Weights and Plates Podcast - #33 - How Much Training Do YOU Need?

Episode Date: July 30, 2022

A lot of templates and programming talk for the advanced lifter out there focuses on competitive lifters, or lifters seeking to become competitive, and competition comes with a few assumptions. One, that getting as strong as possible, and pushing for new 1RM's, is the most important thing in training. Having one clear goal (getting stronger on 1RM's) certainly makes programming easier to talk about, but is that really what the average lifter is concered about?   If you're not a competitor, you probably don't need to use the same approach that competitors do to reach your strength and body composition goals. Practical experience has told us that you can achieve fairly high levels of strength and good body composition without using many of the features of advanced competitive training programs: high volume, high frequency, block periodization, etc. The process may take longer, and your overall results may not be quite as good, but you can manage fatigue, recovery, and lower your injury potential in the process --  as Coach Trent says, maintain "momentum" in your programming and keep training fun.   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Howdy, howdy. We have an interesting topic today. We are going to talk about how much training you actually need. today we are going to talk about how much training you actually need oh so are you telling me that i don't need the maximum recoverable volume to get stronger um well you would have to answer that question do you need to do uh volume forever no no. But what we're talking about is how much training do you need to accomplish your goals, right? Yeah, right, right.

We were talking about this offline because both of us, you know, we've trained for several years. And we've gone through some phases of some pretty intense training cycles where, you know, we're hitting things hard. phases of some pretty intense training cycles where, you know, we're hitting things hard, we're doing a lot of volume, doing long blocks of training, six weeks plus long. And that's great, you know, but that's realistically for most people, that is not going to be what your training life looks like long term. And it may not even be very much of your training life. So if you think about your career, if you want to call it that, of training for 30 years, I mean, how many of those years are you going to spend in that mode where you're just like plug and doing long blocks of training, pushing for numbers? I don't know. I'm not a competitive lifter. That's not really something that I aspire to be. Although I have done several strength meets and it's a lot of fun.

I'm not a competitive lifter and that's not, that's not my goal. So I don't expect my training. Um, and it would be unrealistic to expect my training to look like that. So, you know, for me, again, this is how much training do i need how much training do you need for me uh my training life is going to look different and my programs are going to look quite different from a competitive power lifter absolutely and that's why we wanted to talk about that because that's the way that you and i in real life are training like we're not doing these like super complicated training blocks at least not most of the time. Well, here's the thing. It's become abundantly clear to me that most of the information you find out there is geared towards a top end competitor, whether

it be a competitive bodybuilder that wants as much muscle and as much muscle definition as possible at all costs, or competitive power lifter who wants to lift the heaviest weight possible at all costs, or even the competitive crossfitter. You know, it just seems that these exercise prescriptions that you get when you try to look up, I want to lose fat, I want to build muscle, you know, I want to get stronger, you're going to get a prescription that is typically applicable to somebody who's going to the extremes. And that's a very different situation than most consumers of strength coaching services, personal training services,

or even sport coaching services. You know, most of these weekend warriors that, you know, play various sports aren't trying to go to the Olympics. You know what I mean? Right, right. Well, you know, at least in the case of powerlifting, I'd have to think about if this holds true for bodybuilding, but at least in the case of powerlifting, if you, if your, if your program or your template that you're trying to sell assumes a competitive powerlifter that's trying to push for the heaviest numbers possible, well, it makes it really clean and clear, right? You know, like there's only one goal for that program and that's to make the person stronger, right? And everything in that

program then is in the service of making that person stronger. And like when we talk about programming in general, that you kind of have to do it like that because you have to have a clear goal that you're talking about because any individuality is not going to apply to everyone, right? Right. Like I could describe a program for a guy who's got osteoarthritis and his knees get lit up real easy, but that's not going to apply to the next guy who doesn't have that problem, right? So I talk about it. I will talk about programming in general where it's like, okay, we're trying to get stronger here. Okay, here's iterations of whatever program we're talking about.

Yeah. So that's part of it, right? It's, you know, there's a commercial reason, but then there's also just kind of like the practicality of like, how else do you talk about programming? Well, then the other, the second issue here is that there's no differentiation between training upper and lower body specifically. And obviously, if you are training a large muscle group, that is a very different stress than if you are training a small muscle group. The demands are different and the way you address that is differently. So you kind of get this discombobulated program where, okay, for instance, the bodybuilding physique people, well, you got to do all this volume, all these sets, and they will give you

more or less the same number of sets for, you know, legs, I guess, as they call it, or, you know, chest and shoulders. So translate that into exercises. You might do five sets of 10 squats and then five sets of 10 leg presses and then five sets of 10 straight-legged deadlifts. I mean, these are exaggerations. It doesn't always work out that way. You might get three or four per exercise. But just, you know, looking at this from a lifter's perspective, a trained lifter, a trained drug-free lifter, that's a lot of stress in the low back, you know? Yeah, that's an insane amount, right, yeah.

But these programs are quite common. You know, when you download a hypertrophy program, you're going to see a lot of spinal loading done for a lot of volume and uh that has you know led people on the other end of the the spectrum like rip to push back on this and say hey this is a bunch of bullshit that's going to get you hurt you know which is true but then you get people that jump on the strength wagon and they complain that only their legs grew you know so yeah right right uh you know they'll get a big deadlift and squat and they're, you know, I've seen LP DIYers just come out of, you know, this novice linear progression with, you know, mid threes on the squat, low fours on the deadlift, and then, you know, high ones on

the bench, not even high ones, like mid ones, like typically 175 on the bench and 110 on the press, 115 on the press, seems to be a sticking point for a lot of these average Joe types, but then they'll run their squat and deadlift well over three, you know, sometimes deadlift into the fours, you know, depending on the person, but you see that happen and, you know, there's several reasons for that, but, and that's an entirely different point that we may actually hit on in this podcast episode. But the point I'm trying to hit on is that, yeah, okay, going in and doing a bunch of volume and, you know, doing a bunch of sets probably works if you're doing something like bench press or bicep curls or, you know, dips or pull-ups, you know, although there's limits there, too, because the elbows tend to be sensitive, you know, so you kind of, you know, be a little bit careful, but not quite as careful as, you know, you're not going to do 10 sets of 10 squats, but you could probably do 10 sets of 10, you know, bench presses, you know, with various, you know, bench, you know, incline, bench, decline,

you'll be fine. Or you do the same one for 10 straight sets of 10, although I wouldn't recommend that, you know, I mean, you could try it, try it. But the whole point is you can beat up your upper body and do it frequently, and you'll probably be fine. You got to be mindful of the elbows. I'm not ignoring that for all you elbow people or shoulder people. The shoulder is usually technique-related. Elbows tend to be overuse-related in my experience. But my point is you can beat up small muscles quite a bit. So the bodybuilders aren't wrong and RIP's not wrong. Yeah, you don't need to do a ton of sets on squats and deadlifts to develop a decent set of legs and a decent back. That will happen. They will grow and you will get stronger and you will keep getting stronger and your programming

will actually get lazier. Like right now like right now, you know, I'm running 10s. So I'm doing two sets on Monday on the squat, one heavy, one lighter, you know, and then one set on the deadlift off the floor, standard deadlift and one set RDLs, you know, so I get more of a continuous motion done for a partial, you know, right. And that's all the, that's all the hinging, hip hinging and, you know, knee flexion extension that I'm doing all week, you know, hips and knees. That's pretty much all I do all week. Yeah. And every year, and I've been training some variation of that, some version of that. I mean, you know, when I'm heavier and, you know, trying to gain and,

you know, getting to fives, you know, I'll do more sets. Obviously I'll do four sets of five, you know, for one week. And then the next week I'll do a heavy set of five and maybe a lighter set of five. But the whole point is I'm not doing a ton of volume and my legs have been steadily growing. And, you know, you'll get there. Well, if you did volume, you might grow more. And then I will raise the point that I have been training my legs full range of motion for 20 years. How much more do you think I'm going to get? You know, I'm going.

Right, right. in motion for 20 years. How much more do you think I'm going to get? You know, I'm going, they're getting bigger slowly and steadily, which is what should be happening for someone who's been in the weight room for 20 years. And if you want to say, oh, you did it wrong in the beginning, and you were probably maintaining for most of the first 10, okay, fine, but I've been in the weight room for 10 years. So, how fast should somebody who's been in the weight room for 10 years put on muscle, you know? Yeah. And so and so, and right there, that's, that's a position that the people that I work with, they were just mostly just regular folks, you know, like I don't have very many people that have competitive aspirations and even those that do compete, like they're not, they're not looking at winning the local powerlifting meet. Fuck no. They do it for fun, right? They want to hit some personal PRs.

They want to challenge themselves. They like the camarader, right? They want to hit some personal PRs. They want to challenge themselves. They like the camaraderie, the meet, you know, it's all the same reasons that I have competed. Right. But they're, they're not, they're not like a knocking on the door of going to IPF worlds or anything like that. No. Um, so, so that's the thing like that. That's in reality, most of us, like, do we really care about getting as strong as possible or getting as big as possible, you know, and, and absolutely optimizing or maximizing that to the nth degree, right? Do we want, do we need, you know, all 100% of the possible gains that we can make, or will we be happy with 80 to 90% of those gains with, you know, 70% or less of the work. I mean, it's, it's hard to put like, you know, it's, it's hard to find like a perfect like percentage of what is it and how

much more work do you need to do to get all of it? Um, but in my experience, in my personal experience, and also just hanging out with other people who've been in the, in the gym, as long as I have, and even longer like yourself and other, other coaches, I've noticed that there are a lot of folks who don't do that much in terms of compound lifting, and yet they maintain their strength, a high level of strength, and they even grow it over time for years on end. And there's obviously something to it. Right. And you know, yeah. Could these people like, could you train harder and get a little bit more maybe, but I don't know. It's hard to say because here's the other thing. If you were to go in there and at this point, 20 years later, after first starting to train your legs, just, you know, hammer volume, right.

to train your legs, just, you know, hammer volume, right? And hammer a whole bunch of ancillary exercises to just to add every little bit you can to your lower body. You're probably going to get injured doing that. Yeah, absolutely. Would you agree with that? I mean, that's most competitors. That's a reality of the game. You know, when you're pushing numbers like injuries pop up and when they do if you look over a long period of time if you look over a 10 year period let's say how much further back to those injuries that you accumulate from pushing the limit push you back versus not training as hard but also not accumulating the injuries when you're

when you introduce competition and by that i mean where your goal is to place as high as you can or win, you know, you are now stepping away from, you know, lifting for general health purposes, you know. I mean, you do that after an LP, actually, in my opinion. How strong does one need to be? I mean, there's no such thing as strong enough. I understand that, but the higher the intensity, the greater the risk of injury. You know, it's just the nature of things, you know, and if you haven't been hurt and you've been lifting heavy for a long time, that's great. You know, let's celebrate that, you know, count your blessings, be thankful for it. But, you know, the higher the intensity that you're lifting, the greater the risk of injury.

So now you take it to the next step. Now you want to win. So if stuff hurts, you're more likely to neglect that if you can get through the workout. Olympians will take painkillers. If they make it to the Olympics and they're injured, they'll take painkillers and lift with an injury, you know? Sure, yeah. You know, I think Demas had his wrist operated on and he was getting, you know, painkillers in the back before he did his attempts at the 2004 Olympics.

That's why he played, and he still plays third, you know? Yeah, I was reading about Rosazza the other day and, man, that guy's like, I think he had like a hand injury as well. But he had a lot of injuries and like, this is like his gold medal years in Athens. I think like, was it 2004, 2000? 2004 was Athens.

That was Athens? Okay. I can't remember when he won a gold medal. But yeah, and that guy retired not long after. And the dude's just wrecked. So you're like, that didn't happen all of a sudden at the very end of his career. It had been building for a while. Exactly.

I mean, you do it long enough and you keep trying to push more and more and more. And it's going to happen. So again, how much do you need to train? That's what this episode is about. So if you are a competitor, you need to train as much as your body will tolerate. That's where this, you know, maximum recoverable volume stuff comes from. It's just the idea that, hey, you know, you have a competition coming up every, you know, so often, you know, depending on when your competitions are. And you need to perform better than the last time. And you need to do everything you can to do that. Especially, you know, if you're an Olympic caliber, you know, if you're an Olympic lifter, you're looking at, you know, maybe a half kilo more from Olympic to Olympic.

That's four years apart for a kilo or a kilo or half kilo, you know, one to two pounds. Unless you're Lasha. Yeah. So, you know, so it's like, are you going to gamble on less and maybe miss the mark or would you like to overshoot and make sure, damn sure you get it? You know, that's kind of where this more is better shit comes from, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Sure. It's the same thing with bodybuilding and although that sport is also, you know, a contest of who can tolerate the most drugs, you know, so it's right. Right. Although, you know, it's interesting, a little shout out to our friend, Andy Baker. Um, he's got the Baker bar. What is it? The Baker barbell podcast. I should know. I, I was about to say, uh, but yeah, on his show, he's actually talked about, uh, bodybuilding training and in, in the context of like all the volume that gets sold as necessary for competitive bodybuilders actually maybe not that necessary. And maybe all the drugs are not as necessary if they had more intelligent training. I think Andy's point was that they could get by with less drugs with better training and therefore, you know, hopefully less heart attacks at age 35 and all this crazy stuff you read about.

I mean, he's right. They could probably achieve the same thing with less drugs if they didn't train like morons. I would say that. But then what would happen is they'd eventually have to do more anyways. Yeah, sure. And it's all relative. So I totally agree with what he's saying. I mean, for one, bodybuilders don't press with a barbell, certainly not with a narrow grip if they do, you know? Yeah, exactly.

They're going to hold it like a bench press if they even do it, and it's probably going to be seated. And if it is standing, they're still going to hold it like a bench press. They will not do a properly performed overhead barbell press. You will not see that in a bodybuilding program. You'll see dumbbells. You might see seated if you're lucky. And you'll see cabless, you might see seated if you're lucky, and you'll see cables and all this other shit that somehow they think that quote-unquote training shoulders

involves a bunch of isolation work. You don't need a compound for that. And that's bullshit, because I've trained people with horrible muscle-building genetics, and I've trained people with good muscle-building genetics, and they all fill out their deltoids by getting their press up i see this reliably in men women old young you know uh good genetics bad genetics my brother he has great arm and shoulder genetics tight skin big you know short insertions big puffy muscles he started pressing and he thought his arms got too big you know and he was just doing through it he had to throw out all of his uh his his v-necks yeah i mean he lives in fucking la that's another story but um you know he's like i don't want to be

that big but yeah he was just doing three sets of five and adding to it and of course because of his genes you know he got to 175 for three sets of five just doing it once a week i think and uh you know that and then i you know i had another girl i trained a while back she you know was a competitive lifter and she never trained the press because power lifters don't need to press. That's what they believe. And then I had her pressing and doing chins, and she probably put an inch or two on her arm. She had good arm genetics, obviously, so she was a good responder. So bodybuilders train like morons.

The fact that the press is not used in bodybuilding says it all. They should be pressing with a barbell overhead with a correct grip not holding it like a fucking bench press you know they should be pressing you know with a vertical bar path you know vertical forearms etc with a barbell it's it's a mass builder i had one guy say oh you know overhead press is good for transfer to function and then i'm like but not good for hypertrophy and i just you know i rolled my eyes i'm like that well clearly you haven't trained the press if you're making a statement like that. You haven't coached somebody else on training the press to get to a heavy weight either, you know? Right, right.

Their inexperience shows. And, you know, I can't fault people for that because Starting Strength was written 15 years ago. Well, no, longer than that. It's 2022, 17 years ago. The first edition came out. The second edition, you know, popularized it, I think, over the internet around 09 is when he wrote that. He started the boards a couple years before. And you got a figure, so that's 17 years and probably about half that time, you know, you've had a large number of people pressing. And most of those

people pressing are not bodybuilders, you know? Right, right. I'd say bodybuilders are probably a small percentage of people that, quote-unquote, do starting strength. Yeah. You know, CrossFit has a lot of overhead work, but it's all done with the legs. So CrossFit suffers a different problem. And if you have to do anything, you know, overhead, the legs have to help you through the hard part. You know, you either jerk it or you push press it. Right. So at the end of the day, who's strict pressing?

Basically guys who've read Starting Strength and like we just said, most of our clientele, not competitive. They might enter meets, but not competitive lifters. They're trying to get on a national or international stage. They're not trying to go to the Olympia. They're not trying to go to the IPF Worlds. They're just guys training in their garage that'll do a strength lifting meet. So, again, nobody's training the fucking press, yet the press is still absent in bodybuilding programs, and it reliably puts muscle on the deltoids, even if you have long deltoids and not favorable bodybuilding genetics. So that's just, I just wanted to go on that tangent.

Yeah, that's a good tangent. I mean, I'm a press fan. It might be the only thing I'm good at in the gym. Same here. That's the only thing I'm good at in the gym. Same here. That's the only thing I'm good at. Well, and I know it's like some of the confusion too comes from like folks who are more bodybuilding oriented. Some people might rightly, in my opinion,

point out that the press may be useful for building mass. It may not be sufficient for the task. It may not be sufficient in itself for the task of preparing to be on the bodybuilding stage. Fine. Yeah, that's fair. But it's not like you're not going to build a great platform. You're not going to build some great cannonballs doing heavy presses. You might need some other work to get stage ready. But that's not what we're saying here, right? It's the complete absence of pressing is, you know, probably to folks' detriment. Like, yeah, the complete absent of pressing is the problem.

I mean, a good portion of them squat and deadlift. You know, not all of them. Some of them don't deadlift. Some of them don't squat. But a good portion of them squat and deadlift. A lot of the Mr. Olympias have squatted and deadlifted. Most of them bench. I'd probably, you know, if I had to estimate, probably 90% of them Olympians, Mr. Olympians have squatted and deadlifted. Most of them bench, I'd probably, you know, if I had to estimate, probably 90% of them are more bench press.

They don't do chin-ups, but most of them do pull-downs, you know, but they don't do any compound overhead work and it blows my mind. Right. Yeah. They think that shoulders is isolation. So, I want to get back to this idea of like programming and how much training do you need? And I want to just kind of hit on some practical examples because again, like, like I pointed out at the top of the top of the podcast, this is not really something that you can talk easily about in generalities because we all have different goals. And we just said like, you know, my goal is not to be as strong as possible right now. I want to be, I want to maintain a baseline of strength. I want to try to grow that a little bit over time. I want to maintain a baseline of conditioning

and I want my joints to be happy. And that's, that's pretty much it. Okay. So, you know, I can talk about that and other people might have different goals, but we'll talk about some practical examples just to illustrate the point. So for the last, gosh, at least 18 months, I've more or less been in some form of maintenance training, which we talked about in another episode. Maintenance is not really a thing, but I liked, I'm going to steal another thing from Andy Baker here. So thanks, Andy. He said something on one of his podcasts about raising the floor. And the concept, I think he was talking about it more in the context of someone who's trying to get stronger on their top end lifts, that when they become advanced, when a strength focused

athlete becomes advanced, at some level, they have to focus, spend their time focusing on bringing up their floor. In other words, what they can do on a variety of exercises, including the compound lifts, but also some supplemental lifts like, you know, RDLs and stuff like a deadlifts and good mornings and stuff that supports the squat bench and deadlift. And at some level, they have to work on getting all of those up for fives for eights for tens for twelves right all of the typical strength training ranges and if you do that if you work on raising your floor then over time that will translate to getting your top end numbers up now it doesn't mean you don't train your top end numbers at all of course you have to do that too they're both important but but sometimes you can let me put it this way it's more reliable to increase what

you can do let's say on an rdl for eights or fives than it is to always bring up your one rm deadlift because there's a lot that goes into a one rm right yeah And that's interesting because, you know, after essentially training progressively for a decade, you know, meaning I'm trying to add, you know, scheduled basis, I've ended up doing it in those terms a little bit more lately that, okay, well, yeah, I'm trying to bring up my floor. I'm not really trying to push my 1RM right now. And what I've noticed is that there's a couple concepts that I've tried to adhere to that seem to keep me going. Number one is that I orient my programming around momentum. That's my number one priority when I'm, when I'm programming for myself is I'm trying to do whatever I can to keep myself in the gym. And there's a couple of points to that. One is, and this is a big one is mental, right? You know, if I, if, if I've got a lot of stuff going on in life, like I'm about to have a baby in a month. Okay. There's a lot of stuff going on.

I don't really have the mental capacity to get in the gym and get focused and hit really heavy doubles and triples right now and really push my top end numbers. Right. It's just not there. So, um, I don't do that. Right. I'll, I'll have some, I'll have an occasional heavy session maybe every two or three weeks so that I'm not losing my, my feel for heavy lifts. Right. But I'm not pushing heavy numbers often and mentally it keeps me in the game. Right. I feel like every workout is I can get through it and I'm not dreading anything. So that's, that's important for me on the same token. I'm also not doing five by fives or high volume days on my lower body lifts. Um, for the same

reason, I just, I don't want to go in and spend an hour and a half squatting and pulling. Right. Um, it's just not, it's just mentally that would just crush me and then I'd be more likely to skip the workout. So that's, that's the first concept is just like momentum. So for me, what that means is that instead of doing five by fives, if I need some volume in my training, then I'll do four by fours, let's say. I just kind of knock one number off both sides of the sets and reps. And I find that that keeps me in the game more than doing five by five would. is I've been doing less of the competition lifts and more of the, you know, supplemental variants. And that's kind of the same idea there is I'm looking to manage fatigue. And that's kind of the second major concept that I'm looking at. And that goes hand in hand with momentum. They really play into each other, right? Is that I'm basically trying to not accumulate too much fatigue week to week that I'm feeling run down. Cause that's another surefire way for me to start

hating the gym again, right? Is if I'm feeling beat up going into every workout. And so the way that I've been managing that is that I will in between those heavy bouts of training. Like when I said, I only do like heavy doubles or triples on the squat every couple weeks or every three weeks, maybe what I'm doing in between is I might still be going heavy, but I'll go heavy on a different exercise like a front squat. Because doing heavy triples on a front squat is not nearly as taxing for me as a low bar back squat. So that's that's kind of the a couple of concepts that i've noticed as i've been programming for myself yeah no that's you know there's i've you know this kind of goes back to the whole you don't have to deadlift a deadlift heavier uh yeah i've ran several people through a pulling program with no competition deadlift and then i train the competition deadlift and it

goes up um so i certainly see that and uh it's, you know, that's the whole argument for doing traditional bodybuilding stuff when you're not hitting high intensity. So when volume goes up, you do more isolation, accessories, ancillary exercises, whatever you want to call it. And you're in a place where you can recover from that because it's lighter, you know, it's tiring for a different reason, but it's lighter. There's an endurance component to it as well. And, you know, you bring up some of those weak points. And I think that one of the mechanisms there is, yeah, you probably build some finer muscle tissue, you know, in certain areas, but you're developing more kinesthetic awareness of some

of those smaller muscles, which will transfer later when you're doing the bigger lift. You'll feel yourself engaging more stuff, so to speak. Yeah. So, you know, then, you know, as it gets heavier, you not only drop more volume, you drop the accessories, you know, and then you just keep kind of moving, right? As it gets closer to 1RM, the more you're doing the competition lift. As it gets further from 1RM, the less specific your training needs to be.

But you still need to do some sort of a squat, some sort of a press, some sort of a bench press, and some sort of a dead need to do some sort of a squat, some sort of a press, some sort of a bench press and some sort of a deadlift or some sort of a vertical pull, whether it's a chin up or a pull down, uh, that needs to be in all your programs. You know, maybe you don't want to do a squat and you want to do a box squat or a pause squat, you know, or high bar squat, you know, um, maybe, you know, you know, maybe you're not going to deadlift at all. You might just do RDLs, high pulls, shrugs, you know, things like that. You may not bench, you may do incline. You know, I'm doing incline and dumbbells and close grip right now. I'm not even doing flat incline, flat bench. I mean, flat incline. Yeah. That's a double negative there. So, you know, you just want to, you kind of want

to vary it up, but make sure that you're getting those key movements in. That's what I try to explain to people, right? Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. I almost think of slots in my week of like, okay, how many lower body slots am I going to have? How many upper body slots am I going to have? And it's not even like, how many squatting slots am I going to have? It's no, it's lower body, which could be a squat or a pull. And it could be any variant of those two. And I just decide, you know, what do I need in order to meet my goals? Right. So right now, like for me, I'm trying to hit some basic strength milestones that I have or, or baselines rather is better way to say it of like, I want my four, I want to be able to pull 405 for at least five reps right and i haven't

been dead lifting from the floor very much lately so i just hit 405 for a triple yesterday i want to try to hit 405 for at least four next time i pull it in two weeks and i'll get up to where i'm pulling 405 for at least five maybe six reps reps. And that's fine for me. That's just a good baseline strength number. I'm not particularly interested in pulling 450 plus right now in that process. I'm just trying to maintain a baseline for me and that's one of them. So yeah, so that's, so what I'll do is I'll basically run that up until I'm there and then I'll just kind of see where my fatigue level is at. And then if I need to, if my lower back and it is getting kind of beat up at that point, then I'll, I'll pivot away from that for a while. And I found that, yeah, as if you can maintain, what's interesting is that if you can get to those points with your competition lifts, you can go away from them for quite a long

time and really not lose anything. Right. Especially, but the key here is when you're doing this, is that when you're doing these supplemental and ancillary exercises, assistance exercises, that you're always trying to grow on those. Right. So if I'm doing RDLs, I'm not just hanging out at 275. I want to take my 275 and I want to make it 315. I don't want to go much over 315 i got yeah i mean well

there's limiting effects there's limiting effects and that's that's kind of the other thing right is that the the most of these supplemental lifts especially in the lower body i find are they're self-limiting right like right my problem with an rdl is that if I'm taking it nice and deep and getting a real long, deep hamstring stretch over about 305, it starts to float away from me at the bottom of the lift. And that introduces this huge moment arm on my lower back that I don't want. And so I've, I've got to be, you know, it's, it's kind of like, I'm only going to be able to work it up to maybe like 315 this time around. And I'm gonna have to switch away to something else and I'll come back to it and hopefully maybe i can get it to 320 next time but i'm not gonna just be able to lp my rdl for like weeks and weeks and weeks on it it's it's

gonna get stale i'm gonna have to do something else i got to 370 or 375 for 10 and uh i was just like fuck this i'm going back to 315 for r? Yeah. Then one week I had 365 on because I was resetting my deadlift. I did 10. And then I'm like, all right, I'm doing 315 on the RDL. I left the 365 on. I did 10. And I'm like, man, that 315 was fucking hard this week. Then I looked and I'm like, I didn't take the quarter off.

So I don't want to RDL 405 for 10. I'm kind of lazy. Yeah, sure. And I think it would get up there. I mean, right now, my floor is I want to make sure I can still pull 405 for 10. And so far, I've been able to reliably do it. I'm actually supposed to pull 400 for 10 this week. This is how bad I don't want to get heavy on them.

I go up five pounds per week starting at 365, so I won't be at 405 for several weeks. There we go. but my squat that keeps going up i just hit 345 for 10 so last time i ran up my 10s earlier this year it was 340 and i lost a little bit more weight too so you know it's over double over double body weight for 10 what are you weighing though about 168 pounds yeah yeah that's that's pretty monster uh set of 10 there yeah not enough body weight but you know my numbers are going up so i'll take that uh that's great so basically what i've done is i've you know been following this uh program andy put together doing a version of andy's arm specialization program trying to hit upper body a little bit more essentially

arms and chest every day bruh so you know back to early yeah back to you know how much do you need to train you know if you care about upper body you're gonna end up training like a bro at some point you know that's what i figured out the arms and chest every day crap you know has context to it you know upper body is all you care about it's you know those muscle groups can be trained frequently every single day and right not quite but you know you need to do it a lot more often than lower body. And could you do it every day? Probably, you know. I mean, they do, you know.

They just don't deadlift. They don't press. They don't squat, you know, so they're unbalanced, you know. A lot of the time it's the drugs, you know. Drugs tend to make the upper body get a lot bigger. But a lot of the time it's the way they train, too. They don't squat. They don't deadlift.

But, yeah, you know, in the program, Andy time it's the way they train too. They don't squat, they don't deadlift. But yeah, you know, and the program Andy's like, there's a leg day. It's like, you just, if you're a strength focused person, it might just be a couple squats and that basically leaves a lot of room there to kind of do your own thing. So that's what I've done. I'm basically keeping my squat and deadlift programming exactly the same. And I'm just trying to bro out essentially up top, see if it makes a difference because my bench barely moves. You know, I accidentally got it up by getting fat and then I couldn't replicate the result. And when I say that, you know, I wasn't like super fat, but, you know, I was up to 190 to 195, you know. Yeah, right.

And, you know, got up to 310 just from weight gain. I was only benching three sets of five once a week. So I think it was just the shock of having more leverage, you know, drove it up. But then when I tried to run it back up, I couldn't get close to that. And I'm like, what the fuck? And so anyways, now I'm just – and then when I lost the weight, of course, it went straight down. So I'm like, I was just lifting more because of the range of motion change. There was more leverage.

I need to gain contractile tissue up top if I want to get this thing to move up. You know, I fixed a lot of technical problems so anyways yeah but then i looked at that i'm like i'm not doing a bunch of leg volume i'm my legs are growing without that much work and i'm satisfied with the rate you know maybe i'll entertain it later if i get bored but right now i just want to do squats and deadlifts once a week and it's working getting stronger let's keep going but uh yeah you know how much do you need to train it depends on context man if you're just a guy who wants you know your back and knees to not hurt and uh you know have less of a belly you probably don't need

to train that much but you need to be active you need to you know walk a lot you know and make sure you're not sitting on your ass when you're not in the gym but i don't need to do as much as the competitive bodybuilder or powerlifter or crossfitter. You know, you're not a competitor. The problem is a lot of the literature on this topic is geared towards competitors. So what does the non-competitive person need to do? The guy who just wants to look better, feel better, and move better, you know, and not hurt. And, you know, he's not necessarily trying to look like he's 25, but he doesn't want to feel 85 at 55 either, you know? Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And, you know, for females, the same thing, you know, most of the female clients that come to me want less body fat, you know, and are willing to put on some muscle mass. Don't want to get huge, but, you know, typically understand that, you know, getting huge is such an easy task. I definitely would have pulled it off by now, trust me. Right. But, yeah, it's the same kind of thing. Like how can I eat like a normal person and not be fat and be reasonably lean and be reasonably fit, be reasonably good, and not spend eight hours in the gym and not eat 800 calories?

The extremes, there's people that want that, you know, and that's a different situation, you know? If you want to compete, you're going to be, this is going to be what you're thinking about all the time. You know, you're going to be, you know, planning out meals, possibly Tupperware containers or meal prep. You're just going to have a lifestyle centered around that. I find that most personal training and strength coaching

consumers, that's exactly what they don't want, is what I hear. You know, I don't want to be in the gym for three hours. I don't want to be walking around with containers. You know, I don't want to weigh everything, you know, when I'm eating. So, you know, again, you got to drop the standard then, you know, if you're 175 pound guy at six feet, age 50, you know you know 59 then you're going to gain some muscle but you're not going to you know gain 20 or 30 pounds of muscle you know um especially yeah you're not going to be like a super jacked 225 like at that age no you're not you're not going to get you're probably not even going to get a 10 change you know probably but visually you're going to see a difference you're going to look better you're definitely going to feel a lot better that's

definitely going to happen you know by doing these things you're gonna have a better lifestyle but you know if you are you know a beanpole and that's your phenotype meaning that's just how you look you know you're how you're built you're not gonna turn into you know a big fucking warrior looking dude you know like a bodybuilder you know here that's just this is not gonna happen and when you see transformations like that, there are often things being left out, typically the drugs. Sometimes you have people that are genetically gifted and just need to touch weight and then they blow up. That happens too. But for a lot of us, you know, I busted my ass. I probably had like a 15% change and it's been

20 years of being in the weight room, 10 years of continuous training. And if I had to guess based on the data that I have on myself, probably like a 15% change. And I'm, you know, as mediocre as they come, you know, like I said, I'm about a buck 68. I'm probably good for, I can probably, I'm probably deadlift 525 or so right now if I run it up. I can probably squat 450, maybe 455, and, you know, press probably somewhere 210, 215. I don't think I'd hit 225 right now. I lost a few pounds off of it, but not much. Yeah, I find that's pretty sensitive to contractile tissue too.

Yeah, I mean, I hit 225 at 180, 185. But, you know, my 10R was 160, uh, when I was 190 and it's 150 right now. So maybe I'm 215 right now, but then I also think I had a PR hiding under there that I never hit. Cause I did triple 200, which would suggest based on my ratios that there was probably a press greater than 225 there. So maybe I still have a two plate press. if I run it up. That one's weird. Running up those singles is not so cut and dry like the other lifts, but that's a different podcast episode.

Yeah, absolutely. It took me four weeks to get that 225, and I knew it was there. It was just the calibration of that was quite strange. We need to talk about that. It's infuriating. Yeah, because it took me like 18 months to press. My PR single is 242. Mm-hmm. And I had had like multiple training runs where I'd hit like heavy doubles and triples

like that. Like I tripled 225 at one point leading up to that. But it took like 18 months to hit that single PR just because, yeah, it just wouldn't come together when I peak for the single. Transmuting a press is an art, man. It's horrible. I'm telling you. I mean, I think the ratios are similar as the other lifts, but the timing, man, and the programming of those singles,

that preparatory, or what is it, that peaking phase? Yes. I don't fully understand it yet because, like I said, I think I got 200, 205, 210, 215, and the multi-rep sets I hit suggested that somewhere 225 and 235 was there based on data from previous maxes and previous PRs. And once it got to 215, I got it smoothly, but then 217 wouldn't move, 220 wouldn't move, and then I'm like, what the fuck? So then a whole other episode, but basically had to put heavy pin presses in there for about two or three weeks, and then I was able to get it. I ran the pin presses up to like 255 from the forehead, from above the head, like right above the forehead, and then I ran it up to like 255, and then that petered off. I couldn't get any heavier. Then I'm like, all right, next week, let's next week let's do a press and then i got 225 yeah we should definitely we should do a press peaking episode that'd be kind of fun fuck yeah you could do a whole episode on that because we're anyway so that'd be great let me reverse back so um so yeah i know if you're not a competitor

you might be looking at you know if you have pretty good genetics you might get a 10 change and you know a couple of years If you're a mediocre guy like myself, you know, you're not super muscular, you're not super fat, you're not super skinny, you're just kind of in the middle, you know, it might take you a lifetime of training to get a 10 to 15% change without drugs, you know? And just to dial those numbers down, if you're a skinny guy built for marathons, I mean, that gets even smaller, you know, because you're not, you don't have the raw materials for this. You know, like what I tell people is I'm halfway decent at using very little. You know, like I can press 225 with very little muscle mass.

You know, there's guys much bigger than me that can't do it, you know. So that's kind of how I say it. I'm not dense. You know, I'm 5'9". You know, I'm 168 when I'm lighter. I'm in the 180s, sometimes 190 when I'm not dense. I'm 5'9". I'm 168 when I'm lighter. I'm in the 180s, sometimes 190 when I'm heavier. That's not very dense for a lifter. 4'45 squat, 5'25 deadlift, 2'25 press. It's decent for the little density I have, but nobody measures you on density.

They're measuring you on body weight. The guys that weigh what I weigh are shorter and lifting more. So I don't see it as crazy, but what I'm saying to our listeners is, you know, the more shit you have going on, the more you have to spread your resources. And the more you have to spread your resources, the less you're going to get out of the things that are less important. the things that are less important. So if your resources are disproportionately allocated to, let's say, a marriage, a full-time job, children, a home that you're taking care of, then, you know, lifting gets about 10% of your resources, then expect to make, you know, slower, steadier, and less overall progress. And that's fine. It's just what we're trying to do is here, set the expectation here. So how much do you need to train if you're that guy? Not as much as the bodybuilder or the power lifter you know you're probably going to put an hour you know hour a day and you're guess what

you're still going to get stronger you're still going to get yeah and that's the thing you know like i think if you we've we've talked about this on the show before like if you roll into any given public gym and you squat three wheels for three sets of five and you can pull 405, you can put four plates on the bar and pull it for anything. I mean, like you're probably going to be in the top five strongest guys there in just your average public gym. Right. And you know, that's totally achievable for a lot of people, for a lot of guys out there. I should go do 405 for 10 in the globo and see what happens right well that's the thing that people don't even like

they won't even it won't even register they'll be like oh it's kind of heavy but you could do 225 you could do 275 maybe not 220 but you could do probably 275 you get the same reaction that's that's my prediction but uh but yeah i mean that's the thing's my prediction. But, uh, but yeah, I mean, that's the thing. Like those are very respectable numbers when we're talking about the general public, very respectable. You're just not going to see very many people doing that at your, at any given public gym. Now they may not be anything special in the strength world, you know, in the powerlifting world, or, you know, you may not have any, anything special in terms of physique in the powerlifting world, but in terms of general public, you're well beyond the average. I mean, you're probably in the top 5% to 10% of the population at that point.

If you exclude these two. And that's the thing. And those numbers are very achievable doing exactly what we're talking about here and just training with momentum in mind. Now, it just may take you five, six years to get there. That's fine. I mean, what's, what's the rush, right? So yeah, I think that's, that's the thing, right? Like our strength standards are still pretty high when we think about the average person out there. But at the same time, like there's, there's also a way to think about and frame your thinking about how you're going to program

and what you're going to program and what you're going to do and how far you should reasonably expect it to take you for the average person that's not interested in competing, that's not interested in getting on the drugs, that's not interesting in carrying the containers around all day. And so that's what we want to talk about today. Hopefully you found that interesting. I think we should do an episode sometime on like, I'd like to do an episode on like rotating. What is it? What do you call it? It's like rotating linear progression. I've heard that term thrown around for basically like the program you've been doing where you're kind of taking different rep ranges and LPing them over time.

I don't know. I think that's a classical periodization, right? Start from high rep, them over time? I don't know. I think that's a classical periodization, right? Start from high rep, low load to go to low rep, high load. Yeah. I mean, well, sure it is, it is, but at the same time, it's like, you're not doing, you're not doing the same amount of volume to our earlier point that you typically find in these like block periodization models, you know, you know, it's like really for you, it's like a couple sets. if you know maybe three sets in there but usually like one or two so um i think we should talk about that a little bit more because i think there's a lot to mind about understanding programming beyond just volume and tonnage right and i want to talk about that some more on a future episode but um you want to close out yeah so I think we kind of hammered that really good.

We could probably do another episode on this another time as well, because this is one of those things that, you know, so much to unpack, but yeah. Thank you 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, or you can visit the Jim's Instagram page at weights double underscore and double underscore plates. Very good. You can find me at marmalade underscore cream

on the Instagrams, or if you're interested in online coaching or in-person coaching, if you happen to be in or near the East Tennessee area around Chattanooga, you can go to jonesbarbellclub.com. All right, we will talk to you again in a couple weeks. Bye.