Weights and Plates Podcast - #91 - Truth About Upper Body Training

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

In this episode, Robert Santana talks about programming for your upper body and how it differs from lower body training. https://weightsandplates.com/online-coaching/ Follow Weights & Plates YouTube: https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf- Instagram: @the_robert_santana Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/weightsandplates Web: https://weightsandplates.com  

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana and I am your host on this show. We're going to see how I do conversing with you, the audience. I have a lot of guests planned for this year, so I'm going to try and keep it interesting. I'm typically the type of person that likes to converse, but we'll see how I do. You know, there's people that have done radio shows and podcasts and talk alone for one, two, three, even four hours. I'm not going to quite do that, but you know, I'll talk to you for an hour and see, see how things go. So we left off last time I interviewed Gretchen and we had a good episode there. I plan to bring her back for more.

I think it's great to have different people on here. I think it's great to have females on here because the barbell training experience and this whole journey is different for females than it is for males, different for old than it is for young. So I'm gonna try and get various people in here to kind of speak to their experience so it's not always mine.

As you all know, who've been listening for a long time, I was the skinny fat guy that followed all the magazine programs of the late 90s, early 2000s, and didn't really get anywhere until I discovered Starting Strength, where I got into basic barbell training and have been pushing it ever since. And in doing so, I've learned a few things. I've learned that the big compound exercises can be progressed steadily over a longer timeline than the smaller single joint,

or what they call isolation exercises, can. And what I've learned recently is that these lifts really do progress at a different rate. And that seems rather obvious. I know it's in some of the books, but it's something that's been on my mind in the last couple of weeks. Because as those of you who have been listening are aware, I'd say between the end of 2021 and the end of 2024,

so a three year period, I put a lot more emphasis into my upper body. It started out as an arm focus program that I modified. And at the end of 23, I started really trying to dial in the bench, the bench press. And I hit my 315 last year, but recently, you know, I came to some realizations.

There was, you know, there's a couple of things, you know, I was working through some tendonitis that I'm still working through, and it's now getting better because the intensity is not quite as high and I'm managing my program a little bit differently. But the tendonitis held me back, and I started going back and looking at some old videos.

And this is the beauty of recording your lifts. You can do that. So I went back to 2015. I had run basically a version of block training that was very RPE based. It was prescribed to me by somebody else. It about killed me in lower body. I would never train like this in lower body.

I've tried other versions of this with other coaches. And whenever it's the squat or the deadlift, I just get completely fucking wrecked. And for years I've discredited it as a viable training approach for a drug-free lifter who is sufficiently strong. Maybe somebody who's not that strong might be able to benefit from it, but once you get past a certain level, it's just a lot of tonnage and it's a lot on the low back. That was my experience.

However, my upper body strength went up, particularly in my fives and my triples. And looking back, I don't think I peaked as well as I could have. I think there was room on the bar that year. But I bring that up because it finally dawned on me that between 2015 and 2020, that's when I hit my last bench PR, I didn't really get stronger at my bench, not a whole lot stronger. I got a whole lot stronger in my press, so in 2015 my press went to 210. Remember, this was two years after my linear progression.

I attribute some of that to having strong chin ups that I had been working since I was 15 because I was a swimmer, so they had us doing a lot of behind the neck, wide grip, lat pull downs, and if you were strong enough to chin, you chinned. And you did it with an overhand grip because God forbid you work your biceps as a swimmer,

it might shorten your stroke. That's what some of the sport coaches think. But you know, my press went pretty well. I was at 210 in 2015. I weighed about 200 pounds at the time. But my bench topped off at about 290 or 295. And my best set of five was 265 that year. I was benching with a much closer grip than I do now.

So what I found interesting was I couldn't bench 300 that year. And I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that the person I was working with had a bias towards volume. And as many of you know, I'm not a big fan of overdoing volume. I'm all for using more volume when it's appropriate,

but at some point it has to come down so the weight can continue to get heavy. And that just did not happen back then. So I was a pretty frustrated lifter. I was distrusting of a lot of things. One of the things being weight gain, I was pretty distrusting of it. And next month I'm gonna bring out an old friend of mine, Hari Fafoudis, who got pretty

strong himself, gained weight and lost it all. And I think he's going to be a great guest for this episode. But in looking back, I'd gotten a 205, I couldn't squat over 400, and I sure as hell couldn't deadlift 500. And I just didn't think all the weight gain was justified for, I think, a 395 squat and a 455 deadlift at my heaviest. In fact, those two numbers went up when I was losing weight. So that was a problem with the programming. I had somebody who was biased towards volume. And I feel like a lot of people are biased towards volume for a couple of reasons.

I think a big reason is these people tend to be addicted to exercise and they can't control their drive to want to do more. And by more, it's more volume. They wanna feel more pain. It's a masochistic thing that I don't quite understand. Maybe I need to get a psychologist on here, but it's quite a masochistic thing. Or they just know that the majority of people

who hire a coach are going to push themselves as hard as an athlete would, or as hard as a coach or somebody who's competitive would. The average personal training client is probably going to go in, you know, progress for a few weeks, skip some workouts, or when it gets heavy or hard in any way, he's going to want to change the program. And that's typically what happens, you know, when you're dealing with the general population. workouts or when it gets heavy or hard in any way, he's going to want to change the program. And that's typically what happens when you're dealing with the general population. There's a large swath of people that aren't interested in pushing themselves so hard that

they're scared. They just want a good workout. And that's understandable. So when you deal with a lot of people of this demographic, the conclusion is, well, if I want client retention, I can't make it too hard. So I think that is one of the reasons that volume is popular because it's hard in a similar way that cardio is hard.

You know, it burns, you might get out of breath, you get a muscle pump. It's more feel, you know, there's a lot more feelings associated with it. When you lift heavy, it's an adrenaline rush and you're scared shitless. You wanna shit your fucking pants, you're so fucking scared. So I think volume, I think high volume and basically any form of keeping activity in the weight room continuous,

whether it be CrossFit or bodybuilding or circuit training or supersets is popular because I think there's probably a dopamine rush or some something of that sort, you know when you run you get endorphins When you lift something heavy you get an adrenaline rush and then you get an adrenaline dump Then then you're just wrecked like you've been in a fucking coma where I was going with that is When I trained in that way, I was just always beat up. But it's undeniable, my upper body strength went up, I just was unable to express it, which is half of what I want to talk about today, the expression of strength versus the development of strength.

It's something that many of you who stay in this more than a year are going to encounter. We like to, we used to tell people, and I think people still say this, that only a very strong powerlifter or a strength specialist is going to have to worry about advanced training. Most people won't be advanced. And that's somewhat true. Most people who go in the weight room aren't going to become an advanced powerlifter that's who go in the weight room aren't gonna become an advanced power lifter that's reaching their absolute limit. That's true, but some people will have to resort to advanced programming for one reason or another.

Some of those reasons include age. So an older man is going to be a novice for a shorter period than a younger man. He's not gonna be able to recover as quickly, especially when it gets hard. And it's gonna get hard much sooner than it would have had he done this when he was younger. Somebody who has some sort of disease process, maybe an autoimmune disease, for example, that person's not gonna recover the same way

as a healthy adult. That person is going to have their stress recovery adaptation cycle change much sooner than a healthy adult age 18 to 25. However, I've had some young people have to resort to intermediate or advanced programming earlier than one would expect because they simply get injured easier. So to work around the injury, we have to artificially lengthen that recovery time or time between heavy PR attempts to protect the injured tissues.

The bottom line is, when we talk about novice, intermediate or advanced, under the best of circumstances, you are a young adult doing this with ample recovery and can push yourself and not get hurt very easily for a period of time. So let's say an 18 year old kid starts or a 15 year old boy starts, let's say that,

15 year old boy starts training. You know, he might get to advance by the time he's in his early 20s. And he might stay an advanced lifter through his 20s and possibly his 30s if he doesn't get hurt. And he's gonna be a hell of a lot stronger at the end, whether he takes drugs or not, right? He's gonna reach a point that he would not reach

if he started into 30s or 40s, simply because the time wouldn't be there to take advantage of the short recovery cycles. Think about that for a second. A 16-year-old boy that starts a linear progression might squat three times a week, well into the 300s, maybe well into the 400s, depending on the person. But then if he starts at 35, he might peter off at 275.

So it might take him a lot longer to get to where he would have gotten in maybe a first year, second year, as a teenager. Because sometimes there's not enough time. He might get to a really good place in his late 30s, but in five years he's 40, his recovery's slowing down. In 15 years he's 50, versus if he started at 15, now he's 30 in 15 years, he's still young.

He can still push for another 10 years at a slow and steady rate. So that's under the best of the circumstances. In other situations, you have somebody who's a 65 year old novice. He's probably going to be a novice for two or three months before he's on an intermediate program, and he'll be advanced by the end of the year, certainly on upper body, and we'll come back to that in a second, simply because an older adult does not recover as fast as a younger adult for a variety of reasons. It's just like an old car, you know? If you don't replace certain parts on a car,

they're gonna run down and the car's not gonna function. Well, with a human body, you can't necessarily replace a lot of these things, so they just kind of run down. And things tend to slow down. Metabolic rate tends to slow down, although there's debate on that now. I'm not gonna dive into that body of research,

but there's debate on that. Muscle mass tends to be lost lost whether you train or not. When you train you bend the curve there. Connective tissue integrity tends to decrease. A lot of these older men and women have achy joints, especially men have achy shoulders, elbows, knees, hips, I mean you name it. Back, back's the most common. And they aren't as insulin sensitive as their younger self. They can't eat the amount of food that their younger self can eat. An underweight man might be able to eat 5,000 calories a day and gain body weight and be fine. You know, he fluffs

up his glucose is normal, his blood works normally, feels fine and his training is going great. But at 55, let's say he's still underweight because just built that way, he's not gonna be able to tolerate that as well. It might affect his insulin sensitivity. He might feel like shit all the time, so can't eat as much, can't gain weight as effectively. So there's a lot of factors there with aging and the same principle applies to somebody who's sick, who's chronically sick, you know, has some chronic illness that affects their ability to recover.

So although you may not be a highly advanced elite competitive lifter, you may be in a situation where the length of time to recover from one PR to the next PR is quite long. And understanding how these principles work is important. So we typically say when you start lifting, you're squatting three times a week, you're deadlifting three times a week,

you start out by adding five to 10 pounds per workout, then you're adding about five pounds per workout, the deadlift frequency drops, eventually the squat frequency drops, and you go from maybe adding a PR three times a week, so 15 pounds a week, to twice a week, 10 pounds a week, eventually to once a week, five pounds a week, then you go to every other week, that's another, that's 10 pounds a month, right?

And so on. Well, it doesn't work in this linear fashion forever. You know, after about a couple of years of this, it becomes less steady, more unpredictable, and I'm going to dive deep into this with my buddy Michael Wolfe when I bring him on. But the point is that training gets more complicated. So as you become more advanced, you have to start thinking about your fatigue and how to pull it back.

So for me, it's been pretty straightforward on squat and deadlift. As I've gotten older and as I've gotten stronger, I've actually done less squatting and deadlifting. I squat once a week, I deadlift once a week, I try to add every two to four weeks, depending on where I'm at in the training cycle. If I'm running up the lift early on,

I add frequently and then I drop the frequency, but then eventually the PR takes about a year to achieve. On the bench press and the press, and this is where I was going earlier, those lifts I think become advanced in the first year or two. Probably the first year, year and a half. The early intermediate phase doesn't seem to last quite as long as it does for a squat or a deadlift.

And I suspect this to be because the bench press and the press use fewer muscles. They load the shoulders. There's no, you don't have your back and hips to aid you in the lift the same way that they do in the squat. So as a result, you end up plateauing on these lifts quite early. And training has to get a little more complex,

but not that much more. You know, there's a thing that Rip says all the time. He's like, you know, how long can you progress any extension? Few weeks, few months, you know? And I think you could go up the ladder with that and apply that to a bench press, a press, or a chin up, or a row of some sort.

Like, you know, you might get some steady linear progress on some of these lifts for a period of time, but then it basically just bottoms out. What that really means is you now have to go into advanced programming principles. And it's kind of similar to what the bodybuilders do. So these single joint exercises don't really get stronger over time.

I mean, they do, but the way in which they get stronger is not the same as something like a squat or deadlift. And if you look at how a lot of bodybuilders train, they're doing lots of sets, lots of reps, and I've talked about why that is, or why that is from a practical standpoint. If you're doing a knee extension, if you go heavy, you're not just gonna extend your knee,

you're gonna use more of your body. Same thing with a bicep curl, a tricep extension. To keep it strict, the weight has to stay light, and if the weight stays light, you up the rep. So it makes sense why they kind of go in that direction. But then, you know, they like to focus on volume and tempo and, you know, working on slow, eccentric and. Supersets and all these things to stimulate the muscle

in ways other than adding load. And that makes sense for those types of exercises. You know, this has become very clear to me. For those types of exercises, that makes sense. You're not gonna do a squat with an eight second tempo. It's not really gonna help you. If you wanna do that kind of work, you're better off doing that on a knee extension

or a knee curl. But when you squat, that's an overall strength exercise. You're using lots of muscles. It's very functional and compound. So you really wanna do that with more weight, fewer reps. we say five or less, because once you start going over five, you might be able to get a good set of eight. What I've found is once it gets past rep number seven, you know, it's just hard to keep all the muscles firing at the same time. They're all firing, firing is not the right word, but it's just hard to maintain and reproduce the same technique rep after rep once endurance

becomes a factor. So that's a big problem there. It's the same thing when after rep once endurance becomes a factor. So that's a big problem there. It's the same thing when you try to do a heavy bicep curl. If you're doing a set of five on bicep curls, it's gonna turn into a reverse clean. So keeping all this in context, right? You don't wanna do tons and tons of sets of squats and deadlifts.

If you're trying to get them up, you're gonna end up beating yourself up unless you're on a bunch of drugs and those guysifts. If you're trying to get them up, you're going to end up beating yourself up unless you're on a bunch of drugs. And those guys tend to beat themselves up too, even though they try to not bring that up. They're hurting all over the place, just like any other athlete. Athletics is not about health.

You need to be healthy enough to perform the sport. But beyond that, they're training through all sorts of fucking injuries. So we're not even going to go there. That's a whole nother episode. But I've come to the conclusion that a lot of this bodybuilding stuff, I always said a lot of it is because of the drugs they're taking and not necessarily because of the programming. And I do believe that to be largely true,

but there is some context here. If you're trying to do an exercise like a knee extension, you can't progress in a linear manner and keep adding load steadily over time. The loads need to go up, but it takes longer, and the process is a little less predictable. So it becomes a version of what they call block training, where you're accumulating a bunch of fatigue, you're doing a bunch of volume, and you're not really worried about the weight necessarily.

You're not gonna hit a limit PR set of, let's say, five, if you're doing fives on this block. You're just doing a lot of sets, building up fatigue, and then you're supposed to pull back that fatigue to begin to express that strength. So earlier in the show, I said there's a difference between developing strength and expressing strength. So we like to say that fives are training singles, doubles, and triples are practice. So what does that mean? Well,

the bodybuilders and the hypertrophy people will say that five to 10 reps is what you need to do to build muscle. I might argue that fives on a squat or deadlift or a compound lift, maybe tens on something that's more isolated, yeah, that's gonna build more muscle. It's gonna develop strength. You're training for strength at that point, right?

And then one to three reps, you're expressing that strength. I heard a guy years back say, well, you build muscle and you teach those muscles to work. And I think that's basically a version of the same thing. You're training for strength by doing the higher reps, the higher volume, and then you're expressing the strengths

by doing the lower reps, the lower volume. I think there is value in all of it, but I think there's context, right? If you're doing a big compound barbell lift, you typically wanna keep it to five reps or less for safety reasons, if nothing else. And when you listen to a lot of these gurus that are really strong, big jacked guys,

they're not doing a ton of volume on their squats a lot of the time. You know, I can think of one bodybuilder that said he does one set of ten on the squats, but he is known for doing lots of volume. It's just not coming from an exercise like the squat. So high volume on a squat might be three to five sets of five, depending on where you are in your advancement.

I don't do five sets of five. You know, the highest I have won is four in recent years because that fifth set beats the ever-living hell out of me, and I didn't see it translate into more weight being lifted for a single because my goal is to express it eventually. I keep hearing this silly bullshit that it's neuromuscular because you're not doing that much volume and okay, if it's neuromuscular, that's important too

because your nervous system controls your muscles. I think those neuromuscular events that happen at high intensities will transfer over to the lower intensity, higher volume work you're going to do later when you start the next training cycle. So I've always approached training using a classical western periodization model where you start with higher volume, lower intensity, and you work towards higher intensity, lower volume. But again, context matters. If you're doing a big barbell lift, typically five reps or less. If you're doing something like a bicep curl or a chin up,

or something that involves a couple of joints, you know, I might do that eight to 12 rep range that everybody loves. And if I'm doing a single joint exercise like a preacher curl or a knee extension, I'm gonna do sets of 20, because you're only moving one joint. And I

gave myself tendonitis by doing 10s and 12s on a preacher curl. So I'm starting to understand where these people are coming from. Now, when it comes to programming stuff like that, that's not my area. I'm not here to program your preacher curl, but I understand the general principles because they apply to something like the bench press. And to come back to block training, you're going to accumulate work through lots and lots of sets. So I might do five sets of five on a bench press and I might do five sets of five on a close grip bench press.

Then I might do three sets of five on a floor press and I might press once a week, right? So I'm benching and doing some sort of pressing motion four times a week. And that's gonna make me real tired. So the weights I use are not gonna be anywhere near 5RM at this stage. Now, as you do that for a few weeks, eventually you get tired and you can't lift very much

and you're beat up. So what a lot of guys will do is they might do three to four weeks of this and then deload it where they reduce the volume by maybe a third. They reduce the intensity by about maybe five to 10% depending on the lift. And they'll do that for a week or two, depending on how advanced you are. And then you might move into what they call a transmutation phase where now the volume's coming down so that the intensity can go up.

You might stay at sets of five for this, but you're just not gonna be doing as many sets because you need to be more recovered to start producing more force and lifting the heavier weights. And you might do that for a few weeks, so maybe three, four weeks, then do another deload. And the last phase, they usually call a realization phase.

This is where you are expressing your strength. And here you're going to do singles, doubles, and triples. And this could be broken up into two versions of this. You might run this for a month, take another D-load and then run it for the next month and max out. And what you're doing there is you're teaching your muscles to now handle these higher intensities that are getting closer and closer to your maximum potential which is your one RM Why is this important? For many of you it might not be if you're not gonna max out and go to a meet I think it's important when you're trying to develop upper body strength, and I find that a lot of people

Will do starting strength, maybe some version of heavy light medium afterwards, and they'll complain that their upper body strength is not in par with their lower body strength. And it makes sense because it's a different type of stress. And I have found consistently in my own experience, and when I get Hari on the show, him and I will talk about it some more,

that a version of this approach is gonna work real well to develop that upper body strength because A, the weight is lighter, B, these exercises are more limited in terms of the number of joints and muscles involved in them so they advance quicker because A, the weights are lighter and B, these lifts advance quicker because there's fewer muscles and joints involved.

It's not as much of a systemic stress as a squat or a deadlift unless maybe you're benching 600, but most of you listening are not benching 600 fucking pounds. I mean, if you are, let's get you on the show because that'd be pretty cool to talk about, but most of you are not. And you know, it doesn't matter if you want to do the press or the bench press. I found that over a long enough timeline, the bench press will interfere with your press. So you have to pick which one you wanna focus on.

If you're gonna press more, you gotta bench less. If you wanna bench more, you're gonna end up pressing less because you're not gonna be able to do much overhead if you're benching a lot. So, you know, longer you stay in it, you gotta pick your specialization. So that was one of the things I learned last year was, you know, I've been trying to train my bench press

similar to my squat and deadlift, and it doesn't look like it got a whole hell of a lot stronger over the last decade. I'm definitely stronger, I think, with a healthy elbow. I'm much stronger than I was five years ago when I hit my last PR, but we're not seeing it in the numbers right now because I finished out that training cycle injured, and I don't think I ran it in the most ideal fashion either. I mean, I'm now benched with a wider grip, better technique, but you know, I have an injured elbow and I probably didn't program myself in the most ideal way

because on that lift, it looks, everything points at me being a much more advanced lifter. Then on the squat and the deadlift, which steadily goes up year after year with some version of a linear program that's spread out over the course of 12 months. It doesn't seem to be the case in the bench press. This is one big reason why your upper body lifts may be stuck. You may alternate the bench press and the press, do your chin-ups on bench press day, and finish out your linear

progression, make sure you micro load, etc. Then you might do a heavy light medium or a texas method, and that might work for a while. But then eventually, and I'm telling you, it's somewhere between year one and year two, it happens quick. That approach doesn't work, and you just kind of get stuck in the same place over and over again.

And it's pretty clear something else is needed. And I think this approach is probably just fine for the bench press, the press, or any other type of more isolated exercise that's not a squat or a deadlift because the systemic stress isn't that great. So that's one big lesson I learned. And if you take an approach like that,

I think you'll see some pretty good results. And I may write an article on this and kind of show what it looks like, because I think that'd be helpful. I don't think that it needs to be super complicated. I think one of the problems with a lot of these block training programs is they're super complicated and they tend to use perceived exertion scales. And I've talked about RPE many times, these fuckers on the internet.

The moment I talk shit about their precious RPE, they go out of their fucking minds and are all over my feet hollering and you're welcome to keep doing it, but RPE is bullshit. We've already went through this. You don't get to say the lifter's doing it wrong because it's the lifter's perception of his exertion. Let me remind you of this. Rating of perceived exertion. You don't get to say it's wrong because you're not the lifter. You're not perceiving it, asshole. If you're going to tell that lifter to add more weight to it, it's no longer a perceived exertion. It is the coach's perceived exertion. It's the coach's rating of the perceived exertion. He's perceiving that the lifter didn't lift heavy enough and he's telling it, now he's

giving a load assignment. You should do this many more pounds. And that's good coaching, right? But the only, I don't see a place for running an entire program based on what it feels like. Because I'll tell you what, one of the other things I learned last year, once my five RM deadlift got to about 490, every fucking rep felt like an all out effort.

And there was a couple, I think 490 and 495, every fucking rep felt like an all out effort. And there was a couple, I think 490 and 495, I had to repeat a couple times because I thought I was done after a rep or two. And once I got to 500, I knew I had to go in there, drum up a bunch of adrenaline, and pull the fucker like my life depended on it. And when I did that, I got those two PRs,

and that was the end of that training cycle that went phenomenally, and I'm still currently in. But I don't think you have to assign an RPE and then give an endless number of sets until you're tired that day, which is basically what I did all those years ago. There was no line drawn on where the sets ended. It was, you know, take this much off your top set

and keep going until it's an RPE nine. So there's no measurable there. How do you measure that? Right? I think the general approach to that programming is correct for, again, for upper body lifts, especially, but you got to draw the line somewhere. You know, people got lives, you got jobs to get to, you know, you can't be in the gym doing 10 sets of five.

You know, I don't think I did quite that, but I definitely probably did seven. I know I did nine triples one day because the light weight on the offload took forever to tire me out. And I don't think it ever did. I just said, fuck it, I'm done. So I think looking back at your training history

at what you did, so let's say you're doing Texas Method. So you got five sets on Monday, three sets on Wednesday. So it's eight sets and then one set on Friday. That's nine sets. So maybe you want to try 15 total sets and that doesn't mean they're gonna be to all-out failure, you know. So if you have maxes, I like to start a program like this conservatively. I might start at like 70% of max for my heaviest bench press variant that I'm going to do that week and then offload from there for the assistance exercises that are typically lighter and then I might run that up a little fast the week after maybe I'll start at 75% you know with some people

depends how heavy the weight is I think for me 75% went pretty well when I started this recently and then you run up and then you take, you know, roughly 5% off the bar in the beginning. And then once you start reaching that threshold where you're now getting closer and closer to your five rep max, you might take closer to 10% off the bar because the weight's getting heavy. 5% off a 5RM on a more advanced bench presser,

let's say it's a 400 pound bench presser, let's say it's a 400 pound bench presser, in my case, a 315 pound bench presser, that's a whole lot of stress. And I think that might have been what was contributing to the ongoing tendonitis, is that I'd do a top set of five, I did 270 for five, then I did 260 for five. Think about what that sounds like, right?

It's not like doing 135 and 125. So, working off defined metrics works pretty well. By this point, you have those. You either have maxes or you have training data that you can kind of gauge off of. You want that first week to be not warm up weight, but reasonably light so that you can have some runway

into the following weeks. And the offloads, just keep them realistic. When the weight's lighter, the offload can be smaller. When the weight's lighter, the offload can be smaller. When the weight's heavier, the offload can be bigger. And then over time, that volume's going to come down. This is probably something you want to consult with a coach on. It becomes very individual, very unpredictable, and working with somebody who's been through it can be very helpful. But yeah, I think an article's in order on this. So yeah, using some defined metrics based on what you've done, holding yourself accountable to loads and having reasonable offloads when you're

using back offsets at lighter weight, um, are probably some simple common sense things to do. And then of course, as you start moving out of training and into practice, cutting the volume so that you can express that strength is huge. And I think that's where a lot of people mess this up is they get so used to being beat up, they want to stay beat up. They're afraid that if they're not beat up,

they're gonna detrain and lose everything they've worked for. And that's not how it works. You're gonna recover and the heavy weights are gonna fatigue you in a different way and you're gonna need to adapt to that. So take your foot off the gas. You don't have to be beat the fuck up all the time like these people at the Globo Gym

or like these fucking bodybuilders. So that's just my two cents on upper body training beyond that novice intermediate phase. You're gonna do some version of that. Now with lower body training, it seems to be much simpler. You know, you run your linear progression, frequency drops, you're adding weight weekly for a while. You can set a weekly PR for a while into your second year.

And then beyond that, you can go every other week. Now that doesn't mean you're gonna stay on fives forever. You know, this fatigue builds up. What happens in an individual workout is nothing. It's what happens over the course of days, weeks, months that builds up and beats the shit out of you. I mean, you really see this on the squat and deadlift. You might have to take weight off the bar to recover,

do a D-load, you know, eventually. Or maybe if you're preparing for a meet, you know, you cut back the volume, work up to a max, and then start the whole process all over again. And then maybe this time you might be adding weight every other week. You know, I think this approach can work for a good few years. And it's also a good way to ease back into those heavier weights. You know, the other difference that I've noticed with lower body training is that

uh, unlike upper body, the fatigue takes a lot longer to dissipate. So I think a lot of you listening may have experienced this where you run up a lift, you can't get that set of five, and then you just drop off maybe 10, 15, maybe even 20% and start the whole damn process all over. And then all of a sudden, this time you've leapfrogged through all these numbers, right? Let's say maybe you got stuck at 475 for five on the deadlift or let's call it 315, whatever, pick your numbers, right? Let's say maybe you got stuck at 475 for five on the deadlift, or let's call it 315, whatever,

pick your number, right? For me it was 475. Then you just say, okay, I'm gonna drop to 425 and go up every week. And then you go up every week all the way to 485. Then you go up every other week, 490, 495, 500, 505, right? And it's pretty linear progression. You're like, what the hell?

Have I just been doing it wrong all this time? You know, am I an early intermediate? Well, no, stupid, you've recovered. You know, you've basically allowed that fatigue to come off and now you're expressing some of that strength. But then, like before, you hit a wall, right? That's what happened to me. You know, 505 for five, I knew that was it.

From there, that's where you kind of do the same kind of thing. You dial back down, maybe not so much this time, and then start working back up, but now you're spreading it out more, right? You might run up for like a month, month and a half, two months, hit a new PR, pull it back down, do that again.

You know, you repeat that process enough times, you've put in a year or two before that next max. And this is also the difference between somebody who's just training to get as strong as they can versus somebody who's competing in a sport. Sport competitions tend to interfere with acquiring additional PRs, you know, and that doesn't get talked about enough.

You think of a strength athlete, and you think they're gonna lift the heaviest weight possible, and they very well do, but they have other things to consider. know the dates their competitions the weight class are the most competitive in you know they don't typically nurse injuries the way somebody who's just doing this at a gym does you know they'll they'll go to competition and you know they'll compete injured you know they'll do they'll do all sorts of things that's an. But when you're just in the gym like me, and like a lot of you,

and you're just trying to get as strong as you can, you don't have a weight class to consider, you don't have a timetable to consider, you can stay on a program for a real long time and make progress. And I think that also gets lost too. This is something that sort of happens later on when you're an advanced lifter,

an older person who's doing this. You know, you have to kind of plan for these infrequent PRs and then take advantage of the times where you're fresh to run up some numbers, get to a new place and then restart that process a few times, you might have to do that for a period of time before you max out. And it's not quite as clean as it is for a novice. But the one thing that I have seen that's consistent is if you keep showing up, the number will keep going up.

If you keep showing up and you're doing this as safely as you can, over time you'll keep getting stronger doing this. But there comes a point where it just takes a really long fucking time and you gotta just tune it out and keep going. You just tune it out, keep going. And all of a sudden you hit a PR and it's been five years.

And it's a big PR. Then you're like well did I just put 50 pounds on my lift in the last six to 12 months? No, no you didn't. That's all been building for years. Think about Olympians, they're on four year training cycles and if they PR every Olympics, like you take Dimas I think from 92 to 96 to 2000 he PR'd over a 12 year period. But those PR's were not huge. There were a few pounds each time. So most of you are not going to train for the Olympics, but most of you will probably reach a point

where your training status is advanced for one reason or another. Very few of us are young, healthy novices that are not prone to injury and have all the resources in the world to just train. A lot of us have other things going on, either with our bodies or with our lifestyle, that extend that stress recovery adaptation cycle.

And what that basically means is you become an intermediate sooner, you become advanced sooner, and you have to train in such a way to keep the progress going at a slower rate. You do the best you can with what you got. You train around lifestyle, you train around injuries, you train around illness, you figure it out, you just keep showing up. The most important thing is that you keep showing up. So I didn't quite make it an hour this time, but I think I've beaten this point to hell. Hopefully it doesn't sound like complete shit. I've just been talking alone here. It's new for me, so bear with me. Hopefully these will get

better. My next episode will have a guest, so you'll get used to... you'll get the format you're more used to. But I'm gonna have to do these every so often, and I hope I get better. You know, I gotta pretend y'all are sitting here in the room with me and we're just having a conversation. Until then, I think I'm gonna close out now. Thank you for tuning in to room with me and we're just having a conversation. Until then, I think I'm going to close out now. Thank you for tuning in to the Weights and Plates podcast. You can find me at weightsandplates.com. If you are a Metro Phoenix, come to Weights and Plates gym.

It's right here off 32nd Broadway in between the Tempe and Phoenix borders. We've got plenty of racks here, plenty of space. And if you want to come learn how to barbell train, I'm happy to teach you. And go to my website at weightsandplates.com where I offer online strength, nutrition, plenty of space. And you know, if you want to come learn how to barbell train, I'm happy to teach you and go to my website at weights and plates.com where I offer online strength, nutrition and combo coaching. I just added Gretchen Gheist as a strength coach. She's my first strength coach of them myself that's on there. So if you want a strong woman to coach you, you can find her there along with the rest of our team. You can find me on Instagram at

the underscore Robert underscore Santana. The gym is at weights double underscore and double underscore plates. And I should have said this in the beginning. If you like what you heard here today or what you heard in previous episodes, smash that subscribe button on YouTube. Our link is youtube.com slash at weights underscore and underscore plates. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next time.