Weights and Plates Podcast - #80 - Does Upper Body Really Need More Volume?

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

When the upper body lifts stall, the typical programming answer is "add volume." Some do this by increasing frequency -- the number of times you perform the lift each week -- and some do it by adding more sets during each upper body session. Others do both! It's not bad advice for a lot of people coming off of novice upper body programming. Many of these lifters have low press and bench press numbers relative to thier squat and deadlift, so adding a few extra sets during the week, whether it's via introducing a fourth pressing slot or by increasing the number of sets per workout, doesn't add that much systemic fatigue to the workout.   For more advanced lifters, however, especially those with high upper body numbers relative to their bodyweight (pressing at or above bodyweight for multiple reps, and benching well above bodweight), it is less clear that high volume training is necessary to drive strength gains. Maybe what you need at this point is less volume.   Dr. Santana and Coach Trent bust the myth that high volume training is necessary for growing the upper body, and discuss how stress and fatigue play a significant role in upper body programming -- this is not just a squat and deadlift problem!   Online Diet Coaching and Strength Training with Dr. Robert Santana https://weightsandplates.com/online-coaching/     Weights & Plates 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. Yo, what up? Oh man, my biceps hidden by my shirt. No, it's hidden by lack of size. It's so fucking big lack of size man hey you know uh if i look all disheveled and red and stuff it's because i just squatted so um it's my excuse it's my excuse this show is real you know we actually we actually do all of this shit that we talk about we actually lift weights you know occasionally once in a blue moon i lift weight right so um we had a little conversation offline via text the other day that thought was kind of interesting and i think the gist of it was that upper body is just as subject to fatigue

and interference effects from the primary to upper body lifts that we do, which are the press and bench press as lower body. Or maybe I shouldn't say it that way. Maybe it's not just as sensitive to fatigue, but it is quite sensitive to fatigue. And I think that's underrated. I think a lot of people underrate the effects of fatigue on the upper body. I would agree with that. And we were talking about this because it's actually manifested in both of our training programs fairly recently. So my story is I was, you know, I've been benching once a week, pressing once a week for the last, you know, for a while now, several months now. And the only time that I've broken that is I will go on

these runs occasionally where if I do it in intensity press, cause that's where I am in my press right now is I do an intensity press on one week and the next week I do a volume press. So if I do an intensity press, not always, but when I have time, I will go and do some dumbbell bench right after that. Cause I'm only doing, you know, let's say I do two sets of three on the press. That's not very much. So I will usually go and do two or three sets of dumbbell bench right after that. So technically on those weeks, I'm hitting bench twice that week. You're supposed to bench every day, bro. But you know, it's point is I'm not, it's my frequency is very low especially for my level of advancement right and um just a couple months ago i was pretty much i was really grinding out my intensity bench i was doing like 255 for two sets of three

and they were kind of like that last rep was pretty fucking grindy and that that sucks man you know i've benched 320 at one point. Um, my, I think my PR for my PR triple on the bench was like 280. It's definitely, I've definitely at 280. I don't, I don't know if I've hit 285. I don't think so, uh, for a triple, but you know, point is 255 is not great for me. Um, but I was, I was really struggling. And what's interesting is the last two weeks, I had a good run where I came back from a little bit of a trip and I decided to do 225. I just threw 225 in the bar and I did five and I'm like, well, shit, that wasn't too hard. So I'm gonna do three sets of five today. And the next week rolled around. I'm like, well, I'm not gonna like, I just

did 225 for three sets of five. That wasn't an intensity day. It wasn't really a volume day either. Let's just do 230 for three sets of five. Why not? And it went up pretty easy. Okay. So the week after that, I'm like, well, shit, let's throw 235 on there. So basically I've worked it up to 240 for three sets of five. Now my 240 was kind of hard. I don't know if I'm going to get 245. I'm going to try. My recovery was pretty shitty going into that. So that could be kind of hard. Right. I don't know if I'd get, if I'm going to get 245. I'm going to try. My recovery was pretty shitty going into that. So that could be part of it. But the point is I had this like little linear progression run for the last few weeks that kind of came out of nowhere.

Because remember just two months ago, 255 for two grindy triples. And now I'm at 240 for three sets five. Right. And then I realized because of like schedule kind of getting crazy and I ended up like intentionally flipping around some workouts and stuff. I basically did not press for 15 days. Seriously? I did not press at all. What happened?

15 days. But I hit the bench three times in that span. Right. And guess what? My bench went up. Now, if you look at my presses, they're doing a little bit better. I am pressing on my intensity days over body weight for sets of three. So I weigh somewhere around 185 to 190 right now. And I was doing 190, 195 for two sets

of three on my intensity days. So my presses are pretty heavy. And even my volume days, you know, I'm doing like 160 for a bunch of reps, five, four sets, five, five sets of five. Right. And so I thought that was kind of interesting. I stopped pressing and my bench went up. So what that tells me is that I think my press was interfering or it was limiting my progress on the bench because of the, the hangover effect of the fatigue. because of the hangover effect of the fatigue. I believe it. You know, people don't give that enough credit. The mainstream conventional wisdom is that you need to bench every day, you know, and that goes down to the gym bro that's, you know, even at the high school gym, all the way up to, you know, an advanced power lifter and a bunch of drugs. You know, there's this kind of dogma that permeates every subculture of lifting that you know you can just beat the shit out of your upper body forever and you know i hate to sound like a broken record but a lot of

this comes back to fucking drugs what what what are one of the known positive side effects of steroid use trent and i think it's much, much greater accelerated recovery. Yeah, that's how, that's the mechanism of action. Increase improves recovery, right? But where do you visually see the muscle mass gains the most? Oh, particularly in the upper body. In the upper body. Yeah.

You know, the pecs, the arms, the shoulders. Bigger delts. Yeah, traps, pecs, delts. Yeah. Exactly. shoulder delts yeah traps pecs delts yeah exactly and the bench press will almost certainly go up if you add that to your routine right if you just start taking drugs your bench press is going to go up your arms are going to get bigger your chest is going to get bigger that's going to go up so when you kind of remove that from the equation and you're talking to people who've never taken anything, you often find out that with the exception of, you know, guys with short little arms that don't have to push it that far and big pecs, you know, with the exception of those guys that are just naturally gifted for the movement, you know, the medium to long-armed guys with mediocre muscle mass, they all complain that their bench doesn't go up.

Have you kind of noticed this? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Poverty bench. They have a name for it. That's right. That's right. I would say that I'm kind of one of them. I've always had muscle bellies on my pecs, but I've always struggled to get the barbell to go up. I can get my dumbbell bench to move pretty easy because of my pecs, right? But I figured out at some point in the last few years that my arms were the limiting factor, and it kind of makes sense. My tricep strength was not great. So I made it my mission to get my bench up the last two years. So from 20, 20, I think 22 and 23, I spent a lot of time doing hypertrophy work, right?

So I did bodybuilding stuff. A lot of volume on chest, triceps, biceps, you know, rows, things like that. And you know, some of it had its place in and nearly need to do as much as I did ended up with some lateral epicondylitis from preacher curls that, you know, got aggravated by benching and squatting. And eventually, it led to recently, I went to a transformer bar bar so that I can let that heal up. Anyways, as soon as I got off that and started focusing on heavy fives and trying to really program the bench, I'm like, all right, this is the first time I've really tried to focus

on the bench because I got my press up to 225, just using typical programming, press twice a week, add every week, one heavy press, one light press, a bench press in between. But the bench always just suddenly starts to fail, you know, and I could not figure out why. And I think the press I do better at because of the long arms, you get it over your head faster, to the swimming background. And three, there's a lot of back involved in it. And I think it follows your deadlift to an extent, right? Sure. But with the bench, it would just suddenly fail. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact the elbow extensors play a big role in it. And also, it's a lot of eccentric loading on the elbow flexors when you're coming down. You know, people don't consider that, right?

And I know these things now because I've been training it with tendonitis. And then I remembered I had a lot of clients in the past that had come to me because they were getting tendonitis from benching, you know? So it's interesting that you could get this lateral epicondylitis, not even tricep tendonitis, by the way. You know, it's just that lateral epicondylitis from benching, you know? So it's interesting that you could get this lateral epicondylitis, not even tricep tendonitis, by the way, you know, it's just that lateral epicondylitis from benching, you know, and that is what would be happening on the eccentric, right? So I started out, I'm like, all right, got to bench three times a week, you know, so I'd bench three times a week, I pressed once a week, I was doing five sets of five all close grip, because I knew that the triceps were my limiting factor. So I did close grip, five sets of five one day, press, three sets of five, incline, dumbbell, three sets of five, so I can work pecs, bro. And you know, there's value there. You know, I'm not discrediting that,

but for what I was trying to do, it only got me to a point, right? And then I would hit an intensity set of five at the end of the week. Well, eventually I couldn't, I couldn't hit, oh no, no, no, let me back up. I did five sets of five close grip the first day, did pin bench press the second day for a set of five, followed by, I believe, a press. And then I did an intensity bench and all out set of five, followed by inclined dumbbells on the third day. And I was able to go up to a point. Then I got to the point where I was starting to get closer and closer to my previous 5RM. So for reference, my past 1RM was 310. My past 5RM was 267.5. So right around the mid-250s, I was having to repeat intensity days. The tendonitis was playing a role here because I

was getting a lot of asymmetrical lockout. And part of that's I have scoliosis. So when it gets really heavy, I don't have a big one, but I have a slight scoliosis in my upper back. And I think this is part of the reason why this happens. Same here. Yeah. And my left arm's longer to my right. So when it gets heavy, I get an asymmetrical lockout. The left takes longer than the right to lock out. And it got more pronounced than ever this year. And I think it's because of the golfer's elbow. So I had to start addressing things. I'm like, all right, I'm probably doing too much. So let's follow the specificity principle here. Let's drop the inclines out of here. Let's change the close grip to flat bench and see what that does. Keep everything else the same. Well, I kept missing

the heavy bench at the end of the week, you know? So I, you know, I'm like, all right, let's address recovery. You know, I'm not sleeping very well. Let's sleep better. Let's eat better. You know, let's do this. You know, the weight gain's there, so I've done that. And still kept missing 262 and a half. I'm five pounds shy of my PR. I could not get it for more than four. And on the pin bench press, I kept missing that as well. I got to 310, and I kept getting four.

So I'm like, okay, well, let's try this like a deadlift. The intensity day will alternate. And one week I will do a bench press. And the next week I'll do a pin bench press. Meanwhile, I'm still doing five sets of five on Monday and the press on Wednesday. So tried that, guess what? Kept getting fours, right? And, you know, I'm just getting frustrated. And then sometimes recovery things weren't in line. So I, you know, I addressed those things, but then eventually got to things weren't in line. So, you know, I addressed those things. But then eventually got to a point where my lifestyle was pretty steady and I was still getting fours. So then the next logical thing was, okay, let's go every other week, you know.

So I'll do a heavy week where the intensity day is a bench press. And I'll do a light week where the intensity day is a pin bench press. So I'll do 90% of one week on the light week, right? So I tried that, and guess what? I kept missing this last rep. Kept getting four. So then I missed the rep with an asymmetrical lockout. Like I literally locked my right arm out with 262.5 while my left was like a quarter of the way through.

So then I started thinking, okay, I need to address the tendonitis. my right arm out with 262 and a half while my left was like a quarter of the way through yeah so then i started thinking okay i need to address the tendonitis so all these things that i'd already done and made it less shitty but it's still lingering right right like i think my arms might be shutting down so i got under the transformer bar so i'm like okay now i'm not even squatting with my arms behind my back anymore so maybe that will help right what happened next i got a set of four again so i'm like okay it's not completely the tendonitis so now what what's the problem here so i started looking at it and i'm like all right the five sets of five are stressful and then the five rep max whether it's on off the pins halfway up or full range of motion it's too much stress in a week i'm like

this is the next thing i got to address right so you know i took an extreme approach that you know wouldn't recommend somebody doing this if they're going to try but basically it all led me to a two-day split where i just started this i would do my intensity bench so the first week because i was coming off the old split i got a set of four with 262 and a half and this is where i kind of came up with it i'm like all right well let's just do the volume day right after you know know? So instead of doing five sets of five, I did four sets of five with the light volume day. Remember, I have a light volume day one week, a heavy volume day the next week, right? So I'm like, since I just benched heavy,

full range of motion, I'm going to bench light for the four sets of five. So I did 262 and a half, got four, did 232 and a half, did four sets of five following that. And then I squatted and deadlifted because that was the other thing I had changed somewhere in the mix of this that I forgot to mention. I started making sure that I was doing my intensity bench before I would squat and deadlift for the week. And I only squat and deadlift once a week because I'm like, well, maybe the back soreness is interfering, right? It wasn't that either. I mean, it probably was that. This is better this way. I'm going to keep it this way. But, you know, now, so I was bent. So I did my heavy bench, the four sets for backoffs.

And then I deadlifted, then I squat. And then I'm like, well, might as well press, too. Let's just do all four, you know. So I did that last week for the first time. And then Thursday, I'm like, okay, the second bench day, because I still acknowledge I need two bench days a week, at least, you know, for the frequency. So I don't have to train. Like the second bench day, I'm just going to go lighter instead of trying to keep it stressful.

So I went down to 210, paused, three sets of five. So it's 80% of, what did I do that week? 260, two and a half, right? Yeah. So I did 80% of that. And I did 210, three sets of five with a pause, nice and easy. This past Tuesday, which was yesterday, I hit 310 for a set of five. Finally got all five, and it wasn't too bad.

So this Friday, I'll probably do a lighter three sets of five with a pause, probably 195. And then hopefully, next fucking Tuesday, I can get that 262.5 and start moving towards my previous PR again and hopefully get a new PR in the next couple months. We'll see what happens. But I got to say, when I came in yesterday to bench, I felt pretty damn fresh because basically I'm beating the shit out of myself one day with everything. Right. And then I get pretty much a whole week to recover and just do a light bench the second day to get active recovery. You're converging on the Kurt Karwoski late stage training.

Isn't that what he did? I think I've heard that late in his career, he pretty much lifted once a week. Really? I didn't know that. I think he trained like... Now, it could have been that... I've never gotten a clear explanation of what he was doing. So it could have been that he did his barbell work once a week and he was doing some like bodybuilding stuff throughout the week so you know he might be hitting the machines and like dumbbells and shit right other days of the week but yeah i'm pretty

sure he was only like squatting and deadlifting and stuff like once a week at the end of his career this is late late stage i mean because you think about the guy. This is a guy who would, like, warm up and then hit, you know, 650 for eight, you know, on the squat, like, stuff like that. So, enormous amounts of stress generated from those lifts at that point. So, you know, we always say that, you know, it's relative to a point and it's absolute, right? So, you hear that and you're like, well, you know, he was squatting like a thousand with a suit on, you know, and he was deadlifting in the sevens, you know, that's a lot of weight. So I guess it would make sense to go once a week, but then, you know, maybe that applies with lighter weights too, you know, I think absolute load does matter after a certain

point. You know, I remember when I first met Rip, you know, Bill Starr used to say this and then, you know, by proxy Rip shared this with us, and then, you know, by proxy, Rip shared this with us, and then I heard other people at New Starr say the same thing. Once the deadlift, you know, in regards to the deadlift, they'd say, once the deadlift gets over 500, it's too fucking stressful to be deadlifting a bunch of heavy volume. And I found that to be true. You know, I'd say that for a lot of guys that are less athletic it's once it gets past the mid to upper 300s it starts to happen i would say for me it was a huge game changer once i got over 500 pounds like clockwork you know yeah but i have noticed for a lot of people

i train that effect starts to happen after about 350 yeah yeah I'd agree. Yeah. For me somewhere in the, you know, 400, somewhere around there, 405. That's the, the, the stress seems to ramp up. Well, that's, you know, I think that's the difference though. Right? Like Kurt Karwoski was like a freak show mountain of muscle, right? Like he, he was closer to Ronnie Coleman than, you know, than anyone else anyone else, even though he was a powerlifter, not a bodybuilder. And take away the drugs, take away the genetic eliteness, and you get people like you and me. And yeah, I mean, I think that it's still the same concept applies. The weight on the bar matters.

The absolute load matters. We're lifting, we're benching 50 plus pounds over body weight. Right. Um, that's not insignificant. I think I'm at like 1.7 times my body weight. Yeah. Right. And then on the press, you know, like, you know, I'm pressing over body weight for reps. That's, that's a lot, you know, it's a big, it's a big stimulus. Um, especially for, you know, you consider, you know, my other circumstances too, right? Like my recovery is not great. It's not, not nearly as good as it was, you know, four years ago at my peak. So, you know, you kind of add all that together and you're's, um, it's just commonly perioded advice that when your, when your upper body work stops moving, you got to add more, right? I think that's always more volume. It's always more, right? Always more volume. What the thing is, I think that's true for the guy who's pressing one 15 and he's stuck and he's benching one 85 and he's stuck, you know?

Um, yeah, that's probably true because that guy probably weighs a hundred, at least 185 and he's stuck you know um yeah that's probably true because that guy probably weighs 100 at least 185 pounds himself right so he's pressing well below body weight and he's benching maybe at body weight um the the the relative amount of stress is different in that case right so right you know so i don't think that advice is wrong per se. It's just that it applies to, you know, we're talking about the difference between more advanced and more novice or kind of that early intermediate phase. It works, but like, just understand the principle of it. If you've been doing this a while and that's a problem that's happening to you, you just keep getting stuck over and over again. Maybe it's a stress problem. Maybe you got to,

maybe you got to spread your fatigue. I'm sorry, spread your stress out over a longer time period to manage the fatigue. It's not just a squat deadlift problem. No, no. And you got to figure too, most of us have been bench pressing longer than we've done the other lifts. Especially if you're in our age group, for sure.

Yes, yeah. You know, I've been bench pressing for 25 years since i was 15 you know and uh you know my form's better now but i was always touching my chest my shoulders and triceps were going through the full range of motion i just didn't engage my back as much as i do now you know so you know and on top of it i did a lot more volume when i was younger so i'm pretty adapted to it. What I, you know, what kind of led me to this conclusion, obviously, was tinkering with all those variables, like I said. But, you know, I'm really bought into this whole stress recovery adaptation thing, because

it seems to work consistently well with the squat, the deadlift, and the press. And I saw it work with arm work, too. I was doing heavy curls curls every other week and they started moving again after i got stuck that one year when i was training curls so what i couldn't figure out is okay i can't bench every week well why can't i bench every two weeks now and then i just realized i'm like well this kind of does behave like the squat and the deadlift eventually the amount of volume you're doing is less if you're doing a ton of fucking sets that that means you're just not strong, you know? Right. You're just not strong. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, where I've seen, you know, with the clients that I've worked with, where I've seen the opposite approach work well, so the higher frequency, so pressing or benching more often,

and then with more volume, it's with the, you know, women are a good example, right? So some of my women that are pressing, you know, in the 50s, kind of 50, 60 pounds, somewhere around there, they tend to do better with more frequency and more volume. More total volume throughout the week. Right. Than what you get in novice linear progression, right? But the weight's under 100 pounds. That's right. The weights are under 100 pounds.

Yeah. That's what I'm comparing it to. But the weight's under 100 pounds. That's right. The weights are under 100 pounds. And that's kind of the limit. That's kind of the spot right there where programming starts to respond more like a male. You would expect the males to. It's somewhere in the like 80 to 100 range. Once women are pressing in that range for their work sets, then it starts to respond more like the average male would respond to that training. Kind of interesting. So anyway, all that was to say is that I'm challenging the just common advice

or the knee-jerk advice to like, well, I guess you got to add more. You need more volume. You need to press more often. You need to bench more often. You know, maybe not, maybe not. Let's touch on that for a second. You know, I do think that there's a place

for more volume, but the place that most of us run into problems is knowing where to draw the line on that. So let's say I just maxed out. I'm going to start a new training cycle. And, you know, I want to experiment with piling on a bunch of volume. It's probably fine because the weights are going to be light the first week for sure. And then for several weeks thereafter. Now look at the problem I recently ran into, okay? When did I start running into a recovery problem or a too much stress problem? You know, however you want to look at it, you can look at it both ways. You know, I'm not recovering because I have too much stress, right? So it happened at, I was about 95% of my previous 5RM when I started having to repeat loads week after week and try things again, you know?

So I was approaching my 5RM. So, okay, my 5RM is 267.5, right? So when I was doing high volume stuff, okay, I started around, what, 220, 215, maybe at the beginning of that training cycle when I was doing all those things at the same time. And, you know, I coasted all the way through to the 220s, the 230s, and then 240s where, you know, I felt them. And then once I got into the 250s, especially like 250, two and a half, 255, I'm having to repeat sets now. And then after 260, it just wasn't moving anymore, right? So this goes back to something I have to really drill into clients. There's an inverse relationship between volume and intensity. This applies at the macro level, i.e. you're a thousand

pound squatter, you know, or 500 pound squatter or whatever, right? You're lifting a lot of weight, right? And it also applies at the micro level. You know, if you're doing 70% of your 5RM and it's week one after a meet, oh yeah, you could do a bunch of volume. But once you start approaching that 5RM, you know, that's an all out set of five to failure, then you probably can't do multiple sets with that kind of weight, you know? So if my best, look at my case, my best set of five is 267 and a half. Once I got to 260, 262 and a half, I could not progress the load because I'm approaching what's considered an all-out set of five, and then I'm still doing all these sets. I'm not pulling the sets back. I'm not spreading the intensity out. So yeah, high volume is fine in the beginning when you're working up, but then as you start to feel

that weight get grindy, you have to pull that shit out so you can keep moving. And this is one of the biggest criticisms I have of block training. This is still popular in powerlifting. I was put through it by multiple coaches, is that, you know, by week three or four, you're starting to really feel that fatigue pile on. And then their answer is do a ridiculous deload and then switch to another rep range, never hit a PR for that first rep range. And then at some point, the PRs just magically fall out of the sky when you start training singles, you know? Right. And I think that probably accidentally happens, you know, that you get novice effect from under-trained clients, you know, I'm sure that happens or sometimes it just works, but there's no, it's not systematic,

right? You're just like, I've gotten this person tired with light weights and i'm never going to put anything on there that's a brand new high stress exposure i.e a new pr until they max out on the platform and that's just fucking silly like right you know when i do a training cycle i want a new set of five you know i want a new triple i want and then i obviously want a new one rm that's the gold standard that's what i'm trying to ultimately work towards but if you're setting new records at those higher rep ranges by higher rep range i mean that you know three to five rep range right right uh then that's probably a good indicator that you're probably gonna max out you know if you set a new pr to set a 10 that's probably not a great indicator sometimes it can

be you know but sometimes you're doing more reps for the given weight because of endurance. You know, I learned that a couple years ago, but that's a different topic entirely. My point is that when I've done block training in the past, I get tired very early. And then all of a sudden I'm struggling to do a set of five with maybe, I don't know, 80% of my best set of five, you know? And then the whole theory is, well, you're just getting tired. And you know, when you're not tired, you're just going to max out. And well, if that were true, why, why isn't the set of 10 or 15 translate to a one item, you know? Like I'm doing, you know, like I could like, what'd I do? My best set of five is 475 right now. Uh, six months before I hit that, I was, I couldn't even get that off the ground for a single.

They're like, oh, well, you're just tired. We got to pull back the fatigue. Okay, how is that going to transfer to a PR? And I'm sure the power lifters are going to swarm in here and leave comments about this bullshit and say, oh, you just don't understand it. It's just far more complicated than your archaic brain can comprehend. Well, no, I don't think it is. I think you're honestly just throwing fucking spitballs and accidentally getting it right sometimes. Yeah, exactly. I agree. I mean, I had this conversation with our good friend Andy Baker on his podcast, the Baker Barbell podcast, where we talked about his, he calls it his KSC power building method. That's, that's his, like the official program that he's written out. But basically, it's an it's an 852 progression.

And if I if I, I've been running a number of clients through this for the last several months, and I really like it. If you want to, if you if you are an intermediate trainee, you've you've passed a sort of early intermediate stage where you've introduced an intensity day and a volume day in your programming, and you've moved past that, and it's not, you know, you've run that out, not working anymore. This is a pretty good way to do it. But it's very different from block programming. Essentially, what it is, is for each of the main lifts, you have a week of eights. Let's just keep it real simple. Three sets of eight, one set of eight on the deadlift. Maybe, maybe more, depends, but you know, let's just keep it simple. Three sets of eight,

week one, week two, you do three sets of five, week three, you do three sets of two, three doubles. And you, and it's a linear progression in the sense that, you know, you just want to add to each of those rep ranges linearly. And roughly speaking, just kind of rough numbers. It's all going to be different because usually when you first introduce this to somebody, they're not used to doing eights at all. So their eights are probably going to be artificially low because doing three sets of eight on like the squat, it's fucking hard. That's a lot of reps. So it's probably gonna be pretty low. But over time, you'll see these start to converge

roughly around, you have your double, which we'll call the sort of the absolute sort of 100%, you know, intensity. And then you have your fives, which will converge somewhere around 50% of that, I'm sorry, 90% of that. So you've got your doubles, 90% of that you have your fives, which will converge somewhere around 50% of that. I'm sorry, 90% of that. So you've got your doubles, 90% of that is where your fives will start to converge. And maybe 80% of that is where your eights will start to converge. Obviously, strength matters. If you've got a guy who's squatting 500 for three triple for three doubles, he's probably not doing 80% for three sets of eight. It's probably gonna be 70% or something, but just in general. And, but what I like about this is that that's not how you're

thinking about it all. You're not doing these as a percentage like block training would often have you do it. You're doing them as a linear progression. If you do three sets of eight at 275, okay, we're doing 280 next time it comes up then we're doing 285 and um i think the reason this works well is because unlike block programming which is usually done over like a 12 week you know 12 week block you're touching those eights but you're going to hit doubles again which are really heavy in two weeks right and as soon as you hit the doubles it's eights week again which is high volume but you're only two weeks away from having hit eights in the past right so you never really get detrained from from any one rep range and you don't lose the feel of those very, very heavy weights. And I think that works

pretty well if you're trying to drive up your volume. And in particular, I think Andy's sort of whole like approach to this, if I understand him correctly, is that he's trying to get you to build some muscle mass. So if you've never been exposed to that amount of volume before, it can be useful in stimulating new growth, right? But, you know, here's the thing. What do you do when you finally run it out? Because eventually you will. And there's some things you can do. You can microload, you can reset, you can do top sets and back off sets, but eventually you're going to run all that out. And then what I plan to do with my lifters that are getting close to that is pretty much exactly what you've described, right? Their volume is going to come way down and, um, they're going to hit these lifts less frequently.

Um, so, but that's, that's, that, that, that I think is a really nice sort of, um, example of how volume can be effectively ramped up as an intermediate in a productive way that's also focused on continuing to add weight to the bar and doesn't interfere or doesn't get you too far away from actually lifting heavy weights. I think that's a big issue for average people. Yeah, I'm sure there's people who can go you know 10 weeks without touching like pr weights but i can't fucking do it i need to i lose the feel way too fast yeah you know and i know before you come in and argue with me i realize that most people in their block programs will have you hit like a heavy single and then do all your volume work but then the single's not heavy it's usually sub submaximal. Right. It's RPE

eight or something, right? Yeah. Or it's like 80% of your max, you know? Right. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, I find that to be much more productive. So if you're, if you're kind of wandering around in this intermediate phase, like, you know, give something like that a try, right? Cause it's still, it's very simple. It's a linear progression. You're just trying to add weight to the bar and you're trying to PR each of these rep ranges. And that's the thing too, is like, it's pretty much exactly what you were just describing earlier, which is that, okay, if your double doesn't go up on a given week, but your eights and your fives are continuing to move, you just try the double again. And probably, probably if your eights and fives continue to go up, you will hit that double, it will move. Really, you know, so so

there's there's flexibility in this program, if your eights aren't going up, then probably you need to adjust the intensity of them because you're getting tired. I think the broader concept here is and this is what I want people listening to this to take away from it is at the end of the day, the load has to increase, to increase. When you're planning your training, the end result is that you lift a heavier weight than you did before. Obviously, when you're a novice, this is easy. You could do that in two days. When you're an early

intermediate, it's pretty easy and predictable too. I shouldn't say easy, simple, I should say. Simple, yeah. If you're not doing everything, it's hard. Yeah. So if you're a novice, it's quite simple. You add a few pounds in a couple of days. If you're an intermediate that just came off of a linear program for the first time, then it's weekly. You know, every week you're adding a few pounds. Once you get past that point, then it gets kind of gray. You know, recovery demands go up, but let's assume you've addressed all that.

Well, now you got to figure out what's next. Okay. I can't get a new PR every week. So let's try to get one every two weeks. Now, how you do that, it gets a little tricky, you know, but the deadlift, it's pretty fairly straightforward. You're going to rack pull one week and a deadlift one week, you know, I've taken the same approach to bench. Let's see what happens in a few months before I tell you if it's, you know, something I would, you know, firmly believe in or not. But, you know, pin bench one week, bench press one week, but then how do I do that in a way that keeps going up, right? That's where the volume comes in. But the bottom line is, and then, you know, it can go up to every three weeks, every four weeks, or you said every

10 weeks, you know, so there's some people that have to do that, you know. But the point is that each week is designed to build upon the last week leading up to a new pr for that rep range you know right right um it's not about getting tired and flipping a coin and hoping you get a new max when it's time to peak and you know exactly go on the platform remember too when power lifters are competing they don't know what the fuck's really going to happen till that day and then once they start lifting it becomes about maximizing the number of points they get then you got guys that are on that nine for nine shit oh gotta get nine've got to get nine for nine. You know, it's great when you don't miss a lift, you get all nine lifts, but PR is always better. We all know that, you know? But the point is when

you're talking to competitors about this, their goal is to score points at a meet. And what's there that day is what they have to work with, you know? My goal for somebody who's purely interested in strength and isn't going to get on the platform is for you to lift more than you previously did for as long as you're interested in doing that. If you get to a point where weekly progress is no longer possible, then we got to find a way to make it happen bi-weekly. And when that's no longer possible, we try to find a way to make it happen over three weeks. And I've went as long as four weeks with some of my advanced lifters. I think the longest I've seen is five or six, you know, and it gets tricky and

it gets more individual too, you know, everybody's different. And you're also older by the time you reach that point too. You're not, you know, right. If you started at 30, you're probably 35, 36, 37 now, you know, body starts to change. You know, if you started at 40 or 45, you started at 50 or 55 or 57 or 58. The human body changes each year, especially as you get older, those changes are more pronounced year to year. But the big takeaway that you get from this is if you're starting a new training cycle and you're starting with fives, then you want a new set of five at the end of that. And if you're advanced, it might take several months. You know, you got to build up to that, you know, and then at a certain point, the closer you get to your last PR set of five, the more stuff you got to pull out because now that intensity is high enough to where you can't hit that intensity

for the amount of volume you were doing at the lower intensity. So the takeaway here is plan your training to get a new 5RM, a new 3RM, and ultimately a new max. If you do that, it's quite simple. It could get frustrating, but you know, once you figure it out, you kind of know your body, you know how to predict it, you know how you respond to a given lift. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's, that's the way I'm thinking about it when I'm picking any rep range. And I'm always thinking about the taper down to the max that I want to hit. Now, I think that it's, it's, I think it would be fair to say that if you are not interested in competing, I think it'd be okay to say like, I don't care what my one RM becomes. Like, I don't even care about testing that. I have some people that are like that, that I train. I think it's fine. Um, for them, they're tapering down to a double,

they're going to taper down to doubles. Um, and, and I think that's fine. But the point is like, you're always any training cycle. If, if you're into this at the advanced level like we are and you want to push things at this level every training cycle is going to taper down in rep ranges eventually and you want to try to produce new max like you said at the end of that i think the thing is when you're an intermediate it's useful to explore some of these other rep ranges because you might find that for yourself that doing some eights for instance yields some useful new growth that translates into heavier fives down the road that's right now and the only way to know that is to do it now you gotta try it you gotta try it now what i what a lot of people find too,

don't be surprised if you try that and you're like, eights didn't do fucking shit. That's happened to me several times. Like on squat, I've done eights and you know what? It doesn't really make my fives move. When I taper down from like, if I'm doing eights and I take my eights from 275 to 315, my fives don't go up that much from there.

I mean, it's just, it's kind of a hard limit. So for me, I find that squatting fives, pretty productive, pretty productive. And then eventually they'll have to taper down into triples and then doubles. And then, you know, I like lifting heavy, so I do singles, but you know, that's just me. But I've had other instances where like on the bench for instance in the past when i've when i've trained eights on the bench that's actually has made you know given my fives a little pop you know my fives will go a little bit further um having done eights beforehand than they than they had in the past so you know so there you go so it can it can be useful, but yeah, we're all looking, we're looking for that taper at the end with new PRS along the way. And I think too,

the other thing is the more advanced you get, you may not always be able to take a new five RM or three RM and translate that into a single, a new PR single. But I think as long as you're setting rep maxes along the way, as you're tapering down you know you're on the right direction you know you're getting stronger I've had that happen to me like when I was when I was competing in strength lifting with my press I had three meets where two meets and then the third meet I finally got it where basically I had two meets where I didn't, I did not PR my press. Like I got meat PRs at the meet, but I had pressed that weight before in training and it just didn't, you know, I would PR my fives, I'd PR my triples, sometimes a PR doubles and the single on the meet day just

was not there. It was not, you know, a new PR was not there. And finally on the third meet, so this is, you know, over like an 18 month period, finally it was there. And I, and I manifested that new PR single that I was looking for. That happens, but along the way for every meet prep leading up to that, I was hitting new PRs on my triples and my fives. So, you know, I knew I was getting stronger and that happens too. Yeah. And, you know, to what I'll say there is when you're talking about singles, the heavier the weight that you're lifting, the closer you're getting to 1RM, the more environmental factors, lifestyle factors will affect things. So I can understand what you mean when you say you get a new 5RM, then you couldn't translate that into a single. That training cycle. Right. That training

cycle, we got to be clear about that because I've had that happen. And then I quote unquote, repeat, went down to a couple weeks of triples, doubles, singles, boom, new max. Because obviously I lifted a heavy set of five. Five is a pretty decent strength stimulus, or I hit a new triple, which is a really good strength stimulus. I should have a max there and I'm stubborn. I refuse to believe that I don't. So like, all right, let's address this recovery. Let's run a short mini cycle of triples, then go back to singles, try to peak it again. Boom, got it. It happened to me with 500. I couldn't get it off the ground. Then the guy was getting coached by at the time, ran me up for five or six weeks, and then I got it. You know? So we both knew the strength was there because of what I had accomplished in that training cycle,

but that peak just didn't go well because expressing that strength, you're even more sensitive to lifestyle and environmental factors than you are when you're doing higher reps, quote unquote, relatively speaking, when you're doing three to five reps, you know? Yeah, when you're peaking, you know,

you've got that week basically, you know, it's a small window of time where you're truly peaked. You're one cold away from fucking it up. You know, you get a cold bam, no peak or shitty peak. Oh yeah. So I will argue that, uh, it does translate, but maybe not for that training cycle for that training cycle. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that's, yeah, that's the whole point, you know? So, you know, basically, our point stands that if you're if you're setting rep maxes along the way, you're on the right track, you know, but we're always looking for that max. And that's, that's, that's the essence of the way that we look at programming is, is is adding weight to those rep ranges. That's, that's what it's all about. It's not about, you know, arbitrarily doing percentage loads, just because it all needs to be in service of something else. It's not about getting tired. It's not about getting tired. It's a much clearer way to know that you have trained in such a way that probably got you stronger, that's probably going to get you bigger too.

you stronger, that's probably going to get you bigger too. When you're talking about just accumulating fatigue by doing lots and lots of light sets, that sounds a lot more like endurance to me. Think about it. You're becoming more fatigue resistant, which is closer to an end. It's not a true endurance stimulus. It's a laughable one if you think about it because the weight is reasonably heavy, but it's more of an endurance deal than it is an all-out strength deal, right? At the same time, if you train singles, again, inverse relationship. You can't train 97% of 1RM and do a bunch of sets with that, right? So you've got to draw the line somewhere on this, right? We're not saying that you need to train at 97% of 1RM and try to accumulate a bunch of volume at the same time.

But we're also not saying that you're going to do 65% of 1RM and do 20 sets. The answer is somewhere in the middle. But I think the more important thing is what we are saying is you're going to start at a given starting point. Usually for me, that's 65% to 70% of max, sometimes 60, depending on the lift, right, for week one. And then we're going to try and add to that. And you know, it might start every week, then it might go every two weeks, and it might go every three weeks. And if you have, if you've done this long enough, if you've reached the point where you need to be thinking about this, then, then you know what your previous PRs were for each of those rep ranges, right? And you know at what point you're going to have to start pulling back.

I'd say somewhere around 90% to 95% of your rep max for a rep range is a good indicator of, hey, it's time to pull back some volume because I probably can't add five pounds of this next week or two and a half pounds of this next week because I just did 95% of my previous PR. I'm probably going to be tired from this so next week i'm going to pull out some sets or i'm going to do some light back offs or maybe i'm going to wait two weeks to try a new pr you know because i've been going up every week to this point i mean by that point you're probably at two weeks if you're advanced enough but you get the idea the point is you're trying to add load in a fairly predictable manner it's not going to be totally predictable is, you're trying to add load in a fairly predictable manner. It's not going to be totally predictable. And remember, you're spreading something out over a long period of time now. And in that long period of time, lifestyle factors could get in the way and

cause you to have to reset and start the fuck over. That's the problem with being an advanced lifter. But if you keep your eye on the prize and follow that same formula of, hey, I'm going to try and add incrementally over scheduled timelines so that I can build up to that new 5RM. Now you're using the concept of accumulation in a more logical and systematic way versus I'm just going to get myself so tired that light weights barely move off the ground or don't move off the ground. You know, I've went down that road, guys. Shit on me all you want. You know, I don't care. I've done it. You know, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. You know, I've been through this multiple times and I get the same result. When I do what I'm talking about, I get a different result, the one that I fucking want, which is more weight on the bar, more muscle mass. You know, I'm sorry, I haven't doubled my muscle

mass in my training career. But I don't, you know, stick needles in my body either. So yeah, you find somebody, you find a living human that's doubled his muscle mass over a training career. And I got a bridge to sell you, you know? Yeah, exactly. Well, I was about to say like, and I got a bridge to sell you, you know? Yeah, exactly. Well, I was about to say like, these, these folks are long gone. So I guess, you know, we're just talking to the air at this point, but you know, for the, for the hypertrophy bros out there, you know, there's a lot of guys who advocate for exactly what we're talking about in the bodybuilding world, you know, and where, where bodybuilding is, where they don't give a shit about what you squat or bench or deadlift, you know, in the sense that like, they don't, you don't have to do those

movements to make your legs grow. I mean that you probably should, but you don't have to, you know, if your legs grow doing hamstring curls and leg press, fine. You know, I guess if you're a bodybuilder, that's all you really care about, right? Is leg growth. But, you know, so many, so many like great bodybuilding, you know, coaches over the years have said the same thing where it's like, you got to add weight to the bar or add weight to the exercise, right? You have to like, that's the drive that is the main driver of progress. And they all complain that there's like, there's a lot of guys that confuse this because they cover up their shitty training by using more drugs. They just push more drugs to cover up the lack of progression in their training. And that works for if you got great genetics and you're willing and able to do enough drugs. It actually works for a lot of people. People build pro level physiques like that. level physiques like that. But they tend to not I guess this was Dante Trudell sting. He's like, those guys tend to get to a certain level and they never grow past that. And then there's

other guys who get to it that you know, insane pro level and then continue to add to their physique year over year. That's right. And, you know, the Jay Cutler's the world and such. Well, it's the same thing with strength sports, you know, eventually, you know, you know they the drugs stop getting them any further and uh they level off i remember one guy ran a linear progression he may have ran texas method then he's like well i just got on drugs i want a more linear progress you know and you think he's the first one to think of that you know right right yeah and then you got

these guys telling us that that's how we got a lift. Mm-hmm. You know, and it's like, no, you stuck yourself with a needle because you could not train your way through that sticking point. That's why you got on the needle. That guy was cool. He was brutally honest about it, you know, and he's not out here on the internet dishing out advice. He just lifts, you know? Right, yeah. lifts you know right yeah but there are guys that take their progress that resulted from additional drug use and attribute it to whatever the fuck weird shit they were doing in the weight

room and then now that becomes standard advice you know yeah um the you know the beauty of training the bottom 50 is you actually have to think critically about how you're going to get this person stronger versus yes when you trade in the top 1%, as long as they show up and don't get hurt, they're probably going to get stronger year after year. They're probably going to get bigger year after year up to a point that levels off. But when you train the bottom half of the population, you have to think about what you're doing a little more carefully. You have to problem solve. Yeah. Especially if they're not willing to take drugs, you know.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, it's even interesting. It's even more interesting when you you you look you work with people who have, you know, for like a normal, you know, drug-free male, they have low T, um, or even female, you know, for that matter, you know, that that's a challenge as well. Cause I've seen it happen where I help guys that are, you know, get progress that really, really have to work for what we would consider like fairly, you know, baseline achievements of strength and they have to work their, baseline achievements of strength. And they have to work their ass off to get there. And they do. And then later, later on, they, they look at their T levels and like, wow, those are in the dumps. They get on some form of testosterone replacement therapy to bring their levels up to normal. You know, I'm talking about taking a male from 200 to 400. Like I'm not talking about going from

450 to 900. Um, and, and then their weights just really fly up, you know? So, uh, I've trained with guys like this that, uh, they're, they take, so they get, you know, I'm thinking of one guy in particular gets on TRT. He's taking the, what is it, one cc a week, I guess. So 200 a week. And at some point, I don't know how he ended up in this place, but he ended up going up to 300. And of course he liked it, you know. Yeah.

300 on the squat. 300 a week. Oh, 300 milligrams a week. So basically he was above TRT levels. Okay. So that's a gentleman's dose of TRT. Yeah. So a gentleman's dose of TRT. But it's not like some of the egregious stuff I've heard competitive powerlifters take like half a gram or gram a test a week. Right.

But it's more than TRT at that point. Yes. In the lifting community, they'd say, well, he's on a low dose of steroids now. It's not TRT because there's TRT and there's steroids, you know? Right. PEDs. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, whatever.

But, you know, he's barely in that PED realm. You know, I don't know much about pharmaceuticals, so maybe that extra 100 grams is a lot, you know? I've never taken it, so I don't know. But the point I'm bringing up here is even with all that, I still lift more than him. You know, he's been at it for, you know, when I met him years ago, he had been for four years, shows up, trains, has the body weight on him, you know, and works his ass off, but I'm still lifting more than him on all the lifts. Yeah. So, you know, it's not like it's magical if you get on drugs.

But to your point, when you're dealing with the bottom half of the population or even like the bottom 10%, you know, those guys are fun. Even when they get on drugs, you know, they still get a mediocre result, you know? That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. They're doing this for quality of life. Exactly. Like when I'm talking about, this is the guys that are like, they, they get on TRT and they're

like, wow, it's like my, my elbows aren't killing me after every single workout. This is the shit you were telling me. Yeah. It's like, finally, it's like, I'm actually like, I, like, I didn't realize I wasn't sleeping through the night, you know? I didn't realize like how much brain fog I had now. It's like, I actually feel like I can think, you know, all day. He's like, I'm not tired until the evening, which, you know, when you're supposed to be tired.

Yeah. These guys are not getting huge and jacked from doing, you know, 150 milligrams of testosterone a week. What was bullshit is though, his damn forearms got bigger than mine when he got on that shit. Yeah. So yeah, sometimes those receptors yeah that's what i'm saying like one of those tell signs is big traps big forearms bigger delts you know yeah right uh yeah i'm like you motherfucker you know the one the audience will find this funny the one reason that i have rationalized in my head just getting on trt possibly uh and i'm not going

to because i don't want to lose the hair on my head and all the other reasons i've outlined not to mention i've not reproduced yet so i don't want to fuck with that either um but um i would like a beard like i think if i got on that that's almost like yeah i'd get it i get the hair on my cheeks i think i want i would take it more for that than to make the gains. I mean, obviously, I make gains from it. I'd say it out loud on this podcast, but the beard seems like a better motivator than pulling 600 sooner. Yeah, right. Just have the migration of hair down.

Yeah, just get some on my face. If I could sacrifice a little bit on my head not have a fucking bald spot but then have like a full fucking beard you know i think that'd be cool that'd be worth it yeah you got you've got some to spare i'm totally kidding but i've noticed that these guys that get on it they grow facial hair they've never had before and like places yeah yeah and i'm like you fuckers i'm like i might have to resort to that if i don't fucking, you know, get hairier with age, you know, in the face. That's hilarious. I've gotten little by little, you know, as I've gotten older, but yeah, I'm like, okay, you guys want to sleep better, get more boners, lift heavier. I just want fucking hair on my fucking cheeks, man. Is that a clinical reason to get a TRT? That, you know, uh, I don't, I don't see why not.

You know, it's funny that every year in my thirties that I accumulate, it's, it's the hair just like keeps showing up on my back. Cause you know, I, I denied for years that it was like, no, my back's not hairy. It's like, maybe there's a few hairs there, whatever. And then like, I caught a glimpse of my back the other day in the mirror. I'm like, what the fuck? Like, when did that happen? It's got like a row of dark grass across my traps now.

I think I got a handful on my back. I keep getting these random gray curls here and there, which is pretty cool. But on the face like i think it took all of my 30s for my mustache to connect to my goatee and then now as i'm getting into my 40s i'm like 40 for like three days now you know um i'm starting to see it on the front of my chin like i got a you know handful of hairs in the front of my chest that's what's missing for me so i can't even get a goatee out of this deal man like the mustache connects to it but then the chin doesn't grow any fucking hair you gotta go with the like the french thing with the mustache and the soul patch what do you recall that like the

like the three musketeers is that too european for you yeah yeah i mean yeah i could try to grow a hogan mustache i think i could do that maybe there you go yeah i don't know if it's just dude the thing gets so freaking itchy when it gets long you know you got it yeah you got to push past that i mean it's like growing your hair long you know you know yeah i know you're right you gotta get past the awkward stage yeah i could do the handlebar mustache i would look so fucking weird on me though i'd rather just have a beard you know yeah i'm not that's the thing it's not the itching i'm not motivated to have a handlebar mustache but like i guess i have enough hair connecting the two now that i could do that if i wanted to but yeah dude i want it on my cheeks and my chin and it just it's not happening maybe by the time i'm

50 or i can just get on trt well then it's gonna be so gray you won't see it anyway fuck yeah i'm not gonna die my fucking beard that's yeah no please yeah that's you're not if you do that dear listeners if you do that you're not fooling anybody like we know trent loves this 50 year old dude that is trying to be 22 with with raven with a raven black beard from their Grecian 5 usage. 50's got to do 40 people. It's not. And you're not middle aged. What, are you going to live to 100?

Are you going to live to 100, really? I might be middle aged. Yeah, you might be middle aged. If you're 50, I'm sorry. Statistically, you're not. You're past middle age brother bob dole's middle-aged what bob dole i think he beat it to 100 didn't he or did he died oh maybe yeah that guy was old as shit old fucker he was old when he ran for president that was like

and they were saying years ago now he lasted another almost 30 years wow i didn't even know that i forgot about him I think he died last year or the year before. It was right after the pandemic. I mean, you know, there's some long-lived guys out there, but, you know,

they're rare. It's not you. What is the average now? It's like 78 for guys. No, it's less for men, right? It's kind of funny about that because everybody's obsessed with micromanaging their health,

you know, and we're still dying around the same age. Yeah. Oh, right. And there's, there's, there's people that smoke and drink and pay zero attention to what they eat longer than you. Yeah. They'll go to 90 and they'll be fine. They'll be in there. They'll be 85 and they'll be in just fine health. I mean, they'll be old, but yeah. Yeah. I've seen that before. And then there's the guy who, you know, the guy who used to squat 500 that has a stroke and, you know. This is random, but you know, dying strong is better than dying weak. So, I mean, you're doing a lot better. Yeah. I've seen some rough looking. The worst part is I've worked with some people that came in the gym. This was in Fort Worth when I coached at the gym there. I worked with some people that walked in and, you know, when I first clocked them, I'm like, oh, they're probably in their 70s. find out they're like 59 61 and i'm like i would have said guess mid 70s had that happened several times and like they can't they can't stand up off of a chair by themselves like without pushing off

their legs with their hands yeah now that's something that's totally avoidable you can avoid that you can't avoid dying at 76 or whatever the average is now, but you can avoid that situation. Absolutely. For sure. Yeah. So anyway, well, there you go. Well, there's an hour of something. Hopefully you get something out of it. Upper body programming.

You know, I think it's important. You got to understand this stuff, man. And you have to, even if you have a coach, which of course we recommend even if you have a have a coach you have to understand this stuff at some level so that you can you can keep your head in the game it drives me nuts when i have neurotic people that miss a lift and they're they're advanced lifters and they miss a lift and they're just like oh god like what's what's, you know, I suck. You know, I'm terrible. It's like, you know, I'm just awful. I hate, like they just freak out every time they miss a rep. And I'm like, man, like this is just part of the game. Like it's, this is just the way it is. And, uh, I can't draw a perfect programming. I don't know exactly your fatigue level every

single day. Um, you're going to run into a wall at some point. You've got to get over it. And you have to understand this process. And I think sometimes, I mean, there's some people who are just neurotic and that's just the way they're built. But there's some people, it's just a lack of understanding. They just don't understand how the process works, how it's supposed to work, how programming works. So anyway, hopefully this arms you

with a little bit more knowledge so you don't get frustrated in your own training and you can hang in there and you kind of understand like the principles of what we're doing here. I would agree. Well, that's a good high note to end on. So let's close out. Thank you for tuning in to the Weights and Plates podcast. You can find me at Weightsandplates.com or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. We offer online diet coaching, training coaching, or both.

I also do consults. I have a gym here in Phoenix, Weights and Plates Gym. If you're in the Phoenix metro area, come visit. The Instagram page for that is weights double underscore and double underscore plates. Very good. You can find me on Instagram at marmalade underscore cream. You can also email me if you're interested in coaching, either in the Eastern Tennessee area around Chattanooga or online coaching. You can email me about that at jonesbarbellclub

at gmail.com. All right, we'll talk to you all again in a couple of weeks. Excellent.