Weights and Plates Podcast - #24 - Bro'ing Out: Accessory Lifts for the Strength Focused Lifter

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

Admit it, you like to bro out! You know, catch a pump doing fifteen different types of curls, tricep pushdowns, face pulls... it's ok, we all love to do some curls for the girls. But, it's important we don't confuse fun exercises for productive strength training, which occurs with the big compound lifts: squats, presses, bench press, and deadlifts.   That said, is there ever a time for accessory lifts in a strength training program? It turns out... yes! Accessory lifts can be used for a variety of reasons: targeted warmups, rehab, building proprioception and motor skills, and, for the advanced lifter, adding volume and hypertrophy stimulus to a program when the lifter cannot tolerate additional barbell work.   If you have to ask about accessories, though... they probably aren't appropriate for you!   2022 Wichita Falls Strengthlifting Classic https://liftingcast.com/meets/meqotq65gjp0/registration   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.marmaladecream.com

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Hello, hello. Today, we're going to pick up on our wonderful library of topics. We're going to talk about assistance exercises or quote-unquote accessories. That's like the popular word the last 10 years. I want to do my accessories. I just... Oh, you mean like close grip bench? You know, like curls, bro.

You know, curls. Oh. Yeah. Oh, like curls, huh? Curls, yeah. No, yeah. Tricep pushdowns. Face pulls.

Face pulls. Face pulls, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, got to do face pulls. Yeah. Oh, man curls, huh? It curls, yeah. No, yeah. Tricep pushdowns? Face pulls? Face pulls? Face pulls, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, gotta do face pulls. Yeah. Oh, man. Accessories. So I told you on the, we were like texting about this. We're like, what are we going to talk about today?

And you're like, we got to talk about this bro stuff. And I'm like, accessories, it's kind of like that. What is that saying? If you're trying to buy like expensive car or something, they're like, if you have to ask, you can't afford it. That's true. If you have to ask about accessories, they're not for you. Exactly. I like that. That's where I'm at.

That's where I'm at with it too. So, yeah. So, okay. Well, why don't we start with this? What is an accessory lift? What do we consider an accessory lift versus, you know, the other lifts that we could possibly do in the gym? Well, let's start with, you know, some basic terminology. You have, you know, your main lifts, your squat, your press, your bench press, and your deadlift and your chin-up. Yep. Yep. We would call, in fact, sometimes we refer to those when we're talking about programming, we'll refer to the four compound lifts there, so excluding the chin-up, as the competition lifts. Because, you know, regardless of whether you were a competitor or not, we just call them the competition lifts because that is what you would do in a powerlifting meet or a strengthlifting meet.

You would do the squat, bench, and deadlift in a powerlifting meet, or you do the squat, press, and deadlift in a strength lifting meet. You would do the squat, bench, and deadlift in a power lifting meet. Or you do the squat, press, and deadlift in a strength lifting meet. So we'll sometimes refer to those as the big four as the competition lifts. That's right. If you're a competitor, they are competition lifts. If you're not a competitor, they are your main lifts. So we typically center everything around those lifts. That's what

builds the most muscle mass. That's what trains the most muscles to get stronger. Those are the bread and butter of your program, essentially. As you advance and you get some time under the bar, you know, as you train over a long enough timeline, you know, you start to identify weak points. A novice does not have weak points. A novice's entire body is weak. Yeah, everything is a weak point. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I get these guys, oh, my right arm's bigger than my left.

And it's like, well, that's always going to be the case, but it's more pronounced now because you don't do shit. So, no, you don't need to do, you know, more for one arm versus the other. Or, you know, your biceps are small compared to your pecs. Well, buddy, your pecs are also small, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Everything is small.

So, anyways, if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Just like you can't afford the car. You don't need to be worried about this if you are a novice. But, you know, eventually, you know, you want to do other things. Let's say your lockout on the bench press is a novice. But, you know, eventually, you know, you want to do other things. Let's say your lockout on the bench press is a bit slow. You know, you can do some close grip work or some board presses or some slingshot bench presses. So let's talk about what all that falls under. That falls under the umbrella term assistance exercise. So assistance exercise. So, assistance exercise assists the main lift. So, you have assistance exercises that are partial ranges of motion of the parent exercise, like a board press,

or, you know, a pin press. Yeah, pin press. Pin bench press, pin squat. Box squat. Rack pull, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So, you have assistance exercises that mirror the main lift then you have ancillary exercises that you know work certain muscles of the lift like a glute ham raise device or glute ham raise the device is the piece of equipment the glute ham raise is the movement you know that works your hamstrings you have to keep your back in extension it works your glutes you know you're working a hip extension and a knee extension if you add the, you know, if you do the knee curl component and start with your hips inflection. That's not a deadlift of any kind, you know, so that would be an ancillary exercise. A good morning is another one, you know, with the bars on your back, you're flexing the hips,

keeping the knees as straight as you can and extending the hips. So that, you know, that could be an ancillary exercise for the squat or the deadlift or a lot of things, you know, your back works on every exercise. So having a bar on your back and setting it could be useful for any lift. Then you get into things like bicep curls and knee extensions and all the bodybuilder stuff. Yeah. Single joint isolation type.

Yeah. That's what we'll call that. We'll just call it, we're going to call that ancillary exercises. I mean, I like, I've had people do hammer curls when they have elbow tendonitis. You know, chins tend to work well, lat pulldowns tend to work well for that. I've had people, you know, do a prone grip or neutral grip type curl to, you know, get some blood flow to those tendons. So, you know, they can be used for rehabilitative purposes. But most people do curls because they want their arms to look good.

They want the pump. And they want the pump. They want to feel like they're doing something. Yeah. So I kind of think of it like another way to think about these. And so, like, I like those groups. That's a good way to think about them. You can also think about it kind of like a, I don't know, I guess kind of like a funnel, right?

of like a, I don't know, I guess kind of like a funnel, right? So we talk about specificity sometimes when we're talking about athletic development. And, you know, we always, we talk about in programming, we have to have a goal, right? And our goal, if you are trying to get stronger, that's pretty simple. Your goal, the adaptation you are seeking is strength, right? that's pretty simple. Your goal, your adaptation you are seeking is strength, right? Pretty, it's pretty cut and dry. But also if your goal is to build more muscle, whether you want to do it to look better or you want to do it so you have more contractile tissue to get stronger, then you also, the adaptation you are seeking is strength, right? And we'll talk about that more later because some people are like, well, wait a minute, wait, what about hypertrophy though? I was like, no, you actually want to get stronger when you want hypertrophy. We're going to hash that out more. But what I think about sometimes is you

can, I think about these various like categories of lifts in terms of specificity, right? So when you're a novice, everything's weak. You just need to do the most basic stuff you can that addresses whole body, right? So you do the compound lifts, right? So those are the most specific to the task of getting stronger, right? Would be a squat press bench deadlift. right? That's not very specific to getting strong because you are not handling heavy weights, right? And you can do it for a long period of time. You can do a bunch of reps on the ab wheel, maybe if you've practiced it before, it's not easy, but you can do a plank for a minute or two, maybe, right? So these are very non-specific. They're very generalized sort of exercises. And then those are the two extremes, right? Then you can kind of work your way back. Well, a chin-up is a whole lot more specific to building strength than dumbbell curls, right? Even if you're doing heavy curls, because you're

involving more muscle mass than you do in just a straight up dumbbell or barbell curl. And then you can just walk back to all those supplemental and ancillary type exercises you just mentioned, the closer they get to the big lift, the closer that they look to the big lift, the more specific to building strength they're going to be. Yeah. So that's another way to organize your thinking around these. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, so the way I look at it is all of these exercises have a value. It's just that some have a enormous value and some have a very, very low value, right? So like you said, I don't program tricep pushdowns almost never, right? But it's not, not never, right? They do have some value. And for me, I do the exact same

thing. If somebody is having elbow issues or tricep issues with their tricep tendon, I will program some rehabilitative tricep pushdowns. I don't really do tricep pushdowns for training, right? So they do carry a value, but it's just very, very small relative to the other things that they could do in the gym. The main lifts are the most trainable. You can add weight to them and get them stronger and stronger over a long enough timeline, and you'll pretty much keep getting stronger at squats and deadlifts for most of your adult life until you start declining. Let's assume you've started as a young man. You become an old man. You're going to be working towards a decline. That's just inevitable. If you're an old man and you start, you're going to make some progress for a while.

But my point is those lifts are very trainable for a very, very long time. Something like a bicep curl, I mean, you know, especially if you're doing it real strict and not getting into like cheat curls and turning it into a reverse clean, you know, you're going to, you're not, you're not going to go very far on that beyond the first year probably. I mean, yeah, you keep curling. They have strict curl competitions and people go up and there's ways to do that, but it levels off probably a lot faster, especially if you start getting in a dumbbell. So yeah, maybe with a barbell curl, you might be able to progress that. I don't really see the value in doing that, but you can do that. But you start using dumbbells. For one, as the dumbbell gets

heavier, the shape of the dumbbell changes, so it becomes less efficient to maneuver it around, get it set up, and it almost becomes a different lift, you know? That's why barbells are superior to dumbbells and kettlebells and other types of free weight devices, because the barbell never changes shape no matter how much weight you add to it maybe why you know maybe why the strict bar curl exists as a competitive lift you could probably progress it more um i would argue that you can you know i just don't care to i'd rather do my chin-ups you know um right exactly so yeah you know you're you can't these aren't very trainable so eventually you're just basically doing them to get a pump.

I mean, if you see these guys at the gym, these big dudes, they're pretty much handling, if you go to a gym regularly enough, you see the same guys. If you start paying attention, their weights don't go up on those types of lifts over time. They do the same thing three, four, five, six times a week. Even if you go watch a competitive bodybuilder or a physique guy And see their workouts on Instagram, the weights don't really go up. And then they'll say, oh, hypertrophy, bro. It's like, well, you're also not getting that much bigger year to year, you know, the kind of topped off after the first couple of years, like most people do, you know? Exactly. So that, yeah, and that's the thing, right? So the only way with these very general non-specific exercises, they're not very progressible because you're using smaller amounts of muscle mass, using a lot of times single joints instead of multiple joints to move the weight. And, you know, so what happens? Well, you can add some reps to them. Okay, great. But then all of a sudden now you're doing, instead of doing 10s or 8s, now you're doing 12s. Now you're doing 15s. Now you're doing 20s.

You know, what are you going to do? 25s, 30s? At some point, it becomes, you're not even in a strength building rep range anymore, right? Pretty quickly, you get out of the strength building rep range. So you're not really doing, even if you can add reps to progress them So you're not really doing, even if you can add reps to progress them, you're not really doing strength work. No, not really. And you can't do them heavy because then it becomes a compound movement. Like I said, you turn that dumbbell curl into a reverse clean, you know, reverse dumbbell clean. Yeah, you're forced to turn it into a compound movement. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people like these so much because bodybuilders have attributed the results of their steroid use to, you know, doing a million

exercises and they won't say that. They'll just share their program online or, you know, in our day in a magazine. And, you know, people follow it and say, oh, I got to do 10 arm exercises today and 10 chest exercises tomorrow. And, you know, it's largely bullshit for most people. There's a nugget of truth there, you know. If you're on a bunch of drugs like a bodybuilder, your recovery is probably through the roof and you want to do more, you know. Do you have to do more? That's a whole other question. I know guys on drugs that do a fraction of what bodybuilders do and they're still big jack dudes, you know. Right, right. Yeah, they have elite genetics, they have chemical enhancement. And the other thing is like, you don? Right, right. Yeah. They have elite genetics, they have chemical enhancement.

And the other thing is like, you don't know, unless you understand where that bodybuilder is in their preparation, you don't know where that program that you're seeing them execute, where they are in that program, right? If they're doing a bunch of stuff, maybe they're deep into a cut because they're doing competition prep. Like, you know, no duh, you can't squat and deadlift super heavy when you're cutting calories and tapering down for a meat. Ask Ronnie Coleman how that went. He tried it. If you're having a large weight loss in your training, I have found that, you know, trying to hit intensity, and I've talked about this in other podcasts, I've written about this, trying to hit high intensities, go close to 1RM, typically doesn't end well.

So if you do your fives and you're on a calorie deficit and you're losing a significant amount of weight, I'm not talking about 10 to 20 pounds on an average size male. I'm talking like if you're losing 30 to 50 pounds or more and you try to do that on fives, you're not going to be able to produce the force. You're just, the food's not there, you know, to support that. Exactly. And so the same, same things happen with these bodybuilders, you know, if they're in competition mode, right? It's part of the reason, you've talked about this before, right? One of the reasons that they switched to these, these smaller single joint isolation exercises is because it's what they can do given the resources that they have on board.

And it's, it's kind of evolved as a way to continue to preserve muscle mass during their cut while they're dropping body fat. Okay. So that, so looking at some big jacked bodybuilder, you know, and just seeing what they're doing, like you can't just take that and be like, oh, that's the way they became big and jacked. Got it totally backwards. No, that's not how they got big and jacked. They started out fairly jacked. They took drugs, got bigger. And the champions have all done their big lifts and loaded them real heavy.

That's right. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, you've mentioned before, like Arnold was a, what, 500 bencher, 700 squatter, you know. 700 deadlifter, just under six on the squat. Remember, he's like six foot, six two. Yeah. And, you know, 440 on the bench, which is pretty good with, you know, his long arms, you know, long limbs. Right. So, yeah. So the guy has no slouch. And I'll tell you what. So I was

actually, as an aside, my, my wife and I've been watching the, uh, the last few years of the Arnold strongman classic. We just watched the one that happened what, two weeks ago. And, uh, there was a live stream or that they got reposted to YouTube a few days after the event. And it's funny when you watch the Arnold and the strongmen go out. So if you don't know in the world of strong man competitions, the Arnold is typically more focused on heavy, heavy static lifts. So you're going to see, you're going to see a, a deadlift from the floor of some kind. Now they'll use kind of like crazy bars and the rules are not the same as powerlifting. So it's a lot more fun to watch, honestly. But in comparison to other competitions, like World's Strongest Man, the Arnold tends to be the heaviest competition

of the year. And that's where you're going to see the massive log presses and the giant deadlifts and all that stuff. It's really fun. Arnold loves the strongman competitions. Like you see him, he's, he's, I don't know how much he's really like the times I've seen him like talk and interact with the bodybuilders. Half the time he's like making fun of them these days. Oh yeah. You see him when he's watching the strongman, like he's there watching the log presses and you know, the guy's just like, I mean, he's having a great time. He loves to see big lifts go up. Why is that?

The dudes, he's a classic lifter. He loves the big lifts. Yeah. Those guys used dude's he's a classic lifter he loves the big lifts yeah those guys used to work hard you know yeah they had uh yeah they were on drugs but they didn't have the shit the guys now have so you know they had to train too right and now it's it's just i don't know much about that sport i don't care i never desire to compete in it you I don't care. But the thing is that sport has made lifting popular over the last 50 years. It's responsible for why people started lifting weights and going to gyms and why we have gyms. They got the momentum going. I think CrossFit brought the barbells back into the gyms in the 2000s. But what still persists from the era of bodybuilding is that you must spend all

this time in the weight room doing an endless number of exercises for an endless number of reps, chasing a pump and trying to, you know, hyperventilate and, you know, get your ventilation rate up. And you don't have to do all, I mean, why are you in the weight room? First of all, you know, you're in there to get stronger. That's why we lift weights. Weight lifting is not a good way to get cardio, so stop making it into a cardio workout. Think about it. Three sets of 10, that's 30 reps.

I mean, you could probably do that in under 30 seconds if you're running, 30 reps on your legs. Oh, yeah. 30 strides. I mean, how fast can you get 30 strides? A lot faster than 30 reps with a weight. So why are you going to pick an inferior stimulus to chase an adaptation that has a much more superior stimulus available? If you want endurance, go run or cycle, you know, push prowler, you know, you can do weight.

There's weight stuff you can't do, you know. You can go into strongman. You get the best both worlds. I mean, there's... Right. Yeah. Do some farmer's carries or something. Yeah. me there's risk there's risk greater risk of injury there because you're lifting inefficiently yes but uh it's certainly you'll get the best of all worlds are you good condition you'll get strong but this going in

the weight room and doing all these circuits thinking you're gonna quote unquote get toned get cut whatever word they use that's a bunch of bullshit. The most- Diced. Yeah. That's the one I heard recently, diced. I haven't heard that one. Yeah. But my point is that the reason muscles look full and toned and firm and whatever word

you want to use is because they're developed, and they develop through heavy lifting. And you'll see this across all the strength sports. Look at Strongman. Look at Eddie Hall after he got out of Strongman. He cut down to 375. And he was pretty shredded. Right. Definitely not stage lean,

but if that guy got stage lean, he'd be 360 still. He'd probably beat these guys, you know? I mean, how many bodybuilders are 360, you know, and completely ripped? I don't think any of them. Yeah, I mean. Yeah, Hafthor, I was just looking at him.

He was like 405 or something, wasn't he? Oh, he was... No, so I watched... So because we watched the Arnold Strongmans from the last couple of years, so the last... I think the last competition he did, or pretty close to it, was 2020s.

It's 2020 or 2021. Anyway, that was like the last competition he did as a strongman, and he kind of retired and started cutting down to do this boxing meet. But the dude was... So he's 6'9". The dude was 450. And that was when he would compete in strongman events, he was about 450. I think most of the, when I followed him before that, when he was off season or he was doing lighter competitions, he would hang around like 420 with abs. Like abs at 420.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Maybe 405. Yeah. Somewhere in that body weight range. And he pushes weight up to 450 for the heavy competitions. So he cut down to 335 for this boxing meet. That's my whole point. Bodybuilders, you know, they're so much bigger. It's like, if this guy competed in bodybuilding and, you know, he'd probably have to get down to 390 to get that shredded right and he'd probably win you know yeah that's my point you know they act like oh it's because of the way these guys train you know what was his name

dr squat fred hatfield you know he squatted a thousand and tom platts only squatted like eight or seven or eight hundred or whatever the hell and platts did 25 reps with 525 and hatfield only did 11 and then hatfield did like 900 on the squat and uh what's his name did 700 platts you know and i'm like are we ignoring how much weight is on the bar for both of these guys you know i mean how many people that are reading this are going to do 525 for 11 probably like yeah a fraction of a person you know come on get the, get the fuck out. Yeah, maybe one guy, you know? Come on. And Hafthor, you know, before,

like right before he kind of wound down his strongman career, I'm assuming he's not going back, I don't know, but he deadlifted 501 kilos. He deadlifted 1,100 pounds and he left five to 10 kilos on the bar too. He could have had more. Oh yeah. He just set the world record there.

So yeah. So back to our original point, you know, these isolation exercises, you know, they might be fun. And, you know, if you want to do bang out some curls, go bang out some curls. You know, if you enjoy doing this for recreation and you want to, you know, run a circuit

and do all these ancillary exercises, you know, that's fine. But, you know, just a circuit and do all these ancillary exercises, you know, that's fine. But, you know, just understand you're probably exercising most of the time. And we're in the business of getting people stronger and putting muscle on people. And the most effective way to do that is to get stronger at your main lifts. As you do this longer, you can throw other shit in there and you'll have a pretty good idea if it's going to interfere or not you know if tricep extensions are going to wear out your press because we've done it you've tried it at this point you know you know that why can i lock out

my press this week because you did five sets of 10 underlying tricep extensions that's why you know so you know you have to prioritize right, you have to prioritize, right? Are you trying to train, trying to exercise? If you're trying to build muscle and get stronger and be a more functional human being, your main lifts are where it's at. And then the other stuff needs to be peppered in there intelligently so that it doesn't interfere with your ability to get stronger at the main lifts. Yeah, exactly. And the reason why we say, if you have to, if you have to ask, they're not for you is because when you start out and if you, if you have not lifted or have done very little of the compound lifts, then you've got a bunch of gains that's low hanging fruit

that you can acquire on those four lists. So that's where we start you as a novice. You are going to lift the big lifts only those four at the beginning of your novice progression, right? And you're just going to focus on driving up your weight on those four lifts. But what happens is eventually you get to a point where you are strong enough that you cannot, you can no longer recover from that. And so we got to start pulling out some parlor tricks in order to allow you to continue progressing on the big lifts. Well, so for instance, the novice enters the advanced novice phase, which we would say is, you know, you do a heavy squat on Monday, you do a lighter squat on

Wednesday, you do a heavy squat again on Friday. And on the heavy days, you're always adding weight. We do the same thing with the deadlift. we start alternating heavy and light deadlifts and once we start doing that that's the perfect time to introduce on those lighter days a little bit of this assistance work right so that's where you would really start to bang out more chin-ups maybe you do some lying triceps extensions as you get more advanced as a lifter and you get deep into intermediate style programming, by definition, you are now hitting the lifts, the compound lifts heavy only once every few weeks. And when you're in this phase, you're going to be spending a lot more time lifting in, let's say, 80 to 90%. It's somewhere in that range of your heavy days, right? So you're kind of in the, it's still relatively heavy,

but it's not at your top end. And so when you do that, you then have more space, you have more recovery resources available to handle extra workload in the form of accessories, right? You can go do some volume squats at 80% of your heavy squats, and then go do some, I know, I don't know, do some hypertrophy work after that,

like hit the leg extension or whatever. That's what happens. And that's why, that's when they become useful is when you get more advanced and your programming includes some long periods of periodization, right? Where you're waiving intensity and volume. So you have some holes that you can plug with this lighter work. The other thing too is, you know, we talked about

how we tend to use assistance exercises to address weak points in the lift, you know, lock out on the bench press, you know, getting the bar off the floor on the deadlift, locking out the deadlift with the rack pull. But, you know, there's one valid argument that I will make for ancillary exercises, such as isolation exercises, from a functional standpoint, is that they can help if you have an issue with kinesthetic awareness. For example, when you go to a starting strength seminar, Rip is going to talk about how somebody in the room cannot contract their low back muscles or spinal erectors, the lumbar spine. And he'll walk around and put his hand on your low back and ask you to contract.

And there will always be that one guy that can't do it. And then he'll eventually lay him on the floor, have him lift his quads up with straight legs to engage those muscles. Then do the same thing with the thoracic erectors by putting the hands behind the head and raising the chest. That's, you know, some people call that a Superman, but we're not going to train that. We're not going to add weight to that and progress that, but it teaches you how to contract those muscles. Sometimes doing stuff like that, you know, for several weeks just reinforces it. You don't need to make it real heavy. You could try

to add to it, of course, because, you know, we always try to add to stuff. There's nothing wrong with that. But, you know, I found that I've taken people that were recovering bros that did bodybuilding workouts and, you know, did things super slow, time under tension, this, that, and the other. And one thing they developed from that was kinesthetic awareness, despite the fact that they weren't very strong, right? So I didn't have a real hard time getting them to engage muscles when I was teaching them the compounds. But you don't need to spend several years with that bullshit to get there, you know? And you should certainly, you still should, you should still strength train as an obvice.

I'm not arguing that you should bodybuild first. I'm just saying that as you go through this process, and you start to identify some of these weak points and simple form cues aren't working, then some of these isolation exercises, these ancillary exercises, and even assistance exercises can help you feel those muscles. For instance, you know, at the seminars, we say you don't need a front squat unless you are a Olympic weightlifter. And that's just generally true. The front squat is specific to Olympic weightlifting. The squat is not whether the bars on your traps or on your posterior

deltoids, whether you're high bar, low barring, safety squat, barring, you know, whatever, none of those no squat with a bar on your back is specific to anything except squatting with a bar on your back so this bullshit of oh the high bar is just more specific to olympic weightlifting how so you catch the bar in your hands on your shoulders or overhead with a wide grip it is not specific it is general in this stupid notion that if you low bar squat it's so non-specific it's just going to destroy your clean and jerk and your snatch. That's fucking bullshit, first of all, because a squat is not a competition lift in Olympic weightlifting. That's just an aside. But a clean and jerk is,

and a clean is caught in a front squat position. So that's how the front squat kind of got developed. It's like, okay, we're going to stimulate the squat and overload it so that when you clean, you can just stand right up. It just reinforces the movement. I like front squats for guys who round their upper back coming out of a squat. And I don't use it immediately, but if I got a hard case where I'm, you know, it's just happening no matter what I do and it just doesn't seem to go and we're far enough along the adaptation curve where, you know, okay, early intermediate, late novice. All right, we're going to use a front squat on a lighter day and we're going to run it up heavy. You know, sometimes you have to start at light because the wrists hurt, you know, or they can't get the front rack up high enough.

So you're killing a couple birds with one stone here. You're getting their lats more flexible. You're getting their wrists more flexible. Then you run it up, but it has to get heavy. It has to get heavy enough to where they might drop it if they fuck it up. And that's exactly what I want, because the beauty of a heavy front squat is you have to set your back or you're going to drop it, plain and simple. So if you're motivated enough to get that weight, you're going to set your back.

I mean, eventually it gets hard and your back might round a little bit, but you're going to set your back for the most part. And I've found that to be an effective way to keep the back in extension while performing the other lifts. Not just the squat. I use it for the squat. But I think it's also very specific for the press because you're going to be holding weight far heavier than you can press on a front squat, at the top of a front squat. Yeah, absolutely.

And what I find on the press is virtually everybody who starts pressing without prior instruction wants to relax at the bottom. They want to drop their elbows behind them. They want to bend their wrists back, and they want to just kind of rest down there. And no, you're kind of rest down there. And no, you're holding the bar down there. That's a working position. There's a bunch of isometric shit going on. Your forearms are inflection.

Your wrists are neutral. Your shoulders, your anterior deltoid is inflection because you're in a partial shoulder raise at that point. Your humerus is probably at a 45-degree angle pointing down. So your biceps are to an extent, especially your brachialis, is contracting because your elbows are in flexion with a prone grip. Your brachioradialis in your forearm is contracting. So all these muscles are supposed to be working at the bottom of a press. Your back from neck to ass is an extension while you're holding the bar at the bottom. That's what's supposed to be happening, and I find that teaching that is, you know, challenging in the beginning, but 90% of the

press is that star position at the bottom. And I like the front squat because you're holding more weight in a similar position than you want in a press. And it's also a position that requires you to keep your back set or you're going to drop the fucking bar. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So there you go, right? So the thing about it is the basic training program of training the compound lifts reveals these weaknesses along the way, right? Like, I bet you, and now, again, this is where having a coach can come in handy because a coach can help the hard cases that are hard cases from the beginning. But most people, in my experience, they don't have this problem of rounding their back when they're squatting 95 on day one. They probably don't even have it squatting 185, you know, on day, you know, on week number three or four. No. you know, on week number three or four. No, it's probably going to happen at like 225.

Yep. Or 245. Right. So, so the thing is like, they've already accumulated a couple months of, of barbell training before these problems pop up. Right. And so we're not, we don't go to these assistance lifts from the beginning, right? The problems reveal themselves. We cue and use physical cues, verbal cues, and mental models to try to fix it. And if it can't be fixed, sometimes we have to use more proprioceptive things, right? If touch and verbal cues doesn't work, then we go to these accessory lifts. But it happens after the training. The training directs the use of exercise selection, not the other way around. We don't just draw them up.

So the thing about these compound lifts is as you train them and as you get more experience, it also reveals muscular deficiencies. So in my experience, you hit a point, you know, in your intermediate training phase, which not very many people get to, but if you strain together two, three years of good, get to, but if you strain together two, three years of good, solid, consistent barbell training, you kind of hit a point where just doing more of the compound lifts is not developing enough musculature to get better at that compound lift, right? Like I see some guys that are just genetically, they're not gifted, they don't have big pecs, and their bench kind of gets stuck. And they get in this problem where

you can overload the bench and work their lockout you can try to have them pause and learn how to you know basically hold more weight under tension the bottom but they can't do enough volume of benching at a heavy enough weight to make their pecs bigger and get them to, you know, drive up their bench over time. And what they really need at that point, after two, three years of benching, what they really need is bigger pecs. So then you can start to add extra volume to their chest work in term, you know, in the form of accessory work with the goal of just adding more contractile tissue. And what I think my, my theory on this is why this works, why accessory lifts work in this case is because a, this guy is probably pretty strong, even if bench is a weak point for him, right?

He's not benching 135, right? He's probably benching 225, 250. And he really just, he just can't seem to break that barrier to get up to 275, 315. That's kind of the magnitudes we're talking about. So it's not that he can move some decent weight in absolute terms. So when he goes and does chest flies or something, he's not doing them with the little dumbbells. He's doing them with the big dumbbells. When he does paused bench work, he's not doing it with 135. He's doing it with 205, whatever, whatever it is that we choose.

And, and the goal here, and in my, my theory is that what you're doing at that point is you're just introducing novel stimulus to this lifter because this person has become very adapted to fives and eights and threes and doubles and the normal rep ranges that we use for an intermediate lifter on the compound lifts and you're able to get a little bit of a novice effect by simply introducing new novel lifts and you can you can generate sometimes by changing angles and and uh adding you know volume volume, you can add some muscular size in those deficient areas. Absolutely, yeah. And you just need that, right?

There's some lifts, like the bottom of the press is the same way. Like, you know, if you have big fucking lats, you've got something to stack your triceps on at the bottom of the press. If you don't have big lats, then, yeah, it's like a trampoline, right? So when I press, you know, that's part of the reason i'm good at press is i have a short

humerus and like i just have fairly large lats for my size so my my tricep i can feel it pushing down it's like a giant spring into my lat when i drive out of the bottom i never thought about that but you're right that's what i feel too yeah and so if you just don't have the lats in the first place you're never going to get that trampoline effect when you're driving the bar out of the bottom and you're using a hip drive to get a dynamic start. So sometimes you just need that extra bit of muscle mass and that's where accessory lifts can be useful.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, again, kinesthetic awareness is big and, you know, most of it can be learned in the beginning when you're a novice. But eventually the weight gets heavy, things start happening. You might be able to work through it and grind through an all-out effort in an LP, or you might have to do some things as an intermediate. Then as you become more advanced, like where I'm at, I only have to do the main lifts at this point. I don't get much out of assistance work and ancillary exercises these days. They're, you know, they're fun. I do my chins, obviously,

but I consider the chin an honorary barbell lift. But, you know, I'm not going to do a bunch of pause deadlifts and snatch grip deadlifts or anything like that, like I used to. I just stick with the main lifts. I'm an advanced lifter at this point. You know, I'm competing powerlifting and strengthlifting, you know. So that's what happens. You do this over a long enough timeline, your technique gets proficient, your weaknesses get cleaned up, and, you know, you're just sticking with your lifts. And they're going up real slow and steady over time. But just like with the example with the front squat, there's countless examples like that where you have lifters that are just motor morons or motor morons beyond a certain weight threshold and can engage certain things. And you have to address that.

And there's different ways to do it. You know, bottom of the press. I had a guy once do heavy reverse curls, not because I wanted to get his reverse curl up. I wanted him to get used to the bottom of the press. And when he's curling, you know, it's harder for him to bend his wrists back because he's trying to bend them straight from the bottom position. So I had him do pause reverse curls, reverse curl at the top, raise the elbow, pause for two seconds, and lower it back down. And then his press start started to clean up. Elbows were up, wrists were straighter. But it's not because I made him reverse curl a bunch of weights,

it's because I kept putting him in that position over and over and over again. And this is a concept I learned in Olympic lifting. You know, I couldn't keep my arms straight for the last half an inch of the clean, which, you know which a lot of people wouldn't notice it, but I did and I hated it. And the girl I was working with was a weightlifting coach and I told her, you fix my second pull. You don't touch my first pull because I'm gonna deadlift it

and I know you disagree with that. And if that's a problem, then we're not gonna work together. And then she's like, as long as your money's still green, you can pull it wherever you want. So, you know, she's a good coach, good business person, too. So we worked together. She never fucked with the bottom. And, you know, we fixed the top.

One of the things she had me do was I do it before. Anytime I do Olympic lifts, I do this now. She called them tall cleans. I think other coaches might call them something else because it's hard to find a video of them. So I'm going to make my own soon. But basically I would get up to the top of the clean, pause in that position, and then try to drop under the bar. And that taught me to not pull with my arms and it worked. I would do that to warm up every single, every single Olympic lift session. If I was going to clean, I'd do tall cleans. If I was going to snatch, I'd do tall snatches, you know?

And, you know, I'm not trying to get the weight up on that movement. I'm just practicing the motor pattern, you know? Right, right. Building that mind-muscle connection. Exactly. You know, that's bodybuilding shit, I suppose, but it's really just motor learning. So, yeah, some of these bodybuilding exercises, you know, that's bodybuilding shit, I suppose, but it's really just motor learning.

So, yeah, some of these bodybuilding exercises, you know, these isolation exercises could be useful in helping with the main lifts, but they're not going to put weight on the bar. You know, that's not what they're going to do. They're going to indirectly put weight on the bar by improving your body awareness. You know, that's how I would argue it. You know, one time I had a girl, you know, this was an assistance exercise. I had a girl, dude, she got bored, wanted to do like a hypertrophy type deal. And she's a strong strength lifter slash power lifter. You know, she didn't want to train hard, you know, for strength and wanted something to keep her in the gym. So I put her in like a bodybuilding program with my own spin to it. This was years ago. So I made sure that the main lifts were in there a couple times a week. Anyways, one of the lifts that I put in there was a deficit

deadlift for tens. And she ran that up. And, you know, I think it was just from doing all the reps and the longer range of motion. Somehow it takes, she can pull a deadlift now with a flat back at a very high percentage of her max. Yeah, sure. Where she could not do that before. And, you know, it was the damnedest thing. You know, she also has a short torso, you know, so that probably helps, you know. I have a long torso, so my mid thoracic is inevitably going to flex to some degree. Yes.

Yeah. But she used to have a problem with back rounding. And after that training cycle, those high rep deficits fixed it. I don't prescribe that kind of shit anymore, but it wasn't there for that purpose. It was there for entertainment, which she got. But my theory behind it was that the spinal erectors are probably both type one and type two, a pretty even ratio, since you have to stand up all day. They're designed to resist fatigue in addition to producing force. So I think they will respond to reps and they'll

respond to weight. I think a combination of both in some capacity is probably useful. You know, a glute-ham device is one way to do it without, you know, throwing a compound in there that might result in your back relaxing before your hips and knees, which, you know, it's typically how people get injured doing high reps and squats and deadlifts. The back tends to go before the muscles of the hips and knees do um so you know you can do a glute ham device there's there's various ways to do that but i think that the erectors you know can be trained for endurance as well and you'll put on some muscle that way as well yeah yeah and the same idea is behind the good morning as well right you're just yeah you're it's a higher loading it involves, you know, a little bit the way that I, I do them and show people I do them involves a lot of hamstring as well as the hamstrings are extending quite a bit. Cause you're, you're shoving your ass

way, way back and trying to put as much of your butt behind your center of mass, that midline as you can. Um, so, but yeah, same idea, same idea. So yeah, that that's, that's the interesting thing, right? You kind of sketched it out earlier that if you are a serious lifter, you're going to go through a novice phase of training. That's going to be very small in terms of your exercise selection. You're just going to work the four big lifts. the other, like you said, the honorary barbell lifts, like the chin-up, that's the primary one. And then, you know, a little bit after that, we might introduce something like the lying triceps extension or dips, which is similar to the chin-up in terms of allowing you to work your upper body a little bit more. But it's still, your exercise selection is very small. Then you get a little bit more advanced and you start identifying weaknesses and their exercise selection grows. And sometimes I think most lifters are going to go through a phase where they have to just test out different supplemental and accessory lifts.

Right. In other words, like, how do you know if you're going to respond if you have a problem with keeping your lower back with lower back fatiguing during your competition lifts? How do you know if you're going to respond better to deficit deadlifts or to good mornings or to glute ham stuff, right? Well, you don't. It kind of is going to depend on your anthropometry. It's going to depend on you, just your individual preferences. But you're going to probably try all three of those. And you'll find over time that like, you're like, yeah, you know what? Good mornings. They just torch my lower back and I cannot recover from them. And it screws up all the rest of my lifting for the rest of the week. But I can do glute ham stuff and it still gets me the same basic thing.

It still helps me build my proprioception, keeping my lower back set under fatigue, and I can recover from it, right? Or vice versa. There might be another lifter who's the opposite. So you finally, you get to a fairly advanced level and you've identified this small, like the handful of assistance exercises, if even that many, that you need. And then you're kind of, you narrow back down and you're back to just the competition lifts and maybe a couple of you know targeted lifts in addition to that so that's that's the interesting intermediate training for lifters is is very frustrating for this reason but it's also kind of fun so you get to try out a lot of different stuff yeah so you know it starts out very general

gets more specific and then it gets general all over again. Yeah, right. From a strength standpoint. Yeah, right, right. I'll throw out one other thing. You know, I think accessory lifts can be useful too to manage stress. And this is particularly for the older folks. But even, you know, I find this myself, like there are certain, folks, but even, you know, I, I find this myself, like there are certain, my knees are just kind of testy on squats. And I kind of learned the hard way that if I do a bunch of fives for sets across, it's that damned fifth rep. Most of the time that bugs me, like I'll get tired and my knee position will get compromised on the fifth rep of the fourth and fifth sets if I'm doing sets across or sixth set, whatever it is. And that stupid fifth rep where my knees slide or whatever, where they come in, bugs the

heck out of my knee. So I've kind of learned over time that if I want to do some higher rep work or if i want to do a bunch of fives or eights across then i'm better off using a lighter squat variant so i'll high bar squat my eight oh yeah i'll front squat for a whole bunch of sets if i want if i want to you know do more quad more quad focus squat but but really it's not because the the low bar squat isient. It's just that for me, I have a persistent problem with holding my knee position for fives across. So I just don't do them anymore. Yeah, and on the same token, I don't do five sets of five on squat because I've found that when I do that much, I can't deadlift. Yeah, right.

You know, so I do, you know, I've done, I did three for a while and that worked. And then I found that three wasn't getting my squat up. So I did four, four got my legs bigger and my squat started moving and I was still able to deadlift. So it seems to be the magic number for me, four sets, five across, I'm going to do fives. You know, I also have figured out that, you know, I need to bench very often. You know, I bench three times a week. I press twice a week, chin three times a week, you know, and that seems to work pretty good.

But, yeah, you know, you learn this stuff through experience. And, again, if you're asking do you need accessories, you probably don't have experience. So you need to get your lifts in order and build those up first. And the time for accessories, quote unquote, will come. really don't, I don't like to close grip bench. I don't like to wide grip bench. I just don't, not that I hate them. I've it's they're fine, but I just, I just don't care. Right. I just don't enjoy doing those. I just want to bench. But, uh, I was talking to you a few days ago. Like I've had this problem with my, uh, my, my left pec, the, the insertion point kind of up near my humerus is somewhere, but it's in the muscle belly, not in the tendon. It's just, I've got some like tightness there. That's just been

persistent. It's been growing over the last couple of months. And I'm really, I'm, I'm, I really don't want to tear a pack because everybody I know that has torn a pack has retorn that pack at some point. So I really don't want to tear my fucking peck. So what I started doing is I finally dawned on me like a, you know, like a dummy. I'd be like, well, if somebody else came to me and they had that problem, I would have them change their grip and I'd have them work close grips. I'd have them work wide grips and just try to change the angle that they were benching at. Incline if they could do it. And I'm like, oh, duh. Well, why don't I do that? Yeah. I had to do the same thing.

So I did that. Right. And I've been the same thing. So I did that, right? And I've been working my close grip and I've been working wide grip bench. I've been doing no standard benching other than just like warming up, but I'll go back to it eventually. And that seems to help, right? Just because I'm just taking that muscle belly

through a slightly different, I'm putting it under a slightly different angle, taking it through a slightly different range of motion. It's not hugely different, but just that small change seems to work. So these things can be helpful in avoiding overuse injuries over time. But that's the thing. I didn't need it until I did. Close grips didn't really help me. I didn't need them to drive up my bench until I just couldn't standard bench anymore. So you probably find that you'll, you'll be forced into using some of these accessories, um, on an as needed basis rather

than jumping in from the beginning. Yeah. So I, you know, I think that's a probably a good place to good place to end it. We've kind of covered everything on that. Beat that, uh, beat that to a pulp. We gave some good good examples hopefully that you can apply um yeah stop rowing out stop rowing out come on yeah you can do this you can do this four lifts just four just four exercise like think about this you'll be exercising monk-like discipline you'll be staring at that that rack of shiny dumbbells over there in the mirrors and you'll just be squatting by yourself like a monk you're a barbell monk now yeah just like us you know and if you can't stand sitting still you know and you feel like it's not enough go for a fucking walk you're probably sitting

around too much right yeah you don't need to turn lifting into an endurance activity it's just it's point it's not a very good one anyways. So, you know, just go for it. Get your walking up, you know. That's what I've been telling people lately because you get these fucking people that, you know, they want to move around all the time. And that's fine. You know, you shouldn't be inactive.

You know, a lot of people have a sedentary job. So, fine, arbitrary 10,000 steps a day. You can do that. You're probably going to feel a lot better without having to, you know, feel like you're having a heart attack in the weight room. You can structure your weight room time such that it's productive and you're doing your five lifts. And that's it. You know, that's it.

So that said, thank you for tuning in to the Weights and Plates podcast. and Plates podcast. You can find me at www.weightsandplates.com or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana, or the gym is at weights double underscore and double underscore plates. All right. Very good. You know where to find me at marmalade cream on Instagram. That's marmalade underscore cream on Instagram. You can also email me Trent at marmaladecream.com. That's my audio production business, but soon, very soon, Jones Barbell Club will be a place you can find me as well. Very cool. But I've got a couple of things I got to get done before I can set that up. So until next time. Thank you.