Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Jeff Nippard on Building Your Best Butt Ever

Episode Date: February 24, 2017

In this podcast, I interview Jeff Nippard, who’s a professional bodybuilder and online coach that produces a lot of great content on YouTube. I came across Jeff thanks, once again, to Cory, who works with me in my supplement company Legion. She turned me on to his YouTube channel and I really liked a video he made on glute training and figured it would make a good podcast because while I’ve written about it before, I haven’t spoken much about it. So, that’s what this interview is all about: how to build a better butt. And in it, Jeff does a fantastic job breaking down more or less everything that you need to know, ranging from the best exercises to do and how to do them most effectively, the best rep ranges to work in, how to program a glute program properly, and more. So, if you want more booty, then this interview is for you. 6:54 - Where should you start if you want a better butt? 9:39 - Any tips for how to move up in weight on the hip thrust and make it more comfortable? 14:05 - How would you recommend working glute-specific exercises into your routine? 18:24 - What are your favorite exercises for the glutes? 24:19 - How do you make the squat more glute-centric? 29:17 - Can you increase glute activation in the deadlift? 36:37 - How can you adjust the leg press to develop the glutes more? 38:25 - How deep should you go with the squat? 44:45 - What other exercises can be changed to increase butt activation? 49:49 - Any other tips for other exercises? 51:26 - What is the role of higher-rep pump training versus progressive overload? 54:44 - Are genetics a factor? 56:37 - Where can we 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/

Hey, it's Mike, and I just want to say thanks for checking out my podcast. I hope you like what I have to say. And if you do like what I have to say in the podcast, then I guarantee you're going to like my books. Now, I have several books, but the place to start is Bigger Leaner Stronger If You're a Guy and Thinner Leaner Stronger If You're a Girl. I mean, these books, they're basically going to teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build muscle, lose fat, and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or live

in the gym grinding through workouts that you hate. Now you can find these books everywhere. You can buy them online, you know, Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and so forth. And if you're into audio books like me, you can actually get one of them for free with a 30-day free trial of Audible. To do that, go to www.muscleforlife.com forward slash audio books and you can see how to do that there. I make my living primarily as a writer, so as you can imagine, every book sold helps. So please do check out my books if you haven't already. Now also, if you like my work in general, then I think you're going to really like what I'm doing with my supplement company, Legion. As you may know, I'm really not a fan of the supplement industry. I've wasted who knows how much money over the

years on worthless junk supplements and have always had trouble finding products that I actually liked and felt were worth buying. And that's why I finally decided to just make my own. Now, a few of the things that make my supplements unique are one, they're 100% naturally sweetened and flavored. Two, all ingredients are backed by peer-reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself because we explain why we've chosen each ingredient

and we cite all supporting studies on our website, which means you can dive in and go validate everything that we say. Three, all ingredients are also included at clinically effective dosages, which are the exact dosages used in the studies proving their effectiveness. And four, there are no proprietary blends, which means that you know exactly what you're buying. Our formulations are 100% transparent. So if that sounds interesting to you, then head over to legionathletics.com. That's L-E-G-I-O-N athletics.com. And you can learn a bit more about the supplements that I have as well as my mission

for the company, because I want to accomplish more than just sell supplements. I really want to try to make a change for the better in the supplement industry because I think it's long overdue. And ultimately, if you like what you see and you want to buy something, then you can use the coupon code podcast, P-O-D-C-A-S-T, and you'll save 10% on your first order. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast and let's get Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. I am Mike, of course, and in this episode I interview Jeff Nippert, who's a professional bodybuilder and online coach that produces a lot of great educational content on YouTube. Now, I came across Jeff thanks once again to Corey,

who works with me in my supplement company Legion, and she turned me on to his YouTube channel. And I really liked a video that he made on glute training. And I figured it would make a good podcast because while I've written about this before, I haven't really spoken much about it. So I reached out to Jeff and he said he'd love to do it. And that's what this interview is all about. How to build a better butt. And in it, Jeff does a fantastic job breaking down, I think more or less everything that you need to know, ranging from the best glute exercises to do and how to do them most effectively to how to make tweaks to exercises that aren't glute exercises per se, but that can heavily involve the glutes like squats and deadlifts, how to properly program your glute workouts in terms of intensity, volume, frequency, and so forth, and more. So if you want more booty, then this interview

is for you. I hope you like it. Jeff, thank you for coming on the show. I'm excited to have you on and talk about building a better, but it's great. It's a pleasure to be here, Mike. Thanks for having me, man. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so this is something I've actually written a bit about it, but it has never, I mean, maybe I've discussed it a little bit before in the podcast, but it's, we haven't, I haven't done like really kind of dove into it. So I think, uh, I get asked about it more and more. So that's why it was on my list of like, I need to find someone and we're going to do a podcast on that. So, um, I think people are going to appreciate it. So I'm just going to kind of just pass the ball to you basically. So, cause you mean basically where, you know, where a lot of

people are at, especially girls these days, they want to build, um, they want to build the glutes. And in some cases, you know, some people, some people don't want to have big legs necessarily. They don't want necessarily a lot of girls, at least that I hear from, and really women of all ages actually. There's a lot of focus on building the glutes. Then some are okay with whatever comes in the way of leg development. If you're going to do a lot of squatting, others are more interested in just kind of developing the glutes, but they want to keep their legs. Not like they don't want hot dog legs, but, uh, you know, they don't, they also don't want big weightlifter legs as well. And like you even pointed out, and when you're emailing

back and forth, there are quite a few guys that, that now it's becoming more of a thing to train the glutes specifically, as opposed to just kind of getting what you get out of proper leg training. So I thought this would be something that I saw some of your YouTube content you created on. And that's how I was like, oh, I want to talk to him about it because I liked what you had to say. So here we are. Yeah, I appreciate it. Well, it's definitely on trend right now. It's interesting my most my all-time

most viewed video uh is my glute training science video which i actually just published three weeks ago and it's already at over 300 000 views almost like 350 000 yeah i saw that which is crazy because i don't think it's like far and above some of my other content in terms of information or quality but it's just the fact that so many women are trying to build their butt now. And as you alluded to it, it is increasingly more popular with men as well. I think, um, especially natural bodybuilders as a, as a bodybuilder, it's really important. I think people are increasingly heavily ranked on conditioning. So how lean you look. And a lot of that is assessed from the back and glute striations are really popular right now in natural bodybuilding and i think that a really

important way to get them to poke through and to show at any level of body fat is to just develop them more probably so you see more bodybuilders training their glutes uh other than just doing like you know quad dominant movements like squats and inlifts, they're doing more glute isolation stuff. You see guys doing barbell hip thrusts and, uh, hip abductions, this sort of thing. So, um, it's definitely popular, uh, like you said. So like, what's it now where, where, where, where should people start in terms of, you have someone listening and they're like, yeah, I want, I want a better, but what do I do? You know what I mean? Right, right. Um, see just to circle back around to the whole, they want the butt, but not the quads thing. Um, I think

that that is at least perhaps in part stemming from the bikini division where I think people are often marked down if their quads are overdeveloped, especially relative to their glutes. Um, so glutes and hamstrings are really, really important in the bikini division. You want some quad shape and development, but you don't want them to be overpowering like you will often see in powerlifters, for example, who do a ton of squatting. So in terms of where to start, I guess... That's probably just worth calling out right there that, sure, I mean, squats are great are, are great for developing the glutes, especially if you're wider stance than if you're squatting deep, but in your, your legs are going to grow inevitably. So like if, if someone's listening and for whatever reason, I mean,

I don't know about you, but I've heard from people that aren't even, that's not even necessarily that they don't want developed legs. It's that their legs are already actually quite developed and, but their glutes are you know uh relatively speaking not as developed so like how are they going to fix that if all they do is a bunch of heavy squatting because their legs are going to continue to develop to one degree or another so that's not necessarily the solution i mean i'd say they're probably there's also a fair number of people at least that i've come across, that have started from scratch. And just with squatting and deadlifting and your basic type of leg type of training, everything came together nicely.

And they're just like, I don't know, I'm good. But that's genetics, though, I guess. Exactly. There are always going to be genetic and individual factors and preferences and so on. But I think when making general recommendations, the squat is actually a pretty good place to start. I think it's great for just general development, strength development. It obviously has a lot of athletic crossover. So the squat would probably be my number one exercise if you were to just do one exercise for leg development generally. However, for glute

development specifically, I think that the research supports the barbell hip thrust being a better alternative. It has more glute activation overall and also has more glute activation relative to the quads. So the squats tend to be a better quad movement insofar as they activate the quads more than the glutes. And the hip thrust, like I said, has been shown to activate the glutes more than the squat. So that would probably be my number one, if you were to just include one exercise looking to just build the glutes. And just to interject there, so to throw a question out that I know I get asked mainly by women is, so when they're trying to move up in weight, they find it very uncomfortable, the DL any tips for how to make it more comfortable?

Sure. So I find that myself. One thing would be to buy a big pad. So I know that Brett Contreras, who we should just throw his name out here at the beginning because a lot of the information that we'll probably talk about will come from either his research or his blog or something like that. He's got a ton. You should probably interview him at some point. No, I actually know it funny enough. So I actually have him scheduled on the show, but because he taught, I mean, like he has obviously

gone through it until he's, he's had that discussion a million times. I wanted to talk about something different with him just for his sake. You know what I mean? That's a great idea. So we're going to have a different discussion. That's what I was like. I'm going to find someone else that, that can talk about this and we can throw we can throw a bone to him and say, hey, this is like the glute guy. But I figured it might be more fun for him to talk about something completely different. Yeah, exactly. It was like when I had Lyle McDonald on my podcast, he always talks about the women stuff. So I wanted to hear his opinion on like frequency and training and stuff more to do with men

so I'm happy to talk about this because I typically will get Asked stuff about like nutrition as it relates to natural bodybuilding and getting lean and that kind of thing So this is a fun time which is which is I mean that's even though that's even just a narrower thing Like I mean what else there's not that much to say. It's like you have energy balance. You have macronutrient balance You have eating nutritious foods. I mean and then playing with your macro i mean it's just that discussion of course i've gone through all that myself there's a point where you're like i don't know what else to say there's nothing to talk about yeah i know yeah if only we could eat the brazilian

nuts every night and that's the secret and that's going to double our testosterone or something if only it would be better for us as content creators. If there was something to things like a Kai berries and stuff. Yeah. Talk about more. Yeah. Super foods. Yeah.

Okay. So where we're okay. So pain with the hip thrust. Right. Um, I would say if you can get a big heavy pad, um, you can use one of those that are not cheap in my experience.

Um, you can also use sometimes James does Brett sell one. Is that why you're Brett sells one? Okay. Brett has one. You can also use sometimes James does Brett sell one is that way Brett sells one okay Brett has one you can also use the I call them pussy pads but they're the like back protectors that go over your over the bar when you're spotting tampons you could use one of those but those often don't provide a ton of cushioning in my experience I find it's better to use like a yoga mat and you can roll it over multiple times and then put that sort of on your hips. That works. And I mean, pretty much any gym has these mats

as well. So like you can find them or you can get your own from bread or whatever, or that's what I've recommended is just go find a mat that your gym has and just roll it up. Exactly. Alternatively, you don't have to use a barbell, even though it's the most extensively studied. You could use bands, and bands tend not to cause the same issue. The problem with the bands is that it's more difficult to load it heavily. So if you're working in a lower rep range, it might be harder to present an overloading stimulus with a band, unless you have a ton of bands and you can loop them around. I find band resistance just tends to be not quite enough if you're loading in lower rep ranges.

But it's also not as painful, so you have to pick your poison there. Not all gyms have a setup for that either. You might have to get your own stuff. Yeah, if you don't have a hip thruster, which I think costs like $600, then you can hook up the bands like under heavy dumbbells. That's a relatively easy workaround. That's an interesting, yeah. Yeah, I could see that.

I haven't seen anybody do that. I'm like, yeah, I guess that's an interesting way to jerry-rig it. Yeah, it works. And then also one thing that I've been doing is just doing them single-legged. So if you do them unilaterally, you don't have to load as heavily. So you can use like a preloaded barbell that doesn't have like same weight on it. Um, or you could use a plate. So like just lay like say a 35 or 45 pound plate in your lap and you might not be able to go quite as heavy, but I find even unilaterally presents a slightly different stimulus on the muscle. It's like a slightly different feel than doing similar

to like a split squat versus just a traditional. Exactly. Exactly. And like I said, it's not quite as painful because you have the plate which is like it's almost like it The way it sits on your lap is a little bit more comfortable than the barbell where you have all of that Load confined to such a small space the pressure obviously on your on your joint is gonna be greater. So yeah Those are a couple alternatives there. Great. Yeah, perfect. All right, cool So going back to just so we we have, that's, that's obviously an exercise. How, how would you recommend? So let's say, I mean, most of the people listening to my podcast are fairly well-educated in terms of just pretty much everything, like all the basics of diet, training, supplementation, whatever. So yeah, let's say you have someone that is squatting

once or twice a week and you know, you know, moderate, moderate volume, moderate intensity or type of type of type of training program, how would you then recommend that they start working in some glute specific stuff? Like how many sets per week, for example? Okay. Good, good question. Um, I would say it's going to be highly individual and depend on their level advancement. But I think that when it comes to frequency, so we can just start there, I think that, as many of you listeners probably know, two times a week has been shown to be superior to once a week in terms of hypertrophy pretty substantially, at least according to the most recent meta-analysis by Schoenfeld and others.

Two times a week seems to be better. However, three times a week, there's not a whole lot of data to support that being better than two. There are a few studies you could cherry pick, but- Right. I'll be interested to see what also comes out of that line of research because I've spoken, like I spoke with Eric Helms about this recently, that right now, as we kind of understand it as frequency, as more of a way to increase, it's more about this recently, that right now, as we kind of understand it as frequency, as more of a way to, it's more about the volume that that allows you to do and recover from. Whereas, but if you could get that same volume in, in one training session and recover from it, it may or may not make that big of a difference. But yeah, no, it's an interesting, I mean, I think it's, I agree that it's generally good advice that if you have, you know, something, some body part that's lagging in, in just training it once a week right now, directly training it

once a week at it, you know, you might have to reduce depending on how that workout is. You might have to reduce the volume of that workout, but you can then double that by training it three or four days later and thereby increase the weekly volume. So yeah, just, just kind of making a, you know, a little note on that for people listening. Of course. Um, and then of course there could potentially be some mechanistic benefit to training it more than three times a week. So five times, six times, seven times a week. Uh, my girlfriend, for example, when we met was training her like six times a week and she didn't for example, when we met was training her like six times a week and she didn't train her upper body because she didn't want it to grow. And that

works just perfectly fine. But if you're going to take low volume, exactly. So that's what I was going to get into. If you're taking a two times a week approach, you can load those individual days more heavily. So you could do say a heavy squat on your Monday workout and then do a heavy deadlift or something on your Thursday workout with lighter squats if you really want to bring up your squat or something, but there's no real need to squat twice a week. However, if you're going to be training at a higher frequency of five times a week, or I would say anything more than three or four, you really want to be cognizant of the exercises that you're including and choose ones that are

going to be of lower impact right so you could do you know hip abductions banded clam shells glute kickbacks even some like light hip thrusts those sorts of things are going to have less of a generally taxing effect on your system than heavy squats and deadlifts right so in terms of setting that up i would probably start off your week where you're fresh, maybe on a Monday or something after the weekend with your heavy, say squat, uh, variation, whatever front squats are really effective as well, you know, whatever. Um, and then maybe hit, hit them with maybe a lighter hit again, a little bit later in the week. So a couple of days later, you could hit them with some hip thrusts or something like that something more specific that's just kind of glute as opposed

to focused and then hit another glute focus session for a third time uh say friday so you could go monday wednesday friday with your heavier loading sort of like strictly focused on progressive overload day on monday and then wednesday and friday could be a little bit more glute specific with more isolation movements and that sort of thing. That'd just be one example of a way to set it up. But I think that the exercises that you choose have to be carefully considered because they're going to determine your rate of recovery after performing them. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. So then in terms of, we've touched on growing the glutes without the quads. Are there other exercises? You mentioned a couple of these exercises. Are these the ones that you've mentioned so far your favorites? Is there any way that you like to, like, for example, if anyone that wants to grow their legs, you're going to tell them you have to be squatting. So there's like the top tier. I mean, well, I mean, of course there are exceptions, but that's like a general, if you can squat and everything's good and whatever, then you're going to want to be squatting. And then, so would you say with glute development,

that is cool. So the first thing we want to start with is make sure you're doing some hip thrusts, assuming you can, and there aren't any, um, you know, physical reasons or limitations or whatever. And then, uh, there are a couple other exercises you mentioned. Uh, how do those, what are those and how do they kind of rank for you if you were programming, you know, someone that says, Hey, I want, I want better glutes. Right. So I think that with the glutes specifically, it's of particular importance to load them in a variety of different ways. I think this is good of muscles just generally speaking, but for muscles, like, just like the biceps, it's like a simple single joint movement. It just flexes the elbow.

It's like you just have to curl, right? The glutes are more complex than that. They have a ton of different origins and insertions. So they originate at the pelvis, the sacrum, and then there's a bunch of fascia that runs up the spine from the thorax region down to the lumbar. And the glutes actually insert all the way up through that fascia. And then, did I say insert? I meant originate all the way up. So they attach all the way up there. And then also on the femur, so they attach at the femur and then also at the IT band. So you have all of these different attachment points for the glutes,

which mean they can do a bunch of different stuff. So their most probably popular function and most significant athletically function is hip extension. Right. It's like driving the hips forward like you would in a deadlift lockout. Right. They also do hip external rotation. So like if you were to point your you kind of like to rotate your whole leg like clockwise if you're to rotate your right leg clockwise just so people can follow along sure opening the thing of it is opening your hips like opening your hips up right and then they also do hip abduction so like in the bad girl exercise if you're bringing your leg out to the side of your body um And then also posterior pelvic tilt,

which is like what you would do when you're twerking, like the downward part of a twerk, the anterior pelvic tilt. And you're popping your butt out. And then posterior is kind of popping it back in. So they do all of those things. And if you're just to include, say like the squat, which trains hip extension, or the barbell hip thrust, also training hip extension and posterior pelvic tilt to a degree, I think you're missing out on hip abduction and external rotation to a degree.

Right. And also just the fact that the fibers run in all these different directions, I think, should be an indication that you should try them in sort of different planes of motion, if that makes sense. So, I mean, you have a simpler version of that with the chest where you have, yeah, there's the upper chest. It's not like it's some different type of pec, but because of how the fibers run as opposed to, you know, the larger lower part of the pec, doing reverse grip barbell or, you know, incline pressing helps tremendously with, you know, especially if someone has developed that kind of lopsided, you know, because all they've done is flat pressing and decline pressing for years. I used to be one of those people, so I know firsthand, but yeah, yeah, very similar. I think there as well. So I would say that like, you basically

want to, and this might not sound overly scientific or anything, but you want to pick exercises that you can feel really well. Um, and those are going to be different for different people. Uh, some girls that I've worked with really love glute kickbacks. Others just find, they feel it in their quads. Like they feel like their quads are taking over, in which case that might not be a good exercise to include but often it is same thing with lunges I personally find a really good stretch in my glutes when I do lunges and they're always sore like for multiple days after probably because of the eccentric component of lunges that you see it really stretches the glutes out like when you think about what you're doing when you lunge yeah

but again some people don't really like it or it hurts their knees or they have quad issues or whatever, so you don't have to include that one. I'm just listing off ones that I like. Lower back extensions would be another one, or hip extensions, whatever you want to call them. That machine where it's like... Yeah, hyperextensions, right? Hyperextensions, right? So that one is also very good for glutes, especially if you do it a certain way, which we can get into. The leg press has been shown to be great at activating the glutes even over the course of the long term.

So it's one of the few exercises that has actually been studied over, like, say, a 12-week period, and you've actually seen significant glute hypertrophy from it. And there are ways to make it more or less glute-focused, depending on your foot position and stance and so on. or less glute focused, depending on your foot position and stance and so on. So then there's also the machine hip abduction, and then you can do that with bands or you can load it with a plate. There are a ton of different ways you can load the glutes through these isolation type exercises. But I think when you understand first what it is that the glutes are responsible for doing, so you understand their biomechanics, then you can think about, okay, this exercise makes sense. This exercise doesn't make sense because it's not even loading the glutes properly um i see some people doing weird variations of the squat where they have like the cable held out in front of them

and it's like pulling them forward and they're just doing squats oh yeah that i've seen that like on instagram yeah so so you have to think about what the glutes are actually doing and then load them in a way that's gonna create create greater tension within the muscle. So there are a ton of different ways that you can do it, but maybe we can just go through quickly those other exercises and just talk about ways that we can make them more glute focused. Yeah. We could start with the squat if you want, like, uh, how to make the squat more glute centric and then move to the deadlift. Uh, it's another good one to kind of specify if you want to there, cause there are many right and wrong ways.

Well, there are many wrong ways to do a deadlift and not, not as many, not as many right ways. And we can just move. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's well said. So, okay.

So first I'd actually like to just quickly elaborate on this. So the reason why we think the squat isn't quite as glute focused is because it doesn't load the hips or rather the glutes as much when they're near or in full hip extension. So that's basically when your body is like straight for lack of a better term, right? Like your hips are fully extended. Um, whereas the squat loads of them largely in the hole and near the sticking point where the hips are mostly flexed. Conversely, the hip thrust is going to load the glutes largely when they're in hip extension. You think about your body positioning and the hip thrust, you're almost completely straight. Just so people listen, if you can visualize it, when you're at the top of that thrust and you're kind of like, it's like you're hovering up in the air.

That's when, if anyone that's done a hip thrust, that's when you feel it the most. Whereas you put your hips in that position in a squat, you're at the top. There's no load. And there's no load. I mean, your spine is loaded or whatever, but it's not. There's no direct, you know, specific load on the glutes, I guess. So that's been shown again and again. And then that's probably why the hip thrust leads to greater activation. But that's not to say you can't make the squat more glute focused. So again, you kind of want to think about what the glutes are doing. And that can make sense of why these cues are effective. So like I think you said earlier, one would be taking a wider stance.

And the reason why that's effective is because what are you doing? You're abducting the hips. You're bringing the legs out further. So it makes sense that they'd be more active that way. Also rotating the... And anybody listening, you can feel that. Just stand up and have a narrow stance or sit, you know, stand for five minutes to the narrow stance and stand for five minutes with a wide stance. And you're going to feel your glutes more with just standing. So, yeah. And then the other thing would be point your toes out, uh, and think about what you're doing there. You're externally rotating the hips. So it's going to turn the glutes on. Of course. Uh, another one that might be less intuitive is sitting back. So another way to think of this would be keeping your shins more upright. Um, so this is a little bit hard to do in the barbell back squat. Some people can do

it easily. They can have a little bit more forward lean. You could use the low bar position that might help. Um, but an easy way to do it would be to use like a counterbalance weight weighted squat. So like a squat where you're holding a kettlebell or something out in front of you, that's going to force you to stay, uh, to keep your shins a little bit more vertical or use a Smith machine squat where you like have your feet kind of out in front of you and that's going to force your hips to kind of go further back and basically what that does is it increases the external moment at the hip so it basically brings the application of load so the load is directed downwards right the weight gravity moves it's gonna

bring that that sort of like direction of force further from the axis of rotation or at the hip right so you have a greater moment arm between those so it kind of like makes makes it it makes that the glutes have to do more yeah i mean if you're if you're gonna if you're gonna hold yourself up something's got to do it and the body's going to go to the glutes that's going to be its primary muscle to keep yourself in that position yeah so i i think that's why you tend to see more activation in the glutes with the sort of like sitting back cue if that makes sense yeah that's also like you like you said it's also a little bit in just in squat form like i prefer low bar squatting um yeah and that's probably because it's probably why i i mean i haven't really put much attention on it, honestly, but I feel like my glutes have developed well and proportionately with my legs, with my upper legs in particular, despite not doing actually, like I don't really do any glute specific training, but I've always enjoyed low bar squatting more.

And I've been deadlifting for a while too and doing that properly. So that helps as well. But so just throwing that out there, it kind of depends on your body. And some people though, if you don't really like low bar squatting and if it's uncomfortable, I would say don't force it. Similar to like sumo versus conventional deadlift, right? Like if one feels really good to you, do that. But if it doesn't, don't think you have to do that. Like if one feels really good to you do that, but if it doesn't don't think you have to do that Mm-hmm, and we should probably say here that if any of these cues don't work for you So let's say squatting with a wide stance for me is very uncomfortable I say I don't like I'd have the mobility to do it

It wouldn't make sense for me to do it just for the slight increase in EMG activity These are just things to sort of like little tips to maybe try out if you're feeling like you're not feeling your glutes firing in The squat then you can try these little things that might make a difference for you however if you're feeling your glutes fine in the squat and they're growing and everything you may not need to make these little adjustments agreed that makes sense good point all right so i think that pretty much covers the squat um and so want to talk deadlifting sure um so interestingly with the deadlift you don't see the same effect of increasing the hip abduction angle that you do with the squat. So you don't actually see big differences between the sumo deadlift and the conventional deadlift when you look at EMG activity.

They're actually very similar between the two. And just to clarify, for glute activity in particular? Yep, for glute activity. What you do see is some, as usual, inter-individual variability. Some people are a lot better at conventional deadlifting. They're a lot stronger conventional. They might see greater glute activation conventional, but as a whole, there doesn't seem to be a big difference.

That's a common misconception. A lot of people think that the sumo deadlift is better because the sumo squat is better, but it hasn't been substantiated in the research. So with the deadlift, I tend to go with what it is that you're better at. So what one you can lift the most weight in, basically. For me, that happens to be the sumo deadlift. But if someone was a better conventional puller, I would say, I don't know, ignore the EMG. There isn't much there.

Do what one is best for you. Totally. And so then to that point, then it's more about technique, right? It's more about having proper. And so then to that point, then it's more about technique, right? It's more about having proper because I mean, you see, uh, I mean, I've come across just emailing with a lot of people that had that issue with it. They're saying they don't really feel their glutes in the deadlift. And it was because they weren't really firing them. Like they didn't really understand that it's the deadlift. Isn't just trying to pick the weight. They thought it's their mental kind of, uh, cue

was just pick the weight up, just like whatever, pick it up, stand up. But, but they didn't understand how the hips play with the role, the hips play in the, really the role that the glutes are supposed to play in the lockout. So I think that's worth probably noting. Yeah, for sure. A lot of a common thing with the deadlift that will pretty much negate any glute involvement is having the hips start too high. And then people, it's just like a lever. It's just like lower back, all lower back, really heavy and cringy. Good morning. Yeah. Um, so you want to start in a position where you feel some kind of stretch or tension on your glutes from the beginning and then allow your hips to extend and your chest to rise simultaneously, not have your

hips already extended and your chest just kind of levers its way up. Yeah. Yeah. So to, to that, like, so that means getting in that right deeper starting position. Obviously it's not as deep as the bottom of a squat. You're kind of in that half squat position. I mean, it changes a little bit from individual individually down there. And then I don't, I don't know about you, but I always like to think of getting it, think of it more as getting my hips forward as opposed to just rising off the ground. You know what I mean? So like just, just really trying to focus on, so the hips are obviously flexed down in the bottom. And really what we're trying to do is, is get our, get our hips extended and locked. And of course with keeping the upper butt,

keeping the shoulders rising at the same rate and then consciously kind of getting those glutes to fire and squeezing them as hard as you possibly can really at the top.. And then consciously kind of getting those glutes to fire and squeezing them as hard as you possibly can really at the top. Those are kind of cues that I've found have helped me not just with glute development, but I mean, it just helps with, with pulling and helps your performance. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And this does tie in quite nicely with the hip thrust. In my experience, adding the hip a to say a deadlift specific program can really help with lock of strength because it's exactly the same movement it's like and range hip extension yeah so you can load that a lot more in the

hip thrust and recover from it a lot better than you could by say just doing a lot of heavy deadlifts where you might be limited off the floor or through the mid-range whereas you can just specifically load the end range with the hip thrust yeah yeah that's that's a good point. That's a good point. Um, okay. Anything else you think we should touch on deadlift? That's it. I mean, there are other variations that are effective, but I just don't know, or I'm at least not aware of any research on it, but like the Romanian deadlift, it's still training hip extension. Uh, it would probably be a really good, you know, glute builder. You're going to see a ton of glute activation with that variation and then basically whatever flavor of deadlift you like.

Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. And just to, to, I kind of just touched on it, but to, to make sure that, you know, people listening are thinking with it is really go for that, you know, whatever mind muscle type of connection where if, uh, on an RDL, that's another example of I've heard, and I've had people email me, even that they don't really feel it too much in their hamstrings. Again, you know, they were kind of turning it more into a lower back type of, you know, good morning, uh, just lever type exercise, as opposed to what it's supposed to be, which is, you know, um, obviously it's really your hamstrings and your glutes that are supposed to drive that and your lower back is engaged, but it's just, it just kind of keeps your spine neutral. That's really the only role that it's supposed to have. Yeah, exactly.

I think that with the Romanian deadlift in particular, a lot of people might be getting overly caught up with progressively overloading that you can progressively overload the Romanian deadlift a lot, but it just means your lower back is going to take over more in my experience. I find it might be smarter if your goal is hypertrophy to drop the weight back, really focus on feeling a good stretch in your hamstrings and then squeezing your glutes at the top and having an explosive concentric, but you don't need to load it to the point that your lower back has to get more involved than it needs to. It's a good point. In my opinion um and then also i should mention this here another

variation that i don't know if this has been studied or not but brett always talks about the american deadlift i'm not sure if you're familiar with but it's basically first time hearing it actually he coined it so okay as far as i know so it's basically a romanian deadlift but you have an active posterior pelvic tilt throughout the range of motion so So rather than arching your lower back like you would, which would help get a greater stretch on the hamstrings, you're going to kind of like keep the lower back slightly rounded a little bit or like at least posterior pelvic tilt. I don't know if it gives the rounding here.

I mean, that would round your lower back a little bit, which would be interesting. Because normally, I guess you're not going to be loading that heavy, right? Because I mean like any sort of deadlift type of obviously you can have some thoracic rounding not a big deal you see that a lot with especially big power lifters but but lumbar rounding usually it could be a dangerous recommendation i don't want to put words in brett's mouth there i know that he emphasizes the posterior pelvic tilt and for me a cue to to trigger that is to round um but use that with caution on a deadlift. I don't want to be-

I would say to the listeners, go check it out. Go see what contours you say about it. Exactly. And then the other thing you want to do is really actively squeeze the glutes together at the top. That's important. That's what a lot of people actually don't do. I mean, in my experience, just working with a lot of people, because you have to consciously

do it. It doesn't necessarily just automatically happen. You don't have to consciously activate your quads when you're squatting. It just, it just happens. Uh, but you can, you can have a lot less glute activity in, uh, even a squat. Like I, when I'm squatting, I really try to, as I ascend, once I, once I get past that parallel, I'm really consciously trying to involve my glutes as much as possible, you know, to get me up to the top and, and at the top squeezing is really as hard as I can. Same thing with deadlifts. Yeah. When locking out the squat, one thing that I find to be helpful is thinking about getting your hips forward and maybe not necessarily just like squeezing your

butt cheeks together. Like you would, if you were like squeezing a coin between them or something, which is actually what I do for the hip thrust at the top with a squat i kind of think about getting my hips under the bar which is which is gonna i think be really effective for for lockout strength yeah no that's a good tip actually yeah totally 100 i agree okay cool so i think that's dead lifting uh let's move on to one of the other exercises that you had mentioned and like like let's say the leg press for example you had mentioned that sure yeah so this one's pretty simple again you just want to think about what the glutes are doing so it would make sense that a higher foot position so higher on the sled is going to lead to more glute activation because that effectively mimics the sitting back cue right it's like getting your

tibias more straight or your shins more straight right and it also it's subsequently that's also your hamstrings as well like whereas if you go lower, it's more of a quad type of exercise. Yeah, exactly. And then the other thing you can do is just point your toes out. You can pretty much do that on everything. Pointing your toes out almost always is going to turn on the boots a little bit. Yeah. Cool.

And then form-wise, if – I mean, something I like to just tell people, if they're going to be putting their feet higher, you know, cause there are people that will say, you know, don't ever do a leg press because it, you know, it, it puts your lower back in a compromising position, but it depends on how far, how deep are you going? Cause you know, we, anyone that if you're learning just barbell training, you know, you quickly learn that like more range of motion equals better, you know, squat deep, you don't have to full squat necessarily, but you know, you at least have to hit parallel or get a little bit below it. If you're bench pressing, get that bar to your chest. If you're OHPing, make sure it get all the way. So they, they try to apply that to the leg press and like, Oh, I'll just, I'll just try to get my knees past my, I'll try to get them behind me. You know what I mean? And yeah, that's a bad idea.

I agree. I I'm actually quite comfortable with limiting the range of motion to the point that you start to feel notice the lower back beginning to round exactly your lower back is rounding in the leg press that's a bad idea you need to go that deep so that's going to be again it's so individual like some people can touch their knees to their chest and be fine i finally feel to be super flexible generally and they can keep that neutral spine and get real deep. Yeah, I've seen it. I feel like we should probably comment on depth here really quickly and range of motion. That's something we glossed over on the squat.

But it's really commonly accepted in my experience that deep squats are better at activating the glutes than parallel squats or partial squats or half squats or what have you um and i think that this comes from some old research uh by catara sano in 2002 and they did show that uh glute activation relative to quad activation and hamstring activation increased as you increase depth so basically deep squats were better at activating the glutes. What they, what I think like scientists after that was published, criticized it for not using relative loading. So they basically use the same weight for the half squat that they did for the parallel squat that they did for the full squat. And so, of course, you expect to see more activation. It's just harder to go deeper, right? So the relative weight is heavier for the deep squat. You can half squat a lot more than you can full squat, right?

As opposed to sticking to like a one rep max type, percentage one rep max for each type of squat. Exactly, exactly. So basically the study was replicated again. Contreras was one person who did this. I think there was another lab that did the same basic study again, except they relative, they loaded it relatively. So they figured out, say, I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but say they did their 10 rep max for the 70% 1RM for each lift. So it was,

it was loaded relatively. And then they didn't see any differences in activation between uh i think that brett's group did um the parallel squat and the full squat and maybe it might i i don't know and it was the front squat it wasn't the half squat uh so i can't say for sure about that one as far as we know the half squat is probably not as good as as the full squat for a glute activation because we just don't have it. But the front squat was just as good. So you could squat to parallel with the front squat or with the full squat and see similar levels of glute activation. Oh, I hadn't seen that research. I'll have to check it out.

That's good to know. Because I had seen what you're previously talking about. I had seen that. Right, right. And interestingly, you know, I kind of like still think that it's better to squat deep just because when Katerasano in 2002 did this, they ended up getting a lot of heat from it later down the road after these newer studies came out. But if you actually look at Katerasano, they not only measured EMG activity relative to the maximum voluntary isometric contraction. So in a sense, they kind of controlled for it. They kind of did because what they did was they expressed it as a percentage.

So let's say you have 100% activation overall. How much of that is coming from the glutes? How much is coming from the quads? And that was how they expressed it across the movements. So you could make the case that it is still increasing relative to the quads, and the loading doesn't really matter too much. Yeah, exactly. So it's still kind of an open debate whether deep squats are better or not, I think, in my opinion.

I think a simple way for the listeners to just come to their own conclusion is try both. Try parallel and try deep and see if you feel a difference in your glutes. If you feel more activation in the deeper squat, then do that. If you don't, then maybe don't worry about it. Do whichever, again, is most comfortable to you and you can do the best. I mean, obviously, you're going to be able to move more weight in the parallel squat, but for some people, they don't have the mobility to full squat. It doesn't feel good, so you don't have to do it. Yeah. I think my

recommendation would be to at least try for the parallel squat. Um, and if you can squat astagrass then, then do it. It might, it might be of better benefit. You have a greater range of motion and range of motion tends to be a little bit better. Um, but if you are, like you said limited in your ability ability or mobility or let's say you don't want to load as heavily Then you can use say the front squat which shows similar glute activation Despite not being loaded as heavily. Yeah, so that's a really good alternative Yeah B would be a front slot I flipped the front squatting for a bit like I had I was doing a lot of back squatting and Just got I mean, it's kind of got to a point where I was not going to make much more progress

in my back squat unless I really started training for it specifically, which I didn't also want to do because I felt like my upper legs were getting to a point where like my jeans weren't fitting anymore. There's a point where I go, all right, I would, I would like, I would like more, I would like to have like more separation and more development in my quads, but I honestly would not like to add two inches to my quads over the next year. I mean, also my calves are forever lagging, so there's trying to manage that as well. So I decided just to switch to front squatting, and it's a nice change. I mean, it was difficult. I went from back squatting 365 to 355 370 in that range for whatever a

handful of reps to i had to start my front squats at like 185 for eight i think i was like holy shit this is way harder now legitimately the first time i had front squatting forever but i was surprised and how i mean it was. It almost felt like newbie gains again, because then I was able to work up to the best I've done is 275 for maybe one or two. Uh, but then I kind of hit that sticking point again, where my, I have long, long legs and long femurs in particular, which mechanically just don't make for good squatting, but I can recommend front squats. If anybody, if you haven't done any front squats, they're harder. You know, sometimes you'll see someone and you'll be like, oh, whatever, 225, repping out 225 on front squat.

Yeah, who cares? That's actually probably a bit harder than you think. Yeah, yeah, it's true. And for people like you, say, who have long squeamers, long femurs, and struggle with maintaining any resemblance of an upright position in the squat, I think that a front squat can be corrective as well as a back squat. Past a certain point, it might not necessarily be a technique issue. It just might be a matter of your skeleton.

And you just have to accept what is. But I think that you should, as a corrective measure, you could try those movements first to sort of try to reinforce a more upright posture, which you're basically forced into in the front squat. Totally. Yeah. Totally. Okay, great. So then let's move on to another exercise is there are there any others that yeah that yeah we we can blast through these so like the lunge is very similar more forward lean on the lunge tends to increase glute activation uh longer yeah a longer you have to you know really get out like put put that. Yeah. Yeah. Don't make like little baby steps. Um, take longer strides. Uh,

what else? Oh, one cue that I find really helpful is driving your front heel into the floor. And this will basically force your front leg to be like the active mover rather than like using the momentum of your back leg or letting the walking lunge sort of like, just like carry you forward, sort of like drive your heel down into the floor that really helps in my experience um instead of like the lateral moving lunge uh doing them forward tends to be better okay some people really like the reverse lunge and that's a good one i didn't mention it in my video but some people will find a better connection or whatever with reverse lunge. I personally find it awkward. Yeah, same. But some people swear by it. So throw it out there. Yeah. Yeah. What else? For lower back extensions, this is actually an important one, I think, because it can very easily be a lower back

exercise. And that's how I'm using it currently trying to rehab an injury. You can really target your spinal erectors with it, but you can also target your glutes with it with a couple technique modifications. So firstly, rotate your feet out again. Um, this is one where you actually do want to round your lower back slightly. Um, and what that will do is it'll basically take your erectors or your lower back out of extension and force your hips to do more of the extending. So your glutes will turn on more that way. You really want to think about using your glutes, like actually, like you might even want to limit your range of motion a little bit with this one

and also squeeze your glutes really hard at the top. And then also bending your knees a little bit has been shown to increase glute activation in that one so those are good tips because like most of the most of the women I see doing hyper extensions I'm assuming they're doing them because of they heard that it's good for glutes I don't I don't think it's nuts they're just trying to do it so they can deadlift more or something like that and and are doing them though just in it just as a lower back exercise there's looking at it, you know that there's really no glutes involved in that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything with kickbacks or?

Yeah, so with kickbacks, I don't know of any research on kickbacks. It's not like an extensively studied exercise. But one thing that in just coaching clients, I found you want to think about, imagine that there's a box on the floor and you're trying to push the box back to begin. And then as you finish it out, you want to arc your foot up sort of like in a like upward. So like kick your foot up at the end. So don't just kick up and also don't just kick back. If you just literally kick back, like you do in those like glute kickback machines where you're like locked in it, it actually overemphasizes the quads in my opinion. Um, so you want to get the slight kick back to like,

kind of get the movement going and then kick up word. Uh, that, that, that, no, I think that's what makes sense. So how to then do you like, what's that? And then lean forward a bit. Also, don't do them straight standing up. Right. And so then how do you like to then load that? Because obviously if it's a machine, it's just going to be a straight back. I mean, at least I haven't seen a machine that is – I mean, it is just like you were saying.

It almost becomes a quad push. At least it's a half quad push. Yeah, exactly. It's not a good exercise, I like to do it with a cable. Um, you can also do it with like ankle weights if you want to do them quadruped. So like you can kind of like get on all fours and then kick one leg up. That's actually a really good pre-activation exercise. In my opinion, it's kind of hard to load, but it can be really good at activating the glutes. So like you could do a series of like fire hydrants where you're like kind of sticking your leg out to the side and then some kickbacks and you can put ankle weights on if you wanted to load it a

bit, but even just body weight, it'll really get the glutes firing. And then you can finish with, uh, some hip circles. So like you're on all fours and you're just kind of like rotating your upper leg in a circle it'll it'll really get your glutes firing and it might be smart to do that before doing anything just so that you know what it feels like you get a little bit of a pump and that might have them firing for the other exercises that you're going to do or this is something i mentioned in my video uh you could use like one of those uh hip circles like resistance band like mark bell sells them um and just do some like

Basic hip abductions with that before you get going with your squats or lunges or whatever you're gonna start with. Yeah Yeah, those are good tips some people also I mean just especially I've seen it with guys that have trouble with really feeling their back with heavier deadlifting or pulling Starting out with some pull-ups even to just kind of get the muscles working so they can feel them more with their heavier stuff. Okay, good. So are there any other exercises that you think should be discussed in terms of like technique, little tips?

Yeah, there are a couple other ones that I like. Like I do actually like glute press downs. So like on an assisted pull-up machine, you see them, this is like a really popular Instagram one, but I just find them, I have no idea if it's like in any way substantiated empirically, but a lot of women in my experience really feel this one or whatever. It's like, it's like almost like a weighted as if you're like, it's like a stair stepper, but it's a weighted kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you can do that one. But again, you want to think about driving with your glutes, forward slightly and uh don't let your quads take over too much if you can do that also the uh hip abduction machines

like the bad girls exercise this one and just so everyone listening that's that's opening your legs basically like yeah so it's just spreading your legs over and over against weight yeah yeah exactly so that one will really target the glute medius. So it's good for like developing that sort of like upper outer glute area. And with this one, you want to kind of I find in my experience, finding a back angle that works for you is probably the most important thing. I think a lot of people do feel it if they lean forward more. And then also if they elevate their butt up off of the seat. I find like if you're sat, if you're just like plop down there and you're just like going out with your legs, uh, you're

not going to be as like turned on as if your knees are slightly elevated and you're kind of sweeping the air. I mean, I personally feel more of my hip flexors if I just kind of sit there and. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So those are, those are it. I think that's, I think I've exhausted everything. I need to say.

That's extensive. It's great. So there was one last thing we had here, which is, and you had touched on this earlier, but you might just want to, might just want to call it out, which is the role of a more higher rep kind of pump training versus, you know, just straight progressive overload training, which it was obviously what, especially a lot of people listening to me are going to be more focused on, like, let's just increase whole body strength. Let's get a good squat, a good deadlift, a good, you know, bench press OHB or whatever. Um, but when it comes to the glutes, what have you found, um, in terms of we're really talking about, you know, intensity rep ranges and so forth. Right. Right. So I think that, and your listeners might be familiar with this as well, but, uh,

the kind of maybe most commonly accepted model, at least in my experience, is Schoenfeld's like three-point model where you have mechanical tension, muscle damage, and metabolic stress being the three main drivers of hypertrophy. Yeah, I've written about it many times. A lot of listeners are going to be familiar with it, yeah. Yeah, yeah, of course. So I think that you want to structure your training in a way that's going to be able to optimize most of those with, I think, tension being the most important thing. So if you're someone who is limited on time, you could get away with a more minimalistic workout, like you said, where you might just like squat, barbell hip thrust, row, bench press, up OHP, whatever, and you're good. If you want to optimize your training, I think you should be including other exercises and other rep ranges. So I think that using a variety of rep ranges is really important, especially for the glutes.

Because like I said, they are so varied in their structure. And it's also because also in some of these exercises, they don't lend themselves to… Yeah, you can't load a kickback. What do you do, like 85% of one rep max kickback? Like, nah, it's not going to work. You just can't do it. Yeah, exactly. So I think that, yeah, doing some burnout exercises at the end of a session is a really good idea. And you can do that at the end of every session because it's pretty easy to recover from. Like you might be sore for a couple days after, but the repeated bouts effect will kick in and you won't be sore for so long if you keep doing it. One that I really like is, again, borrowing from Brett,

but I think it's just called Brett's Glute Burnout or whatever, it's on YouTube. And it's basically where you are on a bench or a hip thruster if you have one, and you hook up bands, or you could on a bench or a hip thruster if you have one and you hook up bands or you could use a plate or a barbell if you don't have the bands you hook up a hip circle so you'll need one of those around your knees and initially you're just sat there doing 20 hip abductions so you're just like you know flaring

your knees in and out and then with your knees with a wide stance you do 20 hip thrusts with the bands around your hips with the knees out then you bring the knees in so you no longer have that tension from the band uh in terms of active hip reduction you're just like you're just there with a narrow stance the band isn't doing anything and then you do another 20 this sounds painful so it's like a 60 rep set absolutely burn out your glutes at the end of a session so like doing that once a week i think maybe at the end of like your progressive overload day or something like that where you're not getting as much metabolic stress uh it would be a good idea yeah that sounds painful it is from what i've heard okay great well um is there anything else i think we've touched on we've touched on a lot i don't i don't know what what else what's left if you can't grow a butt after

this then you just don't have the genetics for it you should you should stop which is you know anyone can grow a butt maybe you're not going to have but all some of the fake butts on instagram there's that you never know what you're even looking at which is that's like it's funny that's the uh that's like i guess the female version of steroids these days is like you look at these butts you don't know is that a real butter and she just go under the knife and because sometimes you see some of these girl what they're with their legs where yeah they can have like quote-unquote toned legs or whatever but the butt and the leg it makes no sense like how did how did these race how did this the ratios are what am i even looking at yeah i actually find a good indicator of that is looking at the hamstring development because some people might not have good quads but if they have a big

butt there's a chance they have pretty well developed hamstrings whereas people with implants will just have the butt and then they have these little twig hamstrings coming down from them because it's hard to train the glutes without training hamstrings like the hamstrings do so much for hip extension too so yeah yeah but you're right and i'm just for the sake of clarity completely joking about the genetics thing like i think i know i know pretty well everyone can build their glutes if they're, um, patient enough with it. Like even people who are like really low responders given enough time, if you find what works for you, they will grow. But you need to keep in mind that some people could be doing everything wrong and still have a very impressive set of glutes just because there's,

there is a genetic baseline that underlies everything that we're talking about. And so some people are going to get away with doing a lot less than others. You kind of just, again, like we've said several times, need to find what works for you and keep doing it and then just keeping consistent. Yeah. Awesome. Okay, great. Well, I think that's everything. So where can people find you and your work? And if there's anything that you have you know product wise or service wise that you have that you know that you want to talk about or you maybe have upcoming or whatever this you know lever will let everybody know

sure so first of all I guess a good supplement to this would be my glute science explained video so on my youtube channel I do a combination of lifestyle vlogging and informative content where I'll discuss scientific literature sort of like I did in this podcast um except it's a little bit more highlighted so it's a little bit more digestible I think for most people um who just want the bottom line yeah I do that a lot on my youtube channel um you can find it it's just jeffnippard youtube.com forward slash jeffnippard that's where I put out most of my content. I also have a podcast where I interview people kind of like you, Mike. It's called Ice Cream for PRs. So Ice Cream for the number four in PRs.

So I interview people. If you want to reciprocate, I'll come on and talk about something. I don't know. That would be very cool. I'd love to do that. I've actually been on a hiatus from the podcast because I've been really focusing on my YouTube, which has been growing really well. But I'm planning to bring back the podcast this month.

So I'll definitely be in touch with you about that. Um, in terms of products, uh, I'm planning to release a glute specific program when I cycle back around to touch on that again on my channel. Um, so you can just stay tuned for that. Uh, but other than that, um, the best thing, the best thing that you can do to support me is subscribe to my YouTube channel and my podcast. That would be great. And you can follow me on Instagram. It's just my name, Jeff Knippert. Awesome. Well, that's perfect.

I think, yeah, I think that's a wrap. I think it's going to, I think people are going to really appreciate it because this is a lot more detail than I've gone into even when I've written about glue. So this is great. I'm glad that we did this. I think you're going to hear from people that appreciate it. So thanks again for taking the time. This was great. And I will, you know, we'll flip around when you're ready and then we'll collaborate again. Yeah. Yeah.

Sounds good. Thanks, Mike. I really appreciate it. Yep. Thank you. Hey, it's Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www.muscleforlife.com where you'll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you'll also find a bunch of different articles that I've written. I release a new one almost every day, actually. I release kind of like four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I'm involved in over at muscleforlife.com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.