Weights and Plates Podcast - #34 - Easy Doesn't Work: An Interview with Stef Bradford (Starting Strength)

Episode Date: August 13, 2022

Coach Robert and Coach Trent interview the woman behind the curtain at the Aasgaard Company, publisher of Stating Strength: Basic Barbell Training 3rd Edition (and the popular training method by the same name), Practical Programming, several other books, and thousands of articles about barbell training, programming, nutrition, the sport of weightlifting and powerlifting, and much more. Stef Bradford holds a PhD in Pharmacology and decades of strength training and competitive weightlifting experience under her belt.    Stef joins the podcast today to discuss the mental and philosophical side of training and why the term “easy doesn’t work” encapsulates the career of a lifter. As she says, “easy doesn’t work” is a catchy phrase but the idea is really “comfort doesn’t work.” The Stress/Recovery/Adaptation principle demands that we continually push out of our comfort zone or cease growing/adapting. Moreover, we have to continually attempt to grow to counter the entropy that is inherent to our universe.   Starting Strength website https://startingstrength.com   Find a Coach at the Starting Strength Coaches Directory https://coaching.startingstrength.com     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'm your host, Robert Santana, along with my co-host, Trent Jones. Howdy. And today we have a guest. Would you like to introduce her, Trent? You're better at this part than I am. Well, I know her primarily as Steph, just Steph, but she is, in fact, Steph Bradford, PhD, the mastermind, I think, behind the Asgard Company and all the goings-on at Wichita Falls Athletic Club. So, Steph, welcome

to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me on. That's not a bad intro. It's probably a bit generous. I don't know if I'm the mastermind, but I am involved in all sorts of things, you know, with Starting Strength and with the Asperger Company. Yeah, so tell us a little bit about that. So, my understanding is that you've actually been, like, you've worked on a lot of the editing behind, like, the Starting Strength book, practical programming, actually been, like you've worked on a lot of the editing behind like the Starting Strength book, practical programming,

and then like all of the thousands of articles and stuff on the website, right? Right. So, well, first of all, I'm in charge of all the servers. So that's one of the main things I do. The books also, you know, Rip gets, you know,

whether he's writing it or someone else is writing it, he gets a hold of that and makes a bunch of editing changes and then kind of spits it out. And then, you know, I add things in. But since I do the layout, I'm doing and you just pick up different things as you're looking at different stages of the project. So I'm not so much editing as catching errors and contradictions from one place to another, one book to another. Does the picture actually match the text, which is harder to do than you might think. And then just kind of putting everything together.

And then you get other people in on it too. And it's just like, does this make sense? They misinterpret it. You have to go back and over and over. So a lot of the iterations on those, I've done that. And then just with the subjects, all of my ideas are woven in just throughout. It would be hard to pick out on a lot of them, whether they originate with Rip or me or Nick or anybody else. But I kind of have my fingers in all those

different processes yeah sure well you know you and i have worked on uh some audiobook versions of the of the blue book and the gray book and and others and uh i know like because i've gotten some of the scripts with like rips scribble on there and like he's a he's a he's a pen and paper guy so uh that is all manual. I can't imagine having to read through all of it and put it back together. Well, for the books, he does those on the computer. So that's a little different. He doesn't edit in there.

And that's fine. You get the document. But then he might send you an email with a little section. And that, you have to manually go in. Where is that? You got to find it. You got to replace it. You got to make sure changing a couple of words here doesn't necessitate a change later on. And the next paragraph, you know what I mean? Just to integrate the frustrating thing with rip on some of that is that once he's gotten to a certain point in the process like he's written it and he's read through it you know a certain amount of times and he's thought through it he will not go back and look at it again right so in other words it's like i'm responsible what i feel like is i'm responsible for catching all the errors right now yeah and there's always plenty of errors but you're just like can you look at it he's like no i can't see anything anymore i'm like we'll just go through slowly and deliberately that's what i'm doing it's not any easier for me but but he doesn't have that kind

of discipline to go through and and really look at it later look at it very analytically after he's worked with it for a certain point he just gets gets kind of blind to, you know how you'll write something and you have two of the same word and you don't even see when you read it, that kind of thing. So he relies on the rest of us to catch some of those things that inevitably creep in.

Yeah, it's a huge job because I mean, besides just the books too, I mean, like how many articles, do you know how many articles are on the Starting Strength site right now? No, I have no idea. It's got to be huge. I mean, because there's articles from the archive

that'll pop up in the feed on the front page that I'm like, man, how did I miss that? It's been there for like 12 years. Yeah, or ones you just haven't seen in a long time. You kind of forgot about them. You might've forgotten a certain part was really funny. A lot of rips are pretty amusing. I don't know how many are there because I just keep adding to it.

And probably when I go through and do some things to kind of reduce some of the structure that the website's built on, I'll be checking to make sure I don't lose anything. And at that point, I'll kind of look and see what I have. But it's a bunch. And right now we're doing a whole lot that are video or audio. So we have three of those a week now. So those have really added up quite a bit. Yeah, it's a huge amount of content.

You got to keep the Bill Starr stuff. That's my favorite to read is like when he's talking about dealing with like the football players at the University of Hawaii. They're just like smoking pot and getting hammers every night. And like somehow you've got to get them in the gym, make them stronger. I'll tell you a secret here. The secret is that Bill Starr's writing was about a 10,000th as good as actually talking to him and listening to him. Some people think like, oh, this is so interesting. He's the best writer. It's like, actually, if you've been a better writer, people would have just been completely enthralled with it, right? Yeah. rider, people would have just been completely enthralled with it. It's just that he lost a lot trying to get it down on paper versus actually talking to the guy was just next level.

I bet. Yeah. That's a shame. I always wish I had had a chance to meet him. Well, on that note, give us a little bit of background on your training history. Because I don't know much about that. So when did you start training? What kind of competitive athletics have you been a part of in the past? And what's your story there? Okay. Well, I kind of feel like I've always done some training.

And the reason I have is because I have three brothers. And we're all almost the same age. So there's four of us in, uh, in five years, which of course means we're fighting and, and scrapping and playing and all that kind of stuff constantly. And, you know, once you get to a certain age, you realize I got to make sure I don't get my ass kicked by this, by my little brother, you know, and I got to hold my own against my older one, right? So I remember even being in elementary school, we had the little Sears weight set, and I would do stuff back there. We do pull-ups and push-ups. I have old training

records from junior high and high school doing push-ups and pull-ups and that kind of thing. junior high and high school doing push-ups and pull-ups and that kind of thing. The first exposure I had to weights was in gymnastics. So we had a very forward-thinking kind of gymnastics program. And this was in Tallahassee, Florida. And we had weights in one of the rooms. Now, I only did gymnastics for a short period of time. Basically, I went from one sport to another because my parents didn't have a lot of money. So the initial stages are like, they just let anyone do it and there's not a lot of costs. So I did gymnastics, I did soccer, just little bits of here and there. Nothing real seriously. Mostly, I just ran around like a wild person in the woods and that kind of thing. But that's when I

first saw weights. And I always wanted to be strong because I didn't want to lose in a confrontation with my brothers or any of their friends. We were all just very physical and competitive. So that was just kind of like a worry of mine, really. And in fact, I got out of... I went to college just in time because my immediately younger brother was really getting to the point where he was not taking any more of my lip, you know, and I was in danger of getting punched. In fact, the night before I left, it was very close. It was very close to leaving with a black eye, you know? So, um, so then once I left, you know, I got, I got some pressure off of me from that.

Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So, I mean, I'm curious, like in high school and stuff, like was it common for like the athletes to train? I mean, like, was it like the football guys were doing weights, but not anyone else? Or was it, I mean, what did that look like? Okay, so in high school, I didn't participate in anything with like high school people. So I participate in anything with high school people.

So I wasn't involved in high school sports. We did have some weight at the two different high schools I was at at different times. There were weight facilities and there was some attempt at training. And we used weights in one of our gym classes when I was in the New Orleans area. But it wasn't serious. It was like, here's some stuff you can do. And I'm like, oh, cool. I can do this kind of thing.

But it wasn't... I didn't ever see any kind of formal stuff. It may have been there. I just wasn't involved. I was really not that involved in high school. I barely made it through, actually. So yeah, so that means you're smarter than me. Because that's like, I wasn't smart enough to not make A's. That's, I like that.

Well, I mean, I came out, I came out with the National Merit Scholarship. I, you know, I came out, I mean, I was a high performer, but, you know, they were also threatening me, if you skip another class, we will kick you out of school. We will kick you out of school. Right. class, we will kick you out of school. We will kick you out of school. The only reason they didn't is because I had that scholarship, which looked good to the school to have. So they didn't want to just kick me out, but I actually did summer school after I graduated. You know what I mean? I actually had to make up a couple of classes. Yeah. I had a similar experience in high school and pretty much all levels of academia.

I was up at community college. That was fine, the year that I did that. Yeah, so I guess from that point, when did you end up back in the weight room? Okay, so, well, what happened when I was in high school, I was just kind of messing around in the house, and I jumped up real high. I used to jump up and, like, push my hand off the house and I jumped up real high. I used to jump up and push my hand off the ceiling and then push myself back down. And I did that and I landed funny on my left leg and I badly dislocated my knee. And yeah, I mean, my kneecap was over here on the side of my leg all the way, completely the wrong position. You've been getting fucked up for a long time, huh?

And I was, well, and you know, a lot of it really was mentally fucked up. Now, after that happened, for the next about year and a half, it was very unstable. Okay. Now, I think I mentioned before, my parents, they didn't have money to spend on this kind of stuff. And, you know, after it happened a couple of times, because it was just very unstable, they took me in. This is one of my, you know, lovely experiences with the medical industry. They took me in and they poked around and took some pictures and did this or that. And they said, well, what we can, the problem is the shape of your bones is a little bit wrong okay um so we could go in and we could cut you know cut part of the bones and rearrange them okay it's like well that's not going to happen

okay that's not going to happen we're not going to remodel my bones okay i don't have the money for that and that sounds like a bad idea right their second their second idea was well what we can do is you know it's obviously too strong to the one side so what we're going, what we can do is, you know, it's obviously too strong to the one side. So what we're going to, what we can do is go in and do a lateral release. So we cut in on part of the connective tissue and part of the quad on the outside. The idea being, well, let's just make it weaker over there and then it'll stay where it's supposed to be. Okay. And I thought, you know, I'm like, this is a really, I'm like, I'm like this is a really i'm like i'm like 13 14 like what you know no that's a really bad idea my parents were like no way so their third idea

there was like well if you're not gonna do that just don't run or jump anymore like ever clearly listened yeah so i listened for a while not that i did everything they said but i mean you know i had you know this usually swollen up knee the fluid would get on it it started getting less and less unstable but hey that completely changed things i was doing at that age so you know 9 10 9 10th 11th you know grade and stuff um it really changed things for me, you know, kind of, it was, it was pretty traumatic, really. But what happened is, I just got kind of tired of it. By the time I was my first year in college, you know, it was just feeling like I don't, I'm too weak, you know, and I just was like, I'm just gonna do it anyway. So I started me and my friends,

we started just doing stuff you could do in school. The weight rooms that are available when you're at college and that kind of thing. That's when I started getting back into stuff. Just kind of casually, kind of on and off. And then when I started training continuously was really when I was in graduate school. I was kind of like, okay, I can't keep working all the time. I got to actually do something for myself. So I said, I'm going of like, okay, I can't keep working all the time. I got to, I got to actually do something for myself. So I said, you know, I'm going to go back to the gym.

And, um, I was having a lot of trouble with my squat. And the reason I was having trouble with my squat, I mean, besides all the normal hard things that are hard about a squat was that, um, that my knees are loose. Now they're so loose. I've had physical therapists laugh at my knees. Like, you know, it was like, that's very unprofessional to be laughing at my knees are loose. Now, they're so loose, I've had physical therapists laugh at my knees. Like, you know, it's like, that's very unprofessional to be laughing at my knees. So, but it was, what's hard and what's still hard is going down. So, you know, as you go down, you start to approach parallel there. It's, I can feel some of that instability still right yeah so um i thought to myself well i i learned what like a snatch and thing was and i'm like i i can do that i can get to the bottom

i just don't want to be in that middle point like i don't want to be at parallel or just below parallel in other words i really don't really like squatting because when you have the turnaround there, just a little parallel, that to me, that's like danger. That's danger zone, you know, but I'm completely comfortable with going all the way to the bottom in like a front squat or a overhead squat kind of position. Interesting. Yeah. So it wasn't really the flexion. It doesn't sound like that was the issue. It's just kind of like that, almost like the stretch reflex maybe that's... Well, it's the mechanical strength. So, you know,

when you get to like the most unstable position of the knee is that parallel there, right? So, now you're depending on your ACL, your PCL to hold together. You're dependent on all the connective tissue of the retinaculum to hold your knee together. Guess what? Basically, I mean, I ripped the retinaculum. I have some scar tissue there. I don't know what, I don't want to know what. My ACL and PCL, I haven't had those images to see if they're there, but I've been told if they're there, they might as well not be there. Okay. You know what I mean? It's just the knees are that loose. So what holds my knees together is actually the contraction of the muscle. That's why getting strong was so important for me to finally do. Right.

But it's still hard when I, every time I squat, like going down, I'm like, come on, hold it together. You know? And I just have to do it that way and it's fine. So I haven't, the last time I dislocated my knee was when I had two of my dogs slam into me from behind on the side. So their combined weight at the time was about, it was approaching 300 pounds, you know, just right at my knee level. So that dislocated my knee. And that was about five years ago now. But I haven't, I haven't had problems with my knee as far as it dislocated or anything like that since I got back into training and got some amount of strength back. Yeah, that's interesting. So you fucked yourself up and you figured out that you have to train to unfuck it. And you've been doing it ever since. So you've been doing this for quite some time. And this kind of leads into why we wanted you on here. I've been doing this for quite some time, a couple decades now. Trent has been doing this for a while. And one of the problems that we like to discuss and things that we run into with, you know, people we work with, people we talk to,

you know, in general, is that there's this, there's like a mismatch between what is achieved through a long training career, for lack of a better word, and what can be achieved reasonably quick. As we know, most people want a button, a pill, you know, whatever word you want to use. They want it fast. They want it now. And they want things that they may never achieve. And one of the things I like to talk about on the show is the process of long-term training. And I don't mean three months, six months, one year, even two years, years and years of training and what that looks like. And, you know, you and I have talked one-on-one about this and you've been

doing this for a very long time. And we wanted to kind of get your perspective on it. The other part of this is we always bring up how many people in gyms are just doing a bunch of stupid shit, you know, and sometimes you see it working. And sometimes you see it working because they're also taking some extra things they're not talking about. And so are the guys in the magazines that tell them to do the programs they're doing. There's just a lot of, there's lack of discussion around drugs because most of the people selling products and services are also on drugs, so they don't want to self-incriminate. The three of us, unless Trent's changed his mind recently, have not fucked around with that. So, you know, I have no problem talking about it because nobody's holding anything over my head. But just understanding that process by which somebody who, you know, whether gifted or not gifted, mediocre, above-average genetics, or

motor moron is doing this without the assistance of chemicals, what that looks like over a long enough timeline. And we're really trying to educate that because we get a lot of people that do hire us, and they don't want to – there's a health element to it, right? They're not doing this to lift the heaviest weight possible, get as big as possible, get as ripped as possible. They're not chasing the extremes. They're like, I want my back to stop hurting. I want my gut to get smaller. Very basic goals. And the thing I hear more than anything is I want to keep doing this for a very long time. And, you know, then I have

to explain these things. And, you know, that group of people tend to appreciate that because they just don't understand. They don't understand that a lot of what they've read in the past, they're leaving out the drugs or leaving out the genetics or leaving out other factors that typically aren't present when you're looking at middle of the bell curve or worse, you know, your motor moron that's, you know, a couple standard deviations to the left. So, that's why we invited you here today. So, we want to just kind of like talk about that. Yeah, it's interesting. So, first of all, you know, one of the big problems is that people see all this information. It may be in books. It's on the internet. It may be podcasts like this one. And people think of,

they just think of it all as information and they forget how much of it is just marketing. Okay. So people that are trying to sell you something, they have this motivation and it shapes what they talk about and how they talk about it, how they present it, because they're selling it to you. And even in cases where people aren't, I mean, they think they're not being biased. I mean, everyone thinks I'm not being biased, whatever. But your experiences and your motivation shape everything you do, even if you're trying to be completely honest and open about whatever's going on. It's just a fact. But we have people running around and they're doing this very deliberately. They're doing it with a very calculated eye because they're trying to ride the metrics to the money, basically, and to the fame, you know,

just to feel like they're more important for things. So, you know, they're trying to figure out what you want, so they can pretend that they're going to be able to, you know, give it to you. So they're playing on the psychology that's there. So, for me, when I first started doing this, you know, I grew up, you know, I was a 90s kid. A lot of WWF that was being watched, you know, in my circles. Right. The 80s Arnold movies were still popular, the Rockies, all that stuff. So you had these big super jacks, super ripped guys, you know. Big and defined was the thing before it became skinny and defined in the 2000s.

But, you know, the idea was, oh, muscles, that means you have to lift weights and maybe you have to eat a certain way. I didn't even get that far as a child. That came later. But typically, you associated large, muscular people with lifting. And it was my naive belief that everything I was seeing, you know, on the TV, you know, later on in the you know, later on in the magazines, and then later on on the internet, was attainable simply through the variable of work and effort, right? And I think I'd been reading stuff and trying stuff for well over a decade before I started figuring out that a lot of this was bullshit. You know, so my question for you is,

you know, when you first started lifting, you know, what was your experience like and how much of this were you aware of? At what point did you become aware of it? Because for me, I was around, you know, these guys would come in the gym, they were all jacked and ripped and lifting a bunch of weight. And I just thought it was training. You know, I assumed, oh, you know, he must be doing something I'm not doing, you know, maybe there was, I don't even think I considered genetics early on, you know, that came later. I don't even think I considered genetics early on. You know, that came later. But I'd see a lot of that.

There were guys in my high school I found out probably in the last five to ten years, the entire football team was on drugs for several generations at that high school. And what I noticed is after we graduated, they all, the players were all skinny. And the older players that were older than me would talk to me and be like, yeah, all the mass is out of that school now, you know? And like, I didn't understand what the hell he was talking about. Then later on, I found out they switched coaches and it just got, you know, that culture kind of like changed, you know, there was just less of that, the drug use going on. But then my cousin, in contrast, he went to a high school in another suburb in Chicago and he's like,

oh yeah, all the kids at my school are on steroids. And I'm like, what? And you know, like I just, I never heard about this. My friends didn't do it. We all read the same magazines. We all try the same stupid programs, same stupid supplements. I just, I was never around that. So it took me longer to, to understand, you know, what's going on in a lot of these gyms. And now it's just common knowledge. Most of these jerk offs at the commercial gym are on some sort of shit. It's just very, very common. And apparently at the youth sport level, it's very common. So, you know, I like to get perspective from other people that have been surrounded by that while remaining competitive and not, you know, necessarily crossing over to it, you know?

Yeah, well, I mean, I was a lot like you in that, you know, growing up, I just knew I wanted to be stronger. Now, I had obviously some of these ideas of genetics just because obviously being a female and being smaller, I mean, you see, like, you can't get around it. It's like, well, I don't have the same, you know, results as this guy over here. I'm smaller or whatever. It'd be hard to miss it, but I certainly didn't know anything. I did. The idea of drugs didn't even cross my mind, you know, um, people would talk, you know, constantly in circles and people I knew about all sorts of, you know, recreational drugs, but not about, not about, not about steroids.

Um, and then, um, I mean, I ended up having, I had, I have family members that have done time for steroids, um, actually, um, which was very lucky, which was very lucky. They were very lucky because, um, uh, they re it really should have gone to a much larger sentence for other recreational drugs. So it didn't cross my mind as a possibility. Part of it might have been that I was not involved in athletics in high school in any kind of formal way. So maybe I would have picked up on something there if I'd seen it.

But the other thing about that is being a female, you're just going to see less of that, okay? Because you certainly, there's, I mean, women use all kinds of stuff. There's no doubt about it. But you can't just wholesale go into some of these things that are going to be available as a female, unless you want to, unless you want to transition, unless you want to start being a male, there's consequences. Okay.

You start taking things that are going to have androgenic activity. That means you are going to physically change and everyone's going to know that you were using drugs right so as a as like as a kid you don't know about ways around that or ways to minimize it okay so you know you don't know what the physique competitors do that want to be feminine but you know have more muscle um or uh some of the the girls in sports do but i mean so it's just just from that level it's just you're just not immersed in it in the same kind of way as a female certainly not back when i was younger um it just started getting around more and more people in gym you'd see some you know completely you know just real bodybuilder type guy and and then you start to hear some talk about

that specific person right and most of the reason you heard the talk is because people are like oh look at him you know that guy you know he's he's you know they would the reason that they talked about drug use for that guy was that it was obvious, number one, and number two, they were very jealous, right? Right, yeah. So, and nevermind that the person talking to you, complaining about that guy was probably, looking back, probably was using stuff too. But it was that envy there, this psychological envy.

And then just the strange situation that's come about because of the political issues with steroids, where they made it a controlled substance despite it not meeting any of the criteria of being a controlled substance. And they just made it so these things had to go underground, right? Yep. Yeah, for sure. Typically what happens, black markets are created from that. No, you just reminded me of something. When it came to bodybuilders and the extremes, that's the only time I would think of steroids.

I would think of Arnold or Ronnie or one of these big, giant guys, giant, veiny guys that look like fucking penises. That's what would kind of go through my head. I'd think, oh, that guy's on drugs. But, you know, I only want a fraction of what he my head. I think, oh, that guy's on drugs. But, you know, I only want a fraction of what he has, so I shouldn't need drugs for that. And it wasn't until much, much later, probably in the last decade, that I started to figure out that, like, take a fitness model, for instance. They're about 175, 180 pounds. They're on a bunch of shit, you know? That was something that did not cross my mind, because me and Trent have talked

about this before, and we don't know when the inflection point was, but big was better in the 80s, probably through the 90s. At some point, late 90s, early 2000s, it was 165 to 185-pound male that's low body fat. And we think it had to do with the Brad Pitt Fight Club era, that that might have been one of those cultural movies that influenced this. But that's when I started going to weight rooms. My dad, he was all about big. He'd go in the gym, he'd lift heavy. That's kind of how I got into it. He was a big dude and a strong dude. He didn't know how to lift like we do. Stuff wasn't available, but I'd go and he'd lift heavy. We'd go out to eat afterwards, and that kind of got me interested in lifting. But then all of a sudden, my brother, who lived with my dad, I did not, my stepbrother did, my dad married his mother,

so he lived with my dad. He's like, oh, I don't want to get big like that. I'll get fat, you know, I want to be lean, you know, and he's like, worshiping these like men's fitness cover guys, and, you know, Brad Pitt and Fight Club, you know, the 165 to 185 pound male who's about 5'8 to 5'10 and low body fat and this is this has kind of been a standard for the last i don't know 25 years or so and i just did not think there were drugs involved because i thought drugs only meant mr olympia and uh over the last over the course of the last 10 years i've trained more people been in more gyms just been been around competitive environments, you know, and powerlifting even, you know, I used to not even think those guys did it because,

oh, they're fat, you know, they can't, I thought roids meant 300 pounds and ripped, you know, that that was what, that was my belief as a child and teenager. And then I kind of realized that those guys, you know, they have a certain set of genetics, they're already big before they get on shit, then they have the liver to tolerate all the shit, you know, these have a certain set of genetics. They're already big before they get on shit. Then they have the liver to tolerate all the shit. You know, this, these were things I did not understand back then, but there's a lot of other guys that, you know, probably take a fraction of what they take and, uh, get a fraction of the result too, and start out smaller. But the whole point is it took me a long time to figure out it was everywhere. And fast forward to why we talk about this on here is I get a lot of people that want to hire me because I want to look like that guy.

You know, he's not super huge. He's like lean, you know, and I just want to look like that. And you look at the dude and like your baseline is like 5'9", you're 150 pounds with no muscle. And, you know, even when you gain weight, it skews towards fat for whatever reason. You know, that's just one example, you know. Or you'll get big fat guys, you know. I'm like, dude, you're going to carry some fat always, you know, you're not going to get down to 9% body fat. So like, there's this false perception that because the person doesn't look like Mr. Olympia, that therefore, that person's physique can be

attained. Yeah, it's, it's interesting, too, like you were mentioning the power lifters, and, you know, a lot of them actually look pretty damn good. But you have to remember the power lifters aren't on the same drugs as the bodybuilders, right? So it's not just there's different goals in what they're doing, number one. But bodybuilders are on a lot of drugs, right? So there's a lot of other things that go into looking a certain way. So it's not just the steroids. It's the diuretics, right?

It's, it's just all sorts of that, you know, combined with the manipulation of diet that you don't need, you don't need that for powerlifting. So you just don't do it. Right. But I mean, you're not trying to like, well, let me decrease the bloat by taking some, it's like, no, you know, I mean, you might want to make weight and take Lasix, but you don't use it. So you look a certain way. Right. Right. Right. You know, you know, you're just selecting for a different deal.

Right. And so you get the different results. But but people definitely look at those different people and they make assumptions about what's possible for them to achieve. for them to achieve. And then that's taken advantage of, I mean, partly just being naive. You know, you don't really know what's being used. It's confusion about what's really going on in any given person. And then you want to believe, man, you want to believe that you can look a certain way. And the problem is that, you know, you do have your base genetics, right? I mean, some things are obvious. You're short, right? I mean, well, I'm short, you know, you do have your, your base genetics, right? I mean, some things are obvious. You're short, right? I mean, well, I'm short, you know, so it's like your certain height, you know, what are you going to do about it?

You know, or, you know, you have certain shapes to your muscles and your limbs, and you're just never going to look like, you know, this, you know, particular, you know, other, you know, girl that you idolize or whatever. you know, particular, you know, other, you know, girl that you idolize or whatever. But, but people want it anyway, even though they, it's like, well, you can kind of like get towards that direction, but you got to work with the material you have. So people don't want to admit that, that they're not going to be able to do something and kind of accept what reality is. And then even to the extent that they want to get somewhere, people tend to be looking for the shortcuts, right? They want to do the easy thing. And easy

doesn't matter who you are, whether you're using drugs or not, easy is not going to be how you get there. You can't do any of these things one time, right? I mean, you can cut off your leg. That's pretty dramatic, right? You can get a big change to how you look by something like that. But, you know, we're this dynamic system. Our bodies, they're growing, they're falling apart, you know. You're taking energy in, you're using energy, you're pooping out. I mean, this is a dynamic process, right? So it's a system and it's

going to cycle through, it's ongoing degradation and renewal, and this operates over time. And what that means is you can't do it once. You have to live this way, right? To get whatever goal you want, whether it's going to try to be a bodybuilder or a powerlifter, just a healthy guy. You have to make decisions every single day, consistently over time, that push you in that direction. Whatever you've got there, it's going to push you in that direction. So I want to go back to, you're in college, you're a grad student, you're also a scientist. I'm wondering if when you're in the weight room, also a scientist. I'm wondering if when you're in the weight room, did you stumble across the idea of progressive overload or linear progression in any sort of way? Like, did you, did you have some sort of intuitive sense that whatever I'm doing here to get stronger, whether it's squatting or

snatching or whatever, like it's going to have to get heavier and I'm going to have to, to progressively load this movement over time to get stronger. How did you kind of figure that out? Well, that was just kind of obvious to me. That was intrinsic to the activity. So remember, going back to being a little kid is I didn't want to be the weak one, right? I don't want to get taken advantage of. I want to be able to pin my brother down to the ground and smash his face in the dirt, right?

So the idea is like stronger was always better. You see what I'm saying? Um, I had, uh, I had a friend at one time, she was, she was training with me and she just did what I told her to do. Right. She, she just, she would do it. And she was naturally very strong. I mean, I, she got up to over 200 pound bench press, just, you know know straight progression that's good she'd say well why aren't i'm like well add this weight and she'd go okay and she's like well why aren't you getting weight it's like because i can't today like are you retarded if i could do it i would you know and i mean she was a lot she's a lot bigger than me too but i mean she was just built

like you know she's had this really tight strong upper body and she had been really straight thinking you try and unfortunately she dropped it for a man as as happens but i remember it was just like it was she asked me something crazy you know like you know um like what do you mean of course i would add weight if i could add weight i can't add 10 pounds that's why i'm not adding 10 pounds you know yeah obviously i would yeah that well i think it's interesting because like, I mean, I went through high school in the weight room, you know, I played football. So of course we were on some like the Nebraska program or whatever, where like we'd try to max out as, you know, as a freshman, you know, they're like, all right, first day of the

weight room, let's go max out on squats. I'm like, what is a squat? Like, I don't even know what to, and, uh, and then we're going to do and then we do percentages of that yeah the pyramid yeah i'm sure we did some of that too but it didn't really occur to me i mean really until like you know after college and just training the weight room that eventually i was like hey man there's there's a guy over there and i'm not that much smaller than him and he's squatting you know it was probably like 275 not even not even something that impressive but i'm like man i can't get past 185 like i can do that there's there should be a way to do that and then it took me a while to kind of run across you know strong lifts and starting

strength and an actual structured method to get there and then it's like you know it's like it just slaps you in the face like well duh why don't you just try like starting a weight you can do now and then add weight to it until you can't. But it's not, but I don't think it's obvious to a lot of people, which I think it was interesting that you kind of figured that out. But it kind of struck me when you said that playing with your brothers. I wonder if this is a modern problem. You know, I grew up in the suburbs and I still went outside and played. We didn't have the internet when I was a little kid, thank God. But I think there's something about when you grow up with a more physical existence, whether it's just wrestling around

with your friends, you know, if you ever like, if you grew up in a rural area and you deal with horses or other big animals, you kind of learn some consequences about the physical world that just may not occur to you if you live a very urban, you know, inside and nowadays digital existence. Right. You know, you get kicked by a horse. You learn some things that you could never learn online. Let's say. If you're just trying to if you have an objective, you know, so, you know, that you're you could never learn online let's say right if you're just trying to if you have an objective you know so you know i just you're moving furniture around the room

which i used to do all the time and we had hardwood floors which makes it easy so you just go get one of your mom's towels that you know she never wants you to use but there you go it's there you take it and all you have to do is get you know you got to pick up an end get it up there now you can move it around and you just have to have one corner on the towel um you might get a hole in the towel but you can get everything around the room so if you just had things you're trying to accomplish you have goals you're trying to accomplish you know did i get it done right do you get that immediate feedback and and you're right in that, like people that are not interacting with the physical world are being, they're, they're missing out on a lot of information.

They're not being very good animals, right? Yeah. Right. So if you're not, if you're not producing force, if you're not animating around, whether it's walking down the street or, you know, picking something up or climbing something, you're living a very limited existence to take it, you know, you know, all inside and, you know, it's very unnatural and you just, you learn a lot less, you know. Have you noticed a change in the folks that are coming to the starting strength methodology for the first time over the years and how they,

you know, how they understand like effort and this internalizing this idea of like, I'm going to have to do something that's progressively harder in order to get from point A to point B. Like, you know, was this a problem with, let's say, the very first seminar attendees years ago versus today? No, it wasn't. And part of that was the early seminars we did. Remember, we were working as a partner with CrossFit. And so we had a bunch of people coming in that had at least some interest in getting stronger. we had a bunch of people coming in that had at least some interest in getting stronger right now a lot of them there they just they they were at this they were at the seminar there

because their friend was sure so they weren't necessarily all that into it but the idea of doing something that was hard and trying to accomplish something was kind of already there and the early crossfit people were pretty hardcore you know i mean as that got to be mainstream it just got it got you know got lax in a lot of ways um yeah but the people that came in they were real serious and they would push harder than they should have because they didn't have a good concept of like form and why you might want you know your shoulder to work next week you know that kind of thing but um but they but they they would go at it hard and they would get under the bar and do stuff. And then when we went to doing things on our own, outside of CrossFit, everything was expanded because that allowed us to actually make things longer and more rigorous and the way we wanted it because we weren't held back by some of their

constraints there. The people that have come and changed over time in that they're more into it, right? So they've come in with a better background, but we've always had a pretty good selection for the kind of people there that were already committed to the idea. Even if they had a whole lot to learn, they were fertile ground. Yeah, sure. idea even if they had a whole lot to learn they were they were fertile ground um sure now in the in the gyms and stuff you see different people come in you'll still have people come in wichita falls athletic club and they just don't know the first thing you know they think it's all pink dumbbells right so um it's like i don't think we have this i mean we do but that's the dogs you know i mean it's a chew toy yeah it's a chew toy you know but um yeah so it's just it selects and that's actually one of the things people like about being a starting strength coach whether they're in a

starting strength gym or not is that the people come there ready to learn what you're there to teach them so you're not really dealing with the general public general public the same way um because they're selecting themselves out you know you'll get some you'll get some especially with online clients but yeah you know they're still coming to you and they're still coming to you and if you can't convince them and and show them improvement they're going to leave you. And if you can't convince them and show them improvement, they're going to leave because there's tons of other options right now. Right?

Yeah, that's good to hear. I mean, that's certainly been my experience is that the people that find us, for the most part, unless it's someone that I know personally that finds me through the community that just hears that I'm like a trainer or something. Yeah, most everyone has an idea that, oh, I'm like a trainer or something. Yeah, most everyone

has an idea that, oh, I'm going to be lifting heavy weights in some way. But I ask that because we've noted on the show before that, you know, I think maybe Rip said this a while back that you just don't see very many 400s and 500s in the gym anymore. I can't find that thread. That was a post that I saw when I first found the material that kind of motivated me because I'm like, fuck, I can't do anything with four or 500 pounds. I need to fix that. And I can't find that thread to this day. I never was able to find it again, but he said,

he said something to the effect of we don't see too many 400s and 500s in the gyms anymore. And I'm like, A, he's correct. And B, I can't do that in anything. Yeah. Well, I mean, you get a different population comes in a different time period, just, you know, because things go through fads, just like the physical fashions we talk about. I mean, people get more into lifting weights or, you know, whatever, whatever the thing is. And you get different demographics. So part of that now and this this is a good thing

part of that now where you see people that may not be lifting as much weight is because there are people that come in that are older people that are starting from a big deficit and they're working to actually just restore good function to their lives and, you know, be able to, to, to live well. Yeah. And those people come in, you know, they, they can't, they can't squat. I mean, they can't go down, you know, with their bare naked ass and come back up. Right. Probably not even if they, they grab something, you know, about the best they can do is to get on and off the toilet, literally. And those guys make an amazing progress and they just derive tremendous benefit from it. But, you know, they're starting from such a big hole and they're like

70, you know, you're not talking about somebody that's necessarily going to put up, you know, really big numbers at any point. Some of them do, but you know, that's going to, this might going to be the most common thing you see for sure. So you, you wrote an article, I guess, I think this was last year, uh, about these people that we sometimes encounter who say, uh, you know, I just want to lift lightweights and work on my technique. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the article oh here it is here it is it's i i j g t w o t right i'm just gonna work on technique yeah um yeah and so you pronounce that you know you know right that's the joke i always have jokes they're only funny to me because i'm the only one that sees how you you know, that sees the angle, right?

I love it. I love it. Yeah. It's like in the IT world, the ID10Ts. Did you kind of have like a, I'm interested in like your academic crossover here. Like, did you have like a way that you kind of understood the physiology of the body and how that was going to translate to the barbell, right? In your training program, right? So, I mean, like you had some sense that it was obvious that you were going to have to have like some progressive overload in your training, but in terms of like actually building like a structured training approach, right? Where you're going to add weight to the bar, you're going to have certain, you know, a certain technique that you're going to use that's consistent. It's going to have certain, you know, principles that you're going to follow. Did you have a crossover point or like

something, you know, in a realization at some point? So no, no, this didn't, it didn't have anything in particular to do with physiology or anything like that. It had to do instead with how you get better at anything, right? So we have the phrase we use, right? Easy doesn't work. Well, that's nice and catchy, but it's really that comfort doesn't work. So if you're not pushing to the edge of something, you're not going to get better, right? If you sit and just practice your scales at a tempo you can do everything right on, you don't get better. You have to practice things you're not good at, right? So you have to work kind of on the edge of whatever you're doing,

the edge of your ability, where you can barely do it and you might not do it, right? When you get it done, you're happy. It's like, yeah, I got through, I did the whole thing. Whether it's, you know, practicing a movement, whether it's lifting the weight, whether it's memorizing vocabulary, whether it's standing up in front of people and giving a talk, it's like you accomplish something by pushing into the edge of what you can do. If you keep doing something you can already do, you're treading water. And not only that, you'll get worse. You don't actually even stay the same. So trying to aim for maintenance doesn't work because, you know,

you have injuries, you have bad days, you know, you lose sharpness because you're not always pushing to, you know, a sharper edge, right? So, so yeah, it's like you you gotta you gotta keep you know working at stuff so easy doesn't work but it's actually kind of it's not easy like something has to be blisteringly hard it just has to be it has to stretch you um and excuses don't work right so what do you do you do the things like well i'll just do it till it feels you know it doesn't feel so heavy that's something people say right i'll do three sets of 10 and then when it doesn't feel heavy i'll add a little weight it's like well it doesn't always feel bad because eight or three ten like as far as i'm concerned that's always a bad day um yeah just with the reps it's gonna it's gonna feel hard

it's gonna feel hard from the reps um so easy doesn't work and excuses don't work. You have to just get in there and do it. You have to do it. It's not going to happen unless you do it. Right. So you can have all the plans, you can have the goals, but if you don't do it, it does nothing, you know, to make progress, you have to get in there and you have to do a little bit more than you're comfortable with for anything yeah and that's you know that's how i learn stuff is i i i just do stuff i'm not supposed to be able to do and then there there you go right so yeah that's interesting good segue too essentially one of the issues that i run into is that um when i'm dealing with people is that obviously they do want it to be easy a lot of the issues that I run into is that when I'm dealing with people is that obviously they do want it to be easy a lot of the time or they want it to be hard for a very short period of time or they don't want to cross over to a higher threshold of difficulty, so to speak. So, you know, I'll get someone real motivated early on honeymoon phase and, you know, I'll put them through the program.

And then in about month two, it's what I would consider not light, you know, but to them it feels heavy because they're not exposed to that before. Yeah. And, you know, you might end up having to work through technical problems. Things will slow down and things will become less predictable for a variety of reasons. And that's usually the phase where people tend to get weeded out, usually after that third month, somewhere between the third month and the 12th month. And one of the things I talk about here, you know,

whether the goal is to get stronger or look better, one of the things I talk about here is that this is a long, drawn-out process, you know, and then it gets to a point where, you know, it's like an analogy I used to use is it's like you're growing your hair out for the first time, you know. It starts to get longer and longer. Then there's that in-between phase where you're like, God, I just want to fucking cut this shit. And then all of a sudden you have long hair. I went through this a few times.

So it's kind of like the same thing, right? You go in. The neuromuscular stuff happens the first couple months. Things are easy. The weight's going up. Then all of a sudden you just miss reps. You can't keep your squat technique right for whatever reason. You can't get away with sleeping and not sleeping and drinking over the weekend. You know, I've had some people that, you know, they'll come in on

Monday, miss everything because they slept five hours, drank a bunch and hiked, you know, 15, 20 miles, you know, and can't do that stuff. So one of the things I really want to touch on today is the concept of time and commitment that goes into this. Because for the last 50 years, we have been fed this idea that the 12-week program is going to get you something that's significant. And what I've been educating people on recently is most of these programs are 12 weeks because there's about 16 weeks in an academic semester, and that's all the time they have to work on this shit. And a lot of the studies, as they say, are 12 weeks in length, 12 to 16. You'll find longer ones if you dig around, but typically 12 to 16 weeks is probably the mode that you would find if you were to pull all these research studies together. the mode that you would find if you were to pull all these research studies together.

And, you know, the bodybuilders say the same thing, oh, 12 weeks, because, you know, they'll bulk up and they'll, you know, cut down and they'll try to like lose a large amount of body weight in 12 weeks. And, you know, the short of it is that three months seems to be a reasonable amount of time for people in their head to accomplish things when in reality it could take three four five six in my case when did i first get exposed this material 10 years ago i've been at this for 10 years so i guess what i wanted to ask you is you know when when was your last pr and how long did you hit prs for well let's see it depends it depends on the list you're talking about because some things i okay so uh so first of all one thing that happens over time is right you get you get your you know

go through novice phase you're adding weight you're adding weight it's easy it's very rewarding you're getting that constant feedback because you're accomplishing so much then it starts slowing down and yeah it gets hard in the intermediate phase because you're accomplishing so much. Then it starts slowing down. And yeah, it gets hard in the intermediate phase because you're not making progress. And because you know what's possible and you feel frustrated because you're used to it coming a little bit easier. And so one thing you have to do

to get past some of the problems with keeping your mental focus so you can keep training, keeping in progress for the long term is, I mean, it is helpful to set some of these intermediate, these short-term goals, these time-limited goals. The problem is you have to set one and then the other in the end, though. You can't just stop or you get nowhere, right? So it helps with focus to do the shorter-term things. One thing you'll do as an intermediate lifter typically is to start doing competitions. So when you start talking about PRs, you have to start qualifying that, right?

There's the absolute PR. Like, this is my lifetime PR, whatever. But, you know, you did it in the gym in your basement and no one saw you. So you're like, did I actually, let's just make this up. Did I actually hit depth? You know what I mean? Or whatever, you know, or did I actually, let's just make this up. Did I actually hit depth? You know what I mean? Or, or whatever, you know, or did I actually walk that deadlift? You don't have the validation, right? So that's your gym PR. And then you'll have your competition PRs. And then you'll have your competition PR, like your, your total absolute weight that you've got.

And then you'll have your PR at a particular weight class. And then you'll have your PRs for exercises that you haven't done before. So if you introduce some assistance exercise, that gives you something mentally to focus on to motivate yourself to continue to make progress because you're picking it up there. You'll also have your PRs as you're climbing back. So when you have like an injury or like I had some surgery on my feet, it's like some of those things. It's like, okay, you get through the rehab phase and then you're like, okay, this is the best I've done since XYZ event. Right.

And you have to kind of be flexible like that mentally or you're just going to collapse. You're going to stop after the novice phase. Right. So it's what it is. It's just like you grind in a lift. like that mentally or you're just going to collapse. You're going to stop after the novice phase, right? So what it is, it's just like you grind in a lift. You have to grind in a program, right? Or you grind towards your goals, you know? You're just not going to have all these easy goals, your, you know, RPE six goals.

It's like, well, those aren't very exciting. That's like, you know, it's like beating the sixth grader right that's like oh thank you you know this is why that rpe shit is so damn popular because the coach doesn't have to deal with the melt psychological meltdowns of the lifter who's no longer getting stronger in a linear fashion yeah yeah so in in some ways yeah in some ways it's a strategy to keep the person at least in the gym so it's not like a wholly bad thing but it keeps these people as children basically right they're not learning they're not learning to go beyond that so it can be a useful tool but it puts you in the in the position of making you know making accommodations for. And I don't know about you,

but when I give myself a reason, I don't have to do something versus I have to do it. That's just a recipe to like puss out. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, when I was, when I was six, my mom wanted me to comb my hair and I said, what's the point? Because it's just going to get tangled again. And she's like, do you want me to shave it off? And I said, give me the comb. She said, give me the comb, right? But that was an argument I had as a child. Why make my bed? It's just going to get unmade. What's the point? But people still have that, residual thing where they they don't want to do it because they're going to have to keep doing it it's like right things that you do you got to keep doing to still be doing them yeah i think i remember people telling me that when i first started lifting oh you got to keep doing it the

rest of your life and i'm like okay that's not the You know, but to that point, like the stuff I was doing back then, and this is one of the beauties of the program. I was spending so much time on shit I just did not like. There was all these stupid isolation exercises, machines, and cardio on a freaking treadmill. Like I'm on a hamster wheel. That, I looked at that and I'm like, I can't do this for the rest of my life. I hate this shit. You know, I won't do cardio. Like I hike several times a week. I can do that hamster wheel. I looked at that and I'm like, I can't do this for the rest of my life. I hate this shit. I won't do cardio. I hike several times a week.

I can do that. No problem. But I just had to tease out. I'm like, what do I want to do? What do I not want to do? What can I stick with? And I figured that out over the years. And early on, I would go in, the barbell stuff, the pull-ups, the dips, that seemed to work.

All the other shit seemed like a giant waste of time. And I just didn't see any progress from it so i just discarded it started bringing stuff back in over the last you know years especially the last several months because i kind of figured out you know where i was going wrong and all that that's a whole other topic but you know yeah if you can't stick with it you know for the rest of your life you probably shouldn't waste your time doing it that's what i always just tell people i'm like nobody's making you fucking do this you know but i'm telling you you're saying like typical person will come to me and say uh i want to build muscle or sometimes i want to get stronger usually i want to they want to look a certain way more often than

not that comes up very often and uh i tell them i'm like well your baseline you know they're not mesomorphs you know that come in lean and muscular you know, they're not mesomorphs, you know, that come in lean and muscular, you know, the average typical personal training client, skinny fat, you know, in some way, shape or form, you know, they either have a belly and skinny arms and not any evidence of training. And that's what I was. This is the typical personal training client. And I'll sit there and say, well, you know, it's going to take some time. It's going to take probably years if you want to, you know, have an extra 20 pounds of lean mass on you, you know, might take 10 years, you know. And this just kind of goes over people's head, then they're like, well, let's do it. And they start doing it, then like you said, it gets to intermediate, things become less predictable, recovery becomes

more of a variable. And they start saying, well, I just don't want to hate going to the gym. Then I'm like, that's fine. You know, there's no, there's no path forward for that goal you wanted. So you need to reassess what the hell you want, you know? But my whole point there is like, you know, this is the big theme of the episode is you'll spend a long time doing this. So there has to come a point where you just, you know, it's like brushing your fucking teeth. You just show up, you do the work, try to do more and keep going. That's hard for a lot of people. Um, it was hard for me at first because I didn't think I was worth a fuck till I can pull 500 pounds. So I was obsessed with that for the first five years of training. It should have taken less time, but you know, I hired the wrong people

at certain points, you know, lesson learned. But you know, once I got it, you know, as we've said in this episode, as Rip has said in, you know, his written materials, audio materials, and I'll say it again, maintenance is bullshit. So when I was done, I was like, all right, well, I just had a meet. I'm tired. I'm going to start with a wait. And then next week I'll add more. And it's been over, it's been three and a half years. No, no, it's been four and a half years since I had that conversation with myself. And, you know, I got, you know, I was in school doing a doctorate. I opened a gym. I switched jobs. I'm running an online business and I just in school doing a doctorate. I opened a gym. I switched jobs. I'm running an online business.

And I just kept showing up. And every time I'd show up, I'd try to do more than last time. And I stopped thinking about it. And every year, sometime around December, I hit a new PR. And that's just how it goes now, you know. And I tell people this, they're like, that's crazy. I'm like, at some point, you just got to stop thinking about it because progress slows down, becomes less predictable.

And a lot of people that hire me have more shit going on than I do and less control over their sleep schedule specifically. Right. Yeah. So it's just this nonlinear fucking mess. And the psychology of dealing with that, as you kind of talked about earlier, and we'll kind of come back to that, a lot of people are just unprepared for it. of people are just unprepared for it well the the thing is people don't don't want to you know they don't they don't want to do things that are not you know glamorous that are not just jumping to that you know physique or the strength that they're envious of or you know particular look somebody has but the and what's what's stupid about that is long-term, they just screw themselves up because they don't ever master the fundamentals, right?

So they want to worry about RPE. Who cares about RPE? I mean, you've got to get your squatting, right? You've got to get your training in. You've got to get your diet. You've got to get your sleep. There are certain fundamental things. They're not going to change.

You can't get around them. You can cheat a little bit on some things but you can't cheat your sleep it's impossible okay um and when you start messing with your sleep that messes up your hormones which messes up you know your you know response to your diet and then you get hungry and i mean just it's just you're yeah exactly you start like this this downward spiral because you have everything you're at so that the fundamentals is you know you got you got to train progressively you got you got to have the stress and then you got to sleep you got to eat you know reasonably right um and and it's just basically you have to live it right you're not

going to do anything long term unless you change or you modify how you live. And that's just, you know, people look over at, you know, pick whoever it is. Drugs or not, it doesn't matter in that you look at that person. It's like, well, what do they do every day? Well, they don't sleep like you. They don't eat like you. They train differently than you do. They deny themselves here they make

certain choices and it's like all those things add up to them being in a place ahead of where you are you know and uh you can skip ahead a little bit but there's the cost of that and you know even if you decide i'm just gonna i'm gonna use a bunch of drugs here or get surgery there right things that work drugs and surgery work. They're quite effective. If you lay those on top of the situation where you don't have the fundamentals in place, you're just even deleting those effects, you know? Yeah, absolutely.

Right. And now what do you do? Well, now what do you do when it's not enough? What do I do? Yeah, I think it's funny. So our friend Andy Baker baker on his podcast he was talking about recently uh dante trudell he was a bodybuilding coach dog shit yeah the dog the dog crap training method right dc training but like all he was saying is he's kind of addressing the

bodybuilding crowd and this kind of ridiculous notion of like having to do tons and tons of volume just volume volume volume yeah and and he's like he's like, he's like, y'all, it has to get heavier. Like you need to pick a few movements that are highly stimulative to the muscle groups that you're trying to develop and you have to work them hard and you have to work them heavy. And he had a few other ideas mixed in there, but that, you know, that's, that was the main message that I've taken away that he was preaching is that it has to get— He said that 20 years ago. Right, yeah.

He was addressing folks. And I think part of what he was addressing there, too, is the fact that there was a lot of drug use that was happening because guys were not training effectively. Well, yeah, the original thread, he goes into his drug use in the beginning. Yeah, right. Yeah. He's like, you you know you wouldn't need to use so many drugs if you had better training and then you wouldn't have you know fucked up livers by the time you're 35 and you wouldn't be having heart attacks you know in in your 20s

that we see now in the bodybuilding world yeah but i mean people just don't want to do certain things i mean so i like i don't think you can, you can't get around sleep. Right. And it's like, well, you're going to have to, you're going to have to change other things in your life to sleep enough. And I mean, not getting sleep is, is wildly detrimental. I actually looked it up and, um, compared to like 50 years ago, um, on average, people get two hours less sleep. That's huge. You know, sometimes they're like, why are Americans so disgusting? Right. You go to Walmart and you're just, you know, you leave without buying anything because you're like, oh, no calories for me today. We're done. Right. But it's like,

you know, people argue about like, why is it, is it the, is the diet? Is it the industrial food? Is it the nasty seed oils? Is it they're not physically active? You know, seed oils is it they're not physically active you know uh is it they're not you know they're they're mental they're distractions and the digital life they're living in is that their social alienation you know they're all separated from their families and friends you know is it their sleep it's yes, it's all of those things. Right. And you have to change how you live guys. You know, it's like, we know what this gets you. Right. So how close to that, you know, just horror on the slob sled do you want to be right? Make some decisions and it's going to have to do with the basics, right?

It's going to have to do with what you eat. It's going to have to do with you making time to sleep, you know, changing how you're interacting, what, you know, going outside and getting some UV light every now and then, you know, that kind of thing. It's not really, this stuff's not hard. Okay. But it takes, it takes doing and it doesn't do itself. Right. Absolutely. So there's one other thing I want to get your perspective on. So you've trained for a long period of time and you've accumulated some injuries along the way. Something I deal with, the people that I tend to work with are people that are over 40 and have also accumulated some injuries or just life stuff, right? Their bodies aren't what they used to be.

And one thing that I have to work with people on is this competing priority of, you know, we know in training that the weights need to get heavier in order to stimulate progress. But on the other hand, there's some real limits to what their bodies can take and what they can recover from in the gym. You know, and sometimes that's joint problems. Sometimes it's just a lack of resources for gym. You know, and sometimes that's, it's joint problems. Sometimes it's just a lack of resources for recovery. You know, they've got other stressors in life that they just, they can't recover from a high workload in the gym.

So I'm curious for you, like how have you noticed that your training has changed over the years in terms of like pushing yourself and trying to push your numbers and find some way to create a progressive overload in your training, but also not wreck your body in the process and accumulate more injuries? Well, I've never had a problem with injuries from training per se. I think a lot of that is just because I am hypermobile and I'm good at falling you know i mean so i collapse you know

versus care things yeah um whether it's joints or whatever so i mean i don't that injuries in the gym is not anything i really have a lot of problems with or even outside of the gym really what i see with you know just just being older so i'm over 50 50 now, is I'm not pushing things hard the same way I used to. And I'm just talking in a competitive type way where you just go in and you're just killing it on the edge. It's just kind of like being back a little bit from that. Just so I have the reserves. Most of the summer and spring and a lot of the fall, I'm at altitude, which is a huge adjustment for training.

Yeah. It's just completely different. It's almost funny to watch somebody try to do a set of five. And I don't care what it is. It's like you can do a set of five. You can do a set of five when it's light, when it's really light. Let's say a set of five presses, but it's just like, I can't, you know, I even would do things like you, you do it.

Like you'd never do it, you know, in Texas, like, you know, when you breathe at the wrong time, he's like, I, I had to breathe. I don't care, you know, but so that's just different as far as like really pushing it. It's just, I, I kind of lost my taste for a competition. I was, I was doing it with the Olympic weightlifting and I got tired of some of the problems there with the judging and with, you know, if you're, you lose your taste for it when you're out of meat and you see terrible judging and you, you're dealing with people, you know, are using drugs.

It kind of just yeah makes it just i i just i'm not i'm not doing it you know like you know you just i i can't get into it anymore you know so i don't push really really hard like that kind of thing anymore i mean i'll do stuff where you know you know try and get you know max pull-ups or something like that you know i kind of attack it but it's it. But I kind of give a little bit of leeway where I wouldn't use to do that. Sure. I wouldn't have done that when I was 40.

Yeah, and I was curious too. So you mentioned pull-ups and stuff. Have you found yourself kind of trying to find other movements or other things to PR instead of the competition lifts, squat bench, press, deadlift? I kind of mess around with some of that stuff. Sometimes I don't, I just don't, I don't chase PRs in the same way I used to. Yeah, sure. So it's, it's not like I'm saying,

you know, maintenance. I'm not, I'm not doing that. I don't have that kind of mentality, but I just don't push to the breaking point on things just because I have other things to do. You know, if I do a really hard workout and then it's like, I'm not, I can't get any work done for the rest of the day. You know, I mean, you know, it's just like, I just go to sleep and I just can't afford that. So it's just kind of more backing off. As far as just keeping it where I go in and train anyway, I probably, I'm strange. I mean, I admit that. Rip just called me out right weird on some of this stuff. But I don't use necessarily the same motivations that other people would do for keeping going and, you know, going to hit this weight, hit that weight. I mean, sometimes I'm

like, okay, I want to, you know, I want my deadlift to be over a certain amount or whatever. I might do that and kind of push that for a while, but it's also just, you know, it's like, if somebody was watching me, like not finish that set, you know what I mean? I can just picture somebody sitting there watching me and I'm just like, I gotta finish that. So I don't actually have to have somebody there. Like a lot of people, they need somebody else there, whether it's a coach or whether it's a training partner or whatever, to like, you know, shame them into doing it.

It's just like, I just imagined somebody there, you know, maybe, you know, somebody that's coached me on stuff before, like Tommy Suggs, you know, who was very helpful coaching at certain points with the weightlifting for me. Just imagine looking at you like, what? And it's just like, okay, I'm doing my prep. But I don't know, I just do it. Yeah, at some point it just becomes so natural. It is like brushing your teeth. You just can't go to bed without doing it. Yeah, it's just you got to do it.

Yesterday, just everything got really busy and it was like 9 30 at night and I'm like I needed to train and I was up at 5 30 in the morning okay so this is pretty late yeah and I'm just like you know and you get that little devil on your shoulders like I'll just do it tomorrow morning like the last thing I want to do is like do a rack pull you know tomorrow at nine in the morning I had other things to do so I was like okay I'm just gonna do it you know just go down and just get started and just walking in and getting started you can get it done so i got it done and i'll do it where i do like i'll do extra you know like i need to get i need to get i get at least a whatever here and i do that i'm like oh i'll do another one or i'll do it i'll add a like kilo you know and just do another step sure Sure. So I'm pretty free form and how I do my stuff because I don't have like time

goals, what you do with competition when you have to get a certain thing or have to be, you know, within a certain weight class when you do, I don't know. It just kind of, it works for me. You know, there's just a certain level beyond which I will not sink on certain lifts. Like I refuse to lift less than that. I mean, my arm better be off. You know what I'm saying? It's like, how can you not bench press body weight? It's like, that would just be wrong. I can't do that. So you get busy and maybe don't

feel like bench pressing or whatever. Okay. But then you come back to it. You've got to at least LP yourself back up to that point if you're not there. To that point, yeah. So actually, I was saying I didn't have injuries. The only thing I really have to work around a lot is that I have thoracic outlet syndrome. So I'll get where my arm's going on. I had to be careful. But it kind of goes through phases, right? So sometimes it's just like everything's just tightening up. It's smashing down and the nerves coming through. I can't feel my arms. You know, you wake up and you're like, the arm you're not laying on is numb, you know, and I mean, can't move it. But I know how to work around that now. So I'll just kind of back off certain lifts. I'll do more specific stretches and just keep going. Yeah, I like that. I think it's so interesting to listen to how people's

training has evolved over years. And, you know, because there's like, what I hear you saying is like, there's, there's, you have some auto regulation built into your training, right? So you're not necessarily have to use something like RPE, but there is some auto regulation in your training where you're like, okay, I have, I have, I have sort of a floor that I want to maintain and work towards if I'm not there. And then on top of that, but I know that I leave myself some space if I have room to push it further. And I've got a little bit more juice in the tank and I know it, I'm going to go ahead and take that. Yeah. Of course I do. I mean, I do tend to overpush anyway. So I have to push myself. I mean, I have to dial it back. There's two. You know, there's two kinds of people. There's people that are under trained. There's people that are trained. And if you let me, I'll train more. Cause I like, I like to, I like to do stuff. You know, I mean, I like to do it, you know, I like to be strong. Right. Whereas maybe the typical client, you're trying to make them do the lift, you know, and they're like, well, let me just do

a little less. And you're like, no, right. I'm, I'm more like the other way. I'm going to aim a little too high. I'm going to miss something that, you know, it's like maybe if you hadn't been so aggressive with the weight, you would have got that, you know? So I'll tend to take too much, which, you know, makes it so I don't just degenerate completely, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's what, you know,

we did an episode on maintenance a while back and the concept and i think a lot of people if they haven't thought about it too hard they think of maintenance as sort of like uh all right i'm gonna squat until i can do 315 for three sets five and then like that's good for me so i'm just gonna go in the gym and just keep squatting 315 for three sets five forever and we all know it doesn't work that way. You're not going to be able to do it. 315 is not going to be there for three sets five all of a sudden, and then not for two and not for one. And, but, but there is, there is a, I wouldn't call it maintenance either, but there is a mode you can be in where you're, you're not necessarily always pushing for new PRs

and new numbers, but at the same time you are continually trying to add. Right. And that essentially can, like, life deloads you in a way, and that can net out to a sort of maintenance over a long period of time. Yeah. Right. Just maintenance in the number you're hitting, it's not like you're really trying for maintenance. So it's a different thing. So it's like, yeah, people, you know, it's just this, like, keeping up your training or keeping your diet or whatever. it's like, it's like, yeah, people, you know, it's just this, like keeping up your, your training or keeping your diet or whatever. It's like, you gotta keep doing it because there's this big giant thing called entropy. Right. And, uh, and then there's like

other things that just jump in and take over your life and surprise you. And you're like, well, I just, I stayed up all night or I had to travel, you know? So I used to like, uh, I would do stuff where I travel and you're like, you get in and then you like want to train. I don't do that. You know, I'm like, if I skip workout, it's fine. You know what I mean? So things like that, where I just, I'm not going to push it the same way anymore. But, um, if you, uh, if you are not pushing on a regular basis, you will start regressing. And that is just an absolute fact. I is extremely rare person that it can actually train in the maintenance way. I mean, one out of a thousand and I've known a couple like where they come into the gym and they literally, you know, it's like, Oh look,

there's your two 25 on the bench. Like I do two 25. And they just do it like a little machine. But you know, like one guy, one guy I'm thinking of right now um that did that it was like just the same thing he never really tried to do anything better and you know what he's doing now what's that i have no idea because he did that maintenance thing forever and he maintained and maintained and maintained and maintained and i haven't seen him in five years you know or maybe it's ten right you know i'm saying? So that's what happens is then you just stop. Then you skip a workout, then you skip more. And then, then you just, you stop, you, you've gotten out of that habit and you've replaced your training. You put something

else there in your life. You know, life's what you do every day. Life's what you do every week. If you're not doing it every week, I don't know if you're doing it. You know what I mean? There's just a lot of things like that. It's like, are you really, are you sure? Are you sure you're whatever it is, or you're, you're a lifter or you're a musician or, um, what are you really? Cause you're not doing it. You're not doing it. Are you that thing anymore? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, I run into this with diet all the time. I always tell people that say, Oh, I picked the worst time to start this because I have this event and that event and this event and that event. I'm like, that's your life. You know, this is the perfect time to start it.

I'm like, and I always use the analogy. It's like training dogs, right? You can get a dog to behave at your house, take it in public, and then the work really starts, right? So, you know, I tell people the same thing. I'm like, yeah, if you can, you know, measure everything out and put it in Tupperware containers all day at home, fabulous. What are you going to do when you have to go somewhere? These are the things that are important, right? And that's where it kind of gets hard for people.

You know, they don't want to carve out that bandwidth to do that. Yeah, I've had, I had, I had a friend like that. I had a friend like that. She was real frustrated because she was enormously overweight and she was always talking about what she needed to do to lose weight and how it wasn't fair that other people had it easier. And I'm like, well, you don't really know that. It's just your results suck. But she was always, every time you turn around, like, well, just a treat, just a treat. It's like, you have treats like three times a day.

You know what I mean? Whereas I don't buy ice cream. You know why I don't buy ice cream you know i don't buy ice cream because if i eat ice cream i eat it for two months you know and i know that or i'll just think about it for two solid months so it's like i try to eat ice cream like once a year it's like i just same here it's just like i can't it's the yeah it's the hedonic treadmill i think i've heard it called where oh yeah just you know you have one one unit of leisure or one unit of luxury and that's it but it's it's a diminishing return because as soon as you consume one unit it's going to take a unit and a half to get the next same hit of pleasure from that right exactly so you know just it's continual

right you can you can extend it forever um yeah i I was thinking too, I think Aristotle's the one who says this in his Nicomachean Ethics, but that virtue is something that you practice. It's a thing that you do. It's not a thing that you get or that you arrive at. And there's a, there's a, the Greek word for this is eudaimonia. We kind of loosely translate that in English as happiness, although it's a terrible word for it. But we, we tend to think of happiness as a state of contentment or something that you arrive at. And it's like, well, once I do this, I'll be happy and then I'll be there and I'm good. And Aristotle, I think it's interesting in this long, you know, he was building on the legacy of his predecessor, Plato. They've

had these long, you know, discussions and sort of explorations of virtue. And what does it mean to cultivate a good life? And how do you do it? We see people that have it, but what's going on there? How do you get there? And that's what he arrived at is that eudaimonia is an action. It's a pursuit. It's a continual pursuit of excellence, which is virtue. And I think that's, there's a lot of parallels to the training life in that, you know, it's what we're going for is the pursuit. And there's really not an arrival point that you get to. It doesn't exist, you know? And unfortunately, I think we've kind of lost touch with that in our Western world of the classical virtues, you know, that our civilization was built on.

Yeah, well, and that goes along with some of the anti-virtues or the opposite side of that. If you look at things now, what do people build things on well it's basically on resentment and envy you know which is you know destructive things spiteful horrible things and uh tearing down the other guy you know you don't even know you assume that he's happy he has what you think you want and you just want to take it away from him and that's the more common thing you see these days actually. Yeah. Well, do you want to, Santana,

do you have any other questions or anything else you want to do to wrap up? All right. Yeah, no. Thank you for tuning into the Weights and Plates podcast. You can find me at weightsandplates.com or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. You can find the gym at weights, double underscore and double underscore plates. Very good. You can find me at jonesbarbellclub.com if you want to check out my coaching services, or you can find me at marmaladecream.com for my audio work.

And Steph, where can people find you? Well, they're going to find me just through startingstrength.com. And, you know, probably not going to be dealing with anyone up front there, but they can find me if they need to track me down. Yeah. Very good. Very good. Like I said, she's the mastermind behind it all. She keeps all the plates spinning. And remind folks too, like where can they go to see everything that's going on in the Starting Strength world now? So there's startingstrength.com, but there's also, there's podcasts, there's videos. Where all can people go to find that? Well, if you just go to startingstrength.com, it's the simplest because through that,

you'll have the links to the Instagram, the YouTube, the Starting Strength Network, the coaches directory, where you can find starting strength coaches throughout the country. And in fact, a few select countries in the world. So that's the simplest way to do it. I'd have to think a little bit to tell you the Instagram and that kind of stuff, because I just don't use social media. I think it's at Starting Strength, right? Yeah, I think it's at Starting Strength. Yeah, it's our buddy Pete Shupos that runs that, I think.

It is. It's Pete's in charge. He has a couple hands that help him out with it. He's the chief memeologist at starting strength. That's the idea. Well, thanks so much for joining the podcast, Steph. We appreciate it. Well, it was good to talk to you guys.

Probably could have talked another hour or so, but, you know, the dog is waiting. Mine is, that's for sure. Oh yeah. We could do another one another time. Absolutely. Cool. Absolutely. you