Weights and Plates Podcast - #77 - YMMV: We're Not Powerlifters, And That's OK

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

In the gym coaching real people, the knowledge and experience gained from years of hard work under the barbell pays off -- a person who has put themself under the yoke and actively learned to troubleshoot problems and adjust training variables is well prepared to help other people do the same. On the internet, however, the biggest total (or the biggest bicesps) wins.    Dr. Robert Santana and Coach Trent Jones discuss the storm of comments around Dr. Santana's recent instagram post citing various problems with RPE, and note that all of the comments come from powerlifters, that is, people compete in the sport of powerlifting. The message of Weights and Plates is, and always has been, for people interested in strength training, not the sport of powerlifting. It's certainly not for elite lifters at the top of the sport. Although the general public doesn't always seen the difference, strength training has very different goals than powerlifting -- namely, health.   So, be cautious taking advice from the strongest, most jacked guys on the internet. What works for them may not work for you, the average person.   Weights & Plates is now on YouTube! https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf-   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream Email: [e-mail]  

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Hola. Hola, senor. Where's your ceremonial yo? I don't feel like it today. Okay, fair enough. I don't feel like it today. Okay, fair enough. No, I had that blown out of my system. So I was at a wedding this last week, last weekend.

I saw some of that. And yeah, I ran into some old friends. It was nice to see some old faces. But staying with a good friend of ours in Oklahoma. And it was funny because someone local, some, a friend of mine in Tennessee sent me this like weather advisory for the weekend to like, Hey, it's like, Hey man, be careful. There's going to be like big storms headed your way this weekend. And I'm like, ah, come on. This is like an average Oklahoma weekend. Yeah. Well, the joke was on me because we got hit by an actual tornado while staying at this friend's house

for the wedding. It was the day before the wedding, the night before the wedding. Oh, did you see it? Yeah. Well, we were down in a root cellar, basically underground. So no, I didn't see it, but I saw the aftermath and, uh, yeah, it was F3 tornado literally went down the street, uh, this person's property and cut through the property and then swerve back down the street. And, um, and yeah, it tore up a bunch of stuff, tore up a bunch of stuff. Luckily the property itself, it just tore up a bunch of trees. It didn't hit the house. Didn't hit the, um, this is like they're on some acreage. So they've got like a barn and

a house and that are separate structures. It didn't hit any of the structures. Definitely took out a lot of trees and fences. And then like down the road further, there were houses that were all, all fucked up. So yeah, I got it. Got a real Oklahoma experience this weekend. yeah, I got a real Oklahoma experience this weekend. Oklahoma's a great state. I don't know about that. I have some dear friends from Oklahoma and family from Oklahoma. But man, it's a tough state

because you got shit like that that happens all over the place. That was not the first, that was not the only tornado damage we saw, by the way. We were driving up through, was it Gainesville? I forget where it was exactly. And we're driving past this town and there's like a warehouse, you know, like a storage warehouse where they probably, where they ship.

It was probably like an internet, you know, sort of go between. So they're like shipping packages out. Maybe it was Amazon or something. And like the skin of the warehouse was like totally ripped off the top. You could still see the packages up on the shelves inside of it. And then there's, you know, there's like half of a gas station and you could, you could just see the line where the tornado made. And that was from, I think a couple of weeks prior. So you got that stuff going on. And then Oklahoma gets really hot. It gets every bit as hot as Texas does,

but then it gets a lot colder on top of it. So you could be minus five or you could be 105 in Oklahoma in the same year. It's a tough state. Yeah, no, it gets pretty cold, but remember, I'm from Illinois, man. It's even worse. Yeah, it's probably, ooh, that's a good question. The state itself is probably in worse shape than Illinois, man, it's even worse. Yeah. Is it, it's probably, Ooh, that's a good question. Like the state itself is probably in

worse shape than Illinois, but not by much. Illinois is pretty bad, dude. You get those winds and the temperature gets much more negative and you get all the humidity on top of it in the summer. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. But anyway, yeah, I, I, I really, uh, I like our friends in Oklahoma, but, uh, yeah, I really, uh, I like our friends in Oklahoma, but, uh, yeah, we got the full experience. Yeah. I was in Omaha, uh, last month and there was a tornado warning and I got hauled up in a, in a Walmart and then nothing happened. So I was like, what the fuck? It didn't even come down. Well, that's 99% of tornado experiences. I mean, I've lived through

a bunch, you know, I'm, I'm from North Texas and there's, it's part of tornado alley. So I've, I've been through a whole bunch, but you know, the only, the only, the time in my life that one actually hit like my neighborhood was in, uh, I was a little kid in the mid nineties and, um, that one, like, well, I should say it didn't hit our neighborhood. It, it, it stopped like about a half mile from our neighborhood, went up and then moved the storm, moved a couple of miles and then went back down on the ground. And I remember that one because there was huge hail and pretty much everybody got a new roof that year. But, you know, that's probably of all the tornado warnings and watches and stuff I've been through, that's two experiences. So most people will never see one.

Yeah. But that's, you know, that's not what we want to talk about today is it i thought it was i mean dude it's the end of the day for you it's the end of the night yeah right we're both gonna drag in a little so let's how about the tornado of comments on uh your recent instagram post oh my lord you know i was telling jordy her video editor to try to leave the inflammatory things that i say on here off of social media because it just draws out the bottom three percent that i really don't give a fuck about and uh you know i insulted the cherished, sacred RPE in one of our episodes. The golden calf of RPE.

Yeah. And you're just not allowed to do that. And if you do that, then you must be an imbecile that is just too simple-minded and caveman-like to understand the intricacies of rating of perceived exertion. So I'm not going to go on a tirade on that. I'm just going to quickly review for the audience and for the haters that may be jumping on here now. I doubt it. They don't listen to our podcast. They don't have the attention span for that.

So that's why I said I am not trying to become one of these guys that argues with haters all day. I remember reading an article a while back about the curve of influence, and they had on the y-axis, I think it was influence, and then on the x-axis was number of attacks you have to fend off. And then it was like, you know, pretty much fairly linear progression, and then it reaches an asymptote, kind of like the, you know, the training adaptations, right? And then the guy an asymptote kind of like the uh you know the training adaptations right and then the guy who was writing it circled the part right before it starts you know leveling off the top before it like spikes up to the upper limit like this is

the sweet spot this is where you want to stay where you have just enough influence and you're fighting off the minimum number of attacks and uh there are guys that make a living fighting with haters and that's not what i'm trying to do but i'm not going to shy away from my opinions either you know uh yeah what's yeah you know it's boring to not have an opinion no we all know like it's like they say what i say opinions like an asshole we all have one yeah i mean don't you want a coach that has some conviction in their methods? Yeah, I do, you know. Yeah. But, you know, to review, RPE stands for rating of perceived exertion.

So on its face, you are rating what you perceive the difficulty of the physical exertion that you are applying is. So perception implies subjectivity. You can't measure my perception. Only I can do that, and that measurement is subjective. Yeah, you have a number you're assigning to it, but it may not reflect what the scale says it's supposed to. So six means you theoretically have four reps left in you, but you stopped. Seven means you have three reps left in you, but you stopped. Eight means you have two reps left in you, but you stopped. And nine means you have one rep left in you, and an RPE 10 is an all-out set to failure, right? So the only person who can judge the RPE is the lifter. You know, the coach can't sit there and say, well, you did it wrong. You may have done other things wrong, like not put enough weight on the bar, but now we're talking

about load. We're not talking about the lifter's perception. Lifter's perception is the lifter's perception. So a lot of the comments I got from these haters was that I don't understand the tool and there's just more to it than that. And then I'm like, no, there's not more to it than that. There's more to it than that, to coaching than that, sure. So if a lifter puts on 365 and then, you know, says, oh, you know, this is way too hard. I need to do 315. That's an RPE 7.

He's not wrong because he believes it's an RPE 7, right? His coach may not believe that because his coach may look at the bar speed and say, hey, motherfucker, put 40 more pounds on. You know, you need to do 355 instead of 360 or say 20 more pounds on, right? 35, right? But that's not RPE. That's coaching. You know, now you're coaching load.

You're prescribing load when you do that, by the way. It's no longer based on RPE. That's coaching. Now you're coaching load. You're prescribing load when you do that, by the way. Right. It's no longer based on RPE. If the lifter thought it was 315 and you want to sit there and get pissed off about it like I would, I'd be like, no, that's not enough weight. You need to put weight on. Now you're coaching. You're coaching load specifically. The moment you invalidate the lifter's perception and state that they have to do a specific load, it is no longer RPE. So, no, it is not more complicated than that. Right. Now, you can describe that in a way that maybe makes more sense like, oh, I'll let the lifter pick the load. And if I don't like what load he picked, I'm going to tell him to add a certain amount of weight.

That's different, but that's not what I was talking about. I wasn't talking about coaching or the other things that coaches do to make good use of RPE. Those are different arguments entirely. Right. Yeah. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. Because the coaches that I know that um that i respect that use rpe they all say that they use it descriptively as in hey i'm giving you the load here this is what you're going to do you're going to do 225 for three sets five but you can put put an rpe rating on it afterwards like what do you think that was and um yeah you know i get it i get it now i think i i've said this on our rpe episode um i i think rpe is unnecessarily obtuse in the way in the rating system like just tell me how many reps you thought you had in the tank that's fine it's the same thing okay reps basically right reps and

reserve right but um yeah but but that's really all that is is just giving us additional data as to the you know your state right your your mental state and your state of recovery in that workout right it's it's some interesting additional data uh does not play a whole lot into programming yeah for the most part and typically i want to hear how somebody feels when they do a load but that's not what these guys were saying they were saying that that i don't understand the tool and that the tool is not about what you feel like, right? There's just more to it. You know, you're supposed to still push yourself and this, that, and the other, but hey, man, the word perceived is in there. Perceived exertion is a reflection of what somebody

perceives the weight difficulty to be. And that is a feeling, right? And if you're just going to use RPE to prescribe a load and leave it at that, you're going to do an RPE 7, then you have to accept that RPE 7. The moment you say that that RPE 7 was not enough weight and they have to put more weight on you, you are now coaching load, my friend, whether you like it or not. And you could do all the word gymnastics you want to try and wiggle your way out of this but the rpe scale by itself without any additional coaching is a rating of what the lifter feels like and if you don't like it like i said to many of you change the fucking channel i don't want you there and that's what this episode's about like who are we really working with here right um so

now that that rant's over that most of you don't want to hear let's right let's segue into what's important here what who are we talking to right well first let's say who we're not talking to these haters we're all competitive power lifters or people associated with competitive power lifting aspiring coaches i think a lot of them are aspiring competitive powerlifters. I mean, a lot of them have singlets on in some of their pictures, you know. Yeah, sure. Sure, they're aspiring powerlifters or competitive powerlifters, powerlifting coaches.

We don't coach powerlifters here. You know, we take people to powerlifting meets after they've been lifting for a while and decide they want to do that, but none of them would consider themselves a power lifter. Competitive power lifters are changing so many more variables than your average person that comes in here wanting a simple workout routine, trying to add a few pounds to the bar for as long as they could. It's a very different mindset. They're much more limited in terms

of what they're willing to do and how much risk they're willing to take. And the lifts are performed differently. They're just not going to do the lifts the same way that the power lifters are going to do them. And that's really what it comes down to, right? Like, I don't have guys coming in here that want to take their 700 squat to 725, you know? Like, that's not what happens. Occasionally, I get people that squat over 500 in here. I've had a guy squat over 600 in here. That happens. But they didn't go under a barbell to start out because they wanted to compete in powerlifting. They got under a barbell to start out because they wanted to compete in

power lifting they got under a barbell so they can get stronger healthier have denser bones be able to do shit outside the gym and not hurt you know uh and then they just happen to be strong right uh maybe not power lifting strong but stronger than most you know much stronger than most right right that's the point that just continued to be missed by these people. They're talking to me, I'm laughing, I'm disregarding it, because at the end of the day, I'm not talking to them. I'm not talking to them. Well, yeah, go ahead. Well, I was going to say, this is even a problem that starting strength coaches run into talking to the general public that has no idea about powerlifting, other than, you know, maybe they know that it exists. Um, I think it's generally more, people are more aware of it than they have been in previous

decades. But, uh, yeah, people see lifting with a barbell and they're like, Oh no, no, I don't want to do powerlifting. And not knowing that our methods are very different from the sport of powerlifting. Right. You know, yeah, we use a barbell, um, but that's, you know, we do, we do a squat, we do a bench, we do a deadlift. That's pretty much where the similarities end, right? Uh, we do other lifts too that aren't, that aren't in powerlifting. We do not do heavy singles for, you know, max effort like you do in power, in the sport of powerlifting. We, that's not part of our programming that's not what we do right um you know so it is to be fair it is a problem that's uh that that

exists right even among the general public the problem is that most people who go into a gym to lift weights are doing it for one of three reasons a they want to lose fat in which case this isn't the best way to lose fat but we we'll come back to that. We've talked about it in other episodes. B, they want to build muscle, or C, they want to get stronger. That doesn't mean that they want to do all of these things to compete in a powerlifting meet or a bodybuilding show. However, when guys like me and Trent got into this, and this is still mostly the case now, unfortunately, there wasn't a whole lot of information out that was geared towards the general public. You know, when you looked up weightlifting, you'd find mostly information on bodybuilding.

And none of it was contextualized. You know, they'd say, build, you know, add this many inches to your arms in this many weeks, right? And it would be written by a bodybuilder. Well, it would be written by somebody claiming this bodybuilder, usually probably some ghostwriting going on, you know? And they'd give you this program that an advanced bodybuilder uses and say that that's going to add inches to your arms in however many weeks. And a lot of the time it didn't fucking work. You know, some people were high responders, responded well to training and would get a result like that. But oftentimes most guys didn't because when you're looking at people in the middle of the bell curve or worse on the left tail, people that are naturally weak, uncoordinated motor morons,

they don't respond well to any, to just anything. You have to train them in a very general way that gets them stronger. Strength is the limiting factor for these guys. You know, if strength is not the limiting factor and you go into the gym stronger than 99% of people at baseline, yeah, you can make pretty much anything work. But if you go into the gym weaker than 99% of people, things become a little more tricky and you have to troubleshoot, right? And what we have found is when you train compounds, these motor morons tend to respond better than when you ask them to quote-unquote isolate because you can't really isolate a muscle.

But when you have them do isolation stuff, they lack the motor control, the neuromuscular efficiency, and the stability around all those joints to even do that. Like, you don't even think. Like, your back has to be tight, your abs have to be tight when you're doing a bicep curl. But if you're a novice and you've never lifted before and you're a motor moron, not the novice who comes in deadlifting 315 the first day or 405. Not that novice.

I'm talking about the novice that has to start with 95 pounds and his knees are caving in. These people exist. Powerlifters don't seem to think so because they're not training these people. Right. so because they're not training these people. They're not training anybody a lot of the time because anybody who's been in the gym business learns really fast that if you try to market to competitive athletes, there's not a whole lot of money in it for most of us. You're eventually going to have to broaden your horizons and train regular people. And I can't tell you how many times I saw some of these people get frustrated because they hired a powerlifting coach and got nowhere, or they hired a bodybuilding coach or a fitness guy that just looks good and fucks around with weight and gets a response, you know.

When you've trained a lot of people that just suck, for lack of a better word, at baseline and struggle with anything physical, you learn some things, right? Yes, absolutely. That's what we do. You know, we deal with middle to left tail of the bell curve, you know, people that are mediocre to below average. And when you're dealing with that, you have to troubleshoot a lot more than when you're dealing with the top 5%. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, this is something that comes up over and over in all aspects of life. But for some reason, a lot of people have this barrier to

seeing this in physical pursuits, right? Whether it's training or sport. Well, it's the worst in lifting activities. And it's the worst in lifting, I think. Because in sport, people acknowledge you cannot train a Michael Jordan. Nobody disputes that. Yeah, exactly. But in lifting, and nobody disputes that Phil Jackson was a mediocre basketball player, but the greatest coach known to man, arguably, you know? Right, right.

But in lifting, the person who is the highest authority is the guy with the biggest total, or the guy who won Mr. Olympia. Right, right, yeah, exactly. And that's the, you know, so there's this phenomenon that people who are good at something are drawn to doing that thing, right? So people who have a natural propensity for a thing want to do it. Duh, right? Um, but that means that your people who get into competitive lifting, right? Power lifting, um, they're, they're already in general above average. Most of them are right. I do not see like, I, you know, when I've gone to power lifting meets, uh, strength lifting meets, I, I see people who are mostly, I'd say mostly average to above average, right? You, you see

some, some elites from time to time, not that often, right? Cause there's not that many of them, but you don't see the left hand of the bell curve. Like, I just don't see it when I go to those meets. I'm sure there's a few there, but for the most part, they don't want to do that stuff. So, you know, when you start looking at a sport, you only see that in the master's class. Sure. Yeah. And that's a whole different thing. But yeah, when you see a sport, it's just like CrossFit, right? We saw the same thing with crossfit people who who got really enamored with the um with crossfit really liked the physiques that it produced right they saw good physiques and crossfit you know crossfitters of course like to take their shirt off at you know every opportunity and um they're like oh man it must be the crossfit well you know what guess who

was good at crossfit at baseline it was the guys who were good athletes in high school you know what? Guess who was good at CrossFit at baseline? It was the guys who were good athletes in high school. You know, the quarterback of the football team, the outside linebacker, whatever. Those guys were looking for something that had a competitive edge to it to continue exercising after their athletic career. And they were drawn to CrossFit. Guess what? They were already good athletes. They didn't struggle with all that stuff. No. And they already had to CrossFit. Guess what? They were already good athletes. They didn't struggle with all that stuff. No.

And they already had a good physique. Maybe they got a little beer belly because they just drank through all of college. But guess what? They came off and then they revealed the good physique that they already had from their athletic base growing up. So we see this all the time. But yeah, this is not who we coach.

This is not who we coach. I like to say I coach average people to get above average results, right? Yep. But that's it. I don't coach average people to get elite results because I can't. Nobody can. No, you can't. And we take below average people to average results too.

That's right. Exactly right. And so if you're below average, we're going to get you average results where other people are going to get you zero. Um, and that, and that's, that's my bread and butter. And that's what I, that's, those are the people I really enjoy coaching. That's who I am. You know, I'm, I'm an average person that got above average results because of my training. You know, I understand that the best. And not having a big total doesn't mean we're not entitled to an opinion in fact we're probably entitled to more of an opinion because we've had to troubleshoot things just to do mediocre you

know and uh you know some guy tried to say that oh well your total sucks so therefore you don't know what you're talking about yeah how many yeah so all right so i i had this experience since i was traveling all last week i was in um i was in a gym in my hometown in arlington i was in this this public gym it's a nice in my hometown in Arlington. I was in this, this public gym. It's a nice gym. Actually. They've got a, they've got a, uh, like kind of a lifting area. It's not a super serious lifting area, but they have barbells that actually have a center neural on them. They're not good, but, but they exist and they've got racks and rigs over there. So it's actually a, it's a, it's a cut above your average, you know, big box gym,

but it is a, it is a average commercial gym in terms of the clientele, right? In fact, it's, it actually skews mostly towards, you know, older boomers, um, in the clientele. But I always like to watch people when I go to these things. Right. And, um, you know, I just realized I was squatting and, you know, I wasn't really sure like what this bar situation was going to be like, is it going to fall off my back or whatever? But I'm like, I want to get some intensity in because I don't have a lot of time to train here. So I work up to 315 in my warmups. I'm like, okay, let's do 315. Let me hit a set of five here. And it was feeling really good. So I'm like, ah, okay. I don't really feel that comfortable

not having safeties here going heavier. Uh, so let me just do sets across at three 15 today. All right. So I did three sets of five, three 15, and there's this guy working next to me who is, uh, I guess he was a firefighter cause he had a fire department shirt on and he's doing some barbell complex thing, very cross-fitty sort of Metcon looking on and he's doing some barbell complex thing very cross-fitty sort of metcon looking thing where he's doing like these muscle snatches and push-ups and all sorts of stuff so he gets done with that and he i can tell he's like watching me squat he's looking over from time to time and you're like here it comes and then he starts loading up the bar to squat and i guarantee you he did not have squats on the program that day. Nobody, nobody

does a fucking Metcon that's like, I think I'll squat heavy now. No, he saw me loading up the bar and he's like, oh, I got to squat heavy too. And, uh, so I, I watched this guy, you know, high bar squat. He worked up to 265 for a triple and it was kind of a hard triple and he was squatting about three inches high and, uh, it was high bar, right? But here's the deal. This guy was six foot, somewhere between six foot, six foot two. He's a pretty big guy. I'd say he was probably 235, 240, somewhere in that ballpark.

He was a big dude. He was a lot bigger than me. And this guy can't squat 275. I have a lot of people in my barbell club that can squat 275. I've worked with, recently, I've worked with a guy who fits in that motor moron, well below average category, who has squatted, he's actually squatted 300 for a set of five now. It took a lot of work. He busted his ass to get there. But here's a deal. You look at, you look at, at people who are squatting, let's say 275,

that we work with your average person, they are far stronger than the general public. You know, like we're, we're, we're far in advance of where the general public is in terms of training. Like, you just don't walk into gyms and see 275 being squatted, much less three plates. It just doesn't happen. And so I think we get skewed. My whole point here is our perspective gets very skewed by competitive lifting. Absolutely. As to what is strong and what are good results.

Yeah, and it's the same thing with bodybuilding. Absolutely. vascularity out the wazoo and lots of size, right? And then you're wondering, you're like, well, I just want a fraction of that. So surely there's got to be a program for that. And it's like, dude, those guys are on a bunch of drugs. And when they started, they were also huge, you know, and jacked and pretty lean. You know, their genetics select for bodybuilding, you know, it's just like Rip said in an episode we did with him, bodybuilders are born, you know? And of course, you know, there's work involved, but their baseline is their baseline. They're starting off ahead of most people. And I love when the older ones post pictures of themselves when they're skinny little ectomorph-looking guys that are 15. It's like, dude, you went through puberty. You grew, you know? Right, yeah. Like, that's not a before

picture. That's before puberty, maybe, you know? Right, yeah. That's not a before picture. Yeah, exactly. Before puberty, maybe, you know? Look at, you know, you can go and find videos of Ronnie Coleman powerlifting after high school. So he was probably like 19. Yeah, he was jacked. I don't even think he was 20 yet. And the dude is freaking huge. He was just jacked.

I mean, he looked like he was 20, you know, a fully developed athlete at that point. He was just jacked. I mean, he looked like he was 20, you know, a fully developed athlete at that point. He was just a kid. I mean, any of our listeners remember being in high school? You know, the guys that played football, that wrestled, that were actually really good? They were fucking big, muscular dudes. They looked like men when they were 15, you know? Absolutely. Yep.

Yeah, definitely a handful of those guys on our team, for sure. Yeah. So it's just, it's silly. handful of those guys on our team for sure. Yeah. So it's just, it's silly. It's silly. And it's silly because this all goes back to Mr. Weider in the seventies. Uh, bodybuilding is probably the first competitive contest where an entire industry was built around this idea that you can achieve what the champions achieve through hard work. And other sports just don't sell that, you know, like guys get to the pros and then you always hear dudes that are like, even as young as their twenties after high school and all the way into their fifties, like, man, I just couldn't keep up with those guys, you know?

Right. Or I just didn't have what it takes I just didn't have what it takes to be pro. I just wasn't good enough. I got hurt too easy. I wasn't fast enough. I wasn't strong enough. I gave it everything. You hear that all the time. Baseball, basketball, football, soccer, pick your sport,

and you will hear stuff like that from the mediocre athletes that played at the youth level and couldn't go to the collegiate level or guys that went to the collegiate level and couldn't go pro you'll hear stuff like that like dude these guys that make it are fucking amazing i just no amount of work is gonna get me there but joe weeder in the 70s did something different with bodybuilding he told the world that hard work and specific programs can allow you to achieve goals that his champions were achieving. And that's just a bold faced fucking lie. Yeah. Yeah. It's, and he managed to convince adults. I think that's, that's the thing about it, you know, because, uh, I remember being a kid, you know, when you're like

14 or 15. Yep. Uh, yeah, I, I bought in, I was like, yeah, you know, I could, I could play in college. I could play college ball if I wanted to. No, I couldn't. Well, not even close, right? But you believe that. You figured it out at some point, right? But yeah, eventually you figured it out. You start playing.

You get to varsity and you're 17 or 18. You're like, oh, these guys are just an absolute different class of person on the field. Dude. But yeah, they managed to convince adults about this they should know better oh yeah i wonder i wonder if there's a corollary here i wonder if part of this is i believe i have to go look this up again it's been a while since i've looked at it but i believe the the amount of organized participation in organized sport has been falling for a while. Um, and, and I wonder if part of this is because people are more divorced

from sport and other physical pursuits than they have been in the past. It's possible, you know, and that's why, you know, cause if you, again, again if you if you play football and you go up against these guys like i actually i played against von miller when in high school it's just so obvious right but if you don't do any of that stuff but you go to the gym you're a gym rat then maybe it's easy to get you know suckered in by these these claims yeah and you know the other thing too is bodybuilding is not first of of all, it's not a sport. It's a contest. Right, right. But it's not one that, you know, kids start participating in at a young age and, you know, continue to do into, you know, high school and college like traditional sports. You know, you might play soccer from age four to age 18, realize that, damn, I've been doing it this long, and this motherfucker is just

worlds ahead of me. I'm not making it pro, like you said. I think with bodybuilding, a lot of it has been viewed through media, you know, like, you know, gyms typically didn't have a team of bodybuilders that trained together, you know? Right. Gyms were full of regular folk that would read about what bodybuilders did and try to replicate it, right? It wasn't a situation where you had a bodybuilding team at the youth high school and collegiate level and then the pro level, you know?

It was just people lifted weights. A very small group of people competed in it. They were all scattered. You know, you had a couple gyms in LA where they were legit dedicated bodybuilding gyms and And that was really about it. You know, there were probably some scattered in other cities too, but it wasn't like, you know, you had, it wasn't like organized sports where, right. You know, you see it all the time, you're in it, you have coaches, and then you're able to kind of watch people develop over time. Right.

You're just kind of getting a lot of secondhand information from people you've never met and you're taking it at face value. I think that's how he was able to convince adults because a lot of people haven't been around it a lot. Like, for instance, I didn't know about all the drugs, you know? Right. Yeah. I was totally naive. Yeah. Like, I'm like, did all of them take drugs?

You know, then you pick up Arnold's book. He's like, look at this guy. He was an ectomorph and he got bigger. This guy was an endomorph and he got leaner. And then leaving out the fact they all took drugs. Right, right. And I didn't really figure this out until I was into my 30s, dude. I suspected.

I knew people took steroids and then some of these guys. And the extent to which they take drugs. It's not just a little bit. It's even back then, rampant abuse. Maybe not compared to today's, but still. Those guys were reckless with their use in a lot of cases. Well, I had explained to a young lady today. She called.

She's wanting to go into this business, and she does women's bikini. And she called the gym. We've been trying to connect for months, and I finally remembered. I'm like, hey, let's get on a call. So we're talking and I'm like, you know, bodybuilding is a contest where you're judged on your appearance. And you can alter your appearance in various ways. You could use exercise to alter your appearance. You can use diet.

You can alter your diet and that will alter your appearance. Your fluid consumption can alter your appearance. Drug use can alter your appearance. Plastic surgery can alter your appearance. Drug use can alter your appearance. Plastic surgery can alter your appearance. The sun can alter your appearance. Your parents that you came from can determine what you look like, right? So the whole thing's judged on looks, and yet we like to focus on only two variables, diet and exercise, right? Right. And it just kind of stems back to Mr. Weider's lie. You know, you train this way, you eat this way, you can be a champion. And it's not spelled out like that necessarily. It'll say, you know, it might be something as simple as gain three inches on your arms

in 12 weeks. Well, you know, I've never put three inches on my fucking arms in 12 weeks. If I train my arms, I can... 12 years, maybe. Yeah, exactly. Like, that's a lot of inches, but you've seen articles like that. Oh, yeah. This many inches.

It's like, how do you know I'm going to add that many inches? Some guys get stronger and don't get that much bigger. Yeah. Early... Man, this must have been the first couple episodes we did. I talked about that DVD that I got with my mass gainer 9,000 that add an inch to your arms in 24 hours.

Yeah. Oh, you want to gain 20 pounds of lean? You need steroids, brother. Yeah, yeah. That guy, that is most honest supplement salesman, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, it's wild. So, yeah.

And the thing is, this spilled into powerlifting too. And, you know, powerlifting was not as widely known about as bodybuilding in the 90s and 80s. Right. It was big because, you know, we have records that go way back. There were federations. It was big, but it was much more niche than bodybuilding. Bodybuilding became mainstream because Arnold became a celebrity, you know.

And then all the other celebrities in the action genre were taking drugs and trying to look like that, you know. celebrities in the action genre were taking drugs and trying to look like that you know so that kind of hit the uh that kind of hit the mainstream and you know kind of guided the health club model that we know today that we call refer to as the globo gym you know it kind of spawned out of bodybuilding right uh power lifting was a little more underground me and rip always joke that it's in the same umbrella as pro wrestling oh yes and uh you know this one girl at my gym she's like they're carnies it's true it's true yeah i mean it's it's a lot so it's funny you know i say it on the show all the time i'm a big fan of strongman and strongman literally came out of the carnival uh if you go back to you go back to the days of the vaudeville

days and, um, yeah, you do have, you have a, the freak part of the freak show was some like big strong guy was going to bend, you know, iron bars over his head or whatever. And a strong man grew out of that tradition and became a somewhat organized sport in the seventies and then into the eighties. And, you know, guess who the early, the guys who excelled in Strongman in the early days, they were powerlifters, right? Coming over from that. So yeah, it all fits. It all fits. It's hilarious. Some of them were pro wrestling, dude. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Mark Henry, sexual chocolate. Ken Patera, he was in pro wrestling.

Oh, really? I didn't realize he wrestled. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He was a pro wrestler back, I think in the N. Oh, really? I didn't realize he wrestled. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He was a pro wrestler back, I think, in the NWA days, probably. He didn't make it to WWF. Yeah. It was 70s, 80s. You know, Ken Patera was a pro wrestler.

Who was the other guy? Kurt Angle was an Olympian. He became a pro wrestler in the 2000s, you know? Right, right. But, yeah, somehow the same mentality spilled into powerlifting. And I don't know how that quite happened, but it was this idea that every single one of us can work hard and get extremely strong. And if we don't get extremely strong, like some of the comments I got, your total sucks. And if you've been at it for 10 years, you suck. It's like you should have used RPE.

You really think I'm limited by my programming right now when I'm progressing at an appropriate rate for somebody who's been training as long as I have, and I lift more than 98% of people? I mean, come on. Have these guys ever heard the phrase, individual results vary? Right. So let me elaborate on that because this goes for our listeners. I'm not just here to bitch. I'm here to kind of highlight something for you. because this goes for our listeners.

I'm not just here to bitch. I'm here to kind of highlight something for you. When you do anything, if you take a group of people anywhere and assign them to a task, you're not going to get the same exact response with the same exact amount of effort. You're going to get a variety of different responses. I learned this in my PhD.

They called it biological variability. And they showed responses to weight loss and weight gain, you know, calorie surplus, calorie deficit. And those responses vary, and we all see it. You know, there's a guy who takes cream out of his coffee and drops 10 pounds. Then there's the gal that, like, you know, eats one extra carrot and gains weight, you know? Right. I'm exaggerating, obviously. I've never heard a story like that.

But, like, you might have two people doing the same things. One of them's skinny. One of them's overweight, you know? We've all seen that, you know, in practice. And it's the same thing with weight gain, you know, some people might shovel down food and not gain an ounce, you know, or gain a little bit of weight, and then some people might shovel down the same amount of food and get obese, you know? Right. And even with that, like we have this obesity epidemic, right? But how come, you know, despite all that, you know, people are eating lots and lots of calories, how come only a small fraction are morbidly obese, you know, like three, four, 500 pounds, you know? Why doesn't everybody do that since everybody's overeating, right? Not literally everybody, but a lot of Americans are overeating, you know? Sure, yeah.

get that quite that heavy, you know? So, you know, it's very important to understand that individual results vary, you know, with anything, and especially with lifting. You know, you're going to have rapid progress the first year. I had that. Then I did an LP 10 years after having that, right? So I lifted and did some of these lifts, excelled pretty quick when I was 19. I was limited by programming and limited by equipment too. I didn't have fractional plates. Then 15 years later, I went at it again, followed the novice linear progression, and I eked out more strength. I got fast pretty rapidly. My best set of five squats was the low to mid 200s, probably because I was under training and didn't do it right. I was limited by technique

and by programming. I added five pounds of workout three times a week. I got to 330, 335 for three sets of five. Most of my clients don't do that, by the way. And that's not my fault. They're just not built for that sort of thing. Some guys go past 400, though. So if I'm a shitty coach, how is it happening with some guys and not others? Because that's how it's supposed to be.

That's right. Individual responses vary. So that's what I was saying with me again like so i had this rapid progress and then year after year it just got slower and steadier which most people could agree is supposed to happen you know uh lane norton is a world record holder his last pr was nine years ago he got i think 28 pounds shy of it last week or the week before you know he squatted 668 which was briefly the world record i think he held it for a year or two um and uh then he got hurt had to rehab that and he dealt with all this other shit and for the first time in a very long time i'm proud of him you know awesome to hear that he's putting up that kind of weight in his 40s now right squatted six squatted 640 you know uh percentage wise it's

pretty close but it's not a pr he may get another pr though he's starting to believe that he might be able to i hope he does you know to. I hope he does, you know? Yeah, right. But look at that. You know, nine years, no PR. You know, he started lifting competitively, like, I think a year before I started lifting consistently, you know? And yet, you know, he came out, he started more muscular than I was, you know, as an adult. And he was already pretty muscular when he started more muscular than I was, you know, as an adult. And he was already pretty muscular

when he started powerlifting, and he put a lot of weight on his squats and deadlifts, you know. But if you just look at the absolute load, you could say one guy is doing it right, one guy is doing it wrong. And it's like, well, no, if you look at the rate of progress, he probably had very fast progress to a much higher spot than I did when he was a novice, and then had the same slow, steady response that'm having you know and you can say that about anybody i mean look at ed cohen well you know he's what he deadlifted 888 conventional at 242 some point in the 90s i think nine i think that 902 deadlift that he did was 1991 and i don't think he ever did it again bro and he kept lifting for another

what 20 years oh yeah um yeah i don't know when his competitive career uh ended but i think it was in the early 2000s right he went through the 20 000 i think he may have done a little bit after 2010 but definitely nothing by 2015 by 2014 he was done i think of him as a 90s lifter, but yeah, sure. There's meets from 05. I know that. There's meets from 05, but his PR deadlift at 902 at 220 that he never surpassed, at least in a meet, that was in 1991 or 1992. I think that 888 was later. In 96, I want to say, he pulled 888 conventional. But he didn't pull 903 you know like

eventually there's an asymptote you know what was he supposed to do go to rip would say he should have got to 308 maybe he would have more but you know at the end of the day you know that guy tried everything you know he went up away class you know and he didn't he didn't pr you know he squatted a thousand i think at 242 yeah. Yeah, was he 198, 220? I think he was a 198er that went to 220. He had records in every weight class. He had records at 165, 181, 198, 220, then 242. But then they've all gotten scrubbed because of, you know.

He got popped for steroids and powerlifting. Isn't that hilarious? Like, get the fuck out of here, you know? The IPF is the last. They're like, get the fuck out of here, you know? The IPF is, they're like, oh, these guys are a tested federation.

It's like, tested doesn't mean clean dumbass. Right. Tested doesn't mean that he even got tested. Now, that's how I add,

I'm saying in general, if you're saying this guy's tested in a tested federation, doesn't mean he ever even had a drug test, you know? Right,

yeah. They only test 10% of lifters. We need to do an episode sometime where we talk about why steroids should be encouraged. It should be not only legal, but encouraged in all sport. Absolutely.

In all professional sport. I was trying to get that on. I wonder if he'd do it. You know, he's a cool guy. I saw, you know, he still hangs out at Lance's gym. Yep. And I saw another starting strength coach, Alex Patesik. Is that how you say his last name?

Patesik? I don't know if you pronounce the P. It's one of those weird Slavic names. But anyway, I saw him benching. He was benching 335 or something like that. And Ed came over and was spotting him on the bench. I was supposed to meet him there on Christmas, but then he got COVID. Oh, man.

Yeah. Lifting on my own. Yeah. He's such a cool guy, right? The fact that he's doing, he's just hanging out with like just regular lifters at his gym and doing that. That's badass. I can ask, you know, I can ask. Yeah. It doesn't hurt. But, and here's the thing about this PR stuff. Life circumstance PR stuff. Life circumstance changes too, right? You know, there's not everyone has the same circumstances in their life to maximize their genetic potential, right? I'd say most people don't have the circumstances to maximize genetic potential. If you have, you know, if you have a

family, if you have kids, you have a job, right? If you have a job that's more than like some, you know, that's, that's a demanding job, then you don't, you don't have the resources there to maximize your genetic potential, right? You're always going to be hamstrung by, you know, by these, by these factors. But I also like the saying, I think I've said it before on the show, anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Absolutely. Right. Like there's, there's, this stuff has value. We've, we've talked about it a lot. The stuff has value beyond just like numbers. You know, if, um, that's why I, I, that's one thing I disagree with, uh, uh, with rip on and the very beginning of starting strength, he says, strength is the most important thing in life. And I'm like, well, if that's true, then how much you lift becomes a value judgment, right? The, the, the strongest lifter is the best

one. That's the best person. We should make them the, the lifter King of our, uh, of our kingdom. But it's clearly not true, right? That there, there are other things important in life and, uh, and more important in life, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth pursuing. And I think the quicker you can divorce yourself from comparison, the more fulfilling this whole training thing is going to be for you. And that's hard. Oh, we laugh about it all the time in the gym because I'm chasing a 315 bench and my member, Andrew, good guy, you know, he met him as a client that when I opened the gym, he was one of my first members. And he's like, you know, we sometimes forget that, like, a small percentage of people could bench 315 because we're, like, kind of divorced from reality since we're watching, you know, guys that are, like, lifters, you know.

And we see other lifters doing it, you know. Nobody's doing it in my gym, by the way. There's not a single member here that is benching anywhere near that. I don't know if there's anybody here benching 275 right now. Yeah, yeah. And even, you know, you go to, again, you go to the bro area of your local commercial gym

and you'd be lucky if you find one guy, the biggest guy in there, benching 315. Right. Right. I don't remember seeing it very often at the gym. And that's all he does, you know, early day. Five times a week, a bench. You know, chest day, early day.

But yeah, you just don't see that. You're going to see some 225s, but not very many 275s and very few 315s. So yeah, that's... I sent a message to my lifters in the barbell club about this last week after I saw that. I'm like, hey guys, you know, just step back for a minute. Appreciate the fact that wherever you are in your strength journey, y'all are strong.

Y'all are objectively strong when you look at the general population. Absolutely. Some people in the club are at the very beginning of their strength journey. Some of them have been doing it for a long time, and they're flattening out. But all of them are objectively strong. Absolutely, Ben. And that's what I'm thankful for Rip for. He really, on one hand, will sit there and say, that's not enough weight.

You need to gain body weight so you can lift this much more. The number always goes up. That's just coaching,. You need to gain body weight so you can lift this much more. The number always goes up. That's just coaching, psychology fucking shit. Yeah. He's also almost 70. Give him a break. For as much as he makes fun of them, he is a high school football coach in a lot of ways. Absolutely.

Yeah. It's like everything sucks. You always suck. And then when you're not around, he's probably telling someone else, oh, he's pretty strong. He's doing pretty good. Right. Oh, yeah. It's a coaching style that I respect. I appreciate it. It works for me. It doesn't, you oh, he's pretty strong. He's doing pretty good. Right. Oh, yeah. It's a coaching style that I respect.

I appreciate it. It works for me. It doesn't – it's not right for everybody. But it's a style. I respect it. But then he'll turn around and say that some people are just better than others. Some people are just better suited for things than others. Right.

And he acknowledges the existence of the motor moron, and he acknowledges the existence of the genetic freak, and he acknowledges the role of drugs. Right. about being in the top 1%. You probably can't be in the top 1%. Like you said, if you're that good, you're pulled in a different direction. People that come to us want to be healthy, want to look good, want to feel good, want to move good, and don't want this interfering with their life in a negative way. And that's not the same thing as a powerlifter

who's willing to eat shit off the floor if it means one more pound on his total. Right. That's a different demographic, different focus, and you're manipulating different variables too. So because I understand that, and the reason I understand that is because of rip and starting strength, I just laugh when these guys write this shit. Like I'm not remotely pissed off about it because we were prepared for these arguments 10 years ago. I don't know when you were certified. For me, it was 10 years ago. You were about, what, five, six years ago?

Oh, no. As a starting strength coach, 2020? Oh, really? Three years ago? Yeah. Yeah. So three years ago for me or for you, it was 10 years ago for me. And I was prepared for all this shit because they were already saying it to Rip.

Rip doesn't do anything. He wasn't strong. He hasn't coached anybody strong. Well, of course, because he's not a powerlifting coach. He's a gym owner and there's not a bunch of elite powerlifters running around Wichita Falls, you know? Yep, exactly. Exactly. You know, and he also taught us that, you know, the best, the worst coaches are often found among the best talent

because that job is largely babysitting they're not limited that much by strength you know right all these other things that they do outside of the sport are important useful and help but you're not getting a huge percent change because they lift it's just that since they're all great on all the teams and they're all elite every little bit fucking counts so if you're getting a little stronger makes them half a percent better that half a percent matters at that level you know so they should do these things but for different reasons than you and i you know if they don't do these things they're probably still going to perform well because they're the top one percent of their

sport you know i was about to say mean, if you're not familiar, you got to go look up Joel Seidman on Instagram. Oh, fuck me. A 90 degree guy? Yeah, yeah. He's, so don't ask me to try to explain what his thesis is, but yeah, he trains everyone in these like 90 degree angles of, like, so his range of motion on all the lifts

is only to take a joint to 90 degrees it's it's just utter it's utter absurdity um i still believe he's trolling i i have to believe that the guy's not serious and he's actually trolling but but regardless the dude has fucking nfl you know mlb athletes training in his facility doing the most retarded shit that you could possibly imagine an athlete doing. And guess what? Those guys are still really good. Yeah, it doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter. The amount of help strength training is going to do for these guys,

in the grand scheme of things, is probably less than 5%, if I had to guess. That's not saying it's not important, by the way. There's all the same benefits there. Increased bone density, probably injury risk reduction if they're doing it right and safely. They shouldn't be training like we're training, obviously, because they don't need to grind quite that much. And who's going to hit harder, the guy who squats 600 or the guy who squats 300? You know, I mean, some of these things are obvious, but at the end of the day, if the guy who could squat 600 keeps playing football and just maintains a 300 to 400 squat, he's still going to get better playing fucking football because he's got a 45-inch vertical jump and he's built for fucking football, you know? Yeah. I remember reading something about, you remember that remember that guy, Julian Edelman, he kind of had a few years of, uh, prominence. Uh, he was a receiver. He was a slot receiver

for the Patriots. And, you know, I think he won a Superbowl. Um, but he, you know, he was kind of like one of these small guys that was, you know, he's probably, I say small, you know, he's five, 11, maybe six foot, definitely no taller than that, you know, 200 pounds, 195 pounds, something like that. But he's one of these like really quick, small guys that can kind of find a little spot and then he could catch everything. He's like flypaper. Well, I remember that guy just, I remember reading about an interview with him and he was talking about training and all the, you know, sports specific stuff he was doing. And then they asked him about like, well, do you ever lift weights?

And he said something to the effect of like, yeah, I, you know, I did for like a couple of years there and like, you know, I don't know, I don't do it anymore. I'm kind of worried about, you know, getting injured lifting, but he just casually tossed out his, yeah, like I squatted before. And he said like, I did four for eight okay and so you know i don't know i'm gonna taste this guy's you know that's pretty claims at face value i believe he did that's not really unbelievable at all but but i remember at the time i was thinking like oh shit that was i don't even know if i had squatted 405 for anything at that point right i just remember thinking oh shit like this this is a small guy. He's the little guy

in the NFL. And the guy that doesn't even really train, strength train, but he can still do 405 for eight. Of course he can. Because he's in the fucking NFL. That's right. Well, that's the thing that really drove it home because sometimes you hear

these stories about the defensive tackles that are benching 550 and squatting you know 700 or whatever and it's like yeah that's believable because that guy weighs 325 this guy's a monster this guy is like an average more average looking dude as much as any nfl player can be average and uh and he's squatting 405 for a bunch of reps. Yeah. I just remember that detail kind of hammering home the difference there. But anyway, we've talked a lot about this. I think hopefully what our mission,

one of our missions on this show is to right-size expectations and also help people understand what the journey of strength training looks like for an average person. There's a lot of good that comes out of this process. We're living testaments of that. There's a lot of benefits here, but you're never going to light up social media, right? You're not going to be, You're not going to turn heads at the beach. That's okay, man.

We're not doing it for that. So hopefully this has been a helpful comparison. I would say so. I think we beat that to hell, don't you think? Yeah, I think so. Trent needs to go to bed too. That's right, yeah. I need my beauty sleep. My dogs haven't been to work today. I had a bunch of errands,. Trent needs to go to bed too. That's right. Yeah, it's past my, I need my beauty sleep.

And my dogs haven't been to work today. I had a bunch of errands, so I need to go get them going. Yeah, so let's close this out. Thank you for tuning in to the Weights and Plates podcast. You can find me at weightsandplates.com, or you can find me on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. We're also on YouTube, youtube.com, weights, or it's at weights underscore Robert underscore Santana. We're also on YouTube, youtube.com, weights, or it's at weights underscore and underscore plates.

And if you're in Phoenix, if you're Metro Phoenix, I am south of the airport at the South Mountain Village off 32nd Broadway at Weights and Plates Gym. Have I said weights and plates enough? Yeah, no, I think you should do it again. Yeah, isn't that how brainwashing works? Subliminal messaging yeah there you go so you know you can find me in all these

different places alright excellent yeah you need to go look them up if you are in the Phoenix area if you want to find me you can do that on Instagram at marmalade underscore cream I haven't been posting as much lately but yeah I need to get back on that but you can also find me if you're

interested in coaching jonesbarbellclub at gmail.com. All right, we'll talk to you again in a couple weeks. you