Weights and Plates Podcast - #45 - The Muscle Masterclass: Andy Baker on Hypertrophy, Common Upper Body Mistakes, and the Best Lifts for Growth

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

On today's show Robert and Trent welcome guest coach Andy Baker, Starting Strength Coach and co-author of Practical Programming for Strength Training, 3rd Edition and The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40. Andy is a master coach with a wide range of expertise and interests. He coaches high level competitive powerlifters, bodybuilders, high school and collegiate sport athletes, and regular folks just looking to become generally fit and strong. Along the way he's learned a lot about packing on muscle, and has identified common mistakes guys make when struggling to add mass, especially to their upper body.   In today's show Andy addresses the difference between strength training and hypertrophy training, a frequent point of contention amongst powerlifters, bodybuilders, and the "gym bro" crowd. As Andy puts it, both bodybuilding and powerlifting are performance based, whether you like it or not. The powerlifter obviously must perform on a platform where his or her best lifts will  be judged on completion, while a bodybuilder is judged on more subjective criteria such as muscle size, symmetry, and separation. Both competitors are strength athletes; growing muscle requires regularly adding weight to the target lifts and progressively overloading them. Where they will differ is specificity. The powerlifter will need to train his skill and neuromuscular efficiency in producing 1RM's on meet day, while the bodybuilder needs to look a certain way. For the bodybuilder, then, the ideal rep ranges will be higher -- most likely 4 to 12 reps -- while the powerlifter will spend more time in the 5 and under rep range. Likewise, the bodybuilder will choose exercises which stimulate the most muscle group for their unique body type, anthropometry, and genetic predisposition, while the powerlifter will spend most of his time performing the competion lifts (squat, bench, deadlift).   Thus, one of Andy's keys to growing muscle mass is understanding that the goals are different from general strength training and especially competitive strength sports. There are no required lifts for growing muscle. Instead, you want to focus on lifts which are highly stimulative to the muscles you're trying to grow, and these lifts will vary from person to person. Andy paraphrases one of his influences, bodybuilding coach Dante Trudell, when he says "pick a handful of movements that work for your body and get them as strong as possible in a medium rep range."   Andy has written extensively about training for strength, mass, and sport on his website. He also offers in-person and online coaching, as well as programming templates for a variety of fitness goals: https://www.andybaker.com   Andy also has a podcast, the Baker Barbell Podcast, available on all the usual streaming platforms. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/baker-barbell-podcast/id1607570442 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7K8Ue2u52o0GUalVEngPAE?si=15ab03f263a544e2     Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Howdy. Howdy, partner. Today we have a special guest. Would you like to do the intro, Trent? You're like way better at this than I am. Sure, sure. So yeah, today on the show, we welcome Andy Baker. Andy is, I think in all respects, a master coach. He is the co-author of two of the foundational books for the starting strength method, Practical Programming, third edition. We call it the gray book for short. He's also the co-author of The Barbell Prescription, which is a great book on training for the over 40 crowd. And on top of

that, gosh, Andy's got tons of articles that he's released on his website. And now, or I guess as of about a year ago, he's also got a podcast, The Baker Barbell Podcast, where he shares his thoughts on all sorts of training and nutrition topics. So welcome to the podcast, Andy. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah. So I think today, you know, we wanted to have you on because, you know, one of the things that I appreciate about your content and the stuff that you put out is that you have a really wide range of interests within training. So you are a starting strength coach. You've obviously written a lot of material for starting

strength. And that's primarily about lifting to get strong and lifting for novices. But you also have written a lot of things and you've released a podcast about training beyond the novice phase as an intermediate training for powerlifting, training for physique and building mass as well. So you've got a pretty wide base of interest and we wanted to tap into that today. Yeah. I mean, I, that's, and that's just me being kind of following my interests and my passions. I mean, every, you know, every business book in the world will tell you, you know, niche it down, niche it down, specialize in just one thing. But honestly, my interests span a lot of things. I like to experiment. I like working with a lot of different people. I mean, we were kind of talking before the show, the amount of hours that you put in

coaching on a daily basis, both in-person coaching at my gym and the online coaching and stuff that I do. I feel like if I was working with one demographic on one thing all the time, it could get, you know, it could get kind of repetitive. So I enjoy working with, you know, novices looking to, you know, to build strength and looking to learn the basic barbell lifts. I love doing that. I'd incorporate that, you know, basically with all my clients of all demographics. But then beyond that, you know, I like working with people who want to go compete in powerlifting. You know, I like working with people who want to build a physique. I've always had an interest in bodybuilding, you know, since day one when I got my start. I've always had an interest in that. You know, I like working with athletes. You know, I work with some high school and college athletes.

I find a lot of interest there as well. I like working with older people in special populations. And, you know, so it's just, you know, and I find that the more, you know, the more people that you work with, the more you learn and the more engaged you can be, you know, and to me, it's a way to prevent boredom and burnout, if nothing else. But I just I find all of those things, you know, highly fascinating. And so it's, it makes for an interesting day at work for me. Yeah, no, I would have to agree with that. I've had a similar trajectory myself, and it's kind of ties into why we wanted to bring you on here. I just came off another podcast a couple days ago about a similar topic. I was on the RP podcast that comes out next week. We did a three-way with Dr. Mike Israetel and Nick Shaw, and we were just talking about this idea that there is a dichotomy between strength and, quote-unquote, hypertrophy, right? And the kind of theme of the podcast, and I wrote several articles about this and talked about it on this podcast, is that, you know, one way or another,

when you deconstruct any type of lifting program, you're always getting stronger, you know? Sure. And the problem that we've run into recently, I think this is a more recent development. I mean, it's always kind of been there in a lot of the mainstream publications that have come out over the last 50 years. But it's been more of a modern phenomenon where you get guys just bragging about how much work they did. I did this many sets. I did this much volume. I did this much tonnage. And this has given birth to this concept that load doesn't matter, you know, that load doesn't matter. And we've seen it in the, you know, when you look at the one area where there's overlap, and I probably say this in every other episode, between the, you know, the quote unquote scientific research that's, you know, not that much more scientific than what we do when you really get down to look at it. But between the professional research people and gym owners and coaches alike

is that eventually it all has to get heavier. You know, I brought this up the other day and Mike was like, well, we just did, he did some research study with Schoenfeld where they looked at adding reps versus adding load. And I think it's the first of its kind. And he said, there wasn't really much of a difference. Stop, you know? But eventually, they had to add load. So that was like the whole point, you know? That's kind of how he finished his sentence. He's like, yeah, there's not much of a difference because novice effect, we've all talked about it, it's in the books, et cetera. You know, you start lifting, you start riding a bike, you're going to grow muscle, you know. My girlfriend did marathons and her calves grew. So if you haven't lifted before, you're going to build.

But we kept ending up in the same place. Yes, you could add a set next week. You can add a rep next week. But then eventually the load has to get heavier. And that's really kind of the theme of what we wanted to talk about today and what I've been kind of hammering on with this show because I think that's what tends to be missing. We get a lot of guys that are not so jacked, but they're not super obese either. They're just, you know, normal looking in clothes

and just complain that, you know, I just, you know, I'm soft, I'm fat, whatever. And the limiting factor there is usually strength. So that's, you know, that's something I brought up the other day. What kind of drew me in this direction? That was my baseline. I had muscular legs. I started cycling very young. I had rollerbladed. I did a lot with my lower body. So I had no problem with lower body, but I just had trouble developing up top.

And after years of, you know, following silly shit that I found on the internet, it dawned on me that a lot of the guys that I was looking at that were jacked were not limited by strength. You know, their baselines were very high. Like my brother's one of them, you know, he was probably benching 225 his first year lifting when he was like a teenager. Whereas, you know, I had to spend a whole semester in swimming to get to 95, you know, so it became clear to me, I'm like, you know, my limitation is strength, but these guys that are doing all this bodybuilding stuff, oftentimes they are not limited by strength, at least not for very long. So, you know, I'll let you kind of piggyback off that and throw some of your ideas out there. We'll just go where the wind takes us. Yeah. I mean, I think when you, to, when I, cause I've thought about it quite a bit, you know,

what is the, what is the main difference between say, and when I talk about bodybuilding training, you know, most of the time it's, it's kind of, to me, it's, it's lowercase B because most of the people that we work with are not actually, it's such a small sliver of the population that's actually interested in say competitive bodybuilding, um, which is really a diet competition. And as much as it is a train, a training competition, it's a matter of leanness. Um, but anyway, that's beside the point. But what is the difference between, say, bodybuilding versus, say, you know, power lifting or just, you know, strength training in general, basic barbell type of training?

It's really, the difference is, it's mainly on the training, there's some philosophical differences and that sort of thing. But when you break it down, like what's the main differences on the training floor, like on the gym floor, it's really an exercise selection. That's, that's, that's really the main thing. It's specificity just like any other sport. And when you, when you separate, when you, when you start talking about, you know, say think about Olympic lifting. I mean, how do we start out with an Olympic lifter? I mean, we build them a base of strength first, right? We would posit that the best way to, you know, build up the clean and jerk in the snatch in the short term for somebody who's never lifted before is to get strong in a general sense with maybe some small focus on the clean and jerk in the snatch at the beginning.

And as that lifter builds more muscle, builds more strength and gets to a certain point, it's, it's going to shift more to where a much, much higher percentage of their training is going to be directly working the clean and jerk and the snatch, all those variants, still keeping the base of strength in there. And the same thing can be applied to bodybuilding. You know, when you're, if you want to, if you've never lifted before, you know, you're, you're really a true rank novice i mean the the right course of action in general is not to start on a you know really advanced you know broken down body part split type of thing and doing a lot of specificity on each muscle group it is to build a better general base of strength and then the longer that you go the stronger that you get the less

just getting stronger on say squat bench deadlift or whatever is going to, the more you're going to have to specialize and focus on that individual sport, you know, or that, you know, if it's not a sport, just we'll say an endeavor, the more you're going to have to specialize on that endeavor. And what happens is, is, is for, you know, someone that's becoming more of an intermediate to advanced trainee is that the exercise selection is going to change. You know, in my opinion, you know, you're, you're only going to get most people. Now there's, there's obviously there's exceptions to this. If you look around in powerlifting, there's a lot of guys that, you know, all I'd say 90% of their training is basically squat bench deadlift on repeat. They do real high frequency. They do a lot of volume.

They don't do a lot of, you know, high relative intensity sets. So a lot of their sets are stopped, you know, at a, what we'd say a low RPE, you know, well short of failure and they grow like weeds and, and they have, they, their physique reflects, you know, it, it looks more, you know, kind of that body, it takes on that bodybuilder as type physique. I would say that's not most people though. Most, most people, there's a whole lot more lifters that you'll see that follow that approach. And even guys, they get very strong doing that, but you more or less don't necessarily look like they lift.

And the, and part of that is the exercise selection, you know, and depending on how you, depending on your build, how you squat bench bench, and deadlift, those exercises may or may not be the best at delivering, you know, at building up the physique. And so you're going to alter the mechanics of those movements or even do completely different movements, you know, over time. But at the beginning, those movements and other basic, you know, kind of barbell movements are really, really good starting place to kind of build that base of strength that then makes it even easier to transition onto other stuff. So one of the things that I run into talking with clients about this exact concept is that they often don't really have an idea of like what base of strength means. So like I find like for the most part, the people that I work with,

which granted are usually finding me through starting strength. So they're already kind of predisposed to understand like, Hey, we're going to lift the barbell and we're going to focus on a few basic exercises and get strong on those first, but they'll usually buy into the barbell part of it. But where I sometimes find there's like a deviation between like what they think base of strength means versus what I have in my head. So Andy, do you have like a, like certain like break points where like you want to see a guy in general squatting about X or benching about X before, you know, they're really able to benefit from more, you know, quote unquote hypertrophy exercises. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's a good question. I don't think as a community, we have a really good answer for that because you're looking at, there's a lot of factors in there. It's like,

okay, well, the one thing I always tell guys that are interested in bodybuilding, unlike powerlifting, you know, when you're powerlifting, one of the nice things about that is the criteria for exercises are done for you. Like you have to squat, bench and deadlift, right? Or at least, you know, some guys do a lot of frequency on that. Some guys do left, but at some point in your training, you're going to have to squat, bench and deadlift. You have to learn the technique. You have to get the, you know, those neurological pathways kind of established in bodybuilding. There's no single lift that you have to do, you know, that, and I think it's a good idea that you do a lot of the basic barbell lifts. Um, but, but you don't necessarily have to do anything. So what for

a guy whose ultimate aim is to get into, into bodybuilding, what is a good base of strength? You know, I'd say, you know, squat, bench and deadlift and let's, you know, overhead press or, you know, there's, there's a, there's a handful of other movements outside of the competitive power lifts would be good, good proxies for that. And then you get, but then you get into, okay, it's not just exercise selection. What about rep range for a guy that's in, for a guy that's interested in bodybuilding? Do we need to focus on what his one rep max is? You know, I would argue that for a more advanced bodybuilder, it's, that's almost irrelevant because there's things about a, a one rep max that are more

skill-based neurologically based that don't have, it's not a good use of time for a more advanced bodybuilder to do a lot of 1rm type of work now they may do it on occasion i mean a lot of guys do they like say how much do i bench it's not it's not like it's the end of the world it's not like you can never pull a max a max effort deadlift or do a max bench or whatever most guys even bodybuilder guys are gonna do it from time to time just because we all like being strong. Yeah, Ronnie Coleman. Yeah, but it's not a good use of your training time to do – from a programming standpoint to do things that are really far on that end of the spectrum in terms of the three reps and below type of stuff. That type of work is going to be best suited for people that are interested in whose primary goal is lifting the most weight on a given lift. The same thing, it wouldn't make any sense to do super high repetition, 20 rep leg press or a 20 rep squat have its place sometimes in a bodybuilding program. Sure, but are you going to build a program around 20 rep everything? in a bodybuilding program? Sure. But is that going to be, are you going to build a program around 20 rep everything? No. I mean, I think most people, I don't think there's a whole lot of

debate about this. I mean, most of us recognize that for muscle building standpoint, you know, if you had to pin down a rep range, now again, this varies on what exercise you're doing or even what body part you're doing. But most of us would say that it's probably somewhere like the broad range would be like four to 12. Like that's kind of your, your mid range for kind of muscle building purposes. You know, on some of the barbell stuff, you could say, well, it's more like, you know, maybe four, four to six, four to eight is a good range. You know, that five rep range, you know, maybe more isolation stuff or things like biceps or whatever. It's going to be a little bit on the higher end, more the eight to 12 range. But in general, most of the work

that you're gonna be doing is going to be in that, let's say, four to 12 rep range. It's gonna be the sweet spot for most exercises and most muscle groups if your primary interest is in hypertrophy. So the progressive overload part applies for sure. Like the, the main objective to me is, is always to get stronger. It's just going to be more in kind of that medium rep range for, so, you know, building up your best set of five, like that actually

turns out that's actually a pretty good proxy for, it's hard to measure muscle growth. How do we, it's hard to measure muscle growth on a daily, weekly a short term so the the best proxy that we have to measure the effectiveness of the training stimulus you know or whether the you know if you're getting stronger you're not losing muscle that's for sure especially if you're getting stronger in like that medium rep range you know 1rm strength is kind of that can be hit or miss. I mean, you guys that have, especially like on heavy deadlifts and stuff like that, like if you're, you know, if your nervous system is not in a place where, you know, you're not going to perform well on that really, on that really, really heavy shit. So I would, I'd say that for muscle mass, you know, something that,

you know, your, your best lifts, your best five RM, your best eight RM, that kind of stuff is going to be a better predictor of whether or not the stimulus that you're doing is, is effective for muscle growth. Yeah. Does that, did that answer your question? Yeah, that makes sense. Well, yeah, that's, that's, that's really good foundation for the topic here. So, you know, totally makes sense. We don't need to be wasting our time with, with, with really low rep sets. If we're, if the goal is building muscle mass, what I wonder as an analog to that is, you know, before, and we're going to get into like what kind of movements that you like

for building muscle mass besides the basic barbell lifts, but let's say for somebody who's a novice or maybe an early intermediate lifter, where do you want to see, let's say, their bench at for three sets of five or for a 5RM before they really start getting deep into doing chest accessory work like flies or whatever? Do they need to be repping 225 or does it matter? 225 would be a fair number. I would agree. If you're going to compete in bodybuilding, let's say, for instance, or just be – I mean, if you go into – like, everybody loves to beat up on the gym bros, right?

Like, it's kind of a fun stereotype. But if you go into Gold's Gym and looked at, like, the jacked guys in the gym, I don't mean, like, the most jacked guys, but just a guy who's pretty jacked. Like, they all can rep 225 on the bench. Yes. Right, right. You know what I mean? And lazily, you know, so it's not, um, you know, you know, how many bodybuilders with, you know, with, with a good pair of, with a good pair of quads and hams can't squat 315 for reps, you know, 405 for reps is, is probably even more. I mean, there's, there's a good bodybuilder I follow.

I mean, he's like 160 something pounds and he's, you know, he rep, he's not a strength athlete, but he, but he, I mean, four or five for reps is pretty, I'd say that's, you know, it's hard. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it does have to do with build and that sort of thing and the way you execute the movement matters and all that sort of thing. But, you know, it's, it is hard to put a, put a number on it, but I'd say, you know, for, for squatting, I mean, 315 for reps for sure. Yeah, sure. I think. To me, that's a pretty low bar for a guy that we're assuming

this guy is maybe early 20s or something like that. That's a pretty low bar that you can get to somebody on a basic novice type of program without killing them, without having to do a lot of really low rep work. Like most of us can take a genetically average to above average guy with the right amount of motivation that will adhere even 80% to his diet and shows up for his sessions.

Most of us can take a guy like that and get him to a three plate squat for fives fairly easily, I'd say. And then after that, then I would say, you know, I've been doing the, I've been taking novices through the, you know, the starting strength progression for a long, long time. And, you know, we don't define novice intermediate advanced necessarily by how much weight they lift, but, you know, it's a pretty rare bird on a, like a daily type of linear progression. That's going to get to say four or five. I mean, we have some, but it's, you know, I'd say most of the time,

most guys Peter out somewhere in the low threes. I don't know if that squares with what y'all and then before more, you know, before you have to start tinkering with the programming a little bit, you know, and so I'd say that people have kind of a natural end point, um, you know, to where they, but I'd say that's a, you know, that's, I'd say that's low threes for a younger guy, bench, low twos, something like that. Yeah. Deadlift. I mean a guy that's doing 315 for reps is usually going to be able to deadlift – or a guy that's squatting 315 for reps is usually going to be able to deadlift 405 for reps, probably unless he's got some fucked up build or something like that. But that's so, I mean, that's kind of a 225, 315, 405. If you want to just use even plate math for it is that's pretty,

that's, you know, that's fair. Yeah. As long as, yeah. As long as you're in the ballpark, right. Yeah. Of those numbers. Yeah. I wanted to just point that out because I know some people are going to hear this, this show and think like, oh yeah, man, I'm all, I'm to just point that out because I know some people are going to hear this show and think like, oh yeah, man, I'm all in. Let's throw in the curls. Let's throw in the flies and the cable rows. And it's like, if you're squatting 225, then maybe you should work on that first

before you move on to this. Yeah, I think because all that's going to have, there's going to be an interference effect from a lot of that stuff. And so while it might, you know, in theory, it's not necessarily bad to do leg extensions, leg curls, hack squats, all that kind of stuff. You can only do and recover from so much in a given training week. And, you know, if you can just plow through and get some of those basic strength numbers up, it's going to, just like with the Olympic lifting analogy. I mean, if you can get that baseline of strength up, I mean, how, it's going to, just like with the Olympic lifting analogy. I mean,

if you can get, you can get that baseline of strength up. I mean, how much better is your clean and jerk and snatch practice going to be? You know, when you're working with those heavier weights, you're going to have more body control. You're going to have more muscle mass. It's just going to be, it's just going to be better overall. This, it applies to everything. It applies to CrossFit. I mean, if we're going to work with a CrossFitter, do we want to start them on a full on like CrossFit program on day one, if they've never really lifted? Or would we say, I mean, who are the guys that really do well in like the CrossFit games? Well, most of them come in pretty strong, right? I mean, they come in with a good base of strength and then you teach them. I mean,

I don't do this. I just, I can know how it works, but you're going to learn all the skills of CrossFitting, the gymnastic stuff and the conditioning stuff or whatever, but it's, it's always going to work better in that, in the CrossFit world. If a guy comes in with a really, really good base of strength, you know, with those numbers versus if a guy's coming in and, you know, he's, he's benching 95 pounds and squatting 135 and deadlifting 185. I mean, how much WOD stuff do you need to be doing, you know, or do you, would you be better you be better to build that muscle and build that strength? And then kind of, it's not necessarily that you stop. It's not like you could put a hard stop on the strength stuff,

but you start to incorporate that stuff a little bit later. So let's talk about that guy because I know he's listening. And what he's going to take away from what you just said is, well, I don't have to lift heavy because I'm just training for looks. I just want to look better. And meanwhile, he's squatting 135. I run into this all the time. You know, they'll say, I don't care about performance.

I care about looks, but looks are a function of performance, right? So when you say an advanced bodybuilder doesn't need to do a 1RM or train triples or anything like that, you know, describe that guy and how that is different from our pretty much novice, possibly early intermediate. That's just been jerking off in the gym and just decided to call us. Well, I mean, it's the, the, the it's, it's performance based whether you want it to or not. I mean, that, that something's, you're going to have to improve. I mean, so you're at 135, 135 for five squat. Okay. Where do you go from there? So we do, we, there has to be some form of progressive overload. So we say, okay, well, we don't need to do, we don't need to add any weight to that 135 squat.

So what do we do? We add a rep. Okay. Next week's 135 for six in theory. Okay. That's okay. That's okay with me. And then where are you going to go with that? You're going to go to eight, you're going to go to 10, and then what? You're going to go to sets of 20, you're going to go to three, and you're just going to stay with 135 forever and keep adding, you know, days of the week, you know, keep adding frequency, keep adding volume, keep adding reps. I mean, it's just, in a way, it's just from a practicality standpoint, never mind the fact that it really doesn't work to do it that way. It just doesn't. But it just becomes more of an efficiency thing to add the load. And so, does it really matter what your one rep max is if you want to be a bodybuilder? No. But also,

even if you never test a one rep max, if all you do is squats in the five to eight range and you progressively overload squats in the five to eight range, guess what's going to happen to your one RM? It's going to go up, whether you test it or not. You know what I mean? I mean, it may not be world-class if you never train one RMs because you may lack the skill or whatever, but if you take a guy's squat from 135 for five to 225 for five, guess what happened to his one RN? It went up. Whether you test, whether you tested it or not, it went up, you know? So my contention is not that you don't need to get stronger. It's that you just don't need to spend a lot of time training in like that one, two, and three rep range necessarily if physique is the goal or if muscle mass is the goal but it's not

you know but the load still has to go up i mean my my biggest influence in the bodybuilding world is and a lot of guys don't know who this is that's listening to this is a guy named dante trudell oh yeah he came up with this cycling for pennies yeah yeah yeah i mean you don't have to you don't necessarily have to agree with everything because you have to look at the context of who dante worked with and the drugs massively influence the dog crap method and all that kind of stuff but if you break down I mean I've heard him say this if you break it down it's find exercises that fit your structure that can be progressively loaded over time which doesn't apply to all exercises find exercises that can progressively load over time

and get as strong as humanly possible in a medium rep range. And that's basically it. That's, that's that whole, I mean, that's, if he, and I've heard him say that, so I'm not, you know, I'm not extrapolating. It's more, it's more or less a direct quote that that's, that's bodybuilding training in a nutshell. And this is the guy who's mostly credited for, and his influence is still very, very, he doesn't coach people. He owns's mostly credited for and his influence is still very very um he doesn't coach people he owns a supplement company but his influence is all over bodybuilding and the best bodybuilding coaches in the world the matt janssens of the world and that sort of thing are all influenced heavily by dante and that's that's basically his whole thing was and that was his deal in the 90s was coming in and saying, so many of these guys are just, they're, they're, they're fluff training. They're doing,

it's kind of like today's thing. They're doing a million exercises. They're doing, you know, 20 sets of biceps and 20 sets of triceps. Everything's in the 15 to 20 rep range because everyone was so in love with the idea that the pump, you know, you just get that pump and you just keep going and you keep getting the pump. And then when the pump dies, that's the end of your workout. And, you know, if you're an, if you're an experienced trainee, I mean, I can take a pair of bands and get a massive pump in my triceps or my bicep, but how, how much growth am I going to get from that? You know, so that, that was kind of his thing was, look, you need to strip away all this volume. You need to strip away doing 20 different exercises for every body part.

You need to get down to the five to eight range or the six to 12 range or whatever it is. And you need to get progressively stronger on lifts that allow you to get progressively stronger. And that's the thing is how far can you take a dumbbell side delt raise? And I actually think that's not a bad exercise, but, but how far are you, how far can you progress that? I mean, you see guys in the gym doing strict sets of, of dumbbell side delt raises with a hundreds. No, you don't see that.

There's an upper limit on that. But is, is there an upper limit on, in theory, is there an upper limit on how strong you can get on a, on a barbell overhead press or a dumbbell overhead press? I mean, all of those movements can be, in theory, can be loaded infinitely. And those are the movements that we want to focus on. And the barbell movements are probably better than any movements can be loaded, you know, in theory, infinitely, you know. And so that's where we put our focus. So take those movements that can be loaded, and then you load them so that's those that's where we put our focus and take those movements that can be loaded and then you load them in that medium rep range and that's and then

you eat man i remember that big i remember that thread back in 2003 i tried to follow it and uh that was the first time i'd saw that that like you're doing too much shit you know pick a few things at work and make them heavy you know and uh And the thing that was- And that's, I mean, that's what he, guys would go, hey, you know, I can't get my triceps to grow. I'm just using this as an example. You know, I can't get my triceps to grow. And he'd say, well, what do you close grip bench right now for a set of eight?

You know, well, I had 225. He's like, get your close grip bench to 315 for a set of eight and then come back. Tell me if your triceps didn't grow. And it's like, that's the mindset you wanna's the mindset you want to cultivate when you're trying to train for hypertrophy. It's like, my legs are small. Okay. What do you squat? 225 for five. Okay. Get your squat to 405 for five and then come back. Are your legs going to be bigger than they are today? Yeah, they are. They're going to be bigger. And it doesn't matter to me. I've always told guys,

look, it's that end result. It's if you get that squat from 225 for five to 405 for five, you're going to have grown. Whether you did that with high volume or low volume or two days a week or one day a week, I don't really care about that. Like just find a way that works for you and get that, get that number up. Like that's, that's going to be at the end of the day, that's going to be, you know, whether you squat two days a week or three days a week or one day a week is less important than did whatever methodology you use make those numbers move. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that makes me think of two things here. So first, we've talked a lot about, you know, basic general strength, strength of the barbell lifts and why that's, why that's important. You know, we've all hammered it, uh, at length on our own

podcasts, our own content, et cetera. But I just want to kind of revisit something here at the guys that, you know, they want to look better. They want to get bigger. And this also ties into, you know, where I, you know, I personally have found, um, you know, we're not necessarily in the singles, but spending time with triples has been useful in my post novices. I'll get guys that just, I'm a deadlift specifically. This is where I place a lot of priority and I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this. But, um, for me, I was, I've always squatted, uh, since I got out of high school, I've been benching since I was in high school and I've done pull-ups since high school because I was, uh, I was a swimmer. So we had to do those movements. Um, we just didn't squat so you know i noticed okay my lats will get bigger my chest would get bigger my quads

would get bigger right um but you know my delts weren't growing my back wasn't growing uh thick i should say what do they call it back thickness and physique circles i wasn't getting that i did every type of row variant possible and just as an aside what I was about to say about when I read Dog Crap and tried to do that 20 years ago, what was missing from a lot of these programs, honestly, that I've gotten from starting strength was microloading because people just didn't do it unless you're a weightlifter. And I've been following a template that you have on your website, the arm specialization one, and I've microloaded every single one of those movements, and I've taken my side raises from 10s to 20s for sets of 20 over an eight-month period. So, you know, that's what was missing back then, I thought. And for me, I was, you know, like I said,

I was bottom heavy, you know, top small. I would peter out at lifts that a lot of these guys that I was looking at that looked more jacked, that were lifting more, they'd leapfrog past these numbers, you know, so they never had to think about microloading because they would fuck around to a 225, 245, 275 bench, going five pounds at a time because different structure, different limitation. They weren't limited by growth strength at these lifts. I didn't understand that at the time. So the microloading really helped. But back to the other point.

The microloading thing, I think, and Dante used to say this, and he was the only guy talking about this at the time, was you need to find the two and a half pound plates in your gym. Because that was, and I tell you what, when I first started, that was me. I mean, when I would bench, whatever lift I was doing, I'd be benching 225. Well, what was the next increment? 275, of course, right? I mean, you don't load in quarters and plates, man. And you just do 225. I thought you were going to say 235.

No, fuck no, dude. Plates and quarters, you know? And honestly, I'm not going to lie. I mean, I got to decent numbers kind of doing that but i never thought really until i got you know met rip i i didn't really ever think about a really progressive uh you know on a smaller scale a progressive routine like that where you would go 225 230 235 240 245 but you to me, a five-pound increment was micro-loading at the time. But same here. Depending on who you're talking to and what the movement is, you know, that's where it's

at because that's really going to be – and a lot of people will say, I've heard that argument against micro-loading. Well, what is, you know, what's the difference between a set of five at 230 and 235? Like, does that really create that much more growth? You know, I don't know, but I tell you this, you have to do it before you get to 240 and you have to do 245 before you get to 250. Like, and so whether how much growth it creates, it's a necessary step. And like, for most people making those big jumps, like a lot of people do, you know, if you're, if you're squatting 315 for five now, like your next step is not 365 right yeah yeah you know but that's how but i just think that that's how i that was my mindset when i first

started i mean it was all plates and quarters yeah sure and the micro loading thing is is really important especially on small movements um you know like like side delt raises or um and especially small um you know biceps anything is small muscle group that works in isolation like that is just not going to go up 5 to 10 pounds per session. And you have to eke out gains out of that, but that's how muscle is built. Yeah, I thought I was being responsible back then, just putting the fives on, going up by 10 every time. And then I went down to fives, but I learned through RIP

that five was too big on a bench press, but really on a press or anything smaller than that. Yeah. I don't think I'd have the press that I have today without that. But, yeah, I put the little quarter pounds on my notable dumbbells. I go up by half per arm on those side raises, and it's worked, man. But, yeah, I found – so when I started doing starting strength, I got a lot of growth out of the deadlift and the press because I just wasn't training those movements. I didn't understand how you built back thickness. I thought you had to row your way there. And then I learned

through various conversations, the rep, reading content, and just critical thinking, I'm like, okay, these are postural muscles. They work primarily isometrically, so the back needs to be loaded isometrically, especially in those early phases. So I have found the deadlift to be the driver of all other lifts, provided that you're doing it correctly, especially in those early phases. Obviously, this changes because it beats the piss out of you when you're more advanced. But early on, I make it a very big priority to try to get these guys to 405, you know, for a set of five deadlifting over 400 pounds. So I might, I might run up triples just to keep that intensity going, then go back down, rework. And I just kind of really drill it in their head. I'm like, guys, this lift works everything from your neck to your ankles, but let's put lower body aside for now.

It works everything from your neck to your ass, everything around your waist, your forearms, you're working a ton of upper body musculature. In addition to all that lower body musculature, it's getting hit as well. So, you know, it's not as long of a range of motion as a squat, but again, your spine's in tension. You have to oppose that. All those muscles of the back grow, your forearms grow, your abs grow, your obliques grow. And that's what a lot of these guys want, right? They want a nice upper body. And I'm like, go to a freaking powerlifting meet, man. Find a deadlifter that doesn't have big traps, a thick back, and nice set of abs, you know? If you're looking at the guys that are like placing high in the deadlift, they tend to be leaner. They tend to be more jacked, you know? Squats, a bit of the opposite,

you know? And, you know, people criticize, you know, we kind of, again, you kind of like, you look at like, say, the IFBB pros, like at the very top level, and you say, well, we can't really learn anything from them because they're all genetically gifted, true. And they're all on massive amounts of PEDs, more so than any normal person's gonna be willing to take or should take. And you say, so we really can't learn anything

from those guys. But I would say, actually, I think that you can because it's a level playing field for the most part i mean yeah yeah was ronnie coleman gifted of course but was he more gifted than flex wheeler no or any of the other guys that he competed against but what was the thing that set ronnie apart from everybody else it was his back he was he was there anybody else on that stage that could do 800 for a double right nope and when he and he used to say it i mean he used to say as soon as i turn around the show's over because and you know because no it's

like everybody you're like oh yeah they look pretty good and then like they turn around for a rear double bicep you're like ah yep there's the winner like not even close and so what was the difference nobody else at that time was training that way and even jay cutler said you know he was running up second and third place at mr olympia he couldn't beat ron Jay Cutler said, you know, he was running up second and third place at Mr. Olympia. He couldn't beat Ronnie. And they said, well, you know, what did, what did he do? He said, I went back to, I went back to the big list. He's like, that's how I started. But then I got with everybody else, I was doing the cables and the machines and the kind of the stuff, you know, and then it was like, in order to, to beat him and he went back and was like,

I'm going to run my deadlift up to, to you know whatever he was doing 700 for reps or or whatever in order to compete at that same level and so it even at the most advanced stages it still has its place now i you know ronnie didn't spend most of his training sessions doing 800 pound doubles but he could do it and he did do it occasionally um you know and that was um you know, so I think it makes it does make a difference. And it is something that the younger guys who are obviously not at that level and all that, that's something that you can that you can take away. Yeah, I remember in his back training, his famous back training video, you can look up

on YouTube. He does 800 for a double and then he walks over to the barbell row and works up to 495 for 10 or something yeah and that's and that's the other thing like robert was saying we talked about a base of strength earlier like you know when you talk about like say the deadlift being you know like those those postural muscles that that need to be strong isometrically like that like you when you develop the bigger squat and the bigger deadlift, especially you're setting yourself up to have a better platform for doing some of these other movements later that are going to contribute a

lot more. Like you're not like, I don't know if you guys have like done a lot of like real heavy barbell rows, not like Pendlay rows that reset on the floor, but like heavy barbell rows where you're having to anchor yourself and suspend say three 15 or more from your arms and row it. Like you can't have your lower back be the limiting factor for that. Like, it has to be able to hold that posture. It has, you have to be able to, that's, the barbell row is really hard to teach because the first thing you have to teach guys is how to anchor that position so that you can actually row in that bent over position

and not have everything other than your lats gas out first. And that's why for a lot of people, a barbell row is not a great movement for hypertrophy because the target muscle is like the last thing that gets stimulated. You know, the target, if you're trying to build up the lats in the upper back, it's like everything fails before that. And that's not, that makes it not a good movement. But if you're strong enough to anchor yourself to where you can row 315, or in Ronnie's case, 495 for a set of 10, which is ridiculous, the target muscle that he's trying to work is actually the thing that's fatiguing out and not those other things. Does that make sense?

Oh, dude, you took the next topic out of my mouth, man. I was literally going to say a variation of that to lead into the fact that I gave up on rows because of what you're talking about. I wasn't getting anything out of them. And this was pre-starting strength. I never built up my deadlift. I had built up my squat to a decent place for what I was doing. I squatted 315 right before the linear progression. year progression and i you know i've been i was benching 215 for a set of five i think at the time but i never got my deadlift past 315 and i which i thought was heavy and because i was doing it wrong i'm like what's the point of this shit it's a lower back exercise which means i was rounding you know yeah so i would just do it like a few times a year right now um earlier last or now we're in another year so last year uh 2022 mike min Mike Minigal's like, I'm doing Baker's arm program. Give it a shot, you know? So I did. And then, and like, you know, I did the arm stuff and I'm like, all right, three sets.

I'm going to listen to them because I've heard Andy say that these bodybuilders over-train too much. So I'm just going to do the three sets on the arm isolation stuff, which I'm glad I did. I don't have any crazy tendonitis. But I got to the back day and, you know, this is my second time running and I'm on the last phase. This will be 30 weeks of this thing. And what I'll say is that a couple of things, number one, curling has never

felt better. When I used to curl when I was younger, I hated it because my forearms would fatigue. And I didn't know this at the time, but I don't think I was very good at stabilizing my body while I was curling because I didn't have strong postural muscles at the time, but I wasn't so aware of that. So two things happened there. Number one, I came in with a, you know, I probably can pull 550 if I, you know, peak it out. I haven't done it in a while, but I'm a mid 500s deadlifter and I'm going in and doing this program now. And my posture is not an issue. I can hold my body in place. You know, I do a healthy, a bit of swinging that anybody's going to do on a curl, but nothing crazy. I'm not turning it into a reverse clean, but you know, I have more control over that. So it's more focused on the biceps. The second thing that I kind of added in there, um, I had a client,

I've talked about this in several episodes, but I haven't told you this client was complaining about hand pain. And I'm like, yeah, you know, get some hand grippers. And I'm like, you know, I got that old COC captain's a crush hand gri gripper I meant to use 15 years ago and never did. I'm going to bring it in and show it to you. So I start fucking with this thing in the car. It's the guide, the 60-pound one. I'm doing super high reps with it. I'm like, let's try to go up.

So I'm just driving fucking with these things. Then I go in. I'm like, week four of your program. And I'm like, what the fuck? Curls and rows got like super easy. I got to make bigger jumps now, you know? So I used to hate rowing because because A, my forearms would gas. So I really didn't feel anything in my lats.

And B, I didn't have the strong hamstrings and the strong back to stay in position. This time around, the second thing wasn't an issue. I can hold myself in position just fine. But just working on that grip strength a little bit, this is the only time ever that I've gotten anything out of rows or bicep curls. And it's in large part because of squat and deadlift strength, press strength, of course. But then, you know, I added in the hand grip stuff last minute and got better proprioception, better connection with the bar.

And that's the whole point I want to drive at. You know, if you have a strong deadlift, I think a lot of other things are easier because as I wrote in one article, I got an article on the Starting Strength website. The title was, Your Back is Never Off the Clock. Every single exercise is a back exercise. Yeah. Yeah, and to a broader point about, and this is one thing I've tried to beat into my guys that are physique-oriented, is that when you're training for physique, when you're doing an exercise, I would say the exception are things like deadlifts, which are, you know, when you're deadlifting, even if your goal is physique, you're not really thinking about, okay, I need to feel my hamstrings extend and then I need, you know, I need to feel my hamstrings extend my hips and I need to feel my, you just lift it from point A to point B, right? And the muscles that need to be worked are going to be worked.

And that's what makes these things great novice exercises is they actually don't require any mind muscle connection. Right. It's just mechanics. Like when you squat, you just need to teach somebody, here's where you squat down to, and then you stand up. Like you don't have to focus on what's doing the work. You just execute the movement and the right muscles are going to do the work.

And that works really, really well for novices who don't have good connection with their bodies yet. They don't necessarily. But when you get a little bit more advanced and you start looking at developing individual muscle groups, there's a couple of things. One, the target muscle that you're working has to be the muscle that is, quote, failing or fatiguing. And if you're doing an exercise in some other peripheral area of your body is failing first, you're getting

a very suboptimal stimulus on the muscle that you're trying to work. And so that's why I always tell my guys, I'm like, you need to wear straps when you train your back, you need to wear lifting straps. And they're like, well, I want to get my forearms to grow. I'm like, no, no, no. You don't understand. If you're, you're not going to row, you know, 495 is a ridiculous example, but you're not going to row 315 with a double overhand grip for sets of 10 without straps. Your forearms are going to fatigue first. So you're never, you're never actually limit, you're never actually approaching limit strength on the muscle that you're trying to, um, the muscle that you're trying to work. So, I mean, you look at, you look at, you know, most guys that train that when they're training back, I mean, everybody pretty

much wear straps, you know, for most movement. And it's not a question of whether you need the straps. I mean, you can do it. You can probably do some things without straps, but you're going to be limiting yourself unless it's like, why you it's like guys who refuse to switch to like a mixed grip or a hook grip on the deadlift right there they want to stay with double overhand forever and it's like why why you're so you're limiting yourself you're making the grip the limiting factor of this lift and you're leaving all these gains on the table like Like you're, you mean how, how heavy are most guys going to be able to get on a double overhand deadlift? Like they're going to stall out. And then as soon as you switch them to a mixed grip or a hook grip, or let them use a

pair of straps, I mean, they put another 200 pounds on it, right? So why would you let the grip be the limiting factor on a deadlift that has so much potential, but the same thing could be applied to lesser exercises barbell rows dumbbell rows even pull-ups like it's not a matter of whether you can do it without straps it's that you're going to get a better stimulus on your lats if you can relax your grip and let your forearms be less of a limiting factor and less of a contributor every single guy that you'll ever train that doesn't have a good back and especially new guys when when they come off of any type of back exercise, whether it's lat pull-downs, they cannot feel their back. Every time they come off the pull-down machine, where's the pump?

The forearms. That was the limiting factor. They don't know how to train the back. And if you learn how to relax the grip and let the lats do the work, you're going to get a better stimulus out of that exercise. So, um, and that, that applies to a lot of things that can apply to, you know, high repetition, low bar squatting, you know, where's the, where's the fatigue coming in a given lifter for some guys, it may be the legs, but for a lot of guys, it might be the back, you know? And so, so what is that? Is that a, would that then be a great stimulus for developing

the legs, you know, high rep, low bar squats, would Is that, would that then be a great stimulus for developing the legs? You know, high rep, low bar squats, would that be the best stimulus if the, if that's the limiting factor? You know, just like the same reason we don't necessarily want to do, you know, maybe 20s. You know, what's going to be the limiting factor for a lot of, well, your cardio. So you don't want, you know what I'm saying? You want the limiting factor to be the musculature of the muscle that you're trying to work um and so that's one of the things that changes i think for a from a guy that's a like a

novice to earlier intermediate to starting to go into that more advanced stage is that you have to start thinking a little bit more like that and it's your exercises are going to be you know and this is what makes them like a barbell row i don't think is a great exercise for a novice i just don't think they have the strength i don't think they have the mind muscle connection to do it they're just going to i don't like pendlay rows either anyways i hate that exercise for hypertrophy uh i just that's what i've been doing i don't i mean some guys i mean you look at like like mike i mean like israel i i follow him and like but if you look at the way he does like a barbell row to the floor it's very controlled and the tension is not released off of that. When you look at the way most guys, it's not that I hate the Pendlay row. I hate the way most guys do them. You know,

it's not a great stimulus for hypertrophy, you know, for the lats, especially it's decent for the erectors and the mid back, but for like the lats, it's, there's better exercises to do for the lats for sure than a Pendlay row lay row and and some of that has to do with some of that has to do with structure i mean some guys can do a given exercise and they're like man this just blows up body part x and another guy does it and he just doesn't he just doesn't get that same connection to it and so you know like that yeah i mean and that was like you know like with um you know like with me, I've always used this example. I like to do it because it gets a little bit of attention.

But I talk about like low bar squatting. Like for me, like low bar squatting is not a great movement for my quads, you know, because it's, you know, in terms of like for a more advanced, you know, in a more advanced place. I've already built up a lot of strength on there. You know what I'm saying? And so like I look at, okay, low bar squatting. up a lot of strength on there you know i'm saying and so like i look at okay low bar squatting where like if i take a set to failure like what's failing and where is the majority like the next day like where's all the soreness at like soreness is not necessarily something that we chase but it can be a good indicator of where a you know where an exercise is is is hitting you know and for me

like i always talked about like when i low bar squatted when i got at my strongest you know, and for me, like I always talked about, like when I low bar squatted, when I got at my strongest, you know, I was all ass and adductors, you know what I mean? It's a great movement for the posterior chain. But like, if I was going to go into competitive bodybuilding, like my, my focus would shift off of low bar squatting into, you know, high bar pause squats, hack squats, things like that, that really where the stress is all directed into the, into the muscle that I'm going to train. And again, it's no different than that. The mindset is no different than if we're talking about an Olympic weightlifter, where what works at the beginning, you know, for a novice and early intermediate, it's going to shift in emphasis over time, you know, where you're going to,

you're going to have to get more specific to, let's say, quote, the sport or the endeavor. So, yeah, on that note, what are some of your go-to movements then? And let's narrow this down. Let's talk about upper body in particular. So, you know, we've got a guy, he's an early intermediate. He has, you know, reached that sort of, you know, low 200s bench press mark that we talked about earlier. But he's not seeing his chest fill out in the way that he wants to, or, you know, his delts need to fill out a little bit, triceps need

to fill out. What are some of your go-to movements that you're going to reach for? Well, and some of it, so some of it may be, you know, and this is where just a basic, a basic understanding of muscle function really comes into play. You know, some of it may, like, I think the bench press is really good. I think the way, the way, so a lot of it may be changing exercises and some of it may be just changing the technique of a given exercise. Let's take the bench press, for example. The way that a lot of power lifters bench makes it not a great, not a great movement for hypertrophy. You know, if, when you're, chest, when you're hitting, um, you take a huge arch in your back, you know, you maximize the amount of arch that you can do. You bring, you take a really wide grip, you bring the bar down really low onto the, you know,

onto the, really the, like the top of the belly or whatever. And then you, you have that J curve where you're taking it, you know, not in a straight line, but back up. That's you look, just what all you got to do is watch a guy do that and watch what his pecs are doing. You know, what's the, what's the role of the pectoral muscle? I mean, what does it do? You know, it abducts the humerus in how much of that is actually happening in the way that some guys bench press. And when you look at a lot of guys, you look at it and you go, he's just not, there's just not a lot of pec activation in that movement. It doesn't necessarily mean that the bench is a bad movement, but the way that he's benching is not, is not great for pec hypertrophy. So what I, you take a guy like that, you flatten them out a little bit on the bench. You still arch a little

bit, but maybe not quite as dramatically. You change the touch point a little bit to where you're bringing up a little bit higher. The elbows are a little bit more flared out. Now you watch what the pec is doing. Now the pec is actually functioning in its role of abducting the humorous end and he's going to he's going to bench a set of you know he's going to probably use a little less weight but that's but he's using but he's creating more stress on the pec and that's the difference in power lifting versus bodybuilding is it's you're still going to try to do as much weight as you can in a given rep range but you're not just saying in powerlifting it's just touch the chest anywhere and lock it out you know so right but that's not for bodybuilding there's a different criteria you know uh hitting really low on the belly and

pushing the bar back you know over the face is not going to be the greatest technique in the world for for a lot of people some of that depends on your build you know and so i think that's where in the like in the in the powerlifting world this volume shit came from was they're using a really bad exercise to try to get, to try to, to try to develop hypertrophy. And so the answer was, well, I just do more sets, you know? And it's like, well, you don't need more sets. You need a better exercise, you know, or you need a better technique that's actually better for, you know, better for stimulating the pec. So the bench press may be fine. Now, even better than that would be, you know, if you look at the mechanics of it, a dumbbell bench press or certain types of converging chest press machines,

the hammer strength line. I mean, there's so many machines now, I don't even, you know, know them all, but there's a million makes and models of say converging type chest presses, which actually really, really emphasizes that abduction of the humerus and really really makes the the the pec go through its actual full range of motion so you have you have things like um like benching dumbbell benching converging chest pressing machines all of those things they fit the criteria they can be loaded over time you know and then you've got things like, you know, I usually switch guys over or add in incline work, you know, and so there's always been that debate forever about, you know, I guess they call it now like wonders. Yeah. Yeah. And what they call now, you know, regional

hypertrophy. Okay. Yeah. I was going to ask you about that next. Yeah. Yeah. So that was, so this is another case where I think bro science won out because bro science for years said, you know, you've got to train a muscle from different angles. Like you can't just do one. Like you've got to do bench. You've got to do incline. And so they were notionally correct, right? I don't think – it's like a lot of bro science is correct.

It's just the explanation for it is not right. Yeah, they talk about the upper pec muscle. Well, there is. I mean, there's, there's a, if you look at the fibers, there's a clavicular head of the, of the chest and the fibers, the fibers run a different direction than the sternal head, you know? And so, so when you look at stressing those fibers optimally, it turns out that like, you're not going to stress those fibers optimally doing nothing but flat pressing, you know? And so, and so we're talking about you know optimal here you were trying to maximize every bit of growth that we can possibly get you're going to need a flat probably a flat stimulus or a slight decline

might be even better i mean dorian was famous for saying get rid of flat benching everything should be done at a slight incline at a slight decline and if you actually look at the way dorian was ahead of his time he's actually pretty smart you know and you look at the way that the pec fibers lay out he's actually kind of correct in that like that that a slight decline and an incline might actually be a better stimulus overall than a than a flat you know and so um a lot and a lot of guys adhere to that and so you look at the um you just you look at the way the fibers lay out and you can kind of start developing, you can kind of start developing some, some exercises for that. But I'd say for most people, something like, you know, some sort of something from a flat angle, something at an incline angle, whether that's a dumbbell incline

press or a barbell incline press, again, there's no shortage of machines, you know, kind of find one that, that, that you feel works. And if you like, I don't know how much time you, you guys have spent doing this, but if you take a guy that's done nothing but flat benching and you have him, you know, knock out a few sets of inclines, you know, and he, and he does them correctly. A couple of things happen. One, he gets up from that first or second set and he goes, fuck, I've got a pump in my chest.

Like I've never felt before. Well, why is that happening? Well, I'd say he's probably stimulating some muscle that he hasn't really stimulated that well in the past. So he's feeling something pretty novel here. So it hasn't been optimally stressed just through flat benching. And then he's going to have a different soreness pattern the next day. So a lot of guys knock the pump stuff and the soreness stuff. And I think guys think about it wrong. They think of both of those things as causative, that the pump and the soreness is actually,

like, that's the end state. Like, we just want to see how much of a pump we can get and how sore we can get. And I don't think that's the right way to think about it. I think they're indicators. I think they could be indicators of how effective a stimulus is, you know? So, you know, when you can, when you can feel those, you know, and you can go overboard with that for sure, but it, it, it is an indicator that, that something, you know, something novel is happening. That's the, that's like the new nerd term. It's like novel stress, which that's like,

that's like the smart way of like, you know, the weeders old muscle confusion principle, right? That's like everybody that was like, Oh, know, the Weider's old muscle confusion principle, right? That's like everybody, that was like, oh, you can't confuse a muscle. Now they just call it novel stress. Novel stress. But they're kind of saying the same thing. And granted the Weider stuff was like, was stupid, right? Like you don't need 20 different angles to train your chest,

but you might need two or three, you know? And so I usually hit chest the way that I have guys do it is like something flat, something incline, and then something more kind of for that, that costal outer region, whether it's a dip, um, or like a cable fly from top to bottom. And that's, you know, that's pretty much it. Like you kind of hit that, like that's, that's kind of, that's kind of pretty much it for there.

So, um, but I, I mean, I like bench pressing for, I can't do that much of it anymore because I've got a recurring shoulder injury that just the, the, you know, I can only string together so many sessions before I start having problems there. But, you know, benching is fine. It's just the way that you do it, I think, needs to be, if you're benching a lot and you're not getting the pec hypertrophy that you want, look into the technique of the bench first. And you may need to alter the technique a little bit. want, look at the technique of the bench first, and you may need to alter the technique a little bit, you know, and then other than that, it's adding in things like, like dumbbell work, you know, that it allows for a much, a little deeper range of motion, get more, you get more bottom end stretch, which I think is an important component of a good hypertrophy

exercise. Like does it, does it include a decent bottom end stretch and does it take the muscle through a fairly full range of motion? And so sometimes certain dumbbell and machine exercises do a better job of that than barbell stuff does. So it made me think of something. So we've talked about the bench, we've talked about the squat, we've talked about the deadlift. One of the things that I have noticed in myself and virtually every novice that I've taken through a linear progression and intermediates that just weren't training it, novice that I've taken through a linear progression and intermediates that just weren't training it was that the press is highly effective at building all three heads of the of the deltoid if you are a novice or possibly under trained intermediate and I come at this from the standpoint that I used to do every this like I said every type of row I did every type of

raise and I always got good anterior deltoid development from benching and dips and that shit and posterior from pull-ups and pulls of various kinds but then you know muscle would look flat from the side no monolateral raises would change that when i found starting strength and ran up my press it finally filled out and then when i started training other people i started seeing the same thing over and over again i get girls that did bikini shows. They were doing all the same shit that I used to do. Bunch of raises, cable raises, things like that.

Get them to start pressing. That deltoid head pops out. My girlfriend is one of them. She is always getting dinged on her delts. So I had her press more filled right out. And I feel like this lift kind of gets ignored in those circles. The press is largely ignored in physique circles. I've even

heard guys say, oh, it's great for transfer to function, but it's not great for hypertrophy, which, you know, who are we talking to is the first thing that comes to my mind now, because I understand where that statement might have context. But I think that the overhead movements are almost essential as a base, since that's what we've been talking about a lot today. I think that's a base for building the shoulders. well sure and i think it goes back to it goes back to just answer that simple question for yourself if you take a guy that's that's new you know and he's got a 95 for five press or let's even say a 135 for five press and you get him to 185 for five what's going to happen to his delts they're going to grow they're going to grow and to some guys it's like any other

exercise some guys may experience more than others Some guys may get more or less complete development from that and not need anything else. I mean, look at a lot of CrossFitters. They do a lot of overhead press work with the bar. And a lot of them have some pretty jacked shoulders, if you look at it. The other thing with shoulders is that your amount of leanness plays a lot into that. Like if you've got even a little bit of body fat or water on top of that, it can make your shoulders look like canned hams, you know, but when you get, when you start leaning out a little bit, you know, like, like they, they start taking on that shape. So you, that's where leanness really comes into it, where, you know, you may not be seeing everything that's there because it just, it's one of those

muscles where even a little bit of water or, or, or fat over the top of it really obscures what the delts actually look like. Um, you know, some muscles are just like that. So, um, and that's one of them, but you know, that's, I think a lot of it is in bodybuilding circles, the, the press with the barbell press was historically always done seated on a vertical bench and that's a really shitty bar path like if you've ever done like if you've ever done a seated barbell press that's terrible on a real like a high incline press would be better yeah actually right like like lean that incline back a little bit would actually be a much better developer of the front delt but that without when you're doing it from a seated position with like the back support behind you,

it's actually a really, because you get this moment arm in front of you where you can't get your head and your face out of the way. So you're having to loop that bar out in front and it just cuts, it's just a bad range of motion. I mean, it's just hard to really get anywhere on that. So a standing press, or if you're going to do seated, now some of the old school gyms had these where like you had the seated military press, they used to call them the seated military press units that had a really low back support. So it didn't go all the way up your spine, like it stopped like in your mid back. And then you could kind of mimic what you do on a standing overhead press, which is get a little bit of that lay back in order to get your head and your face out of the

way. Now, I think like on a strict military press for the shoulders like if we're talking about hypertrophy a a standing overhead press with a barbell is a great exercise i think where guys fuck it up i think too much layback makes it not so great because again you're just taking stress off of the target muscle yes you're moving the weight from point that's why i don't like like like the starting strength model, like what they call it, the 2.0 press, or like now you've got like this crazy stuff like with double laybacks and all that.

Like if your goal is to press the most weight over your head, that's not a bad way to do it because you're incorporating more musculature. But at the same time, you're potentially taking stress off of the delts, doing that. You're bringing other things into that. So the deltoid itself is not the primary mover and it's not the not always a limiting factor in that movement so i prefer for from a hypertrophy

standpoint a stricter press with a much more moderate amount of layback and that really keeps the tension on the on the delts and that's that's my preferred way to do it. I mean, just the same way that we would say a push press or a jerk is not the greatest movement for shoulder hypertrophy. I mean, is there some? Yeah, sure. Would that be your preferred go-to movement for shoulder hypertrophy?

Probably not. Well, why so? Well, you're bringing in a lot of other shit that doesn't have anything to do with the delts. Like make the delts do the work. You know, and I always tell, I tell a lot of my guys that are doing the bodybuilding stuff like that like if you're pressing you need to make the delts if that's what you're trying to grow then they need to be doing the work and the exercise not all this other stuff so if you're

turning your press into a standing bench press and then going why aren't my delts growing well that may be it just the same as the on the bench bench press. If you're doing a, you know, uh, you know, one of those crazy, uh, you know, super high arch, really low touch point type wide, super wide grip power lifting style. Yeah. You can maybe potentially move more weight, which is good in a meet, but it's not the greatest stress on the pectoral muscle. Um, you know, just the same, this and the same thing might apply to an overhead press. The same thing might apply to a squat. You know, you're talking about what is the best movements you wanted to break it down by body part. You know, I'd say, you know, for a more advanced guy who's built, let's say his low bar squat up to a certain point, you know, switching your style to like a, like a deeper high bar pause squat in order to train

your quads that may, you know, that may be a better stimulus for a lot of people. I know for me it was because just the way that I'm built, I was i was very i was again i always make the joke i'm all adductors and ass on a low bar squat so if i'm training if i if my intention for the day is to try to create a stimulus that makes my quads grow beyond where they're currently at then you know the low bar squat may or may not be the best movement for me. And I think that's where you see like limit. So we, so things change as you get more advanced, right? Like at the beginning, we talked about the best, the best thing is just get stronger on the basic list. But then there's a point of diminishing returns on that. You know, when you get to a certain point, like I was like a mid five low bar squatter, right? Okay. So could I have gotten, so let's, let's just call it 550.

squatter, right? Okay. So could I have gotten, so let's, let's just call it five 50. Okay. Like best low bar squat. What, what, and my quads were not really, you know, that well-developed at that point is a pretty decent squat, but my quads weren't really all that, you know, weren't greatly developed from that. So they weren't small, but if I was going to step onto a bodybuilding stage, that would have been an area that I would have needed to bring up. So would I get more out of saying, okay, well, I'm going to take this 550 low bar squat and I'm going to push it to 575. Am I going to cross some sort of threshold that now all of a sudden makes my quads grow even more than they have? Or did I, did I already hit kind of the upper limit with that? You know, you don't really know. And there's limitations on strength. You say, well, just take your, take your squat to from 550 to 650. Well, maybe I can't do that. You know what I mean? Like, like, like John Meadows had that approach. Like, like I heard John Meadows

talk a lot about that. He was, you know, he would always say like, yes, like the answer is just get stronger, but you're going to hit like when you're 35, 40 years old, maybe, maybe you hit your peak on strength. Like, can you, it, yeah, in theory, it sounds good. We'll just move your deadlift from 600 to 700. Well, yeah, but maybe I can't, maybe, maybe I can't do that. And maybe the time spent doing that is not the best. It's not the best. It's just like in track, right? I don't know if you've spent time like doing, like you have to get like a track, like a hundred meter sprinter, right? You got to get the guy stronger, right? Like, and when they first start, like a young kid, most of the time, the best way to get them faster is to get them stronger. But once, let's say you get a kid to a, you know, a 500 pound squat, like, and he still needs to get faster. Like what's the, should you switch

to something more specific towards that goal? Or should you say, well, we need to just keep pushing strength. Like you're going to hit a point where there's a diminishing returns of, we just got to get stronger on these basic lifts. Like you have to get a little bit more specific. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. And they're, they're also like, you know, kind of baked into that is that there's such a high cost of pursuing that incremental strength at that point, you your squat from 550 to 600 comes with huge fatigue costs that stop you from training something else. Yeah. It's just like with any sport, there's no such thing as being too strong. It's only the acquisition of more strength that's potentially problematic at a certain level. Because

at a certain level, the amount that you're... For that 25-pound increase in your squat, how much faster is that going to make you? Is that going to be the thing that you're for that 25 pound increase in your squat, like how much faster is that going to make you? Like, is that going to be the thing that, that knocks down your a hundred meter time or is it, and just, so it's just like in, in bodybuilding, like is, is putting another 25 pounds on your, on your low bar squat, you know, your, your power lifting squat or whatever, is that going to be the thing that all of a sudden makes your quads explode into a new level of growth? Or would you get more out of it going and like I did convert over to a high bar squat and sinking those things rock bottom, actually

taking the quads through a complete and full range of motion, you know, really emphasize, you know, really emphasizing the stretch at the bottom, taking the hams and the, and the, and the glutes and the adductors out of the movement a little bit more and, and then progressing that in the same way. So maybe you go down to the first time you do that, you do three 15 little bit more and then progressing that in the same way. So maybe you go down to the first time you do that, you do 315 for five, and then you take the same approach. You go, okay, well, I'm kind of weak at these. Like I kind of suck at this variation of the squat. So why don't I push this from 315 for five to 405 for five to 455 for five? And that type of approach is what really started to make certain body parts grow

on me that were stagnated, you know, was just switching that approach. And so that's, it's, you've got to, you've got to make that muscle that you're trying to train the limiting factor or it's not going to grow. So talked about that with back training, you know, deadlifts, rack pulls, all of those things are going to be good. But they may not give you complete development of the lats after a certain point. You're going to have to add more stuff in that sort of thing. Now, I have a question for you on that, though. So let's say we've got a guy here who is squatting 315 for three sets of five, and he's doing that low bar. And he converts over to a high bar squat, but he really sucks at them.

So he's only high bar squatting, let's say, 245, 250. He probably could do more than that, but let's just say that that's where he is. So when you have that much of a drop-off, without getting into programming specifics, would you have that guy just only high bar squat at that point and just and basically just LP or linearly progress that 250 high bar squat up to near 315? Or would you leave in some low bar work from time to time to make sure he's still getting that stimulus? Because there's going to be a drop off in the in the strength stimulus, right? Yeah. And so I so I did this. One of the great things about not having competitive aspirations anymore is I do a lot of self-experimentation.

And like, so I posted a thing on Instagram, maybe a year back or whatever, I was doing, you know, really deep high bar pause squats on the Smith machine. Okay. And of course, then of course, everybody, because they know like my back, they're like, oh, look, Baker converted over to the Smith machine. Like, that's what he's advocating. No, I'm like, i'm bored with my training and so i'm it's a form of self-experimentation to see knowing what i know now if what i think in my head is correct you know and it's easier to experiment on yourself than other people because if you're especially if you're kind of in tune you kind of know what's going on so i did an experiment where i took the that that which by

the way if you've never done that it's actually like a lot of people knock the smith machine but like a deep high bar pause squat like it's actually brutally fucking hard on the quads and so i ran that up like as high as i could on there and i got i got as strong as i possibly could on there you know in the first few times i did i'm like my quads were were wrecked it felt like the like the first time that you did a lp or, like that level of soreness, like this is obviously a stimulus that they haven't gotten before. And I got really, really, really strong on that. Did not continue to low bar squat, went back to the low bar squat. And what do you think happened to my low bar squat? It tanked. It tanked. It tanked. Yeah. It tanked. And, and so,

and so that was from a strength standpoint. Now, it's not like I reverted all the way back to 225, but I was definitely not at my peak. And I think it's just as simple as specificity. You get better at what you train. And when you don't train something for a long period of time, the only exception to that for me is my deadlift.

I actually think I'm one of those guys who almost does better not deadlifting, but I think that i'm one of the exceptions to that um not the rule but the the the carryover from that and i think a lot of it was the a lot of the other musculature wasn't necessarily being trained and i think the the lack of the lack of um or the stability created by the smith machine was was a huge detriment to my strength in the in the in the barbell squat um you know and so it just has to do with with with but but that but that stability added in that you get from say a hack squat or a smith machine squat or whatever actually is a good thing when it comes to it can be a good thing when it comes

to hypertrophy but it's not good that's why don't, I would never train like an athlete that way, or just a guy that wants to be functionally strong. I would keep 99% of what we're doing free weight based, you know, barbells and dumbbell base, because I think there's a, there's a lot to just having, you know, that just you and the barbell out in space. And everybody always talks about the stabilizer muscles. And I hate that term, but that, but there's, it's not, it's not that there's a different set of muscles that are working necessarily. It's that they're not being asked to do as much. And so when you go back and you try to have all that intramuscular coordination that it takes to push a really, really heavy squat up, um, you know, you have to, you have

to train that. But I would say, you know, if you, if I was a bodybuilder, I would say mission accomplished. I would say the fact that my low bar squat went down a little bit was not necessarily because my quads grew. And if you're a physique athlete, then that's the only thing that matters. You know, nobody, when you're on the bodybuilding stage, nobody cares what you squat. They just care about what you're, you know, what you look like. And so that, at that point, I felt like, you know, that would I felt like that was a good thing for me where I was at coming off of a mid 500 squat. It wouldn't have been a good choice for a guy that has a... I don't think they would have got the same thing out of that, doing Smith machine or leg press or whatever. So it's one of those things. I always liken it to academics and Robert's a PhD, right? So it's one of those sayings. I always liken it to academics. And Robert's a PhD, right?

So he's going to understand this probably better than anybody. When you start on an academic pathway, grade school, high school, or whatever, your education is more general in nature, right? As it should be. You don't start off in high school, take, if you want to have a PhD in chemistry, you don't start off, you know, your freshman year of high school, do an advanced chemistry. You do take chemistry, right? You do, you do, you know, you do everything. You do math, reading science, like you get a broad base of education, right? And then you go into your undergraduate work and it's still kind of broad, right? You're still, you still got to do, even if your goal is to have an advanced PhD in some sort of chemistry, you're still going to take some physics. You're still going to take some biology, you're still going to take some math, like you're still

going to do a lot of that kind of stuff. You're still going to need to improve your reading skills, like all of those things. But the farther up you go, the less, you know, the less biology and physics you're going to take, and the more advanced chemistry you're going to take. And I think I think there's a there's a lot you can think of in terms of kinds of how, how an education works going from, you know, broad and general at the bottom to being much more narrowly focused at the top. And so you may, you know, as an advanced chemistry student, you may forget a little bit of that biology and physics that you knew in your undergrad work, but that's okay. You don't necessarily, you, you remember what you need to remember, you know? And I think that's okay. You don't necessarily, you remember what you need to remember.

And I think training has a lot, that analogy works for training a lot. And so that's kind of what I tell some of my advanced guys. Yeah, I like that. I like that. So one last question before we kind of wrap up, and it's one that we've all gotten at some point in time. Bringing all this home, the most common, one of the most common questions I get when we're talking about growth is, how much muscle can a human add to his frame? And this is assuming no drugs. And I know this is, there's no one answer to this question, because I've had to answer it many times. But, you know, one of the reason I ask it is, one of the things that I get is, well,

bro, you're not even big. What the fuck do you know, you know? And, you know, my response lately has been, you know, if you look, I need to post my before more often. I don't do that quite hardly enough. But, you know, if you kind of look at where I started to where I've come, my experience with all this has been that each year, you know, I started out baseline skinny fat. Each year I get less skinny, a little more jacked, but I'm not turning into a big, giant fucking beast.

And my experience training others is most people kind of respond the same way. There's, you know, a small to modest delta, and then you get guys that are just hyper fucking responders. Then you get our motor morons that, God love them, put us to work for several years. So I just wanted your take on that. Well, it's like any other sport. Genetics play a role. I mean, and also your willingness to, especially when you work with a little bit older population and you talk about weight gain. older population and you talk about weight gain. I mean, I always tell my clients, like, we, we know the more, the more that you eat and the, you know, the more scale weight you want to add,

the more potential for muscle you want to have. At a certain point though, you have to balance out your quest for more muscle with what you want to weigh, you know, what, what you want your scale weight to be because you have other considerations in your life, just your health. How heavy do you want to be? What kind of other activities are you involved in and just weighing more? I know I'm kind of the same way, put on more muscle when I get heavier, but my energy level throughout the day is not that great. And I have a lot to do during the day. I run two businesses and have three kids. And like, I feel a lot better at 205 than I do at 230, you know?

And so there's other considerations to weigh, you know? And so if you're going to, so a lot of it depends on how lean do you want to stay? You know, if you want to keep abs in the, you know, like a good set of abs in the mirror year round, you're going to be limiting your growth to some degree i mean you're when you to stack on 20 pounds to add on 20 pounds of purely fat i just had this conversation yesterday with a client yeah yeah this is he doesn't want to put on one single ounce of body fat or water and i'm like dude for a guy that's 40 something years

old of average genetics, to think that you're going to, like, like to put on 20 pounds of fat free mass, I don't think you will understand how hard that is. Like it's near, I would say it's bordering on impossible. It's bordering on impossible with the way that, I mean, Trent loves these guys. Yeah. Like, here understand, like, even if you don't lift, if you just get really fat, like you're actually going to put on some muscle. Yeah. Like without even lifting and like, people don't want to hear that. And it's, and I, and I'm not advocating that you should get fat because I think there's, there's, there's drawbacks to that too, in terms of anabolism. Like there's things that happen

when you're carrying way in excess adipose tissue that actually aren't that great for, like your insulin sensitivity sucks. And so like there's lots of things. I mean, Robert could talk about this better than I could, but from my understanding of nutrition and all is actually being excessively fat is not great for muscle growth either.

But to walk around with like a shredded six pack all day and think, well, I want to, I want to continue to add weight. Well, you're probably limiting yourself some. So some of it is you're going to have to smooth over a little bit in order to put on that kind of weight, you know, and then, and then peel a little bit of that off. And the, the, what people don't understand about this thing and it, people talk about it nowadays. Like it's like, it's like, it's commonplace, like this whole thing of we're going to bulk and then cut, and we're going to bulk and we're going to do a mini cut.

And then people don't understand how fucking hard that is over a long period of time, like the level of discipline that that takes to I'm going to move my body weight up 20 pounds, a half pound per week, which is about what I would tell people. That's about the max you want to go up is about a half pound to a pound per week, which is about what I would tell people, you know, that's about the max you want to go up is about a half pound to a pound per week. You can gain faster than that. I mean, I can gain five pounds overnight, you know, easy depending on, you know, what, what, cause I have almost an unlimited appetite, but that's, it's not going to be, it's not going to be quality weight. So if you're wanting to add quality weight and we're talking about a half pound to a pound per week of weight gain, you're still going to put on a little bit of body fat, even doing that very, very minimal increase. And so to push that up, you know, that 20 pounds, I mean, you're looking at potentially

40 weeks, you're looking at almost the better part of a year of very, very slowly and methodically adding that weight, which takes a lot of discipline to keep it in that range, to be in a surplus, but in a very, very small surplus. And then to peel a little bit of that off and then to go back up another 10 or 20, and then to peel a little bit off and then to go back up another 20, you're talking about a multi-year process of very, very meticulous tracking of calories and macros and that sort of thing. And I think unless you're sufficiently motivated to do that through high levels of competition,

it's going to be more than most people are willing to do in the reality. They may want to do that, but when you look at the reality of that, it's kind of like when somebody wants to get really, really lean. It's like, do you know what it you look at the reality of that, it's kind of like, like how, it's like when somebody wants to get really, really lean, it's like, do you know what it's going to take to get that lean and stay that lean? And like, you really want to do that? Like, I want to drink a few beers on the weekend, you know, and I want to eat a pizza on the weekend.

Like, so, so I'm going to have to accept a certain amount of like, you know, not leanness in order to live the lifestyle that I want to live. You know, if I want, like I've been down really, really, really, really low body fat before. And I know what that takes for me. And that's not a lifestyle that I'm willing to live. And I think most people have a hard time admitting that to themselves. They, they want it in theory, but when you really break it down of what does it actually take to do what you're asking to do, you're not willing to put in that kind of work, you know? And it's just, you know, so you have to, you know, you have the, and that's, I mean, that's why people go on PEDs, you know, because it makes it a lot easier. I was about to say that. I mean, that's why people, that's why steroids are popular because it kind of,

it cuts a lot of time off of that pathway. But to do that as a natural trainee, I mean, just look at natural bodybuilding. I mean, a lot of those guys are, when you look at them, if you look at them pre-contest in the final weeks and months leading up to a contest and you see them in a t-shirt, a lot of them, you can't hardly tell they lift weights.

They're not, they look pretty peeled when they take their shirt off, but they're not that big, you know, because as a natural guy, it's just hard to put on that amount of muscle mass and keep that level of leanness. And I think this is kind of an aside, but the natural bodybuilding sport, I think part of the problem with natural bodybuilding is they enforce the same standards of leanness that they do on the pros that are using all those anabolics and you can't you cannot get that lean without dieting off a significant amount of muscle the pros can because of the because of the drugs that they take they can get down to almost you know i don't know what what percentage of body fat would you say those guys

are i mean at four or five yeah but on stage it's even less less. I mean, because they're so, they're just, it's just nothing, you know? Right, yeah. And it's like, for a natural to get down that low, you're going to have to peel off a lot of muscle mass. And so, to think that you're going to, you know, not only maintain that, but then add muscle mass in that, and to stay really, really lean. and to stay really, really lean. So you just got to come to grips with how much, you know, how much scale weight are you willing to gain? How much fat are you willing to accumulate?

And, you know, that's going to be different for everybody, you know. And, you know, the same thing can be said with strength. I mean, if you get a guy that's 6'1 and 180, you know, and he's like, oh, I want to bench 315, and he's like oh i want to bench three you know i want to bench 315 and he's at 225 and it's like man with those long ass arms 180 pounds may not be enough to move that you know unless you've got some insane genetics it's going to be a tough ask unless you're willing to put on another 20 30 pounds you know and it's just the it's just you need that amount you need the leverages to improve in order to move that kind of weight. And it's just so, you know, and a lot of guys don't want to do that. And I say, well, that's

fine. Like, I'm not, I'm not the guy that's going to tell you what you should weigh. That's your choice. You want to weigh, if you're a 6'1", 180, like that's fine. Like, I think that's a healthy weight, but it's not optimal for a strength athlete, you know? And so if that's what you want to weigh, you're going to have to accept a certain amount of limitations on your absolute strength. And the same thing is true with muscle size. If you're not willing to push the scale weight up, you know, these guys, if let's say a more normal guy that's 5'8 and, you know, 165, I mean, he can look pretty good, but he's not going to be huge. Yeah, right, right. So, and if he wants to get up to 185 205 that's possible but to think you're going to do that all fat-free muscle mass yeah right i mean you did this reminds me of uh

when i was like 16 or 17 i was a football player i played football in high school and i am that guy i was i'm 5'8 and at the time i was 165 thereabouts and i remember going to the gnc and i was like looking for the like mass gainer 9,000 or whatever. And I'm talking to the guy at the front desk and he's helping me pick something out. And he's like, Oh, you just want to bulk up? Like, yeah, yeah. I want to bulk up. He's like, all right, here's what you need, man. And, uh, and I was like, but you know, like lean, right? And he's like, you mean you want to put on lean mass, 10 pounds of lean mass? And he's like, brother mean you want to put on lean mass, 10 pounds of lean mass? And he's like, brother, you better get on steroids.

And you know what? He was honest with me. I appreciate it. He was like, bro, you can bulk up. You can put on 20 pounds. But like, oh, lean? He's like, if you book it in the gym, you might put on like three or four pounds. But yeah, he was like, get on steroids if you want more.

But, yeah, he was like, get on steroids if you want more. Get on steroids or have a genetic profile of that of a guy that plays, you know, that's a running back in the NFL. Yeah, right, right. The tip of the spear genetics. Now, can those guys add 10 or 20 pounds of lean muscle between the ages of 18 to 25? Hell, yeah, they can. Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. A lot easier than the rest of us can.

And that's, you know, and so that's, but that's, again, you're talking about a different, and I would say a lot of the top bodybuilders, certainly at the pro level, have those types of genetics in terms of, I mean, they're close, maybe not athletically necessarily, but in terms of muscle building potential, the ability to, you know, consume a ton of calories and stay fairly lean. I mean, those guys have that. I don't, what, and this would be something we get into the podcast week. I want to talk to you about the whole, the idea of the body type that, you know, you talked about the endomorph, mesomorph, ectomorph type of thing. And I've heard different things on that about,

oh, that's bullshit or that's true. But, you know, there's a, people fit a profile. I mean, I've always been able, I'm one, I'm five, four. And so for me, when I put on a little bit of muscle, that's why most bodybuilders are short. When I put on a little bit of muscle, it shows up, you know, and that's an advantage for a guy of my height, you know, for a guy that's six, one, you know, to put on five or 10 pounds of muscle, it doesn't show up the same way as it does just like fat. If I gain 10 or 15 pounds of holiday bloat, that shows up a lot more on me at five, four than it does a guy that's six, two, um, you know, and so there's, um, you know, you have to, you have to consider your genetics and those guys at the, at the, at the, you know, at the, at the top of the game, those guys that stay, get really, really big and really, really lean, they've got the genetics to do so.

And the rest of us don't, we can do all the stuff that they do and we're not gonna respond the same way. You know, even if we took the same drugs that they do, that's what gets me about diet is guys, they don't have the genetics of the pros. They're not on the drugs and they think they can eat in a way that's less optimal than what the, and they think they can eat in a way that's, that's less optimal

than what the, and it's like, dude, those guys are the genetic tip of the spear. They're on loads of PEDs and they're still look at the way they eat. They're still forcing the protein and the quality carbs and all that. And you think you can get by, you know, eating a sandwich for lunch and a bowl of cereal for breakfast and whatever mom makes for dinner. And you're going to get those. It's like, you don't have any of the advantages that they do. And the air, the one area that you can control, which is your diet, you're way less than optimal on there as well. And that's the other side of it, you know, or side, and you know, this better

than anybody. I mean, the training thing is that's just a, almost a small part of it. I mean, none of this stuff, none of the stuff that we talked about today matters one bit if the nutrition is not in place. 100%. Amen. Amen. No, it's funny, Trent. Brother, you're going to need to get on steroids. I like that.

Yeah. I appreciate the honesty. So from 2016 to 2021, I just trained and paid no attention to body weight. I rarely weighed myself. And I was at the bottom of a cut. So it was interesting. When I ran starting strength 2013, 2015, I think I put, based on Bod Pod, that's what I used to use back then, my lean mass changed by 7 pounds. So probably somewhere between 4 and seven, you know, margin of error. So I gained quite a bit considering how long I've been in the weight

room at that point, just from probably driving my press and my deadlift up because I didn't really train those. My squat and bench went up to just not by as large of deltas. Then after that, I started cutting some weight down. I did, I started doing DEXAs. I did one in 2016. Then from 16 to 21, I just trained and didn't really get on a scale. I got, I think, as high as 190 to 195 range. I'm 5'9". My fat percentage is probably in the low 20s, possibly mid 20s at the highest. Waistline was 36. Then I cut down end of 21 and beginning of 22. And the funny thing is, pre-starting strength, I cut down to 150, 155. I wouldn't see much definition up top. After starting strength and a little intermediate work, I got down in the mid 160s and I would see everything. I'd probably

be like 12, 13% body fat, something like that. This last time, I was in the low 170s when I saw that level of definition. I didn't do any body comp tests. I don't want to fucking pay for it. It's too damn expensive. Because I'm trying to use the same Dexa, and they've raised their prices since because they're a sport med clinic, so they charge more. I just don't want to deal with it. But the point is, it seems like every few years, I've put on a few pounds of lean mass. And that's exactly what you're kind of outlining here when you're not at the tip of the genetics fear and you're doing this, you know, the old fashioned way without PEDs, you know, just diet and exercise. It's like a multi-year fucking process to get a few pounds, you know?

Yeah. I mean, and that's why you gotta, you, I mean, you really, if you like, if you miss that window, it's kind of like, you hate to tell guys this, like, cause I, I mean, you can't do anything about the past, but if you're looking to be like, if you miss that window of starting lifting, say in your teenage or college years, and you don't train hard through those years and through your, you know, through your twenties and through your, and you don't pick this stuff up until like a lot of my clients, I'm sure like yours, like they've never touched a weight before until they're like late thirties and early forties. And that also puts a limit, you know, on, on what you can do. Like you, because of it, because of that, uh, it, it takes a certain amount of years in order to get, um, you know,

in order to build all that mass. And so it's, it's, it can be done, but it's a, it's a tougher ask if you, if you start really, really late in life, it doesn't mean you shouldn't, or that you can't put on an appreciable amount of muscle, but you're potentially leaving a lot on the table. If you really want to optimize, like going back to your question of how much muscle can you put on, you know, a lot of that is a little bit of luck is like, well, ideally, if you could start, you know, on a good program, you know, the earlier you can start the better, just like saving money, right? I mean, you don't start saving investing until your 40s or 50s. Like, I mean, you can still do it, but good luck, you know, it's gonna be a lot easier had you started that process 20 years ago. You're putting all those deposits on there. And you know, the nutrition side, you look at you

look at people like, like what we do, like with the novice linear progression or even things like the Texas method and all that. It's like, you know, why do some guys, you know, you'd say, what's the differentiating factor? How come some guys, you know, they get six weeks into the NLP and they start to kind of peter out already. Some guys get an easy 12. Some guys may go six months, you know, with, with relatively few adjustments to training. What are the differences between those two? And I say more or less it's weight gain, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's, you're continuously putting on, putting on weight will extend your ability to add the amount of muscle that allows you to keep continuously lifting more and more and more weights. Um, you know, things like the Texas method as well, you know, tend to respond better

to them and, you know, and so, um, some guys push that too fast. I mean, like, I think a lot of guys are, especially older guys are just like, well, I just need to get up to, if I'm one 80, I need to get up to two 20, like tomorrow. I've never been, I've never liked that, you know, like it can be done, but it's, and yeah, you're going to get stronger, but it's not the best way to go about it. If you, because you don't want to get, you don't want to get really strong. And then also, like, I mean, we've all heard this complaint from people, like, in the starting strength community, right?

Like, I'm, hey, my squat went from, you know, 135 to 365, but I'm fat as fuck now. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you know, and it's like, well, you're going to, like, they're going to want to peel that weight off at some point. And when they go to, when you have, when you have to go through now a prolonged cut. That sucks. Well, and you're going to wind up losing a lot of that strength that you built anyway. So it's like, yeah, you built it up to 365 or 405 or whatever.

Now you've got to go through a 40-pound cut because you fat-fucked yourself. And that's an old John Shaffer report. I love that. You fat-fucked yourself. That's what I did. Well, a lot of people do and they don't necessarily know any better because the force feeding of calories, like it's, it's not necessarily the right way to go about it. Like you need to be in a surplus, but it needs to be small enough. Like your, your body's only going to put on so much muscle so fast, regardless of how much you feed it. And so trying to just

push the scale weight up as much as possible, as fast as how much you feed it. And so trying to just push the scale weight up as much as possible, as fast as possible, you're going to, yeah, you'll, you probably will get stronger, but you're also going to get to a point where you're not going to be happy with the way that you look. You're not going to be happy with the way that you feel if you're older, you know, and you're more concerned about your health markers, your blood work and that kind of stuff. It may not be great. And you're going to wind up peeling that weight off anyways. And so, and you're going to, and when you do that, you know, unfortunately, you know, when you do a prolonged diet, you know, this, your, your strength numbers are

going to take a hit. You know, there's just, that's, that's a, you know, that's, if your nutrition is good and your training is good, you can mitigate it to a degree, but most of the time a prolonged cut leads to some loss in strength and it's just unfortunate, but that's the way that it is. So I'm not a huge advocate of guys just running up the scale weight as fast as humanly possible and then having to undo it later yeah exactly especially when they're older yeah right that's what i was about to say when you're 40 plus losing that cut is not a uh man that's a tough process when you're 25 you know you can do it and you know when you go on a prolonged cut too, like that's, that's another thing where that becomes a, uh, uh, that becomes a part of your lifestyle that becomes, especially if you're like, if you're married, you have kids and you like, like that's a very, uh, say narcissistic. It's

not narcissistic, but it's, it's a very self-involved process. I mean, like a prolonged diet, you become very obsessed with the diet and everything kind of starts to revolve around that, especially the deeper you go into it. And that, that lifestyle, like where you just lock yourself away in your apartment and don't eat anything and don't socialize and all that kind of stuff that gets harder to do with time. Like it's, that's actually easier to do when you're 25 and single or whatever, but when you're like got a family and kids and job and all that kind of stuff, like it gets harder and harder to do like a prolonged cut like that. Um, and so the, the, the more you can, uh, align things to where your, your cut doesn't have to be quite as drastic and you don't have to, you don't have to carry it out for such a long period of time. Um, you know, I think you're doing yourself a favor. Yeah,

absolutely. Well, Andy, thank you so much for joining this podcast. There's a lot to chew on here. And I think you've really, you've hit on a lot of topics that we've, you know, we've sort of outlined them in our show and you've taken them to a deeper level. So really appreciate that. Okay, cool. Well, I appreciate you guys having me on. Yeah. So before we sign off here, Andy, tell us where we can find more of your material, because you've got a lot of stuff out there. You've got articles, you've got books, you've got a podcast. The hub, the best place to go is just my website, which is andybaker.com. Just go there and that will link to all of my

articles, books, downloadable training programs, one-on-one coaching, whether it's in person or online. I've got group programming that people can do, where it's a little bit more affordable option than one-on-one, where it's kind of a guided thing and access to a private forum and Facebook group and all that kind of stuff. So people want help with any of this stuff. And again, I always tell people like, you know, basically everybody's welcome in that because I, like we talked about at the beginning, I'm a guy that likes to work with a diverse group of people. Like I love all this bodybuilding talk stuff, but I love to, I mean, my most prolific clients, uh, you know, 71 year old power lifter. I mean, I love working with lifters. I love

working with, I love working with people who just want to improve their health and their fitness, you know, that aren't necessarily interested in, you know, lifting a ton of weight or, you know, overhauling their physique or whatever. They just want to get healthy and more fit. And, you know, I, I like working with all demographics. I like working with athletes. And so I've got a little bit of something for everybody. And so if you're interested, come on over. Yeah, it's great.

And make sure you check out the blog while you're there. You've got a lot of great articles on kind of getting more into the nuts and bolts of what we talked about today, like specific programming recommendations. And yeah, there's just a lot of great stuff there. And cool. I appreciate you guys having me on and I appreciate the plug. Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Looking forward to having you. Yeah, we're going to have Robert on mine maybe next week and then we're going to kind of flip the script a little bit and we're going to go all in on nutrition.

All right, let's close out. Thank you for tuning going to go all in on, on nutrition. All right, let's close out. Thank you for tuning into the weights and plates podcast. You can find me at Instagram on the underscore Robert underscore Santana, my website, weights and plates.com. And you can find the gym at weights, double underscore and double underscore plates. There you go. You know where to find me. You can find my audio production business at marmaladecream.com. Or if you're interested in online coaching or in person, if you happen to be in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area, you can go to Jones, you can email me at jonesbarbellclub at gmail.com. Thank you.