Weights and Plates Podcast - #27 - Novice Linear Progression: The Big Picture

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

Coach Robert and Trent discuss the essence of the novice linear progression, and how this simple model of progressive overload can help a wide variety people with different goals. Whether you are looking to lose weight, gain weight, get leaner, improve your joint function, or become a powerlifter -- the novice linear progression is the best first step you can make and NEED to make in your fitness journey.   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com [e-mail]  

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Yo, what's up, man? How's it going? It's, I'm alive. I'm alive. Yeah. So this time, like literally the day after we started recording, or we recorded for the last show, I came down with the worst sinus infection I've had in years. And so, forgive me if I'm a little froggy on the mic today, but at least I can talk. Well, that's good because, you know, you kind of need to be able to do that. Yeah. Not just for here, but, you know, you kind of need to be able to do that. Yeah. Just for here, but you know, it's kind of, yeah, it's kind of like I basically talk for a living. So, uh, it was a, it was a

rough two weeks for me. It was a rough two weeks for me, but, uh, I think it's relevant to today because, um, you know, naturally I didn't train for like seven days. I could, I tried, I tried to get out there and lift a little bit and it went so badly. I'm like, you know what? I'm taking some time off. And so I had to get back under the bar and do a novice linear progression because I had been doing this fancy six-week conjugate program and I was like in week five of the six-week block. And then this knocked me off the pedestal. So I had to do a little LP.

Yeah. And so it got me thinking, you know, we've talked about it a lot. We've talked around it a whole lot, but we haven't really gone into depth about what the novice linear progression is. And it's come to my attention that some of you dear folks out there maybe don't know what that is. They might not. And, you know, I'd like to approach this from another perspective. I guess we should first start with some key definitions. You know, what is novice? Because we get a lot of people that have been in the gym a real long time, you know? Yeah. This term seems to trip people up quite a bit yeah novice not beginner but novice novice what is novice um so yeah you know i was what i would call a an accidentally trained novice

you know i uh you know i had squatted for about 11 years at the time that I discovered starting strength. I had deadlifted in the past. I'd been benching since I was 15 and I'd done chin-ups before. I was already doing 10 to 12 chin-ups. I'd train the press on and off. I'd alternate between, I'm going to press this training program and then push press this training program because muscle confusion and all that bullshit. So I never really, you know, trained the press year round. I just, you know, I felt guilty not squatting. So I squatted year round for, you know, 11 straight years. And I felt guilty not squatting deep enough.

So they were deep. They were just wrong and unsafe and not heavy enough. And I benched, whether it was on dumbbells or barbell, I was benched full range of motion consistently year round. Those were the three main lifts that I always did, squat, bench, and pull-ups. And then I added in press, you know, a couple years before that. But then I would alternate it with push press, which doesn't really do shit for your shoulders, you know? with push press, which doesn't really do shit for your shoulders, you know? Right. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, yeah, so that was what's called what I would consider an accidentally trained novice.

Right, right. But here's where it gets interesting. So let's talk definitions. We define your level of training advancement based on your ability to recover and the frequency by which you set PRs, personal records, you know, first time, you know. And a novice can set a new PR every couple days. And we may have talked about this in other episodes, but the reason for this is because there is a neuromuscular component that is heavily active in those early stages of training. You're learning new movements. You're learning how

to coordinate these new movements. Your central nervous system is recruiting muscle fibers in ways that it's not used to. So you're not really building a ton of muscle at that point, but you're building an amount of muscle that is greater than zero, contrary to what the quote-unquote exercise scientists say there's probably some muscle being built that they are unable to measure at that absolutely but um yeah that's a whole another topic but the whole point is most of your improvements in strength as measured by the amount of weight that you lift is driven by just your nervous system getting better at moving you know yeah exactly yeah i mean you know you think about exactly. Yeah. I mean, you know, you think about

like, uh, if, if, and this is, this is interesting if you're talking about a rank novice, right? Sometimes we'll use that term, a rank novice, meaning somebody who basically has not done any meaningful training or exercise before the program. Yeah. First time in the gym. It may be that they've done some like cardio type stuff before, or they've been on the treadmill, but they haven't actually, they haven't done what you've done or that I did where we lifted weights shittily for many years. You know, that's not a rank novice coming into it. But yeah. And so I think definitely for them, you know, it's such a new event, just learning how to coordinate their bodies and then to turn on all those muscle fibers, you know, at the bottom

of a squat or whatever that, yeah, the neuromuscular gains are huge. Although we do see them with, with pretty much everyone who has not trained in a systematic way before, even if they're not a rank novice. And a rank novice might improve his squat and deadlift, you know, 150%, 200% baseline. Whereas someone like myself, you know, I was, let's see, when I ran starting strength, you know, I'll count my squat because it was deep. It would have gotten white lights in a meet. So we'll count it as 315. By the end of starting strength, it was somewhere in the high threes, you know, I squatted 365 at a meet, you know, so we'll just use that number. So I put, you know, 16% on my

squat and that's with improving technique and running a novice linear progression, right? So 15% of my squat. In contrast, I didn't train the press that much, but I had done singles on it because I did, well, most people on this podcast probably never heard of this, but I did what they call wave loading, where you do a high rep and then a low rep and then a high rep and then a low rep. Like stair-stepping upwards towards a peak? I do. Like I said, a five, a single, then I said a five, then a single. So, you know, when you get to that second set of five, it feels easier because you just did a single, you know? Right, right. And so I had done singles on the press, so I had some data and, you know, my best single on a strict press was about a buck 35., and I think at my first meet I hit $1.85.

All right, yeah. So that's, you know, a 37% improvement. Now, what's the difference there? I've been squatting for 11 years. At that point, I've been squatting, or I've been doing overhead work, either a press or a push press or some sort of overhead barbell movement for about two to three years and not really making meaningful progress on it. So there, you know, instead of 15 to 16% improvement, I had a 37% improvement. Yeah. Now here's where it gets pretty huge on the press. That's a pretty big deal on the press because you think about it naturally, your ceiling is

going to be lower because you've got much smaller muscles involved. Right. Whereas a rank novice, you know, might see about 50% improvement on his press, you know? Yeah, that sounds about right. You know, I think about a lot of guys who go from like, say, 75 to 115. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. Or something like that. That's what I was thinking.

75 to 135, you know? Yeah. Something like that. Or 115. Right. So, you know, I saw 37% improvement. Now, let's take my bench. That was the lift that I had been training the longest.

I've been bench pressing since I was 15 years old. First time I did it was in the high school weight room. So when I went in, my best set of five was 215. When I finished my first linear progression, it was like 237 and a half. So that was, you know, a 10% improvement. Then after running LP a couple times, I don't even want to count that because I ran LP a couple times, then I did an intermediate program, then I went back to LP. So I'm not going to count that. So I basically improved my bench

press 10%. You see how the number gets smaller because I'd been exposed to that lift longer. And the technical modifications I made weren't that substantial. You know, I started arching more and, you know, getting my back into it a little bit more, but, uh, you know, I got 10% improvement on my bench, which was a lift that at that point I had been exposed to for 15 years prior, right? Versus 10, right? Yeah. That's funny. I was, I was sitting here thinking about that and I'm like, that's the one lift I remember from high school. Um, like, you know, I, I do remember I put three plates on the bar, you know, in, on the squat and like half squatted it maybe, but I, you know, I, I couldn't tell you, give you any hard numbers cause you know, my depth was not there. Although I did squat deeper in college,

but, but on the bench press, I remember in high school as a senior, I bounced like 270 off my chest and locked it out. You know, it was definitely one of those like NFL combine type bench presses where I just, you know, trampolined it off my chest, but I did do that. And then I, I benched, um, you know, after, so after five years of solid strength training, I benched 320 for a single, you know, last year. So, so there you go. Like between high school and that, I added 50 pounds, which is a lot to the bench, but still, right. That was, that was years of college and continuing to bench, you know. That's like 18%, you know. Yeah. Right. Right. 18%. Whereas a novice might put, you know, 75 to a hundred percent on his bench. Yeah.

Right. A male novice. Yeah. And, you know, we use the male novice as an example, because a young male novice is going to have the best results when you do an apples to apples comparison, you know, with all other factors constant, a young man with, you know, mediocre genetics to above average genetics and normal testosterone levels is probably going to have the best results out of anybody. So yeah, so yeah, you improved your bench 18%. I improved mine 10 because it was one lift that I'd done for 15 years and was willing to push heavy. So, you know, the squat, I probably didn't push it heavy enough, you know, a lot of the

time. Yes. Yeah. Now here's where it gets fun. So deadlift, I didn't do deadlift because in my mind, deadlift was a low back exercise. So. Right. Because when I do it, my low back will get sore.

Yeah. Right. What's the point of this? I don't understand why I'm doing this, you know? And then meanwhile, I complain that, you know, my traps aren't growing. My mid-back is, you know, kind of fat and I don't see any muscle on my mid-back. And now, you know, people at the gym say my back looks like a face. Barn door.

Yeah, exactly. You got some cobras. Yeah, I would always grow wider because I did chins, but I wouldn't grow thicker because I didn't deadlift. I didn't do any hip hinging with any meaningful weight. I didn't do Olympic lifts, you know. And I didn't understand the function of the back, which is why I've written several articles about this. I'm very passionate about it because I overcame these hurdles just by deadlifting more. Anyways, I had like a 320 deadlift when I first ran starting strength for a single rep.

I think when I finished it, it was, you know, 440. So that's a 40% improvement, you know? So there you go. You know, I had a 40% improvement on the deadlift. I had a 40% close to like 38% improvement on the deadlift, about 38% improvement on the press, a 10% improvement on the bench, which I had been doing the longest, improvement on the press, a 10% improvement on the bench, which I had been doing the longest, right? And then I had a 15, 16% improvement on the squat. So you see, I've been, I'd been benching for 15 years. I've been squatting deep for about 11 years. And then I'd been, I'd have not been, I barely deadlifted. So that would be the next one. And then I barely pressed and that would be the next one, right? So the press and the deadlift, I saw a massive improvement because I

was quote unquote, more novice at those. I didn't really, I had little exposure to those lifts. The bench, 10%, the squat, 16%, which makes sense because I've been doing them for so long, right? So, you know, I would be what I call a trained novice. My chin-ups barely moved. I think I had a couple reps to them because I went in doing 12 reps, maybe 15 reps.

And then my highest was 18. So there was like, we're just going to call that no improvement. Yeah, sure improvement on the chin-ups, you know, from doing that because I was definitely not a novice at chin-ups. Yeah, yeah. So to add this in a context, you know, I was willing to push heavy and I enjoyed having weight on the bar. What I have found working with the general population, you know, I get a lot of people that hire me that want to do this, know what they're walking into and go real heavy. But I also get very many people that are accustomed to traditional quote unquote gym type workouts, you know, circuit training, cardio, pink dumbbells, whatever you want to call it, right? Yeah, they're just it's just all about feeling like you got to work out, right? Which was never the thing for me, you know, I measure

outcomes, you know, I'm like, am I lifting heavier never a thing for me. I measure outcomes. I'm lifting heavier weight. That was always something I looked at. But I found that most members of commercial gyms and most consumers of personal training services don't look at it that way. They want to sweat. They want their heart rate to get up. They want to hyperventilate during the workout. And as a result, I'll get people that have been in the gym for about 10 plus years sometimes 20 and uh they're just barely not a rank novice right and uh when i you know put them on such a basic workout this question arrived well i'm only doing three exercises why only five reps that's just that's not enough volume you know because they're they're also a lot of people

think they're experts too yeah sure it seems to be the state of affairs in the world but bro bro i've lifted for a long time i know what i'm doing yeah and i'm like show me your squat and you know squats eight inches high with you know 185 if i'm lucky yeah right man you know and the females will put like 65 on you know know. Right, yeah. And then squat 8 inches high. Yeah. So, you know, typical female global gym client, I'll see like a 10 on each side and they'll squat 8 inches high when they can probably do 95 the first day. Typical male client will put, you know, 45 and a 25 on each side, which is 185 because, you know, the visual of that looks like they're actually doing something. And they'll squat that 8 inches high. And they have no idea how to brace in a deadlift and you know that's that's why we're here that's

why we have this service i'm not making fun of anybody right yep everybody starts somewhere but i make but i am making fun of you a little bit no i'm kidding you can't blame a person for not knowing but it's when you get people that you know argue with you and say oh no i know more okay well then you can coach yourself you know i've had to have that conversation too. But no, the whole point that we're kind of leading to in this conversation is most of you are novices because you just have not pushed yourself. You may have added a few pounds in the first couple months and then just stopped there and repeated the same thing over and over and over again for years and years and years. You've run in the same circuit with the same

weights and then occasionally you might max out to impress your You're running the same circuit with the same weights, and then occasionally you might max out to impress your bros. Oh, let's just max out the bench, bruh. But most people are an opposite. So as a result, a lot of new clients, you'll put them on the linear progression. There's another reason for that too. Sometimes technique prohibits the progression of load. Yes. And I've had to have that conversation too.

You know, I've had people say, I'm adamant that I don't care about strength. I'm like, well, I'm not going to make you do 10 reps on an exercise that you can barely do five in a row correctly with. So what do you want to do? Right, right. Yeah, and by the way, by the way, I would say that the percentage of people that come to me that need help with their technique, regardless of their lifting experience, is 100%. It's 100%. Everybody's technique sucks. you know, by a competent coach, and you have not been coached recently, and you are not a coach yourself that evaluates thousands of lifts all the time with people, then your technique sucks, right? And how many times, you know, and this, you know,

how many times have you run into other starting strength coaches, right? So people that do this, that are competent coaches, that do watch thousands of lifts, that personally have like one or more lifts that are, you know, with fucked up technique. Oh yeah. I had to fix rip a few times. Yeah. I've seen all the time. So we're all, I mean, that's the thing, right? So we know what we're doing and we have a pretty, a better idea than just about anyone else off the street of how to self-evaluate and fix stuff. And we still fuck it up ourselves, right? So the chance that you have perfect, awesome, like great technique that will not hinder your progress

in your lifting is zero. So I just want to throw that out there because people always under, I think people always underestimate that. They're like, oh, you know, I'm sure it could get better, but it's mine's just fine. And it's like-

It's completely downplayed. Yeah. It's completely downplayed. It's completely minimized. And, you know, then you get this subset of people, it's more common in females, that don't want to film themselves. This is an online coaching problem. Yes, yeah, right.

I don't want to, they either, I've had female clients online tell me that they don't want to see themselves. Or if they do film themselves, they hated looking at themselves. Or they don't look at the video and they just send it to me. Or if they do film themselves, they hated looking at themselves. Or they don't look at the video and they just send it to me. Right. So there's a bunch of psychology there that we should probably bring Juliet on the podcast for. She works with body image and eating disorders and all those things.

But, yeah, no, so that's problem number one with an online client is we'll have women that don't want to film themselves. Yes. And then the second problem is with the general fitness commercial gym crowd, they want to sweat and get their heart rate up. And that doesn't happen when you're working on form for a handful of reps. Right. And they feel like they're not getting a good workout. Then there is the issue of continuing to film themselves, right? So like I might get a video on the first workout, then I won't see a video for weeks. And that's just not tenable. These lifts are very technical and the demands, the technical demands of them change as the load gets heavier. So you're never off the hook on technique. I film every lift that I do unless I truly just don't give a shit and it's light that day. But for the most part, I film all of my workouts.

And it's just second nature because it's like, you know, are you going to go buy a golf club and swing it around and assume that you're swinging it like Tiger Woods does? You know, nobody's going to do that. You're going to buy a firearm and, you know, assume you're a good marksman, you know, that you know how to use it? I mean, some people are stupid. I mean, I bought a firearm. I took a couple classes, you know, basic ones, and then I took more tactical classes to get more precise. And, you know, I would never even think to buy a firearm and just start shooting it if I've never used a firearm before, you know? I was kind of nervous around them the first time I, you know, started using them. First time I fired one because I never fired a firearm before, you know, I was kind of nervous around them the first time I, you know, started using them. First time I fired one because I never fired a firearm before and I was with somebody who had fired a firearm before. So how is lifting a barbell on your back and squatting

down with it and standing back up any different, you know? It's the same concept. It's not, it's not. But we live in a world where people want to go to the gym to get a pump, sweat, and get their heart rate up. But then they want the results that you get from squatting and deadlifting. Yeah, exactly. So we're back to people want to exercise their way to a trained body. It doesn't work, people. Yeah, it doesn't work.

It doesn't work. You're going to have to do a novice linear progression if you really want those results. And it's not going to be so linear because you'll probably move like shit and will for a few weeks. Yeah, that's right. So that's what I wanted to talk about on this podcast is, you know, let's talk about the linear progression a little bit. We'll kind of hit what it is, and then let's talk about what it looks like in practice, right? So the novice linear progression, as we call it, or sometimes we shorten and we just say LP. So, if you've heard us say LP or NLP, and you're like, what are they talking about? That's what we're talking about. It's the novice linear progression, which is the basic model of programming that we use for people who are just starting out with strength training, right? And this, like you said, at the beginning of the

podcast, this applies to both rank novices. So if you've never ever been in the gym before, or you've never lifted a barbell before, this is applies to you. And it also applies to, you know, somewhat trained novices. So people who have, if you have some experience in the gym, but you've never actually trained in this manner. Okay. So it's not a program. This confuses people. The novice linear progression is not a, like a template. It is a model of programming, however, right? But what most people are familiar with is what you might see on the internet. If you Google starting strength, and that is when you go into the gym, you're going to squat, press, and deadlift on the first day.

And we call that the A workout. You're going to squat three sets of five. You're going to press three sets of five. And you're going to deadlift one set of five. Now, this assumes that you warm up with those lifts. And then you do the three sets of five as your work weight, right? So you warm up with lightweight and you build up to this, you know, whatever your working weight is for the day.

And you're not just warming up to feel good. You know, you're not just warming up your muscles and trying to loosen things up. That's part of it. You're also practicing the movement just like you do free throws if you're a basketball player. You swing the bat a few times

if you're a baseball player. You're warming up the movement. So you don't just pump out reps like some jerk-off bro that's in the mirror curling. Exactly. Take your time with each rep. Yeah, that's a huge thing, right? So the warm-ups serve as a dress rehearsal for the main event, right? And at first, you may not understand why it's important,

but the first time you take out 315 out of the squat rack and you're going to do that for three sets of five, you're going to understand how important those warmups were leading up to 315. It's getting your mind right. It's making sure that you're moving correctly, making sure that your balance is in the right spot, all that stuff. You're working on the cues that you've been given if you're working with a coach, all that kind of stuff. But that's the A workout. that you've been given if you're working with a coach, all that kind of stuff. But, you know, so, but that's the A workout, right? And then you're going to alternate the A workout with the B workout, which is the squat again for three sets of five, and then the bench press instead of the overhead press for three sets of five and the deadlift again for one set of five.

Okay. And so it's pretty simple, right? You do three workouts a week. You start with workout A, then you do workout B on, let's say you start, do you did workout A on Monday? You do workout B on Wednesday. You're going to do workout A again on Friday. And then the next week you're going to be workout B, then A, then B. So it just goes A, B, A, B, A, B. And the key here is that every single time you lift, you're going to be adding weight to the bar. Now, as you said before, these lifts are complicated. And so that means that progress in practice is not linear like that, right? So, you know, on paper, you're going to start at a given weight that's a little bit challenging on day one. So let's say that you get under the bar and you learn how to squat and

you can do 135 for three sets of five just to make up a number, right? Well, in theory, you could add 10 pounds to that for a couple workouts and then maybe you're at 165 and now you start adding five pounds to that every single workout and you go to 165, 170, 175, 180, 185, et cetera. Um, well, the thing is at some point it's going to get heavy for you and your form is going to break down. And if it breaks down bad enough and you've got a good coach, we're going to stop you and say like, Hey, well, let's pump the brakes here. This is getting worse. And if we just continue stacking weight on the bar, it's like, Hey, well, let's pump the brakes here. This is getting worse. And if we just continue stacking weight on the bar, it's like, you're going to hit a point very quickly where

your form is so bad that you can't even execute the weight that's on the page. So we need to kind of stop and fix it, or we may need to back up a little bit. Right. So just so, just so you know, when we say linear progression, that's the model, right? The model says that we progress linearly. Reality says we progress linearly so far as your technique is good, right? So, so that, I just want to get that out of the way so that you know that we can kind of level set here. That's what we mean by the novice linear progression. Now, if, you know, if you're one of these people that, you know, wants to get a good workout, get a pump, get your heart rate up, then you might just be more suited for endurance type activity. And you can do this as a secondary mode of exercise.

But you should not try to turn lifting into an aerobic type activity, especially if you're a novice because you move like shit. You need to practice and develop these movements, you know, not just because you have a bar on your back, but you're going to have to squat down and get off the toilet when you're 70, and that becomes hard if you're untrained. Ask an untrained 75-year-old, you know, how does it feel to get up and how does it feel to bend over and pick things up? I mean, let's go back even. Like my father in his 30s didn't like bending over and picking things up, you know,

because he wasn't training like this, and he had bad back because he's on his feet all day, worked in a factory and did not, you know, train his back. At his age, right now, when I'm 37, I don't have back pain doing regular shit like that. So you don't just need to do this because it'll make you look better, get you stronger, get you a good total at a meet or whatever, for whatever vain reason you're doing this, these movements are going to get difficult if you don't strengthen them now. Picking something up is going to be a pain in the ass in your 40s, 50s, 60s if you're untrained, if you're not training your back. And most of the problem with these lifts come from your spinal stabilizers, your abs, you know, your muscles of your waist, your abs, obliques, spinal erectors, and the muscles of your back your waist, your abs, obliques, spinal erectors,

and the muscles of your back. That's where people struggle. Anybody can bend their hips and knees, but doing it while maintaining a rigid spine is challenging. Pushing something overhead while maintaining a rigid spine and rigid legs is challenging for a person who hasn't practiced that. But the stability aspect, so when I first started lifting, they'd say, oh, the stabilizers, right? That's why free weights are better. Yeah, all the little stabilizer muscles. The little stabilizers.

What they're really talking about is the muscles of the back and the waist. Right. And those are muscles that people typically ignore because they just want to push the joints that the weight is sitting over. The core. The core. The core. Or just going to trunk musculature. I prefer that. call it just gonna trunk musculature i prefer that

yeah it wasn't musculature pecs on your trunk too yeah that's fine you know whatever yeah but honorary trunk designation but no it's yeah it's just your abs and your yeah yeah yeah your abs and your back and your obliques and all that shit so being able to stabilize your body while you're lifting something is essentially human life so even if you don't want to run a linear progression or power lift or, you know, squat a big heavy weight for whatever reason or deadlift a big heavy weight for whatever reason, you still need to learn how to do these movements because they aren't going away. And if you get frustrated because you're a motor moron and run off and go, you know go train for marathons and never touch a barbell again, guess what? You're going to throw your back out picking up that pencil when you're 55, and you're going to be like, what the fuck?

Well, I guess I just have a bad back. No, you just have a weak back. Most of us have disc protrusions and herniations and show no symptoms. It's the consequence of being a biped, standing up and walking on two feet. So no, we all got fucked up backs. A lot of us don't know it. So you need to get stronger. So that's my point. Don't neglect the technique. It's not a useless, futile pursuit, even if it takes you some time. So to that point, we got to back up and just identify what the hell you're doing in the gym. Typically, you know, I get a few different types of goals you run into.

The most common, well, I want to lose weight. Well, a lot of that takes place with your diet. You know, if you're an overweight person, you have to clean up your diet. You cannot out-train a bad diet. You can to a certain extent, but not really, you know. So that's where, you know, we got nutrition episodes for that. I'm not going to even dive into that here because, you know, we have other topics that are related to that that we cover. So you'll hear me talk about that and you probably heard me talk about that before, but your diet is a large chunk of that if you are a weight

loss client. But why am I going to put a weight loss client in the gym? Because again, you don't want to lose muscle mass when you're losing weight. And when you lose weight, you can lose muscle mass if the stimulus to keep it is not there. And that stimulus is lifting weights. Remember, you don't want to throw your back out picking up a pencil because you were on keto for 10 months and not eating any carbs and dehydrated, and then you threw out your back picking up a pencil. So no, you need to train while you're losing weight, but you're not lifting weights to burn more calories. That's not what lifting weights does.

It's not, so far as we know, it's not the greatest form of exercise for expending a lot of calories. That's subject to debate, but nobody's ever really measured it in a meaningful way. So we'll just say it's probably a modest energy expending activity. And I also think that it's related to intensity. So, you know, doing warm-up weights for sets of 15, which is what most people do, isn't going to expend a considerable number of calories. The intensity has to be above a certain threshold. And yeah, I know you probably read that meta-analysis. Well, there's probably more than one that, you know, said, oh, light weights and that meta-analysis. Well, there's probably more than one that said, oh, lightweights and heavyweights, same thing.

Well, those lightweights are less light on workout number two than they were on workout number one, and then less light on workout number three or four, however the hell they're spreading it. But the whole point is, if you start pulling up professional research articles, which is a whole other topic, and there's peer- as peer reviewed journals, you're going to see that every single training program is progressive, which means it gets heavier over time, even if it's 25 reps. So it's not warm up weight for the same amount, every single workout, even in those silly protocols that they use. I think, you know, more to the point, right? If you're really concerned about calorie burn, we talked about this in our physiology of muscle episode. When you get strong by lifting heavier

weights, when you get strong and you put on more muscle mass, which takes time, right? It takes some time for that to happen. But when that occurs, your resting metabolism goes up significantly. And that's, you know, you got to think about the long game here, right? Yeah. If you're just looking at the amount of calories you're going to burn in the workout itself, well, it may be, it may be negligible when you are first, you know, training as a novice and you're just, you're just lifting weights, right? It's the actual calories you burn in the workout, right? That, that may be negligible, but over the long run, right, you look at yourself three, six months later, and you've put on some muscle mass, I guarantee you, your resting metabolism is going to be higher. And that will have a meaningful impact on your

ability to lose fat in the future. So yeah, so to come back to that topic, you know, you're lifting weights to hold on to the muscle you have, possibly gain more. The more novice you are, the more you can gain muscle while you're losing body fat. And the more advanced you are, the less that can happen because the more advanced you are, meaning that you're taking longer to set PRs because you're reaching ceiling effects in terms of your ability to gain strength because, yes, eventually you stop gaining strength. in terms of your ability to gain strength, because yes, eventually you stop gaining strength. The more advanced you are, you know, it's already hard to put on additional PRs,

and it takes a very long time. So that person probably can't lose fat and build muscle at the same time. So yeah, so we want you lifting weights to preserve the muscle mass you have, keep yourself strong. That's why you're lifting weights. We don't want you sedentary though either. We don't want you lifting weights and sitting around all day. So you need to walk. I typically say, try to get 8,000 steps a day. Aim for 10. If you're an overachiever, that'd be great. We don't know what number is correct, but I know that 5,000 or less, people tend to have creaky, achy joints. So that's just what I've seen talking to people and seen in my own data. I had bad knees until I started hiking frequently. Now my knees don't hurt anymore.

Yeah, right. So we want you walking around all day. So that's what I would call physical activity or activities of daily life, just your normal movements throughout the day. You want to make sure you have a minimum threshold there. 8,000 steps is probably good. So try to accumulate that walking. And that doesn't burn a considerable amount of calories, but your joints tend to stay lubricated, you feel better, and you do burn more

calories than you would sitting around, right? And you want to do that every day. That's where more is better. So if you're getting 15,000, great, you know, because it's so light, it's not going to hurt you, you know. And then the last one would be what people refer to as cardio or this in the academic world, they call it moderate to vigorous physical activity, you know, or moderate intensity steady state exercise, right? And that's where, you know, you can go for a nice hard hike or a nice hard bike ride, or you can, if you like the hamster wheel life, you can get on a treadmill for 30 to 60 minutes or a bike for 30 to 60 minutes. You know, your classic cardio, right?

You know, two to four times a week of that works. So back up, right? If you're trying to expend more calories while you're restricting calories to optimize your weight loss because you're a weight loss client, you're going to get more of that from your light activity, your walking, and then your vigorous activity, your quote-unquote cardio. You don't want to turn your weight workout into cardio because honestly, okay, you do 10 sets of 10, that's 100 squats. They're going to be light first of all, so there's a bunch of issues there, but two, 100 reps is not that much compared to how many strides you take when you run for 30 to 60 minutes. So it's not a very good stimulus from an endurance standpoint, you know?

Right, right. So yeah, if energy expenditure is what you want to address, then do that through your light activity. Walk more, you know, add another cardio day. Don't do it fucking six days a week, though. We're not sitting here telling you to overexercise. Don't kill yourself doing cardio six days a week because you're not going to stick to that long term unless you're a competitive runner. In which case, you don't need to lift all that often, but you still need to lift. So that's the most common commercial gym member, personal training client,

and even people that reach out to us. The most common goal we get is, oh, I want to lose weight. And before you move on, I want to underline a couple points here that you hit on because I think these are important for you to hear, right? So the two big mistakes that I see when people are running a novice linear progression, especially for the first time, is it's kind of on both extremes of the physical activity problem that you just mentioned here. On one extreme, you've got the people who over-exercise and they're like, well, I got to do cardio six, seven days a week because I want to lose more weight. So the more cardio I do, the more weight I lose. Well, that's great, except if you're also trying to preserve your muscle mass by lifting weights and you're exercising like that every day, you're doing 30 minutes or an hour of cardio every day, you're never going

to recover from the lifting that you're doing. And so, you know, good luck trying to progress on that. You're just going to flame out on everything, right? Your energy is going to go in the tank. You're going to be sore all the time. It's a bad, bad deal. So some people go way too far on the physical activity side of things outside of the weight room. On the other hand, I see people who go to the other extreme where they do like no physical activity. This is typically like with people who are information, you know, like white collar type workers where they work a desk job and they'll go and do linear progression and they'll do their three lifting workouts a week and that's it, right? So they basically sit on their butt at the office all day and they get in the truck and they drive home and they sit on their ass at the couch at home or whatever you

know and there's no meaningful physical activity whatsoever outside of those those workouts and then you know they wonder like a couple months in because then they go on a bike ride or something for the first time and they're like, they have absolutely zero conditioning. And they wonder why. It's like, well, you know, it's, yeah, of course, like you're not getting any conditioning stimulus. So most people want to lose some amount of body fat or look better in the process of training. Some people actually need to lose weight like you're talking about. They are actual weight loss clients at the beginning. Yes. But everybody needs to be doing some physical activity outside of lifting weights,

right? Right. So I just want to underline that because I see those are two huge mistakes that people make. So I like your recommendation. Two to four days a week of physical activity on top of the lifting is a great, you know, it's hard to screw that up. It's not too much that you're going to bonk out on the lifting, and it's also enough to actually get you some calorie burn. And by two to four days, I mean vigorous physical activity. So, quote unquote, cardio conditioning. I think that people need to walk sufficiently every day. Yeah. Good point. Good point. Yeah. Every day you can walk. Walking is not stressful to the human body, right? It shouldn't be. trying to do, you know? I start to wonder, are you overexercising? Because I do know people that,

you know, 35,000 steps because they're, you know, paranoid about getting fat. Then there's other people that might just walk that much, you know, for whatever reason, it's fine, you know? But as long as you're not, you know, doing it because of some psychological issue, which, you know, you need to see a psychologist for that, you know, more is better. There's really no ceiling to how much you could walk, at least not one that I'm aware of. No practical one. No, yeah, no practical ceiling as to how much you can walk. And you should do that seven days a week. There's no days off from that, you know? Need to walk every day. But if you want to get a little oomph and do some, you know, vigorous physical activity, then you can do that two to

four times a week. That's where we're getting at. Yeah. So this is a little interesting, like aside here, um, you know, so I, I was sick for a solid 10 days and I was, I was quite sick for, for five of those 10 days. And so I basically did nothing. I was laying around the house, you know, just about all day. I'd get out once a day to kind of walk a little bit, get some sunshine, but that's all I could muster. And I'm going to get to this in a little bit. But when I came back and I did a linear progression, right, because I was so detrained from being sick, I had to start light and then kind of do a linear progression. The main thing that I noticed is that my conditioning, my work capacity, my ability to tolerate, you know, just doing heavy work was like zero. I do one set of five of squats that's not even that heavy for

me. And I'm just completely gassed, right? Well, you know, a big part of that is, you know, I'm pretty active. I am walking eight to 10,000 steps every day and I'm busy in the yard moving stuff. You know, I might haul some logs or whatever on any given day and all that stuff adds up. Right. So it really does have an effect on your, on your conditioning. Now, luckily it's only going to take me like one to two weeks to get it back. It's not like it's going to be forever, but, um, you know, I thought it was kind of interesting when I get sick, I've noticed that my work capacity just goes in the toilet for a little while until I get my activity level back up. So yeah, so that's the weight loss client. Then the next most common one. So weight loss clients typically overweight or probably more

obese, you know, has a lot of weight to lose. Then there is the client that wants to, you know, get ripped, competitive dieter, right? And these are split into two classes, but they have to go through the same thing. You got one guy that wants to get ripped because he wants to look good with a shirt off. Then you got the other guy that wants to get ripped for a physique show. I'm not really talking about that guy too much. It's more competitive. They're both going to fall into competitive dieting. Now, if your goal is to get low body fat, which is essentially what the goal is for both of these individuals, and you don't naturally have low body fat, you're going to hit a point where your diet is impractical. And you're going to have to lower your calories to a point where it doesn't leave

you a whole lot of wiggle room to eat food you can't measure, you know, unless you have naturally good genetics, in which case you probably don't need me. And yeah, you're going to have to have very low calories, you know, bottom line is what's probably going to happen. And you still need to train, by the way, and you still need to be active. You still need to do those three things we just talked about. Now, you know, this is probably more for another episode, but when you're losing weight, especially if you're not a novice, you should probably use lighter weights either for more sets or more reps. You have to accumulate more volume.

And typically, the rep stuff is probably better done on a machine if you're not technically proficient because by rep number seven, the smaller muscles of the back and waist start to go out or start to fail before the larger muscles of the hips and knees. So that's just something. Stabilizers. Stabilizers. So that happens to all of us. But if you're, you know, not very consistent with your technique as it is, you have no business doing tens on a squat or deadlift.

But you can go do tens on a leg press, you know, just fine because it's idiot proof. Don't raise your ass off the damn pad, you know. But, you know, there's some things you still have to consider. But for the most part, if you're in a machine that's doing all the stabilizing for you. That's why those are very popular for high reps. But for your barbell lifts, probably need to scale back on those just so you don't hurt yourself. And that's what a lot of competitors do. They, you know, they tend to do more machines and dumbbells. And they have weird ideas too about, oh, you know, squats and deadlifts make my waist too thick.

You know, it's like, just shut up, you know. you know, it's like, just shut up, you know? But, you know, all that aside, the practical reason to spend more time with, you know, assistance exercises, isolation exercises for high reps, machine exercises for high reps, it's just from an injury management standpoint. You just don't want to do a whole bunch of work on squats and deadlifts when you're getting super lean. Yeah. Ask Ronnie Coleman how that worked out for him. Yeah, exactly. So, you know. Lots of shitty reps at extremely heavy weights. I mean, the dude was really strong, but atrocious technique. Now, we don't deal with too many of these people. And since this episode is about the novice, let's talk about what the novice should

do. The novice should not worry about low body fat at this point. Novice probably has low muscle mass. Now, if it's a, you know, obese novice who's probably going to come in with some high numbers to begin with, he can probably do it. But typically, the guy that comes in wanting visible abs or the woman who comes in wanting to be very lean, because some women have visible abs and store body fat in other places. So visible abs isn't always the case with females. It tends to be the case with men because a lot of us store body fat there. But if your goal is maximizing muscle definition, we'll just call it that, or low body fat, and you're a novice of normal size with pretty shitty lifts at baseline, you need to not worry about it. You've come to the wrong place. I'm not going to take you to 5% body fat when you're, what, 160 pounds at 5'9", at 25% body fat. No, we're not going down.

You need to just train and go up slowly. This is the skinny fat problem. And yeah, this is a lot of people, right? The people who are overweight and very overweight and obese, they usually know that they have a weight loss problem they need to tackle. But a lot of the people who really need the most education I found are the skinny fat folks who are high body fat, but maybe reasonable body weight. Right. But they're just their that usually want abs. They're the ones that will come to you and want abs, you know, like care about abs. It's typically the skinny fat. You might even get some that are so skinny fat they have like, you know, over a 40-inch waistline and they're squatting 135 and having a hard time because they just don't have muscle mass under that. You know, even with the leverage from the body fat, they just have small muscle bellies under all that fat. So a skinny fat person may not necessarily be a normal BMI every time. I get people with, and I see this more in females, I'll have females with a high BMI and very low numbers on the bar. So you would look at them and expect that, you know, they're bigger, the mass moves mass, they'll be able to lift more, not necessarily, you know. They'll have low weights

on the squat in relation to body weight. You know, you'll have a 160-pound woman struggling to squat 100 pounds. You've seen it, I've seen it, right? And this happens with some men. Typically, men, we put on more total weight, so you don't see it as much, but it definitely happens in men where I'll get a 200-pound guy that is struggling to squat, you know, 225, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And that falls back into that skinny fat realm. But typically, the people that are very gung-ho about having low body fat tend to be in that skinny fat realm. And my fix for that is to not lose weight because I'm not going to take a 165-pound 5'9 guy down to 135. We're not going to do that. It's malpractice. Right. It's malpractice. I've done it. I've done it. Or, or 185 pound five, nine guy, you know, I see a lot of that. Right. So like, yes, yes, there are other guys who are 165 and they're generally, and they may be skinny fat, but they generally have more of like a trim waist at that, at that rate. But I, I run into a lot of guys who are 185 pounds and they're five, nine.

Right. And that's for them. They think they're like like they think they need to be 165 then that's the answer for abs and it's not you know no we we're gonna gain up to 195 200 you know or whatever um it kind of depends on on their skeletal build and how much their you know weight they can support there but they need to gain up to gain the muscle mass right absolutely and uh i yeah i've had guys that were 185 and 34 inch waist and they, what can I do about this belly? And I'm like, what belly? I mean, a belly is typically visible in clothes and I'm watching you in clothes and I don't see a belly. So, well, I think what you're really describing is lack of visible abs and a soft stomach. Yeah. Or the man boobs. I've had that complaint where they're like, you know, they don't have, you know, they'll have like the man boobs i've had that complaint where they're like you know they don't have you know they'll have like the man boobs but they don't you know it's not visible in the shirt

necessarily yeah but who's seeing you know who's seeing you naked okay if your woman's seeing you naked you've already done other things correctly so it's obviously not a big deal and especially if she's seen you naked multiple times yeah so you know i used to have the pec fat issue man boo whatever you want to call it and benching took care of it you know benching even when i'm quote unquote you just need pecs yeah yeah just bench and do a bunch of dumbbell bench too i think that works for some guys you know and just be a bro with the damn bench press and that will take care of 75 of your man boo problem now if you legitimately have gynecomastia, you just need to go get surgery. I've had guys do it. Works just fine. You know, get it scanned, see if it's breast

tissue, and then take care of that. You know, some of this stuff requires surgery. I have another guy right now that's getting excess skin removed because he just got so big, you know, and he's doing great. He's losing, he's getting strong, he's learning how to lift. But, you know, I'm not going to fix that, you know? Yeah, exactly. But yeah, no, the skinny fat guy or gal, they're obsessed with muscle definition. And, you know, the answer to it in the short term would have to be to become underweight or get close to being underweight or get to a body weight that you can't sustain. If you have to do that to satisfy your psychology, or get to a body weight that you can't sustain. If you have to do that to satisfy your psychology,

by all means, don't let me tell you what to do there. But if you want to be a reasonable weight and show muscle definition, you're going to have to train for quite some time, train for a few years. You said it on a podcast a couple of years ago, I think, that the average dude, it's a little bit more variable, I think with, with, um, with women, but the average dude who's not genetically gifted, but not a dud either. And he's skinny, he's a skinny, he's a five, nine skinny, fat, 185 pound dude, right? Like we've just been talking about. I think you said, uh, how many years is it if they really want abs and to look like muscular and like they train what do you say

five years probably about five years yeah five years right that's that's what it's going to take right it takes a long time to build that muscle and to get your lifts up to a high level and then be able to trim the body fat off and actually have something left that looks good yeah no it so you want to look like statue that's what it's going to take. No. And you know, the problem is that a lot of guys that are putting out information for the last 50 years or, you know, getting chemical assistance and not disclosing that. Yeah. If you exercise and fuck around at the gym and take some steroids, your body's going to change favorably without really working very hard. And a lot of those guys that sell this stuff, I mean, they are, they're also already coming from a position

of like looking great. Like they're like your brother, you know, that you've mentioned on the show, right? They already looked pretty good without doing anything. And then they just add a little bit of training on top of it. And it's, you know, they look great. Yeah. Okay.

So we're talking about the average person here, right? It takes time. Yeah. Now it doesn't mean you're not going to look great after a year of training, but you're probably not going to have abs yet. No. No. So it's just, if you're in that skinny, fat category, you're in for the long haul,

unless you're going to go do a bunch of shit that we don't condone here. Right, yeah. So the next demographic we run into is the skinny, skinny guy that wants to gain weight. Typically, this guy is fairly defined, you know, underweight from a BMI standpoint, but just like that, because typically has a fast metabolism and a low appetite, horrible combination. Beanpole. Yeah. Beanpole. Low, you know, poor appetite and a fast metabolism. yeah being low you know poor appetite and a fast metabolism so these guys uh they just need to eat a bunch of food and typically they're you know they they're not worried about body fat they just hate eating is what i've noticed right you know if you can get them to eat the calories easy they'll

do it and they won't complain that they got fat because they're so traumatized from being skinny you know and that's not something i can personally relate to, but I've heard this theme over and over again. They have been skinny their whole life, and now they put on weight. They're happy to put on fat and muscle. They start getting too big of a gut. They're like, all right, I've got to clean this up, man. My cousin's a good example. He was 6'1", 55.

At one point, he was 130. Wow. But this was when he was 20. He got hernia repair. And then he's like, all right, I'll train hard for a couple years. So he did GoMad, put a bunch of lactase enzymes in there because he's lactose intolerant. And GoMad is a gallon of milk a day, by the way. A gallon of whole milk a day. And the reason that we recommend that to young skinny men is because young skinny men tend

to be broke. And a gallon of whole milk a day provides you with 2,400 calories, 128 grams of fat, 128 grams of protein, and 192 carbohydrates. That's quite a bit of food. That's a whole day's worth of calories for a smaller person or more than a day's worth of calories for most women. But for the bean, for the beanpole that needs four to five thousand calories because he has a fast metabolism and a low appetite, you know, he's going to drink half of that just from the milk and he's going to spend, you know, anywhere from two to four dollars a day

depending on what part of the country you're at. Although, what is it? Is it ten dollars yet for milk? God, I hope not. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know. We buy raw milk from a local dairy farmer around here. But let's be very clear here because every chance we want to address this, we can. The gallon of whole milk a day prescription is for the 18 to 25-year-old healthy male. Yes. The gallon of whole milk a day is intended for the 18 to 25 year old healthy underweight male. Example, six foot two, 140 pounds, five foot nine, 125 pounds. Again, underweight, healthy, 18 to 25 year old male everybody outside that demographic does not need to drink a gallon of whole milk a day i can see an argument for a gallon of skim milk a day if you just have

trouble eating and want 1200 extra calories with a lot of protein carbs sure but the gallon of the gallon of whole milk a day the 2400 calorie gallon of whole milk a day is for the weight gain client that is very underweight, is going to gain more muscle mass than most of us simply because he's starting so damn low and he's malnourished because he doesn't eat a lot and he has a high metabolism, fast metabolism, poor appetite. Right. And that's the thing about, you know, so everybody, you know, understandably because most of the people in our society are very over fat, right? Whether they're obese or overweight or skinny fat or whatever, most people are over fat, right? So everybody thinks like body fat is something that has to come off the body, right? They're always thinking about it as something you've got to lose or you want to lose or you're trying to lose. But if you're an underweight person, if you're one if you're one of these very skinny underweight persons, you need more of everything. So do you need more

muscle mass? Yeah, absolutely. You do. Do you need more body fat? Yes, you need more body fat. So you need everything. So it's okay to put on a lot of body fat. That's why we recommend it for this demographic. And it, yeah. And then also the other thing too, I think is kind of funny about the milk thing. Cause that's, that's like, everybody thinks that the novice linear progression is that template that I laid out. They're like, Oh, it's that template. Right. And it's like, well, no, actually sometimes we change it and it evolves over time. You know, it's a model, not a template. The other thing is the, but people think of the template of the three sets of five and they think of the milk. Yeah. And I'm like like yeah okay if you need to eat a little bit more food you know like you can you

don't have to drink just a gallon of whole milk like you could drink like two pints of whole milk if you need you know just a little extra hit of calories like why does it have to go straight to a gallon like either i'm not gonna drink milk at all or i'm gonna drink a gallon. Like either I'm not going to drink milk at all, or I'm going to drink a gallon of milk. Yeah, yeah. So that was just an aside. Yeah, you could progress to it. You can do a quart. I've had guys do a quart, half gallon. Yeah, sure. So my cousin did that, and he had to treat it with lactase enzymes to digest it. And he went from 155 to 217 he took his squat you know it was probably oh man i don't know 95 135 somewhere around that and he took that all the way to uh i believe 315 for three sets of five that's great yeah and then he took his his bench i think he had messed around the gym and i think his best max was like 185.

So he was probably benching in the low hundreds, like 135 for three sets of five going in because he was a dude. He messed around with the bench press. Yeah. He took 130. What's his name? His name's Andy. Andy.

Good job, Andy. That's fantastic. It's rare to see someone that sticks with it long enough to do that. And 217 at six foot, that's a very solid body weight, but he's not huge at 217, right? That's just a reasonable, like jacked looking dude. His progress photos are on my website

under testimonials. Okay, yeah, fantastic. Yeah, and then he took his bench from 135 to 220 for a set of five. He did one set of five with 220. And he got his press to 150 up from, i want to say 75 85 and he deadlifted 475 for a 1rm because i put him in a meet um yeah all right i think his

best five i think his best five was like 425 or something or maybe yeah something like that that's great but uh he did a 1rm of 475. He squatted 385. And he benched, what did he bench that day? I think 230 or 240. And anyways, when we took him down, he got down to about a buck 65. He wanted to see if he can get abs, you know? And he put in the work. So I'm like, okay.

And he was down to a buck 65, I think, because, you know, he was just maybe a few pounds shy of abs. And he's just like, fuck this, I don't care. You know? Yeah, right. you know, he was just maybe a few pounds shy of abs. And he's just like, fuck this. I don't care. You know? Yeah. Right. But, you know, he looked good. He was cut everywhere else. His stomach was definitely flat.

And people thought he was like a basketball player, you know, or a volleyball player because of the way he looked. But then he'd walk in the gym. This is what was cool. I think it's cool. You know, it's certainly not going to earn you a bunch of business if you're trying to get people big and strong because he looks pretty skinny still. I should say slender, not skinny. He looked like he participated in a sport like basketball or volleyball or swimming. He got swimming.

He got those comments a lot too. So he looked athletic, right? But he didn't look huge. He just was about 6'1", 65. Then he scaled up to 175 180 you know started eating more but he'll walk in the gym at baseline and he'll squat in the upper twos low threes and you know he'll bench in the low twos and he'll uh deadlift in the mid threes just at baseline after not training for like six months or a year that'll happen that's great and people will stare at him

because he doesn't look like he can do what he does, you know? Right. And they'll start asking him questions because they'll be like, what the fuck this dude, you know, he looks like, you know, he looks like a swimmer or a basketball player and he's, you know, dead lifting 405 for a set of five, you know? Yeah. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. And also that, and that's a great illustration, by the way, of like the reason why we're so crazy and we do this stuff.

So, you remember, I told you that my work capacity after 10 days of being sick and basically, you know, zero physical activity during that time went to shit, right? In just 10 days. Now it'll come back real fast, but that's the thing about strength. That's pretty cool, right? So you go through this process of being a novice and you actually follow this training cycle through. It's really hard, but at the end of the day, you're going to end up with a baseline of strength that is far higher than where you started. That's right. And it sticks around for a long time, right? And that's pretty cool.

If you train far enough, in fact, your baseline will be ahead of the general public like him, right? You know, like I could lay off for six months and I'd still be stronger than everybody around me that I know. Yeah. And that's what's cool about it. You know, not everybody's going to get super huge, but everybody can get stronger. So, yeah, no, so that was the skinny guy, you know, that's what I would do for the skinny guy. And, you know, he had a gut at 217 and he didn't care, you know, he just was, he'd rather have that than be skinny7 and he didn't care you know he just was he'd rather have that than be skinny but he didn't want to stay there either you know and his sure you know his girlfriend was giving me shit it was kind of a funny experience and she comes in they were in

college at the time and uh she's like why are you making him gain so much weight he's getting fat he doesn't want to eat all that and i'm like well he needs to like kaylee he needs to get 270 she's his wife now i'm like she needs he needs to get to 275. Then she's like, he doesn't want to be 275. He's cracking up because he doesn't fuck with her. Right. And we still joke about that to this day. That dude ate so much food.

He ran the LP textbook and got pretty damn strong. But he didn't give a shit about getting fat. And he was 20. Gut's not going to give him a heart attack at 20 and and i'm gonna throw in one other thing here because i just want to connect the dots for people i mean hopefully if you've listened this far to the show you've picked this up but if you haven't yet right you know and you want to be one of those dudes that's six foot and 220 right 225 that's a reasonable body weight for somebody who's a well-trained lifter at that height. And it's not huge either, by the way. It's not even close to huge. But somewhere around 220

at six foot, how do you do that and have good body composition and not have that little gut, right? Well, remember, this guy was a novice and he went up from, what do you say? 155. 155. He gained 60 pounds. He gained 60 pounds, okay? So yeah, he's going to put on some body fat. I guarantee you, I guarantee you, because I've seen it a million times, had he stayed at that body weight and just hung out at like 215, you know, right there, just kind of held his body weight steady, and he trained, he continued to train for another year, he wouldn't have that gut anymore. No. All of a sudden, it'd be just a really solid looking stomach.

Yeah. And everything else around it would fill in. So that's how it happens, right? So when you see these people out there that are muscular and well-defined at six foot 220, you know, that's how it happens, right? That's why we say it takes five years to get there because, you know, you gain the muscle mass and it takes time for the body fat to start to peel off a little bit and the muscle mass to increase again. It's a long-term project. I just want to connect the dots there. Absolutely.

Absolutely. He didn't care to keep doing it. Yeah, and that's fine. That's totally cool. Your goals are yours. He's satisfied being 185 at six foot and being reasonable. Yeah, and that's fine. That's totally cool. Yeah, and your goals are yours, you know. He's satisfied being 185 at six foot and being reasonable. Yeah, and that's awesome. And he has that baseline of strength.

Like, that's fantastic. You know, he's still stronger than everybody else around him at the gym. That's what I care about as a strength coach. Yeah, same here. He's walking around with those numbers. Same here. But remember, for those of you that just heard that, you know, one of my clients got a belly.

He was 6'155". If you're the skinny fat person, I'm not going to make you do that. You know, if you're the overweight obese person, I'm not going to make you do that. So, you know, I got another example. I got a guy right now I know is listening to this because every time I mention him, he's like, oh, man, you always mention me on your podcast. I'm like, because you're doing fucking awesome, dude. He was 5'10", 3'18", when he started. And this was November of 2020. End of 2020. He is still a client of mine. He's still active. And he's approached this in a pretty

reasonable way. He cuts for eight weeks at a time. He maintains for eight weeks at a time. You know, if he has to cut it short, he does, you know, he kind of, he's very good about being aware of his body cues and whether he just wants to, you know, and binge eat and he'll like pull the plug before that happens so we've successfully taken him from 318 and that was on 12-7-2020 to 233.6 on 4-19-2022 so he might be lighter than that he might be heavier he's got to check in sometimes takes a couple weeks off and comes back. We're talking on training, but anyways. So yeah, so he went from 318 to 233. That's fantastic. He does two exercises three times a week because he's a busy business owner.

So I don't have him doing a bunch of shit. He does a three-day split with a squat and a press, a deadlift, and either a bench press. These aren't his exact – this isn't his exact program. I don't have it in front of me. But basically, you know, a squat or a deadlift and a bench or a press. And then he alternates that for three days. And when he's eating at maintenance, we increase the intensity and he goes real heavy. And then when he's eating in a deficit, if I do, if I keep the intensity too high,

he starts, his joints start hurting. So we drop the intensity, we up the reps. And, you know, I don't, I try not to push him to grinder level reps on these lifts because, you know, things can break down. But when it ends up there, we tend to reset. You know, he's very, again, he's very aware of his body and what he's feeling in terms of like his hunger cues, but also whether things hurt and don't feel right. And he's likely to get injured, you know, and he calls things pretty well. So while he was in the low 300s, upper 200s, you know, we pretty much ran an LP the first time around and he got way up there. You know, I think he was squatting in the upper threes for sets of five, you know, he was into the fours for deadlift. And, you know, I can't remember his upper body lifts, but they weren't bad either. And it got to a point where I'm like, okay, we've exhausted that process where, you know, you're running a successful LP while you're losing weight. That's done. So now we have to move to something else.

And then, you know, time constraints. So we're like, okay, two lifts per day and high reps when you're losing weight and a deficit, lower reps, higher intensity when you're in maintenance. And we've done this several times. And for the most part, his strength is held. And, you know, he's pulling in the upper threes close to four for, you know, eight to 10 reps. And, you know, he's squatting in the lower to mid threes for the same. So by the time we get this guy down to the low 200s, this is the next cut that he does should be the last one. Although at some point, these things tend to slow down. So I don't want to jinx it we'll find out but i'd say he has one to two more weight loss phases left to get to where he's trying to get but i just

can't imagine the amount of muscle this guy's gained in the last year and a half right it's gonna be cool to see yeah it's gonna be cool to see but again you know he still needed to train you know he did it and we adjusted it but we didn't have him doing a bunch of shit in the weight room. First of all, he's a busy guy. Second of all, you don't need to do that in that position. Right. So no, not everybody who picks up a barbell is going to get fat. Some people are going to shrink too.

It just depends on your goals, your history, your genetics, your age, all those things. So speaking of age, that's the last demographic. And yeah. And I just want to say really quick on that, you know, so, so that guy too, the timeline you gave us, right. That was two years and four months. That's right. Right. Yeah. So two years and four months to date to lose those 80 pounds. He's got a little bit of ways to go till he hits his goal, right? Yep. Okay. So, so that, yeah, just, just let that sink in for a minute. He was 41% body fat when he started. Yeah. So it two years and four months, and this guy's killing it because he's maintained a high level of strength. That's fantastic numbers. And, um, and he's been really consistent to have been able to do that. And I'm willing to bet because here's the thing is it,

I've seen this a lot with, with weight loss, right? Where it's not just that he lost the weight because he could have lost it quicker, no doubt, but he's already demonstrated by being able to do this over a long time period that he's going to be able to keep it off too.

Oh yeah. Right. And that's, that's so huge, right? What's the point of losing 30 pounds or 50 pounds or 80 pounds or whatever in, you know, faster, as fast as you can, if you're just all going to come back, right?

There's no point to it. So that's a big, big part of weight loss that is underappreciated. Yeah, just throwing some numbers here. I'm looking. He recently pulled 390 for a set of eight. He squatted 270 for three sets of eight. That's great. Yeah, that was like in the last couple months he did that.

I think he might have went heavier before, but that's around where I thought he was, so I'm not too far off. So, yeah, no. So, you know, not everybody who picks up barbells is going to get fat. Now, our last demographic before we close out is the elderly adult or older adult you know somebody basically you know adults over 50 goals start to change i don't get too many asking for abs um if i can't

even think of one up to maybe a couple in the last six years that i've been doing this at high volumes. No more than that. What is it, 2022? Yeah, about seven years. The person over 50 typically wants their back pain to go away, their knee pain to go away, and they want to not have a belly. That's typically what I get from the 50-plus male. Right. what I get from the 50 plus male. Right.

50 plus female, understand she's, well, typically, not always, most of the time, understand she's not going to look 25, but she also wants to get rid of the belly fat and, you know. The arm fat. Arm fat, you know, there's regional fat pockets that they talk about and they typically want to lose weight and show more muscle definition. And the recipe is the same. They talk about and they typically want to lose weight and show more muscle definition. And the recipe is the same. You know, you can't beat them up as much because the recovery is impaired at that point because of age. You have an aging body.

It's not going to recover as fast. You know, training an advanced lifter and training an older adult is quite similar, I've noticed. Yeah, absolutely. For different reasons. So these people, it's a mixed bag. It's a mixed bag. Either having a person over 50 that wants to look like they're 30, and that's the same kind of problems you run into with the skinny, fat person that wants to have abs.

The expectations are a little bit on the unrealistic side, so you have to talk through that. And just a lot of educating on what's possible. And then sometimes you just got to turn away business because you can't do that. You know, it's like, I can't make you look like a 30-year-old, you know, can't do that, you know. But then the other half is, you know, you get these 50 plus people that, you know, well, I have bad back and bad knee, you know, can you show me how to do this correctly? And then show them how to do it correctly. You clean up the diet. They lose some weight.

They put on some muscle, and they look better than they did, and they look better than 97% of 50-year-olds. Absolutely. And that's without visible abs, you know? Yes, yeah. So they look good in a shirt. Yeah. You know, that's a big deal.

Yeah. Occasionally you'll get like a person who's in another sport that signs up and wants to work with us. That's more rare. It's more niche, you know. And typically their sport coach thinks they know everything about the weight room, which is a whole other topic. But, you know, there's oddities that you get. But those are the main ones. You typically get somebody who's overweight or obese, wants to lose weight.

Somebody who's skinny, fat, and wants abs. Or you get somebody who's, you know, middle-aged and wants to hurt less and, you know, not have a belly. Right. Right. So, you know, when you, when you look at the profile of these different types of novices, right. Um, the novice, the interesting thing about this, right. Is the novice, the model of, for the program is the same for all of these people. Right? It's the same. Where the difference is, is the length of time that they'll be able to run the program. It's the rate of progression. That's right. Yeah. that's in her 70s. And, you know, we started pressing with a wooden dowel, right? And we're not going to even be able to add one pound a workout to her press, right? It's going to be slower than that. It's okay. The model is still the same, which is kind of an interesting thing

about this, right? And then, you know, finally, the length of time that it lasts is going to be different, right? And so this is the last thing that I want to point out is sort of like a common error that I see. There are certainly people who sandbag and they give up before they really get started because they're frustrated with all those things you talked about at the top of the show, right? They don't like the novice program cause it's too simple. It's not enough reps. It doesn't make them hot and sweaty and tired, um, or whatever. And there's, so there's people that give up early. I'm not talking about those people, you know, the only answer to them is just to do it, right? They don't know until they've done it. But then I see a lot of people in all

of these categories who try to beat a dead horse too long. Like they, they run the novice progression and they stall out. They may get some work on their technique done. That's great. I highly recommend that. That's usually why people stall out on the lifts is they have bad mechanics and the mechanics are keeping them from going forward. But everyone has a limit, right?

And you kind of run into a point where you just can't make progress anymore. And I will run into people who will reset their lifts. They'll hit their wall at whatever the weight is and they'll go down, let's say 10% and then run it back up and then do it again and run it back up and then run it back up and run it back up and run it back up.

And they're just like, they'll spend like a year trying to do the novice linear progression, maybe even longer, right? Yeah, that's a big mistake because the thing about training is that you can't be a novice forever, right? Eventually you're going to become more advanced. And sometimes depending on what your scenario is, you might become advanced a lot quicker than you think you may be, right? So this is something that like, I think from the starting strength world, there's like some mixed messages here because sometimes when you hear Rip in a video talking

about the novice linear progression, he's addressing that young sport athlete that's 18 to 25. Okay. They might actually do a novice linear progression for six to eight months because we're talking about a young male with high testosterone, with a lot of room to grow. That's, you know, that has, that doesn't have a lot of training experience because they're young. Okay? Well, but that's not the average person, right? If you're 45 and you're an IT consultant, you're probably not going to run LP for six months. You might.

You might. It'd be cool if you did, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's over in three months. That's fine. This older lady that I'm coaching right now, her linear progression as such will probably be over in, I don't know, six weeks, maybe before that. It kind of depends on the lift, right? She'll probably be progressing one lift while the others are stalled out. But that's the thing, right? So the timelines can be drastically different. It doesn't matter. That's not how we look at programming. That's not how we look at training. We look at it in terms of what can you recover from, and we just run the model until it stops working. And then we move on. Then we start to draw from our well of experience to create a more advanced

program for that person to keep them going. And I think the important thing that I recommend our listeners to consider is when you're coming to a barbell coach or lifting coach or somebody who's going to train you in the weight room, you need to outline goals for your time in the weight room. And weight loss is not a goal for your time in the weight room. You need to think about how can lifting weights contribute to your weight loss goal. And it's indirect. It adds muscle mass, which changes your body composition. You look different. You look better, right? Fat guy who trains looks better than a fat guy who doesn't train. We went through this many times. But I think that when you take this one-dimensional view of, I need to lose weight and that's the

only thing that matters, then you start to not fully appreciate why you're doing some of these things. And then you run into this problem where you just don't make progress with it, right? Because you're setting up goals that have little to do with the thing you're doing, right? You're in the weight room because you're trying to hold on to muscle mass or build it. So you have to train to do that. You're not training to lose weight. You're eating less to lose weight. You're walking around more to lose weight. You might be doing some cardio to help you lose weight, but that's not why you're lifting. So you need to really separate what you're doing in the weight room from your goal to lose weight. You know, obviously the other demographics I mentioned don't have this problem,

but I tend to find that this is a huge issue with weight loss clients. Now, muscle gain clients, if you're such a motor moron, you know, I've had to do this. People that just want to gain muscle and will never get on the platform. And I talk about bodybuilders. That's a whole nother demographic, but people just want to gain muscle and look better and don't need to lose weight. Sometimes I've had to make them do leg press and things like that because this is usually more with online clients, of course, because in person I can fix a lot of these things quick.

But online coaching, muscle gain clients, if they're complete motor morons and they can't move well and the form's taking forever, I might have them leg press or do something like that to load those muscles and put on some mass while we're building up the technique. But then as soon as they can squat, we get rid of that stuff, you know? Right.

Yeah. But at the end of the day, just the whole point that I'm making here is that you're in the gym to teach your muscles how to work better and to grow them and or to hold on to them when you're losing weight. and to grow them and or to hold on to them when you're losing weight the activity you perform under a bar or in a weight machine or the dumbbell or whatever if you're lifting weights that's for your muscles that doesn't directly cause you to lose body fat right and it's also a long-term process that's the next step so we'll do on this is you know basically the timelines with this these things and managing expectations but you. But it doesn't need to feel like cardio.

And if it doesn't feel like cardio, it's not a failed workout. You know, just do some cardio afterwards, quote unquote, cardio conditioning. I don't know what the fuck word people use these days. But, you know, if you don't feel like you got a good workout, then go get a good workout. Go for a hike. Go for a run. Ride a bike. That's where you can get those endorphins that you get from aerobic exercise.

But don't turn your weight workout into an aerobic activity. You're just leaving muscle and weight on the bar, on the table. You're in there to strengthen your muscles, teach them to work better, and get them to look better. That's what you're in the weight room for. So if you're a novice and you leave the gym and don't feel like you got that good workout, that good muscle pump, that heart rate elevation, then it probably means you need a little more cardio to psychologically satisfy yourself. But you don't need to do 100 air squats in a row or 10 sets of 10 or anything like that. You don't need to do that. BJJ.

Or that. Unless you want to learn how to fight. I don't know much about martial arts, but BJJ is popular. Yeah, if you're trying to do a whole bunch of BJJ. The thing about BJJ is nobody just like what they ought to do is like drill one two times a week and then spar once a week you know that's probably what you should do yeah um every every person I know that's done BJJ they like spar three to four times a week and then drill three days a week yeah it's not gonna go well if you're getting your elbow bent behind your asshole you know

on a regular basis like you're're not going to have a good time lifting weights. Absolutely not. Uh, sorry. I'm sure it's fun though. I mean, it looks fun, but I don't, I guess. Yeah. There's, there's so many places we can go with that, you know? Um, well, yeah. Joking way too, but no, there's just, you know, there's all sorts of considerations outside of what you do in the weight room that can alter the way that you program, how long a novice LP will last, et cetera. But at the end of the day, if your goal is to get a good workout, the weight room is not the place to do it. You try to, quote, unquote, get a good workout in the weight room and do things that are actually hard, you're probably going to get injured at some point. But squats and deadlifts, you don't want to turn that into cardio. I guess that's what I'm kind of getting at.

Yeah. Yeah. Well said, man. Well, okay. Well, there you go. There's a profile of various novices and an exploration into the novice linear progression and the big picture, right? You know? So I think, I think this is the stuff that we wanted to cover this because this is the stuff that a lot of people overlook. They get, they get wrapped up in the details and the nuts and bolts of like sets and reps and am I progressing enough and the three questions and stuff. And it's good to know those things, but also it's important to understand how the novice linear progression fits into the big picture of your goals and how you're going to get from A to B. That's right. All right, well, we can close out there and we'll have another one for you in a couple of weeks. So thank you again for tuning in to the Weights and Plates podcast. You can find me at weightsandplates.com

or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. If you are in the Phoenix Metro, you can find the Jim's Instagram page at weights double underscore and double underscore plates. And I'm actually checking it now and I'll be updating it soon. So you're fantastic. Fantastic. Well, you can find me on the Instagram, my personal at marmalade underscore cream, and you can find me online, my coaching services, cream. And you can find me online, my coaching services, wait for it, at jonesbarbellclub.com. Finally got the website set up. Nice. Pretty bare bones, but you can find my contact information there and I'll be adding more to that as I go along. But yeah, that's Jones Barbell Club.

I offer online coaching. I offer online programming. And of course, if you're in the Chattanooga area, I offer in-person coaching as well. So give me a look up there, jonesbarbellclub.com. you