The Uneducated PT Podcast - #52 Cillian O'Connor - Dysfunctional Patterns

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

In this episode of the Uneducated PT Podcast we speak to Cillian O Connor a strength and conditioning coach from Dublin who helps the general population get strong and healthy. Expect to learn why functional training is destroying your gains, the considerations you make when programming gym sessions, the misconceptions about an ‘advanced plan’ and much more. Hope you like this one and subscribe for more.

Hello and welcome to the uneducated PT podcast with me, your host, Carlo Rourke. The goal of this podcast is to bring on interest and knowledgeable people from all walks of life, learn a little something from each conversation. And for you, the listener, just learn something from each episode. So don't forget to subscribe to the channel, press the box below, show some support, and I'll see you on the next episode. Kill, well, can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into Strength and Conditional?

my background was actually not very athletic or sporty at all i was actually like actively bad at sports probably pick glass for pretty much everything in school especially anything with a ball i had a tendency of getting hit in the face with um so i guess maybe i'm a little bit different in that sense i noticed when i got into s and pt a lot of people had maybe been a bit more naturally sporty and identified with that and that was part of how they ended up in that as a job um but then around the time when i was you know 15 or so um i was really lucky that my gym had a uh in transition they basically had like a fitness module that you could take and i'd already been doing a few bits at home by myself we had some some home gym equipment in my house um

i think it was kind of just like an out left for teenage angst more than anything and i started noticing like the psychological benefits of training. And I remember a really big turning point for me was when I was like 15. I did a 10 minute plank in like we did like this fitness test thing in school. And I think that was a, it was kind of the first time that I realized that I could actually push myself beyond what I thought was capable because I'd never identify it as somebody who could be athletic before. And then from there, I just kind of, I just kind of, kind of went into doing CrossFit a lot with my friends after school. Really enjoyed that.

Actually didn't know what I wanted to do at all coming out of school. I initially went into a philosophy and German degree. I lasted about maybe a month or so doing that in Trinity before I dropped out. Basically realized that the only thing that I could really imagine myself wanting to do as a job for the rest of my life was something involved with training. and coaching just seemed like the most kind of obvious avenue for that. So I ended up going into UCD then, doing a bachelor's in health and performance science, realized that strength and conditioning probably made the most sense for some kind of coaching that would have involved, you know, that scientific aspect to things.

And I think, you know, training athletes just seemed like the most kind of challenging. prestigious type of coaching that you could do. I went on then to do a master's in strength conditioning from St. Mary's University in Twickenham. And while I was doing that, I was building up coaching experience with, I worked an S&C coach in a school with rugby teams and just taking kids after school as well. I worked in a CrossFit gym for four years during that time too,

so got a lot of experience with training just the general public, which actually probably was where I kind of gained the most coaching skill. Did some work for UCD high performance gym as well. Worked with a lot of different types of athletes there. The rowing team, ladies football team, some of them were playing Irish international, men's rugby, swimmers. So there was a really wide variety of different sports as well. And then I think it was around the time I was coming to finishing the master's in

and see that I had started to take a few personal training sessions with people in the CrossFit gym. And I think between that and just also working with kids that weren't really doing anything particularly athletic, but just wanted to get fitter in the school, I realized that I actually enjoyed that more. And I found it was more of a challenge getting like a middle-aged woman who'd never trained before to, you know, put 20 kilos on her deadlift than it was to take a rugby player who was very naturally athletic and make them a tiny bit better. Or at least that was my experience. I'm sorry, I know I'm waffling here, but I'm almost getting to the end. And I think all of that combined with the fact that I realize, which I think a lot of people do as they go further down that

S&C career path, that I just didn't think it was a very viable long-term career option. I think there's probably not enough discussion around just how difficult it is. The burnout rate is very high. The pay very poor, very difficult if you ever have any aspirations of having like a family or anything like that. You're going to be moving around an awful loss. And to be honest, you're just very expendable. You know, the supply massively exceeds the demand for S&C coaches. And as a result, to get up that pecking order, you really have to be willing to sacrifice the loss, I think, in terms of, you know, your beliefs and principles around what's the right way to do things. And you probably also have to know the right people as well and have played certain sports at a certain level,

potentially to some degree. So all of that culminated to me just deciding to move into PT. So I guess, you know, I think myself as a coach, but I guess most accurately, I'm a personal trainer in person and online now. Sorry, that was a very long-winded way. No, I want you to lay the groundwork because it goes to go into the topics that we're going to go into. But before we even go into that then topic. So I just wanted to pick your brain on a few things you said there. One thing you said there that you probably gained the most

experience working with the general public over actually working with athletes. Why do you think that was? I think that you know, the very nature of somebody being athletic is that they pick up movement very easily. There's not an awful lot of queuing

that you need to give to someone who's a natural athlete usually to get them to do. a pretty looking deadlift, a pretty looking squat. Certainly you'll encounter people who aren't at like that very high level who are athletes and have an issue with learning gym stuff. But by and large, I found that actually there wasn't much of a coaching challenge with athletes. More of the challenge when you're working with athletes is dealing with their coaches and dealing with all of the politics and stuff around trying to get people on staff,

on board with what you're trying to do. whereas, you know, I've probably the biggest coaching challenges I've had have been working with people who are, say, like in their 60s, have never been in a gym before, you know, have no idea what the squaw is. They don't, there's people that have been training for two years. I still have to tell them what a bench press is every session because they just, it's not in their lexicon, you know? And so, and also because those people are so deconditioned, you really have to know what

you're doing because they can get hearth much easier you know like a 20 something year old football player can take some pretty crappy programming before they get hurt you know but um you really have to be smart like i think personally that any good coach even any good physio like fundamentally what we're doing is managing load and if you don't know how to do that appropriately with somebody who's older and deconditioned you're going to get them hurt and they're not going to come back so yeah that's where I found that it was a much bigger challenge to actually get them stronger from where they're starting off that. I think on average, and obviously anybody who works in S&C is probably going to disagree with me, I think if you got a 60-something year old woman who's never trained before

to go from deadlifting an eight kilo kettlebell on day one up to a bodyweight deadlift, I think that that is much more impressive than taking someone who was already a shift hot athlete and getting them to a double body weight deadlift. You know, I just don't think that that's that hard once you know what you're doing. Isn't it ironic that, okay, most people go and do a degree and do a master's and get, create all this knowledge around training to work with athletes who need probably the least amount of help in terms of knowing what you're doing around their training program

versus, you know, probably the, the general public and elderly people who probably need someone to be an expert to be able to help. And yet, it's the opposite way around where, you know, someone does a six-week personal training course that probably doesn't really still understand training and now going out into the, and they're the ones who are left to look after the general public

and people who haven't trained before who actually need someone who, is an expert and is an expert in movement and in load management. Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, like most of the time, I feel like also the things that you're helping people with, or the things that I help people with, to me, are a lot more meaningful than the stuff that I would have done when I was working with athletes. You know, like, my granny is 97 and in a nursing home, and I go into visitor every single

week and I feel like that is something everybody should do at some point even regardless of if you have somebody in there or not you need to go into one of those places and see what is waiting for you down the line if you don't look after your health and the vast majority of people aren't engaged in strength training particularly people who are in that slightly older generation that have very limiting beliefs around whether or not they should be doing it and And so to me, keeping, like I train both my parents. And I think that's probably one of the most meaningful things I do every week because keeping them functional, knowing and having the confidence that I don't see them ever not being able to sit out of a chair by themselves and stuff like that.

Or even when I work with people who are younger, but to them the training means like improving their self-esteem or confidence because they've never, like me never saw themselves as an athletic person. I've just always found that to be a lot more meaningful than the. stuff that I would have been working with in S&C. And, you know, part of that is probably because I'm just not a big sports head. You know, like I have a few sports that I like to follow. But I think ultimately I realize that I just don't really relate that well to athletes because it's not my background. Whereas I do relate really strongly to the huge effects that resistance training can have

on somebody who never saw themselves doing it in the first place. it's funny isn't it's there like you go in because you have all these aspirations that okay i'm going to help people with performance but then it's not the performance you think about it's the performance of life it's quality of life you're helping people yeah yeah i think there's a big you know i think courses to a certain degree have a little bit to answer for um and i think they do have a duty of care to people who are you know 18 or 19 going to a ceo don't really know what they're what they want to do and they're seeing these posters of like you're going to be working with elite level athletes and stuff like that and like the maths just doesn't work a it's

like there's just not enough places and job placings for the amount of people who are doing these courses um and i think you know i'm don't be wrong i had some great lecturers in that course that i did in ucd um some of them i hold in really high esteem and i know that a lot of the decisions about how the course content was curated, wouldn't be up to them. But there was one lecture at the very end of that three years in college where they went through some vague ideas about what you could start looking at for career options.

You know, and I know from my own course, I think out of maybe roughly 30 to 40 people who finished this, there's probably about five, including myself who are actually working in coaching in some respect now. I thought you were going to say in terms of weight like high level athletes. No, I think two guys as far as I know actually went into S&C. And the rest, there was a big chunk that actually ended up just going into medicine because you could use my course to leapfrog into medicine.

There was a few who went into physiotherapy and there was a loss who just did other stuff like went off to do like a a business or marketing degree afterwards because they just realize what the fact am I going to do with this thing. Yeah. Yeah. Um, isn't it, isn't a funny that, um, you people go into these careers, whether it's like, you know, being a strengthening and coach, a physio, whatever it is. Um, and you have all these aspirations of where you're going to end up. But a lot of the, like you said, it's about who you know, a lot of the, a lot of the work in terms of actually making it in them in them domains is is networking and being able to market yourself and sell yourself.

Yeah. Which is obviously a really important aspect of it because I know loads of really good strength and conditioning coaches who actually ended up leaving the industry as a whole, not even not even just sports, but not even working with Genpop clients anymore either. Yeah, because I think for a lot of people it seems like a big fall from grace. You know, if you go from working with really high level athletes and they see it as a step down if you have to go to working with the general population. I actually think, if anything, it's a step up, especially, you know, not only are you working

with people now where you can have a really huge impact on their lives, but they appreciate the work that you're doing enough that you can actually get sufficiently, you know, financially, um, I'm forgetting the word, but like, you know, you're going to guess if you, if you put the the work in and you're going to have to know how to market yourself regardless you know if you're in s and c you have to market yourself to find the right job um if you're in pt you certainly have to market yourself because it's your own business but at least you're in control of that um there's a lot of stuff in s and c you're just not in control of it all you know um but with personal training you're working with people who i find really value the work that you're doing and i think the other thing as well is

that what S&C coaches often forget is that if you're coming from that background that's very academically driven, it's very evidence-based science-heavy, you have a major step up in terms of knowledge and what you have to offer than usually what the average personal trainer is. And don't get me wrong, there's some fantastic personal trainers that never did a degree. You know, they went through to doing a personal training, certainly educated themselves. But by and large, I think most people would agree that the standard in our industry, industry is pretty poor. Certainly just from like what I see if like I have a membership in Fly Fifth and there's a few different ones that I go to. And I look around sometimes. I just see the

stuff that people are doing with people. I hear over here the conversations they're having. The narratives they're spinning about different things. Yeah. You can't help yourself catch enough to be. Yeah. And I'm never I'm never going to say anything. You know, like I'm the I'm the kind of person where like, you know, even if I saw somebody doing something right next to me that I thought wasn't very efficient or effective. If they don't ask for my input, you know, it hasn't been solicited. I'm not going to, I'm not going to interject. But you do overhear these things and it's nice because I know that I'll always have some something to offer people that's, that's different to what they're going to get on average if they go out. It's like I never get busy in January because people go off and

they do all these like six weeks to get in shredded abs things, detox diets or whatever. Yeah. It's February and March when people have tried those other options, realized that actually the standard out there of stuff isn't as good as they thought it might be. And then they start thinking about, okay, maybe long-term behavior change actually has some sort of value to us, you know? Yeah. They only come to you when they're really ready. Which is good, you know. There's a great coach, William Walsh, who I have on my own podcasts.

and, you know, like, those people create customers for me. So, like, as much as I find it annoying and I wish that people didn't have to go through that, as often as, or as much as we would like people to want to go for, you know, the sensible, sustainable options starting off, when you have a shiny thing being dangled in front of you that's promising that you can get it done faster, and in some instances cheaper people are going to want to go for that

you know it's human nature that you want to believe that that could be true so I don't I don't begrudge people giving that a try first but it you know

there's a reason why you never see you know one year checkings on those people who are doing those programs it seems to always be a new person every six weeks

in that cycle and then you never hear from what happened to them later on, you know. Let's go into training a little bit and different things that I want to touch on with you. So you wrote a blog on functional training and how it destroyed your games. Can you talk a little bit about what you meant about that? Yeah, so I was training in a CrossFit gym while I was doing my master's in S&C, or training and coaching there. and my training was going really well.

It was kind of starting to break through some plateaus that I'd had for a long time. Because at that point, I'd been strength training. Fair, like, I started training when I was 15, but I started doing, like, what I would call, like, progressive, proper strength training from the age of maybe a base 19 or so, 20. And it was around that time that I got exposed to some functional training pages and ideas on social media. I'm sorry, just for listeners who might not understand. So what would you mean or they mean by functional training? Oh, yeah. So I saw this in your questions.

And actually, I think this kind of gets at the heart of the issue because nobody can really say what it is, you know? Like, I know what functional training should be based on the word functional. What? How is it marketed? Yeah. So to start off, like something that's functional means that it's being done for a purpose. or to achieve a goal. And to me, that's what training is.

Like all training, the thing that separates it from exercise, like just going into a spin class or something to get a sweat on, if you're training for something, it means that there's a desired goal that you're reaching for and you've got some kind of program you've created that's trying to get you there. So to me, like the word functional training is just kind of asinine and redundant. It's like saying, I'm going to have some wet water.

Like all water is wet. All training should be functional. and in reality, you know, if a bodybuilder wants to increase their bicep size, that means a bicep curl is functional for them, you know? If a powerlifter wants to increase their bench press, then a bench press is functional for them. A Turkish get-up is not a functional exercise for a powerlifter who wants to increase their squat. You know, the waist is never going to be challenging enough for their legs. So this kind of leads into, like, what you're referring to there, which is like, how do we actually practically see functional training present? in the real world, which I actually find quite interesting because what I've described just there

is a very open-ended thing that's going to be specific to, you know, each person and their goals. How we actually see functional training presented is a very narrow set of acceptable movements and exercises that for some reason have just become this dogma that this is supposedly the safest and most effective ways to do things. And there's some interesting stuff that we see. pretty much always present. So there tends to always be this major emphasis on activating the glutes, pretty much all the muscles on the back ear body. So upper back, glutes, abs, it seems like you can never have enough work for those things. Like, I've literally heard people who, you know, proliferate these ideas, say things like you can never do enough pulling. You can never do enough band pull

parts. There were some people a few years ago who were saying like do a hundred band pull apart every single day for shoulder health. The other thing that tends to be pretty prevalent is a fixation on stability. So using unstable surfaces with the viewpoints to improve instability. So doing things on bozo balls. That's the one that I would see often as someone's still. Yeah, I think that's become a bit of a meme. To be fair, I don't actually really see that too often. No, I don't see it anymore, but I see the jokes of it a lot. Yeah, I think it had its time. I think to be fair, what I tend to see with functional training now is it's really just very poor what I would see exercise selection for, you know, if we're going based off the principles of what we know make strength training effective, it kind of gets in the way of a lot of that.

So we want exercises to be stable because if something is stable, it means you can load it and you can produce a lot of force. and that's what gets you stronger. More force also means more mechanical tension, which is as far as we can tell at this point, like the primary driver for muscle hypertrophy, gaining muscle size. So stable is good. You know, anything where you are spending a lot of energy

trying to stop yourself falling over, it's probably not a great idea for strength. And I would also argue it's not good for stability either because there's just not a loss of times in the real world where I can imagine you're going to be standing on a very, wobbly surface like that, you know? In general, if you are being stronger, is probably going to be more applicable to those situations

than having done loads of stuff on a wobble board or whatever. There might be athletes listening to this podcast now who are thinking, well, I, you know, do my push-ups off of OC ball or do my squats off them because it's going to help me with balance and coordination for, you know, in multiple directions and so on and so forth, or at least that's what I've been told. Yeah.

I understand where they're coming from with that because the problem with functional training, and I'll give it its due, is that it's intuitive. And I understand that that's why it's what a lot of people gravitate to. Because when I first kind of got sucked into this stuff, I started incorporating a lot more of these ideas in my own training. And then the narratives I would tell people about why we're doing certain exercises. And the problem is it makes you sound like, you know what you're talking about much more than the same. simple stuff does. You know, like I got way more buying with people much faster when I was telling them, we're doing a deadlift this way, because if you don't, you're going to get hurt because of

X, Y, Z thing, you know. And so sexy cells. Yeah. And it makes you sound very learned. It makes you sound like an expert. It just, it seems intuitive to people, this easy to understand concept that like this other thing that functional training tends to harp on is this idea of neutrality. like you want to have a really flat back. And again, it's like this narrow set of movement standards. Anytime you do anything, your back has to be flat.

Anytime you do any bending, your knees have to be directly in line with the middle of your fuss. Anytime you do any exercise, your shoulders need to be pulled back and down. And it's just like, it's like they're constantly referring to this mental image of the guy in the anatomy chart

with his arms perfectly by his side and everything. And, you know, it's just what happened for me, me is that I hurt my knee after um i'd see in a video that you know maybe some of your listeners might um follow this guy squat university and a lot of the stuff that he posts is around quote unquote fixing asymmetry and basically people come to him with pain or injuries that they've been having trouble with solving he points out some degree of asymmetry in their movement and then

diagnoses that as the issue, gives them exercises to do, they're going to supposedly fix that. And the person, well, at least in the ones that he posts, they get better. So I know for a lot of people listening, they'd be like, well, what's wrong with that? Well, the problem is that we don't actually know that that was what was causing the pain. And we don't actually know that what he did there was necessary in terms of, we're now going take you away from doing any of that, you know, in my, in my scenario, it was basically I needed to change the way I was holding the bar. When I squat, it's a little bit crooked. I've never figured out why. I don't know if it's because one of my arms is a bit longer, one of my shoulders

is a little bit tighter. I don't know what it is exactly. But, you know, at that point, I was squatting around 170, 180 kilos maybe. And I tried fixing this thing. And I hurt my knee for the first time ever and I'd never gotten hurt in the gym before I can't say 100% that was the reason why I got hurt but I know you know even after that when I started to question this stuff and went back to doing the squats the way that I'd always done I felt a lot stronger yeah didn't have any issues with the knee pain I mean I can go into the whole kind of journey that I went through with figuring out how this stuff maybe doesn't have as much validity to it as I thought it did but ultimately I found that you know these ideas just were over-complicating these over-complicating things and not serving me

so do we do you think it's that we're getting too a lot of times we're getting too bogged down into the into the finer details of you know it has to look a certain way there's a there's an idea of perfection that it has to look like in order for it to be correct yeah and the other thing that the main thing that i would question is why Like, where, why do we believe that that particular way of doing things is perfect? Because there's no studies to support it. And in the absence of evidence, you're usually going to look at something closer to anecdotes, which is like real world stuff. And you can look around, like if you go to, like a live stream of the next IPF competition, people who are super strong.

There's asymmetries abound, you know, people holding bars. is crooked, one knee, like, shifted in more than the other, one foot further forward than the other. There's people that have set world records with asymmetries. You know, I think it's more close to the truth that asymmetries are the norm. And that actually this idea of being, quote unquote, perfectly symmetrical, using perfect technique. We just don't have the evidence to support what that perfect technique is in the first place. Or that it's a first place. Or that it's a, it even needs to be changed. You know, in my case, trying to change, it derailed my training.

I got hurt and it took me a year or more to get back to where I was. And so, you know, the one thing that I would say is that this stuff is never black and white. So it's not that I would never, ever change something in somebody's technique. You know, if somebody is doing a bench press and they're holding the bar totally more to one side and it looks like one arm just isn't getting any work at all. yeah i'm probably going to investigate that i'll probably have them get down on a bench with one dumbbell in each arm i'll see is there a huge strength discrepancy there if there is yeah of course i'm going to work on that you know i'm sure most people don't want one arm to be twice as strong as the other they don't want twice the muscle development in one side but i don't think that's actually an

accurate representation of how this um bears ath in the real world most of the time most of the time people have a tiny little difference in how they're moving and it gets just blown out of proportion totally and it becomes like we're going to take all the weight off the bar you're going to do these exercises for a few weeks and i don't think we have enough evidence to suggest that that's actually necessary that makes sense so here's a question so let's say let's say because i suppose we'll we'll talk about it in the context of like an amateur athlete or an athlete who's trying to improve their performance at the moment because i think these are they're probably the people that fall into the the functional training and aspect a little bit more

than the gen pop. What are some, what are, what, what can, if an athlete, let's say, is following kind of functional training or getting kind of, um, down a rabbit hole with that, what would your advice be to them in terms of how they should approach their training then? I think that there's a major misconception that because somebody plays a sport, their work in the gym needs to look like that sport. So a lot of, this is another thing I kind of forgot to include is that a lot of functional training concepts relate to this idea that we're trying to make the gym work look like the stuff on the field or in the ring or whatever. Yes.

And again, I don't think that's well supported. I think really what people need to be thinking about is that the work in the gym is by its very nature supposed to be general. It's not supposed to make you better at your sport. If that was the case, then, you know, airlifters and bodybuilders would be competing in the NFL. They'd be winning Six Nations Championships. It's not the case. And I think this is where people get mixed up,

where it's almost, it's this weird paradox where it's like they both expect the gym to do huge things for their performance, but then also kind of poo-poo the effect that it could have as well. Because like a lot of people will do stuff, like do a bit of gym work and get stronger. improve their power and stuff like that and then go back into playing a sport and be like, well, I didn't get any better at us. But it's like, yeah, but you have to practice.

Like, I mean, I could be twice as strong as an athlete that I'm training who plays is Gaelic football and I'll just get hit in the face with the ball every time I go out on the field because I don't have the skill, you know? So like what we're trying to do in the gym is we're trying to increase our capacity and then we express that capacity

with the skill that we have that we train in practice and when we play the sport. But there's never, never any guarantee or notion that just because you've gotten stronger, you've gotten faster, you've built up all these general abilities that you're going to be a superstar athletes.

Like unfortunately, especially for sports that have a huge demand for, you know, find motor skill and coordination, things like golf, things like tennis, even like on the field sport end of things, things like football, soccer as well. Unfortunately, the technique and skill aspect of it matters so much that if somebody is,

you know, 20% better in that department, you could probably gain as much strength as you want and you're never going to be better at the sport than them because it just doesn't matter that. And I think that's why you see the most nonsense and shenanigans happening in S&C for those sports because unfortunately it just doesn't matter as much. as it does in something that's a little bit more capacity driven. Like, you'll never see nonsense training happening with track and field athletes. You know, it's, it's such an athletic, or, well, I kind of hate using that because it's such

a general vague term. But in terms of what most people think of in terms of athleticism, like power, speed, explosiveness, things like track and field, obviously like, you know, 100 meter sprinting and stuff like that, those guys don't do silly nonsense in their training because they can't afford to because they really have to be getting stronger, more explosive, etc., in measurable ways. Where you do see the silly nonsense happening is in sports where you can just about get away with it, you know? I mean, there was a guy from Manchester United.

I can't remember his name. I know he played for England. I think maybe he played for man. You don't hold me to that. But this was about, he was probably back in like 20, 15 or something like that. I think it was around like the Europeans. Yeah. I remember he was bragging in the media about the fact that we did absolutely no gym work at all. And he was on the English, uh, you know, national soccer team. Uh, and I would believe him, he didn't look like

he lifted at all, but he was so skillful that he could get away with that. If you do that in rugby, you'd get snapped in half. So, you know, a bit of a long winded answer to your question, but I think what I'm trying to say essentially is that you build your general capacities, things like, your strength and stuff like that with the best tools available for us. And those aren't going to be exercises that look like what you do in your sport. Because again, to go back to what makes strength training exercise is effective, they need to be simple or they need to be, well, simple,

but they need to be stable. You need to be able to load them through a full range of motion. I need to be able to progress them for a long time. If you're trying to do like, how long can you progress a weight wrapped around your boxing glove for? You can't do that. And it's not training anything except your shoulder, which is going to be trying to hold the weight up before it falls down.

Whereas even though a bench press and a squat doesn't look anything like boxing, you're going to build the muscles in a way that you can actually get them strong enough that it can make a difference when you go in to throw a punch, because now you've built up an ass that's strong and powerful enough to generate enough torque from your hip, you know, the muscles through your chest and your shoulders that can deliver us at the end then as well. And I think that's lost. on people and I understand that and that's a big reason I got an S&C as well because coaches don't understand that either in terms of like sports team coaches. They're more than often not going to look

at the guy who's doing stuff that looks like their sport and going to think he's an expert and you're just you're always going to be fighting a losing battle in that sense. I'd say I'd say social media has amplified that as well because if you see like a footballer or whatever at Lee who is like at the top of their game, unbelievably skillful, and then you see them doing a training session in the gym that they might have recorded and has all these fancies things. Well, if you're a kid, you're looking at

and thinking, oh, Christiano Ronaldo does this and he plays like this, which means that if I do this, I'll be able to play like this, but it's the opposite way around. It's like, he plays like that so he can get away with training like this. Yeah, yeah. And I actually,

I wrote an article and did a podcast about this because it's, again, sort of a hard concept for people to wrap their head around. Because again, it's intuitive. You look at the guys who are at the top and you assume whatever they're doing is what I need to be doing. Yes. But that's actually a logical fallacy called survivorship bias.

So the best way that I've heard for basically explaining why this is a mistake is, it's actually a story from World War II. So basically the allies were trying to figure a is how to armor their planes in an efficient way. because the more armor you put on a plane, obviously, the less range it has, it would have to refuel sooner because it's heavier. So the idea was we're going to put the armor in the places that matter the most. So what they did was, you know, the planes that would return from combat, they would look at where the bullet holes were. And the idea was that those are the areas that we need to armor more because that's where they're getting shot. Again, it's intuitive. It makes sense, you know, all the bullet holes are there, so that's where you put them.

And then I think it was a mathematician called Abraham Wald from Columbia University, I believe, actually pointed out they were making a huge mistake because the problem was their sample was completely biased because they were only looking at the planes that made it back from combat. So what they were actually seeing was wherever the bullet holes were on those planes was actually where you could afford to get shot and still make it back alive. because interestingly there was no bullet holes in the cockpit where the pilot was there was no bullet holes

in the fuselage that could explode and kill them and so all those bullet holes that were missing were where those planes that got shot out of the sky got shot. So that's called survivorship bias where you assume that because somebody has succeeded that that was the best way to get there

and it's similar when we look at like basically the best analogy for that in terms of the gym setting is when you just look at the big strong guy in the gym, and you just copy exactly what he did. What you're not seeing is all the people that took that approach and got hurt or made no progress. Because the major confounding variable that we always have

in something like training is genetics. There's some people who have such good genetics, particularly professional athletes, that they can kind of do anything that's even approaching some sort of logical plan. And they just make progress. It's not fair at all. But if you don't have those genetics, you're probably not going to get results, you know?

And that actually feeds back into kind of what we were talking about at the start, about what I really like about working with non-athletes, regular people, because you have to know, you have to, it gets to the meath of what's most important and closest to the best way to train. Because if I, you know, sometimes the big strong guy has been doing something smart. but I would say on average if I took the stuff that some of the massive guys

that I see training in the gym were doing and I had someone who's brand new to training doesn't really have any genetic aptitude at all if I had them do that they'd probably just get hurt and I think probably one of the you know I don't think this has been research

that well but I would imagine as we start to do more research on the genetic coding that makes for people who end up becoming really fantastic athletes, I would imagine they have some natural resiliency around injury that the average person doesn't have. Because the number one thing that will stop you from being a professional athlete is if you get hurt.

You know, we all know stories of people who, you know, they were the golden boy or golden girl and they were on this road to success and they had some kind of massive injury that derailed their career and they just never came back from it, you know? I know so many athletes who are. were unbelievably talented as kids and then ACL injury or something like that and never played again.

Yep. So, and they very well could have been trying to follow what it looked like, you know, the really fantastic guys were doing. And it might just have been the case that those guys were able to survive

that type of training. It doesn't mean that that was the best way of doing things, you know? That's such a good analogy for the survivorship bias. I love that. Yeah, it's a great story. I think it's really good for,

it communicates very quickly to P.E. people why it's a silly thing you know yeah it really paints the picture of of why people are getting away with the kind of training that they're doing and could you give me a breakdown then in terms of like the considerations you make when programming for a client as someone in the in the general population well you know when you're working with someone in the general population I think the biggest difference between them and you know somebody who's more advanced is that more often than not, training isn't going to make up as big a part of their life as those people who are a little bit more advanced. So, and I think this is where I had to do a little bit of,

or a lot of upskilling transitioning from like S&C into PT was upskilling on the soft skills. So probably the biggest thing that I try to do when I start working with someone is really figure if and get to the meath of why it is that they want to start working with me and why it is they want to start training. Because I kind of, I look at, you know, the road success is I kind of look at it as like a hierarchy, like a pyramid. And if you could imagine the foundation or the base of that pyramid is the person's why or their motivation.

And basically, if that foundation isn't set super solid, then everything above it is going to crumble and fall over. It's why I'll never take anybody who I think is being forced into training by a spouse or a family member or something like that. If they're not doing it for them and for good reasons, like, you know, their health or, you know, being able to play with their kids or stay out of the nursing home or whatever, you know, I don't take people who wants to, like, do photo shoots and get shredded and stuff like that and then I'll never see them again. Yeah, people can do that if they want, you know, there's, there's no judgment for me there, but I want people who are kind of

going a little bit deeper than that and they really want to, you know, change their life with this stuff. So that's the first consideration that I have and I want to make sure that I'm a good fit for somebody and they're a good fit for me and my philosophies and stuff like that. And then the next step up from that would be looking at creating, you know, a smart, realistic plan for them. And I think that's probably one of the main places where people go wrong when they try to do this stuff by themselves. I think a lot of times you've probably offend this yourself, Carl, when people come to you to work with you that I think people think we're going to pull some magic tricks out of a bag, like exercises they've never seen before,

some kind of super secret sets and rep scheme or something that's going to revolutionize everything. When really I see a large part of my job is actually trying to do right by the person by making sure they're not giving themselves a silly, ridiculous plan they won't be able to stick to. because the more the more wins or successes I can get somebody to stack up at the start, the more likely they'll stick with it long term. So I think most people would probably look at the training that I give people starting off and think,

you know, that's way too easy. And to be honest, it is too easy. I want it to literally be too easy so that the odds of them not being able to stick to it are very low. So if somebody's never trained before, I am never going to put them on to a four-day training plan

and to be honest, probably not even a three-day training plan because even going from no training at all to one day of training is literally a 100% increase in the amount of dedication that have to put into this stuff each week. So we make it, you know, we kind of figure out like

where are they starting from? If they've never trained before, I'm going to give them, you know, one, two days max a week because I know they can make great progress with that anyway. You find that that's a difficult conversation to have when they're, if when someone's just,

starting and excitement is probably at peak level? Sometimes I think, you know, I always say that, you know, for whatever reason, I'm very blessed with the people who come to me and maybe it's the message that I put out makes it very clear. You attract people with similar values and personalities as yourself. Yeah, like I said, like, you know, I don't, I don't really get New Year's resolution fueled people. Now, saying that, I have had people where I've had to. really convinced them that look you know I know that you want to do five days a week and change your entire diet but I'm telling you right now the odds aren't in your favor like I've never ever once

seen that work for somebody before you know even myself as somebody who this is my whole life this is my job I don't know what I would do without training it's such a huge part of kind of what gives me meaning in life I started off small You know, and I had days where I missed the gym when I first started like really trying to get into like the progressive strength training stuff. And I had to pull things back and get consistent before I started adding more stuff in. So the odds that somebody were like this isn't even in the top three priorities in their life is going to be able to jump into five days a week and change their whole diet and start going to bed at 10 o'clock. It's just not going to happen most of the time. So yeah, there can sometimes be a little bit convincing there.

what I usually say to people is like, okay, we'll make a deal, which is basically that if you, if you do, you know, the two days a week or whatever consistently for the next month, we'll add another day in. And usually what happens is people find that actually even two days a week is a little bit of work to make sure you get 100% of those sessions in. And I'm not a hard ass with people. Like what I've seen is that typically if you're a beginner or somebody in that range, you can probably get away with about nine. 90% compliance. So, you know, if you're doing two days a week in the space of a month, you can afford to maybe miss one to two of those at most. But I tend to not really like people to miss any sessions just because it's a bit of negative reinforcements. Yes. Like I want people to basically start making the shift in their identity from I'm not a gym

person to I am a gym person or like I'm the kind of person who cares about my fitness and makes time for it. Which is similar to the identity that you had to shift when you were younger because you Yeah, sports. Exactly. And that's why that plank story is so important for me because that was a threshold where I crossed where I think if I would have quit that day, I sometimes wonder if I ever would have got of the training because I put a lot of work.

I think the first time I did that plank thing. I got like, you know, two minutes or something. And then the second time I got five minutes. And then I trained for like three months to try to win it then when we did the read test or whatever and that's why I want people to succeed because if you start failing at the fitness thing immediately it basically proves to that little bad voice in the back of your head that tells you that you know you're never going to be able to do this you're giving proof to that you know it's such a fine line isn't it between having someone that like comes into you and then trains for the rest of their

lives or never trains again and if they have like a bad personal training and experience where you have a personal trainer who might not be knowledgeable and makes sense. it as difficult as possible for that person. Yeah. They may never come back again. Yeah. Absolutely. And like, I think what people have to remember as well, like if you're, especially if you're a coach listening to this is that, you know, if you give somebody really hard stuff to do on the first day, in their head, they're thinking this is what I have

to do every single time I come into the gym for the rest of my life now. And that's not true. They don't. Like the nice thing about being a beginner is that you can actually do. pretty cheesy workouts for the first month or so where like in my experience I don't really have to take people any closer than like really about four to five reps away from failure for the first while and they'll easily keep adding weight to the bar. It means that it's a big shock then when they get to like the end of that beginner stage and they realize like okay we have to really kind of start pushing a little bit more here to make progress but I would rather have that than have somebody come in the first day, blog them, have them unable to walk for three or four days afterwards

and never come back again. So, you know, that's kind of, that that stage is, you know, we're setting a smart, realistic plan where it's, you know, a number of days that I'm confident they can do consistently. Exercises that I'm confident they'll be able to do. Particularly like if I'm working with people online, I tend to go a lot more. Ironically closer, it's probably what like the functional training type people. would prescribe for everybody in terms of like

I'm not giving somebody a barbell squat if they're doing online coaching with me and they've never been at a gym before they're gonna do what would your alternative be like a goblet squat or?

Yeah a goblet squat or like honestly like if people are really deconditioned they could even just do body weight squats and get a lot out of that. You know I'll get them doing stuff that I'm very sure they'll be safe failing on like dumbbell bench presses and stuff like that for high reps

because I think what's interesting when you read the research, particularly on beginners, especially on beginners, is that almost anything works at the start. There's a great saying that a beginner beginner could ride a bicycle and their bench press would go up. So there's just no needs to make things unnecessarily difficult or complicated for them at the start because the real battle is getting them to do the thing consistently. So if somebody came in to me and they, you know, really didn't want to do the exercises that I thought would be slightly more optimal or efficient for them or whatever.

But I thought the ones they did want to do would make them excited to come in. We're just doing those. Like to be honest, if somebody was like, I just want to do upper body for the first month, I'd be like, if that means that you come to the gym for the first month and I can start working in some legwork at some point later on, like, I don't really care. Because I think people really underestimate that the first and biggest balance. battle and why I kind of have that hierarchy in my mind is that until you're consistent, nothing else really matters because basically my hierarchy goes, you know, getting your motivation, right, then making the smart, realistic plan. And then the next step, which is really where the consistency comes in is what I would call embracing and stacking up what I'd

called good enough days. So a good enough day is basically just employing the idea and principle that anything is better than nothing. Exactly. Yeah. And because it's the main thing that you'll see happens with people who get into fitness in the new year is because they've created this really unrealistic, difficult plan, it's very easy to mess it up. It's very easy to fall off because you've made the barrier for having a perfect day so high that it's very likely that you're going to have to make a compromise somewhere. What usually ends up happening I find with people is that they underestimate how stressful a stressful week is going to be. And then something happens where basically they might only have like half an hour to train instead of the hour that they would like. And so they say,

feck it, you know, I want to do it properly. So I'll just do it tomorrow. What they, what they underestimate is that they've now mentally given themselves an out for any time that they're not able to do something perfectly and the odds that they're going to miss that like i i think it's crazy how um predictable it is that if somebody misses one workout it's like the odds of the missing the next workout doubles at least um so that's why i harp on that good enough thing so much because i would really much rather somebody even go into the gym and just do 10 minutes and then leave just so they could tick that thing off for the day and say, yes, you know, I did what I was meant to do today, even though, because anybody I know who stuck with this stuff long term does that, they employ it.

They, you know, they do sessions when they're not feeling amazing and they just get the first exercise done and walk out the door because that's what keeps them stacking up sessions over the course of months and years, which is where you really start seeing huge changes happen. you know a good example i give is like a really strong guy and you one time came into the gym he'd forgotten his uh his workout top and he'd come straight from the office so he trained wearing like his button up shirt from from work you know and it wasn't most people would just go home that's that's my that's my outlet yeah there's my excuse not to yeah they're looking for an excuse whereas he's looking for a way to work around it he borrowed shorts from somebody else that he

knew he just didn't do any exercises he thought would pop the buttons off the whole thing. And so he embraced that, you know, good enough date. And then the next stage up from that, I was a very long answer to your question because this is the last part of the pyramid. And ironically, it's the part where everybody wants to jump in is that's where you start doing like the optimizing stuff or like adapting and reviewing stuff. People want to jump in on that level where they want to find the perfect plan, the perfect exercises, you know, they'll change stuff every couple of weeks or whatever. And you can only

actually make informed decisions about that when you've been doing something consistently for long enough to know if it's working or not. So basically, like if you're at that point, we're able to start making those informed decisions saying like, okay, maybe you'll get more results now if we add in an extra day. Maybe we could change this exercise. We're going to change the reps on this or whatever. You know, once you're at that stage, if you can stack a point. You know, you can stack a some consistency there. That's where you start seeing amazing results happen. But the problem is people aren't willing to do that unsexy first two stages of, you know, really digging down to like, what do I really want? Which is scary because once you've spelled that out, that means now you know

if you fail or not, making a smart, realistic plan and then executing the good enough days. And until you get through all of that really unsexy, just like putting the head down for the first while stuff, you won't get to the results that you want at the top then. That makes complete sense. Yeah, it's such a, it's such a fine line. I even see it in myself when you were speaking there. Even like I just, I started doing my tie only over the last nine months, first time ever doing that sport whatsoever.

Yeah, fair play. And, um, like, it was like, I knew that I had to stay somewhat consistent. Otherwise, um, once I stop, I'll just stop completely because when it's new and it's difficult, it's very, it's very energy consuming because you're, you've no skill in it and you're a beginner and it's, and you forget how crap it is to be a beginner. And so I, so I was trying once a week for the last nine months and there was a time in there where then I went up like two a week after that and then I was starting to kind

to get into a flow, but then I missed a session and like you said, the odds of you then miss another session, I missed a whole month and I was a month and then I kept on saying to myself, if I don't go back tonight, I'll never go back. and I had to break that cycle and now I'm back in the flow of it but it's so easy to just say all right I'm just going to give me myself that outlet of that one session

and then it turns into a month six months a year never again yeah yeah and that's like ironically you know let's say that happened when you were doing I don't know say two moitai sessions a week or something like that you know if you tried to sell somebody on the idea of starting with just one a week so they could be consistent

they're like oh that's not enough but then sure like if you end up missing a month, the guy who was doing one a week has passed you ace pretty soon because he's just stacked them up consistently, you know? Yeah. And that's what I think, people just think too short term with this stuff. Like, especially with strength, muscle gain, all that sort of stuff. It just, it takes so much time that it's very difficult to, yeah, it's why it does like, and I don't see anything wrong with six-week challenges, like for getting people on board or whatever.

but it's why it's so appealing to people because it's just difficult to think of this idea that you're going to actually need to, you know, make this thing happen consistently for months at a time before you start really seeing the big changes happening. Yeah, it's so difficult to get your mind around like the small compounding effect of little small changes on a weekly basis. And you touched on rep ranges and stuff like that. So even if we go on to the kind of, let's say there's a few people listening to this who it might be a little bit more advanced in the training.

consistently they want to optimize and they're getting kind of bogged down in the detail of rep ranges could you talk a little bit about why people get confused on rep ranges and how they should think about or approach the rep ranges with their training uh yeah well i think it goes back to that idea of like knowing what it is that you're trying to get out of your training in the first place and then it becomes a lot easier to work backwards from there so you know if somebody is training for hypertrophy or muscle gain. You know, there's been a lot of stuff in the research over the last kind of decade or so

that's suggested that, you know, there is no hypertrophy rep range. That, you know, they've done studies where they have people do sets of three and they've done studies where they've had people do sets of 30. And then, you know, the results end up looking pretty similar. What I think gets lost a little bit there is that there has to be a practical element to it as well.

So basically, like, if you're looking to gain muscle, what you're looking to do is increase the amount of force that you're putting on your muscle, but you also need enough volume as well. So, like, the problem with doing a one-ret max every time you come into the gym is that it's just not enough total work. You know, the force is super high, which is great,

but you can only do one of them, and that's not going to be enough to make most people who've been training for a while grow. It's part of the reason why you see Olympic weightlifters are so strong but they don't have big muscles obviously bigger compared to the average person but if you're comparing with like bodybuilders or whatever

so there's clearly like a minimum amount of volume that you need to get in I think even though it sounds very brosciencey there's actually a lot of validity to that idea of making most of your training happen in like that 6 to 12 six to feet 15ish rep range

if you're looking for muscle gain. And the reason why is because I think it's just the most practical in terms of, you know, most people have an hour, maybe an hour and a half to work with when they're in the gym. If you want to be able to do more than a few exercises and be done in somewhere between like three to six sets in an exercise,

I just think that makes the most sense because assuming you're lifting somewhere close to failure, you know if you're doing six to 12 reps and assess you won't really need more than about three to six sets to guess what you need out of the exercise and it gives you time then to be able to get through maybe say four to six exercises in a session um so you know and like in terms of i think where people get into the weeds then is like well what's the effect of sixes versus eights versus 12s I don't think we have good evidence that it really matters all that much. I think there could be a little bit of individual difference there in terms of, you know, a great guy.

I think one of the questions you had in there is like people who've kind of influenced my coaching and a really good guy for ideas and programming is a powerlifting coach called Mike Tusharer. he was actually responsible for popularizing the use of RPE, which stands for rate of perceived exertion in powerlifting. He actually popularized, sorry, RIR, reps and reserve, which they're very similar to each other. But he also has started using what he would call emergent strategies for programming, which is basically the idea that you basically let the way the person responds to the training dictate the choices that you make. So what I usually say to people is that like you're just there's never going to be a scientific study that comes out that says sets of six are yes.

Just do sets of six forever for everybody in every scenario. That's the way to go. Humans are really a complex biological system. There's too many variables involved. You know, you'd never be able to make a study that controls for all of that for everybody. what you can do is treat yourself as an individual. Obviously, you want to start with, you know, where the evidence is generally pointing towards, which probably would be somewhere in that 6 to 12 rep range.

And then you go ahead and you do what most people don't do when they're in this optimizing thing is actually just do the feck and thing for long enough to figure out if it's working or not. I have had many times with exercises where I swap up the rep range because for whatever reason, I just feel like I'm feeling the exercise better when it's a little. little bit heavier, less reps. And some exercises also lend themselves, I think, better to certain rep ranges. You know, like if you're doing a bent over row, I think that if you're doing really, really heavy weight, there's likelihood that your lower back is going to start taking over there and it's going to turn into more of a deadlifty type motion. So probably better to go a little

bit lighter on that. And so that kind of covers the hypertrophy thing. You just kind of have to experiment. I think once you're in that 612 rep range, you're honestly fine, as long as you're taking it somewhere close to failure. And the main thing is that you're making progress. And similarly with the strength one, if you're training for that, obviously the main

thing that's going to carry over the most is doing heavy stuff. So the ideal would be if you could go in and do a 1-rap max every single day, but that's not feasible. You can't recover from that. You know, even power lifters don't do that. Like, they usually would work up to doing like their

I think usually like their opening lift on each of the exercises like a week or two out from competition and they wouldn't go any heavier than that. So basically you have to do submaxima work for strength. So you're towing the line between basically going light enough that you don't create loads of fatigue, but heavy enough that it's going to actually carry over to assuming it's a one rep max that you're looking to go up because strength is specific. So it could if it's a three rep max you don't need to be doing ones necessarily to make that go up both um you know with all of this stuff and any kind of training variable uh that people debate about carl for me i think what gets lost a little bit is that ultimately we're in the gym to make progress and so when somebody is asking me these things

it's usually the first thing i'll ask them is well are you making progress because if you're making progress it doesn't get any better than that um especially when you've been trained for a while. If you're if you're making any kind of significant increases to your major exercises over the course of weeks and months, you know, at a reasonable amount. Yeah, if you're adding half a kilo to your deadlift every year, you probably could do with optimizing some stuff in your program. But I think once you're making progress, it's very unlikely that you're going to get a lot out of tinkering with stuff more from there. What you want to do is waste until you hit a bit of a wall or start to slow down and then you go to what okay what are the most likely things like i made um

if anybody wants to subscribe to my newsletter i have a free uh plateau breaking bible and this was gonna be my following question for you as well to break down a little bit so even in terms of obviously like if someone's making progress with with their training um there's there's there's basically no need to be kind of tinkering with things but let's say they've been training for while they've gone from kind of a novice to an intermediate trainer and they've hit a little bit of a wall with their training and they're not sure what to do what what are some of the um ideas around uh platos that you could suggest yeah so i think it's something that doesn't get talked about enough um to be honest i think a lot of coaches just don't really have a good answer for us and you know i've

i've come up with what i think makes the most sense logically but you know obviously it's going to depend on each person. So I basically look at it in terms of, you know, when we're working with training, the human body, like I said, it's a complex system, which basically means everything is intertwined with everything. You're not going to be able to say for absolute certain.

Anything is definitely the way that it is. You're basically just going to go off patterns and what seems to be making sense and the noise of it all. So I start with what's the most likely thing and then work down from there, and kind of check them off as I go. So like the most fundamental thing that you have to be doing for training is training.

So that might sound kind of like stupidly obvious, but the amount of times that I'll get people who say that they're stuck and I ask them about if they're getting all of their training sessions in and it's like, oh, well, you know, the odd time where I'm kind of tired, I skip the gym.

It's like there's no point at looking at anything else until you're 100% consistent because, you know, the, like, I mean, the only thing. yeah exactly like the beginners have these superpowers for um getting better at training in every single session and and yet the only thing that could screw that up is if they don't train consistently so that's how important consistency is so we tick that off first so assuming somebody is consistent i think the next thing to go to then is probably looking at um you know things like they're in

nutrition and their sleep because I find that the problem with the beginner stage is that it kind of plays a little bit of a trick on people in that they they just think this is going to be it forever now you know like oh this is great I just go into the gym every day and I'm able add two and a half kilos and I do my best bench press ever and it never occurs to them that like yeah well you know if you kept doing that forever you'd be benched 300 kilos in the space of like a year or so so probably not going to happen so basically what happens for most people when they hit a plateau out of the beginner stage i find is that they're actually just not um they're not fueling themselves enough but they're not eating enough food

for fueling themselves for the workouts and they're not eating enough for recovering and or their sleep might be kind of poor as well so those kind of things are usually i find unless the program is really dumb. It's usually more likely that that sort of stuff is causing the issue. And to be honest, even if it's not 100% the cause for all of the plateau, it has to get fixed at some point. Anyway, so, you know, if somebody is, has hit a plateau and I find out they're only eating 50 grams of protein a day, it's probably more than likely making up the majority of the reason for why they're stuck because it's so far below what we know in the research is likely to be where you're optimizing your returns from training. So I'm like the thing with the nutrition thing is you could

kind of go on making it a little bit better forever. But you know, everybody has to at some point say this is the amount that I'm willing to make sacrifices in my life in terms of being able to do the odd night days, being able to enjoy desserts, all of that sort of stuff. So you have to draw a line at some point and move on to like where else could you possibly make some improvements that would help with a plateau. Then so the next thing would be, you know, one of the major principles for training is progressive overload. And people mess progressive overload up in both ways.

So either not training hard enough or training so hard that they can't actually recover from us. So you can get people who have been doing the exact same. sets, reps, weights on every single exercise from once at a time and, you know, they're puzzled about why they're not making progress. It's because you're not challenging your body enough. So, you know, let's start putting a little bit of extra weight on there, two kilos more this week, a couple reps extra, whatever. But then on the flip side, usually more on like the teenage boys side of things, you get people thinking they should be able to add 10 kilos to an upper body

exercise every week. Again, not really doing the mats in their head about where that would have them in a year. So basically you need to be doing what I would call the minimum effective dose. So adding just enough that you're able to make progress and recover from us. And that's something that becomes especially important as you get older because, you know, I feel that you get hurt easier as you get older if you kind of do silly things in the gym. So I've become a lot better at restraining myself. If, you know, if I've made good progress and hit a PR for that day, usually unless I'm going for like an all-time best, I'm going to be like, let's take that there, leave some in the bank so I know that there's room to make progress next time.

And that, you know, that takes some tinkering. Sometimes it can take working with a coach to figure out what that is. But basically, you want, I find, to usually have one to two reps in the tank. On average, most of the exercise has been you're training. You can go to failure every now and then. If you're doing a D-load or at the start of a training block, you can have more reps in the tank, certainly. but the majority of your training

you should probably only have about one to three reps in the tank at most then the other thing which kind of gets into some of the well so functional training kind of violates both of these the progressive overload that I talked about and then this next one specificity as well

you know it violates that the progressive overload principle by making things so unstable and hard to load that you can't actually load them for the long term but the other one then is a lack of specificity. So specificity means that your body basically gets good at the things that you do repeatedly. If you're a beginner, you can get away with some pretty major flexibility around that principle

because like we were saying with the bicycle, making your bench press go up. It's probably not going to make a world record power lifters bench press go up though. And is that you think that's a mistake that maybe not novice trainers but intermediates make where they end up program hopping too much? Program hopping, yeah.

Yeah, because obviously you're dead right. You need to be sending a kind of consistent stimulus to your body so that it's clear what it's trying to adapt to. The other big one as well, though,

is I think people sometimes try to get a little bit too clever with their programming and actually end up messing up the specificity. A big one in powerlifting, I think, is I'm not a huge, huge fan of the whole like training your weak point thing. I don't think that it lacks validity altogether. I think people are really bad at assessing this. And what happens basically is people will be doing the

basic exercises they want to get better at, say like a squat, a bench, press a deadlift or whatever. And they'll see some kind of content online about training your weak points. And they basically misdiagnose what they think the problem is and they start doing some totally different exercise that they think is going to fix it and they're actually just getting good at that exercise and they come back the initial one they wanted to get better at

and they haven't made any progress on it because... They've just had to waste them 12 weeks of doing a rehab for something that they didn't really need to rehab. Yeah, not even rehab. Just like, you know, a common one would be like, you know, based on just the biomechanics of most lifts,

they're typically going to be at their hardest point and you're going to have the least amount and mechanical advantage when you're in the bottom. So if I keep loading up weight on a squat, eventually you're going to miss. And if it's really, really heavy and really above what you can do, you're going to miss at the start point

where you start pushing out of the bottom, you know? And same with the bench press. If I loaded up 300 kilos on the bench press and bring it to my chest, I'm not moving that thing off my chest. chest. Does that mean that off the chest is my weak point or did I just have too much weight on the bar? This is what you spoke about earlier about load. Everything comes back down to load management. Load management and also just like not, I think it's very dangerous when you get into that

intermediate stage to start assuming things. Basically the more the more series of assumptions that we make, the more likely it is that we're going to be wrong about stuff. Especially again, when we're working in like what I call this complex system. Like the biggest mistakes people make in training is when they assume training is a simple system. Like you put a simple input in, you get a simple output. I do this exercise. It makes my bench press go up. It's not, that's not the way that it works.

And so I always go by Occam's Razors basically, it's a nice kind of decision-making tool where you assume that the most simple explanation for something is more often than not the correct one. and you know more often than not doesn't mean that it's always the case sometimes there are more complicated explanations for things but i find that you're going to set yourself up for success um the majority of the time if you go by the most simple explanation and for me if somebody isn't making progress on an exercise it's just because they're too weak you know they're not it's not that they need to go off and train some specific part of the lift somewhere else it's that their muscles literally just aren't aren't strong enough to generate the force in general.

And it's a sure best to just do that exercise and work on more fundamental stuff like your nutrition, making smarter weight increases, et cetera, then to hedge a bet that this exercise you saw on YouTube is going to directly target some part of the week where you're weak and then come back and make it go up. I do think that as you get more advanced, like certainly if you are somebody who is an advanced level power lifter or something like that, you probably have a lot of that basic stuff ticked off. And the problem is,

again, it kind of goes back to people looking at advanced people and assuming that that's what they need to be doing. I busted through a huge amount of plateaus in my kind of early to mid-20s when I started simplifying things more and actually just doing the basic stuff better and looking at things like my nutrition.

and like basically with this stuff Carl I would say like the average person when they're plateaued if they just got like an extra half an hour of sleep and added like 10% extra protein into their diet would probably do an awful lot more for breaking through than going away and looking at tinkering with programs

and stuff like that. So more often than not I need to squat more more often than not I need to probably eat more more often than not I get to bed a little bit earlier. Because our bodies like all our bodies know is resistance and they and they're going to adapt in the movement pattern that you're doing. So those are the muscles that it's going to prioritize making the adaptations in. So when you get too clever with this stuff, I just don't think our bodies are so detailed that the strength adaptations they get

that like it's like you have to be doing a close grip bench press to get your bench press to go up. There's just no other way, you know, or you have to be doing the bench press against bands. or a deadlift against chains or whatever. All of that stuff is fun. It can work sometimes, but I just think that you're opening up the odds of you failing any time that you start making assumptions about stuff too much. The good stuff is the boring stuff really, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. And it's not boring if you're progressing in it, but when you're not progressing, then you feel like you want to change. Exactly. This is where, you know, I think I'm quite different to a lot of coaches, is that

I think my training on the surface might look boring. Like I do change exercises here and there. For the most part, we're going to do like the bread and butter stuff that works and we're going to make progress on it for a while before we change things up. But I always say that like making progress

and reaching your goals is way more exciting than changing the exercises every single week. You know? And I feel like that's, it does two things. it gives a coach and ath from being able to show someone they're making measurable progress. Because how can you know if you're making progress if the exercise changes every single week? And it also gives the person who's doing the program an ace from having to push particularly hard.

Because every time that you change and exercise, the first really like two weeks, you're just getting used to learning how to do the thing properly, you know? That makes complete sense. Okay, I've two more. This has been brilliant. I've two more questions for you and then I'll let you go. So the first question I wanted to ask. is if you could give younger kidding one piece of advice about starting off and his strength and

condition and career or just career in general in the fitness industry what would that advice be uh well you know hindsight's 2020 obviously now you know if i got teleported back to when i was like going into college or whatever age um i probably wouldn't do s and c but the problem is that i don't know if I would have learned as much as I did, if I didn't do the degrees that I did. You know, my master's degree in particular was fantastic for really instilling the importance of critical thinking. So I learned a huge amount of both just how to how to critique different ideas, how to analyze research and stuff like that. So, you know, yeah, I'd love to be able to have gone back and got a head start on building a business with a PT.

career, but I don't know if I would be able to do as good a job if I didn't go down. You wouldn't have the skills that you have now that most PTs don't have. Okay, so here's a different question then to that. So let's reframe it. So if you were to go back again, what would you have done more of? I think I would have started personal training earlier. And, you know, not even necessarily in a business sense, but I think that. The experience?

Yeah, it's never too early. to just to start getting your hands dirty with coaching people. And all the best coaches that I know, interestingly, worked in CrossFit gyms. And I don't think there's anything particularly unique about CrossFit gyms, but what it does do is it throws a heap of the general population at you week in and week out. Like I'd say I probably trained at least 300 different.

people over the course of that four years. And the vast majority of them were not, you know, elite athletes or anything close to us. So coaching in itself is a skill. So I probably would have tried to just start training friends, family members, stuff like that, even just for free as early as possible. Just to start building that skill. The other thing as well is, I.

probably would have just told myself just to stop caring about what people think about me a lot earlier as well. Like I posted on social media for about seven years before I got any traction on it. And the main difference was I just I just stopped caring about if people disagreed with me. I think the problem with strength and conditioning is that it's quite a toxic culture that you're made to feel like if you step on the wrong person's toes say the wrong thing you might affect your employability down the line and you constantly have to have this really nicely curated network of the right people who like you and stuff like that and one of the things that's great about personal training is that you're actually directly rewarded for being yourself because you attract people who are like you and people appreciate authenticity um and And so that was when I started, you know, gaining more followers online, connecting with more like-minded people was when I actually just kind of took the gloves off and said, you know what, like all of this stuff that I'm seeing is bollocks.

This is what I actually think people should be doing. This is what I wish somebody would have told me when I was starting off with training or if I was starting off with coaching or whatever. And I just think there's a, we desperately need more of that in the fitness industry. I think there's a lot of fakery and people saying what they think people want to hear. And it definitely affects your bottom line. Like, you know, if you say the stuff that people want to hear, you're going to get more of them interested and whatever you're selling or whatever. But I feel very blessed that I have a job where I have the freedom to kind of think freely, speak freely.

And that, you know, in many ways, I'm kind of actively rewarded for us in terms of people connected. with it more than. Yeah, versus being punished for it if you were depending on other people to employ you. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And then the last one I have for you

is the same question. What advice would you give to an earlier, Killian, who was just starting off training? So what kind of training and advice in the gym would you want you to know earlier on? Yeah, that's a good question. I think

one of the big ones would be not to overcomplicate things you know stick with a program long enough to figure out if it's working the amount of program hopping I did when I was in my late teens, early 20s was just atrocious

and I think a big one that people really underestimate is actually the benefit of training with other people and not just from the standpoint of, I think it's massively underrated in terms of like how much it aids in your performance in the gym. I think most people naturally,

if they look over at somebody else who's doing more weight than them on an exercise, it's going to want to push a little bit harder than if they were there by themselves. But also just in terms of like, I think what a lot of people who aren't into training don't understand is that there's a there's a lot of joy in terms of like having it as a social outlet that you can do with with friends and i have some great memories from over the years of certain training sessions that i've had with friends and stuff like that um and particularly like in a country where we have this very unhealthy fixation on so much of our socializing revolving around alcohol um you know

don't be wrong i still drink and i love those times as well but i think especially as a get older and the hangover start hitting harder and you, I'd say a lot of people could benefit from realizing that actually there's this whole other thing that you can do with your friends that not only do you have great crack while you're doing this, but you know, you're home at a reasonable time. It's actively improving your health. And I probably would have done more of that. I did my fair share of training with friends when I was younger, but I think I could have done more of kind of like, you know, having one or two training partners consistently and building more memories that way and pushing each other a little bit harder. One thing I would say as well,

just to quickly go back to that other question in terms of like if there's anybody listening who's starting off as a coach is not to overvalue the social media stuff. It's, it's certainly got its value in terms of, I think it's good for like long. term branding and kind of building a reputation and a bank of content and stuff like that. But there are so many coaches that nobody knows about who have lots of clients and are doing very well for themselves because they do the really important thing, which is they do a great job with people and they get referrals through them and they build a business that way. And there's a lot.

People would be shocked at how many people have big followings on Instagram and are getting zero clients from us because it's not you can very easily become an entertainer on there. It's something I realized my page was kind of starting to turn into a year or two ago and I actively tried to step away from that because there's a big difference between people who want to be entertained online and people who want to actually learn from you and would consider actually working with you at some point. So I think there's a lot of danger. These social media companies as well, they kind of teach us and um coach us to value the wrong things like likes and stuff like that and i would say the majority of people who've ever gotten in contact with me online for coaching are people

who never once interact with my page they never left a like they never left a comment they never sent me a message and then out of the blue one day they were like hey you know i've been following your stuff for x amount of time sometimes years and now i'm finally ready to take the step and if I was just going off what Instagram told me to do, I never would have thought that person was getting any value from what I'm doing. And it was oftentimes posts that I thought did terribly that actually had a lot of value in there for them.

So I just thought I'd add that in there because if there are any coaches listening, I'd hate for them to get sucked into that rabbit hole of just chasing growth on social media at the expense of actually coaching people in real life. Yeah, it's that instant gratification, isn't it? Okay, this has got me a lot of likes, but has it actually brought any value to a person

who might potentially buy from you and likes and shares and followers don't pay the bills clients who want to work with you do. I have two accounts and one account I have 300 followers on it and the other account I have like 100K on it. Yeah. All my business comes from the 300 followers.

Yeah. And like people don't see that but like they're the people that live locally to me that just follow me for pure for train and stuff like that. And, you know, so I think that yeah, that's a huge, really important lesson, especially like the era that we're going into where it's just pushed more and more of being on social media. And even people buying past, you know, actually doing the trade of personal training, just to go straight onto social media and try to become viral famous without actually

understand them what they actually want to do. And there are two different things. Like you could, you could try to be an influencer. But like most of the people who are, big influencers in the fitness industry they're not coaches like that's not their job their job is content creators um there's no way you can compete with those people if your job the majority of the time is coaching people because you're just not going to have the time or resources to make flashy videos and posts and stuff you know yeah yeah and another thing you touched on there what i thought was really really important was even just the the social outlet of training and it's something that I've really come to understand of the importance of it.

I remember like I've gone through phases of different kind of work in the fitness industry. And I remember for a time there, I was like running boot camps. And it wasn't like, you know, general public lifting massive amounts of weights and stuff like that. And it was them doing, you know, a little bit of high intense training and a little bit of lift doing some sort of a resistance training. And then I got into my head.

It was like, so I'd have like 15 people in a room. They're all enjoying themselves. They're all training together. You know, they've gone from not training at all to just getting in there and inconsistent, which is the whole premises of what you spoke about. But I got into a phase then where I was like, no, you know, boot camps are no good. It has to be, you know, individual specific training program going into the gym by yourself at a commercial gym and following your own direct program.

And like, you know, I've come full circle to that and say like, you well, yes, it is important for you to have your own specific program and for you to see progress on that. But, you know, a lot of the people that actually came to be, you know, they just wanted to get out and move and get it out of the house for an hour. get away from their husband or their kids for an hour and like the impact of that of being able to and like you said like a lot of people

like having different outlets that isn't just going to the pub and I think as people are getting older a lot of people are spending less time in the pub now anyway and then kind of old institutions become prohibitively expensive anyway yeah exactly so like being able to have somewhere like especially as you get older and you probably don't see your friends as much you don't go out with them as much you don't have as much

of a social life as you used to especially if you're a parent or something like that To be able to go to the gym or to a class for an hour and meet people there and have that kind of social interaction that you need. Like that's, that's massive, I think. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's part of one of the things that CrossFit did really well. Yeah, like as I've, I used to kind of critique CrossFit quite a bit. Funny enough, I started with this, then worked in a CrossFit gym, then kind of like thought there were some aspects. of it that weren't great. And I would still say that, but I think one thing that they did really,

really well that was so different to what you would get in a regular gym before they came along was instilling this kind of community social aspect. And I think there's so many people out there that, you know, I'm very much an introvert, so I don't relate to us. I like training with maybe one, two friends at most, people that I already know. Like going into an exercise class for me would be hell. But there are people out there who would actually never do fitness if they didn't have an option like that available to them. And I think that it's fantastic that has become an option and it's become more normal. And that kind of goes back to like, you know, if I was working with somebody and it seemed like that was the hurdle for them, you know, being able to say to them

that like, look, I don't think personal training is the thing for you. I think you need to go, you know, find four or five friends who want to go do some kind of group training class or whatever because that's the thing that's going to get you doing this thing not only consistently but also enjoying it as well. Yeah. Yeah. It goes back to that thing then what's your optimal type of train

for what you want versus what you actually need. Yeah, it's whatever you'll do week in and week eighth, you know. Kenyon, this has been brilliant. If people wanted to reach out and ask you a little bit more about training or wanted to work with you, how can they find you? probably best way is my Instagram so my name on there is as dysfunctional patterns or if you put in

Killian O'Connor I'd say I'll come up as well there is a Gaelic footballer who's very popular called Killian O'Connor who I'm waiting to retire so I can get my my Google search optimization back but annoyingly there's also now a very talented teenage magician from I think it might be from me or something like that

who's called Kilino O'Connor yeah it's a very famous idea should I have. Yeah, yeah, I know. I didn't really expect that when I was growing up. Plus, yeah, at Disfunctional Patterns, feel free to shoot me a message. If you have any questions on training or anything like that, I'm always happy to give my two cents. So I also have my own podcast to Philosophy of Strength so you can find Philosophy of Strength on Spotify. I'll put everything in the show now. It's kidding. This is being brilliant today. Thank you very much for your time. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Really enjoyable. Thanks for watching. If you like that

episode and you want to see more content like this. Make sure you're subscribed and I'll see you on the next one.