Weights and Plates Podcast - #42 - Liver King, The Limits of Research, and What Actually Works

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

If you are into lifting and spend any time on social media at all, you've probably heard of, or at least seen, the Liver King. Coach Trent and Coach Santana discuss the recent "controversy" around the Liver King's steroid use, why nearly everything you see on the internet is fake, and what we actually know works when it comes to getting strong and building muscle.   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. Good evening, sir. Good evening. It is actually night here too. Yeah. Yeah. This is the time of year that is, uh, sucks because it's like five 30 here in the Eastern time zone, at least it's like five 30 and it's pitch black outside and it's been like

raining and foggy all week here. So, you know, yeah, I feel like it's, it'll be like six 30 and we won't even eat and dinner yet. And it feels like it's midnight. I'm like,

all right, I'm ready to go to bed. I'll look at my phone. It's like, it's six 25. Yeah. We don't do daylight savings here in Arizona. Yeah. So on that note, if you live in a climate or a geographical location like that, it's probably a good time to start taking your vitamin D. I just started taking vitamin D last week to combat the fact that I'm probably not going to get a whole lot of sun for the next couple months. Yeah, we need to get some sponsors so we can abruptly interrupt what we're saying and like promote something like everybody else does.

Nature's vitamins. Yeah, right. What is the Ollie ones? I see those damn Ollie commercials everywhere all over my YouTube. Yeah, I don't know. They've got like a color for each, you know. Are you in a energetic mood today or a p YouTube. I don't know. You know, this has got like a color for each, you know, are you in a energetic mood today or a pensive? I don't know. Well, when we have, when we have that bullshit on our show,

that means we're probably doing okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, but we have a topic today, but before we get into that, um, we got to talk about liver King. Liver King. Can you make me echo when I say that? rip does liver king yeah i can do that king king king king um yeah so uh i just think it's hilarious right so we talk a lot about on this show the effects of steroids and peds on people's physiques that are out there taking their shirt off for a living and if you don't believe us then you can just look to the latest scandal that has struck the liver king right so there's this dude if you don't know the liver king he's i think he's actually kind of funny i didn't know much about him but i of course i'd seen him because his face is just plastered all over the internet. If you, you know, if you get on YouTube or social media at all,

you probably have seen the guy, but if you haven't, is this dude who kind of, he's like a modern day Hulk Hogan, except that his whole character is that he's like, I don't know, 40, super tanned, like really jacked, super lean, you know, like 9% body fat. And he goes, he's got this huge beard and he's like always harping on about like being primal. It's like, you gotta be primal, brother. And, uh, you know, you gotta follow the ancestral tenets of living, sunshine, you know, good sex, lifting weights. Um, I don't know what they are, but you know, he's got this whole, whole shtick that he does. And he also eats raw liver and raw meat all the time. Of course, that's one of it because it's primal.

The way I was introduced to this fucker, I had a client from South America come visit me. Him and his brother are from here. We were just bullshitting. He was squatting. I was coaching them. Then all of a sudden, we started talking about social media personalities. Like, have you heard of this new one, Liver King? You know, he says, if something's wrong with your liver, you eat liver. If something's wrong with your lung, you eat lung. And I'm like, I just started laughing. Is that really?

Yeah, yeah. I don't know if he said that. I'm assuming so because, you know, these guys aren't... That sounds about right. Yeah, these guys aren't the type to make shit up. But he was like, yeah, they say, if your heart brought me heart. And I'm like, you know, it's the stupidest thing ever, but it's gimmicky and he's probably making a shitload of money doing it without knowing anything else about him. You know, fast forward, this whole fucking thing happened, which, by the way, we threw it in the title so you would click and listen to it, by the way. Of course, yeah, right.

Even we have to use some clickbait. Yeah, it's relevant, though, right? Because, all right, so basically, if you haven't followed the news and stuff, and I don't know a whole lot about this cause I don't, you know, he's just another charlatan. Um, there's been a million of them before him. There'll be a million more after him, but basically another guy who's probably also a charlatan, uh, this dude named Derek from more plates, more dates on YouTube. That's the name of his YouTube channel. He does all these like breakdowns of like actors and athletes. He's like, are they natty? Here's the stack they're probably on, um, as if he knows. But, um, yeah, so he, he exposed the liver King. So apparently the liver King like, uh, wrote into this guy

because he's, um, you know, he's got basically like, uh, some sort of like hormone consultation service and the liver King like wanted coaching on, on his like, like hormone consultation service. And the liver king like wanted coaching on his like, like steroid stack. And so, you know, he did the intake form and stuff. And so, so Derek from more plates, more dates outed him and showed like all the shit that he was actually on already. And then, you know, the like $11,000 a month on growth, growth hormone that this guy's taking. And all the dextrose and protein powder that this guy eats every day. And all the raw meat and liver that he's not eating that he claims he eats, right?

I didn't catch that part of it. Yeah, so he's taking a bunch of protein powder and dextrose powder and all that shit. He did eat a little bit of raw meat. He wasn't totally out of his diet. but it certainly wasn't like his whole diet, you know? So anyway, I brought it up because I think it's hilarious that anybody thought that this guy was natural in the first place. Like the dude looks like he has ab implants. It's like, he just like sewed in these like pockets of like rock and like the separation is ridiculous my understanding is that he has owned a supplement company for a long time now and apparently he's very wealthy from that and he decided to create this moniker because he decided he wanted to be famous in 2022

like could you have picked a worse time to decide to be a media personality yeah yeah exactly well yeah so he says all this is he says as much in his uh his apology of course he has an apology video now he'd be like i lied about it because he i left out that part he's always he's always claimed that he's been natural like people ask him like hey bro like you take steroids you've been on steroids he's no, I don't touch that stuff. Never did. Never will. And so now he has an apology video to admit that I was lying, but I was rich. You see, I was rich though. And I decided I want to become famous, put a face on this and help people. So anyway, this, this guy's just a character. so anyway this this guy is just a character so it's just a reminder if someone takes a shirt off for living then they're on steroids like it just they they do yeah it's like it's a 99 chance that

if they take their shirt off for living that's like a big part of what they do in their marketing they're on steroids and for the five guys that aren't, that I'm wrong about, it doesn't matter because the 995 other guys who are- We better clarify this because I take my shirt off for a living sometimes. Okay. Yeah. Let's clarify it. But well, but that's, is that like essential to your marketing? No, it's, you know, I'm doing shit. Yeah. It's an aspect. It's not, and aspect. It's not in every single video I film, but, you know, it happens. So when you're working out at the gym, right, you have, like, either a T-shirt on or, like, a tank top, right?

Mm-hmm. Okay? Like, you wear normal clothes to train in, and you post normal lifting videos of you actually training the way that you train. So what I'm talking about is the guy who's, got a YouTube video and like their, their shirts never on. I'm not going to sit there and have a conversation with you with my shirt off. It's just, you don't go on, on shows on other people's shows on YouTube with your, and like have your shirt off for the whole thing. Right. Okay. Never has a shirt on. So that, that's the people I'm talking about. That's the people I'm talking

about. Every single one of them. If they're sitting there having a conversation with their shirt off, they're probably on drugs. Yeah. And yes, your favorite guy is on drugs. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. Because what they're trying to do so this is the thing the secret of all marketing Is that all marketing is trying to convince you? That you have a problem That you didn't know that you had You see you don't look like this guy Who's got his shirt off and he's super ripped

you don't look like this guy and you see like you didn't think that was a problem before now, but The marketing is trying to convince you that that's a problem. You just haven't perceived it yet that you're not lean enough and you're not ripped enough and you need to be like this guy. And then you're like, if you listen to this shit and you let it come in, you know, you let it live in your head, right? By consuming a lot of this content, then you can easily convince yourself, especially if you're a young impressionable person that, Hey, I need to look like this guy. And then, well, how do I do it? Well, then, then you're, then you're susceptible to the plan, right? He's got a programming template that he's going to sell you. He's got supplements. He's going to sell you. Right. And then you realize that none of that stuff works. Oh, this reminds me of,

and you know, I don't know if it still happens. I just, I don't see it on my feed and you know how that goes. There's algorithms, but Instagram, what, four or five years ago, probably three to five years ago, it seemed like the thing to do was to, you know, show your big, happy family. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. The humble brag. Yeah. Yeah. Same. Is that still happening? Cause i just don't see it so i don't know it was a thing four years ago though it was yeah you know it's yeah i remember that because so i'm i'm a big fan of strong man so i follow a lot of the top strong men that you know do world strongest man and yeah you know the rogue and the arnold and uh that i noticed that was a big thing like yeah about that time frame it's like well you got to do like the video with like you know picking up your like two-year-old like right after you set a world record deadlift or something and um yeah

it's still kind of a thing but i think i think it's a little bit more natural now because it's not in vogue but yeah that's to your point all this stuff same shit same stuff like look and then before that and the early days of instagram was, look at me with the designer clothes in front of a sports car that I don't even own. Yeah, right. With a shit-eating grin on my face. You know, that fucking bullshit smile that they have, you know? Yeah. There was a guy that'd be like, here I am in my garage, you know, checking out my Lamborghini.

Who started that? garage, you know, checking out my Lamborghini. Who started that? But the real treasure in my house is all the 4,000 books that I have that I read every day. That was like 2012 to 2015. Yeah, there was some guy like... Yeah, no, I remember that. So, it started with that.

Then it started with, we have a happy, awesome family with, you know, our, you know, five kids and three dogs and this picture perfect Instagram photo that we're going to post a slightly different one tomorrow and a slightly different one the next day. Then we're going to have them in the background. We're lifting. Yeah, right. Yeah. And that's the, and it's always like something like, you know, like, man, I'm super rich and I've, I've won, you know, I've got six trophies on my wall, but you know what? None of that matters. See, none of that matters. The $14 million that I made in endorsements last year, that doesn't mean a thing. It's really all about my family, you see. But they always have to specify how rich they are

before that, right? Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. Dude. It's hilarious. It cracks me up then there's the the ultra high pitch sales voice like guys i made five million dollars last year and i'm gonna tell you how i did it like what the fuck is with that man like all these guys sound like that and then when you talk to them they don't sound like that if you find different videos of them doing other stuff before they started there's like that high pitch salesitched sales voice that they like to do. Well, you say that, that they don't talk like that, but that guy that just defrauded like billions of dollars

from like crypto investors, FTX, the Sam Bankman fraud guy. Yeah, he talks like that though. It's like I heard like an interview that he did where he like accidentally kind of admitted to some of the fraud he was perpetrating, he was like yeah he talks like up here like this i'm like what like this is so weird there's guys that intentionally do that though i don't understand it yeah you know it's like it's like i'm gonna they think they're gonna make more money sounding

like that for some i think it's like i want to convey high energy i think that's what it is you know yeah because high energy is good it gets people amped up you know uh it's just like uh elizabeth holmes you know the lady that uh made the fake blood testing the theranos company dude if you had that shit when i she would talk like this like down here yeah she she would always talk like with a really low voice and then there's a couple times that she you know, like she didn't know she was on, you know, and then there's her just talking to normal female voice. So, all right. So the,

the moral of the story, um, if somebody has taken their shirt off for a living and they do it all the time and it's like the focus of their marketing or their, like what their, their, their public persona, um,

they're on steroids. And I think the second thing is everything on the internet is fake. Everything's fake. Like everything's fake. It's all fake second thing is everything on the internet is fake. Everything's fake. Like everything's fake. It's all fake. All media is fake. You want to restrict this to the internet? I mean, all media is fake.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, really and truly, like even you and I, right? Even you and I are presenting to you, the listeners, a certain version of ourselves, a certain character, if you will, within the context of this podcast. Now, I mean, I happen to believe in all the things that I'm saying, but you're only getting like one little slice of me. You're not getting the whole me that you would get if you knew me in person, right? And so even that, right, with people who are trying to be honest and forthright, it's still like kind of like it's really filtered so you know i would even

say that we're fake in a sense like if you want to call it that but there's a lot of stuff there's a lot of other people that are straight up fake like everything about them just a complete there's a there's a continuum of this shit yes yeah you know there's you know fake faker fakest not so fake i don't fucking know there's like there's a there's a spectrum of it um you know if you were to come to my gym i'd happen to be this way you know but uh like you said you're only getting a fraction you know right right i'm at work you know it's different than when i'm at home and it's different than when i'm with my girlfriend generally there's overlapping things you know there's a level of consistency that I aim to preserve, I suppose.

Yeah. I gotta think about this more. I don't like being in the fake category, but we are putting out a program, so there's a performative element, I think is what you're trying to say. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm being a little, like, you know, incendiary with my language here, right? Fake, I wouldn't call myself fake. Now, I wouldn't call myself fake. I don't think so. Um, you know, that's not my intention for sure, but, but, you know, I have to admit the fact that like, yeah, there, you know, anytime you get in front of, um, anytime you have any sort of public message, whether you have a YouTube channel or a

podcast or you're an author of a book, you are always kind of, you gotta pick, you gotta take, you gotta take a stand on things and you gotta kind of you got to pick you got to take you got to take a stand on things and you got to kind of pick an approach um and so we're we are uh engaging in rhetoric in a sense of course you know this is not dialogue this is not dialectic like we might have in person and that changes things and you know the internet is is just like everything it's it's that fact hyped up to like a billion X. Everything is rhetoric, and it's all meant, it is all carefully designed to get you to do something or believe something and follow somebody. Well, that leads into the bigger topic here, because, you know, at the end

of the day, we can't prove most of what we're saying, you know? Right. And by that, I mean, you know, there's no facts, right? We're reporting anecdotes, you know, that we've experienced firsthand and secondhand with people we've trained. I think many of the listeners have experienced some of the things we're talking about so that, you know, adds a layer of credibility. You know, there's relatability there. But at the end of the day, and this is the problem with the internet as it pertains to our industry is everybody thinks that they have the facts you know right and this is part of a more uh you know broader problem in terms of information in general of any kind right yeah is that there's this idea that there are facts

and that a specific group has access to those facts and everybody else is lying. You know, I think that's a sign of the times, I guess. Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah, it's kind of the zeitgeist. Yeah, yeah. You know, everybody is arguing over whose version of reality reflects the facts. And we'll just kind of keep it to our industry and not turn into a broader conversation but you know and over the last probably 40 years there's been a body of peer-reviewed literature

that has come out pertaining to lifting weights right various programs various exercises biomechanical studies you you know, there's diet studies, there's lots of different studies reported in peer-reviewed journals pertaining to exercise of various types. And probably in the last, I'd say, 15 or so years, that's probably fair, about 15 or so years, because 20 ago when i started uh looking for information on how to train most of it was in message boards and forums and people didn't talk about the science and uh nobody was citing pub med it was just you know guys were still just talking about what they've done what's worked and very few of the guys writing had advanced degrees now Now, everybody

seems to have one. But I'd say probably in the last 15 years or so, it's been, well, if a study doesn't show it, therefore, you have no evidence. And, you know, people have forgotten the reality that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And just because you don't have a peer-reviewed article that reports a study conducted in a government-funded university, or sometimes, you know, private institution, but most of these studies come out of universities that are state-funded and federally funded, too, here in the States, at least. There's a lot of stuff that comes out of New Zealand and Australia, too, in this area of research. But, you know, there's become that there's this idea that is circulated now that if it doesn't come out of a university in a published paper, and some guys take it further, you know, that has to be indexed in PubMed, that has to be in this specific

journal that has this specific impact factor, you know, because goalposts change. The goalposts change depending on what bias the person setting those goalposts is trying to push. But the general consensus here on the internet these days is that if it's not a peer-reviewed journal, therefore, it doesn't happen. And it's so bad that even, how long ago was it now? 15 years ago, when I started taking upper division undergraduate classes in nutrition, we were explicitly told, and again in my master's, that do not trust anything out of men's health. That it's all bullshit. That it's not based on research.

You don't ever cite a magazine. That you must cite sources that are peer-reviewed. This was the position of most academic institutions I found out later, but certainly the one that I went to. And that's what they told us. That it was laughable to use information from Men's Health. When in fact, the information that I was using from Men's Health was also published in the literature. And is also in the blue book and is also, you know, part of what I do now that is highly effective. And I'm referring

to periodization, classical periodization. Start with, you know, lower volume or lower intensity, higher volume, and move towards higher intensity, lower volume. That's classical periodization. So I learned that not in an NSCA book or an exercise physiology book. I learned that in a men's health magazine in 2002, 2003. It might have been men's fitness. I used to look at both. And I've been following classical periodization ever since. I understand it on a more conceptual level now because I've been formally educated and read more books since then. But that was my first exposure to it. Do a hypertrophy phase, do a strength phase, do a power phase, even though it's not really power, but they call the, you know,

max strength stuff power back then for whatever reason, I don't know. But, you know, I've been, basically, I did that then. Then after I ran my LP, I basically did the same thing in post-novice training, you know? So, but if I took that statement at face value, then I would just discredit something that, in fact, generally holds true, you know? That's a pretty effective way to train, you know? And I know some douchebags are going to come on here and say, oh, DUP's better. And this is not the discussion we're trying to have here, okay? So, save it. You know, that's a different conversation. What I'm saying is that, So, say that, you know, that's a different conversation. What I'm saying is that, you know, I was told that magazines don't provide accurate information, that accurate information only exists in a peer-reviewed journal.

Yeah, there's been this rise of, like, you know, evidence-based and then insert whatever your field is, like evidence-based medicine, evidence-based, you know, practice. That was the original term, evidence-based practice. Now they've added medicine, nutrition, you know? Yeah, sure. Right. And, you know, I don't, I'm not going to comment on like specific fields of like what that means specifically in medicine. Cause I don't know, I'm not a doctor. I don't, you know, I don't know anything about that field really, but just kind of generally, one thing that strikes me is like, there is more than one way to understand the world around us. Like in other words,

there's more than one type of information out there, right? And that, you know, there's the ancient Greeks thought about this stuff very deeply and they came up with a lot of really good stuff. And one of the things that they, they distinguish between is episteme or epistemic knowledge, or that's where we get the word epistemology from. And doxa, where we get like doxa, doxology, I think from the church. But anyway, basically episteme is like sort of demonstrable knowledge. And then doxa is knowledge that's based on testimony. episteme is like sort of demonstrable knowledge. And then

doxa is knowledge that's based on testimony. It's based on the sort of a, what most people agree based on testimony happened. And so you think about it, like demonstrable knowledge would be like one plus one is two. Okay. We have this number system. Here's one object. Here's a second object. Let's put them together. And you see how you have two objects. And that's a fact that if you ever doubt it, if you're like, wait a minute, hold up, Trent, I don't, I'm not quite so sure about that. I can show you again, right? I can always demonstrate that knowledge. But there's plenty of things that we know happen like history right that that we only know through testimony you can't go back and demonstrate that the french revolution happened okay like you just can't do it we only have testimony does that mean that all history is

fake and made up and and and you know it never happened or none of it happened? No. I mean, did it happen exactly the way that the accounts that we have portray it? No, it probably didn't, right? There's all sorts of like ways of viewing history and no one has the one right account, but we can through many accounts sort of hone in on sort of like, this is kind of, this is the thrust of what happened. And I think the same thing can be true of like, you know, learning about training, right? We have, we can't go back and, you know, like exactly, we can't test like, hey, here's this dude on program A, let's take the same dude at the same time and put them on program B and compare the two. You can't do it.

You can only run one program at a time. And that guy is a different guy after he completes program A. So you can't say program B works better if he runs it again, right? Or works better or worse. You can't do a crossover with this sort of thing. You just can't do it. So we kind of like in the training world, it's really no different than sort of like history or religion or, you know, all sorts of, you know, fields of human knowledge that aren't demonstrable. A lot of it's based on testimony, right? And we sort of—

Most peer-reviewed research is entirely based on testimony. Yeah, right. And that's, yeah, there's the other thing, too. Let's not pretend like research is like perfectly factual or perfectly demonstrable, like, you know, mathematics and physics tend to be. So, yeah, I and he gets great results, okay, that's not really very good. But if there's a whole bunch of successful athletes that all tend to follow the same type of training program, then that's a valid, you know, that's valid information. It's still testimony. It's still subject to bias. You know, there's no studies about it, but... Everything is subject to bias, first of all.

Yeah. But if, you know, if you train 500 people in a row and you use a linear progression to do it and they get a lot stronger, that's pretty good information. Even though some people would say, like, well, it's just anecdotal. Okay. Well, you know, there's enough people there to convince me to give it a shot, you know? Right. Yeah, people don't understand that professional research, you know, when you get a peer-reviewed article, what you are reading is a testimony, as Trent said, I would call it a self-report, using a more common term in the scientific field. It's a self-report.

The researcher is reporting what happened to a publishing source, you know, a journal, and the reviewers are deciding whether it was written well enough to muster, to pass a muster for publication. to pass a muster for publication. And oftentimes, those reviewers will make recommendations on what that, as Trent says, testimony should look like. They'll say, change this, change that, don't like those numbers, don't like that figure, you know, and sometimes they'll change statistics. So, you have, you know, several layers of humans reporting things. So, at the very bottom, you have your lab techs that are, you know, let's say it's a training study, right? We're just going to narrow it down to that. You have your lab techs that are coaching people. Then you have probably different lab techs that are doing the pre-post testing for whatever outcomes you're measuring. You might have an x-ray tech doing a DEXA. You might have a

sonographer looking at muscle volume. You might have a nurse drawing blood. You know, it just depends what you're measuring. And then a different person's training them. And the person who's actually listed last is the lab director. That person's probably not there for 75% of it. So people don't understand what researchers actually do. Researchers aren't in there training people on lifting weights. They're writing the paper that gets published. But more importantly, if they're at what's called a Research 1 institution, that means the institution has a high research activity. I believe there's two and three. That means lower and lower, et cetera. And there's like, I forgot what all the different ones are. But Research 1 means high research activity. Arizona State University is a Research 1

institution. So if you're working at a Research One, your job as a researcher is to secure external funding to pay for projects that will get published, and also so that the university itself gets a percentage of that funding that you're securing. And most of the time, they're chasing federal funds in the form of NIH grants in the field that I'm in, right? Yeah. And so they want grants from the federal government to pay for their research projects and also to essentially give the school free money. You know, they're paying for facilities, but the school is getting a deal.

They're not paying the faculty as much. They'll typically waive some of their teaching times, you know, so that they can spend more time on the projects. But in practice, what they're physically doing is they are competing for grants, and then they're delegating a lot of work. They have a team of – they have a research team that they've assembled to carry out all these tasks. So you have the researcher who may have designed the project. Then you have a lab manager that probably oversees everything in the lab, isn't necessarily doing one thing, but is supervising all the different things. So let's say they're doing ultrasound testing or BO2 max testing or 1RM testing or training. You might have a lab manager that's in charge of

supplies and general supervision and may carry out some of the tests. You might hire one that has a specific skill set as well. They do. But they're there overseeing. Then you have your techs, which could be doctoral students, master's students, undergraduate students that are doing various jobs of various levels of importance. And they're also writing stuff up in many cases. You know, I just finished my PhD. I'm trying to publish an article from it right now. that goes on. You know, you have a team and the person who gets most of the credit on the actual publication is the person that is physically, I don't want to say doing the least, but they're not actually carrying out the methodology. They're designing the methodology and they're securing the money. But most of the time when that's getting carried out, their typical day consists of lots of meetings, you know, and a lot of them pertain to, you know, research activity. Some of them pertain to administrative activity, and then they have a lot of administrative tasks.

So when somebody says that, you know, Stu Phillips is this great researcher in Canada, and he said that there's no difference between load in terms of 1RM or hypertrophy. I think that was the article that we reviewed back in 2016 at the coaches conference. Well, Stu Phillips wasn't in the lab training people. He probably wasn't even testing people. He wrote the article. He got the grant funding. If there was grant funding, I don't remember. And he was probably working on several other articles at the time. And he was probably sitting in a shitload of meetings and popping in and out of the lab periodically. You know, this is not uncommon. It's just what it is. And, you know, a lot of people don't know this that haven't worked in academia. There's, you

know, pros and cons to it, you know. Obviously, if you're trying to run something big, you have to delegate, you know, as simple as that, you know. But to equate an academic professional researcher with a strength coach is not a fair comparison because they're two completely different jobs. You know, they typically will hire a strength coach to carry out the strength training if their grant is big enough to allow that, right? But the point is, the person writing the article that's doing the interviews and getting all the PR is not the person that showed somebody how to squat, you know? Right. Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, I can easily see, you know, being... Their project manager. i can easily see you know being their project manager

yeah that's a good way to put it yeah sure does a general contractor put in the drywall sometimes but not not often usually right yeah same same concepts it's like they're like contractors essentially yeah sure sure and i i can see how there's a lot of layers of human error that get introduced because there's so many people with, you know, a finger in the pie, so to speak. Right. Just like you see human error when you have a brand new house built by a company that builds lots of houses, you know? Yeah, right. You know, you're like, what the fuck? Why is my, you know, tile coming off, you know? Why is the drywall, you know, peeling up, you know? Like, there's issues. Why is the garage not level, you know?

drywall, you know, peeling up, you know, like there's issues. Why is the garage not level, you know? Yeah. Right. And so like, you know, and it's, it's interesting, you know, I, I have heard there's a term called the reproducibility crisis in the sciences generally. Um, I don't know how it affects specific fields. If it's worse in some fields than others, I suspect it is, but basically my understanding is that, you know, when people like kind of the, the, the unsung hero of the research world is like being able to reproduce results that other people got in important studies. So if, you know, Einstein does a study and says that, Hey, listen, there's this like thing called, you know, the space time continuum, um, or gravity or whatever, you know, I probably just fucked that up. But whatever he

says, he finds some important discovery and he's like, Hey, listen, I measured these two stars and they came up with it. Well, then other physicists need to also do the same experiment and come up with the same results to verify that what he, uh, the results he got were valid and that the conclusions he drew, he drew from those results, therefore, are also valid. And if you look at all the body of research that's out there, there's a whole lot of it that cannot be reproduced. So what does that tell you about how valid it is and their conclusions? You know, years ago, I think that, I don't know if it was NIH research or psychological

research. I can't remember if it was narrowed to one field, but I remember hearing that 75% of peer-reviewed research was non-reproducible. You know, and this was seven years ago I heard something like this, you know. Yeah, yeah. It could be higher or lower now, but I think that this is probably especially true when it comes to human subjects, because what people fail to understand i mean it comes back to understanding understanding the limits of research which is not something the average person understands even somebody with a master's may not understand

it because you haven't dove deep enough into it yet but when you're recruiting human subjects pretty much 100 of of the time, it's a convenient sample in this day and age, you know? Right, right. And what that means is that you're just recruiting people that volunteer or that, you know, you have access to, right? Whatever is easiest, because the alternative would be random selection, as they call it. Random selection, you basically flip a coin and wherever that coin lands on the

phone book, that person's, you know, going to participate, you know, in a perfect world. I'm just picking a phone book because, you know, or let's say you're drawing names out of a hat, you know, whatever you want to call it, you're basically, you know, picking people at random and they're participating. The problem is that is unethical and you can't force somebody to participate in research. So, you know, we're restricted to convenience samples. And even if you could force people to participate in research, the problem you run into then is you have humans that are compelled to participate. So, that's a confounding variable also. Right. Right. For the layperson, this is important because if you're picking people at random within a community, then that means everybody in that community had an equal chance of being enrolled in that study, right?

If you're conveniently picking people that are available, that means everybody in that community did not have an equal chance to be enrolled in the study. So let's say you live in a neighborhood or, you know, township of, I don't know, small township, thousand people, right? And then you just, you know, pick 20 people that you know and do a study on them. You can't say that the entire population of that township will see the same results, right? Right. So they say, oh, you can overcome that with more subjects. Well, who decides how many subjects are enough subjects, right? You know, they'll say, well, you look at previous literature and see what effects they got, you know, but then how far down the rabbit hole do you go if you keep going back to the previous to the previous to the previous to the previous, right? Like, even so, let's just look at percentage-wise, right? If you're trying to say that all Americans should do X, well, this country has 360 million people in it.

So even if you got 10,000 people in a study, that's not even a percent of the U.S. population, you know what I mean? Not even close, yeah. Is 10,000 enough? I mean, I would say no, it's not even 1%, you know, so it's 1% enough. That's what, 3.6 million, you know? Is that enough? And then when you get to that point, now you have all these other factors introduced to study 3.6 million people, you need a lot of people to carry out that work. So now you have different people carrying out different tasks and you don't have, you know, you try to get as much consistency as you can, but you kind of see where I'm going here, right? There's a lot of things you just can't control. And when you're dealing with human subjects, that's even worse. You know, like I said the

same thing, I said the same thing Christy said when she graduated. They're like, what did you learn from your PhD? And at the end of my defense, something to that, one of those types of questions. And I said, well, from now on, I would much rather study animals because they follow directions. They show up and you can predict the outcomes. They don't have free will. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you're offended by that, you're on the wrong podcast. But seriously, you know, when you do animal studies, you know, you get much more valid data because you are randomly selecting the animals and you're, you know, randomly assigning them to different groups.

And, you know, you could get good data out of that, but we are not animals. So what happens to a rat is not the same as what happens to a human. So the whole moral of the story here is human subjects research is carried out by humans, and humans are imperfect. We all make mistakes, and the more humans involved, the more mistakes are likely to happen. This is just, you know, statistically speaking. So by the time you get the annotated version of a, you know, research publication and, you know, whatever newspaper you read, at that point it's been so diluted down and it doesn't cover any of these limitations and it presents it to you as, well, look, science says, and it's like, well, no, professional research, you know, and they're reporting something. Can that be demonstrated? I like that

word now, Trent, I'm stealing that. Can you demonstrate what you've read in that article? You know, and sometimes you can and sometimes you can't. Like, for instance, I always say one thing that we agree with the bodybuilders on, and the bodybuilders agree with the professional researchers on, and the CrossFitters agree with us on, is that if it gets heavier over time, you're going to grow, whether it's fives or tens or singles, right? Because you can demonstrate that. You know, if you're lifting five pounds today and 500 pounds in a year, you know, it's quite a big jump. But, you know, you just rehab from a stroke and you're, you know, it's quite a big jump, but you know, you just rehab from a stroke and you're, you know, 25, it's a rare stroke, right? So you started with five pounds in the hospital bed and then you got healthy and you got up to 500 pounds. Okay.

But anyways, you're going to look different from baseline. Yeah. I've never seen somebody go from, all right, so let's say like an average, very average person, right? Let's say somebody who deadlifts 135 on their first day. And there's going to be some people be like, well, he could have deadlifted more though, right? Let's say he does. Okay. Let's say he goes balls out first day. That's the horrible idea. Don't do it. But let's just say he does. And he pulls one, I don't know, 175, maybe 185. It ain't 200. average guy okay now you fast forward a year or two and he's pulling 500 okay i've never seen that happen and the guy didn't get significantly bigger no so i'd like to see it i'd like to see a guy who does that and doesn't get any bigger yeah i don't think i've

ever seen it it doesn't happen it doesn't again's demonstrable, like you said. Right, right. We've seen that. They've seen it in the lab. We've seen it in the gym. You know, we can all agree on this concept. Yes. Now, people try to twist this concept and have taken this position that the load doesn't matter at all. It's all about work, tonnage, volume. You know, we talk about that a lot in this podcast.

And I've been thinking about that a lot lately, and I'll come back to that. But, you know, the whole point is when you take something like, you know, DUP, daily undulated periodization, is better than classical periodization. You can't prove that. The lab hasn't even proven that, first of all. And it's not demonstrable. You know, it might be with one person, but then you might not see it with the next person, right? Or you might see comparable results, you know, is probably a more likely thing. Because at the end of the day, you know, on that topic, and I don't want to make this podcast about that topic, but, you know, Mike Israetel, you know, colleague of mine, he wrote an article, I think, with Chad Wesley Smith eight years ago, and it's on Juggernaut's page.

And it's my favoritegernaut's page. And it's my favorite article on periodization. You know, he said there was one type of periodization. And he kind of goes in and says, if you look at DUP, okay, the exercises might change day to day. So that's conjugate. And he's like, the loads might change day to day because it's daily undulating periodization. So, you know, that's undulated. You're undulating the loads, but then you're adding next week, so that's linear, you know? So, you know, that's, it's just one of those things, but irrelevant to this topic. The whole point is a lot of the stuff on training, you know, you can't replicate it, you know? And they're not controlling all the lifestyle factors that go into this, you know? They're having people, they're doing doing what is being done in a lab is not all that different than what is being done in a gym.

You know, they might randomly assign people to groups, which is good because, you know, you can be confident that, okay, if you randomly assign your people to groups, then the results that were greater, you know, are likely due to the treatment effect. That's the theory behind that, right? But the problem with this type of research and the type of things we're asking people to do is that training is also sensitive to things outside the gym, you know? Very, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So you could have a disproportionate number of people in one group sleeping like shit and, you know, the other group sleeping better, you know, or same thing with diet. Well, you know, we try to control for that. Well, how do you control for that without supervising these people 24 hours a day? You don't, right? Yeah. You're getting self-reported data, which has its own issues.

So now you have a self-report bias, which, you know, either is conveniently left out of the discussion or minimized with, you know, creative language. But it's still there. You know, they're making assumptions about what people are doing based on what they say they're doing, right? So that's where you have a big problem, right? You could sit there and say, well, you know, the high-load group did better than the low-load group or the high-volume group did better than the high-intensity group. And, you know, maybe that's true. Maybe it could be due to the training, but maybe people in the, you know, high intensity group weren't eating enough, you know, or maybe they weren't sleeping enough and they told you they were because they want to make sure they

get their gift card at the end of the study and they're worried you'll kick them out, you know? Yeah. Or for whatever reason, you know, or they just, you know, are not good at self-reporting. You know, these people aren't scientists, you know, they're normal people that you're recruiting. So, you know, do you think they're weighing out their food with cups and scales and getting something accurate? Or do you think your estimates of what their food frequency questionnaire, questionnaires are accurate?

No. So this is the problem that I have with human subjects research in general. There's just so many other things out there that you're making assumptions about. They're pretty big assumptions. You know, you really don't know what people are doing behind closed doors. You just don't, you know? No, you don't. So, yeah, so to bring it back, you know, you go on the internet now and people like to fight about this stuff. They like to say, well, you know, show me a study that says that, you know, I like to say, well, you know, show me a study that says that, you know, getting strong first is better for – or that you need to get strong first to perform hypertrophy training.

Well, there is no study. And I'm not going to claim that, you know, I can carry one out because I can't. You can't either. No university can. There's no money for that, first of all. And I don't think there's a grant big enough for that. Let's say you could house people. Think of the logistics of that. Now you have a group of people that's used to living in their house and going to their job and all that. Now you've displaced them from their natural environment, put them in an unnatural environment

for several months, made them follow something that you've told them to do and got a certain result. But then when they go back to their natural environment, shit has changed again, right? So, I mean, I could go on and on about the different examples of why you can't really take this stuff at face value. You know, the bullshit test is, is this demonstrable? And, you know, if it's not, that doesn't mean it's useless. It means it might not be useful for your purposes. And your purposes are you want to get stronger. You want to look better. You want to feel better.

You want to build muscle. You want to get dates. I mean, that's why people do all this shit, you know? Yeah, right. But, you know, like, that's what I'm saying. You know, research is not always, research does not equal fact. You know, I think that, yeah, there's people that want to equate the findings of research. First of all, there's people that want to equate the findings of research with science, with the greater, like, big topic of science.

And I don't think that's the same thing right science is a process it's not it's not the findings of a bunch of research papers that's not what science is that's one aspect of the scientific process right but it's not science itself and then i think the other thing is people want to equate this kind of knowledge that's gained from uh scientific inquiry with the truth and that's not what it is either it's it's it's part of the truth but it's not the whole truth right just like testimony is an important part of the truth but it's not the whole truth either right now i don't know that humans can know anything objectively i i don't think we can know that humans can know anything objectively i i don't think we can i don't think it's possible we can only know the truth you know through it through a what is like through a veil darkly

right yeah yeah and you know that's a much deeper discussion yeah that's a much day yeah we're getting into metaphysics there but that's not what we do here right and i think i but you know i think the thing about training and like kind of applying like, okay, so, you know, is the point of this show then to say that like, well, everything's bullshit. Everything's fake. All this is completely irrelevant. No, that's not what we're saying. I think where I find like a good way to evaluate the information that I'm intaking is, can I look at the people who are generating the information that I'm looking at? And sort of, can I find some sort of like alignment with our values or alignment with our lifestyle or some other way in which we are alike? And, you know, if I can,

which we are alike. And, you know, if I can, then that information is more valuable to me. So let me give you an example, right? When I encountered starting strength and I went to the first seminar in Wichita Falls, I see a lot of like pretty average people, right? The people who get into starting strength, now maybe it's like, maybe they're not average if you like compare it to like the whole population, but they're not like genetic freaks, right? Starting strength seminars don't attract people who are like D1 college athletes, right? No. Or professional bodybuilders. Or professional bodybuilders. They're pretty average dudes. Now, they might be a little self-selected towards people who are better at weightlifting as in like, um, you know, slightly bigger builds or taller or, you know, more dense or whatever, you know, maybe you could try that, but it's pretty average people. It's not people who are like squat. Like when you go

to a seminar, there's not a whole bunch of people that are squatting 300 plus. In fact, there's probably only like, uh, you could probably count on one hand, maybe two hands, the total number of people who are going to squat over 300. Most people are squatting like 185, 205, 135, right probably has changed over time. I remember I went in 2013 for my first seminar, and Dave Abdelmoulay was there, and he is a good example. You know, he, you know, he was, he's a big dude, you know. Yeah, sure. He's bigger than me, but like, when I saw him before we did any lifting, I didn't expect him to be insanely strong, you know. He like, he blended in a room, he was, you know, he was a big, he had a bigger build, you know, but he didn't, but I always pictured a bodybuilder, you know, type guy or a big fat and strong power lifter type guy that was like a lot of the power lifters that look like fat bodybuilders, you know, essentially. Yeah. Right. That's what I pictured

when I pictured big heavyweights. Yeah. Dave, you know, I think at the time he was chubbier, you know, and he looked pretty normal. And then he started squatting and he had like five plates on each side. And my buddy's like, dude, he's squatting 500 for five, you know, or something. I think it was around that. I want to say he was squatting like 500 for five. Then he hit six. I think he squatted six at some point. Then he like deadlifted a big crazy number two. and uh you know it's not that he was not small like after he did it i'm like well you know he's a big guy so okay but it was like i had a different picture in my head after reading all the muscle mags you know that yeah right you know guys were either really ripped and huge that were lifting big weights or they were fat and you know muscular you know right yeah exactly yeah yeah and so like so you see a guy who's really strong, but not necessarily elite, you know, genetics for aesthetics. Right. Um, and that's the average. Whatever the fuck that means. So yeah, whatever that means, you know, uh, but, but my point is that, so I, I walk into like this

world of starting strength and I see a lot of like pretty regular dudes that are getting results and the whole, and there's a bunch of guys squatting 315 you know to 350 that come out of this okay that's not insane but i'm talking about for reps right for three sets of five that's not insane but but that's a hell of a lot better than the general population i don't see anybody at the globo gym squatting 315 for three sets of five no like basically nobody i used to think that was heavy for even one right and so like i see that and i'm like okay well these guys like these guys have something relevant to tell me here okay now i could go in the same so i could do the same experiment i could walk into you know um you

know an olympic level weightlifting gym with a bunch of like you know competitive olympic weightlifters and they might train a different way. I don't know if what they have to tell me about their training programs is really very relevant to me. It doesn't mean they're wrong. You know, it just means that like, I'm around a bunch of genetic freaks. Like you don't get to the Olympic level unless you are an exceptional athlete. Right. So, so yeah, I mean, all that's to say is that, right, so I think you have to do some level of like, well, who is telling me this information? And, you know, are they producing results in a population that's like relevant to you? at least there's a lot of, um, it's popular to look at what professional athletes do. And it's just not very relevant because, you know, even if they, it's completely irrelevant, it's completely irrelevant because there's a whole bunch of reasons why, but one, one big reason is that you're just not the same kind of person that they are.

Right. Um, there's more to it than that, but like they are, they are genetically another level and they're going to respond to training totally different from you. So it doesn't mean that what they're doing is wrong necessarily. Sometimes it might be suboptimal. Maybe it is optimal for them. It doesn't matter. It's not for you. It's not relevant to you. No. You played sports. I played sports. I remember high school swimming. The most gifted guy on our team was a year below me. And he'd been doing it his whole life. So he had time in the water on his side, of course. But he had the build. He was tall, long-limbed, big hands and feet, thin, very light.

And he was very fast and he got faster every year. And I think we're, the rest of us were probably doing 10,000 yard workouts. He was probably doing 2,000 yard workouts, maybe 3,000 yard workouts because he had asthma, but then he would use the asthma to get out of the time. And, and, uh, you know, he, I don't, I can't recall if he ever outright admitted that he might now as an adult, I don't know. He's, he's a nice guy. I always liked him. If you're listening, I'm not knocking you. You know who you are, but I doubt he's listening. We haven't spoken in 20 years. But he was a nice guy, cool dude. He was a likable person, but he was just burnt out with swimming, I think, because he'd been doing it his whole life. Yeah, sure.

I met him. He was 15. I was 16. Or no, I was 15. He was 14 when I met him because I was a sophomore. Yeah, sure. which was local. Then they had a sectional, which I think was a bigger region. And then there was the state meet. And he definitely went to the sectional, which was the one below the state. I think he went to the state meet his freshman year. I really do. He must have. He was fast. And then, of course, by his senior year, he was fast. I don't know. He may have posted a record somewhere, but he went on and did it in college. But my point is, he did 20% of what the rest of us did and still got faster, you know? And it was good to see, though, you know, because, you know, Rip talks about it all the time. We tell our clients this all the time. You know, athletes improve in spite of what they're doing, not because of what they're doing in a lot of cases.

Now, I mentioned the older kids for a reason. The year above me, they had just enough talent to perform at a very high level with hard work. And those guys were fucking workhorses. And the year above them, those guys were even bigger workhorses. And both of those cohorts went to state. We were a small program at a public school southwest of Chicago. We were a small program at a public school southwest of Chicago. We had a hard-ass coach who is an Italian guy.

I think he coached at a Catholic school before he coached at my high school. And he was tough, and I like him, and I follow him on Facebook. He's still the same old coach as he used to be, and I think he's retired now. But I appreciated that he was tough on us. He was tough. We all respected him. And, you know, I think he had three state rings from his previous high school because he had a lot of high talent at that Catholic high school. And then at our school, he just worked the hell out of us. Now, the two – so I was class of 02, so the class of 2000 and the class of 2001.

Those guys were fucking workhorses, especially that class of 2000 and the class of 2001 those guys were fucking workhorses especially that class of 2000 and they would tell me their time a lot of them what was interesting about those kids was a lot of them started in high school you know they didn't have all those years of swimming as youth some of some of them did but a lot of them had four years in you know i remember one guy that comes to mind he was a fat chubby kid his freshman year never played a sport in his life, swam for four years, went to state his senior year. Oh, wow. And we're talking about a handful of guys that went to the state meet. He didn't have a whole team post a top 10 total in state or whatever they called it.

They didn't place top 10. But he sent high school students to state every year up to a certain point. I think the talent started dropping off after my class. I think he said, I don't remember. But my point was I saw workhorses and I saw talent. And the guys ahead of me were workhorses. There was one guy. He was in my Spanish class.

You know, he swam four years. They made fun of him. And he went for an individual event at state. And I think he placed, I don't know, I don't think he broke a record, but he placed pretty high. And his freshman year, he was getting made fun of by a couple of the guys that had done it their whole life, you know, and then he was faster than everybody, you know. Right. And he posted records at the school level for sure. And, you know, he was ripped, he was muscular, in a different build than the other guy I mentioned. But, you know,

he had the big hands and feet, you know, long limbs, not super tall though. He was of average height, but very ripped. And I think he did it in college all four years, but he started when he was 14. And like I said, the guys who were doing it performed ripped on him. So I saw what work ethic and above average talent does. And then I saw what superior, superb talent does, you know? So I got to see that, you know, at a young age. And I think that's what, that's why I kind of like, when I heard Rip talking about this, I never really thought about it until I started going on about it right now. But I think when Rip was talking about this, it resonated because I saw that firsthand. I saw guys that were of above average talent that worked their asses off and they went

very far. And then I saw guys that were like two, three standard deviations from the mean, you know, that just got faster doing very little, you know? Right. Yeah, exactly. And it was interesting. But fast forward and, you know, put this in the context of lifting, a lot of people will look at a bodybuilder and think that that person knows how they need to get big, you know? Some people will look at a powerlifter that think that that person is going to know how they need to get a 700-pound deadlift. And it goes back to what you say.

You've got to find groups that have had similar experiences. Rip was about as shitty of an athlete as they come. I think he said that he had, what, a 12-inch vertical jump or was it 16, some shitty fucking number. I believe it. He's not very explosive, and he's said this publicly, you know, so I'm going to make fun

of him a little bit there. But because of that, when you're not athletic and you try to do things like this, you have to troubleshoot a lot of problems that,

you know, the guy who's doing 20% of what you're doing doesn't have to troubleshoot. Obviously, the greatest athletes do both. They troubleshoot

and their three standard deviations from the mean. You know, that's Michael Jordan. He was a workhorse and he was five standard deviations from the mean, if that exists, you know? Yeah, right. But, you know, I like what you said there, you know, you just kind of, you got to find people that relate to your situation. And I think a lot of the time when I'm talking and I'm sharing this stuff, you know, like my situation has always been that, you know,

I'm bottom heavy, you know, I have no, I had no problem getting a decent squat and, you know, I was never, I never sought out to be a power lifter. So, you know, I'm, you know, cruising, I'm getting close to a 500 squat these days. I think that's probably going to happen in my lifetime. You know, it's not a very impressive squat by power lifting standards. So all is context right right but uh you know like you just said trent most people in the globo gym i mean you see 225 maybe you know a lot of the time i think the numbers have gone up you might see a power lifter in there now because more people are doing that stuff but yeah you know when i used to lift at those places from 2000 to i don't't know, 2015. I was at various, 2014, I was at various globo gyms. You know, you didn't really see squats over two plates very often. You didn't see deadlifts over

three. You know, sometimes you'd see a four-plate deadlift for one, you know? And for me, it was, you know, lower body was not a problem. You know, I rode BMX-style bikes for very long distances because everybody had like a dyno, you know? It's because you're a child of the 90s? I'm a child of the 90s. You know, I wanted a dyno. Everybody had a dyno or a Haro or one of those bikes. And, you know, I didn't know what the application was.

I mean, I knew it was a trick bike, but, you know, I'm ADHD. And I'm, you know, a curious kid and I'm a curious adult too. I wanted to go a little bit further. So I'm basically doing long distances on this little trick bike. And if those of you know what I'm talking about, I would sit, stand, but like, think about the range of motion around the knee. I developed some pretty strong quads just from doing that. Cause I was a growing child, right? Right. Right. You know, I roller bladed too, you know, I walked in the snow, you know, from school sometimes, you know, so, you know, that combined with, if you look at my father, he's a larger version of me.

I'm like a mini version of him. You know, he's a couple inches taller than me, and he's bigger bone frame. But, you know, big pecs, big quads. I didn't get the big thick wrists, though, you know, but I got the big quads. I got the big pecs. I can develop back muscles pretty easy, you know, but he's got thicker wrists than I do. Right. And I have the same calf shape that he does.

They're just, my muscles are just smaller than his because he has a thicker skeleton overall. Yeah, right. And he's just a bigger guy. That guy's an endomorph, you know. My mom's side, they're, you know, more of the skinny fat phenotype, you know, small wrists, small structure, you know. So I kind of got a blend of the two. I got my dad's muscle bellies with my mom's structure, you know, my mom's family structure. So yeah, you know, it just makes sense, you know, like legs, my dad, he was leg pressing,

you know, not that leg press means a whole lot, but he was like pressing close to a thousand, you know, in his twenties and thirties, he didn't know how to squat. So he didn't fuck with it, you know? Right. But that's still, you know, like, I mean mean how many guys do you see at the at the globo gyms doing four plates on the leg press maybe five yeah um probably not for full range of motion either but um yeah you don't see guys doing a thousand very often no he was yeah he was doing heavy dumbbells you know and he would do full range of motion on things and i remember i could do a dip so he's like well just hold yourself up there i'm'm going to go do some curls. I had to hold myself up on the parallel bars. That was my first exposure.

I was at an old YMCA in Chicago that looked like one of those classic 70s-style gyms. This was the early 90s, so it probably was set up in the 70s and not updated yet. It was great, man. They had a racquetball court next door. But that was my first exposure to the gym, and I learned, you know, you just make the connection early on. You see big guys and you see big weights. And fast forward, this is the point that I'm really trying to get to today. You know, I guess I have a lot on my mind, but point I'm trying to get to today is you may see a guy who's not very big, but very strong,

but how often do you see a big motherfucker that's very weak? I mean, you just don't. And if he does, he's learning technique, and he's going to get a lot stronger than the skinny guy running the same program. There's a reason for that, right? So, and even then, you don't see, you know, an emaciated man lifting a bunch of weight either. Like, what do we mean by small, right? You's his name lamar gant 132 pounds oh yeah yeah i mean look at him okay he is quote unquote small he's also short so he's very dense but you can see all his muscles popping out man he doesn't look emaciated i wouldn't call that guy skinny you know he's not a super heavyweight but his deadlift locks out of his kneecap you know yeah if you go yeah look at yeah he's like 5'2", and yeah,

his hands are like below his kneecaps. Yeah. 5'2", 132, but if you pull up his pictures or watch videos of him lifting, he's a very defined built guy. He's not skinny, but yeah, sure, he's not a heavyweight, but he's not skinny. There are other factors besides strength that are non-trainable that play into muscle size and muscle appearance, right? Bone structure is going to make muscles look bigger. Penetration angle of the muscle fibers is going to make the muscle look bigger. The skin thickness and elasticity is going to make the muscle look more pronounced. Insertion point on the joint is going to make the muscle look bigger. So, you know, the aesthetic of a muscle depends on factors that are non-trainable. You know, what is trainable is the size of the individual fibers, right?

And time and time again, it responds to load. Where does this concept of work and volume and tonnage come from? You know, I have a theory on this, and I'm going to write about it, and I want to talk about it some more with people on that side of the equation that are colleagues of mine and can be cordial. But I think where it comes from is, you know, if you barbell train long enough, you can't accumulate enough volume with those exercises because they just beat the shit out of you, specifically the low back, if we want to just

really narrow it down. If you're squatting and deadlifting, your low back fails, and you can't push your legs and back and arms very much using that exercise, right? And I was very happy to see Mike Isertel post the other day, I'm talking about him twice now on my podcast, but he posted the other day that he only does one set of squats. And the long story short of it is he explained this phenomenon. That's all the stress he can handle on that exercise. But he's doing a shitload of volume for his legs. So what we're really talking about here is if you're an advanced lifter, that's, you know, let's say you're squatting close to triple body weight, right? Two and a half times body weight even, you know, let's just say over double, right? You're squatting over double body weight. You can't do a bunch of sets and try to grow your legs that way because your low back can't handle the stress. Same thing

with deadlifts. You can't do a bunch of deadlift sets and work your back that way because your low back is going to, you know, get trashed. You might get injured too. So, you know, that's where things like rows and dumbbell rows and isolation type exercises can be useful because you're just, you need, those individual muscles need more work to hypertrophy more, but you can't use the main lifts to elicit that at that point in time because the low back gets trashed before the rest of those muscles do. So yeah, so then you end up having to do isolation exercises, accessory exercises, ancillary exercise, whatever you want to talk about, like, you know, a barbell row, dumbbell row, bicep curl, etc. Right. So let's put the

barbell stuff aside. Let's say you're restricted now to machines and dumbbells, which is what bodybuilders commonly used aside from a barbell. You know, there's other things you can use like, you know, strongman type equipment, but that's different. We're going to restrict this to machines, cables, and dumbbells. Well, what do we know about these? Well, number one, up until recently, and you know, think about it, bodybuilders started putting information out 50 years ago. So we got decades of inertia behind some of these topics. Dumbbells and machines make large jumps. For instance, a dumbbell will typically go up by five pounds. You might see the zero to 50-pound ones go up by two and a half.

That's not always the case at most gyms, and I would argue that 20, 30 years ago, that was never the case. I think the two and a half started popping up after 2000. But even so, two and a half is a sizable jump on a single-joint exercise. It's a sizable jump on a bench because let's start with the five pound, right? So if your dumbbells are going from 70 to 75, you've added 10 pounds to a bench press. If you're doing a dumbbell bench press and you have to go from the 70 pound dumbbells to the 75 pound dumbbells, you've made a 10 pound jump, right? Here's one example of where, you know, I shine genetically somewhat, you know, I'm not super strong, but when I first ran a dumbbell bench program, I was 19 and I, you know, bulked, you know,

pushed my weight up to 200 and I was doing dumbbell bench and I periodized it. I did tens, I did eights, and then I did, I did, I did eight to 10, six to eight, four to six, and I did four weeks of each. It was a periodized cycle, and I did every angle, I think, flat, incline, decline. Yeah. And I knew intuitively you had to try and add weight. This made sense to me. You have to do the next heavier one, right? Well, I got away with it.

I think that in my quote-unquote power phase, I was doing 90s for sets of four, you know, and I was 19. you know and i was 19 but you know now having trained a lot of like you said average people uh that would that doesn't happen for most of the average gym folk that's not a you know that's not an athlete you know an unathletic motor moron as we call them is not going to get to 90 pound dumbbells in the first three months of training they're going to get they're probably going to get stuck much sooner than that i consider that a decently heavy dumbbell press by commercial gym standards, not by powerlifting standards, but by commercial gym standards, bench press in 90s after three months, pretty good. It didn't transfer to barbell. I didn't have a big barbell bench back then. But anyways, I didn't think anything of this. I'm like, oh, well, my pecs are responding. You know, then my squat went up to 315 for a single, that same

training cycle, because I had to put three plates on, right? You got to. Yeah. So I did that, and I was doing dips with 90 pounds straps, so almost 300-pound dips, you know, at the time. And what else did I do? I was still able to do chins because of all the swimming, so I had a good foundation there. But then, like, my bicep curls weren't going up, you know, and, like, my tricep extension, these individual muscle group type exercises weren't moving. And I kept seeing the same kind of trend repeat itself over the years, you know.

And by the time I got to starting strength, you know, I started pressing. You know, I didn't have a strong press or a strong lateral raise. I did every type of raise possible. I'd do all these dumbbell presses, and I just would not have impressive numbers there. Whereas my bench, I'm like, oh, I can bench 90s. I can squat over 300, and I can do all these dumbbell presses and I just would not have impressive numbers there. Whereas my bench, I'm like, oh, I can bench 90s. I could squat over 300 and I can do dips with weight. I could do pull-ups with weight. Well, what the fuck? Why can't I curl? Why can't I lateral raise? Why can't I dumbbell press? Well, you know what? It's all bullshit because once I started pressing and deadlifting, my back, my traps, my erectors, my deltoids, all that filled out, right?

Fast forward, you know, and I've been training for 10 years and I'm like, you know, still haven't really gotten bigger up top in a while. You know, my shoulders did because my press kept going up, but my pecs have been leveled off for six years, you know, my arms have been leveled off for a long time. So I started doing an arm specialization program Andy Baker put out and I modified it, you know, there's some things I wanted to do differently. You know, I put a barbell press in every phase, which wasn't in there. And a couple other things, I added the hand grippers. I modified it. I'm a coach. That's what it's intended to do. A template's not intended to be followed 100%. He explains

that. But I did that and the difference this time was, so there were lateral raises in there, there were curls in there, there were dumbbell shrugs in there, and there were some cable exercises. However, you know, now I'm a starting strength coach doing it, you know, with 10 years of strength training experience. You know, I have dumbbells that are loadable and I have plates as light as 20.25 pounds. as light as 20.25 pounds. So every single exercise was incrementally loaded week to week, because now instead of benching, you know, 85, I did 82.5. This time I did 90 for 10, by the way, since we're talking about 90s, you know, I bench press, I did 90 pound dumbbells for 10, which I'm very proud of. But the whole point is like, I was moving on that exercise, but let's take my weaker exercises, my dumbbell curls, I was going up by a couple pounds per dumbbell, so four to five pounds a week, you know.

And there was novice effect there, you know, like this second time around, you know, I did 50-pound dumbbells for a set of eight, which a big victory for me. This was unfathomable years ago, even months ago. I wouldn't think that I could curl 50s for eight, but the micro-loading has made a huge difference. And when I kind of think back, you know, what I conclude from this experience is that all this add reps, add sets, add volume shit comes from the fact that that's what these guys had to do. You know, if they're training and, you know, yeah, sure, they're on drugs. Sure, they have good genetics. Sure, they're going to jump over, you know, just like I did on the bench.

They're going to go even further on the fucking dumbbell bench, even further on the curls and all those exercises because they're naturally muscular guys and they're on drugs. But what happens when they get stuck, right? And they will get stuck, you know. Things help until they don't, and that includes drugs, right? Otherwise, everybody would deadlift 1,000, and not everybody deadlifts 1,000 who's on drugs. There's plenty of guys that are, you know, on a bunch of shit deadlifting 500, you know? Right. So my whole point is that let's say they're curling 50s, right? Or let's say 60s. These guys have bigger arms than me, so we're going to use bigger numbers. The next one up is 65. Are they going to add 10 pounds to a bicep curl? No, they're left with two options. They can do more reps with 60, or they can do more sets with 60.

And they could keep doing that until eventually maybe they'll get 65, you know? Or they can change the exercise, train it a different way, and see if their barbell variant goes up, one that they can incrementally load. But the whole point is they can't do 60 for a set of eight on a bicep curl and then do 65 because now they've added 10 pounds to a single joint exercise, you know, counting both arms. So I think that that's where a lot of this tonnage, work, volume dogma originates from is that they were reacting to the circumstances they were presented with. You know, the machine, even the machines, the machines go up by 15 pounds sometimes. Right. Yeah. And, you know, I've always hung a plate off the pin, but some people may not have thought to do that. You know, they're just intuitively looking, oh, it goes from 100 to 115. Well, shit, I'm going to have to do extra sets with this because I can't go up because

I do 100 for 10 and I do 115 for six, you know, or five or four. Right. So, you know, you have people reacting to the situation they're in. The situation they're in is that they can't make a small enough jump on that lift, right? I've been doing this now for six months. I've committed one to two years of this type of training because I'm trying to learn and I'm also trying to grow. I want my upper body bigger, man. I want big arms, bro. Of course, right?

And the micro-loading has been a game changer. My lateral raises go up a half pound per arm each week. I don't think about it. I'm doing 20s on those, by the way, and I'm almost to 20 by 20, and that's almost six months of this shit. I just add a little quarter pound to each side of the dumbbell every week, and that's a one-pound jump combined. Right? So it's still going up. It So, you know, it's still going up. It's fucking hard, but it's still going up. I'm actually feeling something in my lateral delts. And I'm, you know, the irony of all this, Trent,

is I'm getting beat the fuck up from this. And, you know, I want to talk about that when we get Baker on it, but I'm getting beat the fuck up from this. Even yesterday, I didn't even squat or deadlift. I just did all bench press lateral raises tricep extensions did heavy calf raises and then today dude i am fucking trash my everything up top is just feels like my i feel like i have a backpack on you know everything's heavy right

yeah and i've you know i've i've heard andy talk about you know you have to be careful when you're doing that kind of work to rotate exercises periodically because he told me yeah because you'll end up you know your your tendons and the you know a lot of a lot of the reason you you do dumbbell work in particular is because you can take it for a longer range of motion than you can with a barbell for instance like a dumbbell bench you can take that deeper than you can a barbell bench and that extra range of motion can't necessarily actually i guess it depends depends on some things right so yeah yeah it depends on the the dumbbells you have in particular well the the range of motion this is just an aside we'll talk about this more

deeply in another episode but i test this because my friend was yelling at me like you're not going deep enough with those dumbbells and then i'm like dude i can't go any lower than like i took i went down i'm like this is the bottom bro and then I took the barbell and same bottom. So I thought about this. I'm like, well, number one, if I was fatter, I would get more range of motion because no fat pad in the way I can go lower. Right. Since I'm not a fat guy right now, hopefully not again, you know, my range of motion is identical. So I think it depends on leanness in part. My range of motion is identical. So I think it depends on leanness in part.

The second thing is what I figured out was the real range of motion advantage on the bench press is horizontal abduction. Abduction, adduction. Yeah. Because that's what the pecs are. They're horizontal adductors. They adduct the shoulder horizontally. Yeah. Think about the pec deck, right? Yeah.

Exactly. So anyways, go on. Yeah, no, I agree with that. And one significant thing too is the equipment you're using, you know, not all dumbbells are made equally. That's where on the pressing motions, that's where the old school York globes are really nice because having that globe on there is very comfortable to rest on it. Oh, they're great. But you know, like if you're, if you're doing a, a press and you've got this huge globe, right, it actually sits nicely on the shoulder, unlike a hex dumbbell or like a big stack of plates on a plate loaded dumbbell. Um, and it, and you know, it's like sometimes that can, that can equal, you know, an extra

inch of range of motion or whatever. But, um, so there's a, there's, you know, a lot of factors there too, but yeah, but the point being, Baker, I think would say that you need to rotate your exercises because, you know, you're putting a lot of mechanical tension on your tendons. And in some cases, using larger range of motion variants of the movement. And yeah, you know, that's pretty fatiguing, right?

Even though you're doing a single joint exercise, it may not be's pretty fatiguing, right? Even though you're doing a single joint exercise, it may not be systemically fatiguing like a heavy deadlift would be, but it's still locally, it's fatiguing for sure. When you're strong and you do all that shit and you're doing what I'm doing, I'm doing sets across, adding a little bit each week. Right, right.

It's systemically fatiguing. I didn't think it was, but until I experienced it this week, I'm like, holy shit, I feel like I just deadlifted five sets of five. Yeah, and that's fair enough. I think that, okay, so this is another takeaway, something I've learned doing very minimal, recently doing very minimal amounts of volume on my barbell training. It's gone up a little bit more lately,

but it's not much at all. I'm doing one lift, one of each of the big lifts once a week. That's it. That's what I've been doing for years now. And yeah, I basically pattern it a lot after the way that you've approached your own training in the last few years. But the thing that I've learned is that if your sets, if the work that you do in the gym is very hard, you're going to see progress. And the same thing goes for when you're lifting a barbell, whether you're doing dumbbell work, whether you're doing lat pull-downs. It has to be hard. It has to get heavier. And it has to get heavier, right?

Let's qualify that because you can make air squats hard. It has to get heavier. And it has to get heavier, right? Let's qualify that because you can make air squats hard, you know, and that's what people want to make warm-up sets hard so they never have to add. This is a problem. Yeah, fair point. I guess what I'm saying is that, you know, I don't need five sets of five, you know, at a medium heavy weight at 80 to 85% to, um, to get my squat stronger. Um, I've learned that if I can do one, you know, two very high effort sets, adding weight to the bar regularly. So I guess there's two pieces here. It has to be high effort and you have to add weight to the bar regularly. Then I'm going to get stronger for a good long while. It won't be forever because nothing's forever, but, you know, but I will. And that's actually been kind of surprising how little

volume I've been able to get away with and drive my lifts up. So, you know, anyway, so, you know, I think we've had on a bunch of stuff here today, but I think, you know, it's safe to say that what we know for sure, because it is both testified to, what it is testified to by a lot of people in a lot of different circumstances is that if you want to get results, if you want to get stronger, you want to get more muscular, you have to add weight to the bar. You have to add weight to the exercises that you're doing. That's just, it happens in different ways over and over and over. Like you said, it doesn't matter how you do it in some, in a of ways like you know you can do you know classical periodization you can do dup it's all progression it's all progressive overload of some kind or another it could uh

happen efficiently you add a little bit of weight each time because you have the equipment for it or it could happen inefficiently yes but some point, everybody who grows has gotten stronger, whether they want to call it that or not. What they're talking about is an improvement in strength, you know? Yeah. You know, the same research articles these guys like to cite, in their methodology, they talk about adding weight. Typically, it's done inefficiently because it's like,

oh, you got to complete two reps over the target range, then you can add. But the then you can add part is kind of important here. You know, load matters. You may not need to lift heavy 1RM, you know, heavy in the sense of 1RM. You may not have to do a max, but it has to get heavier.

That article is almost done, by the way. That's the title of my next article. It doesn't have to be heavy, but it has to get heavier. That article is almost done, by the way. That's the title of my next article. It doesn't have to be heavy, but it has to get heavier. Yeah, absolutely. So when somebody tells you 30% of one RM has shown growth, that's because it's not 30% of one RM 12 weeks later. Bam, there we go. Yeah.

Everything's fake except for that. That's the only fact of life you can rely on. Progressive overload. You have to do more to get more. the only fact of life you can rely on. Progressive overload. You have to do more to get more. You get out of this what you put in. You know, one of my doctoral advisors said to me once, when you finish your bachelor's, you know everything. When you finish your master's, you know nothing.

When you finish your PhD, you realize everyone's full of shit. It couldn't be more true, man. You know, my degree is conferred on Monday. We looked this up before we started this podcast because Trent was trying to decide whether to congratulate me or not. I'm a purist, so I looked. Yeah, that's right. Monday is the degree conferral date, also the day I walk and get hooded and all that shit. But that's a fact of life, man. I'm like, yeah, once you go deeper into something, I think whether it's a PhD or, you know, if you try to get to an advanced state in anything, you realize nobody really knows anything. Right. Everyone's full of shit. anything right yeah i know shit if i studied math enough i probably would get to the conclusion

that's like well one plus one you're like well i don't know if it actually equals two technically you like those memes it's like actually actually nuance remember when that was like a term nuance oh god let's not even go there all right right, man. Let's sign off. All right. Thank you for tuning in to the Weights and Plates podcast. You can find me at weightsandplates.com or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. Or you can find the gym at weights double underscore and double underscore plates. We are located in Phoenix, Arizona, just south of the airport.

So if you fly in and want to get a quick workout in we're about five minutes away very good you can you can try try some of those dumbbell some of those lateral raises yep at the starting strength gym that uh bro i got mad spotters now too oh nice nice jelly. I'm jelly. Well, you can find me on Instagram at marmalade underscore cream. That's also the name of my audio production company. You go to marmaladecream.com. That's where I produce podcasts and mix music and all sorts of other multimedia adventures. You can find my coaching services at jonesbarbellclub.com. All right. We'll talk to you all again in a couple weeks. you