Weights and Plates Podcast - 106 Strength Without The Noise Beyond Novice Training

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

In this episode of the Weights and Plates podcast, Robert Santana and Andy Baker pick up where they left off—diving deep into what really matters after the novice phase of strength training. From chaotic early training setups (including recording in a truck to escape jackhammers) to the predictable pitfalls lifters fall into, they unpack why so many people are eager to “major in the minors” before mastering the fundamentals.Together, they explore how goals shape programming—whether you’re training for strength sports, performance, aesthetics, or simply to avoid being “weak.” With candid discussion on genetics, aging, muscle-building potential, drug-influenced advice online, and why variety matters for performance and longevity, this conversation lays out the realistic roadmap every lifter needs once the newbie gains start to slow down.Subscribe for more episodes of Weights & Plates where we cut through the noise and get real about strength training, nutrition, and long-term progress. https://weightsandplates.com/online-coaching/Follow Weights & Plates YouTube: https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf-Instagram: @the_robert_santanaRumble: https://rumble.com/user/weightsandplates Web: https://weightsandplates.com

Welcome to the weights and plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host. Joined by Andy Baker for part two from our last episode, this time on video. Oh, did the last one want to be in only audio? Yeah, yeah. We just released the audio because my video was shit and you were having lighting issues. So people liked it.

That was the most chaotic attempt at filming a podcast in history. So I literally had guys in my kitchen like the day that we needed to record like with a jackhammer like pulling up tiles. So I had to go sit out in my truck to film. That was the only place without the jackhammer sound out in the driveway. And there was like no light. It was getting dark. So by the end of the podcast, I couldn't see you. Yeah.

It was just like little just shadows, you know, just a voice coming out of the darkness. So, you know, hopefully this one will be better. I hope so. So where we left off last time, we kind of went through your beginnings, talked about novice training, and then started talking about more intermediate, advanced stuff, diet. And I kind of wanted to pick up there because that's what kind of prompted us to go into this. We were talking about Rose and broadly speaking assistance exercises because we get a lot of questions about this. Everybody wants to start there. there's a big problem with people wanting to major in the minors.

Yeah. Yeah. So just to kind of rehash. So we get a novice. We run them through starting strength or some version of that with the basic barbell lifts. They make linear progress, get their newbie gains for those of you who haven't been listening for a long time. And then things get a little bit more complicated, but not a lot more. And we start talking about adding exercises.

to address various weaknesses or to direct training in a different direction, depending on what the person is doing is you wrote in the book with Rip. Once you are no longer a novice, you have a decision to make. And I think I want to start there. Yeah. Well, it's just about, it's like, I always use the analogy about, like, education. It's like, it's almost like higher education. Like, at the beginning, everybody has to learn the basics.

It's like, you've got to learn to, like, read, write and do arithmetic before you can move on to anything else, you know, and that's kind of the novice, that's kind of the novice phase. That's kind of our reading, writing, and arithmetic phase, and we want to get you really, really, really good at those before we move on to other things. But as you, as you advance through the training or through your education, then, you know, just doing the squat, the bench press, the deadlift, the overhead press, and, you know, and pull-ups is a good, it's a, it's really the perfect foundation for both strength and size and just, technical ability.

If you can master those lifts, you can, you know, it's going to transfer to just about everything else that you're going to do. They're not overly technical, but they do have some technical skills. So you're, you're kind of learning, you know, apart from building muscle and gaining strength, you're also learning just some body awareness type issues and that sort of thing that, you know, that transferred it to anything else, even outside of the gym, but also transfer to other movements in the gym. And so, you know, once you've kind of mastered that scene, you've got that really good foundation in place, hopefully.

And you don't want to let those go. You know, you don't want to lose your base of what you've built. But also just putting those lifts on repeat forever is usually not the best strategy. I mean, there's a multitude of reasons why you're just going to get stuck. That physically, mentally, you know, and some guy, that's a big one, too. is the psychological need for a little bit of change. And that varies by the person. I mean, you get engineering types, you know,

they're perfectly happy to just keep the same four or five exercises in forever with just simple manipulations of sets and reps. And for a lot of people, that can work, especially if you work with somebody that knows how to program, you can manipulate volume, intensity, frequency, and all that on it. Just a small handful of basic exercises and get a lot out of it. but some people are just going to want a little bit more variety in their program. They're going to want to explore new exercises.

And they're going to, the other part of that is, you know, it can be more effective to have a little bit more variety, like actually more effective, not just because you want it to. But having that additional variety in the program can can be more effective. It can kind of satisfy kind of the boredom aspect of it. But I also think it goes a long way towards injury prevention as well. I do think that the best, you know, the best analogy I've ever heard is it's like, it's the same reason like we rotate our tires on a car or if all you did on your car was just take left hand turns all the time. Like your tires would wear it in the same spot. And having a little bit of variety in the program with a different exercise selection across the week and not just doing the same lifts,

especially the same lifts hard and heavy is going to go a long way kind of towards mitigating some of the, especially those just overuse type injuries. that you get with just doing the same stuff over and over again. But, you know, what happens is after the novice phase, back to your kind of original question, which is you have to decide what is the direction of your training because at the beginning it's just to, you know, basically include increased basic strengths and build a good foundation of muscle mass. And then after that, how do you want to specialize or generally how do you want to go. You know, do you, are you training for sports? You know, are you using the gym in order

to transfer to some other outside activity that has its own set of physical demands and is a drain on recovery and that sort of thing? You know, it's very different working with an athlete who's got to balance the training with the actual practice and play of their sport versus a power lifter whose sport is the lifting, you know, so all of their time and energy and recovery assets and all that can go towards just towards their in-gym activities and there's not much to do outside of the gym. So, you know, are you training for sport? Are you training in order to do a, you know, a strength competition, strength-based competition, power lifting, weightlifting, strong man, you know, kind of a corollary to that would be bodybuilding, you know, a little different. It's not as performance-based

as the other one. So I'd almost put that in a separate category. But those are kind of the big four that we normally talk about in terms of the strength sports. Do you actually want to do that and compete? Or are you training just for, like our buddy Michael Wolf says, are you just a dedicated recreational lifter? You don't really want to compete, but you're also not just in it to just maintain and feel better. You know, you want to get strong.

You want to move your deadlift from 405 to 500 just for the sake of doing it. That would be me. And that's a lot of who we work with, especially our online clients. That's probably the bulk of who I work with is people who care about it. They want to get as big and strong as possible. But they're not really competitive in that. And then you have a certain other subset of the population. And this is more of my, we were just talking about this kind of off air, which is like the difference between in person and online clients.

Like a lot of my in person clients are more like, they're more like health and fitness based. Like they're not like I had a client tell me. a long time ago, and this has resonated with me as like how to program and how to manage the training for a lot of my in-person clients, which is I don't really care how strong I am. I just don't want to be weak. Right. So they're not like dead set on, I've got to move my slot from 315 to 405. They just want to be strong and they want to be healthy and they want to be fit.

But they're not that obsessive about the numbers or their physique or, you know, anything really highly specific. So those are kind of like, you know, those are like kind of the four categories. I put people in, you know, whether there's, and so you have to kind of, as a coach and as the athlete or the person under the bar, they have to kind of decide what direction you want to take your training and then establish an appropriate programming strategy for that. You know, and like you said, at the novice phase, it's kind of all the same because whether you want to be an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer at the beginning of your education, you're

all going to start in the same place. You all got to read, write, do math, you know, cover the basics. and then at a certain point, even in your undergraduate degree, you're all still doing a lot of the same stuff, right? Which is kind of that's like the early intermediate phase, which is you're all still doing a lot of the same stuff. You're all still squatting and deadlifting and benching and all that kind of stuff. But then as you get a little further along in your undergrad and your master's and all that, you start to really, you know, you start to do a little less or a little less focus on some of the basis

and start to expand more into the area of specialty. and then by the time you're a PhD or whatever to keep to keep on this kind of silly analogy is you become entirely focused with just that that one area and really in a highly individualized way to bring up your you know your your specific weak points and your your needs as a competitive as a competitive power lifter or as a competitive bodybuilder you know you may follow radically different programming than somebody else you know somebody like me who is a good. bench presser, but a terrible deadlifter, you know, relatively speaking as a power lifter, my programming might look very different than a guy who's, you know, six inches taller than me and whose arms are as long as I am tall, you know, who struggles on the bench, but can deadlift, you know, all day long, you know, and it's really suited and built for the lift. His programming might look radically different from mine, you know, because we have different needs as athletes in different areas where we need to focus, you know, but you see that in

bodybuilding all the time at the advanced level. You know, some guys, most guys that are, competitors have a couple of genetically gifted body parts where they don't necessarily have to train those as hard or as often as, you know, say another body part, which is really, really hard to respond. Pretty much any competitive bodybuilder will tell you that,

that they have one or two of each of those. And so the programming at that, at that level is going to be highly specialized and highly individualized for that athlete. We're at the lower levels it's going to look. more kind of the same for everybody. Right. So you raise an interesting point. Like you said, many in-person clients, they're more on the health and fitness side,

or what I like to call the looks side, right? They want to lift to achieve a certain look. And for many years, like you and I have discussed in the past, the main source of information on lifting weights. Hold on just a second real quick. Sorry. I know you'll have to edit this out. Oh, no worries. Yeah, super long.

Sorry. Sorry about that. My wife was doing something in the kitchen. I don't think she realized I was reporting, but it was. I don't know if you could hear it or not. No, I couldn't hear shit, dude. Okay. All right.

Maybe it was no big deal. So, yeah, we have this dichotomy now in the industry between strength and hypertrophy. And I want to dive into this with you because you talk about it quite a bit. I talk about it quite a bit, a bit, a little bit differently. But a lot of these guys. that are consuming content. And back in the day, all we had were bodybuilding magazines or spinoffs of them, you know, like the men's health, men's fitness. It was some spinoff of bodybuilding.

Right. Because the message that is sent is, well, they train to look a specific way. But that's not necessarily the specific way that most personal training clients seek to look. When we're talking about bodybuilding, we are talking about a level of muscularity that most people aren't interested. in achieving and can't achieve realistically. And they also forget that there are other variables that influence the way a muscle looks. You know, like you said, limb length is one. Insertions is another one.

Angle of panation. The number of muscle fibers. Body fat level. Body fat level, skin thickness. Yeah. Rip used a word that I'm stealing from his article on it. Gray style knees and elbows. I never heard that word before.

Does that just mean thin? Yeah. Yeah. Look at Ronnie Coleman's waist Yeah For how big he is I mean what is he has like a 27 inch waist or something that is I mean oh yeah

I mean just the bone structure is perfect So if you like you said If you one of these guys with big Kind of thick knees Like just bone structure knees You know That versus the guy who's got little tiny knees You know how much

The little thin knee joint And elbow joint is going to make your quad Look that much bigger It's going to make that action actual, you know, that meat over the top of the quad is going to look so much bigger when you've got a really narrow joint. Absolutely. And the biggest one is the number of muscle fibers you have. So far as we know, and I think I'm on board with this theory, we only enlarge what we have.

We don't add more in terms of muscle mass. Right. Nobody's really disputing that. It looks rather obvious. Right. So that's probably the biggest limiting factor in terms of training. And then you factor in the drug use, which I don't say that. negatively, you know, that's part of the sport because

anabolic steroids and testosterone and testosterone, analogs or anabolic steroids are a stimulus for growth. And people forget this. And I recently reshare that old 1996 article. You know, there's, I shit on academia a lot in this show, but there's some things that kind of check out

pass a smell test. This is one of them. They put these guys on high dose testosterone, and they define that as 600 milligrams per week, which is triple the high end of TRT. Right. And the guys who took test gained more muscle mass and the guys who strength trained did not take test.

Obviously, the guys who did both gained the most. But this highlights my point. The drugs alone are a stimulus for growth. Right. So the problem is, and our boy, Dante Trudell talks about this. There are guys that hop on rather quickly, get results, attribute those results to their training and then start dishing out advice and ends up hurting people. Remember that long thread he posted about that?

Yes. And this has been the thing I've been ranting about for years because you get guys that come to you and they're like, I want to do hypertrophy because so-and-so, who's on a bunch of gear and has been on a bunch of gear for years, said you have to do a million different exercises, which kind of brings us full circle to where we're at. Number one, these same people that say these things also acknowledge that you gain most of the muscle mass you will ever gain in the first couple of years. Yeah. They say that. They start citing fat-free mass index, all this shit, right? And I would agree with that. You know, that's been my experience.

The first couple years were the fastest, and then it's very slow and steady. As an add-on to that, and you may get to that, but I want to say it because you'll forget because it's very, very relevant to the guys that we train. And this is one of those things. Unfortunately, you can't do anything about. When you talk about the first couple years of training, it also matters when those are. Yes. Because unfortunately, if you miss that window of late teens, early to mid-20s, and you

you don't start lifting until you're 35, you're not going to get the same. It's not just that you miss 10 to 15 years of training. It's that your ability to grow is more when you're teens and 20s than it is. And if you don't start lifting until, you know, your 40s, you're never going to hit what you could have hit had you started when you were 16, you know. And yes, there's nothing to do about it. You know, you start when you're. start. But if you start as a teenager in early 20s and you have good training at that time and you

put on a lot of size during that time, you're going to be able to put on more than if you don't start until you're 35 or 40. So it matters when you start. And like I said, that's just an unfortunate dose of reality because I think you and I both probably work with a lot of the same types of people who come to us as novices intermediates that are in their 30s and 40s. Absolutely. So you have to manage expectations. about what is possible. So it's interesting to bring that up because I have been talking about this quite a bit. Eventually, aging becomes a limiting factor.

And when I explain to people how, okay, if you started out with, let's say, so the, let me back up, I tell people all the time that baseline muscle mass is highly predictive of where you're going to end up assuming you don't take any drugs. And this just baffles people. So I'm like, if you start with 125 pounds of adult muscle, your post-puberty, because I see these fucking ex-bodybuilders and bodybuilders and influencers are like, look at my before picture. I was skinny at 14. And now I'm 2.05 and ripped. And I'm like, dude, you were also going through puberty.

That's a variable as well. You were growing no matter what. Kind of like the endabolic stuff. Yeah. Puberty is a stimulus for growth. Who do we know that doesn't take steroids that grows without training? Teenage boys, right? The growth is happening regardless.

So assuming you are 18 to 25, we'll say that's a good window to start. You don't have those effects playing a role anymore at this point as a male. And you start training. Let's say you gain – so I like this old article that Lyle MacDonald wrote where he was talking about how much muscle can you hypothetically gain over a lifetime. Do you remember that one? I've read just about everything Lyle's written. So he was talking about – Crazy as he is, big fan.

Dude, he's like – yeah, he's like the rip atopo of bodybuilding. man. So fucking autistic. I know. But it turns out to be right on basically. Yes. Dude, he's always fucking right on this shit. So I read this article and he's like, we don't know the exact answer. But if we look at this, you know, logically, he's like, if you have a year of serious training and you're a young man and you've never done it before, you might gain 15 to 25 pounds

of muscle with the genetic outliers gaining the 25, the guys who are naturally built for it, right? And then he started like tapering that number down. He's like, in year two, it might be like 10 to 15. then year three, it might be five to ten. Then it becomes immeasurable. And he kind of came up with this 40 pound number. But then he kept putting in italics serious training. That means uninterrupted.

You're progressively overloading. You're PRing every year for lack of an alternative metric. But he said most people aren't seriously training for four consecutive years, five consecutive years. Yeah. When you were telling the story, that's what's going through my head. You have to factor in like gauge loss during the course of every year. Oh, I was sick. Oh, I took a two-week vacation.

Oh, I had to stop because of that, you know, like. Yep. And so, like, those little periods of, like, de-training and atrophy that occur to, like, almost everybody. Like you said that because they're not actually training hard, let's say, 50 weeks out of the year, you know. So I've kind of leaned on this theory of his, and I agree with it. I think 40 is probably reasonable for somebody with good genetics who trains hard and does it for a while. So then you start doing the math, right? So I'm like, okay, if you start at 18, let's say you gain the 20 the first year, then you gain another 15 the second year.

You're at 35, right? Then you might gain another five, another five. So now you're at 40 to 45. And then it becomes immeasurable. And you see it with guys that compete in bodybuilding, natural bodybuilding. You see this huge change. Like, look at Lane Norton, for instance. He's a good one.

He claims he's drug-free. I think I believe him. But you look at him back in like 2001 or 1999, whenever he did his first competition, he was already a muscular dude. By 2005, he was pretty jacked. And from that to now, his body hasn't changed that much from his fifth or sixth year of training. And that's when he introduced powerlifting exercises, squats and deadlifts. So that's a good example. You look at that.

2001, when he started out and he wasn't really doing squats, he was still muscular. And then he got really muscular by 2005. And then from 05 to 15, yes, he was bigger, but not that much bigger. Right. Yeah. So everything just starts to level off. Exactly. So then you consider that, right?

So you put in five years, you've gained pretty much most of what you're going to gain. Then you gain fractions. Well, you start doing the math. Then you're getting older, right? Right. You have age slowing you down. Right. The math doesn't add up to where you can gain 60 or 70 pounds of muscle.

If you're a skinny guy with 125 pounds of lean mass, a baseline, you're not going to be 200 pounds and jacked. It's not going to fucking happen, you know? Yeah. And it just blows these guys mind. Then they hear these bodybuilders telling them, oh, you need to do. All these exercises, you need to focus on the stretch and stretch mediated hypertrophy and length and partials and all these little things that, you know, we can both agree they work, but how are we defining works, right?

Yes. Like if you make a muscle work harder, no matter if it's a single joint exercise or a compound exercise, it's going to grow. But to what extent, right? Like a squat will go up for years. So this is the, this is because I'm always pushing back on bodybuilders about the press because they claim that, oh, the press only works front delts. It's only good for function, transfer to function.

And they will cite the EMG shit. They'll say, well, you're not getting a lot of muscle activation in your lateral del. You know, your side dealt. You need to do lateral raises. Well, I was the guy who did every type of fucking lateral raise known to man. Then I found RIP. At that point, I'd started overhead work a year before. And that was the first time I saw that shit fill out.

So then I started thinking about this. This kind of reminds me of the old fat burning zone with aerobic work where they're like, you know, if you do low intensity, you're burning more fat. Well, the ratio of fat, yes. But less calories. Less calories, right? So I think it's the same kind of analogy, right? Like my side delts not contributing much to a press, but which lift is going to get overloaded for a longer period of time. Yeah.

That's the big thing that Dante was pushing, Dante Tradell was pushing back in the 90s because everything was so oriented towards just get the pump, get blood into the muscle. And it's back to that now. It's back to that now. It is. It is. And, you know, what his thing was was what really moves the needle, you know, in terms of adding muscle and strength. And it is, you know, what lifts can you do or what movements can you do that can be progressively overloaded, basically to infinity? You know, there's no, there's theoretically, now there is an upper limit, but theoretically there is no upper limit to what you can overhead press, bench press, deadlift.

squats, you know, there's other exercises that fit to bill that are more bodybuilding specific. I mean, I put leg presses and hack squats and that kind of stuff. Oh, yeah, of course, of course. Basically overloaded to infinity, but those would have fit his criteria for a bodybuilder where that's where you're getting your main juice from. And it's like not that you shouldn't necessarily if you're a bodybuilder or really want to maximize everything that you shouldn't do, you know, cable press downs or some of these other types of movements, but that if that's the only thing in your program and

where your focus and your, you know, your intensiveness, your, your, your intensity lies. You're, you're going to get a, so, I mean, his message is so, obviously a lot of the specifics are different, but his kind of macro message is so similar to like what we preach. And like, he would have said, like, what's really going to move the needle, like what, you know, take your, take your, take your, take your, take for whatever rep range, call five, call it 10, doesn't, doesn't really matter. I mean, it does and it doesn't. but in kind of the grander scheme of the argument,

whatever your metric is, whether it's a five rep set or a 10 rep set or whatever, you know, take it from 225 to 315 to 365 to whatever. And you can do that with weighted dips. You can do that with a close grip bench press. You can do that with some of these other movements that guys don't really want to do overhead presses versus cable laterals.

It's like not that those things have zero value, but they're not going to move the needle as much. especially for a guy that's still in that like that that that mass building phase still it still is in that realm where he needs to put on 20 pounds 30 pounds or whatever that's only going to come from overloading those those compound exercises that can be loaded to infinity everything else is kind of icing on the cake like it works it's the last three to five percent that's probably right but it's but it's it's those things that can really be progressively overloaded for long periods of time um And those heavy compounds were to do it. And that was the message he was, he was been preaching for years. And, you know,

and he had a system for doing that that also used the drug, the drugs to push them. Yes. That was his saying was, was, was, was, you look at dog crap training,

which was his methodology, which is, you know, he said his hardest thing was getting these guys that needed to grow, that weren't growing is getting them into the gym and getting them to strip out like 80% of what they were doing. Mm-hmm. And,

and basically just, just focusing on a routine for not for the rest of their career but for a wit like kind of like our novice program yeah i wouldn't define dog crap as novice training but no it's almost like it's almost like introductory training for a more advanced athlete it's like intro to advanced training almost is would be a good description of kind of dog crap training um but that was that was his thing was that like we're not going to do three or four exercises for chess today we're going to do one and then do it again you know like friday you know do it monday then do it monday then do it on Friday. And the whole goal is to take your bench press from 315 for a set of five

to 365 for a set of five in a short of time as possible. And that's what if you do that, you will have grown. You know, I tell guys this all the time and I've said it on podcast before, like if you squat 315 for five today and a year from now, you squat 315 for five. And that's your legitimate max. It doesn't matter about your volume. It doesn't matter about frequency. It doesn't matter about length and partials or blood flow restriction or whatever other little thing you want to if if none of that has produced the ability for you to improve on that 315 for a set of five you will not have grown it doesn't matter if you squat once a week or three times a week or if you did assistance work or if you didn't if you're if the limit of your abilities is 315 for

five today and a year from now the limit of your abilities is still 315 for a set of five it's highly unlikely that you will have grown. Now, then you say, okay, so the goal has got to be, and I'm just using five as an example. I'm not married to that for hypertrophy, but it's good, it's a good range. But if, if you take that, what's that? For the bigger exercises, this is what I've concluded, and I think you have two. I think five to eight is great. Yeah.

Once it gets past that, there's an endurance component and things start to break down. But yeah, so I always tell people, like the fives, because of what, we're doing the squats, the deadlifts, the bench presses, the presses, but the more isolated the movement, then yes, the reps need to go up, obviously. Right. Yeah. And I think, yeah, and I think that's what, there's a lot of, there's a lot coming back to that now in the hypertrophy world of talking. You'll see a lot of content on that now about the four to six rep range being superior. There was, I remember like stars, stars original five by five. And actually, what was the guy's name that was that had the five by five before him was red red reds park red what's that redge park well

there was a there was even going back mark barry maybe oh was it like going back to the 30s because arnold got it from regs park and i don't know we're yeah and lots of guys used it like back in the day but but like in start book he talks about some of the um you know some of the research that came like from the soviets like the eastern block countries and stuff that research this you know really heavily, what, 40, 50, 60 years ago that, you know, the optimal amount of volume for strength and size was four to six sets of four to six reps. Well, he was like, well, okay, so the average of that's five sets of five. And I can sell the shit out of that in a program because people like that nice, clean.

Part of the five by five lore is it's so nice and clean, right? Yeah. It's not four sets of six to eight reps. It's five by five, right? So there's a market ability to five by five training. But the reality is that it works. And you're seeing a lot of the hypertrophy type influencers or whatever coming back to what we need to do. We need to do more four to six rep training because that's where all the growth occurs.

Is it everything else that you would do? And I tend to agree with this in a 12 rep set is only there to get to those last four to five reps. Right. So it's only reps number, you know, 9, 10, 11, and 12 that are actually doing anything. So the first eight are just to set up the fatigue to get to reps 9, 10, 11, and 12, assuming that 12 reps is maximum. That's the Beardsley's effective reps theory, which I tend to agree with. I don't think it's bulletproof, but I think it's good. I think it does explain a lot.

I think it explains why higher rep training, 10 to 15 reps, training basically has to be taken to failure to be effective. Whereas five rep training does not have to be taken to limit failure to be effective for muscle growth. Because if those loads, basically you're already at max motor unit recruitment, you know, when you're when you're, when your set is already at 80, 85% of one rep max, you're basically at mostly or full motor unit recruitment from rep one of that set. So all five of those reps and a heavy set of five are maximally stimulative, whereas in a 12-repset, you're not at full motor unit recruitment until maybe rep 9.

And who's to say even then if you really are, but it's really those last, you know, and it goes back to that kind of the cliched stuff of, oh, it's the last rep is the one that counts. Well, that's actually quite true in hypertrophy training. If you're going to train with higher reps, then failure is really necessary. A 12-reps set with four reps in reserve, I don't think it moves the needle. you know, I think higher rep training. And so, but going back to the single joint versus compound and rep ranges and all that,

I think the four to six rep range stuff that's kind of coming back is very much in line with what we would say about five rep training being extremely effective. And going back, you know, to some of the Soviet crap that came out would say is very effective. But there's a practical issue with isolation issue, with isolation exercises being loaded strictly in the four to six rep. range. It could be a safety thing. It can be a joint integrity thing. It can be the how do you progress a leg extension done for sets of four? When you put another pin on the stack next week, you're going to be a two. So using a broader amount of rep range for isolation movements,

whereas, you know, a bench press or a squat, as you and I know, if you microload, you can do five reps today, add five pounds, do five rep next week, add five pounds. You can stay at five reps or say, let's just say four to six for argument's sake and progressively overload that four to six rep range on a compound movement for long periods of time without having to adjust anything. You can't do that on isolation movements. If I'm doing four rep dumbbell curls today, and that's my limit. If I go up five pounds on that dumbbell curl, I'm going to be at one and a half two reps next week. And the third week I'm at zero. So in order to have any sort of progression on those isolation movements, you have to start at a higher rep or at least implement higher rep ranges

so that you can have some stimulative reps in your training, you know, or else. So I'm not against doing the occasional really heavy leg extension as long as it's in good form or really heavy barbell curl as long as it's in good form or whatever for those really, really low rep ranges. It's a problem of one, it can be safety. Two, it can be just, progressability. There's no ability to progress over any long period of time a four-rep leg extension. Now, you can start with 100 pounds for 15 reps on a leg extension, take it to failure, and add weight every week until you hit six and then restart back over at 15 and keep doing little cycles like that. That works extremely well as a programming strategy for isolation

movements. And it's fine because 15 rep isolation movements don't have the same fatigue level as 15 reps spots do. And I'm not opposed to doing that kind of stuff either from time to time. You know, but as the core of your training, it's very, very difficult to do that. It is very fatigue producing. And you probably are wasting a lot of effort in order to get to those final reps where you could just do the equivalent of those final reps. And probably, probably better if you just did a heavier weight for less reps. You know, I think we did touch on the last,

in the last podcast about rep ranges and steroid use. And there are reasons why. It's not that all these guys are stupid and they don't know that a five rep squat might be better than a 15 rep squat for whatever reason. There's still some thinking out there right wrong or otherwise that, you know, higher reps for legs are better. That's always been there.

You know, that type of thing. Is that just swelling and sarcoplasmic hypertrophy? and edema and all that kind of stuff from from the higher reps or is it really producing more growth. You know, whatever. That's a separate topic. But there is a safety concern for guys that are using really high levels of anabolic to not go really deep into those low rep ranges with really heavy weights because they will get injured because of tendon ruptures. Because the tendons don't keep pace with the strength of the muscle.

Right. The muscle strength, the force production capacity of the muscle is increasing a lot. week to week when you're on heavy gear use the integrity of the tendon is not and so you can exceed the the the the the muscle's ability produced force can exceed the tendons ability to keep that a muscle attached to the bone and that is that is more pronounced on a heavy set of three or five reps than it is on a set of 12 to 15 reps so there are legitimate reasons for say a pro bodybuilder to not go deep, and especially in a pre-contest scenario where their carbs are low and all that kind of stuff. They're more dried out and more susceptible to injury.

They're doing a ton of cardio, you know, all that kind of stuff. It's not the best, maybe the safest blend of things to do. So, you know, that is a legitimate issue for people to think about it. If you go back to Dante's training, you know, with the dog crap training, he did, you know, like I said, his training methodology with the D.C. training was not independent of. of drug use. It was designed to what he called blasting crews. Yeah, I remember that.

Yeah. The DC training was meant to be in conjunction with a blast, which meant to really overload the body with a shitload of drugs. So these guys are going to take a bunch of drugs and then they're going to train really, really, really hard for, and I don't know it was a six, eight or 12 weeks or something like that. Something like that, yeah. But they're going to really push their ability to load these exercises.

But if you look at the rep ranges that Dante prescribed. for those guys. It was fairly high rep training. You know, more so than what it wasn't. Yes. It wasn't heavy three rep squats and all that. It was 10 to 15 rep leg presses and that kind of stuff. But still with a focus on progressive overload, but but at a higher rep range. And I think part of that was a safety.

Dante's not stupid. And he's very, he's very educated on both the training and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the year use side of things. And so I think his training methodology was meant to be run in conjunction, these really, really, really aggressive runs at progressive overload with the drug use. And then a cruising phase where you pulled the drugs back, lower the weights or lower the effort level, and kind of cruise allowed your body to recover whatever it needs to do around super high drug use and then run another blast again. And so I don't think, I think like his methodology still works independent of drug use. but the exact way that he did it was, you know, Lyle's a big DC fan.

Lyle does a lot of dog crap training. I've done a lot of dog crap type. Never the exact program, but a lot of the rest pause sets and the focus on lower volumes at higher effort levels, especially if you're not a guy that wants to do a lot of volume and you want shorter, more high intensity workouts. There's a lot of good stuff to draw from Dante's work over the last 20, 30 years. It's funny. He wrote that, what was it, cycling?

for pennies. Yeah. Board post back in 03, I think. Yeah. And then in the 2010s, power lifting got popular, CrossFit got popular, and people were lifting heavier. Yeah. And it kind of just disappeared.

And then now the old stupid shit of lots of exercises, lots of volume is back. It's all that. Now he's peaked his head back into the social media sphere. He said he won't do podcasts. He responds to me. We talked a couple times. He won't do podcasts or anything like that. But he just sees the same stupid shit recycling.

And it just prompts him to, like, remind people of some of these lessons, you know? You know, he's just had his peace, though, you know, like he's just not going to get on there and say the same. And he makes money from his supplement company and all that. So he's not an influencer, you know, no. But he's very influential. Yes. It's interesting because we still were into this problem of these. There's who was saying this recently?

It might have been Dorian Yates. Just shitty low card bodybuilders, dishing out advice. And then when you look at the top guys, like Dorian, Arnold. Ronnie, even Cutler, all of them were strong. All of them would gain lots of weight. All of them would hit the compounds heavy. None of them were fucking weak, you know? Right.

And when a guy like that is sitting there saying, okay, yeah, you really shouldn't do, you know, heavy sets of five on the squat. Well, for that guy, it's 600, 700, 500, you know, these guys are strong fucking squatters. And they're also dealing with problems that most of the clientele that consume this information are never going to deal with. Like, oh, my core fails before my quads. You know, the skinny guy, a skinny fat guy that hires you or me, and he's in his first couple years of serious training, even three, four years of serious training, never

going to take anabolic. He's not going to run into that problem. His quads are going to grow just fine from squatting because even though it's contributing less to a squat than a leg extension, it's contributing and you're overloading. It's contributing more. That quadricep is producing more force, even if it's 30%. son of the lift, right? It's producing more. That is a huge point that I think has been missed in this idea now where it's gone back to this like total, this idea of total isolation. Yes. And,

and you see a lot of these, a lot of the people that are pushing this content now is like every, every exercise for every muscle, the muscle has to be completely isolated. It has to be completely stabilized or it's ineffective or whatever. But that's, that's something to look out like what you just said like yeah a quad even but just because the quad is working in conjunction with the hamstrings and the glutes and the adductors or whatever in a squat it's still probably producing more force than it would be in certain single joint movements or whatever for and then more next week all really strong so yeah even though the quad's doing 100% of the work in a leg extension and the quad's doing 40% of the work or whatever in a squat it's it's that 40% they out

way the 100% that it's doing in the other. I don't know that for sure. What we do know is that next week, it's going to produce more force than this week. Yes. And that's the other thing is that because it may be, because it's work, it's not working in isolation. It again goes back to Dante's point, which is that it has that ability to be in theory progressively overloaded to infinity, which certain isolation movements don't have. You know, some some have more capacity than others. They're not all the same. Sure. Yeah. But, you. You know, it's, they're, they're, yeah, you don't want to get carried away with everything has to be work strictly in isolation in order to grow.

You know, the heavy compounds have a lot. And also, too, like just from a practicality standpoint of programming, it's, it's the, and he talked a lot about this, and I've talked a ton about this, which is using your exercise selection in order to bump up your frequency. In other words, people may look like, I basically train. like one body part per day. And I train, I'll just use myself as an example. And I do like between five and six days a week, sometimes four, but I like, I like that style of training. I like shorter, more intense at this point in my career. It's not how I always trained, but it's how I like to train now.

But I also, so somebody could look at my routine on paper. If they just looked at my split and they'd say, well, he only trains shoulders once a week. Like, how is he going to grow from that? But that's not really true. If you look at the way that I do my exercise selection, because I start every chest workout with incline press. You know, and so that's twice a week right there because all your, all of where your EMG studies will show the front delt is activated just as much in an incline as it is on a strict overhead press. Yep.

And so you're getting, you know, if I do, I may only do chest once a week, but I always include stuff for in my arm day, my tricep stuff, I'm always doing weighted dips. There's two right there. Like, so you can, you can bump up the frequency of the muscles that are trained to, to two, three, or even four times a week with your exercise collection when you're using those compound movements. Yeah, if your chest workout was nothing but peck deck flies and, you know, cable flies, then yeah, but most people don't train that way. Most of your big bodybuilders have never trained that way. So even when they're at a like, say, a once a week frequency, they're not

really, you know, I would argue my triceps get worked four times a week, you know, even though I only train them directly once a week. But I have a day where I just do biceps and triceps, super short workout, usually on Friday, super short workout. I took that from you. I started doing that. Yeah. And so I don't need a lot. I mean, if I'm not a bodybuilder, but if I was, my arms would be the best genetics for gross. So I don't need to hit them, you know, directly three times a week or whatever. I don't think that really works at all anyway, but anything that's inside. But, you know, when I do chest on like on a Monday, there's triceps in there. When I do back, on Tuesday. It's not a lot of tricep stimulus, but there's some proximal stimulus when you

Of course, yeah. Or pullovers or things like that. You know, if the triceps are really, really sore and you go do a back workout, you will feel them. And you're not just on the stretch, you'll feel them on the contraction. There is, there is a try some tricep activation when you perform movements that have shoulder extension, which is going to be all of your lap movements have some degree, well, all of your lap movements have shoulder extension. Long head. Yeah. So that is, that, but that's. a secondary role of the tricep. I mean, that's its proximal role is to contribute to shoulder

extension. When I do shoulders and I do shoulder presses or whatever, triceps get stimulated a little bit again. I'd argue it's probably for where I'm at now, that's secondary stimulus that I get on my triceps from benching and shoulder pressing is probably not enough to elicit growth, like, because it is a secondary stimulus, it's not the primary mover. And I think that becomes necessary, you know, but for a novice, that kind of the secondary stimulus that you get is enough to elicit growth. So the secondary effect that you get on the bench press is enough to make the triceps grow. For a more advanced guy, it's really not. Like when he does a chest workout, his chest is going to get growth from that. The secondary effect on, let's say the delts, the triceps, is enough

to kind of prevent any sort of atrophying or whatever between extended periods of time of not training it. And that's the other thing now, right, that we're in this like weird frequency thing. Like, you have to train a muscle every 48 hours because it starts to happen. You know, after after the training session, then you've got basically a 48 hour window where you're recovering and growing. And then it's the, then atrophy starts to set in. And so guys are like, oh my God, I have to train every muscle every 48 hours or it's going to shrink. And it's like, no, for one, I think the spike that you get in muscle protein synthesis outweighs the drop off. So, you know, you go, let's just say you go up two, but down one. Because plenty of guys have grown training a muscle once a week. Of course.

I mean, it's silly to think that every muscle has to be trained every 48 hours, but you can through through good selection of your exercises, through doing a lot of these compound movements that train lots of muscle mass together. If you are worried about that, you are absolutely going to prevent any sort of atrophy in your triceps, say, when you're benching or shoulder pressing. It may not grow them if you're a more advanced lifter and you've already got a lot of muscle. You're not maybe going to get a ton of growth from bench pressing on your triceps. You may need more direct work in order to make them actually grow when you're trying to get that last little bit of growth in.

But it's certainly going to preserve the muscle mass for that week in between training sessions, let's say. And so do you want to split where you're only training in each muscle group, you know, once a week if you're using intelligent exercise selection. But everybody creates, it's like nobody just goes in and does leg extensions for their quad workout. No. Like you're squatting and leg pressing or, you know, some kind of those types of movements.

You know, when you go and when I do a hand, I'll do a workout. I do two lower body days a week. One's quad kind of quad focused and one's hamstring focused. But there's stimulus in both of those workouts for both. Plus, when I do my heavy stiff leg deadlifts or RDLs, I'm getting a ton of, I get, oftentimes my lats get sore from those, my traps get sore from those. So there's a ton of secondary effect when you're, if all I did was go in and just do leg curls, then yeah, there's not a ton of carryover to the rest of my body. But if you, with those bigger movements, you're creating a pretty broad stimulus at every session. So you reminded me of something.

When I followed one of your, when I thought, so you reminded me of something. When I followed one of your templates, it was an arm program. There were shrugs in there. And I haven't touched shrugs in 20 years, maybe. It's been a long time. But, you know, I did exactly what you wrote because that's kind of how I approached things. And I adjusted as I, you know, as things start to unfold, I adjust it. Like, you know, joint pain, et cetera, you know.

That's what happens. You start with a template, then you conform it to the lifter. And I did that for myself. But I'm like, I don't want to do the shrugs, but I'll do the shrugs. but I'll do the shrugs. I'll do everything you put in there. And the grip work was great, by the way. Yeah.

But all of a sudden, you know, I'm like my girlfriend at the time, she's like, your traps are growing. And then I started paying attention. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, they work. You know, most of my trap growth has come from deadlifts. Right.

But then I look at it, to your point, when we use the word growth, like when you and I are using it in our situations, we're talking about a small amount of growth, absolutely speaking, right? We're not talking about I'm going to put six inches on my truck. traps and have no neck from doing shrugs, you know, when I've already been deadlifting for 15, 20 years, you know? Right. So that was interesting that that happened because I wasn't trying to grow traps.

I was just trying to do the program. And I was just doing trugs and then making them heavier than started using the straps and making them even heavier. And the traps grew. But we're talking about less than 5% growth probably if you were to measure. Yeah. But if you want to maximize stuff, like guys come to me all the time and they're like, well, I can't get this to grow.

And it's like, have you tried training it? Yeah. You know what I mean? Like you're just like, like you said, like I can't get this muscle group to grow, but then you look at the program, there's like no direct training for that, you know. And I think in large like a lot of people like because we've talked about it before. And it's sometimes we don't always caveat stuff like as well as we should. Like what audience, like what audience this particular sound bite or this particular piece of information applies.

I'm a little bad about that because I talk to everything. I've got, like, I've got, I train novices, more intermediates. I train more advanced people. I do the straight stuff. I do the physique stuff. Like, I, so, like, I'm, I'm very much, like, a guy that has my finger in lots of different little places. And I'm not always great about reminding my audience who I'm talking to.

And so, like, guys will add, like, a client will see a piece of content I put out and like, hey, when are we going to start doing that? And I'm like, well, you never, because that wasn't, like, that wasn't for, like, that was not for you. Like, but a lot of people. They don't have, I feel like if you're more educated, like you're more educated on the stuff, like, and you have more experience, you can kind of, when you hear a piece of content, like you know, you know who that is, who that information applies to and who it doesn't. You can kind of, you can kind of piece that out. Like, oh, that's for this population.

Yeah. But it doesn't apply to this. And a lot of people, they hear stuff and they think, well, that applies to everybody. But I think a lot of people have a misconception that because in the beginning when you start with a program like starting strength, that is just doing the compounds, the same four or five exercises, and that everything does grow, you know, more or less, that if they just keep doing that and keep adding weight to that, that everything will keep growing in the kind of the same proportions.

And eventually that levels off. So somewhat contradicts what I was just saying about, you know, progressively overloading the compounds. I think that is always definitely in the beginning phases of programming. Like that is, that's really the only thing that matter. It still matters 10 years in, five years in, 20 years in, but it becomes less and less of that kind of global stimulus. And you do need direct work on basically any area that you're concerned about. So, you know, at the beginning, you know, guys will just, you know, bench and press and do chens and their arms are going to get bigger.

But there's not a single bodybuilder in the world, natural or enhanced, who only or a guy with gigantic arms that only does bench overhead and chins and develop unless he's got just world-class genetics. And I would consider like for arms for me to have really good genetics for arm growth. But but I also train them, you know, like hard. Like I act like yeah. Like I don't care like barbell curls are a better bicep exercise than chinos. I would agree.

I want to dive into that, but I agree. You know, they just are. Like you're, you're, so you're, you have to train the movements that you want to get bigger. I mean, that seems like the most, the most basic statement anybody can make that you have to train the muscle directly for it to grow. But a lot of people miss that. And some people go too far like we were just talking about. Yeah. Isolation only and too many sets and too much frequency.

But the other side of that spectrum is that some people have this kind of misconception that you can just do this handful of basic movements forever. and never change anything, never add anything to it. You know, Dante's more intermediate and advanced programs are not the same as the dog crap program that he's famous for. That's his beginner program. But again, his beginner is different than our beginner. Yes. His beginner is 240 pounds in the offseason that needs to go to 280.

That's a contest bodybuilder. Right. Yeah. You know, that's not our beginner. So his, like I said, but he has like a beginner and intermediate and advanced programming that he uses. It's just his beginner program would be like kind of where our late intermediate and advanced guys would start. If that makes sense. Because his beginner has an adapted nervous system, has built adequate amounts of muscle at that point and is now anabolic's on top of it.

Yes. So that is not somebody who's been fucking around in the gym, not really using a barbell or not. Everlifted before at all. His intermediate and advanced programs do add exercises. Yep. They do. Because that global stimulus that he talks about at the beginning of just, hey, for triceps, we're not doing cable extensions and all that.

We're going to close grip and do weighted dips. We're going to do one on Monday and one on Friday. And we're going to add, we're going to keep doing those until you can close trip 365 for a set of eight. And you can weight a dip with a hundred pound dumbbell around your waist. And then we're going to keep. going to start adding cable press sounds and, you know, lying triceps and all that kind of stuff. You know, I add him in sooner because I can't, I'm not doing the blast cycles that he is. So I actually need that stuff a little earlier to maximize growth.

But the key is that you really want an adequate dose of both long term. You know, you need to really maximize growth. You need an adequate, you never. you never leave the basics behind, but you don't just stay with the basics forever. Again, it goes back to that education. You never, no matter what your discipline, you never stop reading, writing and doing basic math. Right. Ever.

No. And the better you are in those things, the better you'll be it. The faster you can read, the better you can write, the quicker you can do math in your head. The better scientists, you're going to be, the better lawyer going to be the better. You know, whatever you're going to. So you never leave the foundations. but the foundations are enough to take people to where they want to go. You have to add on to that.

But you don't need to add on into excess, especially leaving the foundational movements behind or do so much that you can no longer progress the foundational movements because there's such an interference effect from all this other shit that you're doing. Yeah. So a couple things. So in starting strength and in practical programming, it has mentioned that most people are novices. And what Rip means by that is. Most people haven't adapted to a lifting stimulus long enough to be considered an intermediate or advanced lifter for various reasons. They move like shit. They don't have training drive.

They don't know that they need to add. They've done inferior programs or they get sick. They travel. You know, they can't keep a schedule. There's a lot of reasons that people don't get to a point where they have a lot of these problems. And I like that you mentioned earlier, sometimes you have the problem of not saying who things are for. And I think that's just industry-wide because this industry used to just appeal to like serious. lifters like my friend, he has a weightlifting club that he runs out of my gym.

And he always says, he's like, if we trained at a gym like 30 years ago, everybody's a lifer, you know? Yeah. And now that's not the case. And it's, you know, been changing since the early 2000s and 90s, more, I guess, normies have been getting into the weight room and trying to do things. And when they consume content, they're getting it from guys that are like hardcore about it, you know?

Yeah. And then when they hear, I need to do a six second tempo on a bicep preacher curl to get growth. they think they're going to add four inches to their biceps doing that when they can't do a chin up yet. And I have to always remind them that the guy saying that has a lot of neuromuscular efficiency is very strong and all these things that we've been talking about this far. So to kind of bring it back to the next point I wanted to hit, the phrase, train upper body like a bodybuilder, lower body like a power lifter has been circulating around lately. I've been hearing that more. And this has kind of been my experience to an extent.

I found that now when I say growth, I'm pretty satisfied with any amount of growth. I'm not trying to get on stage and get every little fiber on my thigh to pop out. You know, when bodybuilders are talking about growth, they are trying to impress a judge and they want finer details of their body to come through. Yeah, which is why they have to do leg extensions because they have to develop the rectus femores. Yes, exactly. Which is best stimulated with a leg extension, not a squatter or a leg press. And so that a leg extension for a competitive onstage high-level bodybuilder is a foundational, almost non-negotiable piece of the thing where it is not, I like leg extensions, but I would not classify them as necessary for your recreational athlete. Right.

So you're Normie that just wants to look good on the beach. Yeah. He's not looking for that kind of growth. He wants his thighs to look like they do something. And squats typically do that. and they do it for a long time. They're still doing it for me. Now, upper body, I was always bottom heavy.

I rode bikes a lot when I was a kid, rollerbladed, used my lower body a lot. I was always weaker up top. And when I started pressing, that took care of the shoulders, when I started deadlifting, my whole back grew. And then I found that my hands are weak and I'm not strong at curling-tight motions. Like, despite all the stuff I was doing with the squats, the presses, the deadlift, the chin-ups, I still struggle to carry groceries long distances or whole boxes. in this position, you know, my elbow has bent. So recently, I don't know how it happened. I think

when I did starting strength, there was always like a press bias, probably because rips shoulders are fucked up, so you don't even bitch about the bench. And somehow we all kind of fell into this press bias. And I just kind of did it. I went through the motions. I pressed twice a week. I benched once or twice a week. And then my bench just kind of stagnated. You know, I did a lot when I was younger. And for most, I think this was a net positive because my rotator cuffs caught up. You know, my shoulders got stronger. So I think what I did was probably smart because I did do a lot of benching, even though the programming was an ideal before.

Well, in the last few years, when I started your arm program, I got into more benching, right? So I did a lot more benching. And I realized that the, first of all, the strength doesn't really go up unless I do it four times a week, you know, for whatever reason. So I started doing that. And I started alternating the variance. So a close grip one day, a pause one day, a regular one day, an incline one day because I care about that. recently started messing with decline.

So I started thinking about this. I'm like, okay, my arms are growing because the triceps are 75% of your arms. So I thought that was cool. But I'm like where I'm weak is an elbow flexion, you know? So how do I approach this? So I would say that I am closer to novice in those movements than advanced because I kind of neglected that. I don't curl. I never really curled consistently.

I had strong chin ups because I used to swim. So that just kind of stayed. and I'm like, you know, I haven't trained my overhead pulling probably since I was a young kid. So I'm going to approach this the same way. I'm going to do four shoulder extension variants a week. And I'm going to curl like how you taught in that program, you know, do a four to six sets once a week, you know, some sort of bicycle curl. And then I thought about it some more. And I'm like, okay, this is a contest lift.

This curl could be pushed heavy if they're maxing it out with their back against a wall. So I'm going to curl every other week and dumbbell curl every other week. and then I'm going to try and add weight to that. So I'm kind of doing the basic intermediate type program for the bicep curl. Meanwhile, I'm doing one heavy chin up a week, basically a Texas method type deal, one heavy chin up a week, one back offset on the pulldown, which now has turned into a chin up because it's gotten heavier. Then on the other days, I'm doing a prone grip pull down, a V-grip pull-down,

and then I'm doing a row, which is a partial, if you kind of think of it that way. And a few things happened. You know, I started getting stronger at these lifts. And the way that I'm measuring that is I get on the scale, with the weight belt on before I had the plates and then I try to incrementally load that and then lo and behold, my grip stronger, my biceps have gotten bigger, et cetera.

Yeah. And I'm still doing a handful of exercises, but again, I'm not trying to get my brachialis to pop through the skin on stage. So I impress a bodybuilding judge. I just want my arms to grow a fucking inch, you know? And I've accomplished that through a lot of benching and a lot of chin-ups. Now, if I was a bodybuilder, now I'd have to like start thinking about, okay,

well part of my bicep isn't showing and guys when we're talking about this we're talking about fractions of an inch here dude these guys are these guys have 20 inch arms and they're adding exercises to bring a fraction of an inch of that arm to show on stage they're not adding three four five inches to their arms no the basic meat is already there it's things when you add a certain you know you're you're that's the that's the that's the old debate about regional hypertrophy can you can you influence a part of a muscle by, you know, by training it at a certain angle. Can you influence the lower head of the bicep, let's say, for instance, by training it at a certain angle versus another angle, you know, does regional hypertrophy exist? I think it probably does, but like you said,

it's such a small, how could it not? Of course. For one thing, like, when you change the exercise and you get radically sore in a different spot, you know, on that muscle, I mean, that, I've always said, Soreness is not a goal of a training program, but it is a really useful indicator. That's an indicator. Yeah. It's an indicator of stimulus. And it can be a really good indicator of did I train the right muscle or not. Same thing with a pump. It's not, I don't really believe that the pump itself is the causative factor to growth. But it is a, it is the best indicator probably of correct exercise execution of who's going to get bigger. The guy that does 10 reps on a lap,

pull down and comes off and goes, and I go, can you feel that in your lats? And he goes, oh, no, not really. Or the guy that comes off the lap pull down and is like, fuck, my lap's fucking hurt. Like they're, like, they're blowing up. Like, who's, like, they're coming out of his shirt. Like, he's got such a, such an insane pump in that area.

Like, who's going to grow more over the long term? The guy that can't feel his laps work at all in the lap pulldown? Or the guy that gets like an insane mind-blowing pump from that exercise because he has a very, very good mind muscle connection to that. Now, does the pump itself, does the fact, does the muscle being engorged with blood and having all the, all the, all the, the, the metabolic kind of waste products in the bloodstream, all that is that in it of itself causing the growth? No, but the fact that blood is in the area that he wants to work and there's like metabolites floating in the in the bloodstream that burn is an indicator that those muscle

fibers just did a whole shitload of work. So the pump is an indicator. Absolutely. Effective training technique. And if you train a muscle and you cannot get a pump in that muscle, there's some caveats to that. I like that. It's an indicator of technique.

It is. And that's why it's important, you know. And that's why that's, especially for bodybuilding type of training, getting a flight pump in your warm-up sets is crucial because it allows you to refine your technique through a handful of wider warm-up sets until you've got it fine-tuned to where, okay, so I'll give a good example of one that's really hard to get people to do, but it's actually fairly important for us. It's critically important for a bodybuilder, which, and this, again, it goes back to this idea of kind of regional hypertrophy is lower lat development.

And one of the better exercises for that is like a close grip. pull down, like a feet grip pull down. That's what I'm doing. Yeah. Ag grip pull down. Yep. And not leaning back and turning it into a row and not pulling to the upper chest, but pulling down here to the mid chest and flexing the shit out of your lats at the bottom.

Oh, shit. I would have started doing that. Yeah. If you can do that, you can generate a massive pump in your lower. I bring clients into the gym sometimes that, and I show them that technique of how to do that. and they're like, I didn't even know that's where my lats inserted. Like, I didn't know I had lats way down there. They've never felt them with until they, until they've done that movement.

But once they, you do a couple of light warm-up sets and you generate that massive pump, okay, now I've got the technique down that's going to engorge those muscles with blood and make them do the work. Now I'll go ahead and load it for, you know, a handful of work sets. Who's going to get more growth out of that movement? It's the guy that knows how to do that movement. to blow that muscle up. And I guarantee there's not a single pro on stage who doesn't know how to do that. No. And they all know how to do it.

They can all get an insane pump from every exercise that they do. They all talk about it. There's not a single bodybuilder that you've ever talked about who has, who has ever not. Now, a lot of them, like you said, they miss a tribute. The, you know, the pump is the only thing that matters. You know, do you just get a pump in the muscle and it will grow? you know, that sort of that like I think a lot of guys don't get the fact that it is an indicator and not causative. But it's not an unimportant thing.

And I think for guys nowadays to throw that out the window as something that just because it's been shown to not, it's been shown that there is no correlation between the buildup of metabolites in the bloodstream that caused that, that's in that muscle burn or the engorging of the muscle with blood. There's no direct leak causing those two. And that's where the pump comes from. It comes from both of those things. There's no, there's no leak that shows causation there.

But any effective exercise technique is going to, and it's the same thing with soreness. Soreness in and of itself, it's like severe muscle damage on the tissue. That in and of itself is not an index is not, it's like, it's not like, okay, the more sore I get, the more growth I'm going to get.

Obviously not. there's ways that you can make somebody really, really sore without with with very ineffective training techniques. Yes. You can emphasize. You know, there's all kinds of things you can do. But shortness, again, is an indicator of growth, you know, or an indicator of effective, of effective exercise execution.

And the type of training that you do that is going to cause hypertrophy that's going to be stimulative enough to make a muscle grow is also going to cause muscle damage. Like the two are, they're co-travel. You shouldn't seek out muscle damage and soreness. But the two things are, they're co-travellers. You cannot, it's very difficult to get a really effective hypertrophy stimulus without causing muscle damage. And so there's going to be some sortness.

I've never known anybody that had gigantic any body part where that body part wasn't routinely sore, you know, not so sore that they couldn't walk for a week. Right. I don't know. I've never met a single bodybuilder who didn't have leg soreness the next day. Well, dude, on a much smaller scale, every time I squat, my adductors are sore. Yeah. And it was kind of funny because the first time I cut after doing starting strength and kind of

training this way, I'm like, man, why don't I still got fat in my inner thigh? I'm like, oh, shit, wait, that's like rock solid. It's not fat. I just wasn't used to that. I was used to, you know, being like fat from when I bulk up. And then first time I cut down, I'm like, man, I'm like a buck 65 because my upper body training wasn't great at the time. And I'm looking down there. And I'm like, what the fuck is it?

Then I'm like, oh, shit, that's muscle. Yeah, you've got adductors now. And it's, yeah, they're routinely fucking sore. My hamstrings are routinely sore when I, when I deadlift. Yeah. If I front squat, my VM, my vastest medialis gets sore because I can get deeper. Yeah. I mean, so it's just, it's an indicator of where, you know, where does an exercise hit you?

And again, it can be an. indicator of where to, it's like the old age old question in bodybuilding, are deadlifts, a leg exercise or a back exercise? You know, guys have debated about that for years. So I put deadlifts on leg day or back day because they both get a ton of stimulus. Right. I'd argue if you do a ton of them, where are you the most sore the next day? Are you like, are you the most sore in your hamstrings and your glutes the next day? Or is it your your erectors and your traps and your, you know, your mid back? Is that the most sore? I can't answer that. Dude, they're all fucked up the next day. Yeah, well, I kind of agree.

You know, they're all pretty sore. But, you know, depending on your build, you're going to have a certain level of stimulus that's maybe a little bit different for the next guy. You know, and that's kind of like with a lot of different exercises, it's kind of where is your pump at? Where is your soreness level at? And that can be an indicator of whether or not that movement is an effective stimulus for that muscle group. So let's talk about Rose. What kind of sparked all this? Okay.

What was I going to say? Oh, so as you're talking about this, I'm thinking about rows. So I recently, because of the way I designed my program, I wanted one row a week. So three full range of motion overhead pulls, one partial. And I forgot why I defaulted to the chest supported row, the one where you're completely upright and you're on an incline. So there's no hip flexion whatsoever. You're not bent at all. And after a few weeks of doing that, I was using the arsenal, the arsenal chest supported row.

I guess that would that be considered a machine because it's plate loaded? Yeah, so plate loaded. Yeah, the plate loaded arsenal chest supported row. So you're completely, you're completely horizontal, no hip flexion. As it got heavier and heavier, then I started feeling all these weird fucking muscles way down near my lumbar. Not quite that low, but like right above, I'm like, shit, I've not been using all my erectors. And now when I deadlift, I don't feel like I have to fight as hard to set up. It's kind of interesting.

But the thing that I've been, you can clarify this because people are all. always asking about rows, how strict, how not strict. You and I have talked about this. And, you know, it really depends on the purpose. When it comes to Olympic lifts, the way that I've been teaching them lately, as I explain to people, I'm like, you're hoisting a weight up, essentially, which I consider it to be functional. So I've been teaching more novices how to clean for that purpose. So they can learn how to hoist up weight. You can do that with a row, too.

It's very frowned upon with the bodybuilders. They say any movement of the hips is bad. And, you know, I agree in one context and another, not so much. But a novice shouldn't be doing a barbell rope anyways. We talked about this, right? Yeah, I don't know if we got to that or not. But you brought it up briefly in the last one. I think you did.

I feel like I heard you say it recently talking about me. So I think it was the last one. But the reason that I like doing rows is because, like I said, I'm weak in elbow flexion. And my experience with them has been the first thing that goes is your hands. And then the arms tend to fail before the back because it's a partial, right? Right. So I get all these questions about how strict should it be. You know, I guess how strict should it be?

What are you doing it for, you know? It so. I have my ideas. I want to hear yours because you talk about this exercise quite a bit. I think pretty strict. You know, for the muscle to grow. What are we trying to grow? You have to have a target for an exercise.

When you're talking about hypertrophy. Yes. You have to have a target muscle. So when you're talking about strength training. it's a little different. Yes. You know, I don't, if I'm training a power lifter, I don't necessarily care whether he's more peck dominant or tricep dominant or

which exercise, you know, do the triceps get more of the share of the lift or the pecs get more of the share of the lift? We're going to set him up in a way to where he can bench press the most weight. Okay. Where his leverage is set for his body type, whatever, we're going to set his grip, his arch, in his back, his touch point for that barbell. All of those things are going to be manipulated so that he can lift the most weight. And that will be demonstrated in the gym.

You're going to be able to see what technique is the strongest. The same thing for a deadlift. Whether, you know, if he's a competitive bodybuilder, I mean a competitive powerlifter, I don't necessarily really, like on stance width and where the barbell sits on the back, it's going to be what is the technique. neat that allows you to lift the most weight under contest rules.

It doesn't matter whether you're more quad dominant or glue dominant or whatever dominant. Same thing with sumo versus conventional. The object is to lift the most weight under the rules of that federation. So whether it's sumo conventional stance width. None of that matters. It doesn't, we're not trying to target a muscle group. I'm not concerned of whether X muscle does more work than B muscle, you know, or A muscle does more work than B muscle.

in hypertrophy training though that matters so you the heart you have to when you're doing a hypertrophy a lift with the with the goal of stimulating growth you have to say what which muscle am I targeting right or even to get even more granular what part of the muscle am I targeting I would say that's a non-issue for most people let's just go back to what muscle am I targeting yes well that muscle one, two things, it needs to be doing the bulk of the work, you know, 80, 90% of the work without contribution from other muscles that are, let's say, irrelevant to that lift. Right. And by and large, it needs to be the failure point.

It needs to be the thing that fails because if we agree that training closer to failure is where maximum growth, where the growth stimulus occurs, the signal that goes to your brain, it tells it to remodel that tissue bigger and stronger than it was before, happens when specific muscle fibers reach a very slow contractile velocity. Specific muscle fibers. Right. Not the movement itself. This is a big thing when people understand what we're talking about. We're talking about tension. You have to understand the difference between tension at like the muscular skeletal level tension versus tension.

within specific muscle fibers themselves. That and that the contractile velocity of those muscle fibers of the target, they have to reach a near zero point. That's failure. That's where the stimulus for growth lies. We used to think it was different. The model, we've all said this at some point in our past that muscle growth was stimulated

basically by muscle damage. Break the muscle down and it will it will regrow bigger and stronger than it was before. And I think that's where a lot of the older training methodologies, a lot of the high, super high volume approaches came from where it was that point of let's just make the muscles sure as shit, throw a ton of volume out, throw a ton of exercise at it, because we're just trying to break down those muscle fibers and do as much damage as possible and then let the, you know, let the body will repair the damage muscle fibers and the muscle will be bigger and stronger than it was before. I think what we know now is that that is not the exact mechanism by which growth occurs

and that it is more of a signaling mechanism than it is a repair of muscular damage. And that that can that can it's what rip talks about in the very first day of the sliding filament theory between the acronym I and fibers. Yes. And the cross bridging and all that shit that happens. And that when that process happens, which only happens at a slow contractile velocity, so the weight has to reach near failure or be, so it has to be light and trained to failure or very heavy from the get-go. Both of those cause what? A slow contractile speed of those muscle fibers eventually so slow that it fails or reaches a velocity of zero. Yes. Right. Okay. So, but that has to happen in the target fiber. of the muscle that you're trying to train. So if you're, that's why that's the argument against, say, low bar squatting.

If the quad, there's still, it's not that there's, it's not like there's zero growth. But if you're trying to maximize things, in a low bar squat, are the quads the point of failure? Typically not. Or is it, huh? Typically not. Yeah, no, I would argue typically not. It's going to be probably the adopters. They receive probably the most.

stimulus that you know, but something in there. It's harder to ascertain on a big compound. Exactly. It's very hard to ascertain. It doesn't mean they're, it doesn't mean that they don't have value. I think that they do. What I've noticed with the low bar squat, because I've exclusively trained it for years just because I'm not a bodybuilder. I like it. I'm used to it. Sometimes I'll switch it up in high bar. It's just, I like doing it. You know, I'm not so biased against it where I'm going to say that it does things it doesn't do. I just, that's just what I do. And what I've noticed is the. I. Yeah. And what I've noticed is the. I. I. I. vastus lateralis and the vastest intermedias and the gracilis, they have gotten more developed. The medialis, not so much because I need to get deeper for that. Right. That's been my option. But I have normal anthropometry, though. So what I'm talking about is this, my argument that I'm using is most of what I, I don't look at all the papers. I read other people who look at all the papers.

Same. And I find somebody who I think has the right. analytical approach that can blend the interpretation of those papers with practical application. So I'm not the science guy. I'm not trained in reading research papers and all that kind of stuff. I don't care to, to be honest. I am and I don't care. I have bought in to Beardsley's.

People should go look up Chris Beardsley. He has a great Instagram account and his kind of effective reps theory, which is basically that any set that has the capacity is stimulate hypertrophy has about five effective reps in that set. There's about five reps where the contractile velocity is slow enough to signal a hypertrophic response. And so a heavy, a limit set of five is there. You're at full motor unit recruitment from because they basically what he'll tell you is that basically around eight, it probably varies with your absolute strength, but around 80 to

85% of one RM, you're at full motor. you were full motor unit recruitment from rep one. Even though you're still four reps from failure. You feel that too. Yeah. The weight is heavy enough, though, that it is stimulative from rep one. And so by the time you get to rep five, it's, you know, you're at, you can't get rep six. All five of those reps were maximally stimulative, you know, or close, or very close to it.

Whereas if, go back to your example, if you do have max. effort set of 12, it's only those last, say, five reps, assuming the 12th rep is hitting failure. In other words, you could not do 13 if your life dependent on it. Right. It is only those last five reps. And I'd say it's probably more like the last three or four, but it doesn't matter. Yeah, that's what I say. It's not bulletproof.

It's just a way of things. It's only those, it's only those last five reps of that set that are. maximally stimulative. You know, because the first, let's say, seven or eight, there's not a huge effort level there, right? Around rep number eight or nine, you have to start thinking a little bit. Okay, I'm going to have to put some ass into this movement to get it. Well, that, that, that, that, that, that mental part, that's what stimulates motor

unit recruitment. Your ability to think, I have to squat this harder. I have to try harder. That, that enhanced, that's more motor units in that. And then also the bar speed is going to slow. Rep number 12 is going to be far slower than rep number one. And because that contracts, it's going to be very slow if it's actually a failure. And those repetitions that have that very slow contractile velocity are the ones that are going to stimulate hypertrophy.

So going back to your row thing, what muscles are doing the work in this row? And then when you fail, what is it that's failing? you know, where is the failure point coming from? If you're trying to use a row to develop your laps, this is what I'm trying to understand. So is it more erectors that are failing? You know, if it is, then it's like doing, that's like doing deadlift with a double overhand grip.

Your grip failed far before anything else did, which means nothing else is going to get very much stimulus because the weakest link in your chain failed way before any of the other muscle. were even remotely challenged, right? Yes, yes. So if your row technique is shitty, which it is for most people. It was for me. Yeah, so maybe your erectors fail first.

Your low bat, you're set up in a way because you don't know good technique or your erectors just aren't strong enough to handle a heavy weight for whatever reason that your erectors and your low back will fail far before your last ever approach failure, which is then going to make at least that version of whatever. version of barbell row you're doing, not a good exercise for hypertrophy because your target musculature, your lats are failing way before that. If you're using a double overhand grip on a barbell row, your grip is going to fail way before your lat suit. You can handle far more weight with straps than you can with a double overhand grip. And so you guys will say, well,

but I want to train my grip. Fair enough, but you're doing it at the expense of your laps. And you're using far less weight. Your grip is going to fail. You'll come off of that. Your forearms are going to have a massive pump. You won't feel shit in your back. You're going to, you won't grip. Straps have, this isn't an aside, but straps on back movements.

If you look at a lot of bodybuilders training, why are they using straps on a lap pull down when they don't need them? It's not because they can't do it. And it's not because they're lazy and their pussies and all this stuff, which is what the internet will tell you, it's because by being able to relax the grip and relax the forearm, they're able to generate more into their laps. Okay? You don't, you don't have this.

There's an interference effect from having these other muscles having to do a shitload of work. Yes. They can probably do more volume doing it that way as well because their forearms are not fatiguing. And most guys, when they start doing back training, if you start having them do like a dedicated back day, when they first start, if they don't, if they don't, if they don't, if they don't, if they don't, if they don't, if they don't, if they don't, if they don't. have coaching and instruction on the list, most of them will get off a lap pull down machine or any type of row variant or whatever and they've got a huge forearm pump and nothing. Yep, yep. It becomes four on day, not back.

Yeah. Which is why guys use straps. It makes, especially if you're going to do multiple exercises for back, it's to save the forearm fatigue, but it's, but it's also because because it's more stimulative to the lat to disengage the grip and disengage the forearms a bit to really ensure that the laps are the things that become the failure point in that lift. And so when you're doing barbell rows, it's very, very difficult to do barbell rows heavy without a little bit of cheat in there.

The torso is going to move. But if you are using hip extension in place of scapular retraction and shoulder extension, you have to look, what is the function of the lap? Well, it really has like three, like, its primary is shoulder extension. So the most pure lap movement in existence is a pullover. But second would be like a chin up or like a pull down, especially like a close grip. Yes. Like here or a V grip or like the mag, the close mag grips, things that are almost pure shoulder extension are going to be the, that's the primary role of the lat is shoulder extension.

But secondarily from that, and this is where the pendle row came from. And literally, I feel like I didn't even know Glenn, but I feel like I'm the only person who has ever read his explanation of what a Pendle row is. And literally nobody that does Penley Rose now is doing it the way that Glenn described them in his written article. Maybe there's other sources that he has for them. I don't know. But I have read very detailed account of Glenn Penley talking about why he prescribed. pen lay roast and also how to do them in the correct technique. And there's there's three elements of that is that the latts, again, shoulder extension

is their primary, but secondarily is scapular retraction. That's not the primary role of the latts and it's not the best way to train the lots, but they are involved in scapular retraction. But the other thing that they're involved in is spinal extension. Yes. And that is the one thing that people don't realize about the latz is that they have a role in spinal extension, especially extension of the spine around the mid back, not necessarily the very low back that's going to be almost pure erector.

That's what I felt on that chest supported row. When you get a few vertebrae up from that, right? Yes. Yes. Where the last attached low, they're involved in spinal extension. A pendle row, it's like the glute hamraise is designed to do what, train both function of the hamstrings at once. It's training hip extension and knee flexion at once, right?

A pinle row is designed to train all three functions of the lap in one movement. It's designed to train spinal extension, scapular retraction, and shoulder extension all in one rep. Nobody does it like that. It's all hip extension. So this is some very small amounts of the other ones. And so a pinle row pulled from the, everybody thinks just a pinlay row is a barbell row pulled from the floor. That's what I thought. But there's more to it than that.

And what Glenn was talking about when he wanted it pulled from the floor, from the floor, he used the terminology that I've only heard, ever heard him use, which is dynamic archie. Okay. Which is to start with the back and slight flexion and dynamically, dynamically extend the spine, not the hips. Now, most people aren't going to be able to do that. They're too big of a muscle motor moron to be able to do that. Yep. And in order to dynamically extend the spine while keeping the hips still.

So dynamic spinal extension with scapular retraction. Why am I demonstrating this on video? I don't know. But it's what I'm doing with my hands. Some people are watching. Extending the spine while it's a very short shoulder extent. The range of motion on a row for the range of shoulder extension is very short. So that's what I was looking at.

Yeah. Right. So it's not like if you want like full shoulder extension, you want something from overhead. Okay. Chin up, a pull down. A row pulled in, especially low on the body, is going to be pure or a very shortened piece. It's the short end of shoulder extension. So we talked about training muscles in their shortened versus lengthen phases, which I don't think really matters for most people.

But what you're doing is for training the Lats in their shortened position. So there, and you're just doing like what they're almost fully contracted right there. But it's still, it's, it's still powerful stimulus. So that's what a pendle row is, is those three elements all in place. The way guys do them now, though, is all like, maybe it's none of those three. I see them. A lot of times it's, it's, especially guys that go insanely heavy on it. And maybe it's not a bad exercise, but it's mostly hip extension.

And that's not a role of the last. is not, that's not, so when your, when your body, if your torso is starting here and you're opening up your hips like this in order to finish every rep, the bulk of that weight that's being moved is being moved by the hips. So if you just want to move some weight around and maybe it has some carry over to the deadlift, you know, to do them real sloppy like that. A lot of big deadlifters that do a lot of big heavy rows will tell you it helps them. I don't know. But what I will tell you is there's, there's no argument. argument to be made that a movement that is 80% hip extension is a really great lat exercise. I don't think so because it's not, it's definitely not the limiting factor. And so the pendleigh row thing was kind of an aside. So going back to your point of doing like a chest supported row. Yes. Is a good way to take other muscles out of the lift that may be the limiting fact.

Take your erectors out of it, right? and support yourself on a chest pad and then row that way so that you can function or you can perform the function of the muscles that you're trying to work. And you can perform those functions hard and with heavy weight without being limited by other exercises that you're by other muscles that you're not worried about training and that movement. The other thing I would say is people don't understand the position of the arm on rows. Okay. When I went on Dave Tate's podcast a year or two ago, we had a great conversation. And I wish it, we had that it was one of these conversations that we had after the cameras went off.

But we were talking about back training. And we should have, it would have been great content. Yeah. But we had similar agreements is that, you know, the West side guys, they talked about training their back four days a week. Right. They didn't train their laps four days a week. Okay. But not every row is the same, right?

You can do, there's a type of row that you can do that trains almost zero. lot. Okay? Yeah, yeah. There's a type of row that you can do that trains very little upper back. There's going to obviously be some overlap between the two, but the style of row that you do and the placement of your arms relative to your torso really determines whether that row is going to be a very lat-focused movement or whether it's going to be more of the upper back and the rear delts type of movement. So any type of row that you're going to do that where you really want to target the upper back, the rear delts, the bottom of the traps, the terrace groups, the rhomboids to some extent, and some lat, you're going to have the hands are going to be basically high and wide,

and the weight, the resistance is going to be pulled in towards the chest, okay? And so that would be like a chest supported T-bar row, that sort of thing. But the elbows are out away from the body. And that's not a lot of shoulder extension. No. Almost none, basically. What lat activation you're getting is from its secondary, role in scapular retraction.

But it's not a primary lat exercise. It's definitely a secondary contributor to the movement. But that type of row, and that's, I see a lot of guys doing their barbell rows that way where they bend over and they pull the bar up into their chest. I've seen that, yes. Which is making it into more of an upper back exercise. But that is a shitty, terrible upper back exercise because now the bar is so far out in

front of your body, that moment arm is so long. you can never possibly move any load that way. When you're pulling, if you've got the, if you're bent over all the way and you've got a barbell on the floor and you're rowing it into your chest, that moment arm is extremely long and you're never going to row a very heavy weight. You can do far more resistance without the limiting factor of that moment arm of your lower back being having that weight so far out in front of your hips.

A chest supported movement is far better for that because you're upright, or you're laying down, whatever, and you're supported and now just those muscles can do the work and they're not limited by anything except themselves which is what you want and when you hit failure it's not going to be because your lower back gave out it's going to be because those muscles the those muscle fibers themselves reach the contractile velocity of zero and that's where the growth comes from now so how do we row for the last the guy that first pointed this out from a biomechanical standpoint that that people I mean, others did before him.

But the first person that we would know is Dorian Yates. And that was his Yates row. And Dorian was very smart on muscle function. Extremely. He was the smartest of anybody in that generation in terms of being able to explain exactly why he did the exercises that he did and why he did them the way that he did. But the Yates row, so all these rows have names, right? Yeah.

And then you've got the Yates row. Well, the Yates row is what? he's very upright and he's pulling the weight into his lower abs, not into his chest, not into his upper abs. He's pulling the weight into his lower abs. And early in his career, before he blew out his bicep, he did it with a supine grip. And if you experiment with that, I don't program supine grip barbell loads because they're very dangerous to the biceptain. I agree. But when you have the elbows, as we talked about upper back with the elbows being high and wide,

well for a row for the last the elbows are going to be down and in okay and now when you do that rowing position what do we see shoulder extension more shoulder extension yes right so the yates row where you're more bent over you don't have a moment arm

between the midfoot and the barbell the barbell is going to spend it over the midfoot which is why Dorian can row 405 I can row quite a bit of weight you know I do more of a I do more of a yate style row than I do that but you know why guys will ask me sometimes not that I'm flaunting my own strength because it's not impressive at all but I can row 315 for a set of 8 to 10 pretty easily and get and not have

any pressure on my low back but I'm aware of the distance between that barbell and my midfoot just like I would be with a basic barbell lift and it's not that far out in front right right and so it's so you're my erectors are not limited or not the limiting factor it's a very short range of motion for the latts, but it's because of the weights that are used, it's very effective range of motion. But you don't have to do a barbell row. Any row that you do a single arm dumbbell row, if you want to do the old, you know, support with one hand and do a single arm dumbbell row, you're going to pull that dumbbell with the upper arm close to the torso and pull the weight down in towards the hip. Not up here like that, which is most guys dumbbell row like this, up here like that.

Yeah, yeah. A little lat, but mostly upper back. a good dumbbell row for the lap, that elbow's going to be down a little further, and the weight is going to be pulled into the lower abs. Okay. And that's why you see guys when they do like the old, like the hammer strength, single arm, the, the hammer, it's similar to the arsenal machine, right? Yeah. The dual arms on there.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So why do you see guys so often do that movement standing as opposed to actually using the seat? It's because they're trying to position their body. If you watch, they'll grab the. of the handle and they pull the top of the handle down into their hip. Yeah. They don't pull in a straight line up here.

No. They stand so they can pull the handle down into the hip, which that activates the lats. So they know what they're doing. If they wanted to work more of the upper back, they would sit upright on the chest, grab the pronate the horizontal handles and pull here and work more of the upper back versus grabbing the top of the handle, keeping the elbow in and pulling down into the hip. Now you've got a very good lap exercise. And so fundamentally understanding muscle function is the key to really understanding how back training works.

That was literally just going to that. Just grabbing weight and rowing it without any thought into how you're rowing it. But, you know, if you look at Dorian's training, that his barbell rows, his Yates row was designed to target the laps specifically. Now, did he get a lot of, he's rowing 405. So did he get a lot of erector stimulus? Sure. Did he get, you know, some trap activation and some midback activation, of course. But his, there was a lot of overlap there. But his target on that movement was the lat. And that's what he wanted. He switched later on to a double overhand grip instead of a supine grip because he tore his bicep. I've done them both ways. And I have, I've torn my bicep too in the past. So I don't, I don't use them. But if you want to play around with it and just grab, you know, 95 pounds or 135. and do some kind of Yates-style rows with a supine grip about a shoulder-width grip and pull it low into your abs and really arch and then flex your lats hard at the top. Do about 10 or 15 reps.

You will feel it far more than you do a regular barbell row, the way that most people do a regular barbell row. And then you can turn that heavy, good free weight compound movement into a movement that actually produces a stimulus and a failure point for the muscles that you're trying to train. that makes sense. It makes perfect sense. That was very hard to do a biomechanical lecture in a podcast.

We've probably lost like 75% of the audience here, but I care about it because I have grievances with Rose that you've cleared up here in this explanation. So my first one, and I think you can agree with this because we said this in the last one, is that a lot of novices or just guys that aren't strong are very concerned about how to row. and they probably don't need to spend time on it. You know, I was one of these guys back in the day. I've always done the full range of motion pull up, chin up, pull down because of swimming. That was a high school swimmer. They had us doing it very young. And I kept that in rotation always.

So I understood how that lift worked. My lats would get wider from it. I got it. The row up and, you know, pre-starting strength, I didn't fucking get it. That's why I don't like rows for novices. I think the novice, their back training program needs to be chin ups. and deadlifts. Because those are classic point A to point B exercises.

Yeah. Which is what they need. If you go into a full stretch at the bottom when you're doing your chin-ups which I always have, which they can do and you pull yourself up, chin over bar or chest to bar, the lap is going to work the way that you want it to do. The same is not true on a pull-down. If you don't, a pull-down is not a point A to point B exercise.

and guys fuck it up very badly all the time. And so, but a chin is kind of dummy proof in a way. And a deadlift is really dummy proof. If you can, if you just do the mechanics correctly, you don't have to feel there's no, there's a difference between understanding proper lifting mechanics and establishing a mind muscle connection. Yes.

There's overlap, but they're different. Yes. And the lifts that we teach to novices do not. require a mind muscle connection. They're not anywhere close to you have to get to that is teaching people how to set their back before squatting. So the little thing we do in the seminars where Rip goes around and touches everybody's rectors and sees who can set their back and who can't.

Yes. That's the closest we get to the importance of a mind muscle connection in the strength training program that we do for novices because you have to be able to use your brain to activate that muscle. Yes. Other than that, it's mechanical. it's go go go down to this point and come up and if you do that all of the right muscles will do their job whether you feel them or not and so that's part of the reason why we use those movements

you don't need to feel those muscles working in order for them to work that's that's different than for more advanced level bodybuilding or hypertrophy work where a lot of these exercises is you do need to learn not just the mechanics of the lift, but what we call that mind muscle connection. Is your brain connecting with that muscle and are the mechanics in the right place so that the right muscle fibers are getting the bulk of the stimulus?

And that's where these guys that come from a starting strength or a power lifting background, run into the bodybuilding trouble with the hypertrophy work and why they, because their rep execution is terrible. They just think, well, I just grab whole. this motherfucker and just start rowing.

And sometimes they can move a lot of weight, but I watch a guy do a row and I'm like, at no point did his last do any work. It was just body movement, hip extension, elbow flexion, whatever. Yeah. But there was very, you can watch the last. I mean, that's all you have to do. Watch the muscle. It's not doing shit because this rep execution is so terrible.

Or guys do swinging pull downs. You know, yeah, they're moving the cable from the top of the stack to their chest, but they're using every other muscle in their body other than their laps to do it. And they think, well, shit, I'm, I'm repping the whole stack for a set of 10, but why are my laugh small? Because you're not using them. Yep. So that was the second issue I had with Rose.

And a lot of this is, you explained it way better here than in other videos and things you posted up because the dynamic thoracic extension. I was not connecting the lat with that. I understood that you need to do it. You said it in the first podcast that it with you and Trent. And I tried to do it like on my. own with a wide grip cable row. And I'm like, what the fuck?

I couldn't figure it out, man. And then I started fucking with that arsenal machine a few months back. And I was like, oh, this is what he's talking about. So whenever I would hear you or other people talk about the lats on rows, I'm like, what the fuck are they talking? This is a partial. I'm like, you can't fucking get a full stretch. What are they talking about?

And like, you just kind of hit it. You're like, no, not that function. You're like, you're acknowledging that it's a partial. But then you're like, there's other shit you're supposed to be doing that I definitely was not doing. And the limiting factor for me on Rose is my forearms, my biceps, because I'm not using my lats enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're yanking on it with your arms. Yeah. And it's the old, it's the old thing everybody building coaching the world used to teach this way of, you know, just thinking of your hands as hooks, you know, and I get people to do this

all the time when I'm teaching. I'm pulling exercises of when think of your, think of your hand as just a hook on on there that you're and you're and then what i'll teach people to do is initiating the movement with their lap or their upper back in other words grab onto that that handle on that road machine and just and keep your elbow straight now move it with just your lap initiate like that and then come through with the hand it's very nuanced and it's hard very hard to teach for a motor moron I don't know if you're a motor moron or not. No, no, I'm not. My guest is not.

Although a lot of swimmers are, obviously enough. I don't. Motor morons in the gym. But anyway, that's an aside. I trained a ton of swimmers. Yeah, yeah, same. They, but teaching somebody, so I had a guy that was kind of a, I don't say a mentor, but a teacher to me in the gym a long time ago, you've probably seen people do this,

which is like, like, like lat activations on a pull-up bar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. pull-up bar and don't bend your elbows just just contract your lap and just move your body up and down just with kind of rotating your scapula down like that and what that is for is that's teaching you how to initiate the movement how do you initiate the pull from the bottom of a pull down or a pull-up or a row with your so when you grab onto that handle on a row machine most guys grab it and their first thought is i'm going to yank on it with my hand i'm going to i'm going to pull with my hand. And so that engages the forearm and the bicep right from the beginning and a little

less lap, whereas if you can really teach yourself to pull from your, you'll hear bodybuilding, all the bodybuilding coaches say that, pull through your laps, pull through your laps, pull through your laps. What do they mean? I didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. That's what they mean. Yeah. Pull, pull through your laps, not, don't pull with your hands. And that's where the straps come into play is they help you to learn that technique of don't yank on the weight with your hands. through your laps. It's a very, very, very difficult thing to teach people. And it's not something that any novice needs to worry about. And it's not something that 99% of the general public that's training for health and fitness really needs to worry about that much either because

they're not really going to have the capacity to do it. It's a, it's a very nuanced thing and it's hard to teach. But I would agree. Maximize things. It's a necessary thing to learn, especially on back training. It's less important. on basically every other muscle group. The hardest muscle group to teach people to train correctly from a hypertrophy standpoint, by far is the back. It is the hardest one to learn, which is why novices and maybe even a lot of intermediates and stuff do better to just stick with like pull-ups and deadlifts.

And maybe some chest supported rows for scapular retraction, although deadlifts work quite a bit of that if you do them right. But some of these other movements are there, they're, I don't want to say they're like too nuanced to learn. That's, that's not correct. Um, but there is a lot to learning them to really getting the most out of them. And this is why a lot of people shit on bodybuilding type training is being ineffective. It's just strictly they don't know how to do it. That's it. They don't know how to make it work. It's kind of like Olympic lifts. It requires a lot of commitment time focus. Yes. Yeah. But there's with back training, it's just difficult because there's, with every other muscle group, there's exercises that you, can do to maximally stimulate those muscles without really learning that mind muscle connection as much. Like, if you want to do hamstrings, I mean, you need, you can do a leg curl, which an idiot can do. And probably some sort of, you know, heavy loaded hipics, an RDL or something like that. Those two things. And that's kind of a point A to point B movement. I mean, it's good to be able to feel

your hamstring stretch and stuff at the bottom. But if you have the right mechanics, it's just a point A to point B movement. And certainly a lot of your chest movements, you're pressing exercises for your chest and your shoulders are point A to point B movements. A lot of height and the mind muscle connect. You know, more so if you get into doing cable flies, lateral raises,

things like that require some of that more nuanced thinking of how to actually feel the right muscles work. And like lateral raises, guys do them with, again, using every muscle in their body other than their side delts to do it. you know, the best thing to do, like, for lateral rays is to really learn how the side delt works is to learn on one of those lateral raised machines.

I would agree with that. Yeah. I don't like them. I don't like those machines that much, like the ones where the pads sit on your elbows. Yep. I don't really like them that much, but teaching people how a side dealt raise works to get them to be able to use dumbbells or cables to do it with that's really effective because it's, most guys when they do lateral raises, if you watch them, they, again,

Again, it goes back to their connection is with their hand on the weight. And they throw the weight up here. Oh, you can't really see. But they throw the weight up here. But their elbow is down by their side still. Well, the point of a lateral race, the medial delt, it abducts the humorous away from the body. And so to make it do its job, the humorous needs to be lifted away from the body, which means that elbow needs to be at least as high as the shoulder.

probably one or two inches higher. And so your, your focus on that movement is your elbows. I tell my clients all the time, when I start with them, I start when I teach them lateral raises, I start with no weight and I get behind them and I put my hands on their elbows.

And I tell them to drive their elbows up against my hands. And I make them work against the light resistance of my hand pressure, pushing against my hands with their elbows. And then I put a little weight in their hand. And I say, okay, now do that same thing with a little bit of weight and get your elbow up higher. Don't focus on your hand throwing the weight up.

Focused on your elbow and your side delt lifting the humorist up away from your torso. Now that's a side dealt movement. Okay. Upright Roes is another one. That's a wide grip upright row. It's another exercise that gets shit on. But it's a great side delt movement, a wide grip upright row is a lateral raise with the barbell held in the hands. and people think of upright rows like this.

Yeah, that's how I was first sight. But a wide grip out here, think about it. What's it doing? It's that. Okay. But it's that, a wide grip, D'Ate talked about wide grip upright rows. A lateral raise can only be loaded so heavy. A wide grip upright row, in theory, can be loaded to infinity.

You know, it's a great side-delt movement, but almost nobody does it right. And then, again, they use hip extension to get it moving. and they use their traps, which the traps are going to be involved some. But a wider grip upright row, if you've learned to do a lateral raise correctly, I'll put a barbell in their hand and I'll say,

now do a lateral race. So they've got their hands hooked on the bar and we're just thinking about driving the elbows up and away from the body with that barbell. Shit, I want to try this now. And you'll get an insane pump in the side dealt from doing those. But again, if you're just thinking about, okay, I'm going to grab this bar

and just start yanking it up to my chin, you're going to be, well, this hurts my shoulder and I don't feel it anywhere. This exercise sucks. You just don't know how to do it. And again, I'm not arguing that everybody needs to do these movements. I'm just trying to talk people through some of the nuanced differences between like deep in the weeds, hypertrophy training and like strength training, strength building. It's kind of two different things. Yeah.

And back to the central point that nobody's going to hear because they've turned us off by now. Oh, yeah. Nobody's listening to this now. You know, the guy that Cubsid, who is undertrained or detrained or is never trained, is never going to need to do this shit. He's going to grow just fine, pressing and deadlifting, you know? Then that's what happened to me. Like I did all these fucking rows wrong like you're talking about. And I look at my back and it will get wider from all the chin-ups.

And then nothing happened in the middle. And I'm like, what the fuck? I'm doing all these rows. Like, I have a weak upper back. I have a weak rhomboid, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Then I saw Rip, saying, fuck Barbel Rose, get your deadlift to 500. then you can have your own opinion and you won't need mine. So I just took that to heart, bro.

And then all that shit grew, I'm like, well, there you go. I'm like, I got, yeah, he's not wrong. For who he's talking to, absolutely. Yeah, and Rip is probably the best in our industry about knowing his audience and keeping on point with his message to his audience. You know, I'm the worst about going off topic and talking about things that don't apply to the bulk of my audience. but I'm not as autistic as he is. So I can't, I'm not hyper-focused on this one thing. So I can't, I can't just like people are like, well, you don't talk about starting strength that much.

And it's like, I talked about starting strength for like 15 years. You co-authored the fucking programming book. Like, I can't, like, I said what I'm going to say about it. They're like, well, do you still, yeah, I still use it. I still use all the same principles. It's sometimes the exact, you know, the exact programming that's in the books. but I've kind of said what I'm going to say about it and I can't just keep talking about microloading and eating more and and you know all in three sets of five like I can't just talk

about that for the rest of my career like I'm interested in too many things and they don't apply to the bulk of the people that I train but they do apply to a lot of the people that I train now and the more I talk about it the more I get people that are coming to me that want this style of training and it's it's a lot of fun for me to do it so so yeah I was in a whole different category than everybody else in that I'm more like our average client that wants to keep pushing it but isn't competitive in any of these arenas. Yeah. The thing I always tell people is competing in a sport or a pageant. The difference between that and what I do is deadlines.

You know, I don't have a deadline. But I'm still trying to add over time. And I did it because I didn't want to look like shit. And I was trying to be healthy, you know. But I would take that. You know, our average client with those goals, and I turn that all the way up because I've been continuously setting PRs year after year for 13 years. And I have to explain to people these things because they look at me, like, or you're not that big. Then I'm like, do you understand where I fucking started, you know?

Yeah. It's all relative. Yeah. And I look at these guys and I see them going through the same struggles I did where they're reading these magazines. They don't have good genetics for this shit. And they're sitting there, well, my lateral raise, you know, with their fucking five or 10 pound dumbbell or they're swinging 15s maybe. or, you know, I need to do the row and it needs to be really strict and they're not deadlifting, you know? And if they do deadlift, it's 165 the first day, you know?

Right. And I have to tell them like, you got to the barbell lifts. So I go, but, you know, so and so, you know, bodybuilder influencer guy said, no, I need the stretch and the mind muscle connection and the length and partial. And I'm like, bro, you're not deadlifting. And if I have you deadlift today, it's, yeah. They're trying to read the organic chemistry book when they haven't taken biology one or one. Precisely. And that's, that's the best analogy.

And that's 99% of it. It's not that the organic chemistry book is wrong or doesn't work. But the reason that they don't understand it and the reason they can't operate and the reason they're failing organic chemistry is because they didn't take biology 101 and chemistry 101 and master the foundations before they got into the more advanced topics. And I think that's, I always go back to that analogy because I think it's the private, it's not perfect, but it's the closest one. It's pretty damn close, man. Yeah. You know, because I think there's a lot of parallels there where if you don't have good mastery of the foundational subject matter, it's going to make it nearly impossible or just really, really hard to master the more advanced stuff. You know, and I would make that argument.

Like, that's why I don't, I don't think of like in the starting strength program, everybody says, well, you know, we don't want to do the power clean. Okay, fine. You don't want to do the power clean. So what do we sub it with? And the answer for years was always barbell rows. That's horrible. But if you have a 155 deadlift, you're going to be barbell rowing 75 pounds. It just doesn't have any stimulus.

And the weight matters. It does. Yes, it's all relative. But the weight that you're moving on exercises does matter. We talked about this in the last subject. It was like Jay Cutler saying, well, you know, I never went heavy. Like I didn't go heavy like Wadi did. I like I trained in the 12 to 15 rep range and it's like but you're but you're inclining

four or five 12 reps yeah 12 yeah like that's so yeah you are going heavy you're not going one rep max heavy but you are going heavy now I just he's not the best like he also said that when him and Ronnie did the exact same workout Ronnie had more weight on the bar with everything yeah but but also Jay Cutler said when he was when he was when Ronnie was on his way out and Jay Culler was on his way up, but Jay Culler was still losing to Ronnie Coleman. He's like, what do I need to do? I can't catch up to this guy. And so he started looking at Ronnie's training and Ronnie Coleman's doing 495 barbell rows. He's doing nine plate T-bar rows. He's doing 800-pound deadlifts. And he wasn't doing that stuff. And even as a super advanced guy, I mean, literally

runner up in the Mr. Olympia, even as a super advanced guy, he went back to the basics. He went back to heavy, you know, he got away from the pumpy, squeezy cable stuff. He got away from a lot of that stuff and went back to deadlifting. He went back to squatting. He went back to a lot of those foundational movements and tried to, you know, reclaim some strength on those. Yeah, higher rep ranges and all that. But he didn't have that, he just, he didn't have that size that that Ronnie Coleman had. That's what I think, you know, even at that level, that literally number one and two in the world,

the weight on the bar kind of mattered. You look at that era of where I think probably the best area of bodybuilding ever, which is Ronnie Coleman, Flex Wheeler, Chris Cormier, Jay Cuffler, Lee Priest, Lee Priest, Dexter Jackson, all those guys. Now, again, a lot of this stuff is genetic, yes, of course. But nobody had better genetics than Flex Wheeler. No. And Flex Wheeler never beat Ron Coleman.

the biggest deciding factor in most of those guys was Ronnie Coleman's back. From the front, I think he was beatable. And even a lot of those guys were better. I'm not a bodybuilding judge, but I don't know all the criteria. But just for my look at it, it's a flex wheeler. Some of these guys were almost better than him from the front. But when Ronnie Coleman turned around and everything from the back, you know, the rear-lachaelic. spread, the back double by, all that kind of stuff, it was over because his level of detail and

size that he had in the back was so much better than everyone else's when he was at his peak. And I always say, you know, is that genetic? Well, sure, it's a genetically strong body bot for him. But who else was deadlifting 800 pounds for reps? Right. Now, did he do that all the time? I don't think so. I mean, that was like for filming, but he did a lot of very heavy deadlifts very often.

You sure did. 495 barbell rows. T bar rose with, you know, nine plates on the end, with the same extender with nine plates on the end, all that kind of stuff

that he was doing that other, those other guys weren't doing, you know, and even from the front, you know, 495 on the bench for a set of eight,

you know, that kind of stuff, under continuous tension, never locking out there. I mean, that kind of stuff, people don't realize how freaking strong that is.

Mm-hmm. You know, 585 front squats for sets of six, never locking out. keeping the quads under tension the entire time. You know, I don't even know whether that's good, good or bad, but it's really hard to do that. You know, and people don't appreciate how much stronger he was than them. And these are the elite of the elite.

So it's like for, so how does that apply to the guy that we're talking to? Well, the weight on the bar matters. Absolutely. If it mattered between number one and two at Mr. Olympia, it matters for 45-year-old Bill from accounting. Like, if he wants to grow, he's got to get stronger. and not worry too much about all this other stuff that I was just talking about earlier in the video. It still goes back to you have to get stronger on the basics.

And even on the non-basics, it still goes back to getting stronger on those movements. Once you learn the technique, the bodybuilding hypertrophy side is still all about, even though it's not a performance-based sport, it's still all about performance. I mean, you're not going to, it's like I was saying, if you're squatting 315 for 5 today and a year from now, you're still squatting 315 for 5, you're not going to grow. If you're barbell rowing 135 for 10 today and a year from now, you're barbell rowing 135 for 10, not going to grow. Like, you have to, the performance metrics have to go up at a time. So it's still performance based even when it's not. The performance just happens in the training, not on the stage. Right.

Exactly. Yeah, I think we've hammered. Should we say bye to both of our listeners? I think so. I think we might have one left. Yeah. Maybe it's Trent. Yeah.

All right. Well, I think I want to do the next one on lifting, like, heavy, you know, singles, doubles and triples, you know. Yeah, back to the pure straight training stuff. Yeah, yeah, because we're not going four hours tonight, man. We're not Joe Rogan. No. But my mind started going there, so I have an idea for the next one. I think it'll be good. Cool. But, yeah, I think we hammered that to high hell. I want to use most of it, even though we're going to lose, you know, most of the people after the first hour. Yeah, that's all right.

Yeah. But, yeah, this one will be on YouTube as well. So we'll get some video. But yeah, I'll close out. So let everybody know where to find you. Best place just go to my main website, which is just Andybaker.com. So if you want one-on-one online coaching, find it there. If you want templated programs, if you want online group coaching. So basically everything that I do, I still have a blog there.

We were just talking about the bullshit of social media before we came on air. And, you know, the struggles with getting your message out there. I still have a blog that I somewhat maintain. But, you know, it's got 10, 15 years worth of articles on there, you know, this kind of stuff. It's got links to my podcast, which I haven't done a new episode in a year. But there's still a lot of good episodes on there. So any thing you want, you know, from my perspective, just Andy Baker.com. All right.

And you can find me at weights and plates.com where I offer online coaching primarily. I also still have a gym here in Phoenix. Waits and plates gym just south of the, just south of the, just south. of Sky Harbor Airport. Most of my short form content pops up on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. We're also on YouTube. And if you liked what you saw today, please smash that subscribe button, as they say.

We're at YouTube.com slash at weights underscore and underscore plates. And I think those are all the places that you can find me. And I'm fucking cooked. So I will see you all next time.