Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Dr. Mike Israetel on Breaking Through Muscle Gain Plateaus

Episode Date: July 10, 2019

Do you ever feel like you’re just spinning your wheels in the gym? Are you having trouble remembering the last time you added any real weight to the bar on any of your key lifts? Has your body weight and body fat percentage been hovering in the same range for what seems like forever? If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, I get it. I’ve been there myself and understand the frustration firsthand. You see, the hard lesson us weightlifters have to learn is once our “honeymoon phase” is over—the first six to eight months in most people—continuing to gain muscle and strength gets harder and harder, until eventually progress becomes so slow you can barely measure it. That’s not even the kicker, either. Not only is muscle and strength gain harder to come by the more you train, the more training you have to do just to continue eking out improvements. In other words, as time goes on, you have to do more and more intense work in the gym for less and less reward. This is one of the key reasons so many people get stuck in a rut, and in this episode, Dr. Mike Israetel explains why this happens, what else contributes to plateaus, and how to overcome these obstacles and keep the needle moving. In case you’re not familiar with Dr. Israetel, he has been one of my most-requested podcast guests and for good reason. Not only does he hold a PhD in Sport Physiology, but he’s the cofounder of Renaissance Periodization, a successful blog, coaching program, and fitness platform, similar in many ways to my own company Legion Athletics. So, in this interview, Mike and I discuss what a real plateau is, strategies for breaking through plateaus, the importance of deloads, exercise order, sleep hygiene, and more. 6:50 - What is a plateau and what are some strategies to break through plateaus? 14:53 - How do you determine if you’ve plateaued? 27:30- What do you do after you hit a plateau? 54:18 - Is intensity important for muscle growth? 58:36 - Where can people find you and your work? Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hello, hello, Mike Matthews here from Legion Athletics and welcome to another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. Do you ever feel like you are just spinning your wheels in the gym? Are you having trouble remembering the last time you added any real weight to the bar on any of your key lifts? Has your body weight or your body fat percentage been hovering in the same range for what seems like forever now? If you answered yes to any of those questions, I understand. I have been there myself and I know what that is like. I know the frustration

firsthand. You see, there is a hard lesson that us weightlifters have to learn. And that is once our honeymoon phase is over, and you know, the first six to eight months in most people, the newbie gains phase, as some people call it. After that point, gaining muscle and strength or continuing to gain muscle and strength gets harder and harder until eventually progress becomes so damn slow that you can barely measure it. And you know, ironically, that's not even the kicker. Not only is muscle and strength gain harder to come by,

the more you train, the more training you got to do just to continue eking out improvements. In other words, as time goes on, you have to do more and more intense work in the gym for less and less reward. And this is one of the key reasons so many people get stuck in a rut. And in this episode, Dr. Mike Isretel explains why this happens, what else contributes to plateaus, and how to overcome these obstacles and keep the needle moving. Now, in case you are not familiar with Dr. Isretel, he has been one of my most requested podcast guests. I've gotten many emails from people asking for me to get him on the show. And for good reason, not only does he hold a PhD in sport physiology, but he is also the co-founder of Renaissance Periodization, which is a successful blog, coaching program,

and fitness platform, similar in many ways to my own company, Legion Athletics. So in this interview, Mike and I discuss what a real plateau is. I guess that's the first question you got to be able to answer accurately and correctly is, am I plateaued? Many people think they're plateaued when they're not. We also discuss strategies for breaking through legitimate plateaus, the importance of deloads, the order in which you do exercises, sleep hygiene, and more. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine,

in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100% natural post-workout supplement Recharge. Recharge helps you gain muscle and strength faster and recover better from your workouts. And it's also naturally sweetened and flavored, and it contains no artificial food dyes, fillers, or other unnecessary junk. All that is why it has over 700 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average and another 200 on my website, also with a four and a half star average. So if you want to be able to push harder in the gym, train more frequently and get more out of your workouts, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of Recharge today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast at checkout and you will save 10% on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee

that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans. So you really can't lose here. Head over to www.lesionathletics.com now, place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they're just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least. Let's get to the show. Mr. Israel, thank you for coming on my podcast. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you've been one of the consistently requested guests. So not only am I excited to talk to you myself

today, because I'm actually curious to hear your thoughts on what we're gonna be talking about. I know a lot of my listeners are going to be excited to hear your voice as well. Oh, thanks so much. Yeah, I'm excited to hopefully say some not stupid things. I'm usually prone to saying plenty of dumb things. So hopefully I reach a minimum there and then get some wisdom going. It's fine. We can fix it in post. We can edit out whatever will make you sound super smart.

Perfect. It's going to be a lot of editing. All right. Perfect. It's going to be a lot of editing. All right. So what I want to talk to you about is breaking through muscle gain hypertrophy plateaus, because as anybody who has a bit of weight lifting and muscle gain slash hypertrophy, obviously those are the same things, but as anybody who has any weight lifting under their belts, any significant amount, at least, at least a year or two, there's no such thing as a plateau in the beginning, right? Like basically whatever you do is going to result in some muscle growth. It's going to result in some hypertrophy. Even

if you're just doing like pushups and pull-ups and air squats every day, you're going to, at least for the first few months, be like, Ooh, look at my biceps. Look at my tricep. Look at my chest. But that honeymoon phase, I'd say on average, it's probably what about six months or so. Some people seems to be a bit less, some people a bit more, but definitely by the end of the first year, all of a sudden it's not so easy anymore. You're not adding weight to the bar every week. You're not noticing such major changes in your progress pictures every month. And it only gets progressively more so as you continue. And I would say then if you are someone like me or like you, I mean, you're far more advanced than

I am, but take me where I've been lifting weights since I was 18. But for the first while, I didn't know what I was doing. I've been lifting weights properly for about six or seven years. There's very little left for me in terms of my genetic potential. And it's very easy just to feel stuck. And so that's what I wanted to talk to you about is hitting plateaus. And I think the place to start there would be, we should probably talk about what actually is a plateau. Cause I often hear from people who think they're plateaued, but they're not, they're actually still progressing. They're just not progressing maybe as quickly as they once were or as quickly as they would like to be progressing. I don't think that's actually a plateau. And then what are some strategies that we can use to break

through legitimate plateaus? Yeah. Great place to start because I had thought that I would start exactly the same place. And you're completely right. A lot of people think they've hit a plateau where they haven't really sort of done the due diligence to come back and define what it is they mean by a plateau. And a plateau does not mean rates of gain you are unsatisfied with. In that case, everyone always should be considering themselves plateauing because unless I'm turning into Thanos, then I'm plateauing because I would love to be growing faster. Let's say you put on 10 pounds of muscle a month. I mean, that sounds absurd, but what if someone was like, Hey, do you want to put on 15? I mean, how many people would really say no, they'd probably say, yeah, sure.

So then sort of reflexively, we have to redefine a plateau as like, well, anything under 10 pounds of muscle a month, but that's completely insane. So the more direct concern here is that individuals will think that they're at a plateau, whereas they're really like you described, just transitioning from very new gains into intermediate gains. New gains happen on a weekly and monthly order as far as rep strength on lifts for the weekly and visual changes that are pretty apparent monthly. And then intermediate gains sort of happen more in the monthly and yearly timescales, right?

So monthly, you notice that you're getting considerably stronger. And then within several months, every year, sort of, you notice that you're looking very different. And that can be a shock. So one of the first things to do is to set realistic expectations and to sort of benchmark your progress and figure out if you really are plateauing. One thing that has to be said before we get into any more advanced critiques is that you've got to be measuring your rates of progress, or at least benchmarks of how you're doing, in order to figure out if you're plateauing.

I've spoken to too many people at gyms, and they say, you know, I think my bench was plateauing. I'm like, okay, how is it plateauing? They're like, well, I think I'm just not getting stronger. I'm like, okay, like, how is it plateauing? They're like, well, I think I'm just not getting stronger. I'm like, okay, what's your best rep effort recently? And they're like, I can't remember. I'm like, well, if you can't remember how strong you are, how the hell do you know if you're plateauing? It's completely insane, right?

It's like asking a battlefield general to give a report of, you know, how was this week in battle? You know, did you guys push the German lines? How do you feel? Right. How do you feel it's going? Exactly. Did you push the German lines back? Are the Allies winning or are the,

are the allies winning or are we losing? We're like, I don't really know. We don't really collect a whole lot of data on, on where things are on the same. If you, I'm feeling pretty optimistic right now though. Exactly.

Yeah. That's kind of how Hitler run world war two. He was like, I'm feeling good about it. And the generals are like, we're losing. He's like, ah,

we're fine. Like, okay. So it's a, it's one of the things you don't want to really. Just move those troops over there. Exactly. My fear, there are no troops there. Yeah, just move them anyway.

Yeah. Just move. We got to make more troops. That's where you get all the Nazi zombie movies that are great, you know, zombie troops. But in any case, so basically you want to make sure you keep a good log book. Keep tabs on your appearance, generally speaking. Taking pictures is good. Sometimes you feel like you don't, you know, pictures and body weight. You look at, you know, you weighed 165 pounds and you looked like something. And then two months

later, you think like you've plateaued, but then you take a picture and you weigh 168 and you look at leave a little sharper. You're like, Oh, well, gee, I don't even know what I was thinking. I'm like, sometimes, you know, you look at enough Instagram pictures of other people and get ahead of yourself. And then as far as rep strength, that's the easiest one. That's the sort of golden ticket to benchmark is, you know, how is your repetition strength? And that comes back to the importance of having good, basically identical or very similar technique from week to week to month to month on basic exercises. So you can keep track of see if your squats are actually getting stronger, your pull-ups, your bench press, so on and so forth.

And if that's the case, you may find that after analysis, you're not really at a plateau. You're actually at a small rate of improvement. Now, the cool thing is, is all of the tips I'm going to share, plateau busting, so to speak, are applicable to just making your gains better. So there's not any different tips of like, well, because somebody could say like, well, okay, you know, Dr. Mike, fine. I'm not technically at a plateau, but I don't want to gain five pounds on my squat every two months. I want to gain 10 or 15. Same tips, so no worries, but at least you can be assured that you're not at a plateau. time scale you want to measure, let's say you're measuring three months behind and to now, three months ago to now, you're looking at your rep maxes on, let's say, whatever, let's say you say your quads are plateaued. You look at your best rep efforts on squats, leg presses, and hack squats three months ago, and you compare them to today, and you see that there is no increase or a

decrease. Any decrease is definitely a plateau or worse, and no increase as well. The no increase or a decrease. Any decrease is definitely a plateau or worse and no increase as well. The no increase is, of course, there's a statistical boundary layer about that. What I would say is if a couple of lifts are up a little, like five to 10 pounds in strength, but some lifts are down and you've been doing all of these lifts the whole time, it's not just a learning thing, I would still call that a plateau. If all lifts are up, even if it's all lifts are up by five pounds. So for example, your squat 10 RM used to be 315. Now it's 320. Leg press 405. Now it's 410. Hack squat 365. Now it's 370. All the lifts are pointed up. That's not technically a plateau, right? Because you're technically still gaining.

It's just really slow gains. Again, it doesn't really matter because all the recommendations for faster gains are still the same. But what you're really looking at a plateau is this. If you had to be a trial lawyer against your own gains and you had to prove to yourself that you definitely weren't gaining and to a judge, could you do it, right? So you just stand in front, you know, you're a Southern lawyer. You've got, it's like 90 in the courtroom. You've got a white suit, you've got glasses, you're patting your face with a handkerchief, right? You say, when I say, and you point to the gains chart and you say, look, you can say to me that you've been

making gains and your squat reps have gone up by one rep and five pounds respectively, but your hack squat and leg press are both down by one to two reps. Are you willing to tell this courtroom that that is your idea of what gains are? And of course, you'd have to come back to yourself and be like, no, right? Because another way to think of it is somebody asks you, somebody you're close with. Then you just pull a Bill Clinton. It depends how you define gains. What do you mean by gains? What do you mean by if? Totally. And the thing is, you could pull a Bill Clinton and say, what do you mean by gains? But look, everyone gains means plus sign, right? It means more. Now, there is a very fruitful,

though pointless debate to be had about it does five pounds on your lifts over a year mean gains. Technically, it does. There are some very advanced arguments for that, you know, stochastic noise tears all that up and you can't actually be sure that you're making gains, right? But at least it's up, right? But the thing is, if multiple exercises are up just a little, but even one exercise is down, you're no longer sure, right? And then if multiple exercises are down, even though some are up, you're definitely going to say, like, I'm not clearly making it. Fundamentally, muscle size expansion is everywhere and always in an equated fatigue state going to mean you get to do more reps or do more weight, right? How do you – if someone came to you and they're like, I think I put on size on my quads, but, like, I can't see it because it's covered by fat, what are you going to tell them?

You're like, let me see your squat, leg press, hack squat, lunge numbers, right? And let's say all of the numbers are up like 20 to 25 pounds for the same reps. What are you going to tell him? You're like, let me see your squat, leg press, hack squat, lunge numbers, right? And let's say all of the numbers are up like 20 to 25 pounds for the same reps. What are you going to do? Say they didn't gain size? You know, yeah, I believe you. Like, it makes sense. Like Ronnie Coleman doesn't squat 225 for 10 reps. You know what I mean? Like he squatted 585 for 10 reps. Like that kind of makes sense. So it's one of those, like if you're getting stronger for reps, you're doing super well. If it's just not clear that all around and all exercises are getting stronger for reps, I don't know about that. Right? So we basically have a definition of a plateau is if you clearly just didn't make gains all around over whatever time course. And if you lost- the duration specifically? Because I would think that matters depending on, so let's say they're in the year two, three, four, something around. I know those aren't all the same, but let's just say they're not a 10 plus year veteran, for example. So for someone who has a few years of

proper lifting behind them, what type of time horizon should they be looking at? Would you recommend looking at their numbers over the course of a month or maybe a quarter or six months in terms of determining? Obviously, if they were to look week to week, they'd be like, oh, I'm stuck. No, no, no, you're not. The weekly gains, that life is behind you now. Yeah. So there's two problems with weekly gains. There's the small problem of the fact that you no longer make weekly gains fast enough in order to be reflected accurately on a bar. For example you if you increase your squat two and a half pounds per week but that's actually unbelievable that's really good but every other week you're going to think you stalled because the plates only add up to five you know what i mean like

so that's a small problem the bigger problem is this within the context of an accumulation phase of a mesocycle, which means weeks one through four, one through six, or one through eight, in which you're increasing the weight on the bar, decreasing the reps in reserve, trying to match the same reps, or going up in reps, adding more sets, right? The accumulation phase means making things harder, right? Just meat and potatoes training during one of those phases before you deload, right, and really drop fatigue and sort of restart the next mesocycle, there is an increase in fitness. So muscle growth is occurring, although I will say that that growth occurs on multiple timescales. There's

parts of muscle or components of muscle that don't grow for weeks until you're done training for a certain phase, but some muscle growth occurs on an hourly basis. So growth is occurring during that time. Your nervous system is expanding its abilities to activate muscles and bring in good technique. So your fitness is going up. Your ability to do more reps and more weight is going up during that time. But here's the real kicker. Concomitantly, fatigue is also going up during that time. And if you're training properly, I would say that fitness and fatigue go up at roughly

the same rate every single week until you deload. Once you deload, fatigue comes down, fitness stays basically the same, and you reveal this new capability that you have. For example, do you get better as an MMA fighter training for two hours? Of course, yeah. That's how you get better. The thing is, if you had to fight Jon Jones, I know, scary, would you choose to fight him fresh or after a two-hour session? Well, of course, after a two-hour session? Well, of course, after a two-hour session, let somebody beat up on him for a while. Maybe he won't kill you. He'll

just maim you, you know, something like that. He'll be tired. But could you really say, well, now he's worse after his aliens come down. They have someone fight John Jones before he trains. They have him fight after he trains for two hours. The person who fights him before gets maimed worse, and aliens conclude, oh, interesting. It seems that this training process makes him worse. We will do less training process and he will become the best. Like, no, that doesn't work like that. He's actually getting better during training, but he gets tired too. So week to week measurements of am I getting better are what my colleague, Dr. James Hoffman and I and RP Plus, we have a service. It's like 10 bucks a month or something, where you log in and ask us all the questions you want. We answer them on video webinar every week. What we like to say is weekly sort of performance analyses, week to week to week are almost completely pointless and sometimes worse because they just confuse the shit out of you. Yep. You can liken it to, I mean, I run into more women than men who make this mistake because women are so indoctrinated to live and die by the scale. But you have women out there who are just starting in their fitness

journeys and they weigh themselves every day. And they freak out when they wake up one pound heavier and then they're super happy if they wake up one pound lighter. And it can just be very confusing if they don't understand the bigger picture. Super confusing. So I would say that when to benchmark your plateaus, when to conclude that you're, when to do the analysis comparatively to see your plateaus at the earliest mesocycle to mesocycle. That makes sense. Yeah. So basically after you've done a deal at week and you're nice and fatigue reduced, you look, you know, and you do another month of training, right? Then you compare two months, right? Or two mesocycles. So let's say each mesocycle is five weeks of increasing accumulation, one week of deload, six weeks total. Then you compare a six-week period you had 12 weeks ago to the one you just had.

You look at the numbers. Hopefully it's the same exercises. Comparing different exercises is wholly pointless, by the way, because people will be like, well, I squatted this and this mesocycle, but I leg pressed this and that one. Am I making gains? I have no idea how the hell you're supposed to, you know, like what are the, what's the ratio there? So same exercise, two different mesos, fatigue reduced, or the same average fatigue. And basically if you want to do a real advanced analysis, or you really wanted to be chromogeny,

you could do the average weight and reps for every single session you did of that exercise in the first mesocycle, add all that up, divide by the number of reps, and then do the same thing for the second to see, okay, like what's the average performance, right? And you don't have to do that. You can just go on the end of week PRs. Like what PR did you hit that last mesocycle versus the one you just finished, right? Like if you squatted 315 for eight in the one, one mesocycle ago, but you hit 320 for 12 in the last one. I mean, clearly you're not like stalling, right? Now, could you have had a slightly better performance just by chance, or you just got a little bit more sleep, or the first mesocycle you were breaking up with your

girlfriends, it was on your mind? Yeah, totally. That's why the average system works better. But the average system is a huge pain in the ass to do. You could just work on PRs and it works totally fine. And this brings me to my next point. Because there's a little bit of a chance element, even in comparing PRs, even comparing averages meso to meso, what you really want to do is compare probably what we call block to block, two to four sequential mesocycles in a row compared to one another to the next two to four mesocycles in a row. That's probably a good basis for comparison. Yeah, that makes sense. An even better basis of comparison, unless this gets more into the advanced lifting,

is macro cycle to macro cycle. So for example, you can have a fat loss block and you can have a muscle gain block, each one three mesocycles long, one where you lose fat, one where you gain muscle. You can compare your rep PRs from fat loss to muscle gain and say, oh man, like I've hit a plateau. First of all, of course you're going to perform worse in the fat loss one because you're at

a hypocaloric condition. Did you actually lose muscle? Oh, that's not really that clear. So what you want to do is compare macro to macro, which means this past fat loss block three mesocycles of fat loss and hypertrophy training. How does it compare to the last time you did a fat loss block? If the comparison is like, gee, you're just about the same strength, you've hit a plateau. If the comparison is like, oh, you're up 20 pounds on every lift for the same reps,

you did not hit a plateau and no harm, no foul. Yep. Yep. That makes sense. Something else that just pops into my mind because it's a mistake that I've seen people make is comparing, let's say you're comparing their squat, right? And they're looking at a squat in one mesocycle versus another. But what they didn't factor in is that in the first mesocycle, they were squatting in the, that was the first exercise, let's say,

of that workout that they did. And then in the next mesocycle, they moved it to their third exercise and they're looking and they don't, they don't think with that. They just see the number went down and think like, oh, I'm stuck. Yep. That's a great point. I mean, it's just a very great point. And I'd love to segue off of that point of use your brain to make sure you're comparing like versus like to the next point I have about what to consider and all these factors and sort of solving your problem of plateauing. So let's say you are plateaued, right? The next point, very similar to the one you just made as far as like, come on, like at least compare the same exercise order. You should know that you get tired through the

exercises. The next come on, you could do better kind of point, sorry to get pedantic, is do you deload? Because it's funny because like I've literally, how many times have you spoken to guys at the gym and they're like, I think I hit a plateau. You'd be like, you mean like even after your deload? They're like, what's a deload? And you're like, oh, boy, let me tell you that you're on to some really good shit. It's, you know, fundamentally, a deload is a phase of fatigue reduction that lasts roughly a week and you get to maintain all of your muscle gains and your strength. But your fatigue goes down because as you train, like we mentioned earlier, through an accumulation phase, your fatigue goes up and up and up and it masks your ability to have your best performances. Literally, it's like saying during the construction of a house, how much better is the interior looking? Well, while the

house is being constructed, there's like more and more sawdust and wood chips everywhere. So it actually looks more and more like shit the entire time. Or yeah, well, as you're building the TV stand and the area where the couch should be and the cool roof, it sort of looks cooler because of that, but that's more and more garbage that the builders are leaving there every day, like, and stuff's all hanging around. So it's kind of like, on average, if you asked an interior designer to look at the house in month one and month eight of its construction, they'd be like, yeah, it's got more cool stuff, but it also has way more crap in it. So it's just, the comparison is completely masked. So I will I will make a claim here is I think the majority I don't know what percent it is, but the majority,

probably the vast majority of individuals in the early intermediate stage of lifting who are let's say not super duper well read on online fitness expert kind of stuff, probably, you know, maybe early listeners of your podcast and folks whom those listeners are going to send your podcast to, there's going to be like, you better listen to this. I think the vast majority of those people, anytime they say they have a plateau, it's really just that they don't deload and they don't know how. They just don't even know it's a concept. It's not a knock on those people. Good God, I must have lived for five or six years before I knew what a deload was, but that's how people get into that situation. Maybe, maybe even nine

times out of 10. Or how many times have we just stubbornly, I know I have stubbornly not wanted to deload. Cause like things, things are going well, things are going well, just keep going. And then, and then things just don't go so well. Things are not. And then you're plateaued and then you deload. And then the next week you're like, Oh my God, I'm a living God. I'm 50 times stronger than I thought I was like, ta-da. right? So my first recommendation is deload. If you don't know what that means, look it up, right? There's tons of ways. Just type in deload definition on Google, and then you're going to get hit with a ton

of stuff. You might even find an article I wrote on it over at Muscle for Life, if anyone listens, if you search for deload. Exactly. Yep. You'll find articles by you, by me. There's one on Juggernaut that my colleague and I wrote a long time ago, like fatigue and its causes or what is fatigue. And there's just tons of stuff about how to deload, just the real simple basics that a lot of people just don't do because you walk into a gym, 95% of the people won't be able to tell you what a deload is. say, man, you know, like I'm kind of, kind of hitting a plateau automatically light bulb as a trainer or a coach or someone who knows stuff should come up in your head and be like, Hmm,

this is probably just an accumulated fatigue issue. You know, as soon as you remove accumulated fatigue, it turns out they were making gains the entire time. So I think that that has to be the first thing that's said. Yep. Yep. I totally agree. Hey, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored to check everything out. Just head over to legionathletics.com. And just to show how much

I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout, and you will save 20% on your entire order. If it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That's essentially 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, the URL is legionathletics.com. And if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. Okay. So let's say that we have somebody, again, they have a few years of weightlifting behind them and they have good form and they're good at the exercises now. They've made all the easy, they've grabbed all the low hanging fruit. Now they're going to have to work a lot harder for a lot less. They're in the beginning of that, really, the rest of their life journey.

That's the way it is, right? You got to work harder and harder and harder for less and less. And so they've hit a plateau, and it's a legitimate plateau. They are deloading. What next? How does the flowchart play out? Yep. I got a whole list.

No worries. So the next is still kind of a backdrop kind of thing, but it's so important. It has to be said, and we don't have to spend much time on it because this podcast today is probably about training, right? But it's one of these things that kind of has to be said, but that has to be said as innuendo for it's really, really important. Is your nutrition fundamentally sound? Is your sleep fundamentally enough? Are you gaining weight at a rate high enough for it to reflect itself on the scale so that you're actually fueling and providing substrates for the muscle growth process? And lastly, possibly not

least, are you managing stress and various stressors effectively, which can include other physical activity forms. So someone could say, you know, man, I'm like really struggling to bring up my arms. Like, okay, tell me about your life. And I go, blah, blah. I eat, I sleep well, blah, blah. What else do you do? Like, well, I'm a division one wrestler and I practice six hours a day. Jesus Christ. I'm surprised you can do any weight training at all on top of that. Right. So that's one of those stress management things. And that's not the only kind of their psychological stress. Like people like I've literally had these conversations and people often ask me how I come up with these like

examples on a spot. This is literally stories from my life. Right. I've literally had conversations with people at the gym. Like, yeah, I think I'm hitting a plateau. And I, I used to piss away like minutes and minutes and minutes talking to them about nutrition and stuff. I'll get into it a little bit volume landmarks and all this crap. And they're like, yeah, I'm going through a really rough divorce right now. And I'm like, why the hell are we talking about anything else? Like, of course, your divorce is going to make you super stressed, which increases all kinds of stress hormones, which literally at the molecular level interfere with muscle growth. In addition to that, you say someone's like, oh, you know, I've, we're just moving down the list

here for weight gain. Someone said, you know, I'm really having trouble bringing up my quads. It's one of the first questions I'll ask. I'll be like, how much do you weigh? Like 165. How much weight have you gained in the last year? They're like, I haven't. Like, okay. Where do you think bigger quads come from?

Like, is there a 165 pounder that has the quads of a 240 pound bodybuilder? No, because they physically weigh more than that. You know what I mean? Like some people will say like, oh, I'm not growing muscle. I'll be like, are you gaining weight? Like, no, where the hell is the muscle supposed to come from? So that's one of the main things is make sure to slowly gain weight, you know, like- Got to make those lean gains, bro. Exactly. Yeah. Cause all those huge guys making lean gains everywhere, right? So that's a thing.

The other one is sleep, super important. There's multiple studies now showing that if you don't sleep enough, you literally, when you lose weight, you lose mostly muscle and barely any fat. And if you gain weight, you gain mostly fat and barely any muscle. It's really, really rough. So sleep is critical. And here's the thing about sleep that I've been noticing more and more, even relatively good athletes under sleep. And there's an ethos to athletics and to trying and to life and to the kind of people that are interested in being the best there's an ethos there that sleep is sort of for the weak you know and that it's kind of optional and there's kind of this um almost pride of like people will tell you like oh you know i don't get no like i i do brazilian jiu-jitsu right and people find out that i like know some shit so

they ask me questions and i automatically zoom in on sleep at least at some point in the conversation they're like yeah i definitely don't get enough of that. But you know, that's life. And I'm like, yeah, it doesn't have to be life. You know, I see you, your bitch ass posting them Game of Thrones updates. I know you do some other shit. You know, you have free time. You know, that dragon fire fucking analysis you wrote on Facebook. I see it.

So yeah, that took seven hours. Exactly. Like, I see you debating people on Instagram about Game of Thrones directorial debuts and stuff. So it's one of those things where it's like, I'm not going to be pedantic and tell someone what they need to do with their life, but there's no honor in missing sleep. If you want gains, sleep is where to get them combined with good nutrition. So it's one of those things where I think a lot of people assume, oh, of course this person I'm speaking to that's talking to me about plateaus gets enough sleep. It's just by no means clear if that's the case it often isn't it's funny enough there's this

bodybuilder that i follow on instagram and he's a very very good bodybuilder he's you know pro and he like made a post he's like just trained a bunch of clients you know and did a bunch of work and eat meals and i'm going straight to the gym no sleep for me tonight like he literally missed a night of sleep he's like i gotta grind i make these gains. I just wanted to like find him in real life and shake the living shit out of him. What the hell are you doing? Right. It's just the worst idea anyone's ever had. But again, there's an ethos there, right? Like how does Elon Musk make all his money? Like he doesn't sleep or whatever, even though I'm sure he does. You know what I mean? Like, does that, does that resonate at all where people think it's always just part of life yeah absolutely i mean speaking of elon musk i saw

an article maybe it was a month or two ago where um he he was saying how the past year it was pretty rough on him and was going into why and um how he wasn't able to sleep without without drugs i mean it got that bad where if he if he wasn't taking i don't know if it was prescription or over the counter i don't remember but if he wasn't taking a sleep drug he probably wasn't taking, I don't know if it was prescription or over the counter, I don't remember, but if he wasn't taking a sleep drug, he probably wasn't going to sleep. So yeah, like you don't, I understand. I read, I read the Elon Musk biography and I'm sure the stories of him, you know, sleeping three hours a day on his beanbag are true. And he probably had to do it because he had to do it. He's not jacked. He's not jacked and has taken a toll on his health.

I mean, he talked about it. He talked about the toll that undersleeping has taken on him both mentally and physically, as well as working 100 plus hours a week for months on end. And so, yes, it's admirable to be able to that somebody has the willpower to do that. And I guess you could say in his case, there's a big payoff, not, not just the money, but he probably is honestly driven by this mission to like get to Mars. And so for him, he's like, fuck my health. I don't care. I want to go to Mars. And that's admirable.

I think it's admirable, but let's not, let's not pretend it makes you jacked. You know, not only that, but it's like, especially if we're sack he's sacrificing he is making sacrifices uh he could he could feel a lot better mentally physically psychologically emotionally if he weren't pushing himself so hard and for him it's worth it but is it worth it if we're talking about arguing with randoms on twitter about about game of thrones like exactly it's not the same. Right. Building a technological empire is not what's keeping you awake. Exactly. Exactly. And I can speak to this personally. I know we're a little bit tight on time, so I don't want to eat up too much of it. I want you to be able to keep going. But over the last couple of years, so over the last two to three years, my sleep has progressively

gotten worse and stabilized at kind of like a generally bad level. And I don't know if it's a consequence of having another baby and having, it's probably a number of things, having another baby who doesn't sleep well, more stress from just as the businesses, as things get bigger, yeah, it's cooler, bigger numbers, but the bigger problems, bigger headaches, the stakes are higher, more pressure and in other issues that have added that have made my life more, I guess you could say just more stressful. Fortunately, it hasn't exhibited in the way of like anxiety or anything, but I feel a bit less relaxed as a person than I did maybe five years ago. And I was sleeping great five years ago. And I was one of those people, it was odd because I would naturally sleep about six and a half hours or so

and wake up. And I went for years like that, having no, I was training hard. I was making progress. I was working hard. Like I literally had no symptoms of undersleeping. I may have been, I probably was, but for some reason- Almost certainly you weren't. Because if you don't have symptoms, you're probably not undersleeping. So whatever it was, I was like, I would fall asleep in five minutes and I would have blackout unconscious sleep. And I would wake up about six and a half hours later and that was it. And I'd rarely wake up at night. I even like, you know, wanted to see my deep sleep. So I got one of those rings or, or something. And, um, I was averaging around four hours of three to four hours of deep sleep. So anyways, things seem to be okay. And then things

are not okay. So I can have personal appreciation for the difference. Like if I'm not sleeping well, I'll still go to the gym and I'll still do my workouts. I don't want to just drop exercise altogether, but I can appreciate now the difference that it makes. Like the RPE of workouts goes way up when you're not sleeping well. So that alone can be the factor. And in the case of my training, I have been a bit plateaued for some time now. I've made slow progress, but the number one reason is sleep. And number two is the weight gain like you brought up where, and at least I'm cognizant of these things. So it doesn't stress me out. I'm not like, why am I stuck? It's that maybe I'm on, I've been unwilling to like, you know, lose my abs. And so that

doesn't mean that I'm like underfeeding myself, but it means that I'm not doing what it takes to make sure that I can progress. Exactly. Absolutely. And you cover that last one. They're fundamentally, you know, waking. Yeah. And then also just fundamental nutrition. Cause sometimes people are like, yeah, I'm gaining weight, but I eat like a pizza a day and a protein shake in the morning and that's it. Okay. So if you go with someone, you're good. Do you deload? Yes. Okay, great. If not, then you help them learn how to do it. Is your nutrition fundamentally good? Are you sleeping? Are you gaining weight? Are you managing stress? If you X out all of those, most people, again, 97% are no longer plateauing. It's true.

You fix the plateau. Assuming they have any sort of halfway intelligent workout programming. 100%. Yep, totally. So, and now that brings us to a workout program. So, the critical component of almost everyone who's concerned about plateauing is training hard enough in the sense that they bring their sets relatively close to failure and they're trying to lift relatively happy. I have very few people.

It is the kind of people that don't train hard enough. They're usually just not concerned about plateaus, right? They're just kind of, I mean, just read the newspaper in between sets, that sort of thing. So big factor in determining rates of gain is your volume, your training volume. And that basically is on a spectrum from what we'd call a minimum effective volume all the way to maximum recoverable volume. So here's our trap people get caught in. They do their workout where they train their biceps every week, several sessions, total number of sets per week that they do for biceps is, say, 10. When they were a beginner, their minimum effective volume was one set per week. You can get beginners to grow from one set of biceps per week, like literal first timers. And after a couple of months, that might go to like six to eight sets a week where you can make really good gains on just training your arms maybe twice a week for three or four sets at a time.

After one, two, three years, your minimum effective volume, the minimum amount of physical number of sets that it takes, hard sets, to grow your biceps might actually exceed eight or ten, right? And for many people, your minimum effective volume slowly trends up through your entire lifting career. So what you might be doing is running an amount of volume that is no longer sufficient to make gains for you, and you're sort of baffled and puzzled at the sort of details. It's kind of like gaining weight from 100 pounds to 200 pounds to 300 pounds and wondering why an apple no longer fills you up. Well, you're a different size now. It's going to take two, three, four apples, right? Same idea. So you got to try to figure out what your minimum effective volume is and if you're training above that. Second thing is you got to try to figure out what your maximum recoverable volume is and make sure you're not training over that. The human body

and every individual muscle can only recover from a certain amount of volume at a time, period. recover from a certain amount of volume at a time, period. And if you exceed that amount of volume per week, especially, then your body spends all of its resources healing you from the muscle damage and has no resources left over to actually make you better. Recovery precedes adaptation, right? So like your body's going to try to fix you first, and then it's going to work on whatever it's got left to make you better. If you train so much that your body can only barely fix you first, and then it's going to work on whatever it's got left to make you better. If you train so much that your body can only barely fix you or not even, you're not recovering, then you essentially are in a position where you've mathematically ruled out muscle growth altogether. Now, that's pretty hard to do though, right? I mean, I don't know what your thought, I'm very curious as to your thoughts. Something that I'll often say is for most people out there

who want to be fit, like take the average guy to look the way he wants to look. He needs to gain probably around 40 pounds of muscle in the right places on his body for the average woman. At least these are the people in my orbit. The average woman, maybe 15 pounds, maybe a little bit more in the right places on her body. And she's been pretty happy. Of course, these people may at that point go, hey, I want more. I want this. I want that. But at that point, they're probably at least 80% there of like, I look great. And I'll keep my body fat percentage around if the guys are somewhere around 10, 12% and the women 20-ish and they're like, cool, I look awesome. 10 to 20 hard sets per major muscle group per week is like 10 would be closer to that minimal effective if you are not brand new and 20 would be closer to that maximum for recovery what are your thoughts on that yeah i think that's a very good place to start but we just got to make sure

that individuals are not left behind with that so one of the newest pieces of research which seems to be pretty solid is that what previously people who are called hard gainers or non-responders in training studies, they're actually ones with really high minimum effective volumes. And it turns out training them more is actually more of the solution than training them less. As you think like, oh, it's a recovery problem. Well, it's probably not. They're probably slower twitch individuals that just can handle a ton of volume and their hypertrophy signaling is just pretty robust in the sense that they're not robust. It's in the sense that they just need a really big signal to grow. So what I will say is, yeah, you could be one of those people for whom roughly 10 is your minimum effective volume, but I'll put it to you this way. If you're training, let's say 12 or 14

sets per week for your whatever body part, and you notice that you don't really ever get super big pumps, you're not ever really remotely sore, And it just perceptively seems like just not a lot of effort. You're like, oh, I'm breezing through it. Man, there's a good chance you're under your minimum effective volume or just really close to it so that you're getting minimum effect. I would say that's exactly me in that range. Yeah, there you go. About 12, give or take, a few hard sets. It's a good workout, but it's not right at home about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Where I, I didn't feel like I had to work that hard to get through. For sure. And then on the other side of the spectrum, there's individuals that are basically, you know, people say like, Oh yeah, your MRV of 20, you should go up to 20 sets every now and again, you'll be fine. You know, some individuals at 16 sets per week, and it depends on the body part too. They could be like, you just chron chronically sore, what we call overlapping DOMS, where you never actually heal. You just get sore and then get sore again and then get sore again on top of soreness, which people do and they expect results. Like, oh, I watched a Kai Green workout where he does 100 sets. I'm going to do that.

And crushing blade onset soreness, an inability to – so basically they get weaker and weaker from session to session or week to week. And they feel just completely overwhelmed. The amount of volume psychologically seems insane. Another one is they get a pump midway through the workout and their workouts are so voluminous that they lose their pump. Like the pump goes away or it gets worse. That's interesting. I've never had that happen. Like, Oh yeah, that's what you have. When's the last time you've done 30 sets for chest in one workout, right? Like people do that kind of stuff. So that's the thing. So it's probably best to think of minimum effective volume and maximum recoverable on a per session basis, actually than per week, although per week works just fine.

So I would say anywhere between roughly three sets per for an intermediate three sets per session to about 10 sets per session per muscle group is where most of the best gains are going to be. But again, those modifiers has, has to be based on personal feedback. Like if I'm saying three, you don't feel a fucking thing at three, do four, do five, do six. If I'm saying you should be able to survive 10 productively, but at eight, you're basically like a broken doll. Like it was, you know, like Mr. Potato head was arm out. Yeah. It's probably too much for you. Right? So it's about finding your own volume landmarks and its and moving from your minimum effective volume to your maximum recoverable slowly over a mesocycle, deloading, and repeating that movement with heavier weights. That is a huge thing because

a lot of times when people have their ducks in a row for nutrition, sleep, weight gain, stress management, what they end up doing is they're just training below their MEV or above their MRV or trying to train above their MRV. I've actually had multiple people. I'm sure you've had this experience where they're like, I'm trying this XYZ program on musclebody.com again, and I only made it through two weeks last time. Do you have any tips on how I can make it more? Like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Just cut the volume by half and try to go.

They're like, yeah, but then it doesn't work. Like, work for who? Individuals vary in their recovery and adaptation proclivities, but they just do. So you have to tailor the program to yourself. So you have to make sure you're between MDT and MRV. And it's not rocket science either. You know, like at the same time though, there aren't that many people out there who are talking about it and who are explaining it in a way that anybody can understand it and actually do something with it and have a practical takeaway where they're not just confused because of all the jargon. And you know what I mean? So I think you're doing a great job explaining it, which I'm enjoying

listening myself. It's great. Thank you so much. At the end of the day, it's like, you know, are you getting pumps? Are you getting a little bit sore? Are you getting fatigued? If no, do more. Are you getting violently sore? Is your performance going down session to session? And do you feel completely crushed and overwhelmed by the amount of volume you do either per session or per week? If yes, do less, right? There's not like a way in which you're going to be getting crushed and super sore, just unbelievably messed up. And someone's like, oh, if you just alternate the way you move your thumbs on this exercise, you'll get big. Like, what the hell are you talking about? There's just no recovering from what you're doing to yourself. There's something we mentioned in our recovery

book. There's a, if you train in excess of your maximum recovery volume, there's nothing that's going to save you. No amount of drugs, no amount of sleep, no amount of anything is going to save you. You've got to train less. And on the other hand, if you're not training enough, and by God, right. And it brings me to another quick point is a cool modification you can make to your program is to use frequency to modulate your volume landmarks. So basically someone could say, okay, here's the deal. I'm trying to make my side delts bigger. I get those shoulder caps. I can do 15 sets of side delts and I get a bit of a pump. I get a tiny bit sore, but the soreness heals like a day later. I train shoulders twice a week and I can

do 15 sets each time. But I legitimately can tell you right now, it's not at my MRV. Like I could do more per session. I just get too tired to do more. And then I'm just using like the 10 pounds for laterals, which I think is stupid. I was trying to think of like 15, yeah, 15 sets per session. What are you even doing? Right. Exactly. So then the response is, well, you do shoulders twice a week, but they heal so fast that they are ready more than twice a week. They're like, well, then just do them three times a week.

They're like, oh, okay. So then you end up starting with 10 sets per session, three times a week. And then because you're, you know, baller enough to be able to do 15 sets per session, now you're up to 45 sets per week. And look, if you don't grow from 45 sets, this shit is just not in the cards for you, right? And or your nutrition is wrong, sleep is wrong, so on and so forth. So it's one of those things like,

if you discover that your minimum effective volumes per week are pretty high and or your maximum recovery volumes are so high that you're never, it's hard for you to get into that range of main effect between MEV and MRV, then add sessions, okay? There'sV and MRV, then add sessions. There's nothing you can't do with added sessions. You can do six workouts per week of shoulders with 10 sets

each time and 10 sets for delts. You do five sets of laterals, a minute rest between each one, and you do five sets of cable upright rows, a minute rest between each one. That takes like 20 minutes or something. It's not the end of the world. That's 60 working sets per week. Okay. And if you take those to relatively close to failure, gee, you know, that's enough stimulus to grow for anybody. So I think I'll sort of the more salient point here is that people say to my legs aren't big enough. I need more legs. I'm already training super hard. How many times do you train legs per week? Why train once leg day? It's a really bad idea. It's been shown in the literature that one time per week training, unless you're really, really big and really, really strong, is just going to, you're going to heal soon enough that you can capitalize on training again.

And if you train so hard that you don't heal soon enough, you're training too hard in that session and you overwhelm your recovery and adaptation abilities and just you're barely surviving at that point, right? Can you imagine someone asking you like, hey, I need bigger legs. And you're like, okay, what are you doing for legs? And they list this workout of like 40 working sets, so on and so forth. And you're like, Oh my God, like you're clearly training it off. Like, yeah, I do that once every four weeks though. And you're like, what? You train your legs once every four weeks. And you're like, well, yeah. I mean like, otherwise I can't recover. Like, why don't you train them easier and train them twice a week? Like, Oh, I never

thought about it like that. Cause you know, there's again, this eth this ethos of like you gotta pour it out under your muscle groups right you gotta suffer you gotta milk it out people are obsessed with finishers you ever hear that term finisher like this is a good finisher for pecs like finisher and my idea is just something people do in porn but you know lo and behold apparently it's a thing in training as well like oh i really finished hard in my workout like what are we talking about the same thing here? Right. So yeah, me too, but it wasn't really a workout, you know, I was by myself, but in any case, it's one of those things where it's almost this, this catharsis, this religious drive to just milk everything out and just destroy the muscle. And the thing is, somebody sat back in the day, yeah, crush it, kill your workout, bro. I'm like, what do you mean?

Like, is it like a 500 meter out, like downwind sniper shot kill? Are we talking about carpet bombing kill? Like what kind of kill are we talking about? It's kind of, you know, what is it? Stimulate, don't annihilate. There's a lot of truth to that. And stimulate means it's fucking hard. We're not saying do sissy workouts. It's hard, but it's not the end of the world. And as soon as you start training hard, three to 10 sets per session, you know, close to failure, then all of a sudden you can recover from more sessions per week and you get better growth. So when people are saying, well, I'm already training hard, a lot of times you can zoom in on their frequency and be like, okay, are you sure

you're training often enough and not too hard per session? Are you spreading out your volume? Let me give you almost the perfect analogy for this. In another realm that's very related to nutrition, have you ever had people tell you that they're already eating a ton and they can't eat anymore because they can't gain weight? And you're like, all right, what are you eating? And they describe this monstrous meal and you're like, holy shit, this guy, maybe he is a hard gainer. And then you've been around long enough to be like, how many of those do you eat a day? And they're like, well, one really, because I get so full after I can't eat anymore. Like, well, here's your problem, idiot. So maybe you could cut that meal by half and have four of those per day. It's that consistent eating. How many times when Brian Shaw or Hafthor Bjornsson,

when they're gaining weight, how many times are they vomit full? Almost never. How many times are they very full? All the time, right? You don't want to get vomit full when you're gaining weight because it's going to burn you out for your next meal, right? You get heartburn psychologically, like you're like, I'm not going to be vomiting every meal. Fuck that. I quit. Right. So you're just not going to eat enough meals. So how big should your meals be for you to gain weight consistently? Big enough to really be tough to eat, but for like three, four or five hours later for you to be like, all right, let's do this again. Same thing for workouts. Yep. Yep. And that often comes down to appetite. I find that a lot of guys who think that they're hard gainers, they actually just have small appetites, like 2,500 calories a day to them. It's like, Oh,

I'm so full. Dude. It's so funny. People ask me, um, they're like, what are your macros? Like, I just finished a fat loss phase. Like, what are your macros? I'm like, Oh, you have roughly 2,700 calories per day or something like that. And they're like, Oh my God, that's so much. I'm like, I'm starving to death. Are you out of your mind? That's it. You know, they forget like I weigh like 230 pounds. It's not a lot when you weigh 230. And so it's a scaling factor. But in any case, it's one of those situations where going back to the workout stuff, it's not how hard you train every session so much as it is, are you doing enough work over the week? And if you are training so hard that you can't recover to do enough work over the week, then you should probably think about expanding your frequency. So although it's really, really actual down to earth kind of advice,

if you're training a muscle group only once a week, don't come and talk to anyone about plateaus because you have nothing to say about them because you're not training often enough. If you're training a muscle two times per week, consider three times. If you're training a muscle three times per week, and it's one of those situations where every single workout, you're like, man, either I would get really sore if I did more, or I feel like I can really do more and be just fine. You know, maybe experiment with four times a week, especially if it's a smaller muscle that heals really quickly, like side belts, rear belts, biceps, calves, forearms, traps. A lot of times, like you can train those every other day, sometimes even every day and be

just fine. If someone training their legs hard, three to 10 sets per session, three times a week, like quads, I'm not inclined to be like, add a fourth session. Like, yeah, you're probably at the very end of what you could do. But it's one of the situations where if you're training once a week, stop, start training twice. If you're training twice, experiment with three, you might be pleasantly surprised. If you're training every muscle at least three times a week, adding a fourth session might work for the smaller muscles, et cetera, probably won't work for the bigger ones. And then you can look at other factors. Makes sense. And I would just add that for people who don't have the time, they'll say that they have maybe three to five hours a week that they can be in the gym training. You're not

going to be able to train everything multiple times a week in that time, or at least not with much volume. So you're going to have to think with, you could say specializing, or you have to think with each mesocycle going, all right, I'm going to do extra pulling for the next, you know, that that's going to be my three times a week, or I'm going to do extra, you know, my pecs are behind. So I'm going to do, I'm going to do a bit more chest. Obviously, if you have endless time, then, because I just, I'm saying that because I hear from people who hear advice like that. And they're like, yeah, that makes sense. But I actually don't have the time to train everything that I want to train three times a week. Yeah. You and I are like a

seamless connection here. I was literally going to be my next point is you have to consider your limitations and try to work within them to allocate volume where you want to grow. So there's a couple of limitations. One of them is scheduling. Like you just don't have enough time. Another one is you're reaching what's called your, so in the MEV to MRV discussion, you could reach your local maximum recoverable volume where you're just training too much for your muscle to recover and training less is the answer. But there's another kind of maximum recoverable volume called a systemic MRV, which is if you train like chest and shoulders and back and quads, and you train them a lot, your

total body system recovery starts to get really, really impinged. And it becomes difficult for you to survive any more hard training. Once you hit your systemic MRV or you're close to it, you can't just add more volume for body parts because your whole body starts to rebel against you, and it's just too much of a fight or flight state. You can't recover from that much training. So a lot of times the answer there is the same answer if your schedule is keeping you from doing more or if you're schedule free but you're hitting your systemic mrv because you're trying to grow everything all at the same time it's a matter of backing up to maintenance volume which is actually quite low it's sometimes

a third of what your mev to mrv volume is maintenance volume on stuff you don't super care about expanding right now and then go mev to mrv normal training volume progression on the stuff you care about so like you said if you want to really improve, you know, your chest might have to be on the back burner, which means just a couple of sets of chest every other session is going to be like fine. And then people say, well, but then it doesn't grow my chest. Well, there's no way around this. Like just as a public service announcement, because I'm feeling like an asshole today, it's one of the most baffling things I ever hear is people are like, I can't train any more than three times a week. And I want to bring up everything, but I'm at a plateau. What do I do? I got nothing for you. It's like, I want to go 200

miles an hour in a Ford Focus, but I don't want to soup it up or get a new car. Well, it's just not going to happen. There's no trick. There's no quirk. There's no hack. I'm sorry. You just have to do more work and or reallocate your efforts. The one question that's still front of brain for me is intensity. Anything on rep ranges? It's not super important, but I think a spectrum of repetition ranges is a good idea. So there's generally three spectra of rep ranges. There's the five to 10 rep range, the 10 to 20 rep range, and the 20 to 30 rep range. Anything heavier than that is a waste of your time. Anything lighter than that's a waste of your time for muscle growth. So I think that

if you're exclusively training in one of those ranges for a muscle group and you haven't experimented the other ranges, try the other range, right? And so on, basically your average muscle cycle should have like probably 50% of your volume in the 10 to 20 range, 25% of your volume in the five to 10 range and 25% of your volume in the 20 to 30 range. And here's where this actually threads into another thing I was going to bring up. You should be watching your body to see where you get your best pumps, your best soreness, your best mind muscle connection, which rep range, and maybe do a bit more in that rep range and less

in the others. You know what I mean? So some guys will squat for sets of six and their sets of six squats will just hurt their knees and nothing else. But when they squat for sets of 15, it blows up their quads like crazy and their knees are fine. You should probably just be doing more sets of 15 and less sets of six, not exclusively, but a little bit of a bias factor there. And on that note, there is something this is a very minor note, right? Is maybe you don't have a sufficiently strong mind muscle connection, or the exercises you're using are really poor for my muscle connection. This usually occurs with body parts like the back parts you can can't see. I mean, there could be a technical issue.

So for example, as people say, you know, my hamstrings are doing so well. Well, do you know how to do a proper stiff leg and deadlift?

Technique sort of looks okay, but if you guide them through feeling their hamstrings on it, they're like, oh my God, my hamstrings are sore for the first time ever.

Like, yeah, you were hinging at the hip and the knee too much. You should be isolating the knee a bit more. I run into that with bench press with guys sometimes too. All the time. Exactly. Exactly. Bench press doesn't feel like anything.

First of all, we improve your technique. We teach you how to arch and retract all of a sudden, boom, your pecs are getting hit and, or maybe you're more of an incline dumbbell press kind of guy. So it's searching for techniques that allow a better mind muscle connection and sometimes for exercises. And lastly, every now and again, and for beginners, this is not a thing, but for intermediates, every three to five mesocycles, your body just gets tired of training with high volumes and gets tired of growing. And this happens in a muscle-specific and probably a central level as well or systemic level. So every man, every half a year to year, you should probably take a month of really low volume training, like literally maintenance volume, kind of like a power lifter would

train a month of no pumps, no soreness, just lifting relatively heavy and just leave in the gym twice a week for each body part, two to four sets per session. That's it. And what that can do is it can resensitize you to muscle growth because your body's just tired of doing it. It's kind of the same. My work performance is really slumped. I feel burnt out. Go on vacation. You come back and everything's bright as ever and super new. So I think those low volume phases, we call them resensitization phases in the literature, maintenance phases, they're really quite effective. They're research supported in a

variety of contexts. So it's actually been shown that if you take everything, four weeks, if you take two weeks off of training completely at the end of that entire block, you grow as much as someone who never took any time off, which is kind of interesting, right? So you're not going to lose a crap load of muscle doing it, you're going to lose zero muscle, and it's going to revitalize and resensitize you to grow more muscle. Yeah, that's an interesting tip. That's something I was reviewing that research with, I don't remember what, just recently. That's something that I haven't worked into my training, but I can think of times where it kind of worked out that way and it seemed to help. Yep. Things just get really stale. And then you train them a little less and

you come back and boom, you're getting pumps and getting soreness from a way smaller number of sets than you're used to getting. Sometimes you ever feel in your training that you're just spinning your wheels or like, ah, I could just be doing squats forever. I don't even get pumps or sore anymore. Like that's not how it's supposed to work. Yeah. Yeah. It's very true. Again, I've, I've been there on and off over the last couple of years. I've had some periods where I'm sleeping well, everything's okay. And I'm making progress. And then periods where I'm not sleeping so well and stress is higher and I've just accepted it. And I just keep on going to the gym and I don't let it get me down, but I just like, it just is what it is. If I could snap my fingers off,

I could wave my magic wand and all of a sudden, you know, not have to experience the stress or the sleep disruptions. I would anyway. So this is all great information. I mean, honestly, you've touched on every point that I had. Is there anything beyond where can people find you? That'd be my next question is where can people find you? And what do you have new and exciting that is coming?

And what else do you want people to know about you and what you're doing? Thanks so much. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. I think just work through, like, rewind the podcast and work through sequentially all the stuff we talked about, because we talked about it and we had a really great alignment on what's most likely to get you in trouble first. One, know what your plateau is, or if you're even having one. Another one, make sure you're deloading.

Then make sure your nutrition, weight gain, stress management, et cetera, then your volume landmarks, then talk about your systemic versus local fatigue. And do you need a low volume phase? And are you really targeting the lats like you're supposed to? Because a lot of people will start first with the last one, right? Like, oh, I'm having trouble growing my lats. Should I like do underhand curl or pull-ups or overhand? Like guy, you're not going to point to me someone with huge lats and say, it's for sure underhand pull-ups that did it. So if I can tell you that guy with huge lats probably sleeps pretty well, eats pretty well, you know what I mean? And consistently trains within his volume landmarks. So just going through that process and not thinking

there's any magic. And as far as where people can find me, rpstrength on Instagram, it's the company that I helped co-found Renaissance Periodization. We've got all kinds of cool digital products, tons of books if you want to learn more about explaining all this much more depth we have an app that writes your diet for you and coaches you through ai it's called the rp diet app it's on android and iphone just go to google play and itunes store and get them and then i'm at rp drmike on instagram and i post videos and stuff and i'm on facebook too and I post a lot of good stuff. I think maybe mostly half naked pictures of myself, sometimes videos. And I've

got a pay site where I do much cooler shit. I'm totally kidding, but I should probably give that some time. The premium Snapchat. And that's all I've got. Exactly. Oh yes. Oh yeah. The Patreon. All right. Awesome, man. I really appreciate you taking the time. Would love to have you back. It was a great discussion. Thank you so much. Take care. Appreciate you taking the time. Would love to have you back. It was a great discussion.

Thank you so much. Take care. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and don't mind doing me a favor and wanna help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes

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