Weights and Plates Podcast - #9 - Why "Maintenance" Is a Myth

Episode Date: August 24, 2021

There's a notion among gym goers that one can simply train themselves to a certain level and then simply keep doing the same thing, workout after workout, to maintain what they have. This flies in the face of the principles of progressive overload, the Stress/Recovery/Adaptation cycle, and training in general, and has caused some confusion among people trying to achieve fitter, leaner bodies. In today's episode, Robert and Trent clear the air about the myth of "maintenance" and discuss why it's going to take hard effort and dedicated training -- not exercise -- for most people to achieve their health and fitness goals.   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.marmaladecream.com

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am your host, Robert Santana, along with my co-host, Trent Jones. That is me. Today, we're going to talk about, well, a couple of things, mainly maintenance, maintenance of your results in the weight room and in your diet, of course. And I think that also ties into, you know, exercise versus training, you know, because that all kind of relates, you know? Yeah. Kind of under the same umbrella. So, maintenance.

There is an idea out there that one can train themselves to a particular level let's just make an example here that a young man could train himself to a 315 squat for three sets of five which is a realistic possibility for a lot of young men doing the novice linear progression a lot of middle age too. And middle-aged men. Some older men. Not uncommon at all, right, to do that. But there's this idea, I just picked that number out of, you know, it's kind of random, but there's this idea

that you could get to, say, that level. And say like, you know what, I'm squatting three wheels, I'm strong enough for life, for whatever I want to do personally, and so I'm just going to hang out. And so I'm just going to hang out here and I'm just going to stay this strong and I don't really want to go any further. And there's this idea that you can simply go in and I guess the thinking is, well, I'll just go in and squat 315 like every time I work out and I'll just stay there because I'm not adding weight

to the bar anymore. So I know I'm not going to get any stronger, but I'll just kind of hang out and I'm going to maintain what I've got. Right. And, uh, are you, are you telling me that that that's not correct? You can't do that. No, the maintenance is bullshit. Um, you know, you're either getting stronger or getting weaker. And I know, you know, some smart ass out there is going to say, oh, well, Robert, that's a false dichotomy. Is that like the business thing where they're like, you're either growing or you're dying? Yeah, pretty much, yeah. I've heard one guy say, you're either more of an alcoholic or less of an alcoholic. Yeah, a good friend of mine said his grandfather told him that years ago.

Yeah, a good friend of mine said his grandfather told him that years ago. And it kind of, when he said that, this was more recent, that's kind of how this topic was inspired, you know, interestingly enough. We were just talking and he mentioned that to me. And then I'm like, that just kind of goes back to what Rip said about maintenance being bullshit, which I've always agreed with. But I'm like, this is a much better way to put it. You're either getting stronger or you're getting weaker. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, okay. It's a false dichotomy. So what? Prove it. First of all, you probably can't. Right. Cause how the fuck do you measure that? Right. Right. A false dichotomy, a false equivalence.

We, we know, you know, so, so we like to talk about being coaches. We like to look at our field experience first and foremost. And we know what happens when you try to go in and you try to do the exact same thing day over day over day. You pretty much, what happens is that you can do 315 for three sets of five. And, you know, you could go in the next workout and do it again. And you do it again. All of a sudden it becomes like three 15 for a couple sets of five and maybe like a set of three or set of four. Like you start missing a rep. You know, if you keep doing this, I don't know, I actually that many people who have actually tried to do that, but I've certainly seen this happen with, um, on other lifts, like the, the press or the bench press, press you know the people that will come to me and they're like i just can't get any further so they would like they'd keep doing the same thing and then like reset and then run back up and then reset and run back up and reset and run back up and just forever and they never get any further but this is a similar idea like eventually we

know from experience like it stops working and in fact you start sliding backwards i haven't thought about this in a long time because i've owned my own gym for two years, and I trained at serious lifting gyms for five years before that. But back in the Globo gym days, and even at the first powerlifting gym that I went to, there's always that guy or handful of guys that goes in and benches 225 or5 or 315 works up to it and then goes home and the last guy i remember doing this this was at the power lifting gym and the reason i remember him is because when you go to a lifting gym or typically most sport type facilities sport and recreation places which is not your commercial gym your commercial gym people want to look in the mirror

sweat not talk to anybody and admire themselves and others. You know, it's a meat market. Catch a pump. Yeah. I'm going to look at that, you know, girl or guy over there with a nice body, or I'm going to look at my own body in the mirror and, you know, I don't want to talk to anybody unless they have something to offer me. You know, it's a different environment, but powerlifting gym, everybody talks to each other. So this guy, I remember because we talked a lot and he was, you know, real cool dude. And he never trained for powerlifting. It was a local gym. I think he lived in that area his whole life. And he was friends with one of the guys there that was a serious lifter. And we all used to just talk about this guy, like, if we can get this fucking guy to

train, he'd be strong as piss, you know? Right, right. He would come in and he would work up to a 295 bench almost every single time. And then he tell me yeah if i can get amped up i'll get 315 and then sometimes he'd get 315 but he's i can't do that every time so usually it was either 295 or 305 yeah and uh basically uh you know that's just his baseline because he's never trained you know right right he probably accidentally got there and it leveled off and stayed there. And then eventually age will cause muscle loss and it'll turn into 255 probably at some point. Maybe it has now, it's been seven years. I'm curious if he's still going in there and hitting 315, you know, or 305 or 295. But, you know, for the most part, you know, if you take someone who's actually trained, you know, it gets you to a point where, hey, you're, I mean, you're either getting stronger or you're getting weaker.

And so what is maintenance, right? Because do you want to train forever and, you know, try to reach your genetic ceiling? I guess that's the question, right? mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that I want to tie in exercise versus training because that will help explain this concept of maintenance and where the question comes from, right? So we'll start with training. First of all, basic definitions. Training means you are trying to go from point A to point B. This can apply to those beautiful keyboards behind you or a barbell. Trent, the sound sound producer the greatest sound producer in the world has these awesome keyboards one of them's lighting up behind him but uh so i

mean if you're playing an instrument you're either getting better at that instrument through incrementally more challenging exercises or whatever you want to call them you know lessons music lessons right you if you're going to become a better swimmer you have to put in more mileage more speed you know or more resistance you know through a pool boy or put on fins you know there's different ways to incrementally load that right in the weight room you're adding intensity one way or another you know so you know even if you're doing high volume eventually the intensity has to go up i mean these it me. These guys that are some of the most muscular men on the planet will sit there and promote volume, but then you look at what they're loading on the bar and it's far more than their readers will ever lift.

Right. So it's like you're missing the clear association here between strength and muscle mass. Sure, they may not beat Eddie Hall and Strongman. They may not beat Ray Williams on the squat and powerlifting or, you know, bench 700. But when you got a guy like Jay Cutler, Mr. Olympia, inclined bench pressing 405 for 10, I think strength is part of the equation. And the guys that are arguing against this are probably benching 95 for 10. And it drives me crazy, you know. So this became abundantly clear to me. And another big name in our industry, Lane Norton, he mentioned something similar. He, you know,

he's got gifted bodybuilding genetics, at least up top, you know, he has capstone delts, you know, packs back, nice upper body, but he's always struggled with lower body. And he, you know, talks about this in various podcasts and publications. And, and the reason I like to bring him up is because what got me into strength training before I knew who he was, was that I looked around the gym one day and I'm like, these guys, you know, look jacked, like how I want to look. They're lifting way more than me. I got the, you know, they come in, they do 225 on the bench for, you know, 10 reps, you know, they rep out 225 on the bench, or they're doing wide grip pull-ups to their chest, you know, which I couldn't do. You know, I can do a lot of

pull-ups because of swimming, but if I had to do a wide grip in front of me, I could barely get my chin over it, let alone touch my chest with the damn thing. I'm thinking of this guy in the weight room back in college, I was 19 and he had big delts you know big back big packs and uh you know he may or may not have been on shit i don't know but he would go in there and rep out wide grip pull-ups and touch his chest to the bar like i would have to go with like 60 pounds in the pull-down at the time you know right i could do a underhand and you know do a chin-up for you know eight to ten reps at that time because i'd you know i swam so we had to do those yeah but you're the last yeah so my whole point was then i looked around and you know nobody pressed so i can't really give you a metric there but typically i saw guys with big upper body

musculature benching two plates probably doing some heavy chin-ups heavy dips you know and you know they were curling a bunch of weight probably probably over 100 pounds. And, you know, one day it just finally dawned on me. This was probably around 2012. I looked around and I'm like, I can't rep out what these guys are repping out, you know. And that's when it, you know, kind of dawned on me. And then my friend, who I'd been programming at the time, said, you're giving me bullshit programs that don't work, you know. Give me something that works, you know. And I've talked about this in other episodes and I just thought back about, you know, Arnold and the old days, they would just, you know, hit heavy power lifting and Olympic lifting and then eventually they'd get

strong enough and they'd have to do quote unquote hypertrophy workouts to basically not throw out their back, elbows and knees, you know, because, you know, Arnold had a 705 squat and a 575 deadlift and a you know bench in the mid-fours you know and he's a long-limbed guy so that's you know pretty good for his anthropometry but he ain't gonna squat you know three four times a week and you know get that type of muscle pump these bodybuilders want remember it's all appearance so right you know right some of this stuff is just being pumped up all the time and fluid retention so yeah they're gonna do knee extensions and shit but that's right yeah you know when you have a 600 squat okay you don't go do your knee extensions you can't squat all the time you know exactly like clearly at some point there's a difference in in adaptation between like the

power lifter who's going pure like his sport is purely as high intensity as you can get and then the bodybuilder who's going for a muscular look that involves you know greater like sarcomere expansion or you know for lack of a better term right they're going for like hypertrophy by getting more water and glycogen into that muscle to make it look bigger and fuller and then you know get a pump on top of that okay yeah there's going to be some sort of difference in training and adaptation to the type of training that they're doing but but we're like we're talking about people who are from a strength training perspective advanced let's qualify we're talking about a very we're talking about a very small difference you know yeah that

right right yeah to your point like how many guys let's see arnold and competition shape was what 250 260 about 260 ronnie was 290 300 all right so if we look at the the 242 and the 275 power lifting weight classes you know i mean how many guys that are at a reasonably high level are like what are they squatting you know 700 would that be a decent squat for it yeah i think so 800 i mean ed cohen i think raw was in the seven or eight hundreds you know at 220 right so it's not like he's that far off from these you know elite specialists in the strength world yeah no um and this kind of gets lost too and then you also got to ask yourself how many of these freaking how many guys that are reading this stuff you know are over 200 pounds and jacked you know we're talking about a minority when you go into

like natural bodybuilding whatever that means you know either that probably either means light drugs or no drugs you know right the biggest weight class in that sport last time i looked this up could change but since then but it was 165 pounds because there's not a lot of guys on this planet that are over 200 pounds and completely ripped i mean they're there you know and we have billion you know what eight billion people on the planet is that is that where we're at now world population yeah sure something like something like that so, yeah, you may have seen these guys, but no, I saw this guy, and there's this gym I go to where there's a handful. Okay, well, we're talking about in relation to the population of the world, they are in the minority. It's not like every other person you see is 200 plus and ripped, you know?

And when you remove, especially when you remove drugs from the equation, you know what I mean? Yeah. So, for the people reading fitness publications, most of these people have trouble gaining muscle. They're not people that come out the gate strong. Like I know a guy who was real jacked. He owned a powerlifting gym here in town that I trained at, and he was a minor league catcher.

And he told me his first deadlift was 475. And I believe it. Yeah, sure. And this guy, you know, was sitting at 225 when he was powerlifting and ripped visible abs, probably like definitely sub 15% body fat. I'd say probably 10 to 12 range most of the time, you know? Right. Yep. And he was a very gifted athlete, very explosive, you know? And he could press 315 without training the press, you know? Yeah, which is crazy. There's people out there.

These people are out there. But my point is most bodybuilders that are competitive typically have good genetics for bodybuilding. Rip has said it many times. I agree with it. It's about 90% genetic, maybe 95. It's not just muscle mass. They have a lot of muscle mass out the gate but they also have tight skin so the muscles look tighter they have good muscle insertion so

where the muscle inserts on the bones and joints will dictate how that muscle appears because remember it's an appearance sport right right yep i've also noticed a lot of them maybe all of them have uh rather small joints you know like if you look at their elbows and their knees like they're kind of small and uh it gives the appearance of the same size muscle looks bigger relative to a small ankle you know the calf looks bigger on the other hand you see these guys who are like the real big heavy benchers and their freaking elbows i'm not talking about the muscles around this their elbow joint is like the size of my knee. It's just huge.

Well, you look at, you know, I like to take someone that's probably closer to, you know, your average Joe, I suppose, but also gifted for that sport. This would have been Frank Zane. He competed at, I don't know, 185, I think. And he was 5'9". And that would never get him to Mr. Olympia today, but it did in the 70s, early 80s. And, you know, he was 185 on stage.

I think he was like 200 off-season. You know, he had visible abs year-round, so probably went from, you know, 12% body fat to 5% body fat or something like that, or maybe 10 percent to five percent because he was just a naturally lean guy, right? And, you know, he was probably on testosterone and D-ball or whatever the hell they took back then. You know, he was probably on drugs like the rest of them, mild compared to the bodybuilders of today. But back then, you know, he weighed, what, 175? And I think he deadlifted 425. He bench pressed 285, and he squatted 400, and he can curl 155. Now, these aren't impressive numbers for powerlifting by any means, you know, but he wasn't training for powerlifting. If he trained for powerlifting, I bet those numbers would be higher. But the point is, most of the guys that criticize strength and say, oh, I don't need to

get strong to build muscle, I need hypertrophy with my, you know, 185 deadlift. They're not pulling 425, you know? Not that I think 425 is heavy. I think most men can get there in their first 6 to 12 months of training if they do what the fuck they're supposed to do. You know, 285 bench isn't that heavy. And, you know, I think it's impressive that he was over 400 on the squat. And, you know, when these guys are talking to him, they're reporting these prs that could mean reps that could mean singles you know i don't know what he meant right but yeah a lot of exactly a lot of those guys since they didn't compete i'm guessing that they either maxed out in the gym or you know they did a few reps with that so you know the guy had some pretty good numbers you know he was well over a he was yeah like if he was 175 and he was pulling 425 that's two and a half times body weight, right? Yeah, that's pretty good.

Times 2.5, let's do that. Yeah, he was just shy of two and a half body weight deadlift. You know what I mean? Same with the squat. So he was doing two and a half times body weight squat and deadlift, and he was a lean guy. Yeah. And the guys that are reading this shit and saying, I don't need to get strong, aren't anywhere near that. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So I don't want to go too aren't anywhere near that. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I don't want to go too much on a tangent on this. The main point here is training requires you to get from point A to point B. You are doing progressively more over time. You can do that for five reps. You can do that with singles. You can do that with tens and eights and fifteens and twenties. I just had a lifter in my gym run the 20 rep squat program. As Dr. Bradford has said in the past, he failed the IQ test, but he did it. And it was of value to him because it taught him that he can keep going. And that was his problem on the heavy squat. So, you know,

carried over. There's purpose to all this stuff. But the whole point is progression is what differentiates training from exercise. So now let's talk about exercise. What is exercise? Well, exercise is what my brother used to do. You know, I'm going to go in the gym and hit 225 for, you know, three to five sets of five or 275. Actually, he would switch back and forth if he felt real lazy. He'd just do 225.

But, you know, basically I'm going to move some weight around so I can move some weight around and, you know, might hop on the treadmill for 20 minutes or, you know, play some basketball with the, you know, recreational team over there or, you know, go for a jog in the woods or, you know, ride a mountain bike or go hiking, you know, and go on a real hard hike. And all those things are exercises, no progression. You're just going in to elicit an acute physiological response that's you forward from where you're at now to a higher point in the future, it's still exercise. You know, you could choose it randomly. Like you're talking about like, well, maybe I'll play basketball today. Maybe I'll just go do some deadlifts today. Or you could go in and there's lots of people who have a plan, you know, they've got a whole

like sheet full of exercise that they're going to do in the gym, but they're still not training unless there is an overload, you know, or just something to move you from point A to B, like you said. And I think, so to make sense of this, right, we've mentioned this a couple times in the podcast already, the SRA cycle, the stress recovery adaptation cycle. And that's just sort of our basic model that describes how progress actually takes place. So when you do train, we know that it makes you stronger. Why? What's happening? Well, the lifting that you do in the gym in a training program is a sufficient stress to cause an adaptation, and then as long as there's the recovery piece in the middle,

which is food and sleep, as long as there's sufficient recovery, you will adapt to that stress that you gave yourself. You will get a little bit more adaptation for whatever you stressed yourself with. So if you're lifting a heavier weight, you're going to get a little bit stronger. If you went a little harder on the echo bike, you're going to get a little bit more condition. But we haven't really talked a lot about what does that word stress mean specifically. And the main takeaway here is that stress means something that disrupts your homeostasis or that is above your baseline. You could think about it that way. your stepbrother you know 275 let's say it was his baseline well if if he goes in and just does 275 is that actually a stress no if he's doing if that if that is if that is indeed the baseline right it's not right he's got to do 280 or he's got to do more reps or something that's going to disrupt his sort of baseline existence or his homeostasis, as we would say in biology terms. That's an important thing.

That model works really well. You know, it's not a perfect model, but it's a model. But it does describe the process of programming and training quite well. Yeah, no, my brother, you know, his baseline, you know, 275 wasn't a 5RM, you know, that was probably 80%. He's probably higher than that if he pulled 405, you know. No, he's going to go in there and do something comfortable. So let's talk about exercise here, you know. CrossFit has been referred to as competitive exercise because there's no progression in CrossFit. You do different shit every day. Funny thing is the competitors actually train. But what you're doing at the CrossFit box is exercise. And, you know, most of the people at commercial gyms are doing exercise.

They go in, do the same circuit of workouts, same weight, and then hop on the same cardio machine for the same time at the same speed. And, you know, it's good exercise. Exercise is not bad. That's not what we're saying here. And let's make that – I think that's actually an interesting comparison, right? Because chances are, if you go to, if you go to your average CrossFit box and you go to your average Globo gym down the street, the people at the CrossFit box are going to be, you know, more, are going to be more fit, a little bit more muscular, leaner, probably. That'd be my guess. That's my experience. Now, the part of that is because

there's always going to be a little bias here. And part of that's because people who are already good at athletics will tend to gravitate more to CrossFit because they're already good at snatching and cleaning and gymnastics and all that stuff. But if we take that out of the equation for a moment, just set that aside. Well, CrossFit has one thing that the Globo gym doesn't have, and that's that it is pretty hard compared to the general person's sort of like activity level, right? And so someone that's going in by themselves to the Globo gym to exercise is not going to choose something that's as high intensity or as hard as what the person that's going to the CrossFit box and doing whatever their workout of the day is. And so the people at the CrossFit box,

you know, if you're coming off the, off the street and you're just kind of like an average person, their programming will get you actually probably leaner and stronger for a while. And the reason being is it's harder than than it is a stress for these people. But the problem that as you know, we know working with CrossFit athletes that come into strength training, the problem they often run into is that they stall out really hard. And after I don't know, six months or whatever, and then they you know, they're all they can't make any progress on their they can't RX their workouts, they haven't been able to get up to that point. And then we know the reason being is because they're exercising, they're not training, but I, that, that's the, that would be an exception that proves the point.

So, you know, you raise an interesting point there. So CrossFit and every box is different. I think that well-run boxes probably, uh, individualize a little bit better because I have had, I've had had had motor moron clients. Motor moron means that, you know, you're not very coordinated. That's probably the best way to put it. Not necessarily weak, you're just not very coordinated. And I've had, you know, people that do WODs that are not very coordinated, not very strong, not very fit.

So not every box is the same, but in general, in general CrossFit favors somebody with a mediocre to high baseline. Yep. Yep. Your former athletes in high school and stuff tend to do pretty well in CrossFit. Yeah. It's, you know, mediocre, uh, to high baseline strength, endurance, coordination, et cetera. But at the end of the day, they're still exercising. And I think that was the idea too. Cause I know, I know that's why Rip got into CrossFit like 20 years ago. You know, he was retired from powerlifting for probably close to 20 years at that point. And he was looking for something hard that wasn't necessarily competitive.

And if you kind of read some of his articles on this, he just was flaring up a bunch of old injuries, so it didn't work out too well for him. But, you know, eventually this kind of leads into the whole purpose of this episode, too, is, you know, eventually you get to a point where you just either don't have time or you just don't want to train anymore, you know? So really it's not like, how do we do maintenance? It's what do you do when you just lose the desire to train, right? I think that's the better question. That's a whole other question, isn't it? It is. And I think that's the question people should be asking, not how do I maintain.

It's, okay, what do I do when I don't want to train anymore? Well, that is when exercise can be very useful for an ex-trainee. So that's one problem, and I'll expand on that. The other scenario is when you get somebody who wants the results of training but wants to exercise their way there. That ain't going to happen. That is the most common general fitness slash globo gym client that I get is somebody who wants the results of training, wants to exercise their way to a trained body. That's just not going to work. You know, they

might be willing to starve because, you know, I think that it's overwhelmingly agreed upon that if you cut your food intake down enough, you're going to lose weight. So I don't find myself arguing with that so much. Once in a while I get somebody that says, why are these calories so low? But it's not very common. Most of the time it's, I can't find this, or I can't follow this diet. Do I need less carbs? Do I need more protein?

Do I need less protein? Do I need organic foods? I get random less protein? Do I need, you know, organic foods? Or, you know, I'll get random shit about how to set up the diet, but I don't really get as much pushback as maybe coaches of, you know, two decades ago got when I tell people, you just, you gotta starve, you know? Right, right. And not literally starve for, you know, the semantic people out there, but you have to restrict calories to lose weight. That part, you know, I do pretty well with that. out there, but you have to restrict calories to lose weight. That part, you know, I do pretty well with that. When it comes to the weight room side of it, there's just this false pretense that you can exercise your weight to a trained body. And this is how I've seen it manifest. You get

one person that may have come from a CrossFit background. And if I do what I know is probably best for them, which is, you know, three days a week, maybe four, you know, three to five exercises, two to three barbell lifts. Well, it's not enough. That's the first thing I hear. It's not enough. You know, so you get those people that think that more is better. They want to feel beat up, tired, and sore because they correlate that with weight loss or with, you know, more definition or with more muscle. They correlate the degree to which they feel tired and beat up and sore. Or how much the workout burns.

Why am I only doing five? I don't care about strength. Why can't I do more? So, okay, you can do tens. So that's problem number one that I typically run into. Problem number two is why only five exercises? Why only, you know, three to five exercises? This is boring.

You know, this is monotonous. Well, you know, swimming is monotonous too. So is golf. So is, you know, playing the keyboard. Walking, treadmill. Yeah, keyboard over there, guitar, you know. Right, yeah, you can get better at those. I mean, do baseball players, you know, go play hockey with the NH there guitar you know right yeah you can get better those i mean do baseball players you know go play hockey with the nhl you know to get better at baseball i mean

come on you know so you know i get that this is boring this isn't enough or this is this is boring this is monotonous i'm bored this is just not fun well training is not fun right ask any pro athlete you know i mean they love what they. It's the thing they're the best at. It's economized their life, so they do it. Obviously, they like it enough to beat the hell out of themselves and keep getting better, but they won't tell you it's fun. Ask an NFL player if training for a game is fun. When I was a swimmer, I hated practice, but I love the meets, the swim meets. Yeah. If you're a professional athlete it's like oh you know it's like I uh I broke my pinky toe the other day well so you get out there and you train you tape it up and

you go train exactly it's like oh you know I tweaked my I strained my calf on a weird play I got twisted weird and then I strained you know a calf muscle or whatever. So you just, you go train like you don't. And so there's like, you know, the other aspect of the sport, it was, it's like these guys, that's what training is, right? Like they keep moving through the roadblocks. Yeah. And this morning, you know, I'm not, I'm no pro athlete. I'm even close to that. Right. And I'm just an average guy. But, uh, this morning I woke up with a cold and my energy levels had been terrible all day. I feel like shit, but I had to do my volume squats today.

I just did them. It sucked. It was a lot worse than it is on a normal day when I feel good. It's what you do. But that's what I do. But that's what training is because the program calls for that.

And if I don't do it, right, I'm not introducing the stress in my workout that's going to cause an adaptation. And at my level, you know, if I miss one workout, that messes up kind of the whole schedule for two weeks. So there you go. You get the rebuttal, well, I don't want to compete. You know, I don't care about competing or, you know, lifting a bunch of weight. Well, you're barely squatting or lifting a bunch of weight. Well, you're barely squatting and deadlifting over body weight. So right now you have to train, you have to get stronger because recently I sent an email out, I asked, hey, why don't you look at the guys that you want to look like and see how much a hard deadlift is for them? And I'm like,

I'm not talking about them bouncing 225 off the floor five times and calling that a workout. I'm talking about a deadlift that was as hard as your 20 kilograms over body weight, equivalent for the guy that looks the way you want to look. I guarantee it's a lot more weight than you're lifting. You know, so again, strength plays into this. But, you know, that's the third thing I get.

Well, why does it keep getting heavier? Well, because it's not heavy enough. Well, isn't that relative? Yeah, but there's some absolutes to consider here. And yes, in this case, it is relative. You are not even squatting and dead lifting body weight. That's not heavy enough. There are absolute and relative metrics here that matter. If you were a fat guy squatting and deadlifting body weight, that might change things a little bit, you know? But if you are a skinny fat person or, you know, a mildly overweight person and you're not squatting and deadlifting more than body weight, then it's not heavy enough, you know? It needs to get heavier, you know? These guys that are telling you you don't have to lift heavy are probably picking up four of you. Look at their workouts. Why are there six plates on each side of the bar

doing deadlifts? That's a five, you know? Why is that? Does that not matter? The same guy that's telling you you don't have to lift heavy is lifting heavy. Well, it's relative. He's doing sets of 10. At some point, these absolutes matter. You're not going to tell me that his 585

pound deadlift for a set of 10 is the same as your 95 pound deadlift for a set of 10 is the same as your 95-pound deadlift for a set of 10. It's not the same thing. Eventually, these absolutes matter too. But, yeah, no, so what did I say first is, well, it's not enough. Then it's why does it keep getting heavier? Why is it monotonous? It doesn't have to be heavy.

Okay, so, you know, I've done the whole, all right, well, let's pad this with some arm work and, you know, some pull downs so we can get them to a chin up. People love getting to a chin up, too. I don't want to stick it out. They're very happy about it. So I haven't had too much pushback on that. But then I'll get the question, why are we doing the same exercises all the time? So, you know, okay, now I've given you some variety, but then you want variety of variety, you know? Right.

And then, okay, well, instead of fives, I'll give you tens. Well, why are we doing the same exercises? Well, it's training. You're telling me that you want to look like, well, the average person, middle of the bell curve, that's not into powerlifting and lifting sports, you know, your average Joe, like you said in other episodes, Brad Pitt in Fight Club, you know, the guy on the men's fitness cover, you know? Well, those guys have more muscle than the guy talking to us and the trainee. And they're probably stronger, too, just out the gate. Their baseline's probably higher.

So, yeah, if you want to look like that guy, you're going to have to get strong. Well, you know, he says to exercise. Well, he's also an Anovar, you know? So that brings my next point. If you want to exercise your way to a trained body, the way that is done is with steroids. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, which we're not recommending the qualifier not at all and you know what's interesting so there's a dude on on youtube um someone just recently introduced me to this guy's is more plates more dates is his name i don't know if you've seen him but he does these like breakdowns of like hollywood actors and he's like you know here's here's what whether i think

they're natty or not, and what steroid cycle they might have been on. And I'm like, I really don't care about that. But what is interesting is he pulls up these really early films and TV shows that these now well-known actors have been on, and he shows what they looked like back then. So he looked at Brad Pitt, for instance. Right.

And we've mentioned the famous Fight Club physique that he had. He was like 36 when he did Fight Club. then he had he did troy like a few years later but he pulled up like some some films from when the guy was like 18 and he looks pretty much the same i mean he got a little bit more muscular but the dude like like when the guy was like unknown didn't have money very likely was not on steroids i don't think you very likely look at him now no and he's and he stayed that's part of the thing is he stayed pretty much the same like i mean he's in his 50s now i mean his but his dad bod in his 50s is what we busted our ass for in our 20s exactly and so it's like this guy just looked like that to start

with like he had visible abs and like really nice muscle insertions and was just a long, lean dude. So anyway, that's just kind of as an aside point, that's kind of an interesting YouTube channel just to see

all these actors. But then you see the other ones who didn't look like that to begin with and like they put on 25 pounds in six months and it's all lean

muscle mass. Oh yeah, like my favorite one was Edward Norton in American History mass. Oh, yeah. Like my favorite one was Edward Norton in American History X. Oh, right. Claims that, oh, I had beef shakes and protein shakes and just lifted for three months and added 30 pounds of muscle. Well, first of all, if you actually gain 30 pounds of muscle,

which we know you didn't because you didn't measure that in 1997. You know, you didn't get an ADEXA. That doesn't measure muscle mass anyway. But either way, that probably means he gained 30 pounds and looked leaner. And if he gained 30 pounds and looked leaner, then he probably took steroids. And Arnold himself contacted him to ask him what he was on, and he denied it. But he's a known elitist. You know, he has a reputation, Edward Norton. He's the type that would, you know, based on what I've read about him and how people have had difficulties with him in movies, he seemed like the type that would deny it, you know? Yeah, right.

But just look at him in that movie. You know, he's like this beefed up neo-Nazi, and he's never looked like that before, and he's never looked like that again. Yeah, right. He was in Fight Club, too, and he's like this really skinny, pale, like, you know, dude. he was in fight club too. And he's like this really skinny, pale, like, you know, dude, but, but yeah, so, so that's the thing, right? So there are people out there that look, there are Brad pits out there that are just, they won the genetic lottery and they look amazing without doing anything, just being alive. But you know, if you're listening to this podcast, that's not you and it's not me. It's not you either. And so what are we going to do? Like if you want that body composition improvement, you're going to have to train and get stronger.

That's the only way you're going to get there to that physique if you don't have it naturally. Yeah, no. So to bring that back home, you know, if you want to exercise, exercise is good for your health. But typically people don't hire me because they want the results of exercise, which is good health and maybe a little bit of novice effect, which means that you'll rapidly see improvements from doing nothing to doing something. But I mean, if you're trying to get a dramatic transformation, you know, and you're trying to look, you know, if you're a skinny fat dude, and you're trying to look like a fitness model, or you're a, you know, fat and you're trying to look like a fitness model or you're a fat, weak dude trying to look like a fitness model, first of all, getting you that lean, you're not going to sustain it very long.

But that's a whole other topic for a different podcast. But if you want to look more muscular and you don't naturally look muscular, you're going to have to get strong or you're going to have to train. Exercise won't do that. I can reduce your calories and have you exercise and you can lose a ton of weight and have no definition. I did it before. That's how I ended up strength training because I did that for 15 years before I started training for strength. Right, right. So that's my whole point. Like I've exercised and done the thing that, you know, people are trying to do. Some of you are listening. I've done that thing before where I'm doing bullshit exercise that doesn't challenge my body that much,

and I feel pretty good doing it, and then I'm just dieting really hard. And what ends up happening is I lose a ton of body weight, and I look, you know, skinny in clothes, but then I'm still, you know, undefined. And if I can commit myself to another cut like that, which I kind of want to, I think it's good for the content I'm putting out, I'm willing to bet I'll be that lean in the 170s this time. Probably. Because now I have a 525 deadlift, a 445 squat, and a 225 press, and a 310-pound bench. So my prediction is I'm probably going to be lean at an even heavier body weight because now we have what? Since that cut, it's been five years now. Yeah, five years. Five years of just, you know, training and hitting PRs. And that has been my experience. You know, I've not really

gone through many like big cuts like you've done. I've done much smaller ones, you know, 10, 20 pounds. That's what I do now probably because, you know, I didn't get that fat. I've noticed, you know, here's what I've noticed. And I've noticed this among a lot of trainees too. So they train for the first six months to a year and they see some big body composition changes because they're putting on a lot of muscle mass. And those guys that are pretty fat to begin with often will lose some noticeable inches around their waist. And then they've gained some muscle around their back and their traps and their delts and all that kind of stuff. So they look a lot better already. And then they kind of level off.

They kind of look a certain way. But the lifts keep going up and they transition into intermediate level programming. But they keep working at it and and it's interesting about a year later after that initial sort of you know phase so so first six months and then like about a year after that yep all of a sudden what do you know the lifts keep going up and they're they're a couple percent body fat lower, and they're stronger, and their muscular definition looks better. And they train for another year after that, and it happens again. And this is without necessarily going through a dedicated cut cycle. You know what I mean?

What I think is happening is that, in fact, throughout the year, they are doing kind of like small little cuts, and then they'll of you know their eating will will ramp up as their their intense training intensity ramps up again to support it and then they so they end up bulking up just a little bit and there's these sort of like little micro moves throughout the year and then net net at the end of the year they're a little bit leaner and they're noticeably more muscular now there's a there's an end point to that of course like everything after a few years of, you're really not going to see any big body composition, composition changes without making much more drastic moves like doing a dedicated cut or moving up a weight class or something. If you're trying to go the other direction and just get bigger. But I've noticed that in my own training. I've noticed that with a lot of

trainees. And this is without purposely trying to change their body composition. They're just training for strength and they're doing a reasonable amount of activity outside the gym. And they're doing a reasonable amount of conditioning. Like that's it. And I've noticed that effect many times. But they're training. They're not exercising. They're training. That's the key. They're training the whole time. They're always trying to add, they're always trying to do, you know, a little bit harder conditioning, etc. So I think, you know, before we finish up, we need to address the whole point of this podcast, and that's, you know, maintenance was the question. While there is no maintenance,

there is you're training or you're not training, right? If you want to maintain a good percentage of what you've acquired training, then you need to do some things. And I think that's really what we're aiming to answer here, right? Somebody asked me today. I have a client that, you know, she was from an exercise hypertrophy, got a sweat burn background. And, you know, I converted her partially. I had to pad her LP with other stuff, so she had five days of stuff to do, but she understood it and understood that it was psychology that demanded it, which made her a very good client to work with. And, you know, then later, you know, you start to, you get to know people.

I'm like, okay, any moment now she's going to burn out at the monotony. So I better, you know, change something here. So I'm like, let's do some tens and let's add in some more isolation, single joint stuff. Let's, you know, do less barbell stuff, et cetera. You know, and then she's like, you read my mind, you know, we're on a good roll here. So then today I was answering a question about, you know, do you guys ever not do barbell stuff? You know, and I'm like, well, if I remove barbell training, then it's not starting strength anymore, you know. So I explained that, you know.

But no, anyways, after the smart-ass comment, I elaborated. I was like, you know, you could deprioritize it, you know. If you don't care about it, you could deprioritize it. And you can keep a good chunk of what you have, you know. I don't know. Don't ask me for a percentage. There's no way I can measure that, but probably more than half. You know, if you just squat once a week, deadlift once a week and, you know, go by perceived exertion. I hate RPE for training, but, you know, I think that RPE is rating of

perceived exertion. You basically go by how it feels and you try to estimate what you could have done, even though you can't really do that accurately. But from an exercise standpoint, probably fine. You could be like my brother and go in there and do 50% of your previous max for a set of five. And you'll probably keep a good chunk of your muscle mass doing that. Like, let me think, what would that be for me? I squat at 445. So that's what, probably 225. If I squat at 225 to 255 every single workout, I probably wouldn't detrain from that. I'd lose my maxes for sure, but I'd probably still look like I do something. I'd probably keep enough of it. But my whole point is these movements are functional. You're always going to squat deadlift press and do some version of a chin-up,

picking, putting stuff overhead on a shelf, taking it off overhead on a shelf. That's a press and chin-up. So these movements are functional. So you always want to move your joints and bones and muscles through those ranges of motion with load so that you keep yourself functional in the world. How much load and intensity depends on what you're trying to do. If you're trying to train, it has to get heavier. If you have trained and you're like where I am, we're on three out of the four lifts. I just don't give a fuck about getting stronger. That said, because I am who I am, I go in there and try to add every time. I'm not saying you should, but I'm saying that's what I do. I go in and I'm like, well, I did this last week. I better add five pounds. And sometimes I accidentally hit a PR. I'm training my bench

because I want 315 and I hit 310 and I missed 315 because I've neglected to fix my elbow flare for, you know, the last. I've been flaring my elbow since I was 15 and started benching. And, you know, at one point I just for some reason gave up on it we don't really care about the bench we're strength lifters but you know it didn't hurt me I didn't get tendonitis from it you know I muscle up some maximal lifts but when it

cost me the third plate that I've been chasing my entire lifting career you need that now my bench is perfect you, I've been complimented on my technique, my lifting technique by coaches and other clients and lifters alike. But, and even on the bench, most people don't catch what I'm doing because it's subtle, but it's enough. When it gets heavier, you see it. The elbows shoot back, the bar stops, then it tilts, and then the plates fall off and I miss 315. Then I try it again a week later and I get so dizzy, I pass out to set the

weight down because the same thing happened. It was slower. Either way, let me get back to my point here. You know, I don't care about getting stronger, but I have to train because it's a psychological thing for me. I have to try and add. So it's made it less stressful because then I accidentally PR, you know, but I go in, I squat Monday, three sets of five, never more. If I do tens, I do two sets. If I'm ambitious, maybe a third, but I haven't done three sets of 10 in ages. Sure. And then, uh, so 15 to 20 reps in that range, something like that. And then I'll press afterwards, you know, three to four, three to five sets of five, depending on how ambitious I am. Usually three, because it's less stressful mentally and I'm busy. Then Wednesday, I'll do a bench press because I'm

prioritizing the bench press. And then Friday, I'll deadlift one set of five and bench press another three sets of five. So six sets of five on the bench throughout the week, one set of five on the deadlift, three sets of five on the squat. And then when it gets heavier, I go to triples and then singles and I do that whole thing. But, you know, that's not, it's not real good training. You know, I probably need more volume to hit a PR on some of these lifts. I think the deadlift I'll probably PR because I didn't time it right last time. And I think I had more in the tank. So I think if I time it right this time, I'll squeeze out another 10 pounds. That was probably there last time. But you know, if I want to, you know, keep getting stronger at that, I probably need to do more

volume, more frequency for a few months and, you know, train it. But, you know, for this, at this point, for me, it's like a hybrid, it's, you know, training, but it's not, it's kind of exercise, but it's still training, you know, but for somebody else, you know, I, like I was telling my client, I'm like, you know, if you just want to, you know, do something else, like, I don't know, some people pick up mountain biking or some people pick up hiking, you know, or some people start playing basketball. Well, then just go to the gym and, you know, do a moderately, moderate squat, you know, for a few sets, moderate deadlift for a few sets, do some chin-ups at home when you have time, you know. And just get the movements in throughout the week and pick the load yourself. I mean, don't do

the empty bar there's a line to be drawn there you know but you know self-select your load do something that's not going to stress you out and allow you to continue to perform the movements you know that that that's called now you're exercising if you don't want to train anymore then you should just turn it into exercise and at least continue performing the movements in addition to whatever else you want to do. Right? Right. Yeah. I have, I have some, I have a couple of thoughts on this. One of them, I think we need to save for another podcast because I think, I think it is interesting. So yeah, I, I totally agree. And there's so many models. If you, you know, when you hit times in your life, well, let me, let me back up a little bit. models, if you, you know, when you hit times in your life, well, let me, let me back up a little bit. So we have a saying that we often use as coaches that life deloads you, right? A deload

is simply when you have to, for whatever reason, take weight off the bar. Sometimes we do intentional deloads where we're like, Hey, you know what? Some guy's getting really just torched from his training. Maybe we overshot a little bit and we'll take, we'll take intentionally take some weight off the bar and take some reps down for a week. Sometimes it's involuntary. You get the flu and you get deloaded, whether you like it or not, you come back and you're going to have to work yourself back up from, you know, whenever you recover from the flu. Sometimes you move and you can't even get to your gym for six weeks or whatever, you know, there's so many things that happen.

You open a gym, right? Yeah, exactly. It's like the cobbler and having the worst shoes, right? The coach has the least amount of time to train. Whatever it is, things will happen in life, especially the older you get and the more complex your life gets, to throw you off of training. And like we said, once you get to a certain level of advancement

in your training, you're going to need a lot more work to get more progress. And if you stop doing it for whatever reason, because life deloads you, then you're going to have to take some steps back. And so often what happens in practice is that you get to a certain level of advancement that your life will support. And, you know, if you're a normal, like most adults, most of us, we have a job, we might have kids or other family obligations. We have a lot of competing priorities going on. And so realistically, there's only so much training that we can fit into our life. And to go beyond that point, we get, you know, problems happen. You know, if you want to be a competitive level anything, you know, and by competitive, let me say that a different way. Definitely, if you want to be a competitive

level anything, but also like if you want to be elite in anything, which includes having an elite level physique, it requires a lot of sacrifice. And it's something that you may not want. You know, like if you want to, if you want to eat the way it takes to get yourself to a like amazing physique, you might have to do things that alienate the rest of your family. You might have to skip out on family things and cause arguments because you got to go train. Like there is a limit to this that's practical, right? Yeah. So you can't progress forever, but in practice, that's what ends up happening. Maintenance ends up becoming like, we're always training. We're always trying to add, but you know, we, we often have other limitations that push us back a step or two and we got to build back and hope hopefully in the long run, we always are building

back a little bit further than where we were when we got knocked off, you know, our progress. But, uh, that, yeah, that's, that's, that's something that I think it's kind of funny. Like some people, I think envision themselves, you know, sort of like they get really into barbell training or really into whatever, whatever aspect of fitness. And they like see themselves doing like elite level workouts and stuff. I'm like, you realize like if professional athletes need like this whole ecosystem to, to survive, they need people to do like all their chores for them. They can't work a regular job because they're working out all day.

They need enough time to sleep and be relaxed. They can't have too many outside stressors. They need a lot of, of outside peripheral support to make their life happen. That's all. That's a whole other discussion, but these are the realistic limitations to training. Let me add some context to that because Trent's talking about getting to an elite level requires all that, but for a lot of our listeners here and a lot of commercial gym clients, middle of the bell curve folks out there,

you're going to have to put that level of dedication in to get a mediocre result. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Exactly. So like, for you average Joe, if you want to get down to 10% body fat, it might require elite level effort. And not look skinny. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And so exactly, we're not all starting off looking like Brad Pitt, so. For me to get down to 165 and just be 11% body fat, I mean, I could have went further. You know, I was probably about two to four weeks away from 5% because at that point, a pound, you know, becomes more of a percentage than it was when I was fat, you know. Right. But just for me to get down to that required, you know, a Herculean effort.

Like, if I traveled, I, you know, had all my meals prepped. I'd, you know, Airbnb, so I'd kitchen. I'd, you know, find a gym. You know, we found the closest gym, pay the day passes, you know, like everything revolves around the gym. And then I was what? I was 5'9", 165 at 11.9% body. That's not competitive, you know? But I had

to put that same level of effort that an athlete would because I was trying to achieve a result that was greater than what I previously had. Right. Yep. Yep. And, you know, you think about like the reality of that. When you're in that situation, you know, what, like if your girlfriend's like, you want to go on like a spontaneous date and go get ice cream. It's like, no, you can't do that at that level. If you're, if you're continuing to push, like, nope, the answer is no. And so like, what does that do to your relationships? And so, and so on, right. You know, you, you already mentioned the physical effects, but, uh, it's just, it's just, and so I, I point that out because of this. I have a problem I run into with some trainees where they'll work with me for a couple of years, two, three years, and it's great.

And I tend to work with a lot of older guys who are in their 40s, 50s, 60s. And, you know, they hit a point where it's like, listen, you know, to go further, to get stronger, to get that next PR, here's what we're going to have to do. And, you know, for them, it's like your body might not hold up to that. You may not be able to come in consistently enough to the gym to achieve this, right? Like, if I'm going to put you on a, you know, block training program, it's like, you cannot miss these workouts because then it's, it blows up the whole program. I don't know if you're going to hit a PR or not. And, and so, uh, sometimes people get frustrated because they've been in a mindset of like progress, progress, progress, progress, progress. And it may not actually be the right decision to get the next PR and that's okay. That's okay.

I would agree. Yeah. It doesn't, doesn't mean we stop training. It doesn't mean we just sit on our thumbs. There are other things to do. But yeah, I want to point that out because some people do that really buy into this training mindset can get frustrated. And it can be frustrating when you get to be three, four years into this kind of stuff. And the PR is just hard to come by. So yeah, so this knowledge applies to two different demographics. If you're somebody who's never trained and you are, I don't know, you're skinny fat, you know, you're 160 pound guy with, if you think you have man boobs and a little bit of belly, or let's say you're the 125 pound female in the same position, right? let's say you're the 125-pound female in the same position, right? It's going to take you elite-level effort to, you know, have those visible abs and not, you know, look like Skeletor. Right.

Because a 165-pound guy with the muscle mass he has at baseline is going to have to weigh 135 pounds at 5'9", 5'10", which is not feasible. It's not healthy, not recommended. I don't think he wants to look like that. The female is going to have to weigh 100 pounds or 105 pounds, you know, not feasible. To change that, you have to increase the lean mass part of the equation. And that will take you, you know, one to two years, probably, you know, and at the end, it's not a competitive physique. You know, you'll look good for yourself. I like the way I looked when I was 165. But the reason I'm saying that to add context to that is I'm not telling you that you need to train for a bodybuilding show or physique show, bikini show, powerlifting meet, et cetera. I'm saying that you're going to have to dedicate yourself just like those people do to get a result that's a fraction of theirs.

Right. And if that's not something that you're willing to do, then you may need to reevaluate your goals and lower your expectations. Because the only people who exercise and get a trained body are people who take steroids. And we all saw them in the college gym and the high school gym. They'd have these bros that would go in there and do arms and chest. And then they'd look all jacked with veins and hard muscles that felt like a brick wall. And I was naive. Didn't know they were on shit. But, you know, that works.

But we don't want you to do that. That's not sustainable. That's not healthy, you know. And you're being a lazy ass anyway. So the trained people aren't going to respect you for it. But, you know, that's the other thing. You know, Hollywood actors and fitness models, you know, they're not going into a drug-tested meet, you know, or a drug-tested sport.

You know, it doesn't matter. I mean, it's illegal in this country. So, you you know they might get hit with a felony for if they get caught taking it but they're that's the least of their worries it's not something that's you know you don't got cops cracking down on fitness models for taking steroids it's not a priority for most police departments but the point is for that job their employer doesn't give a shit how they looked like that they just need to look like that. So they're not doing anything wrong in the eyes of their job, but in the eyes of the law, depending on which state or country you live in, that might be illegal. But my whole point is you're going to have to put athlete-level effort to change your body composition like that, and then the result may not be, you know, a professional level result, you know?

So even though you're, you know, I used to think, I'm like, these guys are so huge. I just want a fraction of that. I'm like, I shouldn't have to do what they do. Well, no, you have to do what they do to get a fraction of what they have because you don't have the genetics out the gate. Otherwise you wouldn't be here reading this and listening to us, you know? Gosh. And there's so much buried behind like the fact that we have

to have this conversation. Part of it is the fact that people feel inadequate in the first place, not having these like really stylized, exaggerated physiques that we're exposed to all day on the internet and in media. You know, people looked at, uh, at one point people looked at Sean Connery, who by the way, was a, he was a bodybuilder back in the fifties. He was like an amateur bodybuilder. Um, people looked at Sean Connery as James Bond and he was a believable James Bond. Like the guy's like, you know, flat stomach, got some muscle, but that guy looks pitiful compared to the like Hollywood stars today when they take their shirt off. pitiful compared to the like hollywood stars today when they take their shirt off and um the fact that that people would look at like let's say a young sean connery's physique

and be like oh it's terrible is that has a lot to say about the body dysmorphia that's that's so present exactly you know and it's like so so when we're saying like don't be discouraged by the fact that you may not have the genetics to to get this elite looking body um that doesn't mean you can't have a really good looking body like not at all and uh that's that that's a whole nother discussion the whole body dysmorphia thing um we all we all deal with it because we're all sort of inundated by popular media and these unrealistic images of people. But yeah, I think that's a good place to end off on. And I'm sure we'll be having this discussion over many episodes. Oh, yeah. I just wanted to summarize real quick. If you have never trained before and you're trying to get from point A to point B,

more muscle and more definition than you have now, there's going to be an elite level effort required for a period of time. You're going to have to train. You're not going to exercise your way there. So sorry to burst your bubble. You're not going to hop on the treadmill and circuit train and get there. You've tried that before, and it's failed. That's not going to work. If you are a trainee and you've put in, you know, one, two, three, in my case, eight years,

you're like, man, I really don't want to train anymore. This is really bogging on me, but I don't want to, you know, stop exercising or I don't want to stop. I want to stop going to the gym, I should say. Then you just need to, you know, lower your standards for what you're doing in the gym, but still perform the movements, still load the movements, and then do whatever the hell else you want to do. Go ride your mountain bike. If the squats making your hips and back too sore to ride your mountain bike, lower the weight on the squat, do less sets, and just gauge it that way. Your priorities change, right? If there's other things you want to do instead of train for strength under the bar, then

you need to dial down the bar to allow you to do those other things. And that's very subjective. You need to dial down the bar to allow you to do those other things, and that's very subjective. I can't tell you that, okay, 50% of your max, your back will be fine to run or ride a bike. I don't know. You're going to have to try it. It's very individual. It's very individual. The point is you're going to go by feel at that point, and at that point you're exercising and not training, so going by feel is perfectly fine.

We don't recommend going by feel if you're training. um there we don't recommend going by feel if you're training that's a whole other episode where i'll attack that you know and you know try to clarify and make fun of a little bit but uh yeah no that's my whole point so if you need to achieve an objective you're going to train if you've achieved the objective and you don't know what the fuck to do you're going to exercise yep or fake train like me that's right that's right. That's right. Yeah. That's, you know, in the long run, if you, uh, if you commit yourself to training, even if you don't have a great program, but you're consistent with it, you're going to see results in the long run. Oh, yeah. You're going to see results like they, they will come and, uh, you know, maybe along the way,

you'll learn something about programming and you'll, you know, maybe get a chance to get coached the way you'll learn something about programming and you'll, you know, maybe get a chance to get coached and you'll learn how to add to those results. So. Excellent. All right. Well, let's wrap that up. Thank you for listening to the Weights and Plates podcast today. You can find me at weightsandplates.com or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana, or you can find the gym at weights, double underscore and double underscore plates, double underscore their weights and plates. Uh, you can find me on Instagram marmalade underscore cream, and you can shoot me an email if you want to at Trent at marmalade cream.com. That's the name of my production company, but I have my email there. You can

ask me questions about podcasts or weightlifting or, uh, yeah, actually don't send me your diet questions. Send those to Robert. He's, he's the real expert here, but, uh, that's right. That's right. Uh, but yeah, until next time. Thank you.