Weights and Plates Podcast - #37 - A to Z Accessories for Putting on More Muscle

Episode Date: October 2, 2022

Yoked, stacked, swole, diced... who doesn't want to get jacked? While the basic barbell compound movements -- the Squat, press, bench press, and deadlift -- are the backbone of any good muscle building program, sometimes certain body parts need more help to grow. Coach Santana and Coach Trent offer up their favorite accessory lifts for hard-to-grow muscles after a lifter has exhausted their novice gains on a quality barbell program. They also dispel some myths about "hypertrophy," particularly the idea that you need tons of sets and reps to grow muscles.   Just like any good strength program, a good hypertrophy program involves putting more weight on the bar on a regular basis. You don't need a ton of sets and reps, or a ton of different movements. The most important thing is progressive overload, and a high level of effort on every set. Sandbagging your chins and bicep curls because you're tired from squatting and pressing will not make your arms grow!   Tom Platz Muscle Camp "Legs": https://youtu.be/8fulA0RGzDU   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. Oh man, hello. This is the second time we're doing this. Yeah. Because we've had some experiences the last few weeks, haven't we? Oh, we sure have. Both of us. Oh, man. So, yeah. So, we tried to do this episode once already, and we had to bail on it because I had family to attend to. So, I had a baby. Congratulations.

to attend to. So I had a baby. Congratulations. Or my wife had a baby, I should say. We need to be clear in these current times. Yes, you did not physically give birth. You're not our own. That's right. I am not a birthing person. However, my wife gave birth to a son. So we welcomed a son a couple of weeks ago. So it's been, you know, the typical kind of crazy schedule, getting used to having a baby in the house and, you know, a lot more coffee, a lot less sleep. But yeah, so it's, that's a good thing, but that threw our schedule off a little bit. And then I think you had some disruptions as well, right? ubu with my truck. Oh, hell, it's embarrassing. It happens to the best of us. We probably have some diesel truck owners here. I have a Ford F-250 6.7 turbo diesel. And, you know, the wonderful EPA requires that you put diesel exhaust fluid into the car because, you know, it's supposed to be better for the environment. As it turns out, that's actually not true from what I've gathered from various mechanics and things that I've read.

Shocking. But, you know, I still have that little DEF filler that's right next to my fuel filler on the side of my truck, and I have to occasionally buy these, you know, jugs of it at the gas station. I've been buying it at Lowe's because a lot of gas stations don't have it. Apparently that was short earlier this year. So I bought four of them in June and I keep them stored at my gym. So last Friday night, I got in my car. It was midnight. Usually on Friday, we all hang out afterwards after we train, me and my members. And I stayed until close to midnight.

Then I'm talking to my girlfriend on the phone. And I had to use a handset because the AirPods weren't syncing. I walk towards the car. I turn it on. And then I see the death light come on or the message saying, oh, you're below 500 mils of death. So I'm like, all right, hold on. I got this in the gym. So I ran back in the gym. I got a box. I'm talking to her. I start pouring it. Then I realized that I am pouring it in the fuel filler. Then I doubled down on stupid. I had looked online to see what people were saying. They're

like, do not turn that key. Because it'll get into your system and this, that, and the other. And just igniting it is like the worst thing you can do. Well, you know, again, I doubled down on stupid because I'm kind of in panic mode. And I know that I need to get that shit out of there fast. We're talking about trying to flush it immediately. And so, you know, I mistakenly thought that the Loves truck stop near my gym off the 10, I-10, would be open for mechanical work. So I'm like, well, I didn't turn the key. The key was already turned, so maybe I can make it.

Well, that was a bad idea. I did not make it. I was also low on gas. So, you know, a couple miles down the road, a car started sounding different. So I pulled it over, turned it off, and left it overnight. And I called, you know, DM'd my mechanic on Facebook. He responded in the morning, then got ahold of me through his cell phone, because he's closed on Saturdays. And he tells me, did you drive? I'm like, yeah.

He's like, basically, you're fucked. Oh, man. And, you know, I'm panicking. But at the same time, I'm trying to deal with the problem. So, you know, I start weighing out options in my head. I'm like, well, I'm not taking it to Ford. It probably costs the price of the truck to fix this, you know. Yeah, right. Essentially, what happens with this stuff, you know, for those of you who've used it, you know what I'm talking about.

Even if it spills on your shoes, it crystallizes. These little white flakes that stick to your shoes, they fortunately come right off. But on metal, it's not so kind. Plastic, you could probably deal with it. On metal, it can be corrosive. So if it crystallizes, as soon as it hits the air, what do you think is happening in the fuel system?

If it's getting into your injectors, your fuel lines, your rails, your fuel pump, et cetera. So essentially, I probably have to replace the whole fuel system, which, you know, is probably at least half the value of the damn car, you know? Yeah. That doesn't sound like an easy fix. No. And I'm just, I'm trying to figure out, I'm like, okay, where am I going to get this cash? I have to do this, you know, what do I do here? Do I try to, you know, try to get it functional and sell it? That's what one guy told me. He's like just get it drive drivable and sell it to the freaking dealership you know yeah but you know i'd get bit in the ass with karma if i did that so

you know i'm trying um basically there's one option i got to figure out how to pay for this repair you know yeah and uh i also got to get it out of the parking lot because i ran into problems at night with roadside assistance because my car is owned by the gym or by my LLC. The gym has a different LLC, but it's owned by Weights and Plates. And it's a commercially registered car and I have commercial auto insurance. So, you know, they said they were sending somebody out. Then I get a call almost an hour later saying they're not sending somebody out because I have a commercial plan that goes through a different department. Don't you love bureaucracies? You know, I was talking to you right before I got on. I hope this corporate system implodes, but, you know, I know how devastating that would be

to a lot of us, but I think the end result in the long run would be better because these people cannot deal with people. They're such fucking robots, but that's a whole other topic. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. But anyways, I'm like, well, it's almost two in the morning, lady, you know, and I'm out in the parking lot in the middle of the ghetto. There's sketchy guys pushing carts. There's a car over here in the parking lot doing something, probably a drug deal. You really just let me stand here for an hour,

and then you're telling me that I got to start this whole process over, and if I do find a tow truck, it's going to be another hour, you know, and it's middle of the night, early morning. So she just kept giving robotic answers. And then I'm like, put me through to somebody who can send a tow truck. So she puts me through to the prompt that sent me to the original department that I called. So I just hung up and left the car overnight. And the next day, after I talked

to my mechanic and kind of troubleshooted this in my head, I'm like, I'm towing this to the mechanic. So I towed it to my mechanic, and then we're sitting there talking about it. He's like, you're my third one this week. I haven't had one in a year, but suddenly I have three. I have a Dodge in there right now. It's all taken apart. And he shows me the old parts and the new parts. They're all lined up neatly on the floor next to each other. Then he shows me the old parts and the new parts. They're all like lined up neatly on the floor next to each other. Then he shows me the death stain all over his floor. He's like, look, the stuff makes a mess. He's like, this is one of those things where I want to sell my job off to somebody else.

And I'm like, well, don't do that. I'm not going to afford it. And he's like, no, it's fine. So one of his mechanics were just bullshitting. And the guy says, you know, I got a check from Geico once for this repair. You should just file a claim with your insurance and see if it works, you know. If they'll do it. So I was like, yeah, my insurance will go up from that. But this is quite a pricey repair that I really don't want to pay in full for right now, you know? Yeah, right.

So I did that. I called, I filed a claim. The guy was not surprised. He's like, hey, it calls like this all the time. I don't know why these freaking cars, you know, why these trucks, these truck manufacturers put the filler next to the fuel filler. It's inevitable that, you know, a good number of people are going to make this error, you know, at some point in time. But, you know, he filed it. He couldn't really tell me whether it was covered or not because my insurance company has that agent model where I have to call the broker to find anything out, you know? Yeah. But whatever. So then Monday, the adjuster calls and says, oh, I'm sending somebody out Wednesday to take pictures, this and that, took my statements, I sent her some documents, the receipt for the tow, all that stuff, right?

And that was that. So, so far as I know, if they're going to send somebody out and spend money, labor costs to send somebody out, it's probably covered. But it's not over till it's over. So Wednesday rolled around and I didn't hear anything. And I had nothing on the website about the claim. Then today rolled around, middle of the day, I finally text my mechanic, I'm like, did they come by? And he's like, they called yesterday, said he was coming this morning at 830, didn't show up. And I'm like, great, 2022. Okay, so, you know, we're still waiting. I don't know. I hope I'm not stuck with that

massive bill. You know, I'm expecting a premium hike, which would have probably come anyway in this day and age, but. Yeah, I would. Yeah. That's one of those where, yeah, take the premium hike. Yeah. I don't want to drop that cash right now, but either way, my friend, friend of a friend said it's every diesel owner's worst nightmare to have that happen. Oh, man. This sounds like something that would happen in California, not Arizona. Well, it's the EPA, dude. It's not the state of Arizona.

This is all states that have to deal with this? The vehicle manufacturers are required to install that in their diesel-fueled vehicles. That is a requirement for diesel-fueled, definitely, trucks. I don't know if the sedans have to have it, but the trucks definitely have to have it. I thought this maybe was like one of those, like, you know how California, if you buy a pistol in California, you can only have like a 10-round magazine. But if you buy it in, you know, Nevada, though. So that's different. So if I run a straight pipe on the car, that depends on which county I live in.

That's state-level things. States set their own emission standards. But Ford, for instance, sells cars in all 50 states. Right. So the Fed can mandate that Ford put that shit in their cars, even though there's certain parts of the country that don't have emissions or don't test for emissions, you know, or don't have a law in the books outlawing that, you know? Nice job, EPA. Yeah.

Nice job. Yeah. Well, everything's commerce now anyway, Trent, you know? Yeah. You know, they're just looking out for us, you know? They're looking out. Somebody's got to look out for the environment. Look, it's for your safety.

Yeah. It's for your safety. Yeah, that's right. But either way, you know, a lot of the diesel truck drivers I know, both semi-truck drivers and, you know, pickup truck drivers, they've removed that and they just, you know, don't live in Maricopa County. In Maricopa County, because it's Phoenix, you know, go figure, big city, you have to get emissions tested every single year. So I can't remove that. I can't. Okay, yeah.

Because if I took that system out and ran a straight pipe, then that solves the problem. I don't have to use DEF anymore. But, you know, I live in a county that requires emissions every year, so I have to deal with that shit. It sucks, you know? Totally sucks. But, yeah, no, it's not an Arizonarizona thing or california thing it's the epa thing and it's frankly fucking bullshit because the stuff's not better for the environment there's a joke out there they say it's basically cow piss because it's urea you know right oh man well so you and i have had quite the week yeah i mean yeah i wish i i wish that your

experience was as uh positive as mine was but um so the world turns well well let's talk about so today we were wanting to talk about broing out again uh in honor of our our man ct fletcher arms every day yeah every motherfucking day we want to talk about our favorite accessory in honor of our man, C.T. Fletcher, arms-urried day. Yeah. Every motherfucking day. We want to talk about our favorite accessory lifts. And we want to put a little bit different spin on this. So last time we covered this, which was earlier this year, we talked about some of our favorite accessory lifts for the strength-focused lifter, right?

So someone who is primarily doing a strength program, which in our minds means you're primarily doing compound lifts with a barbell. But what kind of accessory lifts would be useful for them in the context of a strength focused program. But today, we want to talk about something a little bit different, which is our favorite accessory lifts for, you know, hypertrophy. You know, if you have a goal of building muscle, but not necessarily put more weight on the bar on your main barbell lifts, right? And I think we need a caveat there, right? Because the caveat is, if you can put weight on the bar on your main barbell lifts, you should do that because that will grow muscle. Like, we don't...

Let's operationalize some of these definitions here. Right, right. Yeah, we can get down a slippery slope here if we're not careful. First of all, strength always has to increase to build muscle. Yes. You know, the thing people argue about are words that they're using to describe these phenomena. people argue about are words that they're using to describe these phenomena. If you're purely interested in getting stronger at the key barbell lifts, which, you know, we'll highlight as the squat, the press, the bench press, and the deadlift, you know, whether you're powerlifting, strengthlifting, or, you know, this is just all you want to do, you know, you know, you're going

to want to, different things will be different – different things will be prioritized in terms of picking your supplemental assistance exercises, ancillary exercises, et cetera. Yeah. If you are – if your goal is to build muscle, guess what? You still have to barbell train. Those lifts still have to go up. You still have to get stronger, but maybe your focus isn't 1RM at all costs, right? Right, right. But at the end of the day, the amount of weight that you

lift for any given rep range needs to go up. And there's lots of different ways to do that. Adding weight to the bar seems to be the most practical because, you know, you keep adding sets eventually, you know, there's only so many hours in the day, how many sets can you do? And then eventually, at what point do you turn a strength stimulus into an endurance stimulus, right? You can add reps, but how many times are you going to repeat a weight that you keep getting nine out of 10 reps for, you know, before it's like, okay, dude, you can't add reps to that, you know? We've all been through it. Adding reps doesn't typically work all that well. It might work if you're doing high rep sets,

you know, and you're doing four or five sets of 10, you might get 10, 10, 8, 8, and 10, 10, 9, 9, you know. But, you know, typically adding reps is an incredibly inefficient way to progressively overload, but it's an acceptable method, and you can use it, and it does quote-unquote work. When people are using the word, quote-unquote, strength in the context of lifting, at least in the mainstream, not when I talk about us, they usually mean training for one RM typically on the barbell lifts. And that's absolute strength. That's the absolute measure of strength is the most weight you can pick up, obviously, because you can't lift can't lift any more than that, you know. So, you know, I can see how, you know, people have defaulted to this position. However, if you are lifting more weight for five or eight or ten than you did last week or two days ago or, you know, however frequently you're doing it or a month ago, aren't you getting stronger then too, you know, obviously? So, yeah, that's a form of strength. You know, you are getting stronger at that rep range.

If you, you know, bicep curl 45 this week and 50 next week, did you not get stronger? You know, then you'll get the, you know, exercise scientists, quote unquote, that will say, well, no, that's neuromuscular. That's not strength. You know, well, okay, you've lifted more weight. Okay, so, all right. Let me say this in a correct method. For them, if you are bicep curling more weight eight weeks from now than you are today, you're not getting stronger.

Twelve weeks from now, pick a number. If you're lifting more, you've gotten stronger at any rep range, right? And the funny thing about this is, you know, so we've talked about strength and how people like to define it. Then people will say, oh, I want to train hypertrophy. And typically, what that means in, you know, in terms of how people in this industry tend to use it, is that you're going to do 8 to 12 repetitions with a bunch of assistance exercises, and the barbell lifts aren't necessarily mandatory. You could use machines and, you know, dumbbells and other various exercises because strength is not the priority. It's hypertrophy.

Well, here's where it gets funny. You know, most of these guys are basing their recommendations off of peer-reviewed research. At least in 2022, that's where a lot of this is coming from. Because exercise is a science now. Some of them are using methods that have been passed on through generations of bodybuilders and various people at the gym that have done this. But at the end of the day, when you go back and you start looking at the exercise science, what you learn quickly is that how are they evaluating progress? Well, they might do a

DEXA scan or a bod pod or calipers and do a body composition test, which has its own limitations. But they might use that to measure changes in body composition, changes in fat mass, changes in lean mass. We're not going to go into that. We should do an episode on that, though. It's a good idea. And then they're going to measure how much weight you've lifted. And they're going to report whether you lifted more at the end of the 12 or 16 weeks. Remember, they do 12 and 16-week programs because they're 16-week semesters.

Right. And they're going to report that. And 9 out of 10 times, and nine out of ten times maybe ten out of ten times the improvement in strength is correlated with changes in body composition you know and we expect that right so of course if getting stronger doesn't matter then why do they report uh one rms before and after and they you know they shouldn't be doing one rms when they're training high reps because it's not applicable you're not getting an accurate one rm we you know, they shouldn't be doing 1RMs when they're training high reps, because it's not applicable. You're not getting an accurate 1RM. We, you know, if you've been around this, you know that 1RM needs to be trained for. You have to practice doing singles for a

period of time. If you're doing 10s, there's an endurance component. That's why there's different adaptations to doing 8, 10, 12 reps. You increase glycogen storage to a greater extent when you train at those higher rep ranges. There is an endurance component. Yeah, it's not like running because you're not doing that many reps, but there is an endurance component. So if you're training a stimulus that is probably 50-50 strength and endurance, you know, and then you try to go to a pure strength stimulus, you're not going to be ready for all that weight on your back or in your hands or wherever you're holding it, right? Yeah. So, to tie it up, when you're quote-unquote training hypertrophy, you have to do more week to week, month to month, you know, year to year, you know, whatever you want, whatever period of time you want to cite. So,

it's still a strength stimulus. And, you know, this whole thing about, well, you don't need to squat. Okay. You tell me. How are you? Tell me a better way to train your spinal stabilizers than a squat or a deadlift or a press, you know? But really a squat or a deadlift. You tell me because you don't have to stabilize your spine in a machine. You don't.

Well, if you use dumbbells, you know, you have to stabilize each side more. Yeah, but what happens to dumbbells when they get heavier? They get larger. The barbell doesn't get larger. So the lift becomes less efficient and eventually becomes less, it becomes a different lift as the dumbbell gets heavier. When you deadlift, it really doesn't become a different lift as the barbell gets heavier. You know, certain things change because it's a lot heavier,

but you're still moving the same shape barbell over the middle of your foot. So, okay, you can make the argument for dumbbells. You can make the argument for kettlebells. You can start getting into some strongman stuff, but now we're losing efficiency with increasing intensity. Show me a better way to efficiently stabilize your spine and use all that muscle mass, your abs, your obliques, your spinal erectors, your traps, your lats, all your back muscles. You know, everything that stabilizes your spine gets trained while your hips and knees are moving with a very heavy weight, mind you. So I don't believe in removing these barbell exercises simply because you've decided to quote-unquote train hypertrophy. If you're a motor moron, then you might have to leg press and hack squat and do those things so you can get intensity on the machine while you become more technically proficient at the barbell exercise that is obviously more limited by technique. I've had to do that for some people that are aesthetics at all costs, but I really want them to squat, you know? Right. Yeah. That's so, yeah, I think that's well said. It doesn't matter if you are quote

unquote training for strength or quote unquote hypertrophy, the bar, the weight in the bar has to go up. That is the machine or on the dumbbell or on the machine. Yeah, exactly. You have to do more over time. This is our basic, you know, descriptive SRA stress recovery adaptation model, right? I like that model because it's very simple and it's easy for lifters to understand, even if you don't understand all of the physiology behind it, it works, right? And if you can think of it in very simplistic terms of like, you got to put more stress into the equation if you want to get more adaptation out over time. And there's lots of ways to do more stress, but there's productive stress and there's unproductive stress. And we want productive stress, which is more weight on the bar, more weight on the dumbbell, et cetera. said, I do think there are people who are low responders in terms of muscle mass and the main compound lifts. So they, I'm talking about somebody who has done the novice linear progression and let's say they trained for, let's just say a solid year with the main lifts, right? So wherever they're at at the end of that year, they've done novice LP, they've done some intermediate style of training, some early intermediate style of training like HLM or Texas method. And you know, they still have got small

delts. Their shoulders are just visibly small. You know, they're sometimes you see people whose quads are just a little underdeveloped relative to, like, they've got a giant ass and kind of small quads. You see people whose biceps are lacking, right? Or triceps. Really, biceps are less so, you know, if you have somebody that's actually doing their chin-ups and deadlifting. Biceps are usually okay, but maybe triceps are small. Hey, I'm one of those assholes that can't get the biceps going, but that's changing. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, it's, you know, some people, right?

So, but point being, like, anthropometry will determine the relative amount of muscle mass that you're, I don't want to say using because that's not right. It's really more of, like, the emphasis on the muscle mass in the lift, right? emphasis uh on the muscle mass in the lift right so if you're if you're a long femured short torso individual um your back is under an enormous amount of moment force at the bottom of a squat because in other words you're very horizontal at the bottom of a squat and um your knee is in a relatively open position while your hips are very very flex flexed. Now, that's just a artifact of the way you're put together, right? Now, you contrast that to somebody who is short-femured and long-torsoed. Maybe you look like one of those Chinese weightlifters. And in the same low-bar back squat at depth, your knees are more closed and your hips are more open than that first person we

were talking about. And I've noticed patterns of development as these people get stronger and develop themselves and drive the weight up on the bar. That first person who is very bent over and very horizontal in their squat may have kind of weak looking quads, you know, for lack of a better term. Conversely, that person who's a more upright squatter may not have much of an ass at all, right? And I think we've all seen these people. So that's what I wanted to draw a distinction is that sometimes there's, maybe we'll call it regional hypertrophy that can be useful as a lifter if you want to get stronger. And of course, too, if you just want to improve the look of your physique, right? If you want bigger delt caps, that's cool, right? There's things you can do about that. And it may not come from the compound lifts. I'll give you one example with your shoulders. I've

noticed this with the starting strength style of pressing. So the press 2.0, as we teach it, involves a dynamic hip start. We shove our hips forward in order to create this bow effect with our bodies and use the rebound of the hip bounce to drive the bar and the chest and the anterior deltoids yes right so there's a stretch because a shoulder extends when you're doing that if that's right yeah the hands kind of drop a little bit you get that little pop and that creates this little stretch reflex, which helps you drive the bar out of the bottom. Um, it's great. Right. And driving your press up absolutely is going to build your shoulders. However, I've run across people who are able to very efficiently do that dynamic

hip start on the press. And they, to the point where they can rocket that bar up to their forehead and then use their triceps to lock it out and they never really develop you know much of a anterior deltoid right where and then you put them that same person on like say a seated press which is a very very strict style of press. There is no hip start available. There's no leg drive available, really. It's just a, it's just all, you know, anterior deltoid out of the bottom, essentially. And they're, they're pretty bad at it. You know, there's a, there's a huge disparity between their press 2.0 and their seated press. Oh yeah. So there's an example of where just doing more and more weight on the bar on the press,

because you're using these, this technique, which, which, you know, makes the lift more efficient for you is not going to necessarily develop the shoulders that you want. So that's where accessories come into play. And we got to be careful with this because, you know, these people are going to hear and say, press isn't a shoulder builder, you know, he's talking about very specific cases and there's various reasons for that. We'll get into that. But in general, and I know you'll agree with me on this, Trent, most people that we have coached, their entire shoulder fills out from pressing. Yes. Including the ever so coveted lateral deltoid that these physique people incorrectly refer to as the medial deltoid.

And I want to strangle them. Not really, but you know what I mean. Anyways. It's on the outside, y'all. Yeah. It's on the outside. It's lateral. I don't have a deltoid between my armpit and the inside of my arm.

You know? I hope not. No. We have lateral deltoids, not medial. I hope not. No. We have lateral deltoids, not medial. Anyways, you know, I get all these questions about side delts from these, you know, physique people,

but especially women because women generally don't naturally have big shoulders. You know, you have. Right, right. So the sport tends to now, the way that they judge it, the sport tends to favor women with deltoid caps. So most women don't have deltoid caps. Most men generally don't but you can bring them out more through training and uh you know these women are obsessed with all these side raises and shit and i just every time i have these girls press their side delts fill out you know yeah that's just what happens that's what happens when you press your all three of your

deltoid heads fill out um i will say that the bench press brings the anterior out more than the press. And I know that from my own experience, because I did a ton of benching for years before I did anything overhead. And I always had well-developed anterior deltoids, no lateral deltoids. I only had posterior deltoids because I did a lot of chin-ups, you know? Yeah, yeah. So, once I started pressing, that filled out that lateral delt. It's interesting, you know, some of the girls I train don't really bench. They do a lot of press, and then when the bench goes up, oh, my anterior deltoid got bigger, you know? So, that's a common thing that happens. So anyways, the whole point is that sometimes you get people that run the program out. Everything tends to fill out. You know, nothing typically will let – nothing will typically not grow.

You know, even your calves grow a little bit. Yeah, you're going to grow. You're going to grow for sure. Everything will grow. The common theme that I see is the back and legs, shoulders tend to grow more than other muscles for a lot of guys. You get guys that will come in, the squat will drive up their lower body, the deadlift will grow their traps in their back, forearms will fill out a little, arms will fill out a little, pecs not so much. That's a common issue that we run into. And that's not with everybody.

That's just with certain people. But, you know, we see that trend. And we see people post up about it on the boards, like, there's a lower body focus program. And that's not entirely true. You know, you get a lot of guys that have been doing other stuff in the gym and doing a lot of benching for many years. And then they try to run the novice linear progression. Their bench goes nowhere because they're a gym bro. You know, they're a trained novice, you know, they actually touch their chest on the bench, you know, they've done full range of motion chest pressing. So they're not going to go very far in a program like that. When you take a rank novice who's

never touched a weight before, they go far just fine on, you know, on the low volume, you know, starting strength Texas method HLM, but that just doesn't seem to work for guys who've been bro-ing out for many years. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So one of the things, and, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, I have not pulled the book open to verify that it's in there, but I recall Rip either saying, or he wrote in the book that the dumbbell bench press is probably better than the bench press because you have more range of motion and you're probably using more muscle mass you know to perform it however incrementally loading it is a fucking pain in the ass yes yeah exactly so that's why we use the bench press yeah i don't recall if that's in the blue book um i have to go look that up but yeah i totally agree that's one of the reasons i do like the dumbbell bench for, you know, an accessory movement

is because you can, and you should take it to a point that's below the point where the barbell would run into your chest. You can take it at least an inch below that, maybe even a little bit further than that. And that extra range of motion is going to carry over to more muscle development. So then that's the last thing I wanted to hit on before we start getting to specific lifts that we like is one of the primary drivers, maybe the primary driver of muscle growth,

in my experience, is mechanical tension or time under tension or whatever you want to call it, right? That it's basically putting a muscle belly under tension over the longest range of motion you can and with the most tension you can, right? And how do we generate tension? Well, we don't tell our muscle fibers to turn on and off. They respond to the amount of weight that we're lifting, right? So, you know, if I want to make more muscle fibers in my quads turn on, then I need to, I can't squat 135. I need to squat 335 or whatever, right? Because they will, you know, my muscles will fire more motor units and therefore you contract more muscular tissue with heavy weights than they will with lightweights. with heavy weights than they will with light weights. As far as we know, that's the way that the human body works is muscle fibers turn on or off. They don't turn on partially.

So there you go. There's your tension is primarily driven by the amount of weight that you're moving. However, we also have range of motion that we can mess with. And I would say as an analog to range of motion, we also have angle. And this can come into play with some of these accessory movements like a dumbbell, where you can, or, you know, really like any sort of chest movement, where you can use different grips and different styles of pressing in order to change the angle of attack, if you will, of the muscle belly as it's moving the relevant joints, the shoulder joint, for instance. Yeah, so that's a good point. So I have another point to make before we

hop into the specifics of various exercises we like for these purposes. We need to first talk about what influences muscle appearance because many people use muscle appearance or aesthetics synonymously with building muscle. And building actual muscular tissue is one variable in that equation. Obviously, if you enlarge the size of your muscle fibers, they're going to look bigger, right? But does that influence all of it? No, no, absolutely not. So remember, your muscles are 75% water. So how hydrated you are can influence the appearance of your muscles.

You know, how much electrolytes you take in. If you have a high-sodium diet, you're going to put water everywhere, you know, so that might smooth over things. Next would be your skin, right? Does everybody have the same skin elasticity, right? If your skin is real tight, you're going to look bigger because it's pressed against the muscle belly and the fat layer over it, right? We'll come to that next. And then what about skin thickness? Does somebody's muscles, if you have two people with the same amount of muscle mass and one has thicker skin than the other, are they going to look different? Absolutely. Thin skin is going to make your muscles look larger. people always think of body fat as this squishy substance that sits around your waistline or on your thighs, you know, or on your butt, wherever, you know. But, you know, a certain amount of muscle mass makes the muscles appear smoother if you're lean enough, right? If you get really

overweight or obese, obviously, it all gets covered up, right? But let's say you're not necessarily ready to get on a bodybuilding stage, but you're still quote-unquote cut, right? And people can see your muscles. Let's say you're 5 to 10 pounds. Let's say 10 pounds. Say you're 10 pounds over. This can even go up to 15, depending on how big you are. We'll save that topic. I'll bring that point up next. But say you're 15 pounds over. What a stage bodybuilder with your, you know, anthropometry muscle mass. Let's just say for the sake of argument, you know what your stage weight is. Most people don't. And let's say you're 15 pounds over that and it's all fat. The difference will be that you'll have fewer veins and striations and you'll look less like an anatomy

chart. But to the average person, all those muscles will look smooth and fuller. They'll look larger, they'll look smoother. And to non-bodybuilding judges, it looks real good. You know, people like that look, you know? Right, yeah. It's aesthetically pleasing, but that's body fat that's doing that. Body fat and also water, you know, those guys are dehydrated. body fat that's doing that. Body fat and also water, you know, those guys are dehydrated, but body fat makes the muscles look smoother, less hard and striated and vascular, right? But they look smoother. You still have visible abs, but they don't have veins all over them, and you don't see the individual muscle fibers on them, but they're still visible, right? Your deltoid caps might look rounder, right? But you might not see them splitting apart, you know, you might not see the fibers and the striations, right? So body fat helps you look more muscular, larger, right?

Arnold talked about this in his encyclopedia, you know, years back, decades ago. And he said that some guys would lose in competitions because they look too smooth on stage and they thought it was aesthetically pleasing because most people think that's aesthetically pleasing. You know, for, you know, if you just want to look good on the beach, you know, that's fine. But if you want to, you know, win a bodybuilding competition, it's not lean enough. You have to get insanely lean. And then, you know, there's a couple other things, you know, as I finish up this point. If you've ever looked at a muscle fiber, as I finish up this point. If you've ever looked at a muscle fiber, you've probably seen that certain muscles have fibers that fan out. They fan out. That's called a pennated muscle. That's

the scientific word for it. And pennated muscle also looks bigger and can produce more force. The opposite would be muscle fibers that run in parallel. They just, you know, the fibers just run alongside each other. They don't necessarily fan out, right? Right. Yep. And that's just the angle of penation. And then lastly, where the muscle inserts on the joint or around the joint will determine how that muscle appears, right?

So the biceps, the easiest one to observe this on the bicep or the calves. Calves is another popular one. We all know the guy with the big, tall biceps peak, right? But then if you look, there is a gap typically between the bicep and the elbow. Now there's another guy that, where the bicep goes all the way across to the forearm when he flexes, right? That's because the bicep tendon inserts probably on the forearm. If you were to, you know, dissect this guy, we're not going to do that. But, you know, if you were to take a look at where the tendon inserts on the bone, it's probably down in the forearm, which makes the bicep appear

longer, right? Versus the other guy, you know, the bicep tendon may insert on the humerus. The calves are another one. We've seen people that have these long calves, and you can't really see much definition. Sometimes it's body fat, but you see these really long calves that go down to the ankle. But then you see other people like me, I have a heart-shaped calf, an upside-down heart, you know? And so all these things that I've listed off, with the exception of body fat and water, are genetically determined. You can't change your skin elasticity. You can't change your skin thickness. You can't change your penation angle of your muscle.

You can't change where muscles insert unless you get surgical intervention. And I don't even know if people do that, but the crazy things people do, it wouldn't surprise me. So these are non-modifiable things. So you have to keep this in mind when you're training for aesthetic purposes. You know, you can put on muscle mass. You can manipulate your diet to, you know, look fuller, you know, through various things. You can take things like creatine that fills the muscles up a little more, but I tend to hear people complain that it makes them look too bloated or whatever. I've never taken it. I'm all for it. I recommend it. I'm just bad at taking things. So yeah, there's things that you can do. The biggest thing is training and diet that will

build the size of the muscle fibers themselves, and it will change your appearance through that mechanism. Staying lean enough can change your appearance through that mechanism, and lean enough is variable. You know, some guys want to be leaner than others, but you can't change some of those things that I listed off. Most of those things that I listed off cannot be changed. Those are determined by your parents, so if you can pick better parents, you know, and you figure out how to do that, let me know, but I want to keep all the good stuff I got from mine. That's the problem, so I don't know that I'd do it. But that's my point. Those are genetically predetermined things. So when we move on here and start talking about exercises, we are trying to target the muscle mass variable. And if you increase the muscle mass variable, your muscles will be more aesthetically pleasing

by your standards and by most people's standards. They will be larger. They will be stronger. They will produce more force. But you may not look like the guy down the street with the heart-shaped calf or the very long bicep, you know? Right. Yeah, I think in terms of like practical examples of this, it's really interesting to look at the sport of strongman because we've got guys who are, you know, carrying enormous amounts of muscle mass, probably far in excess of a lot of bodybuilders, competitive bodybuilders even, but they're at higher body fat levels. But you'll see a very wide variety of bodies because the sport is about lifting extremely heavy objects,

often in very awkward positions. So there's a stabilization aspect that's not there in powerlifting, for instance. But so you have these huge guys, tons of muscle mass. Some guys look, you know, honestly, pretty damn fat when they're at competition weight. You know, guys are walking around 6'8", 400 plus pounds. Oh, yeah. But then you have other guys who actually look pretty lean,

like Hafthor Bjornsson is one of these guys. When he competed, the guy's 6'9", would usually compete somewhere in the 450 pounds. Yeah, 450, 460, somewhere around that. When the guy was in his off-season, he'd walk around at like 405 with abs, with visible abs. It's just insane. At Teddy Hall, 375 with visible abs. You know, it's just insane. And Teddy Hall, 375 with visible abs at 6'3". Exactly. Right. Exactly. It's 6'3". That's ridiculous. But you'll have these other guys in the sport. Now, granted, there's usually a little bit smaller guys, but you have other guys in the sport who are just freaking ripped, you know, like Puginowski. Puginowski, yep. You know, that dude is an anatomy trainer. He could have stepped on a bodybuilding stage right after he won World's Strongest Man and placed.

It was like 320 at 7% body fat probably. Yeah, it was insane. It was insane. But it just goes to show, we have guys here who are incredibly strong and incredibly well-developed as strength athletes, but they display a very wide array of physiques. And part of that's because the sport, you know, there's no points for physique in strongman. You know, maybe there's more endorsements for physique, but there's no points in the sport for physique. So it doesn't select for that. So you get a wider array of body types and some of the champions, you know, some of the all-time best strongmen, uh, like Magnus Vermagnusen, four-time world's strongest man winner. The dude never had a good looking physique. I mean, he was jacked. Yes, but he never looked good. Um, relatively speaking, right. Relatively to other athletes in the field, but the dude was one of

the best strongmen of all time. Uh, the best strongman of all time, the Lithuanian, uh, big Z, Zydrunas Savickas, Savickas savickas uh you know he looks like a bowling ball yeah best strong man of all time like bar none so anyway that's an interesting sport if you want to kind of see some of this like in per you know it's sort of like uh you know you can see the differences in physique there i find this stuff really interesting keep in mind too that you know the biggest variable that I didn't mention are drugs. Drugs influence the way your muscles look in ways that are untrainable, right? You know, these guys that are on drugs have very hard vascular muscle. And, you know, people used to

always tell me, oh, that's just, you know, fat loss. And it's like, well, yeah, if you lose enough fat, you get vascular. I get it. But it's a pretty well-known phenomena around steroid users that you become more vascular when you take that stuff, especially in higher doses. And the muscles definitely get harder. I remember I met a guy once, not even in like these type of circles. He was a guy I used to see at the bars in Chicago. And he was roided up just because he wanted to look that way, and that was it. And, you know, I saw him at the bar. I slapped him on the shoulder, say, what's up? And I'm like, damn, that felt like a fucking brick wall. And, you know, I thought that was all training. You know, your muscles are naturally hard, don't get me wrong, you know, but this was like it felt like a brick. The density was crazy.

wrong, you know, but this was like, it felt like a brick. The density was crazy. And later on, when I first started leaning out, you know, I was getting leaner and leaner and leaner, approaching those single digits. And I'm like, what the hell? Why is, you know, why am I still, I guess, soft? You know, I didn't feel like I was fat, but like, I wasn't getting that density, you know, that I remembered from that guy. And I asked my coach, who's competed in men's physique and bodybuilding, and he's like, oh, dude, that's drugs, dude. Yeah, right. That just lifted the magic off of it all. I knew I wasn't going to do that, but then it lowered my expectations

of what should happen, right? Like I can get really, really ripped, but if you press down on my muscle, there's going to be a certain level of, what's the word I word I'm looking for of, uh, you know, it's going to indent, you know, it's not going to feel like a brick, you know? Yeah. Yeah. There's some, some people call that, refer to that. You may, you may be talking about a different thing. I'm not sure. Cause I'm not, you know, I'm not super well versed in the effects of steroids. Um, but like some people call that tonus, right? The resting tension of your muscles. Yeah. Um, you know, and some people have, tonus right the the resting tension of your muscles yeah tonus um you know and some people have again like to your point about genetics some people have a

higher resting tonus oh i believe that too absolutely you know yeah absolutely so but yeah i don't know if uh if storates specifically affect that but it could be what's what's at play oh yeah and uh one one guy i know that's on, he's just on TRT doses, but he said that when he lifts, the pump lasts three or four days versus when he wasn't on, you know, it's like a few hours, you know? Yeah. And I certainly heard this from other users that, you know, that do bodybuilding type stuff. They're obsessed with the pump from lifting because it lasts longer. Yeah. It's interesting. It's pumped up all the time, you know? There's another aspect of this too, which we'll talk about in another episode because this is definitely down a whole rabbit hole we don't need to get into today.

But I think some of that is related to insulin sensitivity as well, which is affected by testosterone and some drugs. It is also affected by getting in know, getting in better shape and, you know, losing some body fat. That's a whole nother rabbit hole. But yes, absolutely. Your insulin sensitivity, I think, does impact like how you feel and how you're, you know, the pump that you experience after training. Absolutely. Yeah, that's a different topic, but. But yeah, so let's get down to brass tacks now. So let's just kind of go head to toe and talk about some of your favorite accessory lifts for notoriously hard to grow muscles. So let's start with the jaw. I'm just kidding. this. My friend at the gym was telling me about it. I don't think he actually showed it to me. The jaw size? I don't know what it was called, but they have something out there for people that are trying to get jaw lines. And we started talking about the ab belts of the 90s and now

that's changed names over the decades, right? And this one guy is like, they have a jaw thing now. And I'm like, what? They never showed it to me. I got to ask them to show it to me when I go back in the gym tomorrow. But no, we're not going to start there. Let's just start by first, you know, addressing the fact that, you know, hard to grow muscles vary from person to person. It's for various reasons, you know, like anthropometry is the biggest one. The length of the segments or your limbs in relation to each other. So let's say if you have a long forearm or a long arm or small hands or, you know, long femurs, you know, that's going to affect the way that you could target certain muscles. So for instance, I have no problem growing quads, hamstrings, glutes, like everything from my knee to my hip will grow. No problem. My calves, I have good calf insertions. So I,

you know, they look like an upside down heart, you know. However, if I good calf insertions, so they look like an upside-down heart. However, if I don't train them, they don't grow. I have to train them. I got a little bit of growth from squats, but basically when I start doing heavy calf raises, they grow. So that's just a classic example. Calves, people always say, oh, calves are genetic. Yes, the appearance of your calf and the shape of it and where it inserts on the tibia is genetically influenced. Yes, that is true.

But growing calves, most people can grow their calves above baseline. It's just the amount of work to grow calves is incompatible with most people's lifestyle. Yeah, exactly. So let's start with calves and forearms because they're probably the most high maintenance, you know, I would say. Oh, exactly. So let's start with calves and forearms because they're probably the most high maintenance, you know, I would say. Oh, yeah. Why do you think that is, Trent? Well, I mean, let's think about our forearms for a second and what they're attached to. They're attached to our hands. We have a lot of flexor muscles and tendons in there. And we use our hands all the time, every day, all day.

So my guess is going to be they're filled with a lot of type one muscle fibers, um, muscle fibers, which are well adapted to very low intensity, but long duration movement, like typing, writing, you know, cooking, you know, whatever. Right. Uh, and same thing with your calves your calves. We don't have all of that detailed work that we do with our feet, but we do walk around all day, or at least we should. We should be getting our 10,000 steps in. So the calves are very well adapted to that, but less so to high intensity movements where you would need a larger muscle belly. And let's also remember when we're doing our leg exercise, because you might be thinking like, well, we squat though.

You know, we don't use our forearms really much when we squat, but we do use our calves. That's true. But the ankle is not really bending very much. So the calf is really just kind of stabilizing that segment. It's just kind of sitting there isometrically pulling back on the knee and the ankle. kind of sitting there isometrically pulling back on the knee and the ankle. What I've noticed from squats is because your ankles do dorsiflex, the anterior muscle, the muscles of the anterior tibia do hypertrophy from squats, but the posterior calf muscles, not so much a little bit, you know, because there's probably some isometric work going

on there. So you do see some, and I've noticed it when people run the LP, but not much. It's also anchoring the knee when you do deadlifts. So it does some work, but again, you're not going to see a whole lot there. So yeah, back to that. We've established there's a lot of type 1 there in your forearms and your calves. These are two muscles that are virtually hard for everybody to grow. Some guys have naturally big forearms or naturally big calves.

for everybody to grow. Some guys have naturally big forearms or naturally big calves, but, you know, I would take that, I would extend that challenge to say for them to grow them above baseline, they got to work too. I mean, Arnold used to take pictures with his lower legs in water because his calves were small in relation to his quads. He was starting to get a little bro-bod, but his baseline calf size was pretty good. I mean, he had big heart-shaped calves, right? Yes. Yep. And one of the valuable things I learned from him, among other things, you know, people don't give Arnold enough credit. He couldn't teach you how to squat properly, but his general programming advice for beginners in general was correct.

The specifics were kind of fucked up. You don't need to go six days a week, and you don't need quite that much volume that early. But generally, his advice for beginners in terms of what exercises and what to focus on and generally what to do to grow certain areas, that all made sense. Big barbell lifts for beginners because barbells are better for mass. This is a whole other episode, so I'm not going to dive down that rabbit hole. But, you know, I learned something when he started talking about calves. That was his weak point. Everything else grew.

His calves didn't grow. And he said that he observed Reg Park, who looked similar to Arnold. They had similar physiques. And he started training with him, I think in South Africa or somewhere, right? He was a British bodybuilder. And if you look at the pictures, he didn't, his physique did look like Arnold's. So it's pretty cool. But he trained with him and he saw that I think Reg Park was calf raising a thousand pounds standing up. So standing calf raises with thousand pounds on his shoulders. And Arnold had been doing maybe a quarter of that, like 200 pounds, 300 pounds, I don't know, something like that, you know. And, you know, because, again, this is

about strength. He concluded that, well, if I want to get champion calves for the Olympia, remember, he's already on a bunch of drugs. So the drugs didn't grow his calves in and of themselves. This was a training problem, you know, not a problem of drugs. So he figured out that if he wanted to, you know, win the Olympia or Mr. Universe or whatever he was competing in at the time, I think it was probably Universe because by Olympia he had all this figured out. He needed to calf raise 1,000 pounds, so he started doing calves every single day, running up the intensity and was doing standing calf raises with a thousand pounds

uh for i don't know how many reps probably tens you know if i had to guess and uh it dawned on me i'm like well i'm not gonna calf raise a thousand fucking pounds you know i'm a hundred seventy pound guy you know and you know when i get heavier i might go up to 190 but you know arnold was like 250 you know so that's four times body weight calf raise and he's on drugs right so i'm trying to dial this down i'm like okay I'm not on drugs and I don't have bodybuilding, you know, championship bodybuilding genetics. So what makes sense for me? I'm like, well, when I calf raise, I typically stay in the 100 to 200 range and I don't even think I even go that high. You know, this was years ago. This was probably six, seven years ago that I thought about

this. So I probably need a calf raise around 400 pounds, you know. I think that'd probably be good if I can rep out 400 pounds, you know, for at least five reps, you know. Right. And at the time, I was at a powerlifting gym. This was around the time I got really lean in 16. So I was in, you know, 165 pounds at the time, something like that. I just finished cutting, and I was, you know, kind of in the mood to work on some of this stuff. So I got the safety squat bar because they didn't have a standing calf raise machine. They only had a seated one. And I put it on top of the spotter

arms outside the rack, the outside of the rack spotter arms that Rogue makes. And I just draped it on my shoulders, loaded it up with weight. Then I just would hold, you know, put my hands on the spotter arms to balance. And I'd just go up and down because that thing ain't going to fall off my back, you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. You know, barbell is impossible to balance if you're trying to do these heavy. And I did that, and I just started adding weight like I would in an LP. I did it, you know, I undulated the intensity. So one day I'd do four sets of 10, one day I'd do like three sets of eight, and one day I'd do five sets of five. And then I'd throw in seated for higher reps, and I'll explain why in a second, a couple of those days. So I was doing calves like probably four days a week. I want to say at the time, four days a week, and I did standing probably two to three, seated like one to two, right?

And the reason I had it set up that way is because calves, you have two major calf muscles that we typically talk about. You have the gastrocnemius, which is the big heart-shaped looking thing. Then you have the soleus, which kind of snakes on the side of your calf, right under it. Then from the anterior view, you have your tibialis major. And that's what I said earlier. You will develop that from squatting. You don't need to do freaking toe raises or foot raises, whatever they call them. Could.

I'm sure somebody cares about that enough to need to do it, but I've just never had to do that. Anyways, so the gastrocnemius, from what I've gathered from both bodybuilders and the exercise science community, has more type 2 muscle fibers than the soleus. the exercise science community, has more type 2 muscle fibers than the soleus. And this would kind of make sense because runners typically, you know, especially in the biopsy studies, you know, they've, you know, biopsied some of these muscles. And runners, especially sprinters, bend their knees a lot, you know. So you target the soleus with seated calf raises. That's where the load sits on your knees and you go up and down. So if you think about runners and cyclists, they use their quads a lot, you know, so they're doing a lot of knee bend and that's going to hit those muscles for lots and lots of reps, right? So if the gastroc is high in type two, higher in type two, and the soleus is higher in type one,

then you would want to hit the gastrocnemius with heavy weights for lower reps, you know, anywhere from 5 to 10. You know, I guess you could do triples. You know, you can go pretty heavy with them. And you want to hit the seated calf raise with higher reps. So, you know, 20 reps, you know, 15 to 25 reps, you know, per set. And you want to do that frequently because why? Because we walk on them every single day. So they are very fatigue tolerant. You can

train them quite often. Do you have to do them seven days a week like Arnold? Unless you're competing in bodybuilding, probably not. When I did them four times a week, I was being asked if I was doing a show because I came back, you know, the beginning of the, I was a PhD student. It was in person, you know, because this was pre-COVID. And I had to go into campus. It was 100 degrees out, and I'd wear shorts. And people hadn't seen me since the previous spring. And the previous spring, I dropped all the weight, but then I started hitting calves in the summer. So I probably had like three, four months of this shit under my belt.

And I started getting questioned about, are you doing a show, man? I'm like, because they're looking at my calves. I'm like, no, I just started training calves, you know? So it does work. But again, you heard what I just said. You do them four days a week and you have to put weight on them. I was doing 405 for sets of five on those calf raises. Actually more because I had four plates on it. So it's 425 on a safety squat bar. So I was doing 425 for sets of five on that. And then I just got lazy with setting it up. Now I'm doing it again because my quads have gotten substantially bigger from all the squatting, especially in the last two years. And

you know, I can't be accused of skipping leg day, you know, so I started throwing them back in. So now I'm doing standing calf raises. It's been maybe a month. So I haven't, you know, I'm starting to see a little bit of growth, but probably in the next month or two, I'll start getting those accusations again, but I'm doing them three times a week. So that's how you would address a muscle like that. You have to train it very heavy. You can also do donkey calf raises. That's a little bit trickier to set up. You need a machine for that unless you want to put somebody on your back, but a donkey calf raise, and I think the name originates from the fact that you're bent over and the weight's on your back or your hips, right? In the 70s, Arnold used to have guys sit on his back, like three or four bodybuilders. So that's like 800 pounds, probably, you know? Yeah. And he would, you know,

the load would be on his back and hips, and then his feet would be on a block so that you can go all the way down. So that's another thing. A lot of people don't go all the way down and fully dorsiflex, you know, raise the foot towards the shin at the bottom. You have to go all the way down, full range of motion. Anyways, yeah, so he'd be bent over, feet on a block, he'd have his arms rested on something, and then he'd go up and down with all the weight on his hips. I used to do these with a Smith machine and put, you know, a bar pad on it so it didn't dig into my spine. It just got to be a pain to set up, and i get plenty out of standing but if you're not getting plenty out of standing you can try that variation and see if

that works because the donkey calf raise configuration hits both the soleus and the gastrocnemius so you get a kind of equal application of force on both um then you know people do the leg press i never got anything out of that it just feels too. Then, you know, people do the leg press. I never got anything out of that. It just feels too easy and weird. You know, then there's like these 45 degree donkey calf raises where you're sitting and, you know, you're kind of bent in the same position, but the load's on your feet, not on your hips. I don't like that either. I don't find it to be useful. So yeah, that's calves. Forearms work a similar way. You have to train them frequently. You can do various wrist curls. What I have found to be helpful, it's too early to tell if I'm going to get hypertrophy from this, but

how did I come across this? I started using hand grippers, captains of crush hand grippers. Are you familiar with those, Trent? I am. So these captains of crush hand grippers have helped me develop my hand strength. And my traditional weakness has been biceps and not just bicep curls. I've always struggled with any type of rowing or any type of shrugging exercise that didn't allow for straps. And I always just thought that weak points, you know, I just can't develop them and this, that and the other. And since this realization, I am not convinced a muscle will not grow if other muscles will. And, you know, you can argue this all day long. I think that if you can grow muscle, you can grow muscle. You just have to find a way to stimulate that muscle. And sometimes there are limitations due to anthropometry, leverage, lots of different things can limit that.

For me, it was my hand strength. I had no fucking idea. So I started doing this arm program that Andy Baker put together. And, you know, I was just like, I'm committed to it, you know. And something was happening at the same time at my gym that coincided with this. I had a member who was complaining that his hands hurt. He's a doctor. He's an anesthesiologist. And I told him, I'm like, you should get some hand grippers and, you know, do a bunch of reps with them to get some blood circulating to your hands. And he's like, no, that might make it hurt. I'm like, if you go light enough, you know, get a light one. Then I said, I'm like, I know I have one. I'll bring it in. I kept forgetting to bring it in. And meanwhile, I'm doing this arm program. And then I was in my garage one day, and I saw the

box that it was sitting in. It was sitting in this box with wrist wraps and a couple other gym items that I never used, you know, that bought once, left them, you know. And I'm like, oh, I got to bring those in. So I throw them in the car, and they're sitting in the car at this point. Meanwhile, I'm doing this Andy Baker arm program. Well, my rows are just struggling as always. And I'm, you know, I'm feeling the weakness in my brachioradialis. You know, that's where I always would feel it when I'd row. And the barbell rows especially were hard. The seated cable row that with the triangle grip was challenging, but I was going up.

I had to start really low in weight. And then I was already microloading by week three, you know. And I just thought, I'm like, well, these are my weaknesses. Let me got to address them. You know, it's like grab the hand gripper. I start fucking with it. I'm like, you know, I'm going to do sets of 20 with this. I'll do three sets of 20 while I'm driving, you know, switch hands, you know, I did this and then it started getting easier. And I'm like, I mean, I think I want to, I need to go up on. So then I bought the next one up. I had the, the guide, which was 60 pounds of force, supposedly. So, you know,

I bought the 80 pound one called the sport. And I started doing that one for three sets of 20. Well, something interesting happened. I go in Friday, this is probably week four, maybe. And suddenly the barbell rows got easy. And I'm like, what the fuck's going on here, you know? And so I just did them. And then I'm like, I need to put more weight on. So I put more weight on and I did them. And I just felt more connected to the bar because my hands had already either gotten stronger, or I'd increased proprioception from doing all that hand gripping while I'm driving. And I'm accumulating quite a bit of volume while I'm driving. The instructions in the Captain's A Crush manual suggests that you should focus on intensity, not volume.

You know, I agree with that, but I think the same rule kind of applies. That applies to calves. You have to do both. So then I go to the cable row, and I'm having to do five-pound jumps, and I've been doing these five-pound jumps for about six or seven weeks now. And remember, on week two or three, I had to microload. It was too damn heavy. I couldn't keep going. Well, now my hands feel like Velcro to the bar or the cable attachment. So I'm like, this is interesting. So then the biggest one, this is where I knew for sure it was working. So he has shrugs in there with dumbbells, no straps. I

started with 100. I figured that was a good place to start. I got it, but, you know, my hands were getting tore up. The aggressive knurling on those rogue loadable dumbbells was a bit much, you know, and they have the zinc oxide coating ones, the DB15s that are 15 pounds. And I would open my hands slow because it was just burning, you know. And I did five pound jumps on them because, you know, I know I can shrug a lot with a barbell. So, you know, I know my traps are strong, but I have to not use, I can't use straps, you know, so did 105. Then around 110, I was barely keeping my fingers closed. Then at like 115, I couldn't, I can only do sets of 12 or 13 and the program called for 15. Well, around this, that same workout that I just told you, the rows and the cable, the cable, but then when I reached, but then when that workout came around,

where the barbell rows and the cable rows got easier, I had to go shrug and I just repped that 115 out and was able to just sit there and hold the damn dumbbells at the end of the set. And I'm like, what is going on here? Now I'm doing 130s. Same thing. I can hold it at the end of the set. I'm also using the 100-pound gripper now. And I have the 120.

I can do triples with that one. So I'm still making progress on those. So I'm like, this is pretty cool. I hated these exercises since I was 18 because I thought my arms were just failing on me or, you know, my forearm muscles, the brachioradialis. I thought it was either my biceps or the brachioradialis that was weak, you know. But now here I am, and I thought I couldn't shrug either. And here I am now. I'm holding 130-pound dumbbells, shrugging sets of 15. No problem. I'm videoing and I'm not cheating them, you know. And the biggest one was my biceps. Now when I'm grinding through a barbell curl or a dumbbell curl, I feel a lot more stimulation. I feel like it's no shit failure.

Whereas before, I knew that my forearms were failing. So I just thought, I'm like, I can't curl because I got this long forearm, you know. But because I have stronger hands, I'm able to pump out more reps with that shit. It's fucking crazy. Yeah. able to pump out more reps with that shit it's it's it's fucking crazy so yeah yeah no i recommend those hand grippers for people that have problems with grip they work you know just to start out get the guide the sport and the trainer and uh do those eventually you'll probably you'll probably need a 0.5 and a one you know if you get really this, you can keep trying to go up. I think it goes all the way up to 365, which is number four.

So it goes guide, sport, trainer,.51, 1.52, 2.53, 3.54, and only four people have closed the four. I believe at a two or a three, you get certified with Captain's a Crush. You can follow Iron Mind on Instagram and see people getting certified. It's pretty cool. But yeah, I always remember, uh, Magnus Samuelson. You remember him? The world's strongest man. Sounds familiar. He's a big Swedish dude. He had huge like Python biceps and forearms. He's one of my favorite strong men of the nineties. And he was one of the few guys that closed the captains of crush the number four number isn't the number four is that the biggest 365 yeah yeah he's he's he's like

one of the just a handful of guys that have closed that yeah i'm not under any illusion that that's ever happening but you know as with anything else we always try to do a little bit more yeah right right well um so let's uh let's move on then all right so we talked about calves we talked about forearms when we're talking about biceps uh yeah curls for the girls for the girls you've got to train the biceps that's got to train the biceps um i think i mean you know i i'm not granted i i am a um i'm a dyed in the wool barbell coach and um i don't really train people in physique but i don't train people i do run yeah yeah that's fair that's fair i think you have you have more experience in it than i do yeah but i do have some folks that occasionally

are they get tired of lifting heavy all the time and lifting purely for strength so so i do have a few uh routines that i like to put them through. And with the biceps, I find myself kind of gravitating to having someone train them twice a week and doing one real long range of motion exercise on one of those days. And on the other day, doing a shorter range of motion exercise that is high in, like basically puts the biceps under tension the entire time. So, and that seems to work pretty well, at least for the barbell trainees that I have that are, you know, usually pretty strong, but maybe you're lacking some size that they

haven't trained their biceps that much other than the ways that we train the biceps normally. So I'll have them do, for instance, like weighted chins on that one day and, um, you know, work on, you know, if they've, if they've never done it before, maybe work in a heavier rep range. So we'll accumulate 25, 30, 35 reps in threes and fives with, um, as heavy as they can go with a weight hanging off the half a dip belt. And then on the other day of the week that they're training biceps, I'll have them do a real strict curl. And they'll do that for eights, tens, twelves. And I often will have them do the last of, let's say they're going to do three sets of eights or three sets of 10.

I'll have them do that last set as an AMRAP and really try to squeeze out some extra reps at the end. And the key though, I find with the bicep curls, I'm curious if you approach it the same way, is that I want them to be real strict. And so I don't always like to do a standing bicep curl like most people think, like you grab the easy curl bar and curl it up to your chin. You can do it that way, but the temptation is, is the weight gets heavy enough to really drive progress. The temptation is to get a little body English in there and like lean back. And so you can finish the rep. You have to be very disciplined to, you know, puff your chest out, stand up real straight, make sure you lower the bar all the way

down and you're, you bring it all the way up to the chin without any body English. So there are some other tricks you can do to curl without that, right? You can do like preacher curls. Um, you know, that's usually my go-to if somebody has access to that as like a preacher curl where they, you literally can't move your body because you're sitting in the apparatus, right? Um, but that's my basic approach is two days, one real long range of motion, like a weighted shin. The other one, a traditional curl, but with higher reps and very strict.

And also, I like to curl both biceps at the same time. Not a huge fan of alternating curls. Yeah, I don't like alternating either. I think the biggest thing with biceps or any type of isolation exercise is you have to apply the same principles. alternating curls. Yeah, I don't like alternating either. I think the biggest thing with biceps or any type of isolation exercise is you have to apply the same principles that we apply to barbell training. Yeah. You have to incrementally load them, which means that you have to use your fractional plates, for one. And you could do a barbell curl,

and you could do it with or without body English. I start strict always, but at some point it's going to get heavy, and you have to draw the line somewhere, just like you do with barbell rows, right? Yeah. Yeah, and to be fair, that's, yeah, a little bit of English when you're squeezing out the last couple reps, no big deal. But you shouldn't be doing it the whole time. I've seen people literally drop the weight out of the top so that they can get a little rebound at the bottom and swing it back.

Turns into a reverse clean. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, I keep that one in there. I like dumbbells a lot for biceps. But again, you got to incrementally load them. There's a couple ways to do that. If you have a loadable dumbbell, that's one way you can do it. And you could just put plates on it.

dumbbell, that's one way you can do it. And you could just put plates on it. You know, it's kind of a pain in the ass to warm those up because, you know, you're putting, you know, plates on four sides instead of two sides, you know? Yeah, right. But, you know, that's what I've been doing. That's what I have access to. If you're at a Globo gym, you can buy those Rogue add-on change plates that they make. And those clamp... Oh, Rogue makes them now? Yeah, yeah. They clamp on on the inside of the dumbbell. and those clamp on. Rogue makes them now. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, cool. They clamp on on the inside of the dumbbell. Yeah, I know. Microgains, I saw, came out with some of those a while back, and I thought it was brilliant. Yeah, those work, too. I don't remember if they have the same increments as Rogue. I know Rogue has a one, one and a half,

and I think a half or something like that. I don't remember. Oh, okay. Yeah, nice, nice. The thing is, you have to buy two sets of them, because remember, unlike a bar, you're using two dumbbells, you know? Yeah, right, right. So you've got to buy two sets. And you just have to really be on that you know if you

incrementally load them they'll go up you know i did i ran i've been running a arm specialization program that i got from baker and uh the way that i've been uh progressing it is i've been adding weight and the way that i've been adding weight is I've just been microloading. He has, I think he has like lateral raises in there for delts and, uh, there's sets of 20. So I just add a half or a quarter pound plate to each side of the dumbbell. So it's a half pound total of a pound increase each week. And they've gone up every single week, you know, so it works, but you know, a lot of people don't do that. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes with curls. Yeah. That's, that's a great point. Cause that's, um, so talking about Andy Baker, one of the things I learned from him that I really like is when I do that AMRAP set,

um, at the end of my curl routine, I'll do a rest pause set. Oh yeah. He loves that dog shit. Yeah. Which, which originally came from, uh, he's got a whole episode about this, Dante Trudeau's dog crap training routine. But yeah, basically it's, you know, you do an AMRAP set and let's say that you were doing, I don't know, let's say you did two sets of 10 and then you're going to do a last AMRAP set on those curls and you get 11. You take like 10 or 15 breaths, pick it back up, and you bust out a few more. And oftentimes you'll surprise yourself. You may think you got two or three more reps, but you'll get four, five, six. But the theory being that those six reps that you did on that second AMRAP on very short rest are, you know, the muscles are already extremely fatigued. You know, you're putting it, you're basically working a fatigued muscle. already extremely fatigued, you know, you're putting it, you're basically working a fatigued muscle, you know, so it's this, it's kind of equivalent to the last two reps of the other

sets that you did, right? Of the first three sets that you did, because, you know, the first six reps, what did I say we were doing sets of 10? Yeah, we were doing sets of 10. So the first eight reps of the first three sets, they were stimulative, but not that much. But the last two are usually a challenge, right? That's where the real money makers are. So that rest pause set though, all six of those reps that you want to call it. They're supposed to be more highly stimulative to the muscle and generate more growth. I don't know exactly what the mechanism of action there is, but it works. But I find that a lot of times when I'm trying to do that with a curl, especially with a barbell, my forearms pump up so bad. Oh yeah. That I'm like, I clearly got more in the tank, but yeah, my, my forearms are just so pumped that I can't get, you know, I'm probably leaving a few reps in the tank. I really think that's where those grippers come in handy. Yeah.

That's a good idea. Now I'll let you know, because I think tomorrow I have to do barbell curls, rest pause, and I haven't done those yet. So the first phase of the program, I had to do one-arm preacher curls for a rest-pause set. Then the second phase of the program, I had to do cable curls. Now this third phase, I have to do barbell curls. So let's see how well these grippers have worked. But, you know, it's great. You don't use a lot of weight, but it's great. The way he instructed me to do it well via his program

you know i didn't actually talk to him was i think the first set was 20 and it was supposed to be a failure and then you do the you know short rest period and then you go an amrap then you do a short rest period then you do an amrap um and that's how i've been doing it so it ends up being like 20 and then like seven and then four or something like that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's a big fall off there, but yeah, I think that that's the other thing too, is like, uh, yes, you absolutely have to progressively overload these exercises. I think the other thing is that when we're talking about, you know, as strength athletes, primarily we, we consider these accessories, you know, Andy makes the argument that if you're a bodybuilder, none of this stuff is accessory. There's no such thing as an accessory lift for the bodybuilder. And that's a fair point.

But, you know, as we look in a strength hierarchy, we look at these lifts as accessories. But one of the things that you have to keep in mind too is that, you know, there's a curl taken to failure is not a particularly stressful lift in terms of systemic stress on the body. Um, it's, it's nowhere near doing like a set of 20 curls is nowhere near doing a set of 20 squats, right? Right. So that the, the amount of fatigue that you're going to build up, it's not very high on this stuff. So you really need to take these lifts to very close to failure, if not straight to failure often, because if you're not, you're just, you're not working hard enough to, to grow. And so I think that's another element of this. And that's where the AMRAPs really come into play because it lets you know if your rep range was, was off or if,

or if your weight was off, you know, if you do eight, eight, eight and 15, you know, you probably could have worked harder in those first two sets. And so you need to fix that next time you do it. you know, you probably could have worked harder in those first two sets. And so you need to fix that next time you do it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I haven't curled very long to say I like, you know, one exercise versus another. I think the barbell curls, the main lift probably. I like seated dumbbell curls, like standing dumbbell curls, like hammer, I like hammer curls. I think the brachialis is a very important muscle if you want arm development because it lies between the biceps and the triceps. So if it gets larger, it pushes those muscles out more, so it changes the appearance of your arms via that mechanism. So, yeah, I like reverse curls and hammer curls, but I like preacher curls for the same reasons you described.

I do them one arm at a time. I don't like an easy curl bar personally. Some guys have to use it. Yeah, I was going to say, so the thing about the easy curl bar is, right, is it gives you a little bit of bend, so it allows you to pronate your hand a little bit versus a barbell, a straight barbell curl where your hand is more supinated. And you can feel it. If you just do that in front of you and you supinate your hand, you can feel your bicep, you know, get tighter as you supinate your hand. Yeah.

So, yeah. So, you like the barbell curl over the easy bar curl? Yeah, because when you're holding it with a completely supine grip, you're using your biceps more. And the more you pronate, the more your brachialis gets worked, which is important too. But I'd rather do a bicep curl or a reverse curl or a hammer curl, you know, versus use an easy curl bar, but some guys have to, and I understand it. Yeah. Sometimes the weight for some people makes it a little easier because it, you know, with the barbell curl, you know, you got to start with 45 pounds. Um, I also, I do like the easy curl bar though for, um, it's versatility and home gym.

So if you just don't have access to much equipment and you, you know, you definitely don't have access to dumbbells or anything like that. An easy curl bar is nice because, um, it's cheap. You can get one from Titan for like 60 bucks, maybe something like that, 70 bucks. It's good enough. And you can use your existing plates. You can use your two inch plates on it. And you can also do some useful tricep exercises. And so, you know, if you got to curl with that, you know, or kind of switch between that and your straight bar, no big deal. Because there's other things you can do with that easy curl bar that I think are, are quite useful. So let's talk about that triceps. Uh, yeah, triceps. I had to do a lot of stuff for that when I was a swimmer because, uh, you know,

old school nineties, man, uh, we had to isolate stuff, you know, and we had to not work the biceps because if we got big biceps, we couldn't extend our arm all the way to fucking swim. Yeah, we went long muscles for swimming, right? Yeah, it was fucking bullshit. Anyways, I like the overhead tricep extension with the straight bar. I used to do that. I like French press. It's pretty good.

I like dips. You know, dips are one of the king of all tricep exercises. I like close grip bench press. You know, I prescribe kickbacks for people, but I don't particularly like them. You can't go that heavy. Eventually, you can't lock them out. It's one of those things. I think they're good for high reps, though.

I like pushdowns. Those are fun. But in terms of effectiveness, I think the dips, the close grip bench, the overhead barbell extension, the lying tricep extension, which I also use a straight bar for. Sometimes I do it to the forehead, otherwise known as a skull crusher. Skull crusher. And I'll use an easy curl bar for that sometimes, but I try to use a straight bar a lot. One that I like that I learned from C.T. Fletcher, of all people people it's not very popular but i like doing the line

tricep extension with a uh supinated grip you ever tried that yeah i have not you just got to be careful because it feels like the bar wants to come out you know right yeah you only get your thumb on one one end of the bar right yeah you feel gravity for sure but man that feels pretty good i enjoyed that interesting yeah i'll have to try that that's now is he holding that when he does that is he holding it real narrow on the bar or kind of just shoulder width a little inside i think it's narrow i do all my tricep stuff narrow yeah yeah sure um to you know remove any extraneous moment arm between the wrist and the elbow so i think you kind of you kind of skipped over this one real quick,

or you kind of just threw it in there, but I don't think a lot of people are very familiar with this exercise, at least not in the starting strength world, the French press. Now, I've been programming these more often for folks, you know, if only as just kind of a, just to change it up and not do LTEs all the time. But, um, yeah, the French press is interesting. So, you know, go look it up if you don't know what that is, but it's essentially, it's essentially a triceps extension, but it's not done lying. It's usually done seated. I've seen them done standing as well. So you, you start it from overhead and then you lower it behind your neck to, you know, base of your shoulders basically, and then back up.

Is there anything, is there any reason you prefer the seated press, or sorry, the French press over the LTE? No, I mean, I don't necessarily, I think the LTE is probably better. I feel like I can go heavier. A little bit longer range of motion. A longer range of motion, go heavier with it. Yeah. I like the French press near the range of motion. A longer range of motion. I can go heavier with it. Yeah.

I like the French press near the end of the workout. It's not bad. You know, I have to load my dumbbells on, and it's awkward because the dumbbell has a sleeve that hangs off at the end, so I nick myself sometimes when I'm going down. Yeah. Then I have to put the plates on backwards so my hands have a flat surface, so then that messes with my OCD. Yeah, yeah. But, no, my OCD. Yeah, yeah. Now, I like it. It's fine.

Triceps aren't quite as hard to develop because you do use them quite a bit when you bench and you press. But, you know, when you start doing them, you know, that's the first thing that grew when I started doing them. But I think it's because of swimming and years past of, or years of experience doing tricep isolation, doing a lot of dips, you know, uh, and I've basically been under training them just by benching and pressing. Um, I did get growth out of press, um, on certain parts of it, but man, once I started doing tricep isolation, that was the first thing people noticed within a

few weeks. It was just the, it's like a novice effect thing when you stop lifting you start lifting again it was that whole thing you know it just had rapid gains in the triceps size whereas everything else has been more steady and gradual yeah uh i feel like triceps are a little bit more i don't know i feel like a lot of guys that i get that are coming out of like novice lp have underdeveloped triceps interesting and yeah they just you know they they start to like i get a lot of guys that will miss benches in the middle oh of the range of motion you know they just they can't lock it out uh same thing with the press you know especially if they're able to develop a good dynamic hip movement and they're able to get a real explosive start out of the bottom

in the press 2.0 that we teach in the starting strength method. I find that they usually are struggling to lock out. And so, yeah, I'm the same way. I do like the close grip bench quite a bit. I also like the triceps overload movements like the pin press. Oh, yeah. I don't know how effective it is for growing triceps overload movements like the pin press. Oh yeah. I don't know how effective it is for growing triceps, but I mean, I feel like it's it. What I do like about it is you can move very heavy

weights, especially once you practice it and you do it often, then, you know, you should be able to get to the point where you can pin press for singles, doubles, maybe triples more than you can press overhead full range of motion and once you get to that point um i think it becomes a really effective exercise oh yeah uh you can do that you can do the same thing on the bench press too with uh like a board press right can be useful uh you can use a slingshot as well it's kind of a similar idea you take take some of the strain off at the very bottom of the lift even though you you are going full range of motion with a slingshot as opposed to a board press, but you get a little help out of the bottom. So it helps you overload the top of the movement. Yeah, that makes sense.

Um, bands and chains are kind of fun too. Again, I, at this point, I don't know if that's really going to grow them so much, but it will help you train through your sticking points. And if you can move more weight on the main lifts then you know you will you will get some growth there yeah but yeah i that seems that seems to work like just kind of something heavy and something for some volume yep yep you know so close grip bench then dips if you can't dip because you're you know fucks up your chest or your shoulders whatever then you know do some l. My experience with dips is, I wanted to mention this since we're on the topic, if you use the method where you place the two barbells on the spotter arms, I think that eliminates the problem nine out of 10 times because I am convinced that people jacking up

their shoulders doing dips is the result of these parallel bars at commercial gyms being too wide, you know, and you can't adjust them. You can't adjust that width. When you place two barbells parallel to each other over the spotter arms and get between them, you can adjust that grips that you could have a nice angle on the humerus so that you're not flared out so far. Yeah, that's a great point. Um, you know, unless you're a refrigerator, you probably don't need to be doing dips at the very end of the parallel bars. Um, you probably need to cheat them, cheat up pretty quick. You know, if you're, if you're using those like Matador, Rogue Matador style, crazy man. Yeah. You need to, you need to kind of choke up and get up in there

close and then of course you have the problem like your chest is running into the end of the bar maybe depending on how narrow you need to be but yeah now if you're okay so if you're are you talking about using rips rack with that's that uses the fairly narrow uprights so you can wedge them against the uh wedge the barbells out against the uprights to hold them in place or how are you securing them when you set your width they don't roll they don't roll on you no they stay in place i did it on the track i did it on the rogue spotter arms that i bought for outside the rack squatting and whatnot okay yeah they that's not believe it or not okay bars do not roll you roll. That's the first thing people get worried about.

And it just doesn't happen. Very good. Excellent. What about diamond push-ups? You know, those were really popular back in the day. Oh, Jesus. I don't fuck with push-ups. P90X. I remember that, what, 10 years ago? Hey, I remember that. What? 10 years ago? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I remember I did P90X. There was a buddy of mine from college that, you know, I don't know, it was some summer after school and we hadn't worked out in like three or four months. And we were like, man, we got to get back in shape. Let's hit a workout today.

We're like, all right. Oh, I still got the old P90X videos. Yeah. Did you do it? And we're like, which one should we do? Legs? Nah. Yoga? Definitely not. Oh, I still got the old P90X videos. Yeah. Did you do it? And we're like, which one should we do? Legs? Nah. Yoga? Definitely not. Oh, yeah. Let's do arms.

Of course. Yeah. Arms and chest. Yeah. So arms and chest. So we did that. You know, it's just like a bunch of, we had like a couple of dumbbells and like a kettlebell and like, you know, it's just as you do like a million sets of like pushups, diamond pushups,

you know, pushups with the like, you know, down dog style, you know, with your legs all or your ass up in the air and all sorts of stuff like that. I couldn't raise my arms above my shoulders for like a week. I was so incredibly sore. It's ridiculous. Remember Insanity? That was another ripoff of P90X. Yeah, I never did that one, but I remember when it came out. Exercise, man. Needless to say, my triceps did not get bigger doing that. Of course not. Yeah, I can't recommend. Can't recommend. What about chest? I like dumbbells. Do you do anything for the chest? I really like dumbbell benching and flies are probably cool. I'm not doing them right now but uh yeah I thought

about this the other day uh when I was I was benching with dumbbells and my buddy tried to tell me I wasn't going low enough and I'm like bro I can't go any lower and he's like you're about where you are with the bench then like I'm like all right well here I took the weight off brought the empty I actually grabbed a pair of empty dumbbells I have more than one set and I went all the way down and I'm like, dude, that's it. That's what I have, right? Then I got the barbell and I went all the way down and I was in the same spot. So then I had to troubleshoot this because, you know, it's obvious what we, we know that you get more range of motion out of dumbbells than you do out of barbells. And there's a couple of reasons for that. And so I had to think this through so that I can explain it, how I'm going to right now.

Number one, it depends on how much body fat you have on your torso. So if you're a big fat guy and you have a big giant waist, then your range of motion on the bar is going to be shorter than somebody of the same structure who's leaner, right? Because you're going to touch the fat pad, either on your stomach or, you know, lower chest or between your sternum, you know, wherever you're touching. Right. You're going to go. You're not going to go down as low. Right. However, if you load up a dumbbell, you're going to go past your belly, you know, as a fat guy. Yes. Yeah. But that's that's not where all the range of motion comes from. Right. So, like, I'm pretty lean right now. So my range of motion is identical in the vertical plane.

So if I go down to the bottom, it's going to be in the same place with a barbell as a dumbbell. So what changes? Well, you get more horizontal adduction, AD-duction when you bench with dumbbells versus barbell. Barbell, your hands are fixed on the barbell and you only get so much rotate and you only get so much adduction of the shoulder when you're going up, and it's fixed. When you have a dumbbell, you can add more. You can go in more as you're pressing up. Basically, as you're describing, you're rotating the dumbbells in slightly, right? So you're externally rotating the humerus, right?

So you can kind of turn them in a little bit on the way down, right? So you can therefore adduct the shoulder more. You're adducting the shoulder more with the dumbbell. And that's why flies are considered pec isolation exercises because there's no elbow extension on a fly. You're just adducting, right? And when you're bench pressing, you're adducting the shoulder, and you are extending the elbow. Two things are happening, right? So that's why I like dumbbell bench versus barbell bench. I think you use more muscle mass through a longer range of motion, and Rip has mentioned this, I believe, in the Blue Book. I'm not sure where he said it, but the problem with dumbbells is

the same thing I said earlier. They're not always easy to incrementally load. So you have to just make sure that you have a way to incrementally load them. And I think that you're going to see a lot more pective element with a dumbbell than with a barbell. That said, the dumbbell bench doesn't really transfer to the fricking barbell bench, man. I detrained on the flat bench. So you got to do both. Right. That's so true. Yeah, do both. Like, yeah, I just did bench for the first time. I've been doing close grip bench nonstop. Baker keeps that in every program. But I haven't done regular medium grip bench press.

And I did it yesterday for the first time. I put 205 on and I got, I think the sets were supposed to be eight reps, four to eight. And I got eight, I got eight, I got eight. Then I got seven. And I'm like, shit. I'm like, I've done 225 for 10, you know? Yeah, right, right. But I was dumbbell benching 90s, but I guess that's 180 combined. So there you go.

You know, there's a clear weight difference there. But either way, I have always noticed that when I bench with dumbbells, my pecs grow rather quickly. And it happened this time. It happened when I was younger. And it's pretty reliable. And so I knew that something was different about it. And that's what it is.

You get more adduction of the shoulder. Now, obviously, the dumbbells get larger as they get heavier. So I haven't tried this yet. Uh, cause I just started getting into heavy dumbbells at the end of that phase, but, uh, you probably have to start rotating the wrist at the top to get a little more range of motion when they get real heavy. Yeah. I mean, that's what I've found with, you know, I think I've done the hundreds, um, with plate plate loaded dumbbells. I've not done them with, like, Globes or anything. I think the highest I've done with Globes is, like, 85 or 90 is what we had at the gym I used to work at in Texas.

Yeah, and certainly those become a big issue because you get this giant-ass ball on the end of it. You know, getting them into position in the first place can be a big issue if you weigh less than the combined weight of the dumbbells. Well, they make trays now that can go onto your rack, i want to buy a pair they're like three oh yeah like four hundred dollars i think and you get and they go into the rack and they like you know interesting go in and they like turn you know like all the rogue accessories

and there's a gap in the middle so you can reach for the bar then you can just unrack it like a barbell interesting if you miss you just drop it or you know you could put some blocks under the bench if you want to do that you know i mean if you have a good technique it's it's not it's not so bad right you just you just got to learn how to do it right just set those dumbbells on your thighs sit down and then like kick them up yeah with your with your thighs when you roll back it's an energy leak i want i want to get those trays i'm getting those fucking trays is this like the monolift the dude once you have you benched with a monolift do you have one i i have not i'm still yeah i've got a i've got a long

shopping list before i get the monolift shit over here man if i end up road tripping that way i'm bringing mine so you could you could try it all right dude fair enough i'm telling you once you bench with a monolift you won't bench any other way because it eliminates all these problems you don't need a human to hand it off to you no matter how heavy it is and you're not going around your face with a barbell you know yeah that's that's that's worth it right there is yeah because you don't always have a good handoff and yeah it's worth it but i want to get the dumbbell trace so bad so uh one other thing and i've mentioned this on a previous episode too but one thing that i've noticed if you're dealing with this has really helped me is you know i've i've had just off and on like the last year of training

i've just had these little pec strains that have just popped up it usually in my left pec but it's it's it's in the muscle belly. It's not a tendon strain or anything like that. So I've had that too, and that different issue. But I've gotten to the point where sometimes I'll just have these little pec strains that'll pop up and I just cannot tolerate benching with a standard grip. So I've messed around with close grip, usually can fix that for a while. Sometimes I'll even go wide grip just just changing up a little bit just changing the sort of angle of attack of that pec moving the shoulder seems to help um that's one thing if you have access to dumbbells you can really do because you can you can fine-tune your uh you know your your angle that you're

using as you're right lowering the dumbbell and that that can help too if you're dealing with you know tweaky pecs you know because the last thing i want to do is tear my pack right um definitely don't want to do that so i'd much rather train around it so yeah but i yeah i like that too uh the uh dumbbell fly i'm gonna name check andy baker again uh i saw this on his instagram a couple years ago he he he does uh when he does flies he actually lays on the ground. Interesting. And then does the fly. And it basically, it just, it really isolates the shoulder. So you don't

have that element of like lowering the fly to potentially a different spot every time if you're laying on a bench. It really locks your shoulders in. And so I find like, especially when you're fatigued, it supports the shoulder. And so it allows you to really isolate that pack and, um, and really blast your packs without any risk of like getting tired and letting the weights kind of maybe crash down a little too low and, you know, potentially tearing your shoulder up. Yeah. Pretty cool. Especially if you're doing a lot of like heavy pressing and stuff like we do in your program as well, you might just have a lot of fatigue when you're attacking these things on at the end. I wonder if you could modify a lot of like heavy pressing and stuff like we do in your program as well you might just have a lot of fatigue when you're so i wonder tacking these things on at the end i wonder if you could modify that and put some short jerk blocks or something under the uh under your bench so you can go lower and still have something to touch yeah probably yeah you could probably get the

same effect there but i i've yeah i was surprised at how well it works um just laying on the ground that makes sense. Another novel lift here. Again, I don't know how good this is for, you know, as a hypertrophy stimulus, but the floor press is kind of interesting. So I went through a phase of floor pressing for a little while, and I think of that primarily as kind of a triceps lockout exercise. Yep.

Similar to a board press. But I was surprised when I did these for like eights and tens at how, like, man, I got a huge pump in my pecs. It's like my pecs were just under tension the entire time. I believe it. Which I was not expecting. It was pretty interesting. I'm not quite sure what's going on there.

I'd have to think about it some more, but. You're still getting some adduction. You're still getting some adduction. Yeah, I think a little bit more than you do, you know, if you're doing like a board press, let's say. Yeah. Yeah. I would say so. It's lower usually. Yeah. I think that sums up most of it. I mean, we get into lower body isolation, but I think it's kind of pointless. I mean, you could do, I mean, when I prescribed it, I just do the obvious stuff. All right, do some leg extensions, some leg curls. I have to use squatted, of course.

Let me be clear on that. Certain people want more variety in their workouts, so I'll put, you know, okay, superset leg extensions and leg curls. But I prefer glued ham rays to a leg curl, to be honest. And if there's one available, I prescribe it, and I have them do the hip extension as well to get double hip and knee extension. I think those are highly effective. I don't know if the leg extension is actually effective,

but if you're going to do one, you've got to do the other, right? You know, this reminds me of, have you ever seen Tom Platz's muscle camp video? Yeah. Where he's talking about, he demonstrates his hack squat technique. And okay, so we'll link this in the show notes because it's hilarious.

If you haven't seen this before, Tom Platts, I don't even know how to describe it. He shows like a bog standard hack squat. He's like, okay, this is how most people do it. He's like, but you know, I was on the quest for the ultimate legs ever and so um so i do i figured out how to do it this way so he basically like hits the bottom of the hack squat like like rock bottom just ass deep in the machine and then he lets his butt come off the pad and and basically lets his knees come way forward like he's doing a hip off of the bottom of this yeah and then he like lets his heels come off the ground too

and then and then he like pulls him you know pushes himself back into the pad and back up it's ridiculous it looks like my my quad tendons just feel like they're going to explode when i watch this and then after the hack squat he starts talking about how he does leg extensions. It's like he gets a partner to hold his legs while he dry humps the machine. Oh, geez. It's so ridiculous. Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, yeah, I don't know. I'm not a fan. I think lunges are cool if your knees can handle them. Some people complain. You know what's funny? I accidentally got. I think lunges are cool if your knees can handle them. Some people complain. You know what's funny? I accidentally got really good at lunges just from doing all this, just from squatting heavy. I remember when I was working with another coach a while back, he put some circuits at the end of the workout, and lunges were in there. And I did them, and I'm like, whoa, I can do them with good form.

I just had a lot of control, you know? So that was pretty cool. You know, a lot of my female clients want to target their glutes, so, you know, I put hip thrusters in there. Those tend to work. RDLs, you know, depth-set RDLs. You know, but now we're getting into assistance exercises. Well, hip thrust is an ancillary slash accessory, but RDL is an assistance exercise. Yeah. I like, I like RDLs. I like the, you know, again, cause it's,

it, it's a very deep stretch on the hamstring, uh, barbell, uh, good mornings can be the same thing, especially, uh, if you have like a cambered bar, um, especially those are, those are real nice, but yeah, it's, you just basically just throw your ass way, way, way back as far behind, you basically want to get as much of your body behind the midline as you can when you do that. And you'll feel a massive stretch in your hamstrings. And that's, that's great. I think, you know, taking it through that real long range of motion and, um, you know, lots of mechanical tension on that hamstring is good. Um, I, you know, I like the, uh, front squat, especially for, you know, on a light squat day. So if, if, you know, if you have a program that calls for squats at varying loads, you could replace your light squat day with a front squat instead.

Yup. And take, and take that thing rock bottom, like as deep as you can. Uh, cause I, yeah, I've definitely felt, you know, you've definitely felt, you know, you'll feel it in the quads when you do that. And I've definitely noticed a little bit of quad development just from incorporating some real deep front squats. It developed more back awareness too. I like using that for that purpose as well. Yes, definitely. Yeah. Definitely helps you keep your upper back extended better. Um, it helps when you're coming out of the bottom. My guys that have problems with rounding their back out of the bottom of the squat, I fix that with a front squat. Just making sure that it gets heavy enough.

That's the key. Right. Yeah, exactly. And the biggest thing about the front squat is everyone pusses out way too fast on the rack position. Oh, yeah. Everybody's like, oh, I got to do California grip. I can't tolerate it. It's like, no, you can't.

I won't let them do it. I just make them suffer through it. Yeah, it sucks, but you can do it. Now, there are some people out there that have freakishly long forearms that becomes extremely difficult unless you're really flexible. But that's not most of you.

Most of you can tolerate the front squat. It just takes a while. Um, I think our friend Phil Meggers on the starting strength, the YouTube channel has posted a couple of videos about how to stretch that front rack position. So go check that out. Go look it up. I think his, I think his gym is testify strength and conditioning, uh, but it's on the starting strength channel. You can, you can see some novel ways to stretch out your forearms, but once you do it, once you get, once you build some tolerance to it, it's like the hook grip, you know? Yeah, it sucks. But once you get used to it, you can, you'll be able to front squat more. Yeah. It's, you know, just, just kind of suck it up and,

you know, best way to fix that is with more weight. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And that'll really teach you to, you know, keep your chest up, keep your elbows up at the bottom, because if you let your elbows drop and the bar starts yanking you around at the bottom of the lift, that really sucks. So, you know, it's good. accessories for the back. I guess some of these could be called probably more like assistance exercises or accessories. It just depends which one we're talking about. But Andy Baker really sold me on these shrugs, these dumbbell shrugs specifically, that has really challenged my grip. And my traps have actually grown. I was mainly just – I did them because they were in the program,

but I viewed them as this is going to make my grip stronger, which it has, but not until I got the grippers involved that I was able to hold anything. But then all of a sudden, my traps started growing, and that was pretty cool. I do like those. I like the Olympic-style barbell shrug. I think that's great for the deadlift. barbell shrug. I think that's great for the deadlift. You know, you start near lockout, then you, you know, use your hips to try and rapidly, you know, get that bar up quick and shrug those traps. Um, I think those are great and they allow you to use a lot of weight. Like you could do a lot more than you can deadlift. Yeah. And I usually like, you know, a hundred

plus pounds more than a deadlift. You better be deadlifting over two and a half times body weight if you're going to mess with that. Yeah, that's the thing, right? I've run into some folks that wanted, there was a guy that I was talking to fairly recently. He was talking about wanting to do shrugs. And I'm like, bro, why don't you get your deadlift to 405 first? Yeah, exactly. That's going to do a lot more for your traps than doing shrugs at, you know, at 405.

405 is not that much weight for shrugs,, you know, at 405. Yeah. That's not, 405 is not that much weight for shrugs. Yeah. Really? No, you could probably shrug. What did Rip say he was shrugging in the 800? So probably a couple hundred pounds over his deadlift, you know? Yeah. Right. Yeah. You'd have to train up to that. You don't start with that. But I like those. I like, I've been, I've been converted. I like shrugs now. The grippers have made me like a lot of things that I used to hate. Rose, I've made fun of for years. I gave up on converted. I like shrugs now. The grippers have made me like a lot of things that I used to hate. Rows, I've made fun of for years. I gave up on them.

Like, they haven't done shit. The deadlift developed most of my back. That is still true. But since I started rowing and since I got stronger at rowing because my hands and brachioradialis were no longer an issue, I started seeing all these random muscles on the corner of my back start to reach the surface. So, you know, I like barbell rows done, you know, the traditional way off the floor like a deadlift with, you know, rapid motion, more explosive. I like dumbbell shrugs. Those are fun. That's a classic, you know, bodybuilding movement that you see done at the gym.

Usually that one's not fucked up too bad, except these guys tend to round their backs. But there's that one. I like cable rows with the triangle grip. That's fun. Of course, I like chin-ups and pull-downs and close grip pull-downs and close grip chin-ups. You know, neutral grip, I should say. I like all versions of chin-ups. The one that i should say i like all i like all versions of chin-ups the one that i've been pushing now is the wide wide grip uh one of my goals is i'd like to get at least you know five to the chest i've never been able to do that um but uh how how wide

are you going there you know like the end of a pull-down bar okay yeah so it's pretty wide yeah i've never been able to get all the way up. So right now I'm at like 120 pounds, I think, on the pull-downs. So I'm hoping that I can get those posterior deltoids strong enough to get my body up there because I've seen guys do it, you know?

It's possible. Yeah. Now wait, did you say chin-up or pull-up with the wide grip? Pull-up. Wide grip pull up. Okay, yeah, so pronated grip. Okay, gotcha. I was about to say, because I don't have the flexibility to go too wide on a chin. No, no, no.

Wide grip pull up to the chest. I would like to do that. I know I've gotten it behind the neck before. I have done that, but I've never gotten my chest to the bar with a wide grip. I could do it with every other grip, just not the wide grip. Yeah, yeah. So I'm working the wide grip pull-downs right now to the chest. When I was a swimmer, we did it behind the neck.

So I'm strong in that position. But I don't like to do that because, you know, for most people, it's not good for the shoulder. Maybe my shoulder can handle it, but I don't want to find out. Yeah, right, right. But, yeah, you know, the way Andy sets up his arm program is one day you do arm isolation, The way Andy sets up his arm program is one day you do arm isolation, and then you get the rest of your arm work from these compound accessory slash assistance exercises. So I have a day where I'm doing bicep curls and tricep extensions, and then there's a second day where I'm doing bench press variations and presses, right? And then there's a third day where I'm doing all sorts of rows and shrugs, you know?

And I got to say that that's a bit, I think that's driving a large part of the growth in addition to obviously the isolation stuff. But all that rowing and, you know, pull downs and chin ups, that drives growth. And you have to include that, you know, you can't just do arm curls two, three, four, five times a week you know you need to do them for sure if you want to grow arms but uh you also have to row and you also do chin-ups or pull-ups and uh yeah you know things that'll challenge your grip like dumbbell shrugs without straps you know you know some double overhand deadlifts or rdls you know could be useful because all that contributes. You know, you're using a heavier weight, you're challenging your forearms more, which allows you,

like you said earlier, to get through those sticking points a lot better, especially when you're doing burnout sets with things like barbell curls. You know, if you're used to holding a couple hundred pounds for an RDL set of 10 or 12, you're not going to have a problem bicep curling an AMRAP with 70 pounds, you know, or 60 pounds. Exactly. Right. You know? Yeah. I think, you know, yeah, I think that's, it's a good point that you highlighted. I think it's probably, you know, a good point to end on here because it brings us back around to what we were talking about the very beginning is that, you know, a lot of people, I think when they think, oh, I want bigger arms, I need to train them six days a week or a day, seven days a week if you're CT Fletcher. Um, but you know, we joke about it, but the thing is like,

that's, that's probably wasted effort. You know, what you need to do is pick, it's just like anything else. You need to pick a handful of quality movements and, um, you need to progressively overload them. And you need to do that over a period of time, like month over month, you need to progressively overload them and you need to do that over a period of time, like month over month, you need to see your weights going up on these exercises. And if they're not, they're not, they're probably not going to be very useful to you. I don't think there's really a lot of magic in the particular style or type of variation that you pick for any of these things. I don't think so. You know, there's some that we like more than others, but you know, some of that might be anthropometry based, you know, it might be just like the way that I'm put

together, these work better than those. And, you know, and I certainly use different variations for different, um, you know, for, for my different trainees and I'm just doing the same thing. I cycle them through a whole bunch of them and we kind of find them the most useful ones over time and we'll just, we'll just stick with those. Um, But I don't think there's really any magic in one type of variation over another. What it is, is it's the progressive overload. It's the long range of motion, lots of mechanical tension, and that requires some discipline in the effort of the lifter. You can't cheat these and you can't sandbag them if you want to grow. So, um, the progressive overload will take care of some of that, but you also have to volitionally go

closer to failure, if not all the way to failure on these lifts in order to get enough stress to grow these muscle groups. And you, and you can do that, right? You don't, we don't want to be doing that on our squats and deadlifts, um because, you know, that's how you get into injury territory. But you can do that on curls and tricep extensions and, you know, that kind of stuff, right? And you should. And you should. So, yeah, I think that's kind of a good place to wrap up there. Anything else to say about that?

No, that's really about, you know, I echo those thoughts. I think that, you know, that last point I make, it just, you know, kind of brought it back there that, yeah, you need to do your compounds, you know, your main lifts, but then even assistance exercises for those lifts can be very important to developing those lagging muscles. So like, like I was saying, you can't, you don't want to curl two, three, four times a week. You want to curl, you know, once a week is probably good, maybe twice. But then you have to, you know, row and do your chin-ups. And this is all in addition to your squats and deadlifts, you know, and your presses.

Right, exactly. Exactly. And that's kind of what I was getting at when I was talking about, like, I like people to do, like, a chin-up and a curl, right? Because a chin-up is like, it's not just a bicep exercise. It's an upper back exercise, too. That a curl, right? Because the chin-up is like, it's not just a bicep exercise. It's an upper back exercise too. That's important, right? I actually, you know, I was always big on chin-ups.

And for novices, I think chin-ups are phenomenal for developing biceps in novices. Yes. I think once you get all those gains eked out, like I did many years ago, probably before starting strength, because remember I had to do these for swimming

and I was doing them heavy already, you know? Right. So I haven't gotten anything out of chin-ups in over a decade in terms of growth on the biceps. I think rows tend to work better, in my experience. It's funny I'm saying this now. I've made fun of them so much. Maybe I'll change my mind later, but I don't think so because I've really tried to troubleshoot this in my head. I'm like, why am I, you know, I can, you know, the grip was the thing that caught my attention. When I do chin-ups, you know, I've went up to 300 pounds with me plus the weight, you know, and never had a grip problem. So I never thought that, you know, my forearms or my hands were the weak link because I can chin 300 pounds up and max out no problem. My hands aren't opening up. So, you know, I had to sit down and think this through. And, you know, I've hook gripped my heaviest deadlifts, you know, but, you know, I have long

fingers, so I can explain that one. So I thought about this, and there's a couple of things there. And, you know, when I'm hanging on the bar, obviously, my fingers are secured around the bar pointed towards the ceiling, right? So it's probably a more secure grip than if I'm barbell rowing something off the floor and my fingers are pointing at the ground in line with gravity, right? Gravity is pulling them open, you know, whereas gravity is pulling the load down on them when I'm doing a chin-up, right? So that's for the grip portion of it. But then beyond that, I was thinking about joint angles and how that would impact muscle mass in the lift. So when you're doing a chin-up, your shoulder is fully flexed overhead,

your elbow is fully extended overhead, and your lats are at their maximal length. So to initiate the movement, if you're doing it correctly, which most of you are fucking this part up. I'm just going to tell you right now because it's the number one thing I have to fix with chin-ups all the time. Most of you listening are fucking this up. You're rolling your shoulders forward to start the lift. I know you're doing it. You need to do what's called scapular depression.

You need to depress the scapula and use your traps to do that, specifically the lower part of your trap. So the upper traps elevate the scapula. That's a shrug. The mid traps retract the scapula. That's what you do when you row. Then the lower traps depress the scapula. It's what you should be doing but are fucking up when you're doing chin-ups or pull-downs. Typically, what I see in most people, and some very good lifters too that do this, is

the elbows start to bend right away. And then you get these complaints of elbow pain. And I am very much convinced, I'm going on a side tangent here, but this is important and relevant to what we're talking about. I'm convinced that 9 out of 10 times this elbow pain I hear about on chins is because they're not depressing the scapula before they start pulling the bar. elbow pain I hear about on chins is because they're not depressing the scapula before they start pulling the bar. They start the lift by engaging the biceps and the elbows, and they're not depressing the scapula. So if you're doing a chin correctly, your torso, your body essentially, since your whole body's hanging off the bar, will become more horizontal at the initiation of the lift. If you're doing it right, that's what will happen. If you're staying vertical, you're probably rolling your shoulders and protracting your

scapula. And that will transfer a disproportionate fraction of the load onto the elbows. So, you know, I just wanted to point that out. But to my point about biceps, if your arm is fully vertical overhead, the lats are fully stretched. So you can engage quite a bit of your back before your biceps start doing anything, if you've done this correctly. That's why I brought that up. So if you start, you depress the scapula, your body becomes more horizontal. Your lats pretty much pull your elbow. Your lats pull your elbow back, start to extend the shoulder. Then right around the middle of a chin-up, your biceps start to really kick in.

Then the end of the range of motion of the chin-up is actually completed by the tricep, where it inserts proximally. And people don't even think about that. When you pull the elbow back to touch the chest to the bar, that is your tricep that is finishing that up, because the tricep is also a shoulder extender on the proximal side, proximal end. And if your elbow is fully flexed at that point when you get to your chin, so it can't be your bicep. So to get from your chin to your chest, that is your tricep. So that is an arm, function of the arm muscles. Just a little bonus piece there since we're talking about muscle group type training.

You want to go chest to bar because for a variety of reasons. You want the most muscle mass or longest effective range of motion, but going from your chin to your chest engages your tricep where it inserts proximally. And when you're rowing, in contrast, to get to the end of my long explanation here, your arms, so let's say you're doing a bent over barbell row, and this applies to any row. Your arms are perpendicular to your body, so your shoulders already partially extended. Your lats are shortened, right? So you are using your lats when you do a row.

That's one of the reasons you do a row is to engage your lats, but they're already fixed in a shortened range of motion because your arms are perpendicular to your torso versus a chin-up, your shoulders fully flexed overhead, your elbows fully extended overhead, you have the maximal stretch in your lats. Now you bring it down to a perpendicular place, now your lats are shortened. So you don't actually engage your lats as much when you row versus when you chin because it's a shorter range of motion to extend the shoulder. As a result, your elbow flexors have to work harder when you're rowing versus when you are chinning because they don't have as much support from the lats as they would on a chin-up. Similar to what I said about the chin-up, you have to retract the scapula before you start pulling the bar so that you don't get a bunch of shoulder

elbow pain. Just like on a chin-up, you have to depress the scapula before you start pulling the bar. So again, every exercise is a back exercise. Let me make this clear. If you're doing a free weight exercise, whether it's a barbell, kettlebell, atlas stone, dumbbell, yoke, whatever, you are responsible for stabilizing your own back. Every single exercise you do with a free weight is a back exercise. So remember that. But, you know, to summarize my point, I think a row challenges the elbow flexors more than a chin-up because the lats are shortened at the big throughout the start of the movement so you don't get as much range of motion around the shoulder so but you're getting the same range of motion around the elbow isn't that interesting yeah that's interesting yeah that's

um yeah and that's a that's a great point that's a great point that's part of the reason why these you know there's a reason we don't just do one type of accessory movement ever, right? You know, sometimes as you get stronger and as you develop as a lifter, you have to be able to challenge your muscle bellies in a way that, you know, with angles and, you know, by manipulating ranges of motion so that you can put that mechanical tension on them, right? You know, and that's something you're right. As a novice, when your deadlift is not that big, your lat strength isn't, you know, it's maybe more on par with your bicep strength. Of course, the lateral, it's a much bigger muscle group. It's always going to be stronger than the biceps to some extent, but they can work more in concert. But as you get really strong, you know, if you've got a double body weight deadlift,

then all of a sudden, you know, chin up becomes a much more, um, you know, menial task. Yep. So, so you've got to, you've got to find some other ways to stimulate the bicep. Yeah. Very well said. Yeah. Interesting. Great point. I had to, because I've always struggled with the damn rows and yeah I had to figure out why and once the grip strength was there that answered part of the question but uh I still noticed even after that I noticed a lot more in my elbow flexors and that's when I started thinking it a lot more thinking through it a lot more deeply and it's the reduction in range of motion on the shoulder

while maintaining the range of motion on the elbow places more load on those elbow flexors. And that also depends on how you're gripping the bar, whether it's going to be more bicep, more brachialis and forearm, et cetera. Well, I think we've pretty much replaced Arnold's Bible of bodybuilding. What is that? His bodybuilding encyclopedia. You don't need that anymore. Just listen to this podcast. Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, it's like two and a half hours long now, so. Because both of us are former seven-time Mr. Olympias, you know?

Right, yeah. No, well, hopefully you found that helpful. And, you know, just remember your principles, right? Don't get too wrapped up in what exact variation you're choosing. Just pick a few, do them, and overload them. And do that for a while before you start changing things around. And then you'll probably see some growth if you actually, you know, put some real effort into this stuff. So, last point. I want to repeat this,

and we've said it throughout the podcast. You need to get strong first, and you need to never take the main lifts out. I don't want to hear that Santana's running a bodybuilding podcast or a physique podcast. That's not what we're doing here. Let's be very clear. When I program, quote unquote, bodybuilding stuff, which I don't really do, but when I do that, I never take the squat press bench and deadlift out of the program they may be de-emphasized versus someone who is training purely for one rm strength but um they're still in the program absolutely and they they form the backbone they just the the frequency and the rep ranges may change a little bit versus someone who's training for let's say a power lifting meet

but we don't take them out yeah no absolutely absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Let's just make, yeah, we want to make sure that that point gets across. Yeah, and if you're a novice, you don't need to worry about any of this. You know, that's not what we're saying here. Most of you will stay novices for a variety of reasons, but if you make it past that weed out phase where you can, you know, focus on something more specific, and this is what you want to focus on, these are some of the things you could do. So hopefully that helps. But if you are a novice, you need to get strong at your main lifts, you know, do your squats, add weight three times a week, then two times a week. Once it gets to a point where you three times a week, then two times a week.

Once it gets to a point where you need about a week, you can start thinking about this. But not until then. It's just going to distract you and fuck up your program because your fucking triceps are going to be sore. You're going to miss your press. Your coach is going to get pissed. You're going to say you listen to me, and then he's going to call Rip, and Rip's going to have me killed. So we don't want that. Okay. Yeah.

So, yeah. On that note, let's close out, man. All right. All right. Thank you for tuning into the Weights and Plates podcast. We appreciate all of your support and all of our listeners. You can find me at Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. You can find me at Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. And of course, my website, weightsandplates.com, which is for the gym and the online consulting services.

And I also have an Instagram page for that. It's weights double underscore and plates. Yeah, please go hire Santana for all of your coaching, bodybuilding, and diet needs. Fuck off. Because he's got a truck to pay off here. I'm basically buying a second car. Yeah, right. So go hire Santana if you need some help with any of those things.

In the meantime, you can find me and my exploits on Instagram at marmalade underscore cream. And if you want to send me an email, you can send me an email about coachingstuffsjonesbarbellclub at gmail.com. All right, we will talk to you again in a couple weeks. Thank you.