Weights and Plates Podcast - #46 - What Now? Getting Lean After Novice LP (Skinny Fat Lifters)

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

Rounding out the January series on improving strength, muscle mass, and physique for the skinny fat novice, Coach Robert and Trent lay out what the early intermediate phase tends to look like in terms of programming and body composition. After building a solid base of strength in a well-executed novice LP, the formerly skinny fat lifter has most likely gained an appreciable amount of muscle mass. An average sized male, 5'7" to 5'10", will weigh roughly 200lbs at this point, and should be squatting in the high 200's to mid 300's for a top set (perhaps even sets across), deadlifting the high 300's to low 400's, benching in the low 200's, and pressing over 135. Note those are rough numbers and genetics, anthropometry, and proficiency with technique can greatly influence those numbers up or down on any given lift.   Despite these considerable gains, many lifters find that they aren't as lean and defined as they wish to be, because the process of putting on that muscle mass brought some fat mass as well. This is a good time to consider a moderate cut in bodyweight, perhaps 10-15lbs for a 200lbs male, to lose body fat and bring out some definition. By keeping protein intake high during the process, the lifter can minimize muscle loss during the cut.   Depending on the lifter's goals, the early intermediate phase of training can be a good time to introduce variations of the main movements to address weak points in the musculature, and reduce systemic stress on the body during a cut. Exercises like the leg press, front squat, curls, tricep extensions, and dips can help a lifter bring up lagging parts of hte body that did not grow proportionately during the novice phase of training. As they are inherently less stressful than heavy compound lifts, particularly on the lower back, they are also good options to continue training when a caloric deficit causes fatigue.   The key point to intermediate training is this: decide what your goal is, and organize your training and food intake around that. Without a clear goal, your training won't have a clear direction, and you're likely to end up spinning your wheels. This also means that you can't have everything at once! If your goal is to lean out, you probably won't continue to improve your top end strength on the main barbell lifts. Likewise, if you're goal is to continue improving your 1RM's, you probably won't lean out because continued strength gains will require lots of food to support training. It is possible to have both in the long run, but it's a multi-phase process, so pick one goal and get after it!   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, sir. How's it going, man? Good, man. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. So I've been running your rotating linear progression idea. Yeah. Myself over the last few months. Okay.

And it's interesting. So I've run into a little bit of a roadblock lately. And I expected this to happen. Frankly, it took longer to happen than I thought it would. So in September, we had a son. And so he was born September 17th and I took basically two weeks off of training. And then I started back in basically, so the first week of October, I started lifting again, just doing like two sets of each of the main lifts, you know, so one lift per day, two sets of two working sets on each of those lifts. So four total lifts per week, very low volume. And then after a few weeks of doing that and adjusting to kind of the new rhythm of life and stuff, I started on a proper rotating linear progression. So I did squat, bench, press,

and deadlift starting with sets of eight. And I would run my eights up as far as I could until I couldn't hit eight reps anymore. And then I dropped down to like sixes, fives, and then triples. And then at Christmas, I tried to run out some singles just for the heck of it, you know, and then I reset again. So here I am. And, uh, I've, I've basically run into a wall with, um, with bench and deadlift and it's a pretty hard wall. Interestingly though, my squat has continued to progress. Like my squats are crushing it. My presses are moving along just fine. I'm making small incremental gains on each, each of these rep ranges. But I thought it was interesting. So like I basically now been running, um, a, this rotating,

very simple rotating linear progression doing in total, let's see, I'm doing two working sets of eight on the squat, doing three working sets of eight on the bench and press, and then a single working set of eight on the deadlift. Okay. And, you know, so what's that been? October, November, December, January, and here we are just about to go into February. November, December, January, and here we are just about to go into February. So that's about, you know, give or take, you know, if you kind of count discount the first month of doing that, cause I was really just kind of, you know, just hanging on. That's about three solid months of progress on my eights and sixes and, you know, and then just kind of running up to some decently high numbers, but not PRs on my fives and threes. So I thought that was pretty good, but now I've run into a really hard wall on my bench

and deadlift, and I'm going to have to figure out what I need to do to get that moving again. Well, as we always say, you want to look at that in terms of, is it stress issue? Too much stress? Is it not enough recovery? What are you thinking? Well, I think, you know, I don't know. That might actually be two different answers there. I think for the bench press, it's for sure not enough stress because in the past I've run into this too. Like my bench, I think like a lot of people's bench favors frequency, right? So the more

frequency that you can introduce, the more, as you get advanced, the more frequency you can introduce, usually the better your bench responds to that. And I'm only benching once a week, and I'm only doing three working sets. So compared to more traditional intermediate programs, I'm doing very low volume. And I'm also kind of light right now relative to what I've been in the past. And we've talked about that on the show, how, you know, if you're light and you just have less mass around your chest, then that can negatively impact your bench. So that's my guess there. On the deadlift, I'm not quite sure. So last time around when I went down to fives on my deadlift, I went from like a three, I think I ran out at like 375 on a set of eight. And then when I switched to fives, I ran that up to 405 for a set of five. Well, you know,

after Christmas, a little bit of reset, I got sick and all that kind of stuff. I switched to fives. I got to 395. And then last week I did 405 and I thought I was going to hit it for a set of five. No, I got two doubles. Just smoked, absolutely smoked. So I don't know. I don't know if that's a recovery issue. I'm pulling too frequently

because I'm trying to pull heavy every week. Or what? Or maybe it's a volume issue again. Maybe I need more volume. Not quite sure. Deadlift's tricky because it could be easily impacted by the squat too. That's my other thought. Yeah. Has my squats been going up the whole time? I just set a PR for two sets of eight. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. You're probably wrecked. You probably need to start spreading it out over two, three, four weeks. Yeah. I think that's probably what I do, but it's, it's kind of, it's kind of weird

because I feel like, because I'm only doing, you know, like one lift per day, four days a week, it's just, it feels like I'm not doing hardly anything. So it's like, yeah, of course I should be recovered from my deadlift. Yeah, I know, but I'm not doing anything. That's a funny thing. You're doing a lot. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, I thought that was kind of an interesting little anecdote there, but I'll let you know. I'll report back in a couple months and let you know how I resolve that and see if I can get those numbers moving up again. Because 405 for five, when I hit that last, you know, I hit that in December, that tied

a PR for me. And I'm like, I want more. I want to drive that five RM up, you know, maybe 4 a PR for me. And I'm like, I want more. I want to drive that, that five rep, five RM up, you know, maybe four 15, four 25. Yeah. Yeah. I think you'll get there. I know that, uh, I see it a lot in the gym where that, you know, that squat gets up there and, uh, keeps going and the deadlift just crashes, you know, that first inch, you know, it's can easily shut down if the back is too fatigued, it becomes a limiting factor on both of the lifts, but especially in the deadlift, because you have that isometric component in the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. Well,

and it's funny now that you mentioned that I'm actually remembering, I've felt, I've had this feeling the last few weeks when I've been deadlifting where like, I just can't set my upper back. Like I know what to do and I've done thousands of dead where like, I just can't set my upper back. Like I know what to do and I've done thousands of deadlifts. I know how to set my upper back, but it's just sort of, it's just not there. Like I'm going to set it and it's just kind of, it feels weak as I'm trying to squeeze it up. So it's, yeah, maybe that's just residual fatigue that's been creeping in. So anyway, you know, I bring that up to say that I think that's kind of an element of intermediate training, right? Is that at some point, you kind of have to push one thing up at the expense of something else, right? So, you know, if you're going crazy on your squat, your deadlift may have to take a backseat for a period of time.

I don't think that that means that you can't move your deadlift up at all. It's just that there are times where you're kind of playing whack-a-mole. And I think that actually kind of fits the theme of today's topic pretty well. And so today we wanted to talk about what do you do when you become an intermediate lifter? And, you know, we're sticking with our theme of the skinny fat trainee, right? So what happens when you're a skinny fat lifter and you've gone through the novice program and you've done everything that we talked about

in the recent episodes, right? And now you're an intermediate and you've probably gained some substantial muscle mass in this process, but you're not quite there, right? Your physique is not where you want it to be yet, but now you're in the intermediate land and you got to make some decisions about what you're going to do next. Right. Yeah. Typically these guys, you know, they'll come to me, they've been training for a while. Their numbers are pretty decent, you know, coming in and, uh,

you know, they'll complain that, Hey, you know, I got strong and, you know, I'm stronger than I've ever been. And I just, you know, I still feel like I'm fat. So how do I lose the fat, you know? So that typically is the priority that this person is focused on. So you might get, so the skinny fat lifter we're talking about is somebody who made a conscious decision to put the fat aside to get strong as a novice. By this point, they're strong. You're not a big, fat, sloppy mess, but you're not defined and you care about aesthetics.

You want to look like you train. You want more visible musculature. This is kind of the person I'm talking about. And your goal is not to be a competitive power lifter. I'm talking about and you're you know your goal is not to be a competitive power lifter and this person might come and say you know I've gotten all the strength but I need to lose the fat how do I do it you know and you know it's the same way anybody else does it you have to eat less fewer calories and you're expending you got to keep protein up to hold on to muscle mass and you got to maximize how many carbs you can lose weight on to minimize performance decrements.

And in this process, your body's changing in a different way. When you're building, you're getting larger. Your shoulders are getting broader. Your traps are growing. Your legs are growing. You're putting on fat and muscle. Now your body's changing the other way. You're losing body fat, and you're becoming a smaller body.

And that has a learning curve of its own. You're going to learn and you're becoming a smaller body, right? And that has a learning curve of its own. You're going to learn how to lift with a smaller body. You don't have this large mass to move around. So it makes lifting more difficult. Oftentimes it's not unusual for the squat to go down just because of this. So, you know, you have a few things that drive strength, you know, muscle mass drives strength, obviously, that sort of leverage. A larger body mass will have more leverage than a smaller body mass. Yeah. When your belt's feeling like super tight and you hit the hole and you've got, you got that extra cushion around the middle, it feels nice on a squat. So yeah, now, you know, you might have to artificially lower the squat,

work it back up, get used to squatting without a belly, you know, or even, you know, a mini belly, you know, or whatever, you know. Yeah. It doesn't take much. It's like, if you lose like a couple inches on your waist, that's a huge change in the feel of a squat. Yeah, exactly. And, uh, you know, by this point, you know, we're going to, you're going to lose body fat and, uh, you're probably going to get down to a lighter body weight, but you're going to be more defined at that body weight than you were years ago. So let's say if you started at 165, 175, skinny fat, you push your weight up to 195, 200 pounds and trained and got strong. Now, when you're going down, you might start seeing more visible shoulders, arms, abs a little bit, quads, etc. Whereas before, there wasn't a whole lot going on at that body weight. And, you know, we typically, that's typically the first thing that this lifter wants to

address. And that's typically how we address it. You know, the other, the next thing is typically, you know, weak points, right? So for me, my weak point's always been my biceps. You know, they just really grew. And as you know, I'm learning more about this bodybuilding stuff, and I've been following Baker's arm program. I learned through that process that the reason I was struggling with elbow flexion type movements was because my grip was a limiting factor. And I didn't know that because I never dropped a deadlift.

Yeah, right, right. So, you know, I could secure a hook grip, but I lacked hand grip strength. And when I started training hand grip strength with the hand grippers, the captains of Crush, suddenly curling and rowing got a lot easier. And now I have resting biceps, you know, they're not huge by any means, but, you know, I notice a visible difference in my videos, despite the fact that, you know, I've gained weight and become a little less defined than at the bottom of my last cut. You know, those muscles are now, you know, more prominent. And so, you know, that could be any muscle for anybody who's in this position. So how do you address that? You know, at this point, throwing in some accessory work, it could be useful. You know, you have a foundation of strength at this point. You may not

be as strong as you ever want to get, but you're pretty strong. You know, you're strong enough to, you know, decide you're cool with losing some body fat. So, you know, if it's time to do some arm curls, okay, you can do some arm curls. By this point, you're probably doing 10 chin-ups, you know, or five to 10 chin-ups, you know on body weight so you know let's throw in some arm curls you know for other guys you know they'll sit there and say uh you know my quads i didn't really see any quad growth okay well maybe add some leg presses in there you know high bar squat one day low bar squat one day maybe front squat you know throw in some you know some olympic lifting you know, throwing some, you know, some Olympic lifting, you know. Yeah, I know. Andy really likes a super deep front squat. You get this maximum knee flexion at the bottom of front squat, get a long range of motion on the quadriceps.

And, you know, at this point, it gets covered pretty extensively in the practical programming book. But, you know, once you're no longer a novice, you know, let's just kind of go back to basic principles here. When you're no longer a novice, you have to decide where you want to put your energy. Right. And for a lot of us coaches, we've decided to put our energy into pushing more PRs, bigger sets of five, bigger sets of three, bigger singles, 1RMs, competitions in some case. I did a few meets. And that became where my emphasis was because I didn't feel like I was strong enough yet. So, you know, I did a few meets and that became where my emphasis was because I didn't feel like I was strong enough yet. So, you know, that might happen also, in which case you want more

modest weight loss so that you don't interfere with that process followed by modest weight gain. And, you know, you kind of settle into a weight range where you can keep pushing more and more PRs. Yeah. And that's, I want to underline that point. So that's a big thing about intermediate training. I've just had, you know, so I tend to do like bi-annual conversations with all my lifters. And then I've talked to a couple of guys who are now like getting into intermediate territory. And that's one of the things I said is, you know, your goals drive everything at this point. So things get a lot more individualized. And so you have to set a clear goal to have a direction. When you're a novice, it's easy because

the goal is strength, whether you, regardless of what your long-term goal is, the goal is strength because we know that strength is going to make everything else better to a point, right? When you get to intermediate territory, now we've hit that two way point conversation, right? Which is that if in order to get better at X, you have to sacrifice a little bit of Y, right? And, and yeah, so that that's huge, right? It's just identifying what it is that you want. Because I think sometimes people are like, well, you know, they're like, yeah, I want to look better. You're like, okay, cool. So here's how we would do that. And then you say, then they hear like, oh, well, I'm not going to get stronger on my one RMs. You're like, well, probably not for

at least a little while. And they're like, well, I want more one RMs though. I was like, okay, which one do you want? You have to some extent, you have pick a direction um to put your emphasis and um i think that's really important to understand because if if you start chasing aesthetics that's fine but just realize it's going to come at the cost of you know absolute weight on the bar for a one rm for a period of time at least yeah you really have to be at a point where you don't care about uh big single pr like one rms and three rep prs five rep prs and uh like for instance i've been training this way for six months now for hypertrophy quote unquote hypertrophy basically higher reps higher sets you know higher volume higher reps right more sets, you know, higher volume, higher reps, right? More exercises. So I'm just

more tired, right? But it's still, it's still done in a progressive way. I went into this with the mentality that, okay, I don't want to lose weight off my squat and deadlift. So I'm going to train those the same, you know, and I'm also not really concerned about building a bigger back or legs. I think that'll keep happening, squatting and deadlifting. So, you know, that was number one. But then upper body, I was just, you know, I was, you know, I pressed 225. Sure, I'd like to press more than that. But, you know, the rate that that's going to go at this point is going to be really slow. And I don't think it's going to be a great growth stimulus at this point because of how slow that lift is progressing, right? My bench press, unless I get fat and get more leverage

it doesn't move so i'm trying to figure out how to make that move through increases in muscle tissue so you know i went in and started training this way knowing that i'm not going to have a big press i'm not going to have a big bench right and uh you know that doesn't bother me. But if that bothers you, you know, if you want want to use, and moves towards higher intensity, lower volume, right? And you could do some of that stuff for a few weeks, you know, but you're not going to dedicate months to that because, you know, if your goal is PRs, it's going to fatigue you, you know, and you're not going to be able to push maximal weight. So it's, you know, typically skinny fat guy, you know, wants to, you know, have visible musculature. So at some point, more physique-oriented type training becomes necessary. Now, you know, somebody's going to ask me, but, you know, you always say that strength, you know, it's all strength, right? Well, it is all strength, you know, but let's say, you know're let's say you got your squat to I don't know 405 right okay you

could push it to 500 right how long is that gonna take you know and what typically becomes limiting effect so when you're thinking about physique oriented training first of all and an intermediate skinny fat guy is you know most likely and it applies in this case, because he's post novice, when you're thinking about physique oriented training, you're, you know, it's a totally different mindset. Like, I did a whole episode with Andy on it, we were talking about it. And, you know, you want to remove the limiting

factor from certain lifts, so that you could target certain muscles on the squat, as it gets heavier, the low back becomes a limiting factor. Some people have said the core, but it's mostly the low back, right? So you end up pushing your legs less frequently because your back is taking so long to recover. Does that mean that your legs need that much recovery? Probably not. You could probably leg press and keep going and get more work done that way way that's why these bodybuilders train that way right right so it's the same thing like for me my limiting factor was my hands my hand grip was weak i got it stronger

now i can curl a lot more you know but before all the curling would my forearms would fatigue before my biceps right and unlike you know things like rows where you can use straps to remove that you can't that's not really going to do the same thing on curls. You need your hands to get stronger and, you know, outpace or stay on pace or close to pace with your biceps. So my whole point is you start thinking about that, right? Like if you want to target a certain muscle, yes, your quads will grow from squatting heavier, but your squat is going up slower as you advance, right?

So you have to take that into consideration as part of the equation. Yes, you want a bigger squat, but what do you care more about? Do you want to grow your legs or do you want to grow your squat? Yes, if you grow your squat, you will grow your legs, but your squat's growing slow, right? And you could hit your legs with more work doing something else at this stage. Remember, novices, it just doesn't apply to you. And if you're a weak intermediate, you know, if you finish your LP and you're, you know, I don't know, you're a male, you know, of adult age and squatting, you know, barely over body weight, you really should keep prioritizing strength. You know, I think that's an important thing to touch on. Like the guy squatting 275 for a max,

who's an intermediate, you know, this legitimately happens, you know, I think you just need to get your squat up, you know? Right. Yeah. And that's, yeah, exactly. Right. Absolute weight on the bar matters. And there's like, like we said, you know, when we had Andy on the show, right. You know, I tried to ask him like, what are your sort of your standards? And it's really, you know, it's kind of a landmine or a minefield, I should say, talking about strength standards because like your size and your frame matters so much. Like a guy that's 5'4", you know, and 165 pounds is going to have a different standard, quote unquote, of being strong than a dude who's 6'3", 265, right? Like just totally different animals there.

But yeah, you're right like they're the absolute weight on the barb matters if you're squatting 275 for three sets of five or 315 or 350 for three sets of five that is a completely different stimulus than squatting 225 or 205 for three sets of five um you know there there's just there are these break points, it's going to be different for everyone. But there are these sort of like levels or break points or whatever you want to call them, where the the stimulus changes dramatically, and your ability to like, impose stress on your body, right? And grow? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you know, while a lot of this is relative and individual results vary, there are absolutes here. You know, squatting 500 pounds is extremely stressful, whether you're 250 or whether you're 185, you know?

Right. Yes, absolutely. 700 pound deadlifter I knew way back. And I was mentioning how Rips says, Oh, 500 is not that heavy. You know, I can do it right now. He used to say that at seminars. And then he's like, dude, 500 is still heavy for me. You know, like the absolute starts to matter when you start, you know, getting up into those big numbers and you know, your size doesn't really play a role in that in terms of recovery, right? If you're doing a bunch of volume with 500 plus pound deadlifts or 500 plus pound squats, you know, assuming you're not on performance enhancing drugs, that's going to take a lot out of you no matter who you are, you know? So let's just kind of keep that in context, right? If you're squatting 275, you know, that's, you know, that's going to get you some growth, obviously. But, you know,

what guy do you know with large leg musculature that struggles a squat 275 unless they haven't done it before? You know, they start training them, they get there pretty quick and pass it, you know? So, you know, you're better served getting stronger than that. You know, double body weight squats, pretty good. If you could do that for a set of five, that's even better, you know? If you do that for a set of 10, now you're an enthusiast. That's kind of where I'm at, you know? Yeah.

But, you know, let's say some good milestones. So like, I guess, okay, does it really have to do with training advancement level, like intermediate versus advanced, et cetera? Somewhat, yes. But let's like add some context to this. You know, I think that a good milestone for, you know, a novice slash early intermediate is, you know, assuming you're not, you know, over fat, obese, whatever word you want to use, you know, if you're normal size, you know, whatever that means, you know, and that does not mean 9% body fat, but let's say 15 to 25% body fat.

Just throw some objective numbers out there, right? Yeah. and 25% body fat. Just throw some objective numbers out there, right? A two and a half times body weight deadlift, a double body weight squat, a one and a half body weight bench press, and a body weight press with five to 10 chin-ups are some pretty good places to be in terms of strength, you know? Yeah, yeah. Those aren't earth-shattering numbers, you know? And this is for a male. You know, for a female, I typically say two times body weight on the deadlift, one and a half on the squat, 75% of body weight on the press and body weight bench press, body weight bench press are some good milestones for a female. You know, and this is, you know, adult, not elderly, you know, not, you know, no special cases here, you know. You know, you should probably work hard to get to those milestones because you're going to look pretty good there, you know, and, you know, getting

beyond that, do you really need to? Probably not, you know, probably not. You could probably do some hypertrophy stuff or you could cycle back and forth, you know, none of these things are absolutes, but yeah, you know, you, you kind of want to get reasonably strong. You don't want to be, you know, you don't want a 185 pound bench press as a man, and then you're just, you know, doing 10s with like 95 pounds, you know? I mean. Right, yeah. I've been down that road. There's something about getting that absolute number up that is valuable that we probably can't really measure or explain, you know?

But once you start getting up there in excess of body weight, you know, you start to use more productive loads, I think. Yes. Although, you know, the science people argue that that's bullshit, but that's fine. You know, this is just my experience with it, training people, training myself. You know, I think that it's important to get that strong. And I think part of it is to the neuromuscular efficiency. And one of my articles, I recently said, how is more neuromuscular efficiency going to be a bad thing in terms of hypertrophy, right? You get used to handling these earth-shattering weights for you, you know, that is relative, you know, because, you know, 1,000 pounds, 500 pounds, you know, like 400 pounds, you know.

First time you do it, it's earth-shattering. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, if you're squatting 300 to 500 pounds as a guy, you know, that's pretty earth shattering, you know? Yes. And, you know, there's guys that go beyond that. That's, you know, I have no experience with that, but I'd imagine that's even more intense. And, you know, getting used to handling that is only going to help if you're pumping out, you know, no bullshit hard sets of 10. Because, you know, you're going to be able to manage it better. When I do a set of 10 now, the first rep feels as hard as the last rep almost, you know, and, uh, I, I'm able to handle it and I'm able to understand that because I've, you know, squatted well over

400 pounds, you know? Right. Right. Yeah. It's absolutely. Yeah. There's definitely a feel thing there. Right. And it's, um, you know, it's kind of like, it's kind of like, uh, in baseball, you know, you put the donut on your bat to make your bat heavier and you take some cuts with it. Right. And you take it off and you're like, Oh man, it feels so light. Um, you know, it's that it's not that you are actually swinging the bat faster per se, maybe you are, maybe you aren't, but the feel changes and that's very subjective, but it does change. And that's the same thing when you, when are, maybe you aren't, but the feel changes and that's very subjective, but it does change. And that's the same thing when you, when you, when you push your that's, and that's part of the reason why, um, often in a lot of cases, we will push a novice at the very

end of novice linear progression up to higher intensities by dropping the reps, right? So we'll take them from three sets of five to five sets of three maybe to like two sets of three and some back offsets and then sometimes with some guys i'll run them all the way up to doubles so from threes to doubles and then doubles and we'll even try some singles at the end of that run mainly because it's fun to do you know it's kind of fun to hit some heavy singles but but also there's there's a reason there is a a good reason for that too and that's that you know when you uh time you put four Oh five in your back and you've experienced that you go back down to a normal working load, you know, and you're going to do sets of five at three 40 or three 30 or whatever, um, or sets of eight at three Oh five. Well, yeah,

they're much more manageable when you've felt four Oh five in recent history. Yeah. And you know, I, you know, I've, Yeah, and, you know, I've heard people say that, you know, you don't need to do that. And, you know, I'd say that that's probably true if you're pretty strong. But I think some people need to do that. You know, like if I get somebody that finishes an LP, let's say in the mid 200s, mid to high 200s, three sets of five, I think it's very valuable. I think it's valuable to run up singles. They're going to recover from that.

But if I get somebody, you know, if it's a 600 squatter, probably true. Yeah. You probably don't need to do singles and max out, you know, it's probably not worth it. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Unless you're a power lifter, of course.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. So yeah, this is, and and that's that's mostly the people that i'm dealing with they're they're running out their lp and like and i'm usually dealing with a little bit older crowd too so they don't reach the numbers that a younger guy would but yeah they're they're ending things in the 240 250 on a squat for three sets of five so yeah absolutely getting them up to towards 300 for whatever reps they can handle definitely helps. So, all right. So I want to, I want to kind of circle back here because I'm sure some,

some people are listening to this and they're like, whoa, I thought we were talking about like changing our eating habits for as an intermediate so we can get leaner. Well, this stuff matters because, you know, I think Andy said it best when he was on our show. If you want to get bigger and you want to gain muscle mass and you want to emphasize your physique, you need to get stronger in a medium rep range, right? Which I think he said four to eight reps. I think you could say four to 10 reps, you know, somewhere in that rep range. But you need to kind of de-emphasize the heavy stuff for a while. And you need to get stronger in a medium rep range and make those numbers go up right and you need to eat to grow while you're doing that and so um i wanted to circle back there because um i think that's that's very important right we're all talking about like how do you get from point a to point b how do you get from the end of that novice phase to prepare yourself to do this work and get the most out of it? Well, when you're a novice, you're gaining muscle at the fastest rate you're ever going to gain it.

You're getting stronger at the fastest rate you're ever going to get stronger. The longer that you train, once you get into early intermediate, especially late intermediate advanced, if your concern is body composition and you're not a competitive lifter, then the weight swings will get smaller over time. So let's say you gain 40 pounds as a novice, and yes, you're gaining a chunk of fat with that. And you knew that going in, you didn't care. And you use that to leverage the weight, which I found that to be helpful. Everything's a series of trade-offs.

Life's a series of trade-offs. So when you gain lots of body weight, you're gaining fat and muscle. What I've noticed is lifts like the squat especially become very easy to perform from a skill standpoint when there's a little bit more body fat on the person, and that's because of what we talked about, the leverage. You know, I'm not telling somebody to get, you know, a 50-inch waist or to get really obese because eventually it becomes an impingement.

But I've noticed that when a little bit of abdominal fat starts to accumulate, the person just starts moving better, you know. And I think that this is useful in those early phases. This may not be applicable to everybody, you know, if you're older, you probably and you know, you have a history of high blood pressure, things like that, or that runs in your family, you're at risk for some sort of cardiovascular event, you might not want to get fat, you know, you might not want to max out either, you know, there's situations where it doesn't make sense. But if you're a young man that's otherwise healthy and you're willing to gain the weight, you don't care that you're gaining fat.

You understand everything that we're explaining here. You're gaining fat. You're leveraging it. It's helping you lift weight more effectively, and it's helping you learn these movements more effectively. Then that can be productive. After you get off your LP, you start to lose that. Then you've got to learn how to move without it. That's the whole learning curve.

You know, after you get off your LP, you start to lose that. Then you've got to learn how to move without it. That's the whole learning curve. But the movement part tends to get easier because you've been doing it for so long and you start to understand what your body's doing in space. So at this point, you know, you may not, you know, instead of sitting around 200, 210, and, you know, you're of normal height, 5'7 to 5'10", right, you might sit at 185 to 195, you know? That might happen. You know, again, this person is concerned with appearance, physique, not competing on the platform. If you're competing on the platform, now we're talking about competitive strength sports.

And, you know, while we want to maximize our health, you also are trying to win. You're also trying to get the biggest weight you can get up, and sometimes that requires being fatter. Look at the top squatters in the world. They have big fat bellies for a reason, you know? Yep, right. But that's not what we're talking about here. So I want to keep repeating myself on this context thing because I don't want people turning around saying, Santana said you got to get fat, you know? That's not what I'm saying.

Goals. Yeah, you got to bring it always back to your goal, right? You have to, the goal defines the direction. Yeah. So goals, right? We're talking about skinny fat guy that has trouble putting on muscle, may or may not have problems getting strong. Typically, they don't get extremely strong, but they can get strong, you know.

You know, guys who get extremely strong tend to get muscular to some extent. We've talked about that in other episodes. But, you know, if you have appearance in the back of your mind, and then at some point you're going to cut weight, you're going to lose weight off your extreme strength, your maximum strength, right? So your 1RMs, your 3RMs. But you're going to hold on to your muscle mass. You're going to bring up weak areas through various assistance exercises or ancillary exercises. And it's the same kind of principle.

You're going to cut weight during periods of high volume and lower intensity, and you're going to build and gain weight during periods of of you know lower volume and that's relatively speaking so you know you might run tens when you're cutting you might run eights fives you know when you're building you know yeah i want i wanted to ask about that a little bit more i wanted to kind of get your your experience with this so when somebody is let's say that we've got a average height male and he's 200 pounds right like you Like you said before, so 5'7", 5'10", they weigh 200 pounds and they're like, okay, I decided I want to focus on physique, I want to cut. So they decide to cut down to 185, 190 kind of range. So they cut 10, 15 pounds. While they're on that cut, do you find that most guys are able to make progress on, let's say, assistance lifts? Not necessarily like squat bench deadlift, but like curls, leg presses, hack squats, you know, whatever their sort of assistance lift of choice is to bring up, you know, to emphasize muscle growth.

Do you find that they're able to make progress on those or are they kind of just treading water while they do the cut and waiting to gain it depends if they haven't trained those movements before uh like i you know i've made progress on certain movements while i was cutting um because i haven't trained them before yeah that's what i was thinking right so again it depends how adapted you are the more adapted you are to a movement, the less likely it is that you're going to gain muscle while you're underfeeding yourself. Yeah. So that's what I was thinking. So we could maybe take advantage of that, right?

So if you're an early intermediate, right, you don't have a lot of experience training outside of the main lifts. Right. Reasonably, I think, you know, you might get on the leg press and have no idea what you can do. Right. So you kind of maybe do a couple of workouts, kind of figure out where a decent starting point is. And then you start progressing from there. I would imagine that even if you're losing weight, you probably can drive that leg press up, um, you know, for a good long while, just because it's, it's novel to you,

or you could say the same thing about a curl, a hack squat, you know, whatever, tricep extension or whatever. So just because of that, you know, basically you can, you can take advantage of the novice effect and sort of, um, get progress even though you're in a caloric restriction. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. Okay. So, all right. So this, so this trainee, they're going to cut, you know, somewhere on the odds of like 10 to 15 pounds. That's what, like 5% of their body weight roughly. Yep. Yep. That's right. Um, and then, so they end up in this new place. They've probably, you know, probably see some definition now that they've, they've cut this weight. What does it look like kind of long term from there are they going to just kind of bulk and cut to continue improving

their physique or do you recommend that people like kind of stay at maintenance for a while you know maintenance is bullshit but uh i thought maintenance body weight maintenance body weight that's what i meant, though. So if they get down to 190. I always tell people to eat to support what they're doing in the weight room. I don't like to use body weight as a metric for progress when you're trying to build muscle.

Then that's my personal thing. All the big-name guys will say, yeah, you have to gain weight and this and that. I think that weight gain just happens on its own when you fuel your workouts. I don't think you should try to gain X pounds per week, et cetera. I find that when people look at it that way, they're focusing on the scale and not their training. The stimulus for growth is the training. And the food you eat fuels the training.

And if you're fueling the training correctly, your body weight will go up just fine. You know, you probably, you know, like bodybuilders keep their weight, you know, well, they claim. I don't know if this is actually true, but they try to, you know, if you're talking to one, they'll say, oh, I'll stay, you know, close to 9% body fat in the off season. And then you'll like see them lifting and they have a gut, you know, when they're in the off season. Right. Right. So like, I don't know that I buy into that, but, um, you know, there are 10, they tend to be leaner than strength athletes, you know, they, you know, ideal. I think ideally they want to do that, but I don't think it always works out that way unless they're naturally lean to begin with. I was about to say, I'm remembering, uh, you know, stories and videos I've seen of lee priest yeah he would really bulk up

who would like go ham on like big macs and stuff in the off season super fat and then cut and then cut way down you know and it's pretty extreme yeah so we're not talking about that but uh you know there's there's a range and uh you want to eat to fuel your training. And if you're trying to, you know, progress week to week, uh, you're going to find that the lifting gets hard and then you're going to have to eat more. And then when you eat more, your weight goes up. And then eventually you get to a point where you're like, ah, you know, I'm starting to feel a little bit fluffy, you know, or softer, like my pants are getting tighter, you know, or whatever. There's, there's some sort of indicator that you're probably reaching what you would consider

as your upper limit and meanwhile your training is progressing because you're recovering and you're training hard and then at that point you kind of scale it back okay i'm going to lose a few pounds get back down my bottom end and then work back up and like to give you an example like myself right uh once i start dropping below 170 training just sucks, you know, this last time I had a pretty good run. And I don't know why that was, but I did. And, you know, once I started getting above 180, I start seeing very little benefit the further I get from 180. You know, if I get from 180 to 190, no difference,

my lifts move kind of the same, right? Yeah, right, right. From 170 to 180, things start to go up. I can maintain a lot of that strength in the 170s. Once I start going below 170, I start getting very lean. Looks kind of cool, but I also look kind of sick, you know? So it just depends who you're asking, right? And my performance starts to suffer. So one of the things you learn as an intermediate, and there's no way that we can predict this or any coach can predict this is where your upper and lower limits are, you know, the upper limit typically is where, okay, I'm noticing more fat gain than anything.

And my performance isn't really changing compared to five pounds ago or something, you know, right, right. And then your lower limit, you're starting to lose energy. You're starting to feel kind of tired, bogged down. Your workouts are going shitty. You only learn that through experience, you know? Yeah, yeah. And some people can't get super lean, you know? Some people can't, you know? And usually those are larger guys. They're not skinny, fat guys. They're typically fat and strong guys, you know? Yeah. Yeah, well, I really like that way you put it. So If you're paying attention to the to the weight on the bar In the correct rep range and with the correct movements for your goals Then and you're eating to fuel that then you're going to see the results you want And the body weight will just be something that happens along the way

Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it. I've I've stumbled into that I know I didn't have really that concept in mind. I wasn't, you know, thinking about that over the last five years, but, um, you know, I had a Facebook story pop up recently that told me five years ago, I competed at, um, strength lifting nationals in Oakland, California. Oh, I remember that. And I was like, oh man, that was five, fuck that's five years ago. Was that five or six? That was five. Yeah. 25 years ago, I think. Yeah, fuck, that was five years ago. Six, was that five or six? That was five, yeah. Five years ago, I think.

Yeah, 2018, I believe. Beginning of 2018. And that was the heaviest I'd ever been. So, you know, I did my novice linear progression and I did some early intermediate training, Texas method and all that kind of stuff. And I pushed my body weight up from 200 to like 205 And then I remember in that next training cycle Um, I'd started got into competing. I did a few meets and I was comparing competing for nationals and I was already over 200

So I thought well I want to try to fill out the 220 or 100 kilo weight class as much as I can And the heaviest I got was 215. And I think I weighed out on that meat at like 211 or 212. And what's interesting is since in those five years since, I sort of gradually, because it was so much effort to maintain that I had to eat so much all the time to maintain that body weight, I naturally slid down to about 200 over the next few months after that meet. And then I didn't compete for a while. And so I didn't really think about it. I was still trying to lift for strength. I was still in that mindset of like, yeah, I'm going to like eventually do another strength lifting meet. So, you know, I'm still pushing the squat press deadlift and

all that stuff. But I kind of slid down to 200 and, you know, had to do some resets on my lifts. And I remember getting back to basically where I was at that at meat day, but at 200 pounds. And then fast forward another couple of years, there's ups and downs and resets and whatnot in my training. And all of a sudden now I'm, you know, 195 and I'm doing the same weights I was at 205. And now today I'm 190. And I'm doing the same lifts that I was at, you know, originally at 215. And I found along the way, exactly what you just mentioned is that below 190, I start to really feel the downside. Like my weight, my lifts fall off really hard. If I get down to like 185, which is too light for me, but somewhere around 190, 195, I feel great. And I've been able to get my lifts back up to where they were when I was 25 pounds heavier.

Yeah. So that's, that's certainly turned out to be very true for me. Yeah. That's what happens over time. You know, you start to get stronger at, um, and then you get down to a lighter body weight. Then eventually that lighter body weight, that bottom gets higher, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It gets higher because you get leaner to heavier body weight if you've continued to train.

And typically if you've, uh, you know, started to address weak areas, you know, I suspect when I go down again, I'm going to be heavier and leaner. That's a, yeah, right. Right. And so that, that's kind of what I'm looking forward to. So when I get into a phase Of life where I can dedicate more time to training again I suspect that I I hopefully will be able to push my body weight up to 195 again And but i'll be more muscular and i'll be the same Essentially as lean as I am now at 190 at 195

Yeah, and and the that difference will be muscle mass That's right. Well, I hope that's been helpful. You know, it, it, sometimes it's, it's kind of hard because like you think, you think you're tuning in for a diet episode and this is a diet episode, right? But it's, but you can't really talk about that without talking about programming, right? Yeah. The stimulus is the training. You know, the diet is part of the recovery process from that. The diet is what facilitates weight loss to the greatest extent, fat loss in this case, right? And what also helps you hold on to muscle when you're losing weight. But without training, you know, the diet, you can't eat your way to a trained body, I guess is what I'm trying to say. The training is

the stimulus. And that's why, you know, earlier I said, I don't like to use body weight as the metric for success when you're massing or gaining muscle, because then the lifter starts looking at the scale and ignores how the training is going. So, you know, training drives all this shit. You know, I did a million different diets on really shitty training programs when I was younger, and I'd end up in the same place every single time I cut. So I had a perfect diet though. I took supplements early on, what I take the multivitamins, amino acids, whey protein, you know, the basics as they called them. And, you know, I did it without supplements for most of my year's training because I didn't want to pay for them after, you know, when I was, I got over

the fascination with them when I was, what, 18, 19. But the whole point is I did all sorts of diets and I was good at gaining weight. I was good at losing weight. And every single time I get under 160 pounds with no notable muscle definition because I was not training. And what I have found is that people that ask a lot of overcomplicated diet questions pertaining to this, you know, like I want to look better, you know, through lifting. They tend to be weak at baseline, you know, and they, you know, they're willing to be pushed. They get stronger, you know, so this is not me taking a knock at you, but they tend to be weak at baseline and they're just missing the hard training more often than, you know, they're doing something wrong with diet, you know, when it comes to general weight loss, it's another story, but

when it comes to, you know, I want to quote unquote beach bod for lack of a better word, and the person's not necessarily a real fat person, you know, right. Talking about your skinny fat person. Oftentimes there's just a lack of hard training is what I've kind of seen. And there's a variety of reasons for that. You know, um, there's not one singular reason, but that's usually the bottleneck in my experience. It comes on the training side more than the diet side. Yeah, absolutely. And it's, um, yeah, you know, and, and so if you're, if you And it's, um, yeah, you know, and, and so if you're, if you want some, you know, more details on like, well, how do I make that cut happen? How do I make the, you know, gain happen? What macro should I be eating? Well,

you can go back to previous episodes. We've talked about cutting in general, and we've talked about, you know, macro nutrient ratios in general, and those principles don't change, right? Those principles are the same, you know, no matter what situation you're in, right? So that's why we're not going into detail there. What we're really talking about here is it's all context, right? It's all like, you know, specific goals and the context of what situation you're in, what kind of physique you're bringing to the table at the beginning of this process, and what that timeline and what that process is going to look like for you're bringing to the table at the beginning of this process and what what that that timeline and what that process is going to look like for you to get to the physique that you want

yeah i would totally agree with that so all right well i hope that's been helpful you want to close us out yeah uh thank you for tuning in to the weights and plates podcast uh you can find me at weightsandplates.com or on instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana or weights double underscore and double underscore plates. Well, fantastic. Well, you know where to find me. If you're interested in online coaching, you can email me at jonesbarbellclub at gmail.com. Or if you just want to follow what I'm doing and what I'm up to, you can go to Instagram and look me up at marmalade underscore cream. All right, we'll talk to you again in a couple weeks. you