Weights and Plates Podcast - #3 - Why You Need to Lift Heavy: The Physiology of Muscle

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

Today Robert and Trent discuss why you need to train for strength, and why your lifts MUST be heavy to build muscle mass. It's popular these days to train for "hypertrophy" -- the fancy term for increasing muscular size -- utilizing sets of 10-12 reps on a large variety of exercises, many of them single joint lifts such as curls, tricep extensions, and hamstring curls. The problem with this approach is that, for the vast majority of people, they do not do these exercises heavy enough to drive muscle growth, and they lack the strength to do them heavy enough to see results anyway. Then there is the problem with ergonomics -- how heavy can you do a single joint exercise anyway? How much can you really hamstring curl?   A much better solution to gaining muscle mass is to use the barbell, which can be used to do compound lifts, which involve more joints, use more muscle mass, and can be performed with heavier weights too. Barbells can be loaded with very light weights for the most novice trainee, extremely heavy for advanced strength athletes, and anywhere in between. Most importantly, mastering a few simple exercises with the barbell is the most bang-for-your-buck thing you can do in the gym, regardless of your goals or athletic focus.   There are physiological reasons for lifting heavy too. Moving heavy weights involves anaerobic energy pathways that burn large amounts of carbohydrates. Heavy weights produce a hormone response which lighter aerobic exercises does not -- heavy weights stimulate production of more testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin growth factor (IGF-1) -- which causes your body to grow more muscle mass, increases your metabolism, and partition calories in a more efficient way.   So, next time you hit the gym to "lift," you need to lift heavy. Heavy weights provide the stimulus for growing muscle mass, and the weight must get progressively heavier over time.   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. We are back for another wonderful episode about strength training, diet, and all other fun and exciting things. I am Robert Santana. I am your host. And I am your host. And I am Trent Jones. And let's get the ball rolling. So I guess last week, you know, we talked about,

what did we talk about, dude? Well, we did a plates episode, right? Yeah. We talked about, well, we talked about nutrition, but it was really kind of like laying the groundwork for nutrition. We didn't talk really many nuts and bolts. We talked about where your nutrition information comes from and why you shouldn't listen to it. Why you shouldn't listen to your doctor. Yeah. And then there's, you know, and when you should, when it has to do with medicine, you know, obviously you're a doctor of medicine. So as, as you know, we are both, we both kind of like strength training. We like lifting with barbells. We like lifting heavy. And it's recently come to my attention in the last,

I don't know, six years that I've worked with thousands and thousands of people that a lot of people don't like to lift heavy. And it's kind of odd because when I was growing up, if you walked into a weight room, and mind you, it was much more niche back then to lift. So we have much more diversity, I guess, in the weight room in terms of what types of people are lifting weights. But when I came into this, it was, you know, how much can you lift, bro? Or how much can you bench? You know, how much can you bench? And if you go even further back before upright support benches were available, it used to be how much can you press because people didn't bench. That's actually what drew me back.

That's what drew me to the press before I discovered starting strength was I read this funny article. It said back before people did the bench press or before there were upright support benches, I don't remember the exact language they used, the measure of a man's strength was how much weight he can lift overhead. And I was like, you know, he's got a point there. If I got a couple of big plates over my head, I look pretty damn cool. Yeah, I'm not going to lie. Like when you put a big, big weight over your head, you're like, that's, it's pretty badass. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

When you, like when I hit a PR bench, I'm like, ah. So anticlimactic. Yeah, it's, there's no, it's not fun. Like watching a powerlifting meet during the bench part is just, it's a total, it's a snooze fest, man. Especially if they're wearing shirts. Oh God. Yeah. Right. Um, and you know, by shirts, we mean bench press shirts. They're elastic and allow you to lift more. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but, uh, now when I, you know, get clients that, you know, hire me as a, hire me as a strength coach or a nutrition coach, if I'm doing their training primarily because it doesn't really come up with diet,

but conversations do happen with some of my diet coaching clients. But if I get hired for training, I'm seeing more and more people just want to essentially brag about how many sets they've done and how much they've tired themselves out in the weight room. Yeah. And, you know, there's origins to this. I may have touched on them before, but when I was coming up, they used to talk about muscle confusion, you know, because— Oh, yes. Yeah, that was the P90X thing, right?

Muscle confusion? I mean— Tony Horton? He goes even before that. Arnold used to talk about that. The shocking principle is what he called it. So this goes way back. I think P90X popularized it into the mainstream, but it was already existent among people that were already lifting. And Arnold called it the shocking principle. You can't let your muscles get used to anything. And again, there's a nugget of truth there. You know, you have to introduce a novel stimulus to build muscle.

But how many different ways can you stress your muscle before you run out of ideas, right? If you want to find out, there's a thing called CrossFit. You can go do that and see how that works out for you. But, you know, the nugget of truth is every time you add weight to the bar, you're introducing a novel stimulus because you haven't lifted that weight before. So when I first started lifting, it was, okay, well, I got to do barbell curls, but I can't do barbell curls for too long. I got to do dumbbell curls too. And then I have to, can't just do regular dumbbell curls. I'm going to stop doing those and do hammer curls. And then I got to stop doing those and spend time on cables.

So it was just like this constant pressure to change exercises because I thought that I wasn't growing because, oh, you're getting used to the exercise. But, you know, it has nothing to do with the exercise itself. Some exercises can be progressed further along than others. You know, you're only going to go so far with a curl, much further than something like a lateral raise, you know, for instance. But a squat or a deadlift or a bench press or an overhead press or chin up, even you can go pretty far with that. You know, you can go from the empty bar and a press to 225, you know? Yeah. Right. You're not going to take a 25 pound

barbell and, you know, progress up to 225 on a barbell curl. It's just not, you know, you can, it'll turn into a reverse clean probably. I mean, CT Fletcher curled 220, but, you know, it's not common that, you know, you're going to progress a single joint exercise, you know, forever and ever and ever. But yeah, these compound exercises tend to, you know, be progressible for, you know, large chunk of your lifespan, you know, you can keep going up. Yeah. up. Yeah. And a lot of these, you know, old school guys that you're talking about that would have asked each other, Hey brother, how much you press? A lot of them simply didn't have a lot of equipment, you know, back in the twenties, thirties, forties and the early days of the barbell. And, um, there are some guys you can look up that built some fantastic physiques and were very strong doing probably six or seven exercises their whole life. Yeah.

Like their entire career. Like, uh, you look at, uh, John Grimmick, that guy was a competitive weightlifter in the, I believe is the thirties in the forties, you know, at kind of at the end of his lifting career when he was getting older and not really athletically relevant anymore, he got into bodybuilding, you know, it's kind of this emerging bodybuilding scene. And, uh, but the guy looked freaking jacked and, you know, like massive, great muscularity. And you know what, he probably just did a whole bunch of cleans and presses and squats and just really basic stuff. So, you know, there's, there's a clear precedent for doing compound lifts, but there's also some scientific reasons we've learned since then for why this stuff works. And you pointed out one of them earlier.

When you do assistance, what we would consider assistance type exercises, like a barbell curl, you're really only moving a single joint in a lot of those movements. If you're doing a tricep extension, a barbell curl, a hamstring curl, that kind of stuff, you're only really moving one joint through its range of motion. And therefore, you're only really moving a small amount of muscle mass in your body through a range of motion. When you talk about doing compound lifts like squats and deadlifts and presses, you inevitably end up moving multiple joints in your body. And those joints are attached to multiple pieces of muscle mass. And so you end up using a whole lot more muscle in your body. And in fact, if you think about it a little bit, this is how your body works in the real world. If your car breaks down at the intersection and you got to hurry up and push it across to safety,

are you just using one muscle group? Are you just using your calves or your quads to drive that car? It's like, no, your whole body's pushing on it. Your calves, your quads, your hips, everything in your hips, your hamstrings, your arms, like every fiber of your being is pushing that car. And that's the way that we interact with the real world is with compound movements. And so that's, that's our preference in, uh, when we talk about training is to use the body as it is used in real life, which is in a compound manner. Yeah. So, you know, you're basically doing, um, normal movements with a load and the barbell is probably one of the most ergonomic instruments known to man because you can load it up with a whole bunch of weight and keep it right over your center mass. You can't do that when you're lifting

a couch or a box or, you know, pushing a car necessarily, you know. A lot of movements in life are inefficient. So by introducing the barbell, you're essentially training yourself in a perfectly efficient environment so that when you are in the inefficient environment, you are less likely to get hurt by the inefficiency. That's the whole idea. Not to mention, it's easier to lift things on top of that.

It translates. So it's always made me laugh when people freak out. They assume that these lifts are more injury-prone. Well, sure, if you do them wrong, just like you're prone to a car accident if you drive wrong. Right. And there's a lot to unpack there, so we won't go down that rabbit hole. I guess I'll just start with why does it work, right?

Well, I mentioned earlier, anytime you apply more stress than what was previously possible, your body has to adapt to that stress, and that adaptation leads to an ability to produce more. So if you come into the gym and you're a brand new lifter and I have you squat, you know, 65 pounds and two days, you're going to squat 75 pounds. And then two days after that, you're going to squat 85 pounds each time you're getting stronger. There's different reasons for that. We'll go into that, but that's the whole idea. You know, you, you, you know, put the 65 pound load in your back, squat it. Body's like, oh shit, that was heavy. I need to do more. I need to adapt to that. So you get stronger. Then you put 75 on. It heavy i need to do more i need to adapt to that so you get stronger then you put 75 on it's like oh crap i need to adapt to that too and you follow this

this pattern for weeks months and years you know and what ends up happening is it takes longer and longer so this is kind of how the whole novice intermediate advanced terminology is defined in starting strength a novice is somebody who you know, set a new record every two days. You know, so every two days you're stronger than you were two days ago. And then later it might take four days. So you might squat on Monday and Friday and set a new record, right? We call them PRs, personal records. And then, you know, you get to a point where you set a new record every week.

And then every two weeks. And then, you know, every three weeks, every four weeks. Olympians set a PR every four years. Right. Hopefully. Hopefully. Some of them go down between Olympic cycles. At some point, yes, you do stop getting stronger.

You do stop building muscle. The amount of progress that you can make is going to vary depending on your genetics. Your genetics are your foundation, right? And there's all these different things you can do for recovery, but you can't out-train bad genetics. Like, for instance, I've gotten much stronger than where I started, but I still don't have, like, 18-inch arms. I'm not going to train my way to 18-inch arms. Right, right. Granted, I don't train arms, admittedly, but if I did, I'm not going to train my way to 18 inch arms, you know? Right. Right. Um, you know, granted, I don't, you know, train arms admittedly, but if I did, I'm not going to get that kind of Delta, you know, like based on how everything else has grown, you know, it would be completely

disproportionate to the other, the rest of my body to pull that off. So, you know, I have many reasons for thinking that. So before you go and troll the comments and say, well, you don't even train arms, dude. Well, you know, I've trained other shit and it hasn't grown that much. You know, I don't have like, you know, 35 inch quads and doing a bunch of knee extensions isn't going to do that. And I have done that. So, right. Right. You know, let's, if it's funny, I hated doing arms. I hated curls and I figured out why actually, um, I used to just do the standard barbell curl and then my forearms would get pumped up and brachioradialis muscle will get pumped up. And I didn't see any progress from it.

Then two years ago, I got bored. What year was this? No, more like three, four years ago. I got bored and I started following. This is so funny. So I follow C.T. Fletcher ever since he did that Command You to Grow video. For those of you who haven't watched it, you should look it up. It's entertaining.

Yeah. And, you know, he starts talking about, oh, I did arms every motherfucking day, you know, for years. You know, for a year and a half, I did arms every day. And then I'm just laughing. I'm like, this guy's just entertaining. He's being a troll, you know? Right. And I'm like, you know, there's probably a nugget of truth in there somewhere, you know? And I just, you know, I didn't really explore it much.

Then, you know, he starts advertising, and know, I didn't really explore much. Then, you know, he starts advertising, you know, I follow him on Instagram and he's like, I'm finally releasing my arm program, my secret arm program. And I'm like laughing. I'm like, he's talking about this is how I got my arms at 22 inches in a year and a half. And I'm like, okay, this is probably mostly bullshit, but there's gotta be something in there that's valuable. So it was like 30 bucks, you know, I bought the program on, forgot what platform he used to sell it and it was just a bunch of videos and i like put it all on my apple notes so that i can remember what the hell to do because he didn't actually he didn't actually give you a template i mean these guys are very old-fashioned for sure you know compton you know he's been training since the 70s concept

yeah so he's like okay this exercise is how we do it you know this exercise is how we do it and he's a former power lifter so you know he moves like shit on some things and other things he moves fairly well, you know? And I basically did, I think I did it for like a month and a half. I was just doing arm work every single day, you know? And it was like basically 10 sets of 10 on everything. And the last set of 10 was a burnout. And it also made me realize that a lot of what they do is submaximal. So they're not going to failure on a lot of these sets and they would go to failure on the last one. So I learned a few things, because I never actually trained a proper bodybuilding program. My assumption was put on as much weight as you can and go as heavy, go as hard as you can, and then you try to add, you know? That was my default

mentality. And anyhow, he had an exercise that he called the leaning curl. I just call it the bent over curl. And, you know, you bend about 45 degrees and curl it. What essentially is happening is you're curling the bar over the middle of your foot. And I felt it all in my biceps. I got the most insane bicep pump ever from that. And I'm like, man, if I knew this like 20 years ago, I probably would have cared enough to keep doing it. But anyway, I stopped doing that after a couple months.

But, you know, I got pretty pumped up from it. It was fun. But the whole point that I'm trying to make is at some point, it always has to get heavier. And even when I did that, that burnout set, I made sure that the weight went up every week. Right. And any which way you try to spin it, you're adding load. spin it, you're adding load. So if you're going to do a quote unquote hypertrophy program, which by the way, any strength training program that is progressive is going to induce hypertrophy. Yeah, that's right.

The, you know, the professional researchers agree on this, you know, coaches agree on this, and yet we still try to spin all this other shit that results in, you know, let's do a bunch of some maximal light stuff for a bunch of reps. That's not what we're here to do. If your goal is to build muscle, and yes, that includes, you know, being quote-unquote long and lean, being quote-unquote toned. That's right. Toned equals muscle? It all equals muscle. All of it means you're building muscle.

Your muscles are getting bigger than they were. If you become more toned, you've gained muscle. If you become larger and not fatter, you've gained more muscle. Your muscles are getting bigger than they were. If you become more toned, you've gained muscle. If you become larger and not fatter, you've gained more muscle. If your muscles look longer and leaner, you've gained more muscle or you've lost a bunch of body fat, you know? But at the end of the day, if you're in the weight room, one way or another, you're going to build muscle. How much of that you can build depends on how you train, how long you stick with it, and, of course, genetics and your baseline, right? Baseline muscle mass is a fairly decent predictor, although some guys surprise you, you know? But, you know, I was pretty small at baseline, and I'm, you know, pretty small now for a trained lifter. You know, I'm not a big dude.

But, you know, some guys are just, you know, underfed or, you know, just young. You know, like Lane Norton's like before and after. And I'm like, before, dude, you didn't even finish puberty in the before picture. That doesn't count. Right, yeah. You know, you basically took steroids the first two years, you know, not literally. He's drug free and I do believe him. But the before picture is not a fair comparison.

What I like to look at was, okay, his first bodybuilding show now. Yeah, the dude started powerlifting, his quads blew up, you know. Yeah, yeah. was okay his first bodybuilding show now yeah the dude started power lifting his quads blew up you know yeah yeah so so i think there's there's basically like a concept that that underpins this right yeah is we're going when you think of when you think about practically what you can do in the gym we know that there's a whole bunch of exercises that you could potentially do when you walk into a gym and we've listed a bunch of those already. But we know that the compound exercises are going to involve more muscle mass. And we haven't said it explicitly,

but you can also lift the most weight with compound exercises. You can squat. It's not unreasonable for a decently trained guy to squat 315 pounds no or a decently trained woman to squat 225 or 205 um that's not out of the question for just any old decently trained person no well how much are you going to leg curl how much are you going to put on the hamstring curl machine right right it's not going to be anywhere near the magnitude of weight and so it kind of makes sense then that if you can use more muscle mass in a lift, you're also going to lift more

weight. And let's tie that back in with what you said earlier. Anytime you can move more weight, you can add more stress to your body. And when you adapt to that stress, then you're going to get stronger and you're going to build more muscle mass. So strength and muscle mass are intertwined. They have to be. And it makes sense on a practical level as well as a scientific level. On a scientific level, they're pretty tightly correlated. Yeah.

So the whole idea is progressive overload. So the hypertrophy zealots want to argue that you have to accumulate tonnage. So our volume load is another word for it. It's a mathematical expression of sets times reps times weight. Some people, the more scientific community calls that volume load. The practitioners that support that style of training tend to call it tonnage. And some people just call it volume, you know? Sure. Because it gets to the same point.

But you're basically looking at arithmetic here, right? So you can make that number real high by doing a whole bunch of reps. What's the problem there now? Are you even getting a good strength stimulus or even, like, we're just going to refer to it as a strength stimulus because hypertrophy and strength are intertwined. And yes, you're going to have strong people that aren't big. I understand that. You know, it's not what we're talking about here. We're not trying to, you know, get into a nuanced argument with a PhD over this. This is not an academic argument. This is a practical argument. And typically, when people get stronger, muscle tends to follow.

And there are meta-analysis that support this for the academic listening to this trolling me right now from his computer. But, you know, there's a continuum. The more reps you do, the more it becomes an endurance stimulus. If you do 200 reps in a row, you are basically doing light cardio. If you do 10,000 reps in a row, you are doing cardio. cardio. If you do 10,000 reps in a row, you are doing cardio. You're basically running or cycling, you know? Or, you know, if you work at UPS, you're lifting boxes all day and moving them, you know? Like, those guys are pretty ripped, you know? But yeah, the point is, the more continuous it becomes, the less it becomes

a strength stimulus, a muscle-building stimulus. So, there is a threshold there. So, okay, let's say that I have you do three sets of 10, which was a classic hypertrophy prescription. We had to do three sets because three just sounds like a great number, and you have to do sets of 10. Actually, there's research that it goes to. There was the old DeLorn, I believe, study, Thomas DeLorn, in the 60s or the 40s, I think. Yeah, 40s.

He was doing PT on these soldiers, World War II soldiers. And one set of 10 versus three sets of 10. Yeah, 40s. He was doing PT on these soldiers, World War II soldiers. And one set of 10 versus three sets of 10. Well, more sets seems to work, but then everybody just stopped at three for many, many decades. You know, three is a good round number. I tend to do three sets. I don't like doing four, five, six, seven, eight, you know, but you know, there's a German volume training that's 10 sets of 10. But let's say that I have you do three sets of 10. Then I'm like, okay, well, I'm not going to add load. I'm going to keep load the same and have you do four sets of 10 next week, and five sets of 10 next week, then six sets of 10 next week, and then seven, eight, nine,

10, 11, 12. Okay. At what point do you get to a point where A, you have no more time in the day because you've trained all day, or you've trained more than your schedule allows? Well, let's just be theoretical about it. You've trained all day. There's 24 hours in a day. You can only add so many sets before you're in the gym for 24 hours. You're doing that like add an inch to your arms in a day program right now.

Yeah. It's like you've literally trained all day. Yeah, exactly. So I did that one once with my stepbrother. It was fun. Oh, man. But yeah, no, at some point, you're going to run out of time in the day.

So there's problem number one. Problem number two, okay, at some point you're going to run out of time in the day. So there's problem number one. Problem number two, okay, if you've done 65 sets of 10, all right, at some point this has become more of an endurance stimulus because you're going to get tired, you know, probably by set number five, you know, set number four or five. So, you know, your weight's probably – if you can do 65 sets of 10, your weight's too light. If you could do 10 sets of 10, the weight's pretty light. If you could do 10 sets of 10, the weight's pretty light. But, you know, 10 sets of 10 has some backing to it. You know, if you want to sit there and do that. I've done it. I think it works.

It sucks. You're in the gym for a long time. I, you know, have accomplished more on less. But, you know, there's a threshold there where you can't add more sets. You can only go so far, right? Okay, well, what about adding reps? Okay, well, okay, you can do a set of 11 next week, which I

wouldn't recommend because 11s don't exist. Neither do 7s or 4s or 9s, 13s. Only prime number is 7, 11. Singles, let's get this out in the air here because it's important. It's very important. Singles, doubles, triples, fives, eights, tens, twelves if you're a bodybuilder, fifteens,

twenties. Sure. Yeah. That's all you need. Yeah. Well, that's all there is. Four is a missed set of five. Sevens aren't real.

Nines are bullshit. Thirteen. You don't do thirteen. There's not even thirteen floor in hotels, you know? So why would you do a set of thirteen? Yeah. That's, yeah, just don't. Yeah. So those are the rep ranges, you know? So why would you do a set of 13? Yeah, that's just dumb. So those are the rep ranges, you know, just to establish that. Yesterday, this guy did three sets of nine, and I'm like, well, you just missed your set of 10.

He's like, well, yeah, I did. Then I'm like, okay, good. I'm like, don't do nines in my gym. We don't do nines here. Anyways, yeah, so you're going to add reps. Okay, let's say that I'm a dumbass and I'm going to have you do a set of 11 the following week, then a set of 12, then a set of 13, then a set of 14, then a set of 15. See what's going on here? Yeah, your tonnage may be going up depending on how you're mathing that.

But you're doing more reps, which means the weight is not that heavy. And heavy matters. There's a minimum threshold of intensity intensity refers to load so we use load weight or intensity interchangeably um there's there's a minimum threshold there that's necessary there has to be a minimum amount of weight on the bar for it to trigger muscle growth otherwise it's too light and becomes an endurance stimulus yeah and all right so i want to dig into that a little bit because bro, I've done P90X and I did like 300 pushups and I got really sore. It crushed me, but it didn't make me stronger. No. And so let's dig into the reason why. Um, so physiologically,

there's, there's some stuff going on when you lift a heavyweight that doesn't happen when you lift a lightweight a whole bunch of times for sets of 11 and you know part of that is like you have to understand how muscle fiber works in the first place and i don't want to go to rabbit hole unlike you know how a muscle functions but suffice it to say that with our current understanding of of muscle physiology your muscle fibers turn on or off. Like basically there is no like work halfway as far as we know, right? They either, they turn on or they turn off, right? And so you can either recruit more muscle fibers up to the maximum that you have or not at all. And so if you're lifting a light weight that you can do 11 times, then you're not actually

recruiting all of the muscle fibers in the joints that you're moving 11 times, then you're not actually recruiting all of the muscle fibers in the joints that you're moving. So if you're doing a squat for 11 reps, you're not turning on all the muscle fibers in your hamstrings, in your quads, in your glutes, in your abs, in your back, et cetera, et cetera. On the other hand, when you work at the lower end of the spectrum and you're adding weight to the bar and you're doing sets of five or sets of three, and what we would consider the higher intensity range, like you mentioned, this would be the higher intensity, higher weight on the bar range, then by definition, you have to turn on more muscle fibers when you're doing that movement. And you're training, you're getting more training effect

in the muscle because you're using more muscle mass. And so there's a, there's some physiological reasons why you have to lift heavy weights to grow muscle. So we've established that a, you have to grow muscle to get the body comp you want. And then now B, you have to lift heavy because that's, what's going to stimulate muscle growth. Yeah. So this is a good place to get into, you know, muscle fiber types. And I'm not going to go onto the histochemical stuff because depending on which textbook you're citing, you know, you might get different numbers, but basically you have your type ones and your type two A's, type two X's, and some books might still call it type 2B. Basically, to kind of keep it simple, for those of you who don't have a physiology background, your type 1 muscle fibers or motor

units are primarily used in endurance activities. So they're very highly resistant to fatigue. They don't tend to grow as large. And I'll come back to that because a good point with that. And they tend to be very oxidative. So they use up a lot of oxygen. You can, you're going to use them when you're running, when you're cycling, when you're doing a marathon, mostly type one motor units. Type two tend to be more explosive. And the 2A versus 2X thing is not quite that important. 2X is more explosive, but then they tend to convert to 2A versus 2X thing is not quite that important. 2X is more explosive, but then they tend to convert to 2A once you start lifting because obviously you're doing multiple reps. So it favors a conversion from 2X to 2A. But basically, they have a high force output.

They're not very resistant to fatigue. So you can't really pump out a lot of reps with those muscles. They're used for very heavy lifts or very fast, rapid activities. And, you know, they tend to grow larger. So your type 1s and your type 2s, they can both grow. The type 2s tend to grow larger because there tends to be more of them attached to the nerve. That's called a motor unit. And a motor unit is made up of motor neurons, so nerve cells that allow you to move, hence the word motor.

And all of the muscle fibers that innervates. So just like with the muscle fibers, you have a type 1 motor unit, type 2 motor unit. And the type 2 tend to have more muscle fibers that are innervated, and they tend to be more explosive. So they tend to grow bigger muscles if you have more type 2 muscle fibers. However, they can both grow, and that's what's interesting. So muscles like the calf, right? You walk on your calves all day, or your forearms, you're constantly moving your fingers around, you're constantly contracting and relaxing your forearms and your calves. So muscles like that, you could do a bunch of reps or even do endurance work and see growth from that because they are comprised of lots of type 1 muscle fibers and have to be stimulated in that way.

Something like the deltoid, you're not doing a whole lot of continuous shoulder work. I mean, you're using every muscle in your body all day long, of course, but not to the extent – you're not using your deltoid to the extent that you're using your calf or your forearm, assuming that you're not, you know, in a wheelchair, obviously, you know? Right, yeah. But yeah, your calves are designed to go all day. Your spinal erectors are designed to go all day. Your abs are designed to go all day, and so are your forearms. So, you know, if you look at, like, some old bodybuilding programs, you know, the guys that really wanted to hit forearms and calves, they do a bunch of reps, and they typically train them twice a day. And, you know, they've studied this, you know, to the extent they can in some academic papers. And it kind of makes sense to me. If you're going to try and actually grow calves, and I've seen this play out in my own training when I cared about that, you know, you have to do them more

frequently. So you can train those muscles every single day, probably twice a day and not over train them because they're highly resistant to fatigue. And you'll see growth that way. So I did calves four times a week. They grew. But the thing about calves that's interesting, too, is because they're also a leg muscle, you can also train them heavy. So I saw that a mix of heavy and light was necessary to really see growth there. So I would do the standing calf raise.

I got up to 405, I think on it. I was using a safety squat bar because I can just, I can hold onto the spotter arms and just go up and down without having to balance the bar on my back because the handles would take care of that for me, you know? Right, right. And, you know, I would do a combination of heavy and light. So then like a seated calf raise, you're working your soleus muscle and that tends to, so when I've read up on this on fiber typing that you have two muscles in your calf your gastrocnemius and your soleus and the gastrocnemius tends to be higher in type twos so you can load it pretty heavy but then the soleus tends to be higher in type one muscle fibers you know proportionately speaking you know there's not no muscle is 100

of one type or the other but my point is you know there are exceptions to this you know, there's no muscles 100% of one type or the other. But my point is, you know, there are exceptions to this, you know, low rep rule and muscles like that. If you see like a post office worker, like a postman, they tend to have big calves. It's like a stereotype, right? Right, right. And they're walking all day, you know. And I noticed that my one buddy once when he didn't have a car, he walked for a month and his calves blew up. And my dad, too, when he lived in Florida, he was walking miles and miles and miles and his calves got even bigger yeah yeah i've noticed that amongst hikers around here oh yeah you guys hike all the time yeah giant calves yeah because that's now it's

interesting too though like on that note um people like often uh very very overweight or obese people have large calves um large gastrocs normally is what i see um they've got that big ball in their calf um and and i i've always assumed that that's because they're they're walking around a lot with a lot of excess weight so they're essentially their calves are having to move a lot of weight that's around all day for a whole bunch of reps no that's 100 true so i just wanted to put that little caveat out there you know you, you got some muscles that, you know, just because of how they're composed in terms of fiber type ratio, you know, you might see some growth in those areas with higher reps, but generally most of your muscles tend to respond to heavy weight. into all the exercises, but I've taken this theory and I've applied it to the spinal erectors, and I've get, you know, sometimes I get people that just cannot set their back, you know, and I'll coach the hell out of them. I'll keep resetting, keep resetting, keep resetting,

and by resetting, I mean lowering the weight and working back up. And they can't set their back with a weight that I don't think, based on, you know, just professional judgment and experience, that I don't think they should be struggling with. Sure and uh i've just had them take it way down and do tens for a little while and then they surpass the weight and they have better back control and you know yeah there's an argument to be made okay let's practice or doing more reps of that movement then there's an argument to be made that hey there's a lot of type one motor units in those spinal erectors because they have they're designed to hold you up all day, you know? Yes. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. Also, I think for some people,

it gets easier to do movements when you have built more muscle size. And so, yeah, by doing anything that you can do to build a little bit of extra muscle mass in, say, your spinal erectors, all of a sudden you've got more contractile tissue there. So you can actually feel it when you set your back. I've noticed that's something with young women that I've had to work through, especially in the upper body lifts, is like, they kind of have to get over a hump where they've got to build enough muscle mass in their shoulders and their deltoids and their chest and their traps and all that stuff in order to actually efficiently move a bar. Yeah, no, it's true. Because when you just don't have any muscle

mass there, it's harder to move that joint. But I think there's another thing that's interesting here when we're talking about muscle physiology. When you lift heavy, there's also a hormonal response that happens that doesn't happen when you lift very light or you do endurance type exercises. So this information, I remember I first learned about this from our good friend Jonathan Sullivan, Dr. Jonathan Sullivan, who wrote a great book called The Barbell Prescription. Who will be getting on here at some point. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to talk to sully um and so anyways so he talks about the physiology of muscle mass and how when you train heavy your body releases a series of hormones

your body excretes more testosterone insulin growth factor was that igf1 growth hormone so right growth hormones squirted out. And these are essentially messengers for the body to do stuff, right? And so you apply stress to yourself in the gym by lifting heavy weights, doing compound exercises like we've been talking about, and your body's like, holy crap, this guy's trying to kill me with heavy weights. I've got to adapt to this. And so hormones are excreted and these hormones set off signals in your body to go through various processes like building more muscle mass so that the next time you go in there and you have to lift heavy again, your body is prepared to lift a little bit heavier than it was before. And I thought that was a really powerful thing because you don't get

this response with other types of exercise. Like if you go for a jog, as long as you're not a complete couch potato, right? And you're coming from absolute zero. If you can kind of handle a jog, when you go out and you do a low intensity exercise where you're not really exhibiting much force, you're not lifting hardly any weight, you're just moving your body, then you're not getting that hormonal response from that workout like you would if you went and squatted a heavy weight in the gym. Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's the same thing with endurance. Endurance, you release, I believe it's dopamine, and you get that runner's high. You're not going to get that from lifting, you know.

So there's different responses to different types of activity, for sure. Yeah. But I think the important thing to hit here is whether you're going to run quizzed, you know, when I was running a VO2 max test. And I was asked about respiratory exchange ratio, which is supposed to be reflective of respiratory quotient. For the lay public, what you need to know there is that it's a number that represents how much fat, how much carb you're oxidizing during exercise, how much you're burning during exercise. And the way that I explain it to my clients, because I get a lot of questions about this on the diet front, is the harder something is above sitting on your ass, the more you're going to rely on carbs. The closer you are to sitting on your ass, the more you're going to rely on fat. And you can alter this through dietary manipulation, obviously.

If you go keto, you're going to primarily burn fat doing most activities. And you're going to use ketones for activities that can't use fat, such as brain function, right? If you eat a lot of carbs, you're going to burn a lot of carbs, you know, sitting on your ass too. But, you know, let's assume you're having a mixed diet. That's the assumption there. That's, you know, pretty even keel in terms of fat, carbs, and protein. And you start moving around, you immediately start burning more and more carbs, the more intense that movement gets. So I was asked, what's the RER? What is the RER of a marathoner? By marathoner,

somebody competitive that's actually working hard and trying to win, right? Okay. So somebody that's, yeah, marathon athlete, so what's the respiratory exchange rate? Yeah. That's RER? Yeah, respiratory exchange ratio. The advisor I was working with at the time looks at me and says, it's about 0.9 or higher. They're basically just burning up carbs the whole time.

And I'm like, what? I thought running is easy compared to lifting, you know? And no, no, if you're actually competing for a marathon, you want to keep up as fast of a pace as you can without getting into anaerobic metabolism, without making it a sprint. You know, it's like, you're basically two steps below a sprint for 26 miles. That shit is hard. Oh yeah.

So that, that's, well, that's an interesting point, right? Cause I remember this was a two or three years ago. Now there's some guy that ran a marathon. this was a two or three years ago now there's some guy that ran a marathon he was basically doing like four minutes and 30 second miles the whole way it was it was an absurd pace i mean this guy was running like not that far off a extremely competitive one mile run for 26 miles and you know this this was this was an was an Olympic level marathoner. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, that's crazy. Yeah. So that's, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. So that is a very high intensity exercise. I think it's a little bit different, though, than your average Joe who's like, man, I need to get in shape. Let me start jogging around the block. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, that was my point. If you're,

if you're trying to maximize your running time, just like somebody who's trying to maximize how much they can lift, uh, it's going to be hard, you know, you're going to be running hard. Like I said, about, I don't know, I've never actually ran a marathon with the intent of running a marathon, but I've swam, um, I've swam the mile before, uh, with the intent of trying to go get the best time I can get. And, uh, it's hard. You have to keep a pretty fast pace and probably a few steps below a sprint because you can't quite, you get to a sprint, you're going to poop out. Obviously you can't sprint for 26 miles. So they're trying to get as close to that as possible without teetering over it. So they're trying to like teeter between, they call it the anaerobic threshold, you know, when you're not quite fully aerobic,

not quite an anaerobic yet, but you want to get right up to that line and stay there for all those miles that you're trying to run, whether it's 10K or 26 miles or whether you're swimming a mile like I did. So it's hard. It's hard. So now back to lifting. When you're lifting, it's pretty unique because you're not putting in quite as many reps. So this idea that, you know, this is something I'll come back to later in another episode, but this whole idea that you have to do reps because they make you burn or you sweat more or it's just, you know, you're burning suddenly more calories is kind of, you know, it ignores the reality that, you know, doing five sets of 10, that's 50 reps. If you're running like, you know, three, four, five miles, that's like thousands of reps, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, 50 reps is nothing, you know? So like, you know, 10 sets of 10 leg presses or,

you know, a hundred reps, it's nothing. It's basically a shitty endurance stimulus and it's also a shitty strength stimulus. So, you know, I just wanted to touch on that because I get a lot of people that think that time spent in the weight room needs to feel like time spent on the track. And they're two entirely different stimuli. Yeah, that's a great point. I've learned this from you also years ago that when we think about total calories burned, because this gets into the people who are worried about, well, how many calories did I burn in my workout? Well, maybe it doesn't matter at all, right? If you're worried about looking better, right? If that's your primary goal with exercise, then maybe you shouldn't really care about how much you burn in a workout.

Reason being, most of the calories that you burn in a given day, just from existing, right? Just being on this earth and being alive and breathing. Most of those calories burned, I learned from you, is happening at rest. And that's just basically your body existing and maintaining itself and just doing its normal processes that it does. When you layer on exercise to that, and you look at the stack of like the total amount of calories that you burn in a given day, on a day that you trained in the gym, it's actually a fairly small percentage of your total calorie burn.

It's like, what is it, like 20, maybe 20%? Yeah, 15 to 25%, yeah. Yeah, not that much. So all the rest of your calorie burn came from essentially existing, right? Some of that's digesting your food that you ate, you know, some of that's just like cellular processes, but you, you, you total all that up and most of your calorie burn is, is coming at rest. Okay. Now, why do we care when it comes to body composition? The reason we care about that is that if you build more muscle mass,

that stuff is much more expensive for your body to maintain. It burns a lot more calories than a fat cell and fat mass on your body. So if you put on more muscle, if that becomes a focus of your training is to put on more muscle, then all of a sudden your calorie burn just day to day existing, because that's where most of the calorie burn is happening anyway, it starts to go up. And when I get somebody in the gym and they express like, hey, you know, I really want to, you know, try to lose some body fat. And they're not, it's almost never that they have enough muscle mass already. I've never had that situation happen. Maybe it'll happen someday. But almost invariably, that person doesn't have much muscle

mass and they have too much fat. They're the under-muscled problem that you've talked about in the previous episode. The first thing I try to tell them is like, okay, so for to look better, the first thing you have to do is build this muscle mass for a couple of reasons number one you're going to look better because you have muscle mass and it looks better on your frame that's one but the second thing is you that's what's going to allow you to get your calorie burn up much higher than it is now and then all of a sudden you find that if you if you're eating the same food that you were day one in the gym, but you've put a bunch of muscle mass on your body, all of a sudden you might start losing weight.

Why did that happen? Because your calorie burn is so much higher than it was on the first day of the gym. And that I find is something that a lot of people overlook, is the fact that muscle mass is a tissue that is very metabolically expensive. That's the way I like to say it, right? It costs a lot for your body to maintain. That's why it's hard to build a lot of it. That's right, yeah.

And so if you want a better-looking body and you want to change your body composition, that's the first place to start. And there's a physiological basis for this. Yeah. physiological basis for this. Yeah. And that's an important point to bring up because, you know, fat does not have zero metabolic activity. It has some. Muscle just has far more. And one of these days we'll talk about brown fat that's very metabolically active, and I'm very fascinated by it, but another conversation. So yeah, no, the more important thing to understand here is we have no way to measure what the hell you are burning in the weight room.

And I'll explain that in a second. So I talked about RER earlier. When they measure metabolic rate during aerobic exercise, you're wearing a mask that has a breathing tube that's attached to a gas analyzer. It measures how much carbon dioxide you're breathing out. And based on how much carbon dioxide you're breathing out and our known quantities of room air, so we know how much CO2, O2, and nitrogen is in room air, so that's a known. We're measuring how much CO2 you're breathing, then we're estimating, based on that, how much O2 you're probably taking in. So that's how they measure VO2 when somebody's doing aerobic activity or when they're resting. And why do they measure VO2?

Well, oxygen consumption is correlated with calorie expenditure. So if you know oxygen consumption, you can calculate calorie expenditure. And if you're just resting, like if I wanted to get your basal metabolic rate using this method, that's why this is called indirect calorimetry, because we're not directly measuring how many calories you're expending. So keep this in mind if you ever get one of those tests done. It's not a direct measurement. It's an indirect measurement based on carbon dioxide expiration. So how much CO2 is coming out, you're deriving how much O2 is probably coming in. And then based on that, you have caloric equivalence that will tell you how many calories you expended based on your vo2

so that's like the complex explanation of it so if i were to come to your house wake you up in the morning and put a mask on your face hopefully you don't shoot me um and then start the machine i can get your basal metabolic rate if you were to wake up and you know get dressed and come to the gym now we're getting a resting because you've already moved so it's not a basal necessarily you've done things so that's the difference between basal necessarily. You've done things. So that's the difference between basal and resting. They're used interchangeably a lot. The difference, it's not really that much, but if you hear those words. It's just you moving around and doing just normal stuff, but not training.

Yeah. Occasionally I point out nuance because I have spent a lot of time in academia. But the more important point here is that when you're measuring that, you're assuming that oxygen consumption is stable. So the proper way to measure that is you would lay down for 45 minutes or I would wake you up in the morning and then I'd still get a 45-minute baseline. So you want to get enough values to get a stable trend so that you know that the machine is working the way it's supposed to and that the person is comfortable and there's not other things influencing those measurements. And after about 45 minutes, then you'll start collecting actual

data and then you'll use that VO2 data to estimate calories. So that's indirect calorimetry. Direct calorimetry, on the other hand, you go into a room, it's called a metabolic chamber, a direct metabolic chamber, because there's also respiratory chambers or indirect metabolic chambers as well. A direct metabolic chamber has pipes that circle the perimeter of the room. They have water in them. We know the temperature of water. And we look at the change in water temperature when the person is in there doing whatever that person is doing. And obviously, they get stable readings without the person in there before they do that. And because a calorie is heat energy, it's defined as the amount of heat necessary to raise the temperature of water readings without the person in there before they do that. And because a calorie is, you know,

heat energy, it's defined as the amount of heat necessary to raise the temperature of water one degree Celsius. That's why this would be a direct measurement, right? So we're measuring how much heat that human or animal is giving off directly so that, you know, calorie expenditure, right? There's no breathing tube involved here. Now, when you introduce exercise, one thing changes. Let's go back to indirect because nobody uses direct because it's extremely expensive. I would have to take that room you're in there, Trent, and then basically put a bunch of pipes around it and make sure it's air sealed and all this other shit. It'll probably cost, well, in today's dollars, you know, I used to say it was a million-dollar chamber. But with what's going on today with supplies, I'm guessing $5 million.

Right, Yeah. But so nobody uses that. So we're not even going to talk about that very much. Most people, when they're measuring metabolic rate in a lab to publish in a research paper, or if you're at a commercial gym and getting it measured, they're using indirect. So they're putting the mask on you and measuring how much air you're breathing out and how much carbon dioxide is coming out. That's what's actually being measured in that scenario. So when we're doing it resting, you can probably get some decent values because the person's not doing anything. So they're in a steady state of O2 consumption or CO2 expiration. Now, when you start exercising, one of the assumptions of this method is that you are in a steady state. So there's different definitions depending on which exercise physiology textbook you're reading. I believe the one that I used, it was about 50 mLs of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute. That's irrelevant. Basically, you have a value that it can change to be considered a steady state. And any change greater than that value means you're not in a steady state, right? So if you're running at a stable pace, you're probably breathing at a steady state.

Let's just say that, right? So you're not, you know, your oxygen consumption is probably steady. Now you start sprinting. You're no longer in a steady state. That's when that RER crosses over one, you know, which is supposed to be the max. That's 100% carbohydrate. And now you're, you know, using up things like lactate, right? And because you're exploding, you're using up creatine too. So it's hard to really derive what's going on in that situation because you've now violated the steady state assumption. This

is very important because the next thing I tell you is going to clarify what I mean when I say that caloric expenditure derived from weightlifting in these research papers is complete fucking bullshit. When you are lifting, there are two things happening. Well, one thing is not happening. You are not breathing because we tell you to hold your breath to stay braced. You're going to do it anyway because it's heavy. Think about whenever you've lifted something heavy. Somebody not familiar with starting strength who's listening to this. If you've ever lifted something heavy, you're going to hold your breath. When you're taking a dump, you're holding your breath.

Anytime you... Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, think about that car. You're stuck in the intersection, all right? You got to get your car out to safety. You're going to take a big breath and then just... And push as hard as you can to try to push that car, right? Yep. So if I put a mask on you when you're squatting, first of all, you're not breathing the entire time you're squatting. Whether I instruct you not to or not, you're probably going to hold your breath for some part of it, if not all of it, if it's heavy enough. So automatically, you're not even collecting data the whole time. That's problem number one.

Problem number two is when you are lifting, your heart rate is shooting up because you're releasing a bunch of adrenaline. Okay, so you're going to start hyperventilating, right? That's not a steady state. So you've already violated the steady state assumption because you've just done something vigorous that's anaerobic and that has knocked you out of steady state. And number two, you're not breathing the entire time. So sure, I could probably collect breaths during your rest intervals, maybe get a little bit of steady state data.

But at the end of the day, any estimation of calorie expenditure during lifting is essentially pulled out of thin air because they're either making it up because they're deriving it from other activities or they're using some study that used indirect calorimetry, which cannot be effectively used to measure calorie expenditure during weightlifting. All that does is get a paper publication for a guy who wants tenure in his exercise physiology department. It doesn't really help us here. So we really don't know what the fuck is going on from an energy expenditure standpoint when you're lifting weights. Unless somebody wants to fork over $5 million and turn my gym into a direct calorimeter, then you can squat and we can look at heat that would be interesting yeah that that would be interesting so yeah to paint a picture of of what you just described there if you're not familiar with lifting heavy here's the way it goes you're

going to go lift a set of five for a heavy weight you get up up there, you unrack the bar, you take a big breath, you hold that breath, like you said, and you squat the first rep and you take one breath in between reps. Next one. And you do five and you go sit down right afterwards. And it was heavy. It was really hard. Well, for the next few minutes after that set, you're sitting there on the bench and you're, you're, you're respirating quite heavily and then it starts to tail off. And then after five minutes or so, you know, if you're a decently conditioned lifter,

if you've been doing this for a little bit of, you know, for a decent amount of time after five minutes or so, your breathing normalizes and you're, you're more or less back to normal. You're, you're more tired because of all that adrenaline and the blood pressure spike that happened during the lifting, but your respiration rate is back to normal. That's the way that a, a, a strength training

session looks like in the gym and feels like and what the experience is. And so, yeah, that's a great point. I didn't, I did not know that, uh, you know, if you're trying to get a calorie reading off of that, the test is looking for a steady state data, and you've produced none of that during that heavy set of five. Right, right. So, yeah, I think, you know, we can certainly go down some biological and physiological rabbit holes here, and I don't think we want to go too far down that we've got plenty more episodes to explore those questions but the key thing here is that you've you've got to lift heavy to build muscle mass for the reasons we outlined before it's got to be heavy because you've got to recruit enough enough of your muscle fibers right you've got to actually turn on a whole bunch of them and if you just just do a light weight a whole bunch of times, you're not going to turn on enough of them. No. And most people are doing that. They're doing what I would consider warm-up

weight for their work sets. That's right. If it's not a challenging set of five, then it's not heavy enough, right? If you can do it for 10 reps, it's just not heavy enough to stimulate, to turn on enough of those muscle fibers. Well, it can be, but that set of 10 can't be the empty bar. That's right. Yeah. And there is a situation where this, that relationship does change, and that would be somebody who is already strong, who then goes and does a set of 10. But guess what? This is your guy, like you'd mentioned in episode one, this is the guy that gets, that benches, you know, 355 that decides to do a set of 10 at 225. You know, he's, it's a different stimulus from somebody who is just starting to build strength and tries to

do a set of 10. They can't do it at anywhere near the same absolute weight as the guy who is stronger than the mechanic. So, different scenario. Let's go down that rabbit hole real quick, and that's where we'll kind of finish up. Okay. Let's first talk about what do we consider heavy, right? So, it's hard to really objectively quantify unless you're an advanced lifter. So, traditionally, heavy or heavy load was referred to as high intensity. And intensity is typically defined as percent of one rep max, repetition max, one RM, right?

And the problem with one RM is if you've never lifted a weight before, especially on a free weight exercise like a squat, is you're not going to produce a meaningful one RM because you're going to do it wrong before it gets that heavy. And you don't have the experience and the neuromuscular efficiency, so your central nervous system is not yet efficient at recruiting muscle mass to produce a true and honest 1RM. And most importantly, your 1RM is going to go up from doing the 1RM because remember what we said about novices, you've now increased your 1RM by doing a 1RM and two days later, your 1RM's gone up. So these are all the problems with using that metric.

I'll use it for the sake of illustration. There have been papers published, and my own experience kind of checks out with this, so I agree with this recommendation, that the minimum intensity threshold to see growth, you have to use at least 60 to 65% of a true one RM. So if you're, if you've done a power lifting meet and you did a no bullshit 500 squat, then, you know, you're going to have to use 60 to 65% of that weight to get a productive growth stimulus. So that would be, you know, at least 300, at least 300 pounds on a 500 pound squat. Right. Yeah. And you could probably do that for a bunch of reps. So a novice, on the other hand, we just use what I would call repetition max, I guess

they call it. You're going to go probably reasonably close to failure. I don't want to say you go to absolute failure because a novice is also not well-trained enough to go to absolute failure. Right, right. So my point is, if you want to do reps because you don't like intensity, then those reps also have to get heavier. That last, those last two reps, rep number nine, rep number 10, you got to be getting

pretty close to failure. Now, obviously, if you go to failure, you're probably, you know, for a novice, yeah, failure for a novice is not the same as failure for an advanced lifter. So you got to contextualize this, right? So if you barely finish that 10th rep your first day in the gym, chances are two days later, you're going to do more weight for a set of 10. And then two days later, you'll do more weight for a set of 10. People have done this. You and I have probably done this before we discovered this information that we discovered. I used to squat 10s. I used to do pull-ups for 10s. I used

to do bench presses for 10s. And I got some growth in the beginning because you'll grow in response to anything. There were issues in my training that prevented me from growing further, but my point is I think people see this idea of doing 8 to 12 reps as a way out of doing something hard, and that's really the problem. If you're doing 8 to 12 reps with 30% of 1RM, which I had a guy do that once, and he's probably listening because he's one of my best clients now. So when I first said it, he's like, you were talking about me, weren't you? I talked about a different podcast. But yeah, I looked at his, he had squatted 400 in competition, and then he gave me all his current numbers. And he was doing 145. And I'm like, dude, no wonder you're feeling like you're skinny fat.

You're under training, bro. I'm like, even if you're going to do tens and quote unquote do hypertrophy. So hypertrophy in the magazine and Instagram world means you're doing eight to 12 reps for a lot of sets. If you're going to do that, remember if you want to follow those rules, it still has to be 60 to 65%, which means if you're a 400 pound squatter, you have to have at least what, uh, what? Two 50 or something like that on the bar yeah yeah exactly yeah about 225 250 240 yeah at least 240 on the bar and this guy's doing 145 and you know he can argue well i didn't lift in two years well the beauty of strength is uh strength is slow to acquire but also slow to go away so i told him you can't use that excuse because you're not weak enough for

145 is heavy anymore it's never going to be heavy anymore unless you're 75 and you've not trained for 30 years. Yeah. Yeah. So exactly. Yeah. That's, that's a great point. You know, when we coach novices on their first day in the gym, one of the ways that we figure out how heavy they need to go on a given lift is we watch how fast their bar is moving. And we're trying to get someone to be, to, to go to something that's very challenging for them. But, you know, like you said, they can't really go to failure anyway, because they can't execute the movement well enough yet. That's also why they can't do tens or why we advise against doing tens. Exactly. There's, there, you know, it's, it's, it's difficult for a, someone who's never lifted

before correctly to do five reps correctly. That's hard enough. I mean, the chance that you're going to get 10 reps right is very low. So there's another practical problem with higher rep sets. But one of the things we do is we watch that bar speed and we want to see, like, we want to observe as we're teaching them how to do a lift and they're lifting, we're putting more weight on the bar. So they're starting to get it. It's they're, they're lifting, we're putting more weight on the bar. So they're starting to get it.

It's okay. That form looks good. Let's add some weight to the bar. We want to see when the bar starts to slow down during the lift. And essentially what we're doing there is we're, that's our proxy for how heavy it is for them, how hard it is subjectively for them to do this lift is, um, we can, we can see that their, their bar speed is starting to slow down and that's where we know, okay, that person is doing something heavy for today. And then we can start our progression from there. And then we know once

from that point, whatever that number is, it doesn't matter. It could be 45 pounds. It could be two 50. It doesn't matter where that bar speed starts to slow down is now a starting point for us to add weight to the bar in a regular schedule from then on, on all of their following workouts. So yeah, that's, I think you made a good point regardless of what your goals are in the gym. It has to, it has to get heavier and it needs to be challenging both from a physiological standpoint. We need to actually observe that it gets harder to do because your muscles are struggling to lift it. Your bar speed slows down. That would be an objective measurement.

And then it also has to be hard subjectively, too. It's got to be something that you are, you know, struggling to finish. It's not supposed to feel like aerobic work. And, you know, if it does and you enjoy that, that's great recreation, but that's not going to get you stronger. It's not going to build muscle. And this is one of the things that, you know, between bodybuilding and CrossFit, this idea that, well, it doesn't have to be heavy, has been running rampant in the industry. And even the guys that promote hypertrophy acknowledge that there's a minimum threshold. And I've talked about it already.

But the reason that we choose five, so again, context, I want to add context to that. We choose fives because we're teaching people to lift barbells in space. These are not machines. And when you're doing a technical exercise and you're not very athletic, because let's face it,

most people hire a personal trainer, not just a starting strength coach, most people who hire somebody to learn how to lift weights are not athletes. Athletes know it all. Ask a strength and conditioning coach or a sport coach. They're hard to fucking deal with because they know everything. They're athletes, right? So that's a minority of the business that we get as strength coaches. It's a minority of the personal training business. It is a very, very, very small niche.

Most of the people that come in don't know how to move well. And then out of those people, we get a good chunk that have no idea what their body's doing at any point in time. So now you've introduced this problem. You're going to have this person do 10 reps when they've never done a movement that's very complicated and they don't move well? That just doesn't make sense. So we start with five because it's fewer opportunities to fuck it up. And that makes sense for a free weight exercise, a barbell exercise. If we were doing a dumbbell exercise, like I laugh when all these like, you know, classic personal training programs

have lunges in there. That's a very technical exercise. And a lot of people can't even get in that position, you know? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And most people do lunges do lunges wrong anyway yeah you know i can do them right now because of all the squatting i've done like three years ago um yeah my old coach put uh put a circuit in at the end and there were lunges in there and i'm like all right he was trying to entertain me is what it was so i did it i'm like holy shit i didn't stumble around bouncing back because i did a regular lunge go forward and backward not like you know the reverse lunge which is easier and like i didn't stumble around bouncing back because I did a regular lunge, go forward and backward, not like the reverse lunge, which is easier. And I didn't topple around all over the place, but I had a 400-plus squat at that point. So I think that I developed all that musculature and I had better motor patterns.

But my point is you get a brand-new person in that moves like shit, you want to minimize the opportunities for them to fail because you want them to progress, and you can progress fives. And fives are not a 5RM for an advanced lifter, which is how most people perceive them. They're like, oh, low rep, heavy weight, nobody should start there. Well, it's like, well, it's not really heavy. The person's doing five because they're learning how to move. So it's not really heavy in that context.

RM doesn't apply here. And more importantly, where does this recommendation for 10 even come from? Well, bodybuilding. Okay, bodybuilders are athletes. So again, niche market. They're typically experienced lifters. They have better motor control, et cetera. Number two, peer-reviewed research.

What are they doing? They're using machines and single-joint exercises, which, guess what? If you open up Starting Strength and Rip talks about those few lifts that he likes that are single-joint or machine-based, he's telling you to do to do tens. And I've always told people to do tens. Why? Because you're in a fixed position. So in that context, yes, you should start with eight to 12 reps. You probably shouldn't do a machine fricking or, you know, machine bicep curl for a set of five or a set of three. You're not, first of all, you're not going to get very far because you're locked into a fixed position, right? So it makes sense that all these, you know, government agencies that recommend strength training exercise are saying 8 to 12 reps with

short rest because that makes sense in the context of machines, and machines are what's used in the majority of research studies. But that's not what we're doing. We're teaching people to move a barbell with their body in space to stabilize themselves while they're doing so. You want to minimize the risk for errors because errors can lead to injuries. So five reps is fine. It's not five reps at 85%. Actually, for me, it's 87% of my 1RM because I'm inefficient like a female, and that's not a sexist comment. Typically, we can go into that later, but typically females are less efficient than males because they have fewer type 2 motor units, And there's a scientific argument behind that. So don't sit there and say, Santana's a sexist.

But some of us guys that aren't very explosive, we tend to lift closer to our max for reps, reps meaning 3 to 5 reps. So my 5-rep max is typically around 87% of my 1-rep max. And that's on the squat and I believe the deadlift is the same way. But a novice is not doing that same effort that i am when i when i do a five rm and no bullshit all outside of five 87 of one rm that's not what i'm having an obvious do on his first day when i say he's doing his quote-unquote five rm the assumption under that quote-unquote five rm is that's five reps that he can do correctly that are kind of hard you you know? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, hopefully you've gotten from this that you ought to lift barbells.

You ought to train to get strong because that's, what's going to stimulate the muscle mass that you need. And, um, you know, we can talk about this on future episodes, but the barbell is really for anyone. It's not, you know, some people perceive that this is really only for the guys who wanted to get into powerlifting or want to be bodybuilders and get super huge and jacked. But no, the barbell is for everyone. are not one of these people that loves to be in the weight room or that aspires to be a strength athlete, let's say you're a runner or you're into cycling or something, you know, there's, there's a lot of things you could spend your time on. And I bet you, you probably want to spend most of your time running and cycling, doing the thing you want to do. So like, you know, if you want the gym to get the most effect for you for the least amount of effort, like barbells are going to do that for you for all the reasons we've just talked about. They're going to help you build the most muscle mass. They're going to be the most efficient for you. They're going to get you the most bang

for your buck with the least amount of time invested of anything else you can do. So that's where you should put your focus in the gym when you're trying to get stronger. Oh man. Yeah. I think, I think we killed that dead. I think so. I think we beat it, beat it hard. You got to go ahead. All right. You got to go heavy.

No matter how many reps you're doing, it has to get heavier. That's right. Yeah. You know, just like if you're running, you have to run faster over time. If you want to drop your times, you know, if you want to swim faster, you got to swim more, you know, there has to be an overload stimulus. So I hope that everybody understands that after listening to, listening to me rant and listening to Trent,

you know, explain it much more articulately. I just ask the dumb questions and then I try to, I try to restate, you see how I do it? I'm the color guy. I restate what you've already said in a different way. Yeah. So it can make sense for my layperson brain. Good, good. All right, man. Well, let's give them a little sign off here. Where can they find you on Instagram if they have questions? Where do you send your troll comments to? Oh, man, leave my Instagram page alone for that. My website is weightsandplates.com. Instagram is the underscore Robert underscore Santana. That is amalade underscore cream. I gladly welcome it.

I will promptly, I won't even read it. I'll just delete it and move on with my life. Yeah. But you can send it. Go ahead and send it. Yeah. That's a good point. I hate social media.

Anyway. All right. Let's just, you know, end it there and we'll have more for you in a couple weeks. All right. Sounds good. Talk to you in a couple weeks. All right. Sounds good. Talk to you in a little bit.