sets per major muscle group per week. And even be in a calorie surplus. If you're not a freak at 20 years old, let's see how long it lasts for. Not very long. And so the training is fairly difficult. And I tried different deload periods. I tried every sixth week. I didn't even try eight because I know that that would have been too much. But every fourth week has worked very well for me. And I've gotten a lot of good feedback from people who have read the book and are now who are doing the program who basically have the same story as me.

They're like, you know, I never really cared that much about deloads. I didn't, I was bad about it basically. And now I've come to really appreciate it because I come into that fourth week, three weeks of hard training. And, and I, now I feel like, yeah, maybe I could go a bit further, but by easing up, I just then feel fully recharged and I have another really good productive three weeks of training. And so anybody listening, if you're not deloading, let's say it could be four to eight, maybe 10 weeks if you're new, depending on what you're doing, I would recommend to, to, to do it. And if you want to learn, I'll just set topic over to legionathletics.com search for deload and you'll find an article. I think I also did a podcast. If you want to just get a quick rundown of how to put it together, it's not complicated, but it can make a big difference. Yeah. And I think the more advanced you are, the more frequent you have to, you have to, right. Cause the weights are heavier. You're doing more, you're creating more tension,

right? Like that's the thing with that's the thing with where technique fits in and where the ability to create mechanical tension fits in is, you know, the more tension you're producing in a specific muscle, the more stress on that overall system, right? But the more, but the more work is being done in less time with less volume, right? And if we have less volume, we have less accumulated stress on the system and on our joints and our connective tissues. And so that's a good positive thing, right? So it's a, my goal, I kind of almost, you know, with clients I've worked with for a

long time, if we get upwards of, let's say 16 plus sets a week on something, um, it's my goal, or let's say upwards of 20, it's my goal to actually be able to productively pull back on that because that means that we have more high quality work rather than more low quality work. Right. I'd rather have high quality than quality over quantity. Right. And this really plays into that in a big way. So, you know, technique and your ability to create tension to me is a fundamental skill, right? It's as important to strength training as dribbling is to basketball, in my opinion. So you got to take it with, you know, seriousness and it's a foundational fundamental skill. It's the sole thing we're doing in the gym.

You know, you don't go in and do anything else other than lifts weight, right? You're lifting weight. You're doing your technique matters. You're trying to create tension. You're trying to grow muscles, trying to produce an internal response, right? We talked about it earlier. So there's definitely those factors as well. You got to pay attention to, but that can undulate things over the course of your career.

And that's where, you know, resources like your book, you know, my book, having a coach or a trainer, it definitely comes into play because you can have that relationship where you're like, oh, okay. I've always heard about this. I never kind of like put it into practice. Right. I never like saw it happening, but this, this makes a lot more sense. And you learn by doing essentially. Let's move on to metabolic stress or metabolic fatigue is it's also referred to as that as well. Yeah. So metabolic stress is the accumulation of metabolic products within the muscle fiber,

right. Within the muscle cell during training, right. So that, that fatigue, right. This is where muscle or metabolic stress gets really interesting. So metabolic stress actually has, uh, currently what we know, uh, or is theorized has an indirect, right? So earlier we talked about direct volume and indirect volume, right? So metabolic stress has this indirect relationship with muscle hypertrophy, right? And it does so through increasing the most direct one, which is

mechanical tension, right? So I'm going to explain that. Okay. So the fatigue that is in part caused by metabolic stress is thought to contribute to an increase in mechanical tension, right? As it increases in the muscle, metabolic stress, as it increases in the muscle, it increases motor unit recruitment and decreases the muscle fiber shortening velocity, right? So it allows us to create even more tension as that fatigue is produced. And the more it is produced, the more tension is produced, right? And that's when your rep starts to slow. More tension is then required to keep doing the exercise properly.

Right. And that's where your rep speed starts to really slow. You're like, you're, you know, you're at that point where you're, if you're watching, like you're doing a bicep curl and you're like shaken, right. You're like, there's so much tension and there's not a lot there. Right. And you're, you're getting, and that's again, so there's, there's a, there's a healthy amount of that. Right. And so we need a certain threshold of that. That's why, you know know this is kind of where you play into the camp of muscle pumps right um so the combination of changes in the muscle during

this accumulation of fatigue basically increases the number of muscles controlled by those higher threshold motor units right those motor units within your nervous system that basically are the controls the command center to those saying like hey fire fire fire right and they they have their arms sort of reached out with their fingers on each one of those sort of playing them like a piano right it's like fire fight you know in a different sequence or a firing rate if you will right and this that it creates an increase in mechanical tension within the muscle. Um, and it's very, very interesting, um, that this can have such an indirect contribution, um, that plays in essentially to the direct one, right. It's that's where that two way street comes into play, which is, which is very,

very interesting. Right. And so it kind of gets you into a few different conversations of like, okay, well, we know we want to create tension and we know we want to create it for a magnitude, a certain magnitude. So at a certain threshold for, for a certain duration of time. So that's a certain amount of volume. Right. And now we can start to play with a few other factors within program design, right. Which I don't know how time you get into today, but that's where things get a bit interesting and where, you know, all of that starts to come into

play and starts to really contribute maybe to your long-term potential of muscle growth down the line. And what are your thoughts then? And again, I can hear people wondering about styles of training that emphasize the metabolic stress. So if you, if you poke around on Instagram, probably should delete your Instagram, but you're not going to delete it if you're on it. And, uh, and you see people talking about, uh, finishers or, or just, it's generally very high rep, you know, it's going to be, uh, 20 rep would probably be on the low end, 20 to 30 plus rep training. I often get asked about that. Should I be doing that?

Or is that just not a very effective way to train because that on the strength and kind of endurance continuum, that's way over here on the muscle endurance side of things. What are your thoughts on that? So you're getting a little bit into Dr. Cody Hahn and colleagues, definitely posted a great paper on this, you know, talking about sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, right? So outside of that muscle cell within the, the outside of the muscle cell directly, you know, we have the sarcolemma and we have the sarcoplasm and there are, there's certain things in there, right? We store glycogen in there. We there's certain enzymes in there that help sort of

govern that cell in a positive way that help, you know, maybe drive more nutrients in or more fluid or more glycogen or more glycogen could be stored there because we, we need more availability of ready to go energy within that cell, right? Because we're always working at that capacity. ready to go energy within that cell, right? Because we're always working at that capacity. And so there is definitely merit to that, um, in terms of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. And so in my opinion, to making the muscle fibers just bigger, right? Bigger, right. So there's a, there's a great visual in my book, um, talking about, or kind of going through this, right. And so, um, if I'm able to, to pull this up really quick, it's, it's a great visual where we're basically going through, right. Uh, a rise in volume of the sarcoplasm, right. So it's, it's, that includes, you know,

things that mitochondria sarcoplasmic reticulum, the things that govern calcium within the cell, which help muscles contract. You could, I guess you, I don't know if it's the technical term, but maybe you could say they're kind of fluid components. Yeah. Fluid components of the cell, right? So things are kind of floating around in there. And if you expand that, of course you now have a bigger muscle, but that that's different than the muscle fibers themselves and the muscle cells and cells, like the, of the cells, right. And then you have the bundles and like those actually physically getting bigger. And those are pro so that's actual protein, right. Those are protein bundles.

And so there's, you know, myofibular hypertrophy, which is more of like the hypertrophy we're used to where muscles, the actual protein we're gaining more protein, right. Next to each other. Right. And in parallel and in series, so next to each other, they're're expanding we're getting bigger we're growing more protein right that muscle protein synthesis process right we're growing more synthesis just means more right growing developing so within that sarcoplasmic hypertrophy we're rising we're basically rising the volume of the, that, that fluid state where, um, those things that help contribute as well to fueling the process of all that muscle growth, that post myofibular muscle growth as

well. Right. So we need those components outside of that, uh, protein to, to do their job as well. Right. Those, those muscle fibers to do their job as well. And I, and really, if you think about it logically, the more we have of those, right, the more essentially the more, right. If we're building a building, right. The, the more construction workers we have on our crew, the more optimally and more efficiently we could build a building maybe even better and stronger in the future. Right. And to me, that's kind of what you're doing is you're kind of adding workers to your, your, your crew. You're adding more ability to, to divide labor and, and increase your ability to, to handle, you know, fatigue or even work being done within workouts, within you know, mesocycles

and phases and different things. Right. Um, and so to me that that's a very, it's a very useful thing. Um, but understand too, that you need, you know, your, your whole workout can't just be finishers. Right. So, um, you're going to notice too, you're going to know, like if you've done it, if you're training mistake that I see out to me is like a lot of their training is that very high rep, uh, metabolic focused stuff. Right. And so you're going to know very, they do very little heavier myofibular focus strength training. Yeah. So they're, they're basically, um, so let's see if I can put this in a, in a helpful way. Hopefully my earlier explanations were helpful. Um, and I didn't butcher them too much, but, um, basically, you know, that, that sort of training, think of it as not adding as many,

you're going to add some protein, but we're not focused on adding protein there as much as we're adding the other components, right. The more fluid components, I guess you could think of it as that would make the protein components be able to work even better. Right. They're going to work better and grow more in the future if we're doing that rather than just focusing on the fluid component. And you're going to notice people, if you've ever done finisher-based training as your sole training or like pump-style training as your sole training. I used to. That's how I used to. But how quickly, this is a test right here how quickly did you deflate yep i used to talk about that is uh yeah you just set that as an experience trained in two days and how demotivating was that

it was so discouraging and just i didn't know why you know yeah i was like i look in the gym i look like you know maybe not jacked but but i definitely look like i lift and then and then i almost look like i don't even lift three days later yeah and. And it's different. It's so it's a difference between like, you've seen guys where, and this is where the difference of like, I think so, like I come from the more of the competing world and we on stage, people talk a lot about muscle density and muscle maturity. And to me, that's just the difference of you having actual more proteins, more myofibular hypertrophy over the course of your career, rather than sarcoplasmic based hypertrophy. Right. So, you know, us young bucks on stage are just kind of pumped up blobs of, of fluid of just like, we got some, we got some muscle, but it's mainly just for show here.

And as soon as we step on stage, we're going to flatten out. Yeah. Yeah. We have about 30 minutes of, we're going to flatten out. Yeah. Yeah. We have about 30 minutes of where we're going to look like that older dude. Um, but you see those guys and that's kind of, to me, that's kind of what that is, is representing is like the muscle maturity and muscle density really is, is displaying through just more pure protein in the muscle, more protein, uh, the components within that muscle, right? So, uh, making up 60 to 70% of protein in the, in the muscle itself, right. Is that myofibular component. So, um, that's very, very important to note and your training should then reflect that more so than, so I do think that was a turning point in my own training. That was probably one of the key things. There were a few key things, but that was one of them

was to start lifting heavier weights. It didn't have to be, I mean, when I, when I first started to educate myself, uh, it wasn't, it wasn't power lifting per se. I did a little bit of that. And I was like, yeah, this is, I actually prefer more strength training with some bodybuilding stuff uh but it was doing i mean it might have been i probably i can't say that i hadn't done a set of like fives or sixes with appropriately heavy weight on a hard exercise before but that that certainly was not how i normally trained and so by switching over to like it was probably i mean i would think previously i'm looking back i probably never did fewer than eight to ten reps and that was that was probably my final set and so i was probably starting 15 20 and to switch from that to like warm up and go into fives uh uh, was, was a, was a big, a big,

a big game changer for me. And just in terms of actually getting strong, uh, for the first time and then really starting to, to gain noticeable muscle mass that didn't just disappear. Yeah. One or two days later. And so there is a, there is merit to though, um, to have more sarcoplasmic based, uh, type of training and in certain phases where, right. So if you're, if you notice you're, you're lacking at a certain part of your training, right. Like, um, let's say your, your volume tolerance is lower than you think it should be, right. You may be lacking some things from a machinery standpoint in the cell, right? And this is mainly theory-based, right?

But if we think about it logically, you may be, it's not a far outreach that it's like, you know, we've been training this one way for so long. Let's say we're, you know, in the low rep camp where we're really focused on creating a lot of tension, a high amount of intensity in our, you know, we never go above 10 reps if we go over eight or six, right. Within that, right. There's a lot of adaptation that's left out there to basically fend for itself that isn't being

properly managed or, or given its due diligence to, to then grow. Right. And we need all of this stuff to work really well. And the better we can have it work really well, right? And we need all of this stuff to work really well. And the better we can have it work really well, the better off we are, right? And so I think a prime example is this, if you watch, you know, you have some of the world's strongest people, right? And power lifting and strong men make them do anything over six reps and it's their world's going to end, right? them do anything over six reps and it's their, their world's going to end, right? Like we have metabolic fatigue coming up out of nowhere after six reps. You're like, you could do 25 of, of,

and just be fine. Like your, your, your machinery, your ability to clear lactate. Yeah. You put that into a rep max calculator. You're like, what is going on? Yeah. It's like, what isn't, what's a, there's a certain rate limiter of our future gains. That's sort of being compromised by our lack of ability to see the full picture rather than this sort of this myopic view of it, of, of just this one sole focus of being like myofibular hypertrophy, like it has to be within this, right? So if you never do those types of training you never expose yourself to those things and you never have to force those things to adapt to work better and more efficiently and your ability to store maybe more muscle glycogen in a cell like that's huge for your long-term potential of muscle

growth it allows you over a course of a phase, maybe to tolerate more volume, you recover a bit quicker in between sessions, which as we've been talking about this whole time, that's massively helpful in a, in a phase where you're trying to build muscle, right? So that isn't to say that, you know, yes, myofibular hypertrophy is important. Building more protein in your muscle is important, but so is, so are other things, right? So we're more aerobic adaptations, right? Making sure that you can, you know, you're a healthy individual that, you know, muscle building and muscle protein synthesis and muscle building is an expensive process for your body to do. Right. And if it doesn't have to do it, it's not probably going to do it, you know? So it's

one of those things where we got to sort of set ourselves up for success and be sure the whole picture is taken care of. The whole cell is happy and we're the right machinery and are all the machinery rather as being given its time rather than just sole focusing on one aspect of many, right. Within a long-term approach to trying to grow muscle. That's a makes me think of my, my position on cardio, which has evolved from the first edition of bigger, leaner, stronger. I was like, just do as much cardio as you need for your body composition goals. And if that's none, that's fine. Basically, like if you don't want to get that lean, you probably don't need to, to do any cardio. You could just lift, watch your calories and macros and be done with it. Now though, now I don't think that's wrong, but now I do recommend that people try to work in

some cardio for health reasons. There are some additional benefits. You do get a lot of health benefits from strength training, obviously, but there are some particularly cardiovascular benefits and some telomere longevity related stuff that you probably don't get from, from strength training nearly as much as you get from cardio, but there's also a performance component. And this is not news to you, but it's, it's something I, uh, maybe, maybe a year ago or so is when I was reading about it. And, um, and then I started doing more cardio and I noticed it is as my cardiovascular fitness has improved, my ability to recover in between my weightlifting, my strength training sets has improved. And by that, I mean, I feel like, so my heart rate comes

down faster. Um, and I feel like I have a bit more energy. So most people listening probably, um, they probably rest. They probably have a stopwatch. Like it's why I use a little stopwatch app on my phone. And I watch my rest times fairly closely. Like I'm probably two and a half minutes or so in between isolation exercises, maybe two, but two to two and a half and then three to three and a half in between my uh my my sets of the bigger heavier lifts and i rarely go beyond that and so um those rest times are appropriate obviously but if i do a set of tens on deadlifts the hardest shit so hard. Uh, and, and is, is three and a half minutes. Is that enough to, to, if I were to rest another minute, would I do better? Yeah, I would actually. Um, but I, um, I don't want to be in the gym too long. And so I know that's appropriate. It's not, I'm not like resting one minute and, you know, going to blow myself up. However, when I, when I give myself that three and a half minute rest time, give or take, uh, there, I have noticed a difference where I would do cardio two days a week, previously 30 minutes, um, just set steady state, just moderate intensity, nothing special. And then

I moved to six to seven days a week, same thing, 30 minutes, but I've been able to increase my intensity. Like what was, what would get me pretty winded previously does not now. And so my, as my cardiovascular fitness has improved, I've noticed in my lifting, especially on these big lifts that are hard, the squat, the deadlift, the higher rep stuff that really gets my heart going that in that three and a half minutes, my heart rate has come down more than it has previously. And I do feel readier to do that next set. And that translates into better performance. Yeah. And your ability to utilize oxygen's improved, right? And how big of a factor is oxygen within every biological system in your body,

right? We have anaerobic systems, which can work without oxygen. And we have aerobic systems that we can work, you know, that have to have oxygen to work. And our anaerobic systems are very short lived, right? We know that, you know, our, our creatine phosphate system are that, you know, is within like what we know of now is at least I know of is like around 10 seconds, right? So you're 10 to 15, maybe, right? And then you're cracking into other things that need oxygen to work, right? And so there are things we can do with and without. And the more you, the more oxygen you have, and the more efficient you are at utilizing it, the better off you're going to be not only within your training, but within your recovery process, which is aerobic, right?

It's recovery is an aerobic process. So, um, you need it and you need it for your health. Um, as I think this is a very important thing to mention as cardiovascular disease is one of the top killers of people on this planet. I think it's paramount that we as health professionals stress the importance of improving health as well as the other benefits of strength training and cardio, in my opinion, an aerobic based training, I think should have a place in there. And I'm really, I was, I'm really happy to hear you kind of have changed your tune on that a little bit. You're not to benefit me, but just for the sake of like, cause you do reach so many people that I think it's important message to send out of like, Hey, better health. Yeah. Maybe in your

twenties and thirties, you're, you're good to go without, but like understand that, that health degrades over time or things get a little less efficient, our ability to utilize oxygen risk for cardiovascular events and disease creep up later in life. And it's good to sort of create these long lasting habits now and sort of preemptively attend to those things rather than just wait until, you know, we don't want to wait until we're 50 to start doing cardio. Right. We want to do it, you know, and you can think of it as, as a health debt, so to speak, or fitness. Yeah. If you, if you accumulate too much, like, yes, you can dig out, but, um, it might be, it might be a tough road to hoe. It might be a long process. And certainly again, you can do it, but, um, you know, a little bit of

prevention is going to be future. You is going to thank you a lot for taking the, and again, for me, it's 30 minutes, six or seven days a week. And I, and I always do something else. So I have a, an upright bike down in my basement. And if I have work calls, I'll usually save it, save that for, so I have to sit on the phone anyway. Uh, I might as well do something, right? Yeah. And, um, and again, my intensity is that, uh, it's at a level of, of, again, I'd say like a four or five out of 10. And so that means that I can have a conversation. I'm a little bit winded.

And so I'll tell people like, I'm on a bike, just so you know. I'm not just like- I'm not doing anything else. Yeah. Yeah. Or just randomly out of breath. Isn't this guy supposed to be like a health dude he can't even breathe um yeah sorry i walked up my stairs yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah sorry i went and uh

i got a soda and sat down yeah um and and so but it's it's not it's not so much like if i were doing higher intensity stuff i wouldn't be able to do i would even be able to concentrate right because that'd blow me up but uh so now i just just multitask it. And if I don't have a call, then I spend that time listening to something that I want to listen to. It could be a podcast, an interview, or I'll just spend my time reading. So I read on my phone as it is. So again, because it's not too distracting, it's a little bit obnoxious, but it's not too bad. I can still read and get some more pages done in the day. And so for me, it was a 360 degree win, right? Yeah. It's a win. It's a win-win. And to me, the way that I think about it, I try to put things in simple terms and I try to create a

perspective around things that sort of just lends its own hand, right? That sort of speaks for itself. And to me, let's say better aerobic training. I'm not an aerobic athlete. I'm obviously here. I wrote a book on science of strength training about building muscle, right? I'm a proponent for this stuff, right? I'm not just working against it, but I'm talking about the importance that should tell you the importance of how I view your health and just the longevity of life and the quality of that life over a lifespan. But better aerobic fitness is going to lead to a lower resting heart rate, right?

If we can cut our heart rate by 10 beats a minute over the course, if we can cut down our resting heart rate- Especially if it goes- By 10? Or more. I mean, a lot of people, I've heard people, they go, cut down our resting heart rate, especially if it goes by 10, like let's say it goes, I mean, a lot of people I've heard, how many they go, they go, you know, I was at like 70 probably on average, you know, and now I'm at 50 and I have my little tracker and it's some, you know, in the middle of the night, it even goes into the forties. Yeah. And extrapolate that across a lifetime. How many beats did you save your heart

extrapolate that across a lifetime, how many beats did you save your heart over the course of a lifespan, over the course of 10 years? Right. And that cannot be a negative thing. Cannot, right. Everything that makes sense to any, anything, right. That can't be a negative thing, right. That can only be positive outside of it going too low. And then you're like, Oh God, you know, we have other problems. Um, but then we're not looking at your overall health or your overall fitness levels as much as like, or how jacked you are versus like this dude, we got to keep this dude alive. You know, you're not going to get there. It's not like, oh, you got too cardiovascularly fit. Now you're, you are dangerously low.

Yeah. You're not like Rob Lowe and Parks and Rec, right? You're, you know, I don't watch the, I don't watch the show. So't watch the shows. Okay. Well, he's, he's such a good role for him. Like he's this fitness freak that basically has like the resting heart rate of 36 and he, any, he runs, you know, he's going to run everywhere. He works for the government, but if he's got to run across town, he's like, okay, he's got to set his, you know, he's got to beat his mile time to the next meeting. He's just the embodiment of it's a perfect role for Rob Lowe, but it's know, he's got to beat his mile time to the next meeting. He's just the embodiment of, it's a perfect role for Rob Lowe, but it's, he's the epitome of health in that show essentially. Well, I had a couple other things on the agenda, but I think we should save them maybe for a

follow-up interview because- I'd love to do that. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. So why don't we just wrap this up here? This was a lot of great information. And again, let's tell people about the book. Obviously, you can show it again for YouTube, but people listening, the title of it and where they can get it. And then anything else where they can find you on social media, if you're active there or anything else you want them to know about. Absolutely. So the book, Science of Strength Training, I was trying to pull up the price here for you because it's a good selling point. So Science of Strength Training. I was trying to pull up the price here for you because it's a good selling point. So Science of Strength Training, if you're watching,

this is it, Science of Strength Training. If you're not watching, it is a beautifully designed book. It's got a yellow cover. It's got like a CGI anatomy illustration on the front. Really well done, by the way, I'll add. I was impressed with it. I do get manuscripts sent to me fairly often and um they're okay something you know i'm not not to put them down generally but this one stood out to me i was like oh this i appreciate the work that went into this there's a lot thanks mike yeah

a lot of good information in here this is it reminds me of um a bit of uh how do you pronounce it frederick i know i know how to spell it i guess i don't know but so where where this really this book really you know the goal of it where it fits in um was somewhere between the strength training anatomy is the book we're talking about if you guys have heard of it um by i'm assuming he's french right right? He's not, he's not American, but yeah. Not American. Okay. We know that. But you know, it could be, he could be Swiss. He could be. No, it's true. I'm so sorry. I'd say any, I don't want to offend anybody, especially him. But this, this book, my book, it was kind of the goal of like, how do we take the useful and practicality, usefulness and practicality of strength training anatomy that has lended

its hand to this industry for so long, and it is such a popular book, how can we add that and blend that with other great books like Muscle and Strength Pyramids from Helms and Andy Morgan and Andrea Valdez, and even some of the practicality and usefulness from your books when it comes to program design, fatigue management and all of these things. Right. And, and how do I package that up in a way where it's written for the everyday person, right. It's written for the 99% of people that, that need to read it. Um, it, and I've gotten a ton of messages from everyone, from your everyday person, your mom with three kids to your, your, your, you know, your dad to your early on personal trainer or a personal trainer that's into their fitness journey or into their personal training job, but they didn't

necessarily get a formal education in exercise science. So it's like, Hey, you know, this is a great resource for you. It's 1599. It like, that's the best part to me. With where the CPI is headed. I don't know. That's like a gallon of milk now. Yeah. So between a gallon of milk or a pound of beef, you're looking at a book. Something like, yeah, yeah. A steak, a New York strip steak at Whole Foods is more expensive than that. Than this book. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and hopefully if you use this book, you can learn enough to buy multiple steaks, right? Is the goal, but no. So that's honestly one of the coolest parts for me is the fact that it's $15.99. It's an under $20 book that is. And I just think that's magical because I wanted to basically break down the entry point to this information

right because it's hard to come by it's hard to put all together it's hard to wrap up in a pretty picture um and again i'm so grateful that i was able to to have the opportunity to even write a book that could fill a gap in a space that i i again, I'm sort of lost on me still. That's like, why am I the one that wrote this? I'm very grateful. Why not? I'm grateful for it. When I published Bigger, Leaner, Stronger initially, I was like, why is this book? Yeah. Why does this not already exist? Why is a lot of it so much just hype and marketing sizzle? And why not just give very simple instructions, give a bit of it's so much just hype and marketing sizzle. And why not just give very simple instructions, give a bit of the scientific background. And yes, the stuff that works,

the 20% that gives you 80% is kind of boring. It is. It's not very sexy. It doesn't have the marketing appeal that so many other things out there have that are contrived. And that is one way of going about it, right? Where you're like not really about results and science and truth. You're just saying, okay, what, what's going to hook people, right? Like those conversations, the publishers are, what's the hook, what's the new, what's the breakthrough? Is it, is it, is it, is it the lectins like, like Gundry? Is that the, that's the breakthrough is it oh is it is it is it the lectins like like gundry yeah is that the that's it yeah yeah or is it the uh is it the even the paleo pitch great marketing pseudoscience

mythological fake history but you combine what what appears to be scientific information and historical information yeah that makes for a very persuasive package um but but when i so when i went about bigger than you're stronger and even now after many revisions and i'm still updating it i i i've i've i think stayed true to that original vision which is i think i have improved a bit of the uh persuasive appeal of it but not at the expense of the actual information. So very much like in just your book as well, these are not books for people. Like if you are still in the beginning of let's say your journey as a consumer, right? So you're not a very, not stupid, but you're not a sophisticated consumer in this space yet. And you still are looking for the miracle fixes and the one true diets or the one true way

of doing things and the one weird trick and all that stuff, right? And I understand. I do understand. I mean, you can have actually intelligent people who they read, okay, all I have to do is stop eating these few random foods and I'll take these supplements. And you're saying I can lose 20 pounds in 30 days, even if they're like, sounds too good to be true, but who cares? I'll try it. I'll try it for a month and I'll spend $60 on this supplement and see what happens. And so many people, they do need to go through that experience at least once to realize like, okay, that didn't do anything.

And now they've kind of upgraded in terms of sophistication. And so now they start looking away from that stuff to stuff like our stuff, which again, it's incumbent upon us to market ourselves and our work well. We can't just blame people for being so dumb that they don't go and buy our poorly titled, poorly written, poorly designed, ugly stuff. That's not how it works. So we need to be good marketers. But again, that core message of there isn't a lot of sex appeal in a lot of the stuff that certainly we're talking about here, but here's the thing that it gets you sexy though. It works. Yeah. So that's, that's kind of sexy actually. Yeah. And, and so it's just, you know, people, they need to, they need to find their way. Um, and I understand,

and that's one of the reasons why I continue to write blog articles and record podcasts and just trying to get people out again of that, um, um, cesspool and, you know, into, uh, into the Olympic, uh, swimming pool. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, let's start swimming some laps, right. It was a good freestyle stroke. Um, exactly, man. You said it, you said it well. And again, like this, these may not be your first books. If they are your first books, if our books are your first books, we're going to celebrate that if they're not, we're not here to bash you or condemn you or to be condescending. We're just here to sort of say, what's up. Thanks so much for joining us.

And we're here if you have questions, right. It's it's, that is where we're coming from. Um, and so, yeah, that's such a big part of the book. It goes over again, as we talked about today, it goes over mechanisms and muscle growth. It dives into anatomy. It dives into muscle function. Uh, there's an overview of each muscle and a chapter two, before we get into the exercise portions of each muscle group, um, chapter three is all about injury prevention, um,

working back up from an injury you know warm-ups what's the new latest science or making sense of static stretching I go into that kind of making sense of that and then program design that's a big question is are there programs in it will I learn how to create my own programs and the the answer is yes. Chapter four is everything I could put together with the limited pages I had left in the book to basically make the best section on program design that I could. Everything from volume to fatigue management, to exercise selection, to progressions, to there's an example of different program types. to, um, there's an example of different program types. So if your goal is to build muscle, um, there's a three and four and a five day beginner and advanced program in there

to gain strength, same thing to, to maybe improve, um, you know, uh, metabolic conditioning or, or, um, muscle endurance or strength endurance. There's a program in there for that three, four or five days beginner and advanced, right? So there's, there's a program in there for that three, four or five day beginner and advanced, right? So there's, there's everything you can imagine wrapped up in this under $20 book. Um, and so I just, I'm stoked, man. Honestly, I just, it's, it's sort of, I'm in disbelief. Um, honestly that it's, it's out there. I got to write it. Um, it's having such a positive impact. Um, it's sort of still lost on me. As you said, like when you first wrote bigger than you're stronger, it's like, why me? Like,

I don't get it, but maybe it takes, you know, guys like us who were, who were not at the top, but who are enough in the middle where it's like, I mean, I was no, no, I wasn't even at the bottom. I was, I had no connections in the industry the industry uh it it was you were more or less still sean patrick right you were still yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's my my my pen name for for my random stuff like speaking of that uh it's probably not anymore but for a for a stretch there uh after the the capital shenanigans yeah um that was that i have a i have a bill of rights book for people listening and i published it under a pen name because it'd be very random i was like this needs to be separate like this is the same guy yeah he's

a bigger leader stronger shredded chef workout motivation know your bill of rights like yeah okay sure um and and so that was that was my best-selling book for for months actually i mean that was like thousands and thousands of copies a month just because of what happened and that spiked a lot of interest in um i suppose our our constitution our constitutional rights and yeah there's a lot of conversation around it yeah yeah but um anyway yeah congratulations on the book great job on it i appreciate the work that went into it i know what that's like and um so again if you want to give people the title for them to go check it out i'll do the instagram thing yeah uh science of strength training again so science of strength training

uh you can look up on amazon it's the easiest place to find it um it's at barnes and noble target walmart it's basically everywhere books are sold um which is a benefit of the publisher You can look up on Amazon. It's the easiest place to find it. It's at Barnes and Noble, Target, Walmart. It's basically everywhere books are sold, which is a benefit of the publisher, I guess. Not necessarily my doing there, but they got it out there. So I'm very grateful for that. So again, you can find it on Amazon

or really wherever books are sold. And then I do hang out on Instagram. So if you guys want to come have a conversation, ask a question, say hello, you can find me on Instagram. So if you guys want to come have a conversation, ask a question, say hello. You can find me on Instagram. And that's at Austin Current. You can type in A-U-S-T-I-N. You can type in Austin.

It's the guy with the big beard. Actually, just me and Mike are talking here and actually just chopped most of it off yesterday. It used to be like long, long. So I'm going on vacation here uh i wanted to chop it off but um well well it's a little cooler you know i my face lost weight you know it's a little more agile you know i never i can't grow anything worthwhile so i haven't i haven't tried and it comes in kind of there's a point where i'm just like it doesn't work also i tend i have like a fat face uh naturally and i guess maybe if i got enough hair on it it would but but there's a point where i'm just like it doesn't work also i tend i have like a fat face uh naturally and i guess maybe if i got enough hair on it it would but but there's this awkward there's

a threshold yeah where i just my face looks even fatter and i don't really care as soon as it starts going outward it's like no no you gotta go yeah there's something like and then you have to take care of it and i'm not a yeah yeah there's just there's a maintenance to it for sure you're a handsome dude you don't need it um i'm more or less covering mine up, but, um, so yeah, that's, that's me on Instagram at Austin current. Um, and then the book actually has an Instagram. If you guys want to check it out or if you, before you buy the book, you want to what's in the book, you know, what, what's it more about? Um, you can go to at science of strength training on Instagram, um, and basically get a lowdown of

more information on the book. I'm actually teaching on that page. It's more of an educational platform than a, than a sales one. Obviously it's there to drive sales, get people interested in the book, but it's more of an educational thing, a creative project for me. So at science of strength training is, is, are the two places you can, you can find us and our coaching company is physique development, so that's at physique development on Instagram or physique development.com is the coaching company. Awesome, man. Well, thanks again for,

for taking the time. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the opportunity, man. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did subscribe to the show, because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share shoot me an email mike at muscle for life.com muscle for life.com and let me know what i could do better or just uh what your thoughts are about

maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future i I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.