0:00:04 Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools
0:00:06 for everyday life.
0:00:14 I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford
0:00:15 School of Medicine.
0:00:17 My guest today is Pavel Satzoulin.
0:00:22 Pavel Satzoulin is considered one of the premier strength training and fitness coaches
0:00:23 in the world.
0:00:27 He has pioneered the development of various programs to improve strength, which he calls
0:00:29 the mother of all fitness.
0:00:34 Indeed, today you will learn about strength as a practice, as a skill that can be applied
0:00:40 to sports, that can be applied to general fitness, to getting leaner, to getting faster,
0:00:42 and to improving your endurance.
0:00:47 As Pavel Satzoulin explains, by building one’s strength through body weight exercises, free
0:00:53 weight exercises, and occasionally machines, one can develop incredible levels of fitness
0:00:54 at any age.
0:00:59 We discuss some of the spectacular examples of people in their 70s and 80s performing
0:01:04 strength feats like 100 pull-ups per week, and we emphasize that one does not have to
0:01:05 be seeking hypertrophy.
0:01:10 One does not have to be seeking getting larger muscles in order to get exceptionally strong.
0:01:15 I myself these days am focusing primarily on trying to get stronger and build endurance
0:01:21 for sake of health and for general life reasons, and because getting really strong turns out
0:01:24 to be very beneficial in every aspect of life.
0:01:27 Today you’re going to learn how to get extremely strong.
0:01:33 You can add muscle if you want in parallel with that, or as Pavel Satzoulin explains,
0:01:38 you can pursue strength and flexibility for their own sake, and there’s tremendous value
0:01:39 for doing so.
0:01:44 So today’s discussion pertains to women, to men, and frankly to people of all ages.
0:01:49 I do think that pursuing strength as its own thing, independent of muscle growth, which
0:01:53 we hear so much about these days, everyone wants hypertrophy, grow muscle, this and that.
0:01:57 Pursuing strength as its own thing is a tremendously valuable endeavor.
0:02:02 Today you’re going to learn how from the world’s premier expert in this topic.
0:02:05 You’re in for a very special episode with Pavel Satzoulin.
0:02:09 He is truly in a class all his own when it comes to fitness and strength training.
0:02:13 Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching
0:02:15 and research roles at Stanford.
0:02:19 It is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information
0:02:22 about science and science related tools to the general public.
0:02:26 In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors.
0:02:29 And now for my discussion with Pavel Satzoulin.
0:02:30 Pavel Satzoulin, welcome.
0:02:33 Andrew, pleasure to be on your podcast.
0:02:34 Respect your work a lot.
0:02:35 Thank you.
0:02:36 Likewise.
0:02:37 Thank you.
0:02:43 I will say that you and perhaps one other person have truly changed the way that I think
0:02:49 about fitness, the way that I train, and I’m super excited to talk to you today.
0:02:53 So I’m withholding excitement.
0:02:57 There are a bunch of different ways to think about this thing that we call fitness, strength,
0:03:02 endurance, hypertrophy, and there’s so much information out there now.
0:03:06 How do you conceptualize fitness, meaning do you look at things through the lens of
0:03:10 are we focused on nervous system, bone, connective tissue, or muscle?
0:03:15 Do you look at things through the lens of anterior chain, posterior chain, hypertrophy,
0:03:16 strength?
0:03:19 I would just like to get your sort of high level conceptualization of this thing that
0:03:25 we call fitness with the idea in mind that most people would like to have some level
0:03:30 of endurance, some level of strength and feel healthy and presumably look however they
0:03:31 want to look.
0:03:34 But let’s set aesthetics aside for the moment.
0:03:36 How do you think about this thing we call fitness?
0:03:42 Well, first of all Andrew, strength is the mother quality of all the other qualities.
0:03:48 So this is again, it’s a statement by Paperson Matveev, Leonid Matveev going way back.
0:03:52 And without a foundation of strength, you cannot build anything.
0:03:57 So any athletic event requires a base of strength.
0:04:04 Of course, that shot putter is going to need much more strength than triathlon athlete,
0:04:11 but the only strength, speaking of which, in triathlon, in marathon running, in distance,
0:04:18 in cycling, it’s been proven that putting athletes on a heavy, low repetition strength
0:04:22 regimen, the kind that doesn’t really add muscle but just makes you stronger neurologically
0:04:26 and it makes them race faster.
0:04:29 So once you’re stronger, everything becomes easier.
0:04:32 How much stronger you need to get, that will vary.
0:04:37 In the Soviet Union, they had something called the model athlete.
0:04:42 So they figured out that for every particular event, your odds of succeeding are going to
0:04:46 be much higher if you’re able to squat this much or bench this much and jump this high
0:04:48 and so on and so forth.
0:04:53 And this is easy enough to find these numbers for your individual sport and talk to various
0:04:59 coaches. For people who are not competitive athletes, you just want to enjoy life, you
0:05:04 just need to think about having a reserve of strength for whatever it is that you might
0:05:05 do.
0:05:10 So look at some PT standards and let’s say in the military or in law enforcement and
0:05:12 possibly apply them to yourself.
0:05:16 I don’t want to impose my set of standards because there are many different, like I might
0:05:22 prefer pull-ups in X and Y and Z, but if we’re looking at strength as the foundation for
0:05:27 general physical preparation, so there’s such a thing as general strength preparation, that’s
0:05:28 part of that.
0:05:33 There’s also special strength, which is sport-specific work, that’s different.
0:05:38 And there are different ways of getting this done, but as you and I know that certain exercises
0:05:43 are going to have a great carryover outside these particular exercises.
0:05:49 So as long as you’re mobile, as long as you’re symmetrical, and those are the things you have
0:05:55 to address first, you need to look into work of great cook, for example, then strength has
0:05:58 to be your priority.
0:06:03 Once you have reached a certain level of strength that’s appropriate for your sport or appropriate
0:06:09 for your lifestyle, at that point you can just maintain it and focus on other qualities.
0:06:14 So I will give you an example.
0:06:21 The scientists, Vysovich and Zhenyushenka, they measured a number of athletes in 20 different
0:06:23 sports, athletes of different levels.
0:06:27 So they evaluated various quality, one was absolute strength, and now there was rate
0:06:30 of force development, pretty much power.
0:06:36 And the third is the rate of muscular relaxation, so how quickly the muscle can relax after
0:06:40 contraction, which is very, very important.
0:06:46 And they have found that strength grew just very little from the intermediate level to
0:06:47 the advanced level.
0:06:49 There’s not a lot of improvement.
0:06:56 Power increased a little bit more, but the speed of relaxation is just shut up as the
0:06:58 athlete became more advanced.
0:07:03 So it’s again, so strength, it is the mother of all qualities, but that’s not the end
0:07:04 door for everybody.
0:07:09 So reach the level that is appropriate for your sport or activity, then just maintain
0:07:14 it efficiently and focus on something else.
0:07:19 If we talk about strength, if we talk about other qualities, we’ll get to them later.
0:07:25 What movements do you believe, if they exist, all people should include in their weekly
0:07:30 routine some place when thinking about how to develop, perhaps maintain, but for most
0:07:35 people it’s going to be the goal of still achieving some strength.
0:07:36 Strength increase, excuse me.
0:07:41 I think there has to be a very low quantity of exercises, just very few exercises you
0:07:46 want to focus on, and I’m going to give you some options to choose from.
0:07:50 So what we try to do is, first of my company, my school of strength, is we try to provide
0:07:55 people with various simple, very low-tech, high-concept ways of addressing, reaching
0:08:01 their knees, because for one reason or another, for this individual, the barbell is the preferred
0:08:02 tool for another.
0:08:05 It’s the kettlebell or body weight or something else.
0:08:08 So I’m not going to say that if you don’t do kettlebell swings or barbell squats, you’ll
0:08:11 never amount to anything, that’s just not true.
0:08:14 But you can pick some, you can pick some events.
0:08:18 So you definitely ought to do something for your posterior chain, you absolutely do.
0:08:27 If we are looking at the barbell, I would start out with the narrow sumo deadlift.
0:08:29 So this is narrow grip?
0:08:33 Not narrow grip, pardon me, but your stance is just wide enough to let your arms through.
0:08:36 So arms stay parallel to each other.
0:08:39 And so you just find a very comfortable stance for yourself.
0:08:44 So Professor McGill has been in your podcast, he explained to you about the different hip
0:08:45 architecture and so on.
0:08:49 So you have to find whatever works, whatever works for you.
0:08:54 And when people talk about functional strength training, and then they start standing on
0:08:57 a ball and juggling oranges, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, because that doesn’t
0:08:59 look like my life or yours probably, right?
0:09:04 But if you have to get a heavy bag of groceries or something, you’ve got a deadlift.
0:09:08 And the narrow sumo deadlift, so if you look at power lifters, an example would be, a classic
0:09:12 example would be Ed Kohn, that’s a narrow stance sumo.
0:09:15 I’m not talking about wide sumo, that’s a very sport specific event.
0:09:19 And you practice that first, you learn how to hip hinge.
0:09:22 It’s extremely important to learn how to hip hinge.
0:09:27 Again, Stuart stressed that how important it is for your back health and for your longevity.
0:09:28 So you learn to do that.
0:09:33 Even whether you decide to pursue the deadlift or not, if you decide not to pursue high numbers
0:09:39 in the deadlift, maybe it’s not appropriate for you, or maybe you like in the coaching.
0:09:42 Fantastic exercise for everybody is a zercher squat.
0:09:48 So in a zercher squat, you hold the bar like this in the crux of your elbows.
0:09:50 So it’s resting right here.
0:09:55 It’s possible to pick it up off the ground, but it’s an advanced skill, it’s an advanced
0:09:56 skill.
0:09:58 Better just to walk it off the rack.
0:10:02 The advantage of the zercher squat over let’s say the back squat or the front squat is even
0:10:07 if you have messed up shoulders, wrists, elbows, you still can do that.
0:10:11 Coaching the zercher squat is very easy, very simple.
0:10:16 And you have tremendous reflexive stabilization of your midsection.
0:10:18 It’s just very, very powerful.
0:10:21 So you acquire that skill of getting tight.
0:10:26 So getting high numbers on that exercise in the zercher, so let’s say an athlete could
0:10:30 shoot for double body weight, that’s a really good goal.
0:10:35 And the bar for those listening, not watching, is cradled in the crux of the elbows in front
0:10:36 of the body.
0:10:37 Are the arms crossed?
0:10:40 You can hold them like this, you can hold them like this, there are different ways of
0:10:41 holding them.
0:10:43 You definitely would want to get proper coaching.
0:10:46 You don’t want to, you know, you don’t want to bruise yourself.
0:10:47 You want to be comfortable.
0:10:48 You want to do it right.
0:10:51 But it’s not, doesn’t take a lot of skill to do that.
0:10:54 You find some pressing exercise.
0:10:59 And again, if we’re sticking with the example of the barbell, the bench press has gotten
0:11:02 bad reputation, you know, thanks to the gym bros.
0:11:05 And you know, all gym bros is there, is the bench pretty much.
0:11:08 Well, these days they also check out their phones, I guess.
0:11:10 Every set, between every set.
0:11:13 The 11th rep, I joke, people check in their phones.
0:11:14 Yeah, there we go.
0:11:20 But if you look at athletes, they, yeah, athletes who also do some lower body works
0:11:23 and posterior chain, chain work and something for the midsection.
0:11:26 And again, the Zercher squad could address that.
0:11:28 They are making a great use of the bench press.
0:11:32 So it’s nothing, it’s a very simple exercise, well, not very simple.
0:11:34 It’s a relatively simple exercise.
0:11:40 And unlike other pressing exercises, it allows you to make strength gains with a very low
0:11:42 volume of training.
0:11:47 So you can do several sets of five once a week in the bench press and keep getting stronger.
0:11:50 Would like doing that in the overhead press when they want to push up or something like
0:11:51 that.
0:11:53 So those are just a couple of examples.
0:11:54 There are many other examples.
0:11:57 You can do snatch grip deadlifts.
0:12:00 You can, the list is very, very long.
0:12:02 We can address the same thing in the same way with kettlebells.
0:12:06 You can look at the body weight exercises, but you need to find several exercises that
0:12:13 have a reputation for building strength that reaches beyond the ability to do this exercise.
0:12:17 If you just do curls, you know, you’re going to do, you’re going to get better at curls,
0:12:19 but not at much else.
0:12:27 So Canadian, Canadian scientist back in the 80s, the DBCL and his team made some interesting,
0:12:28 some interesting discoveries.
0:12:32 Again, they just found that doing something like extensions is not going to carry over
0:12:33 to the squad.
0:12:34 It just not.
0:12:38 The coordination is so radically different.
0:12:46 So you find several exercises that you enjoy that don’t hurt you, that you have the equipment
0:12:51 available, that you got the proper coaching for, and you pretty much stick with them.
0:12:55 And there is absolutely no reason for you to change these exercises.
0:12:59 It’s possible to change them on the margins, you know, from a wide grip bench press to
0:13:04 narrow grip bench press, squats with a pause and so on and so forth, but you don’t really
0:13:08 have to do a great variety of things.
0:13:09 Variety is a good topic.
0:13:11 We can discuss this later.
0:13:17 But like looking at the example of weightlifting, as much as we can find many reasons why variety
0:13:24 could be beneficial, improve neuroplasticity, reduced risk of repeated strain injury and
0:13:30 so on, but the statistics in weightlifting, there’s no correlation between the number
0:13:33 of exercises and the platform results.
0:13:36 And for people outside the sports, it’s going to be the same.
0:13:42 So find this limited, just limited battery of exercises that you can do well, you can
0:13:46 do pain free, and just enjoy them for years.
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0:16:38 Would a combination across the week of some sort of squat, let’s say the Zercher squat,
0:16:45 perhaps a kettlebell swing or something else for posterior chain pull-up and dip be a fairly
0:16:47 comprehensive program?
0:16:48 Absolutely.
0:16:49 I’m a fan of dips.
0:16:50 I like dips a lot.
0:16:56 Some years ago, you said that you were using dips for economy of time, and I started getting
0:16:57 into dips.
0:17:03 I haven’t quite figured out the best way to load dips, because once you get past 15,
0:17:08 20 repetitions of the body weight dip, it turns into something else.
0:17:09 Sure, absolutely.
0:17:11 It turns into aerobic exercise, perhaps.
0:17:16 Well, Luke Ames, he was a powerlifter from the Golden Age of American Powerlifting.
0:17:18 He says, “Anything over six reps is bodybuilding.”
0:17:22 I’m trying to stay in the lower rep range today.
0:17:27 I’ll talk about this with you more, because I think a growing number of people, both men
0:17:31 and women who are starting to do weight training or really incorporate strength training into
0:17:36 their program, are seeking a combination of strength and perhaps endurance as well without
0:17:37 putting on too much size.
0:17:39 Maybe size in some select body parts.
0:17:44 Well, Andrew, I think they need to do possibly several different types of training, but going
0:17:49 back to your examples, dips are fantastic if your shoulders can handle them, if you
0:17:50 know how to do them.
0:17:53 It’s a great exercise, but not particularly democratic.
0:17:54 That’s the problem.
0:17:56 So either you can do it safely or you can’t.
0:18:01 And possibly it’s possible to coach some people to do the dip.
0:18:05 So if you’re coaching somebody to do the dip, the first prerequisite is to build up to a
0:18:07 full-skinned cap.
0:18:11 So it means you’re hanging upside down, look up what it means, folks, on a bar, so you
0:18:13 got to be able to get yourself in that position.
0:18:18 So if you’re able to do that, and if you’re able to get out of the position, you know,
0:18:23 strongly and confidently, there’s a good chance that you can start up and doing dips and be
0:18:24 coaching to that.
0:18:26 If you can’t, probably not.
0:18:31 So either try to build up to that, unless there are medical restrictions or not.
0:18:33 You mentioned the example of pull-ups.
0:18:37 Absolutely pull-ups are one of the best general strength exercises.
0:18:41 And again, to your listeners, general versus special.
0:18:44 Special in Soviet terminology is sport specific.
0:18:51 So the carryover, when you start doing pull-ups, when you excel at pull-ups or the dips, you
0:18:55 are going to get a carryover so far beyond this exercise, which is exactly the reason
0:18:56 you do that.
0:18:58 So I like your choices very much, yeah.
0:19:01 What about specialized training for grip strength?
0:19:08 I believe that if somebody is large, if they can squat 500 pounds, if they can deadlift
0:19:13 600 pounds, I don’t really care if the question is, can you open the pickle jar?
0:19:14 Sure.
0:19:15 This is a critical.
0:19:17 I just get my wife to do it.
0:19:22 So grip strength is extremely important.
0:19:25 And you being a neuroscientist, you know, the disproportionate representation, the motor
0:19:28 cortex of your gripping muscles and the forearm and everything.
0:19:33 So and there is another reason why grip is so important.
0:19:38 So if you make a fist, if you make a very tight fist, you’re going to feel, you’re going
0:19:42 to feel the overflow of tension, irradiation going to other muscles.
0:19:49 So pretty much by gripping tighter, you are instantly increasing your strengths in anything
0:19:50 that you do.
0:19:59 And so a very simple example for listeners, take some pedestrian exercise like curls and
0:20:04 do as many strict traps as you possibly can, the way you normally do them, and then start
0:20:08 just crushing that bar or that dumbbell or whatever that you’re curling, you will immediately
0:20:10 be able to knock out several more reps.
0:20:12 So that makes you so much stronger.
0:20:17 And again, the value of a strong wrist and grip is obviously very important.
0:20:21 For whatever reason, obviously it correlates with longevity, we don’t know why.
0:20:26 We have no idea, correlation is not causation, so we don’t know whether getting a stronger
0:20:30 grip is going to make us live longer, but statistically it’s worth a try, right?
0:20:38 So one can either find exercises that train the grip and the context of developing something
0:20:41 else or train the grip directly.
0:20:43 So either way is great.
0:20:50 So the first examples would be climbing the rope or doing pull-ups and weighted pull-ups
0:20:51 on a rope.
0:20:53 That’s a great way to train, obviously.
0:20:56 So what you do, the way you program it is, let’s say once a week you climb the rope
0:20:58 and a couple of days a week you do pull-ups.
0:21:02 That’s a good way to go about it, and you don’t need to do anything else.
0:21:07 And another example would be some exercises like the kettlebell snatch.
0:21:12 When you start snatching a heavy kettlebell and you drop it from overhead, that eccentric
0:21:15 loading is very, very powerful.
0:21:18 And that develops grip very, very well.
0:21:24 And again, right now we’re talking more about what people in the grip world call the crushing
0:21:26 grip, how you squeeze something.
0:21:31 There are other types of grip that they differentiated, but this type of crushing grip is what’s going
0:21:36 to help most athletes and non-athletes the most.
0:21:44 And I will also warn you that hanging on the bar and doing farmer’s carries, beneficial
0:21:48 as they are for many reasons, it’s not going to do that much for them.
0:21:49 Interesting.
0:21:53 I started incorporating farmer’s carries thinking it was going to improve my grip, but…
0:21:55 They’re healthy.
0:22:02 If you look at McGill’s work, he will tell you that carrying two heavy objects, it’s
0:22:05 going to really pound your spine.
0:22:10 But on the other hand, asymmetrical carry, it appears to be very beneficial.
0:22:11 Then there’s another interesting example.
0:22:15 Now right now I’m not talking about grip training at all.
0:22:19 Not even talking about strength training, but I’m talking about sort of a former run.
0:22:24 Dr. Mike Privost, who used to work with the US Marine Corps Navy, he developed this very
0:22:28 interesting protocol in a test called the kettlebell mile, where you take a kettlebell
0:22:34 that’s approximately 30% of your body weight, and he has good reasons for why it has to
0:22:35 be that way.
0:22:40 You pretty much run with this kettlebell, and you switch hands as often as you want.
0:22:47 It’s a fantastic way to improve your running posture, to develop very stabilizing muscles,
0:22:52 and to improve your ability to rock, but it doesn’t beat you up as much as rocking does.
0:22:54 Rocking carrying heavy weight, it’s rough on the body.
0:23:01 It’s a fantastic way to train your endurance, an additional way.
0:23:03 How heavy is the kettlebell that’s…
0:23:04 Yeah.
0:23:07 Because he says when you start going heavier, it’s going to affect your gait.
0:23:14 So you have to kick your hip over to the side, it becomes something else.
0:23:15 That’s a heavy kettlebell.
0:23:16 30% of your body weight?
0:23:17 Yeah.
0:23:18 I’m 210 pounds.
0:23:19 It’s not trivial.
0:23:25 It’s probably something like 62 pounds or something like that, 70 pound kettlebell.
0:23:30 No, no, it’s not trivial by any means, but it’s also not something you jump into immediately,
0:23:36 and also, what’s very cool is because you get to switch hands very often, you’re not
0:23:41 destroying your QOL and other stabilizers that are contracting isometrically.
0:23:44 And so what we’re doing right now here is kind of a form of anti-glycolytic training.
0:23:50 If muscle contracts briefly and then relaxes, contracts, relaxes within the contraction
0:23:54 cycles are really short, you’re able to avoid glycolysis, you’re able to keep that muscle
0:23:58 working aerobically for a long time and not beat yourself down.
0:24:05 So to the listeners who’d like to try it, start by walking with a kettlebell, switch
0:24:09 hands off, and then eventually build up to running and obviously build up gradually.
0:24:10 Held like a suitcase?
0:24:13 Yes, only like a suitcase.
0:24:14 Okay.
0:24:17 Yeah, there’s a podcast led by a guy named Cam Haynes.
0:24:18 He’s a bow hunter.
0:24:22 He’s one of the people that really brought extreme fitness and ultras to the sport of
0:24:24 bow hunting and is legendary there.
0:24:28 And for his podcast, he has you carry the 72-pound rock up, it’s about 1,000 feet of
0:24:34 elevation in the Oregon wilderness and I’ve done it, it’s hard because of the shape of
0:24:35 the thing.
0:24:42 And so you’re moving it from shoulder to football carry to infant carry and you’re not talking
0:24:43 about that.
0:24:45 You’re talking about suitcase on the right.
0:24:46 Correct.
0:24:47 Are you trying to crush the grip while you’re doing it?
0:24:49 No, no, this is not developing a grip.
0:24:53 And then, and you’re running at 10, 20 minutes, 30 minutes?
0:24:56 Well, he says run for a mile, that’s the goal.
0:24:57 And he has some numbers.
0:24:58 I can give you a link.
0:24:59 You can look it up.
0:25:00 Great.
0:25:01 Mike Prevost.
0:25:04 And direct grip strength training is great as well.
0:25:08 So for example, the best product for that would be the captains of crush grippers from
0:25:10 IronMind.
0:25:15 IronMind is the company that started a serious grip training pretty much in modern era.
0:25:18 And their grippers are the golden standard.
0:25:22 Some years ago, my colleague as strong for his Brad Jones and I, we decided to get serious
0:25:24 about it and see what that feels like.
0:25:25 And we spent many, many months.
0:25:32 We were both able to build up to closing the number three gripper from apparel set.
0:25:37 So that means that gripper takes 280 pounds to close.
0:25:41 And when you’re using very small muscle groups, it’s extremely, extremely hard.
0:25:46 And the observations that we both made and other colleagues and people have made that
0:25:50 once you are able to do that, everything becomes so much easier.
0:25:54 However, the training itself is extremely hard because people are thinking that when
0:25:57 you’re training the grip, it’s just some kind of isolated thing.
0:26:01 You can, you can ride the car and you can kind of squeeze this little pink thing that
0:26:05 you picked up at the department store or no.
0:26:12 When you train with a heavy duty gripper like the one from IronMind, it’s a full body effort.
0:26:23 And you need to use pretty much every neurological trick in the book in order to, to exert yourself.
0:26:32 So for example, if you, if you have ever seen the Sanchin stance in karate, which is, it’s
0:26:36 a stance where the knees are kind of pulled inward and shoulders are pressed down.
0:26:42 There’s a lot of, a lot of tension and everything, everything’s very, very seriously engaged.
0:26:44 The toes are gripping the ground.
0:26:46 So you’re pretty much gripping the ground with your toes.
0:26:48 You’re contracting your glutes.
0:26:50 You’re bracing very, very hard.
0:26:55 You’re compressing your viscera, your lattice firing and you’re sending this, all this effort.
0:26:59 Everything, the only thing they’re not working like you try to keep your traps and face out
0:27:00 of this.
0:27:03 And you’re directing this effort into your grip.
0:27:07 You get just as tired from doing that work as from doing like heavy squats or something.
0:27:09 That’s remarkable.
0:27:13 But if you like that, it’s a fantastic thing to do.
0:27:19 The motor neuron recruitment that you are describing is phenomenal.
0:27:24 I have one reflection on this relationship between grip strength and longevity.
0:27:26 Just a little bit of neuroscience.
0:27:31 You may be familiar with this, so forgive me if you are, but for the listeners as well.
0:27:36 The motor neurons that control movement of the torso lie closer to the midline on both
0:27:38 sides of the spinal cord.
0:27:44 The motor neurons that are responsible for more distal muscles, that is further from
0:27:46 the midline, sit outside of those.
0:27:52 And so as you get out to the movement of the digits, you know, the fingers and toes, those
0:27:55 are the most distal from the midline.
0:28:00 The rate and pattern of degeneration of motor neurons as a function of aging, even if there’s
0:28:05 no ALS or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or anything, is always outside in.
0:28:06 We don’t know why this is.
0:28:13 It may relate to the presence of the enzyme SOD, superoxide dimutase.
0:28:20 But it does seem that people that train their peripheral strength, they can offset some
0:28:26 of that outside to in or distal to more close to the midline degeneration.
0:28:30 So I believe, and this is just a belief that it’s not just correlative, that when one trains
0:28:34 their periphery, they actually can offset some of the degeneration.
0:28:37 It’s also the way it’s mapped in the brain, which is a kind of a discussion outside of
0:28:38 here.
0:28:41 We need to get some diagrams up for people to really conceptualize that.
0:28:48 But it’s also the case if you look at older people, 70, 80, 90, their calves are generally
0:28:52 atrophied even if their torso is still very thick and muscular if they did training.
0:28:56 So I feel like obviously training the core and the torso is so key, but training the
0:29:00 peripheral muscles, at least from the perspective of longevity, it makes sense why that would
0:29:01 be important.
0:29:03 Well, there are so many reasons, obviously, to do that.
0:29:09 So I think that whether you choose to do that directly with grippers or, and there are some
0:29:14 other devices, obviously, unlimited number of devices and exercises, or as a part of
0:29:18 another exercise, like climbing the rope, definitely strongly encouraging listeners
0:29:19 to do that.
0:29:25 I’m going to try this running with the kettlebell on one side for, I’ll go out for a mile with
0:29:26 it on the right, and then…
0:29:27 Oh, no, no, no.
0:29:29 You switch back and forth as much as you want.
0:29:34 Because if you try to do it on one side, you are going to pound your stabilizers and just
0:29:35 pound them.
0:29:36 You’re not going to recover forever.
0:29:45 And this way, this is one of the secrets to developing isometric endurance is very rapid
0:29:51 switching short contractions and brief rests and over and over and over.
0:29:58 That way, the muscle doesn’t go into ischemia and keeps getting oxygen pretty much.
0:30:03 I’d like to talk about concentric versus eccentric portions of a movement, concentric generally
0:30:10 being the lifting phase and eccentric, of course, folks, the lowering phase.
0:30:13 Is there a case for just doing concentric movements?
0:30:17 Is there a case for emphasizing the eccentric portion?
0:30:22 How does one balance those when thinking about soreness, recovery and frequency of training?
0:30:28 Well, first of all, the case for concentric only is if you’re trying to minimize muscle
0:30:32 growth and if you also are trying to minimize soreness.
0:30:38 So for athletes in weight classes or athletes in sports where you get punished by carrying
0:30:41 extra weight, it’s a very good idea.
0:30:49 So for example, when Barry Ross coached Alison Felix at that point, she became the fastest.
0:30:52 She won the 200 meters in the world.
0:30:53 She was 17 years old.
0:30:55 I think she was the youngest.
0:30:59 And so he would have her do deadlifts and they were concentric only and she would have
0:31:01 her drop the bar.
0:31:05 And the reasoning for that is exactly that you’re able to get stronger.
0:31:08 You’re not putting on extra muscle mass.
0:31:10 So it’s safe.
0:31:13 It’s really a very, very safe way to train.
0:31:21 And in programming a protocol for somebody who’s not necessarily in that boat, it’s
0:31:23 still just for the sake of variety.
0:31:29 You may want to choose to avoid the eccentric on certain days like you’re trying to recover,
0:31:30 accelerate the recovery.
0:31:34 So you lift the weight, but then you step down.
0:31:37 So you could definitely do that.
0:31:42 Eccentric work, it’s supposedly very helpful to promote hypertrophy, but there are a lot
0:31:45 of ifs and buts in there.
0:31:53 I’m going to talk right now about the eccentric strength work for strength specifically.
0:31:56 It’s very, because the muscle is strongest whenever you lower in the weight, it’s very
0:32:03 easy to do something knuckleheaded and get hurt, which is Jim Brose do that all the time.
0:32:11 And instead of doing that, what the wise, much wiser approach is to get a perfect spotter,
0:32:17 great competent spotter and put on after you’ve done your normal couple of lower repetition
0:32:27 heavy sets, add maybe 5, 10 pounds over your maximum and make a perfect eccentric with
0:32:30 an intention of lifting it.
0:32:35 So you’re lowering this bar that you’re just the bench press barbell.
0:32:39 You’re lowering it to your chest and you’re loading yourself like you’re ready to press
0:32:40 it back.
0:32:44 You pause on your chest without losing tension, you’re ready to blast it back and then your
0:32:52 spotters take it off you and you do this about two, three times.
0:33:01 This sort of a strategy or variation of it was used by Rick Will, he was able to bench
0:33:07 press over 500 pounds wearing a T-shirt at the body weight of Buck 81.
0:33:12 Back in the 80s, one of the greatest bench pressers who was extremely intelligent about
0:33:13 his training.
0:33:16 And he did the same thing with his heavy attempts as well.
0:33:23 And incidentally, even better, not even better, I should say you do this in a different day.
0:33:30 When you combine this, the same type of eccentric with a very perfect assisted trap, not forced
0:33:37 trap like bros do, it’s all you bro, you know, the guy shaking there and dying, no.
0:33:41 So again, let’s say that your best bench press is, you know, 315.
0:33:44 So you load up 325.
0:33:51 You lower it perfectly and you’re not and you’re lowering at the speed of your max attempt.
0:33:53 So you’re not going very, very, very slow.
0:33:54 You know how guys do it.
0:33:59 They take the first quarter of the range of motion very slow and then they fall through.
0:34:00 That doesn’t do anything at all.
0:34:08 No, you lower it at that rhythm of your maximal weight, you pause and then you press it and
0:34:14 your training partner gives you enough assistance to make it feel like it’s about your 90%.
0:34:16 So the fact is you’re not free.
0:34:22 You get to feel a supermaximal weight, but you’re not experiencing any psychological stress.
0:34:23 It’s very, very powerful.
0:34:28 And again, you do this, you do this maybe for one or two singles.
0:34:32 This also ties with the Soviet research on gymnasts.
0:34:36 They came up with something called artificial controlling environment.
0:34:42 So they compared a group of gymnasts that was working up to some strength demanding
0:34:45 skill with doing typical regressions.
0:34:50 And at the same time, they were also working on typical strength training, weighted pull-ups
0:34:51 and so on.
0:34:59 And the other group would have the coach provide this perfect assistance to enable the athlete
0:35:05 to perform the skill at a high level as they put it, living their motor future, motor future.
0:35:09 But with enough help not to make it hard, but not stressful.
0:35:12 And the difference in gains were just just just dramatically, there’s so much again,
0:35:14 so much faster.
0:35:20 So I would say that would be a very good way to use eccentric work.
0:35:25 Isometric training calls can also be very powerful for strength.
0:35:32 And a great value of isometric training is in its ability to coach you to live properly.
0:35:37 And not just live properly, other athletic events as well.
0:35:42 If let’s say that you’re trying to learn to throw a front kick and you’re doing it
0:35:44 all over the place.
0:35:50 But if you place your foot on a wall and if your coach or sensei positions your body,
0:35:56 your foot in a certain way and teaches you to start applying pressure to the wall and
0:36:02 the ground at the same time and kind of a pulse against the wall, adjust your body and
0:36:05 then you relax, shake off your muscles and you go hit the bag and suddenly you’re going
0:36:07 to do so much better.
0:36:12 The same thing, let’s say that you’re trying to optimize your position for the bottom of
0:36:13 the deadlift.
0:36:18 So you load up more weight that you could possibly lift and then you wedge yourself under and
0:36:22 you start applying pressure and it doesn’t feel good.
0:36:23 So you change it a little bit.
0:36:30 So isometrics are very powerful for not just for strengthening the sticking points, but
0:36:33 also for optimizing the angles.
0:36:39 Then we’re also dealing with something that there’s also a great disinhibition effect.
0:36:46 So what your listeners might not know is, so there are two, you have two pedals in your
0:36:49 nervous system, as in pardon me for telling you this, you don’t need, obviously you know
0:36:55 all this, but there’s the excitation inhibition, there’s the gas pedal and the brake pedal.
0:37:02 And there are various influences, some of them psychological, but not all of them that are
0:37:05 taking away from your strength, that’s called inhibition.
0:37:08 And under certain circumstances, there are documented cases like a lady lifting off the
0:37:15 front of a 36 pound, 3600 pound car to save her son and there are documented cases of that.
0:37:18 So that disinhibition takes place.
0:37:25 So isometrics does have some disinhibition effects properties, very, very powerful.
0:37:31 So isometrics teaches you to, teaches you not to give up on a heavy attempt.
0:37:38 Because if you put, the experiments were done in a safe manner on the machines, obviously,
0:37:45 but if you put an inexperienced person and the machine is moving at a slow rate.
0:37:53 So when the speed starts approaching zero, that inhibition takes place.
0:37:57 So pretty much the subject, things the gig is up, I’m not going anywhere.
0:37:58 That’s it.
0:37:59 I’m done.
0:38:00 I’m just giving up because I failed.
0:38:04 But training with isometrics allows you to develop, to develop this kind of a neural
0:38:08 drive endurance that you need to grind through safely through a heavy attempt.
0:38:10 So very, very powerful.
0:38:11 How would you incorporate isometrics into it?
0:38:16 So you can do this as a part of your warmup.
0:38:21 You can also do pause wraps, they’re fantastic.
0:38:27 When you combine, combine eccentric, concentric and isometric attraction all in one.
0:38:31 So perfect example for the squat, you lower to the parallel and you stay tight and you
0:38:35 stay there for three to five seconds and then you explode upward.
0:38:39 So that’s a great way to train.
0:38:41 I’d like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor AG1.
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0:39:58 I’d like to talk about neural drive.
0:40:04 I attribute you with popularizing, maybe you invented it, but I’m certainly popularizing
0:40:08 the term “greasing the groove” in one of your books.
0:40:11 By the way, we provide links to Pavel’s books in the show note captions.
0:40:14 I’m a collector of your books.
0:40:15 I love them.
0:40:18 Some of them are getting to be collector’s items that are a little bit harder to find,
0:40:21 but you’ll have to compete with me on eBay.
0:40:25 Some of them can be found elsewhere and we’ll provide links to those.
0:40:30 This notion of greasing the groove completely changed my conceptualization of strength training
0:40:36 because I was weaned more or less trying to run cross-country during the cross-country
0:40:37 season.
0:40:40 I only ran it once, but I greatly enjoyed it and continued that sort of training or
0:40:46 trying to put on strength and size, kind of a numbskull, young male approach to things,
0:40:49 but it served me reasonably well.
0:40:51 I’m grateful that I included both.
0:41:00 However, I was so tuned to this notion of training a body part, creating an adaptation,
0:41:04 and waiting for the adaptation to occur, and then training the body part again.
0:41:07 The arguments are all over the internet two times a week, three times a week, and then
0:41:12 I came across this concept of greasing the groove, which as a neuroscientist felt so
0:41:18 intuitively correct and turns out to be correct, you’ll explain what it is, but the idea that
0:41:23 more frequent training or practicing of a movement opens up a tremendous number of
0:41:29 opportunities for development of strength, of size, hypertrophy if one wants, and I would
0:41:34 say just generally more flexibility over one’s total fitness program.
0:41:38 Once one understands this concept, you no longer look at this split or that split or
0:41:41 this many reps or that many reps or this volume or that volume.
0:41:44 All that is important, but you can start to think about it through the lens of the nervous
0:41:50 system, and to me, it was like water in a desert to finally encounter something that
0:41:54 brought together all these different concepts.
0:41:57 Could you please explain for people what greasing the groove is, and then I think the
0:42:00 implications of it will become obvious, but we’ll also spell out.
0:42:04 Andrew, please interrupt me because this is about to become a, this might get really
0:42:06 long, so please interrupt me at any time.
0:42:09 So first I’ll talk about the neural component, then we’re going to talk about the frequency
0:42:13 and the morphological adaptation, structural adaptations as it leads.
0:42:20 So ladies and gentlemen, greasing the groove, we are talking about, let’s use an analogy.
0:42:27 Let’s imagine that you are a bow hunter, and you work in your garage, and then you walk
0:42:32 out of your garage, and you shoot an arrow, and you just go back to going about your business
0:42:40 just working in your garage, or let’s say your kid, who practices martial arts, and
0:42:45 on every break between classes, you just go in the corner and you practice your kata.
0:42:49 This is the best way to practice your skill.
0:42:52 In small portions, in a spaced out manner.
0:43:00 What’s really fascinating is traditional education and traditional strength training.
0:43:02 It’s based on the cramming model.
0:43:04 So remember cramming for an exam.
0:43:09 So you’re studying at night, and you somehow squeak by and you pass it.
0:43:10 Okay, great.
0:43:14 And then a couple of days later, you happily forget everything.
0:43:18 So in contrast, imagine that you are, let’s say you’re studying a foreign language.
0:43:24 You write words on cards, and at every opportunity, you’re standing in line in the bank.
0:43:27 So the lesser mortals are fooling around in their phones.
0:43:30 You’re just going through your deck, like, “Oh, can I translate this word or go put it
0:43:31 back in the deck?
0:43:32 Flip it over.”
0:43:36 The next time you are in some other place, you do this again.
0:43:41 So this is an example of space practice versus the traditional mass practice.
0:43:48 And the evidence of the superiority of space practice is just overwhelming.
0:43:53 It goes back to the 19th century, and there is at least more than a thousand papers published
0:43:54 on that.
0:43:57 And still very few people do that, which is really sad.
0:44:01 And strength is a skill.
0:44:04 So two interesting things happened in the ’50s.
0:44:09 One is Thomas Rush, he was an American exercise physiologist.
0:44:16 He proposed that strength adaptation was largely skill.
0:44:19 And he looked at pretty much that adaptation and he noticed that there’s no correlation
0:44:22 between the muscle growth and strength.
0:44:30 Then at the same time, a Soviet scientist, Stepanov, was his last name, he was measuring
0:44:35 the electrical activity in the muscles of weight lifters who were pressing overhead,
0:44:39 and back then the press was one of the competition events.
0:44:46 And what he found is as the athletes got stronger after some months, the EMGs started dropping
0:44:49 off when they were lifting the same weights.
0:44:54 So pretty much he found out that the nervous system activity became more economical.
0:45:00 They were able to try less hard, yet still lift the same weights.
0:45:05 Or pretty much they could try harder and lift even heavier weights.
0:45:09 And hypertrophy could not explain that because in the ’50s the Soviets were very anti-hypertrophy,
0:45:13 they were just doing double, triple singles pretty much.
0:45:21 So if we look at what’s going on, it’s the hebeon mechanisms.
0:45:26 So pretty much every time that you activate a particular connection, synaptic connection
0:45:31 between the neurons, that connection becomes stronger.
0:45:33 So if you do it over and over and over.
0:45:39 So the grease, the groove is the analogy is that command that’s coming in from your brain
0:45:43 to your muscles, that’s the groove, that’s that pathway.
0:45:47 And the more you use it, pretty much the more grease it becomes, so it becomes a superconductor.
0:45:50 So in the future, you don’t have to try as hard to lift the same amount of weight, or
0:45:53 you can try the same amount and you can lift harder.
0:45:55 So we haven’t even addressed the neural drive yet.
0:46:00 We just pretty much made the modern neurons more responsive to it.
0:46:06 And it’s a very easy and very simple way to train.
0:46:11 And strength comes very easily and very, very unexpectedly.
0:46:18 To make sure that it does happen, you have to address the issue of specificity.
0:46:23 So specificity pretty much means without getting too much into the weeds, to get stronger.
0:46:26 First of all, you need to lift weights that are heavy enough.
0:46:30 And if you’re looking about percentages of one-wrapped max, we’re looking at like 75
0:46:33 to 85 typically.
0:46:38 If you go too light, you don’t make the impression on your nervous system, and it’s just not
0:46:39 specific enough.
0:46:43 If you go to heavy, very quickly, you’re just going to burn yourself out.
0:46:48 And so pretty much like it’s a weight that’s heavy enough to respect and light enough not
0:46:50 to fear.
0:46:56 And the second of all, and this is very surprising, is you only do about half or fewer reps that
0:46:57 you possibly could do.
0:47:02 So for example, let’s say that you’re lifting 80% of your one-wrapped max.
0:47:08 And let’s say that you’re able to do eight reps maximum with it, that’s your– we’re
0:47:11 just fairly, fairly calm.
0:47:17 What you’re only going to do about three to four reps per set, and that’s it.
0:47:21 And the gym bros at this point go crazy, like, where’s the intensity?
0:47:25 Well, intensity in strength training is just how heavy the weight is.
0:47:27 It has nothing to do with the effort.
0:47:31 And it’s been proven over and over that that’s much more important than how hard you’re
0:47:32 exerting yourself.
0:47:33 There are times for that.
0:47:35 There are absolute times for that.
0:47:39 But if the weight is heavy enough, and if you do half the repetitions that you possibly
0:47:42 could do, you’re going to get stronger.
0:47:49 It’s very safe, and you’re not going to burn out psychologically, and it’s also very easy
0:47:51 on your body.
0:47:58 So also, that builds muscle as well purely because you’re able to do a very high volume
0:47:59 of work.
0:48:03 I’m not able to explain the mechanism why it builds muscle.
0:48:08 But as the Soviets found out in weightlifting research, there’s a correlation between the
0:48:12 volume and Robert Truman.
0:48:17 Between the volume and the hypertrophy, everything else being equal, you’re going to get bigger.
0:48:22 So almost every day you’re doing the sets of three, four reps, maybe even five, and they
0:48:24 start adding up.
0:48:28 And before you know it, you’re stronger, and at the same time you have developed muscle.
0:48:35 So to summarize the griefs to groove, you’re trying to train moderately heavy, as often
0:48:41 as possible, while staying as fresh as possible.
0:48:47 And if you decide to do it in the gym, a very simple protocol would be a set every 10 minutes.
0:48:48 It sounds really bizarre.
0:48:53 Like, why would you rest for so long?
0:48:56 This apparently has to do with the initial memory consolidation.
0:48:58 There’s so much is still unknown.
0:49:03 So we do know the grief to groove works great, but we speculate that some of it has to do
0:49:08 with some of the same phenomena related to learning in other fields.
0:49:12 So if you’re doing something over and over, like you’re saying two plus two is four, two
0:49:15 plus two is four, you’re just using your short term memory.
0:49:17 You’re not memorizing anything.
0:49:22 But if you say two plus two is four, you go get a coffee, you come back and you try two
0:49:24 plus two, four.
0:49:26 So there’s that desirable difficulty that you have in there.
0:49:32 And you have to process that instead of just go through the groove.
0:49:34 That apparently helps us adaptation.
0:49:36 So rest for at least 10 minutes.
0:49:42 Do sets of about the repetitions of half of what you’re possibly able to do.
0:49:44 And listen to your body.
0:49:48 Typically train two, three days in a row and then take a day off, but listen to your body.
0:49:53 Incidentally, this grief to groove is the topic of my next book.
0:49:54 I’ve completed it.
0:49:56 It’s not published yet.
0:50:00 If you look at, I can pronounce the Hungarian professor’s last name.
0:50:01 Thank you.
0:50:02 Thank you.
0:50:03 I appreciate that.
0:50:09 So he’s talking about that perfect challenge, perfect practice lies in that channel between
0:50:10 boredom and anxiety.
0:50:14 So if you put yourself in that channel, and if you keep lifting this moderately heavy
0:50:19 weights with the moderate effort over and over and over, you’re going to get strong.
0:50:21 That’s one of the many ways to get stronger.
0:50:25 Are you doing anything in the, um, rest periods between these 10 minutes?
0:50:31 So is it, uh, let’s say, uh, bench press, um, wait 10 minutes till you bench press again.
0:50:34 But in the meantime, you’re doing Zercher squat five minutes after the first branch
0:50:35 press.
0:50:36 That’s one of the way to do that.
0:50:40 You can do up to three exercise, three exercises at the same time.
0:50:44 So let’s say I like Zercher squat and then bench press and maybe a third thing, but I’d
0:50:46 say those two are enough.
0:50:47 And, uh, another option is you can do that.
0:50:53 You can incorporate this into, if you would do only one exercise, you can squeeze it into
0:50:55 your lifestyle or your athletic practice.
0:51:03 So for example, uh, in, uh, let’s say you’re teaching a track, uh, track, uh, practice
0:51:05 or martial arts class.
0:51:11 And every 10 minutes on the clock, you just have the class do drop and do three hearts.
0:51:12 Let’s say three one arm pushups.
0:51:13 Okay.
0:51:14 And then get back to the class.
0:51:16 So there’s no interference whatsoever.
0:51:19 And in fact, it’s better than no interference.
0:51:24 Back in the sixties, Soviets found out something called the, uh, strengths after effect.
0:51:29 So if you do strength work, that’s not exhausting in nature and that’s not novel to you.
0:51:36 It has a tonic effect, uh, just for any, any, uh, anything that you can do with your brain
0:51:38 or with your body, anything.
0:51:42 So what they would even do some coaches do, do so called strength warmup led.
0:51:47 They would, uh, warm up as usual for a track class, let’s say track practice.
0:51:52 Then they would do, let’s say three sets of three or something like with 80% max, which
0:51:53 is not much.
0:51:56 And they start, they start their practice.
0:52:00 Then the coach noticed that the athletes are starting to droop a little.
0:52:03 He’ll repeat that, you know, he might repeat that up to three times.
0:52:10 So what you have is by having this short, a very small dose, like a nano practice of
0:52:14 strength, you rejuvenate yourself and your productivity increases so much.
0:52:18 So whether you want to just do the strength exercise, several of them in that one hour
0:52:24 period, or whether you want to combine that with writing a great American novel, that’s,
0:52:25 you know, that’s your business.
0:52:30 I suppose if someone has access to the appropriate equipment at home, you could incorporate grease
0:52:32 the groove into your entire day.
0:52:33 That’s ideal.
0:52:34 Yes.
0:52:37 And obviously it’s difficult with some equipment, but what you could do, you could use the
0:52:41 heavy duty grippers, you could do one arm pushups.
0:52:47 You could, you could keep a kettlebell under your desk and do presence at every opportunity.
0:52:49 And again, the idea is really just practice.
0:52:53 You just try to hit a perfect, perfect trap.
0:53:01 And notice that if you have some issues, if you’re a warm up dependent person for orthopedic
0:53:05 issues, I’m talking about warm up in the, very much in the body, not the mind in this
0:53:10 particular case, then it might not be appropriate for you.
0:53:13 Although, you know, with 10 minute dress, it might still be okay.
0:53:21 But practicing a skill without the warm up, that means rehearsal is very powerful for
0:53:22 improving that skill.
0:53:26 People think they automatically quit performance with improvement, with learning, but it’s
0:53:28 not so, not at all.
0:53:34 When you’re doing something that’s just out of the blue, it’s a new, you know, the West
0:53:36 Sniper would take a cold shot.
0:53:40 That’s so much harder because you have to have produced that solution.
0:53:46 Or maybe an example that’s closer to most viewers, golf.
0:53:51 You go to the driving range, you start hitting it, and like, wow, you’re amazing.
0:53:55 You just get to, so fine tuned, you hit, you’re perfect.
0:54:00 Then, then you go and you play the game, and you cannot replicate that.
0:54:04 But suddenly, different club, different topography, everything’s different.
0:54:08 And you didn’t have the luxury of that tuning yourself up right there.
0:54:13 So it feels, it doesn’t feel like you’re stronger, but you are going to get my stronger.
0:54:18 I’ve been eager to share with you some recent findings that are not my own, but that I think
0:54:20 you might be curious about.
0:54:23 And then I think most people, hopefully, will be curious about as well.
0:54:28 It’s not greasing the groove specifically, but it provides a, at least partial mechanistic
0:54:34 understanding of how particular types of physical movement with this high motor neuron and attentional
0:54:39 engagement can generate high levels of alertness that can be devoted to, as you say, writing
0:54:41 the great American novel, perhaps.
0:54:45 There’s a guy at the University of Pittsburgh named Peter Strick, who for the first time
0:54:49 started to map the connections between the adrenals and the brain.
0:54:52 And he was able to do this using some really cool technology.
0:54:54 The basic takeaway is the following.
0:54:59 One release from the adrenals, as some of the listeners may know, doesn’t cross the
0:55:03 blood-brain barrier, but it turns out it binds to receptors on the vagus, which then stimulates
0:55:06 noradrenaline in the brain and provides this increase in alertness.
0:55:09 So then the question is, how do you get your adrenals engaged?
0:55:14 You know, we can sit here and we can, we can do a staring competition, which I’ll lose
0:55:16 for certain, but you know, there are all sorts of psychological tools.
0:55:19 We get, you know, caffeine, et cetera.
0:55:23 There are all sorts of ways to get cold water, but it turns out what Peter found was that
0:55:29 there are particular locations in the motor cortex that send a two, uh, basically a two
0:55:34 synapse connection, disynaptic connection directly to the adrenals and the areas of
0:55:38 motor cortex that engage the adrenals cause them to release adrenaline, but just by sheer
0:55:43 movement of particular muscle groups are the core, as you were talking about before, like
0:55:49 bracing the core causes the release of adrenaline, which then via the vagus causes the brainstem
0:55:54 area to release noradrenaline, wake up the whole brain essentially, increase learning
0:55:56 and performance in anything.
0:56:02 And as well, the stronger and stronger activation of the motor neurons, deliberate activation
0:56:05 of the motor neurons seems to engage adrenaline release.
0:56:10 Now to me, this was a wonderful way of, um, trying to persuade people that they have internal
0:56:15 control over the thing that we call motivation, that movement itself can increase adrenaline,
0:56:18 which can increase the tendency to want to move as long as again, you don’t want to have
0:56:19 too much adrenaline either.
0:56:20 Right.
0:56:21 Right.
0:56:22 And I’d like to talk about that.
0:56:25 Um, but I think I and so many other people were kind of raised and conditioned, at least
0:56:29 in this country to think, Oh, if I want to increase my level of motivation, I need to
0:56:32 like, um, I don’t know, watch an inspiring video.
0:56:33 That could be great.
0:56:37 Or I can, uh, drink caffeine and that could or an energy drink and certainly that will
0:56:38 do it.
0:56:45 But to me, the, the discovery, uh, that particular movements and particular muscles being engaged
0:56:47 in activity itself changes the neurochemical milieu.
0:56:49 I mean, of course it had to be, right?
0:56:51 It’s a big duh.
0:56:55 But I think that, um, anyway, I was excited to share with you, uh, I didn’t discover them.
0:56:56 That is new to me.
0:56:58 So I read the naked warrior.
0:57:02 I was closed when I, when I read it, um, but it’s a wonderful book because it talks about
0:57:04 body weight, um, only exercises.
0:57:10 And this concept of, for instance, like trying to crush, um, one’s fist on, uh, you know,
0:57:14 making a really strong fist on the other side and how that will increase your, uh, your gripping
0:57:16 ability on the other side.
0:57:17 This kind of thing.
0:57:18 Yes.
0:57:22 As you know, with your background in neuroscience, obviously there’s so many, uh, neurological
0:57:26 phenomena, like if you can think of like muscle software that we have access to that,
0:57:30 if we become conscious about accessing that, we can be so much stronger.
0:57:31 Yeah.
0:57:35 So when you talk about, you know, doing a set of three or four repetitions or two to three
0:57:39 repetitions at about 85% or 80% of one rep mass, waiting 10 minutes.
0:57:44 And in the intervening 10 minutes, going and trying to learn something important or physical
0:57:48 or cognitive, this makes perfect sense to me because of the relationship of adrenaline,
0:57:53 but also the way that your entire nervous system has changed in the, in the intervening
0:57:54 period.
0:57:56 And plus you have the contextual interference.
0:57:59 So, uh, one of the grease, the groove is not something that I invented.
0:58:03 It’s something that I was able to codify and explain and possibly refine, but it’s been
0:58:06 around since the day of a class as he asked us.
0:58:11 And, uh, specifically in strength training, Paul Anderson, Paul Anderson, one of the greatest
0:58:12 weight lifters of all time.
0:58:19 Uh, he was, uh, you know, he was a big favorite of the Soviet public, you know, very tough
0:58:21 group to impress, but they called him into wonder of nature.
0:58:23 He was so strong.
0:58:30 And Paul Anderson would do his set of squats, then he would wander around, drink some milk,
0:58:34 half an hour later, do set of presses, now go do this again.
0:58:41 And, uh, so he reinvent, not, not should say reinvent, no, he invented without knowing
0:58:48 neurons from Nylons, many of the training concepts that are just cutting edge day.
0:58:52 And again, so this concept of contextual interference, remember, we talked earlier how if it’s harder
0:58:57 for you to produce a solution, if you’re trying harder to remember two plus two is four or
0:59:01 how to throw the ball, then you’re going to learn more as opposed to if somebody just
0:59:03 hands it out two plus two is four.
0:59:09 So Paul Anderson had both the spacing time came like, so the, the groove has been forgotten
0:59:15 in the sands of time and the contextual interference, he did another exercise that erased whatever
0:59:17 previous groove right there.
0:59:22 And it’s, uh, it’s very fascinating how looking at some of these old timers and just how, uh,
0:59:27 how genius, yeah, the unconscious genius aspect of it is so cool.
0:59:32 And of course, I don’t want to be disparaging of common, um, gym programs these days, but
0:59:35 I do feel like the way that most people train, yeah, he’ll do that.
0:59:36 Yeah.
0:59:38 The way that most people train in terms of thinking, okay, I’m going to hit the gym,
0:59:41 and you know, three, four times a week, or I’m going to train chest one day and chest
0:59:45 and biceps while that has some value.
0:59:52 I feel like, um, for creating all around strength and hypertrophy, there’s just such a incredible
0:59:56 treasure trove of other things that you’re sharing with us today that, that are just not
1:00:01 discussed as much because people don’t take the lens of the nervous system component.
1:00:05 One thing that I’d love to ask about the nervous system in terms of training, adaptation
1:00:12 and recovery is that I was weaned somewhat under the, uh, thought patterns of Mike Menser.
1:00:15 This was in the Darian Yates era, and I knew Mike a little bit.
1:00:18 I paid for a consult with him over the phone.
1:00:19 We never met in person.
1:00:23 Um, so that had my mother asking, you know, why is this grown man calling our home and
1:00:26 why are you, why are in the old days, you had to wire somebody money.
1:00:27 So I do.
1:00:31 Um, but it was so worthwhile because, uh, Mike taught me that the goal of training was
1:00:33 to induce an adaptation.
1:00:36 Anything additional was not necessary.
1:00:40 And in his case, he felt was counterproductive, very infrequent training, et cetera.
1:00:44 And it worked tremendously well to take me from like 150 pounds to 210 pounds, which
1:00:48 I had no need to do, but my body just reacted like crazy.
1:00:52 But then again, I was 16, 17 and 18 years old in that time, probably could have done
1:00:55 any number of different things and, and experienced similar results.
1:00:56 Who knows.
1:01:00 But the concept of course is that you train to induce an adaptation, then you rest and
1:01:04 then you allow the adaptation to serve the, you know, moving higher poundages in good
1:01:06 form, this sort of thing.
1:01:11 The problem, however, is that, and Mencer highlighted this, is that training of any
1:01:17 kind, running, lifting, et cetera, taxes both the nervous system as a whole and the muscles
1:01:19 locally in the connective tissue.
1:01:21 How should we think about training and recovery?
1:01:25 So when you describe Greece, the groove, I could imagine if I had a home set up or I’m
1:01:29 going to the gym, I could maybe do four or five rounds of this training.
1:01:32 But at some point, it becomes counterproductive.
1:01:38 So I’m just trying to think about how to schedule this sort of thing, keeping in mind
1:01:41 that the nervous system fatigues as a whole.
1:01:44 And then there’s also the issue of local muscle fatigue or, or even the propensity for
1:01:45 injury.
1:01:46 If you just overdo it.
1:01:47 Sure.
1:01:48 Yeah.
1:01:49 So if we could just riff on this.
1:01:52 If you don’t mind Andrew, I’ll break it up because a lot of great questions right there.
1:01:54 So one, as you mentioned, there are different ways of training.
1:02:00 And again, we degrees the groove load parameters apart from the long rests are very much based
1:02:01 on Soviet weightlifting system.
1:02:05 And I’d like to talk a little bit about that later.
1:02:10 Another system that is a completely and radically different and it ties very much to my mentors
1:02:15 training for reasons would become obvious is the classic American powerlifting system
1:02:18 from the seven from the eighties.
1:02:25 And when people argue about training methods, what they need to understand is there are
1:02:27 many ways to get the job done.
1:02:31 You know, out Coveo, his research in Estonia found because there’s so many different combinations
1:02:35 of stimuli and the different, different adaptations that result.
1:02:39 You can arrive to similar outcomes and a lot of different ways.
1:02:43 So to say this is right and this is wrong, you cannot sometimes do that.
1:02:48 I mean, I can say most of things are wrong, but I can also say there’s multiple right
1:02:51 ways of training and they can be radically different.
1:02:55 And they’re different because they rely on very different phenomena.
1:02:59 So in this particular case, you’re talking about recovery and frequency, which is again
1:03:00 a great way to address it.
1:03:09 I’m going to talk about two systems that are completely different and yet have that same
1:03:13 pedigree that they have brought so many gold medals.
1:03:19 So one system is the Soviet weightlifting system is again where athletes would train
1:03:21 several times a day.
1:03:26 And Bulgarian system is a more extreme example of that and every day.
1:03:34 And the other extreme would be the American powerlifting system, exemplified by Hugh Cassidy,
1:03:36 Marty Gallagher, Ed Kohn, Kirk Kowalski.
1:03:40 So starting from the seventies through the nineties, those are really glorious day for
1:03:42 you as powerlifting.
1:03:47 And in that system, they would pretty much do one or two heavy sets per lift once a week.
1:03:54 So it’s kind of a little bit like Mike Mansor’s work, kind of, but we’ll address why.
1:03:56 So how can that be?
1:03:58 And how can both systems work?
1:04:01 So you address the recovery.
1:04:06 There’s a concept called heterocronicity, which heteromins different.
1:04:08 Chronicity refers to time.
1:04:12 So the different systems in the body recover different rates.
1:04:17 And if you don’t take that into account, then you’re going to have some serious problems.
1:04:25 So the Soviet system took, if you look at the Soviet system with frequent training, they
1:04:30 looked at, okay, we want to do frequent practice, which is exactly what we do.
1:04:36 We don’t want to beat the muscles up so much that they take some very long time to recover,
1:04:44 you know, not too much eccentric stress, not too much acidosis, avoiding things like that.
1:04:48 And they were able to adjust the loads in such a way, so let’s say your weights are heavy,
1:04:50 but not too heavy.
1:04:55 The reps don’t go too high, so you’re able to recover pretty much overnight.
1:04:59 And the benefit of that is it’s been shown that if you fragment a given workload over
1:05:03 more days, over sessions, you get better results.
1:05:09 And it’s, your body is able and your nervous system, endocrine system, your carcass, everything
1:05:13 is able to handle much more if it’s split into small doses.
1:05:15 So let’s use an example of a meal.
1:05:20 Let’s say if you were trying to do an eating competition, how much you can eat in 24 hours?
1:05:23 So it’s not like those Coney Island, you know, how many hot dogs you can eat in one sitting,
1:05:24 no.
1:05:27 But you would probably eat a lot more if you spread it throughout the day.
1:05:29 And this is the same idea.
1:05:36 So it’s like that parable from Nassim Taleb about the king that got anger in his son and
1:05:40 he says he’s going to crush him with a big rock and he realized, well, what did I do?
1:05:45 I don’t want to kill this kid, but the king’s name, king’s word is king’s word, right?
1:05:51 So he ordered his peons to break up the rock into pebbles and then just dump his pebbles
1:05:52 in the kid.
1:05:53 So that’s the same idea.
1:05:59 So fragmentation, the load always allows you to do more and do it safer.
1:06:06 So something else is related to that in some training systems.
1:06:11 Some training systems rely on adaptations, let’s say for strengths that go in the muscle
1:06:17 that go beyond just the contractal proteins, just, you know, the part, you know, my part
1:06:19 that make, that create force.
1:06:25 So for example, the Soviet system, they also try to increase the storage of creatine phosphate,
1:06:30 which is the kind of immediate fuel for muscle contractions for this type of work.
1:06:33 We’re lifting heavy weights over and over.
1:06:39 And so by training sometimes easier, you’re able to keep stimulating that creatine phosphate
1:06:42 adaptation, but without the still allowing muscles to recover.
1:06:44 So this kind of a dance.
1:06:46 And it’s fairly complex.
1:06:51 Then on the other hand, the American system did something completely different.
1:06:58 And the explanations for what happens in the muscle with this, within this American system,
1:07:04 we don’t know for sure, but there’s a hypothesis by Russian specialist Vadim Patasenko.
1:07:06 That seems quite credible.
1:07:09 So here’s, so again, the system, here’s the system you train hard.
1:07:13 You do one hard set once a week or two hard sets.
1:07:20 So the satellite cells that are immature cells in the muscle, they’re sitting there waiting
1:07:26 to jump in, in, you know, if you need to replenish the messed up ones, in order for the satellite
1:07:31 cells to get their job done, they try to figure out, scientists try to figure out what sort
1:07:35 of stimuli are, are required.
1:07:44 And one, the kind of a strong case can be made that a very particular damage to the microstructure
1:07:48 of the muscle can, can provoke that stimulus.
1:07:52 So but that damage has to be very, very specific.
1:07:56 If you beat up the muscle with a baseball bat, you’re just going to get a whole lot
1:08:00 of scar tissue and, you know, some satellite cells will just die and others will just become
1:08:02 scar.
1:08:07 But if the cross bridges in the muscle, the cross bridges is that part that does create
1:08:14 force in the muscle, if they do tear in a very specific way, it seems to do the job.
1:08:21 So the way the muscle contracts is so there is, imagine that you’re rolling your boat
1:08:22 on the water.
1:08:29 So water is one protein is called actin and myosin is the ores that are moving in there.
1:08:37 So the ore dips into the water hooks and pools, and that or relies on available energy in
1:08:38 the muscle.
1:08:43 So these ATP molecules are, you know, stored energy, they’re floating around.
1:08:50 And they had myosin had needs, needs that ATP in order to both to hook to produce force,
1:08:53 but it also it needs ATP to unhook as well.
1:08:57 And it’s in this in between stages called a rigor.
1:09:04 So whenever the muscle has produced force, but there’s not enough energy for it to relax.
1:09:06 So the muscle stuck in rigor.
1:09:07 So think of rigor mortis.
1:09:12 So if you tear that body’s muscles, you know, there is going to tear.
1:09:18 And supposedly this is going to happen only when you’re able to, when the consumption
1:09:25 of ATP is really high in the muscle, but the, but the supply is not.
1:09:33 And so if you’re, if you do that in the first, let’s say 20, 20, 30 seconds before acidosis
1:09:36 set in, that’s what that’s what should happen.
1:09:41 Because if you wait longer, when there’s a lot of acid in the muscle, acid, it kills
1:09:45 that reaction that it kills that reaction that uses ATP.
1:09:47 So you’re not using as much anymore.
1:09:48 Sure.
1:09:49 The demand is down.
1:09:52 The supply is down, but so in demand, so it’s not so good.
1:09:58 So if you erase that fatigue point, so if you try to deplete that creatin phosphate,
1:10:03 that kind of rocket fuel of the muscle within about 20, 30 seconds, then presumably some
1:10:06 of this hooks on this ores are going to get stuck.
1:10:09 And when the muscles lengthening and they’re going to tear.
1:10:10 And that’s a very specific tear.
1:10:12 It doesn’t happen on the outside of the muscle.
1:10:15 It happens just on the inside, in there.
1:10:20 Whether this is true or not, I do not know, but it’s a pretty good theory that does explain
1:10:26 Mike Mencer’s method and explains the American powerlifting method.
1:10:29 Interestingly about Mike Mencer, and again, to the listeners who are not aware of the
1:10:35 method, that means train the muscle really hard, very infrequently with very low volume.
1:10:40 Yes, so Yuriy Verkashansky before he died, a famous Soviet sports scientist known in
1:10:45 the West, mostly as the father of what is called plyometrics in the West.
1:10:48 But he’s also done many other things as well.
1:10:50 He spoke very highly about Mencer.
1:10:54 He thought Mencer was brilliant, Mencer was an innovator.
1:10:58 But many people, some people get good results from it like you did, and a lot of people
1:11:00 do not.
1:11:09 And so pretty much what Protasenko suggested that might happen is eventually you’ll reach
1:11:14 the limit of adaptation of how much you can deplete, how much you can deplete the creatinine
1:11:15 phosphate in that window.
1:11:17 That’s when you hit the wall.
1:11:22 And this is where the American system comes in.
1:11:24 This system is called cycling.
1:11:26 The history of cycling is fascinating.
1:11:32 The relationship, the interaction between the Soviet and American strength schools is
1:11:33 absolutely fascinating.
1:11:39 So just to go back for a minute, Soviet track athletes in the ’50s were using the typical
1:11:44 stupid high rep reps to burn.
1:11:53 Then in the late ’50s, some very sharp young specialist Vitaliy Chuzhinov, he made a case
1:11:56 at a conference and said, “What are we doing?
1:11:57 Let’s look at what…”
1:12:01 He said, “Let’s look at Paul Anderson, Dihebburn, Bruce Randall, these North American strength
1:12:02 guys.
1:12:03 Let’s look what they’re doing.
1:12:06 They’re lifting heavy stuff for sets of three to five reps.
1:12:07 Let’s knock the stance and soft.”
1:12:10 Soviet track athletes started doing that right there.
1:12:14 So this is how the Soviets, for example, learned from Americans.
1:12:20 As an example of how it went the other way, the classic puritization as is known, Matveev’s
1:12:28 puritization, in which you start out with higher volume and less specific to lower volume,
1:12:35 more intensity, and so on, that puritization is not used by lifters in the Soviet Union.
1:12:39 Lifters thought that’s just completely not, it’s just not usable, it’s just inappropriate
1:12:40 for their needs.
1:12:45 Arkady Vorobyov, the professor and Olympic champion made very strong case, why?
1:12:53 Because Americans who got some limited information about it, American power lifters, not weight
1:12:58 lifters, were able to develop their own training system based on that premise, something that
1:13:03 the Soviets didn’t do, and the way it worked is like this, you don’t necessarily have very
1:13:09 high volume, but you start, I’m going to give you a most classic example of this type of
1:13:10 cycling.
1:13:19 And this is again, Cassidy, Gallagher, Colin Karwaski, four week blocks, let’s say there’s
1:13:23 like going to be three, four week blocks, maybe four.
1:13:25 So you do lift once a week.
1:13:29 On week four, you go for a PR.
1:13:32 So let’s say this is a month of fives.
1:13:37 So this is on your week four, you’re going to do a PR set of five, you plan for it.
1:13:41 Week three is somewhere around your old PR.
1:13:46 Week two is lighter, week one is lighter still.
1:13:51 And then after that, you may increase the weight, but still relative effort is going
1:13:52 to drop.
1:13:54 You’re going to kind of repeat the process.
1:13:58 So it does multiple things.
1:14:05 On the muscular level, so what Parthasenko explained, you pretty much decondition yourself
1:14:09 temporarily, and you progressively increase their creatinine phosphate use.
1:14:13 So initially, when you’re deconditioned, it doesn’t take as much to get the stimulus.
1:14:15 You don’t have to push really hard in first week.
1:14:19 You push harder in the second and harder and harder.
1:14:25 There’s a concept, their concept in puritization, so it’s port science, of reactivity versus
1:14:27 resistance.
1:14:30 Reactivity means how responsive your body is to the stimulus and resistance kind of
1:14:37 like in the medical terms, how much it can, it’s not affected by it.
1:14:44 So when you’re starting light after a layoff, your reactivity is high and your resistance
1:14:45 is low.
1:14:46 It doesn’t take much.
1:14:48 So boom, suddenly you build this muscle.
1:14:56 And then you keep building up, and when you reach a peak, then you just step back again.
1:15:03 And on the side of the nervous system, and endocrine system, much later, Soviet research,
1:15:06 they said you can train hard maximum two weeks out of four.
1:15:07 That’s it.
1:15:08 More than that, you cannot handle.
1:15:11 So for every month, you’re training two weeks hard.
1:15:12 That’s it.
1:15:14 The other ones, you’re cruising, you’re…
1:15:15 Not as hard.
1:15:16 Sometimes easy.
1:15:19 Sometimes, there are different ways of programming it.
1:15:23 The typical one that you hear about in the West is you’re going to build things up for
1:15:24 three weeks and then down in four.
1:15:29 That’s one of the about 16 different possible arrangements, doesn’t have to be.
1:15:30 There can be…
1:15:33 Here’s one brilliant way.
1:15:38 Franco Colombo, who passed, unfortunately, was not just a great bodybuilder.
1:15:41 He was a great chiropractor and great strength athlete.
1:15:42 Super strong.
1:15:44 Very strong and brilliant.
1:15:46 So he told me about…
1:15:47 He’s deadlift cycle.
1:15:49 Week one, moderate.
1:15:51 Week two, heavy.
1:15:52 Week three, moderate.
1:15:53 Week four, very heavy.
1:15:58 Again, this is a different way of arranging the same concept.
1:16:06 And these American powerlifters were able to build a system that built the muscle probably
1:16:09 exactly in this manner.
1:16:13 What was happening at the same time, oh yeah, and there’s also another angle, how that system
1:16:14 possibly has worked.
1:16:17 This is fascinating.
1:16:22 Any type of exercise that you do makes your muscles more slow to it.
1:16:23 It’s just weightless.
1:16:25 It’s very, very bizarre.
1:16:26 Even explosive.
1:16:27 Even explosive.
1:16:30 Even just trying to crush the bar and drive the deadlift.
1:16:31 Even that.
1:16:32 The more you do it.
1:16:36 So Goldspinx Research back in the ’80s, that any cycle of stretching or contraction resets
1:16:42 the heavy chain myosin, the contractal proteins that makes it towards slower type.
1:16:43 So any type of work.
1:16:47 If you do biopsy on somebody who is a couch potato, you’re going to find that person probably
1:16:52 has a higher concentration of white fibers than you and I.
1:16:53 Wild.
1:16:54 Very counterintuitive.
1:16:55 Very counterintuitive.
1:16:58 And so that’s like a default setting for the fibers.
1:17:06 However, if you take time off, something changes and it goes beyond the change.
1:17:14 So this research came out of Sweden, I believe, when they trained a group of subjects in strength,
1:17:21 they saw a predicted decrease in their ratio of type 2x fast, which white fibers.
1:17:24 Then they took a couple months off.
1:17:29 And then the experience, they called it MHC overshoot, myosin heavy, heavy chain, again,
1:17:31 like fast fiber overshoot.
1:17:35 So they had something like 70 more percent fibers after that.
1:17:36 Wild.
1:17:38 Nobody takes two, three months off these days.
1:17:45 And but they figured out that is not needed for athletes, because obviously you get deconditioned
1:17:47 in other ways, right?
1:17:49 So remember, we’re talking about heterochronicity.
1:17:52 Different processes take place at different rates.
1:17:54 So it’s like you’re constantly playing, they whack them all.
1:17:57 So this is getting out of shape, but this is not recovered yet.
1:17:58 It’s a game.
1:18:01 That’s the game of training programming.
1:18:07 So in the American system, first of all, the infrequent training, it reduced the stimulus
1:18:12 for the conversion of the fibers towards a slower, isoform slower types.
1:18:14 And the second, all the taper that they did later.
1:18:19 So suddenly switching from five to like one triple, one double for a few weeks.
1:18:23 If you do that for just a few weeks, you’re doing like a one triple, one double, you’re
1:18:28 not going to lose much muscle mass because it really takes over a month.
1:18:34 But if there’s enough time for the myosin to reconfigure itself to a faster type.
1:18:36 So that’s probably what happens.
1:18:37 Interesting.
1:18:42 Neurologically, I think what happens, probably the exerted themselves very strongly once,
1:18:43 once twice a month.
1:18:46 So it’s again in, you know, neural drive, probably with strengths and disinhibition
1:18:48 and other things like that.
1:18:53 And the irony is the system has lost its popularity.
1:18:59 Some records in the deadlift like Dan Austin’s record and possibly Nabba’s set back in the
1:19:00 90s and 80s.
1:19:01 There’s, oh yeah.
1:19:02 La Mar Gant.
1:19:08 This is the strongest deadlifter pound per pound in history.
1:19:13 So like 683 at bucks 32 or something like that.
1:19:15 And it was done back in the 80s.
1:19:17 So he trained that way.
1:19:22 Dan Austin, in other lifts, records have increased in part because of the equipment changes and
1:19:29 some other reasons, but Ed Cohen dominated the platform for decades.
1:19:32 So there are some great, great lifters who trained this way, but then the system lost
1:19:37 its popularity for reasons have nothing to do with its effectiveness.
1:19:40 It doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for everybody though, because training a lift once a week
1:19:44 for one or two sets, there’s not much practice.
1:19:45 And that’s a problem.
1:19:48 So unless you’re training under a very high level coach or you’re already coming in with
1:19:50 great skills, it’s really good.
1:19:55 Second, if you need any kind of level of endurance or if you’re playing other sport, you’re going
1:19:57 to be very sore from this type of training.
1:20:02 So it’s a great system for certain type of people.
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1:22:52 Based on what you just told us about Franco’s training and the rest, seems that shorter
1:22:57 training cycles might be advantageous, even just conceptually and practically.
1:23:02 I’ve tended to break up my year into 12 to 16 week training cycles, been doing that for
1:23:03 a long time.
1:23:06 And now that I’m 49, this is the year that I decided I was going to start modifying my
1:23:10 training a bit because certain little things aren’t working for me as well.
1:23:11 You might laugh.
1:23:15 I’m actually curious whether or not you’ll laugh or approve.
1:23:20 I switched at some point to using the belt squat, these belt squat platforms.
1:23:21 I just feel like that.
1:23:22 You may want to explain that.
1:23:26 Yeah, the belt squat is essentially, you stand on a platform, so you’re on, unfortunately,
1:23:29 you’re on display for everybody there, but that’s not why I do it.
1:23:33 You step up onto a platform, sometimes it’s called a pit shark, Rogue makes a belt squat.
1:23:37 There are other ones, of course, have no relation to any of those companies and you wear a big
1:23:42 thick lifting belt, but it’s kind of sagging in the front and then as if you were going
1:23:44 to attach a weight to it, but you attach yourself to it.
1:23:50 Usually it’s a cable or a lever between your legs sounds scary, but that lever or cable
1:23:54 can drop below the level of the platform you’re standing on and you can load up quite
1:23:55 a bit of weight on this.
1:24:02 What I love about it is you can get very vertical if you want or just a little bit of forward
1:24:06 tilt because you can place your fingers on the handles, you can grip them if you like.
1:24:11 The point being, there’s a lot of degrees of freedom in terms of stance and I like that
1:24:12 you’re not loading the shoulders.
1:24:16 I don’t want to sound like a wuss, but I’ll do it.
1:24:20 I moved from standard squats, back squats, to front squats, then to hack squats, and
1:24:24 then now I’ve been playing around a lot with the belt squat and really enjoying it because
1:24:28 you can go really deep, can blast out of the bottom position, you can load up lots of plates
1:24:31 on there if you have the strength to do so without the feeling that you’re just compressing
1:24:35 your whole spine or worrying about dropping the weight.
1:24:36 I’m enjoying working with it.
1:24:39 I love your thoughts on belt squats.
1:24:46 But in general, I’m hearing you and I’m thinking that moving away from this 12 to 16 week cycles
1:24:50 is going to be advantageous because what I’m finding is that it’s hard to account for life
1:24:55 events in that way and plan training and travel and all this, but four weeks is kind of a
1:24:56 manageable thing.
1:24:59 This month, this is what I’m going to do and of course the months work together.
1:25:03 The body doesn’t know the difference between February and March as it were.
1:25:04 Well, in California it doesn’t.
1:25:05 It does, right.
1:25:06 It does, right.
1:25:07 Exactly.
1:25:11 The seasonal cycles are real elsewhere, but I’m thinking shorter training cycles might
1:25:17 be a strong conceptual and practical framework and yeah, I’d love your thoughts on both of
1:25:18 those.
1:25:23 The belt squat or leg work that’s non-spine compressing and shorter training cycles as
1:25:27 a general theme that people might think of incorporating into their training.
1:25:33 The belt squat and this leg work that’s non-spine compressing, I’m going to address healthy people
1:25:34 like yourself.
1:25:38 So if somebody has medical restrictions, you got to do belt squat because the doctor says
1:25:39 so, that’s what you got to do.
1:25:45 As long as you’re also addressing the rest of your posterior chain, as long as you’re
1:25:48 training your lower back, your upper back, obviously your neck, which obviously you’re
1:25:53 doing that and in some other manner, there’s absolutely no problem with that.
1:25:56 So let’s say you’re doing some shrug pulls or something.
1:25:59 You got that taken care of where you’re doing some deadlifts.
1:26:06 And also for power lifters, what power lifters do, it’s a tactic is when you’re training
1:26:10 the same lift, especially if you train the same lift very frequently, there is always
1:26:11 that heterocrinicity.
1:26:14 Something is not catching up quite as fast.
1:26:22 So you’re going deadlifting and your hands are beat up, you use straps or you come into
1:26:25 the deadlifting and your back feels like, well, it’s time to deadlift.
1:26:27 My back is not quite ready.
1:26:31 Well, you could go do a narrow sumo or something like that.
1:26:33 So there are ways of modifying things this way.
1:26:38 So you’re able to, if let’s say you hit some hard deadlifts or hard squats and you need
1:26:42 some additional legwork, sure, you don’t need any extra stimulation for your upper back
1:26:43 and mid back.
1:26:51 However, if you are a person who has more of a minimalist who does fewer exercises,
1:26:54 then you just can’t afford that because then you’re going to have to do some additional
1:26:55 exercises.
1:26:57 So you’re going to do something else.
1:27:04 So may I suggest for your listeners and viewers to do zircher squats, get a fantastic exercise.
1:27:05 It does not beat up your shoulders.
1:27:09 It does not build up your elbows or your wrists.
1:27:13 It may leave some bruises, you know, but it’s okay, you can live with that.
1:27:16 And does that answer with a bell squat?
1:27:17 Yeah.
1:27:23 And by the way, machines in general, here’s also a very interesting observation about machines.
1:27:30 These are very useful for advanced trainees and fairly useless for beginners.
1:27:31 Oh, I love that you said that.
1:27:36 I barely touched machines early on in my training, dare I say, call it a career, but I’ve been
1:27:38 doing it for more than 30 years.
1:27:42 So I’ll call it a stage of, yeah, it’s a decent run.
1:27:46 But if you imagine, but imagine the scenarios, what do people do?
1:27:47 What do people do?
1:27:48 Oh, it’s safer.
1:27:49 Get in, climb into this machine right there.
1:27:54 You’re not developing any stabilizers so you get out of this machine, you get crushed somewhere.
1:28:00 But on the other hand, if you’re more advanced lifter, so like, you know, Marty Gelger, one
1:28:05 of the top powerlifting coaches in the world, he might recommend leg presses in a very specific
1:28:09 deadlift stance to a lifter.
1:28:13 And this is going to increase strength on your leg drive without beating up your back,
1:28:14 but you’re already doing your deadlifts.
1:28:16 You can definitely do that.
1:28:22 So advanced lifters may make a good use of machines and they don’t need to be taught
1:28:23 how to do that.
1:28:28 They can figure it out, but beginners really should just use exclusively free weights.
1:28:31 I’m not saying everybody should do squat, bench, deadlift, kettlebell snatch and this
1:28:32 and that.
1:28:37 No, there’s a large menu of exercise to choose from, but you got to choose just from that
1:28:40 menu where you discover the weight that’s free.
1:28:41 That’s truly, truly free.
1:28:44 Should we move on to the cycle, shorter cycle?
1:28:46 Yeah, the shorter cycle.
1:28:52 A lot of it depends on the type of programming that you do.
1:28:56 So the type of progression that you use.
1:28:59 So if I may, may I step to the side on that?
1:29:04 So in strength training, you can look at the typical linear progression.
1:29:07 We just progressively increase the weight.
1:29:10 It only works for beginners, obviously.
1:29:14 You look at the wave progression where, you know, you’re going up for a while, then backing
1:29:17 up and then going up again.
1:29:21 And interestingly enough, in this classic American cycle, there’s a wave there.
1:29:26 Even though the weights keep going up every week, but if you, if you did a set of five
1:29:35 with 500 pounds on the fourth week of your fives, and then you went to 520 for triple,
1:29:37 520 for triple is a lot easier.
1:29:40 So there is a D-load built in there, just people don’t realize it.
1:29:44 So it is a former wave loading as well.
1:29:47 Then there’s also the step loading.
1:29:49 Step loading is a very interesting way of going about it.
1:29:55 And I believe it’s the preferred programming choice for do-it-yourself people who not necessarily
1:30:01 aspire to records, but want to train in a very simple manner.
1:30:04 And step loading pretty much means where you start out.
1:30:11 That’s kind of like reverse think of George Costanza approach to progressive overload.
1:30:13 So it’s like regressive overload.
1:30:14 Do the opposite.
1:30:20 Instead of starting light and going heavy, or start fairly heavy and then stay with it.
1:30:25 And then stay with it and stay with that until it becomes fairly light and then increase.
1:30:26 In that case, you’re staying this longer.
1:30:31 So that’s a good approach for less experienced people.
1:30:35 There are limitations, advanced athletes run into limitations of this method.
1:30:40 And finally, there is a variable overload, which is what’s used in the Soviet weightlifting
1:30:42 system and later in Russian powerlifting.
1:30:44 And there’s no progression there at all.
1:30:50 It is just based on pure a periodicity, irregularity.
1:30:54 So it’s like imagine muscle confusion, but the smart kind and nervous system confusion.
1:30:59 Where it loads whiplash like at least 20% every time in volume from session to session
1:31:03 or week to week and exercise or change and so on.
1:31:05 So there’s no progression whatsoever.
1:31:14 So if you’re using a fairly conventional linear or wave progression, the shortest cycle is
1:31:17 generally a good idea, at least for older lifters.
1:31:25 Like in using the American powerlifting experience, older lifters, looking back at Ernie France,
1:31:29 Rick Ukraine, Rick Ukraine, especially who passed recently, unfortunately.
1:31:36 So they were observing how an older lifter can’t afford to start as light because he
1:31:39 doesn’t stop losing ground too much.
1:31:42 And he can’t afford to go as heavy as well or not for long.
1:31:47 So they pretty much switched to shorter cycles, something like eight week cycles, even possibly
1:31:48 six week cycles.
1:31:51 So it’s a legit approach.
1:31:55 But there are many different ways, obviously, because you’re looking at the big picture.
1:31:59 You kind of have to look at it from up close and from afar.
1:32:04 But overall, let’s say, yes, if for older and more experienced lifters, it’s a good
1:32:05 idea.
1:32:06 Great.
1:32:12 Most people, I think who do resistance training these days, would like to also have some degree
1:32:14 of cardiovascular fitness.
1:32:17 In fact, I think one of the great things that’s happened in the last five to 10 years is that
1:32:23 most everybody, men, women, we can talk about kids and kid training, but adult men and women
1:32:29 are thinking about muscle, the importance of having muscle and being strong in particular
1:32:30 as part of their longevity and health.
1:32:33 I think this is a great progression that’s so very different than when I was growing
1:32:39 up where the only people, at least in American gyms that lifted were preseason football players,
1:32:43 bodybuilders, and maybe a few other niche groups.
1:32:46 But now things have really changed.
1:32:55 Earlier we were talking about why the Soviet system and training for strength has been
1:33:01 the tradition and here why things are just so different in how we conceptualize resistance
1:33:02 training.
1:33:06 I’ll just go out on a limb and say what I believe and have thought for a long time, which
1:33:10 is that what screwed up everything in terms of people’s conceptualization about how to
1:33:14 use resistance is bodybuilding.
1:33:18 No knock against people that want to make bigger muscles.
1:33:22 It seems to me that the idea is you go to the gym multiple times per week, you get a
1:33:23 pump.
1:33:27 This notion of the pump always feels aversive to me.
1:33:31 Not the pump itself, but when people talk about it, it just feels a little inappropriate.
1:33:32 Let’s get a pump.
1:33:35 It just feels weird when people say that in any event.
1:33:41 But this whole notion of just flushing the muscle with blood and getting it to, sure
1:33:46 you get some window into your potential future self if you go home and eat a bunch of food
1:33:47 and sleep.
1:33:53 But somehow it’s so unathletic in its approach and I have friends who’ve done competitive
1:33:55 bodybuilding and that sort of thing, not too many.
1:34:00 So I have respect for the sport at some level, but I feel like the way it’s spilled over
1:34:06 into “gym culture” has done equal harm and good.
1:34:10 What I like so much about your work is that it’s really about strength as a skill, strength
1:34:15 as an asset for longevity.
1:34:19 And I guess when I think about somebody who wants to be strong, somebody who wants to
1:34:25 be healthy, I also have to ask, should people be training for strength and endurance, like
1:34:27 the two opposite ends of the spectrum?
1:34:29 Because it seems to me that would be the answer.
1:34:31 As opposed to what most people do, which is, “Hey, I’m going to go to the gym.
1:34:35 Maybe I’ll push a sled and then I’ll do some kettlebell swings and then I’ll also do some
1:34:38 pull-ups and then I’m going to take a picture of my tricep in the mirror.”
1:34:44 I mean, it just seems like, while it’s better than doing nothing, it’s clearly not making
1:34:48 America that much healthier.
1:34:54 And I just think there’s such a vast landscape of opportunity in training for strength and
1:34:58 endurance, but they seem at such odds with one another for most people.
1:35:04 So maybe we could just throw up on the whiteboard here this notion of training to get strong,
1:35:07 strength as a skill, strength as something that’s valuable for longevity.
1:35:09 I think we touched on that a little bit earlier.
1:35:13 And then endurance, the ability to carry two suitcases to the airplane without coughing
1:35:15 up along at the end.
1:35:19 Also the ability to take a hike with your partner or your kids, maybe actually have
1:35:23 a backpack on your back and not have to stop every 50 paces.
1:35:27 Just being a fit overall person, which one, forgive me for the duration of this question,
1:35:31 but when travels to Europe, I haven’t spent too much time in Eastern Europe, but when
1:35:37 you get over to Switzerland or Austria, you see people who are strong and they have endurance.
1:35:40 I mean, I imagine a Sherpa is strong with endurance as well, right?
1:35:42 By the way, Sherpas are really messed up.
1:35:44 Their mitochondria are truly messed up.
1:35:46 This is excessive hypoxia.
1:35:47 It’s very interesting.
1:35:49 Their metabolism is quite severely anaerobic.
1:35:50 It’s very weird.
1:35:51 Oh, weird.
1:35:55 The markers of oxidative stress is really, really high, but sorry, that’s an off topic.
1:35:59 No, no, we can touch on that because it’s interesting that people who live at altitude and…
1:36:00 Soft to a certain point.
1:36:01 Denver is good.
1:36:03 The Himalayas is not good.
1:36:04 Okay.
1:36:11 They have Scandinavian relatives and you go to Denmark or Sweden or Norway and you just
1:36:12 look at it, these people are so healthy.
1:36:13 Their posture is great.
1:36:17 They’re strong and they’re not spending a lot of time in gyms.
1:36:18 Sometimes they are.
1:36:23 So what’s going on in terms of strength and endurance and maybe how bodybuilding and this
1:36:31 notion of building muscle has perhaps caused some issues that we need to help people reconceptualize?
1:36:35 Once again, several great questions.
1:36:39 Let’s talk about bodybuilding and then before getting to endurance, which you said it’s
1:36:45 absolutely true, but I’d say there are different types of bodybuilding.
1:36:52 If you look at bodybuilding historically, it was… guys were strong.
1:36:57 I’ve had the honor of knowing some Golden Age-era bodybuilders like Franco Colombo and
1:37:03 Dave Draper and Clarence Bass and these guys were formidable.
1:37:06 They were not just pretty boys.
1:37:09 They were absolutely extremely strong.
1:37:18 So I think something happened in the culture where bodybuilders stopped valing strength.
1:37:23 Some bodybuilders, there’s still a number of guys out there who are following traditional
1:37:25 methods and they’re strong.
1:37:30 So interestingly enough, the bro split hit once a muscle, a muscle once a week.
1:37:36 It’s not necessarily bad if you again follow more of a into this classic American powerlifting
1:37:37 model.
1:37:40 So instead of training three times a week, you train five.
1:37:45 In addition to your squat day, deadlift day, bench day, you can have shoulders day and
1:37:49 arms day and whatever, but you go heavy.
1:37:54 Look at Regge Park with his sets of five.
1:38:01 And if you focus, if you emphasize this medium reps, and again, Soviets eventually came to
1:38:09 the conclusion that for strength, you should stick in the one to six repetition range.
1:38:14 And you shouldn’t do a lot of singles and doubles, three’s and four’s should predominate.
1:38:19 But four and especially fives and sixes, this is where you get both hypertrophy and strength.
1:38:21 That’s that beautiful combination.
1:38:26 And fives have a great tradition, American powerlifting as well.
1:38:29 If you train with fives, you’re going to get muscle and you’re going to get strength and
1:38:31 you’re not going to complicate things.
1:38:35 So there are some bodybuilders out there who train in this particular manner and they’re
1:38:40 fantastically strong, just not many of them, unfortunately.
1:38:44 But I’d also like to add that there’s another influence that mess things up.
1:38:48 I would take the bros of the nineties with the big bench press and the chicken legs
1:38:55 to these guys who stand on balls and juggle oranges and whatever the hell they’re doing.
1:39:00 I mean, the idea is, so there’s the concept of neuroplasticity, which obviously you know
1:39:06 so much more than I about, that’s always thrown around, oh, you need variety.
1:39:13 And so they throw every circus trick at these poor clients, and by the way, I use the word
1:39:18 “clients” purposefully, like at Strong First at our school of strength, we have students
1:39:21 because hair salons of clients.
1:39:23 But in that world, they’re definitely clients.
1:39:28 Well, today you’re going to stand on one foot and then you’re going to pull on this cable
1:39:31 and then tomorrow you’re going to kneel and you’re going to do this kind of thing.
1:39:38 Well, asymmetrical loading and symmetry are absolutely something that’s needed under
1:39:40 certain conditions.
1:39:44 You need to do it in a professional way, like if you look at Gray Cook’s work, Gray will
1:39:52 tell you just get yourself symmetrical and start lifting instead of resort to this unlimited,
1:39:56 what colleague of mine, Mark Griffin, called random acts of variety.
1:40:00 So I’d say that’s the other, they’re way too many choices.
1:40:03 And when there are no constraints, when everything’s available, you go to a store, everything’s
1:40:05 available, you don’t know what to pick.
1:40:06 And you can stick with that.
1:40:09 So that’s a very big problem, I would say.
1:40:15 So I would say the less time people spend on the internet, unless you’re looking up
1:40:19 research papers or doing something else valuable or fine, watching a good movie, that’s all
1:40:20 right.
1:40:23 So unless you’re looking up a research paper or watching a movie, forget about it.
1:40:29 Or your podcast or my website, that’s it, the rest of it is off limits.
1:40:36 But strengths and endurance, endurance is a very broad term.
1:40:41 And if we talk about, let’s talk a little bit about training for athletes for endurance
1:40:44 and let’s talk maybe a little bit for the general population we’re trying to do for
1:40:47 health and again, for just going for a hike.
1:40:56 So the endurance of being able to do triathlon or swim a very long distance, the adaptations
1:41:02 are primarily taking place in the slow fibers and you have some very specific adaptations
1:41:08 to the capillaries and the mitochondria, so many things, but in a very specific way.
1:41:11 And that’s not going to help you, let’s say, if you’re a fighter.
1:41:17 It’s happened over and over where a guy who’s been a marathoner, he takes up MMA and he
1:41:23 starts getting gassed really rapidly because while he has, his slow fibers can keep going
1:41:29 forever, but not at the intensity that’s required for this particular sport.
1:41:33 So and also we’re talking about there’s endurance that’s peripheral and central.
1:41:37 So you’re talking about obviously your heart, you’re talking about your lungs, you’re talking
1:41:39 about the plumbing.
1:41:43 But then you’re also talking about the extraction and use of the oxygen, which is huge and it’s
1:41:44 totally different.
1:41:48 It can be trained with the same methods, but adaptations are very different.
1:41:53 So then when people realize that, oh, let’s start smoking these MMA guys and martial arts
1:42:00 guys and BGJA guys, let’s just make them puke and that’s going to improve the endurance.
1:42:03 And it does improve the endurance, but a very high cost.
1:42:07 So in the Soviet sport science, there’s a term, the cost of adaptation comes from Felix
1:42:15 Meirs and Professor, he was a cardiopathologist originally, but later again, his research
1:42:17 and stress is amazing.
1:42:20 So there’s the cost of adaptation.
1:42:25 And it’s the same thing is pretty much as buying a car or table.
1:42:30 You can get the same table for a lower price or you can pay the top dollar.
1:42:34 So you can increase your strengths while at the same time blowing your back out or you
1:42:40 can increase your view to a max while getting a resume in the process or you can do it in
1:42:41 a healthy way.
1:42:45 So one of the issues you have to look at, they’re trying to lower the biological cost
1:42:47 of the adaptation.
1:42:52 So in strength training, we do that by very careful and not training hard too often.
1:42:57 So again, the American system is two weeks out of four, the Soviet system pretty much
1:43:01 the same although the planning is going to be different.
1:43:07 First if we look at the cardiovascular adaptations, before we’re looking into the mitochondrion
1:43:17 into the muscle, most of the work should be done below the threshold pretty much.
1:43:18 So what’s the threshold?
1:43:23 So for runners, let’s say you’re running and you’re able to maintain a conversation and
1:43:27 when you start running too fast and you cannot maintain the conversation, you pass the threshold.
1:43:32 It’s like you’re going faster and you’re breathing harder linearly and suddenly it goes like
1:43:34 this like a hockey stick.
1:43:39 So at that point, your body is no longer able to process all that acid and things are starting
1:43:40 to get hard.
1:43:45 So there are certain implications, there are certain implications for your muscles for
1:43:47 sure, we’ll discuss that in a few minutes.
1:43:52 But for your heart, there are two things you’re primarily trying to train.
1:43:57 One we’re trying to train the stroke volume, so pretty much how much blood the heart can
1:44:00 pump out with each contraction.
1:44:04 And it’s a very simple thing to do.
1:44:14 You get up to like 70 to 75% of your maximal heart rate.
1:44:17 So the heart starts stretching literally.
1:44:24 So this blood is incoming and the heart starts stretching and it requires volume.
1:44:30 Some to the font’s writers, they might throw the food in the back of the cycle and they
1:44:34 write all day, because that’s what they’ve got to do.
1:44:38 And that requires that adaptation for people who just do it for health, you don’t need
1:44:39 to do that much.
1:44:41 You know, 30, 40 minutes several times a week is enough.
1:44:44 But for a high level, you have to stretch the heart.
1:44:49 If you start redlining the heart rate, the heart starts twitching.
1:44:56 So there’s no time for it to fully relax and stretch.
1:44:59 You’re no longer really increasing your stroke volume.
1:45:02 And what you’re doing right now, you’re strengthening your rejection fraction, which is like the
1:45:08 strength of the heart, which is needed for athletes whose sports require redlining the
1:45:09 heart rate.
1:45:12 You know, if you’re a fighter, if you are a 400 meter runner, you absolutely need to
1:45:13 do that.
1:45:18 But what they found, it went back to German research going to decades later and then
1:45:21 Soviet research.
1:45:27 If you start redlining your heart rate before you have that volume that you put in and built
1:45:31 up the stroke volume, you’re just heading for pathology.
1:45:33 So there are arrhythmias.
1:45:36 There’s all sorts of different things that that the AFibs, all sorts of things that can
1:45:38 start happen that are bad.
1:45:43 And also your performance is not going to be very high because again, your stroke volume
1:45:44 is not there.
1:45:48 And even for athletes who do that, they should do it for a very short period of time.
1:45:51 It’s just too stressful and it’s just not needed.
1:45:52 Typically it’s a peak.
1:45:56 It’s peaking phase for some weeks before leading up to the competition.
1:46:02 So pretty much steady state, steady state exercise, like riding a cycle or jogging or
1:46:09 hiking, when you’re still able to talk, it’s the best, most efficient and healthiest way
1:46:13 to promote that quality when you’re increasing your heart stroke volume.
1:46:18 If you decide to get a little more intense at some point, interval training is appropriate,
1:46:22 but unfortunately it’s completely and totally messed up and misunderstood.
1:46:26 It’s like a catch-all term, high intensity interval training.
1:46:30 And Brent Rushall, a professor at San Diego said this is nonsense.
1:46:31 This term is a nonsense.
1:46:32 What does it even mean?
1:46:34 Like what’s high intensity?
1:46:35 And also here’s a question.
1:46:40 What does low intensity interval training mean?
1:46:46 Going back to taking a step to the side, but that’s discussion will help us when we discuss
1:46:49 what happens in the muscle terminology.
1:46:53 So there are different rest periods between sets.
1:47:00 There is the ordinary rest period, so which means you pretty much recover your function.
1:47:05 It’s like you’re just as strong or just as enduring as from the previous set.
1:47:09 There is the supramax rest period.
1:47:14 When you, if you rest extra, sometimes you get some extra performance out of it.
1:47:19 And there is this stress rest period when the next set is going to be harder.
1:47:22 The performance may or may not become compromised, but it’s going to be harder.
1:47:27 So with the ordinary stress or ordinary rest periods, that is called, in track, it’s called
1:47:28 repeat training.
1:47:33 You know, so you’re on 100 meters, then you rest for, you know, whatever 10, 15 minutes
1:47:37 as long as you need longer possibly, then you repeat it again.
1:47:39 And your performance stayed this way.
1:47:40 Interval training, again, is established.
1:47:43 It just means that things are going to get worse from set to set.
1:47:47 So that’s the definition of interval training.
1:47:55 The irony is the interval training was designed to increase the intensity of exercise while
1:47:56 reducing the demands on the body.
1:48:02 So if you look at the works of Fox and Edwards, they’re pioneers of interval training in
1:48:05 the United States, they gave some great examples.
1:48:09 So let’s say you’re running for 30 seconds and you’re at this speed and you’re going
1:48:13 to produce this much acid and your heart rate is going to be this high.
1:48:19 Well, if you run for 10 seconds with short periods in between, at the same speed, you’re
1:48:23 going to produce a lot less acid and your heart rate is not going to climb to the stratosphere.
1:48:27 And that type of training is very, very useful.
1:48:30 And interval training can be used for promoting any type of adaptation.
1:48:34 You can use it for hypertrophy.
1:48:39 So here’s one training method I learned from my colleague Fabio Zonin.
1:48:43 It was designed by Professor Mazzaroni in Italy and Mr. Universe and Professor.
1:48:44 Okay.
1:48:50 You take 80% of your one rep max, let’s say presumably eight rep max, set a five, rest
1:48:52 for 30 seconds.
1:48:54 Set a five, rest for 30 seconds.
1:48:56 If you cannot do it anymore, you’re done.
1:48:58 And then you come back maybe 10 minutes later, do it again.
1:49:01 That’s an example of interval training again.
1:49:07 And you can structure interval training for adaptations within the muscle, amidechandria.
1:49:09 And you can also do that for your heart.
1:49:10 So here’s how you do it for the heart.
1:49:14 Today, there are a lot of fancy, popular protocols, but all you have to do is go back to what
1:49:17 Germans did many decades ago.
1:49:19 Here’s the premise.
1:49:23 Your vegetative system, your heart, your lungs, your plumbing, they have inertia.
1:49:26 So for example, imagine yourself as a kid.
1:49:28 You run really, really hard.
1:49:33 You know, you run for, you know, 100 meters or something or less, maybe.
1:49:35 And everything’s fine.
1:49:38 And then you’re talking to your body and suddenly you start sucking wet.
1:49:42 So that’s an example of this inertia.
1:49:49 So if you get your heart rate up to about 85% to 90% one rev max, and then you suddenly
1:49:53 switch to jogging, you don’t want to stop because that’s just way too hard for your
1:49:58 heart without getting that venous return from muscles working.
1:50:05 What happens is the heart slows down, but there’s that blood keeps on moving and the
1:50:08 blood literally stretches the walls of the heart.
1:50:09 I see.
1:50:14 So sprint, perhaps 100, 200, 300, 400 meters and then jog back.
1:50:17 Traditionally, it was not quite a sprint.
1:50:21 The duration would be typical 60 to 90 seconds.
1:50:25 The intensity is such that you get up to top off at 85, 90% of your heart rate max, something
1:50:27 like that.
1:50:31 And then you jog until your heart rate goes to about 60, 70%.
1:50:34 So that’s roughly about the same, probably.
1:50:40 And that, to look things up, it’s like German interval training that was done.
1:50:46 It is based on very definite physiological events like this is what the heart does.
1:50:49 This is what we’re trying to do with the heart.
1:50:55 And instead of inventing some things that are simply trash the body for no reason whatsoever.
1:51:03 And part of the problem also, Andrew, is it’s very easy to get misled by quick gains.
1:51:08 So and it happens in the strength world and endurance world.
1:51:14 Let’s remember the years when you and I and every other male listener bench-press their
1:51:16 max once a week.
1:51:17 You’re strong.
1:51:18 Next week, you’re stronger.
1:51:20 Third week, you’re stronger.
1:51:21 Like you’re doing the math.
1:51:25 You’re doing the math like, okay, well, I should be setting the national record by Christmas
1:51:29 and maybe if you go into the worlds by summer.
1:51:31 And then at six weeks, you’re done.
1:51:34 And for experienced athletes, it happens sooner like after three weeks.
1:51:38 The same thing with endurance, when you start doing glycolytic work, when you start redlining
1:51:42 heart rate and increasing the asses, your performance jumps so quickly.
1:51:43 It’s very contagious.
1:51:47 It’s like, oh, not contagious, pardon me, it’s very exciting.
1:51:51 And you think that you’re going to keep going forever, but you really absolutely will not.
1:52:03 So if you want to train your heart, a good way of doing that is steady state work.
1:52:11 If you decide to do some sort of intermittent work, there are several different ways.
1:52:16 One is intermittent exercise.
1:52:20 That’s more of a repeat in nature, not interval, which is very bizarre to people.
1:52:24 Let’s say that you go moderately hard for 10 seconds.
1:52:27 You go easy for 10 seconds and you do this for 30 to 60 minutes.
1:52:28 Imagine doing that.
1:52:29 That’s good work.
1:52:32 It is good work, but you know what to be shocking to you?
1:52:37 That you’re not going to produce that much ass or you can not redline your heart rate.
1:52:42 Better would be like 10 seconds of work, 20 seconds of rest.
1:52:45 Fascinating research that Swedes did back in the ’50s and ’60s and that.
1:52:46 It’s amazing.
1:52:49 The work period is short.
1:52:52 You’re able to not produce a lot of acid, but just go very, very hard.
1:52:56 And you’re going to be able to train your heart and your lungs in this manner, too.
1:53:03 You can also do, and you also have peripheral adaptations in the muscles of mitochondria
1:53:07 and so on, vascularis, some capitalization happening, too.
1:53:13 But it’s also interesting, there’s one particular type of, I hate the fact that it falls onto
1:53:19 the intensity interval training umbrella because it’s not, because everything that sounds
1:53:23 like hit, it’s not good to me because it’s just made up label.
1:53:30 But there’s one type of training that delivers great benefits to your cardiorespiratory system
1:53:34 and at the same time, it also does that for your mitochondria and even builds muscle
1:53:37 in the same time.
1:53:46 In track, it is called glycolytic power repeats, and in the last 20 years, there were several
1:53:53 good papers that were done on that, DiBala, Brighamaster, I think, pardon me if I’m mispronouncing
1:54:00 their names, but pretty much you do a wingate, like a 30 seconds of hard exercise followed
1:54:05 by approximately five minutes of rest, and you repeat it several times.
1:54:09 Here’s what’s unique about this type of method.
1:54:14 It gets your heart rate up to about that 85, 85, 90% or something, then you’re going to
1:54:19 walk it off after that, so you are going to get adaptations for your heart.
1:54:25 It’s not the most effective way, but it’s, for healthy people, it’s a healthy way and
1:54:26 it’s a very efficient way.
1:54:31 At the same time, we’ll discuss later what happens in the mitochondria level, but also
1:54:37 what’s interesting, you’re also likely to get build some muscle as well.
1:54:41 Typically there is the conflict, which we’re getting to this point about like strength
1:54:42 versus endurance.
1:54:46 Typically, there’s a conflict of strength versus endurance, because if you’re looking
1:54:52 in the mTOR in one side, AMPK on the other side, things seem to be like, “Okay, this
1:54:59 is pulling one way, this is pulling the other way,” but somehow this particular load, while
1:55:05 promoting peripheral and central endurance, endurance, at least in the fast and intermediate
1:55:08 fibers, also does promote muscle growth.
1:55:09 Interesting.
1:55:13 What sort of exercise, this is not sprints, this would be kettlebell swings, for instance.
1:55:19 In the studies that were done, they used wing gaze, they used cycle, they cycled, sprinting,
1:55:22 if you are going uphill, you could certainly do that.
1:55:25 Because this 30 seconds is hard, you’re pushing.
1:55:26 You’re pushing.
1:55:27 Yeah.
1:55:32 In fact, it’s too easy to get something messed up, so going uphill, you can do that.
1:55:33 We do this with kettlebells.
1:55:38 We did this work in my first kettlebell school over 20 years ago, where we would do a set
1:55:44 of, you take a heavy kettlebell, moderately heavy kettlebell, like for you or me to be
1:55:50 like a 70-pounder, and we would snatch it really hard for a set of 20, 25 reps.
1:55:54 And then we just jog until the heart rate comes down, and then we take this leisurely
1:55:58 powerlifting rest, and we’re going to do it again.
1:56:04 And it’s a fantastic way to promote various aspects of fitness.
1:56:07 So you’re going to get a cardiorespiratory endurance, you’re going to have to get peripheral
1:56:13 adaptations, endurance in the muscle, and you’re also building muscle at the same time.
1:56:17 The reasons for that, here’s the theory.
1:56:21 Again, all the conversations we have about this is what happens in the muscle, all these
1:56:23 are theories.
1:56:29 We know pretty much if we do X, we’re going to get Z, whatever, or Y, some kind of result
1:56:32 at this point, but we may not necessarily know for sure.
1:56:36 So the following is another one of the theories, but it’s another good, credible one.
1:56:38 So this is Professor Viktor Siliyanov.
1:56:43 So according to him, the preconditions for muscle growth, in addition to the obvious,
1:56:47 like food and things and hormones.
1:56:53 So when you reach a certain level of acidosis, only a certain level of acidosis, not necessarily
1:56:59 very high, that those hydrogen ions will make the membrane permeable to the hormones, so
1:57:02 they’re going to enter and go into the nucleus and start doing their job.
1:57:05 So that’s one of the part of the explanation.
1:57:10 Then at the same time, also the free creatin, when creatin phosphate, that hot fuel gets
1:57:15 burned off, that’s also anabolic for one reason or another.
1:57:19 So there are some explanations, whether that’s how it is or not, I don’t know, but the fact
1:57:26 is doing a hard 30, 40 second set, followed by a very generous rest.
1:57:31 We’re talking about five, 10 minutes, and repeating it five times, possibly more.
1:57:33 It works very, very well.
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1:59:05 What should I do during my rest periods?
1:59:06 All right.
1:59:10 Well, first of all, whenever your heart rate is high, the very first thing is to not to
1:59:19 suddenly stop, because there are one-way valves in the veins that whenever you contract the
1:59:23 muscles of the legs, they help to milk the blood back through to the heart, so basically
1:59:25 they reduce the stress on the heart.
1:59:28 So just walk it out first, the first step.
1:59:33 If your heart rate was high, then the second thing is you want to do exercises, you want
1:59:38 to do relaxation, myorelixation, muscle relaxation exercise.
1:59:44 What they are is if you watch boxers, how they shake off their shoulders and drop and drop
1:59:47 their hands and do things like that.
1:59:51 These exercises go back to the 30s, Soviets use them since the 30s, and they use them
1:59:56 with elite athletes, kids in grade schools, and everybody.
2:00:01 So these exercises serve several functions.
2:00:07 One is if you are doing an exercise that is strength exercise in nature, some of the cross
2:00:13 bridges are stuck pretty much, and so your muscle is a thixotropic, it’s like gel.
2:00:17 So by moving your muscle in a passive manner, you get it unstuck.
2:00:21 And so you restore circulation, obviously.
2:00:26 And the other reason is, again, control of muscular tension is very, very important.
2:00:29 It’s important to learn how to contract the muscle for strength.
2:00:35 It’s very important how to relax for speed, for endurance, just for a happy life.
2:00:39 If you look at the best sprinters, note how relaxed their faces are when they were on
2:00:43 their jaws, relax how relaxed their necks are.
2:00:46 So relaxation is something that’s practiced, just like tension.
2:00:51 So regardless of what exercise that you just did, shaking off, we call this fast and loose
2:00:54 drills, shaking like a passive, like turn your muscles too fast.
2:00:57 So you want to do this for a little bit.
2:01:00 Then after that, it depends how long is your rest.
2:01:05 So if you’re taking, and it depends which exactly that you’re doing.
2:01:09 In some extreme examples, let’s say that you’re a sprinter, let me re-talk like doing sprint
2:01:13 repeats with, let’s say, 100 meters in 15 minutes, you think, wow, sounds like a great,
2:01:15 great training session.
2:01:21 Well the problem is, these guys do need these 15 minutes to get the acid out of the system
2:01:27 and have some other functions to recover, but after a couple of minutes, the CNS excitability
2:01:29 goes down.
2:01:34 So what the Soviets figured out back in the 40s still is what you do then, after you walked
2:01:40 it off, after you shook it off, you here and there, you insert some very kind of light
2:01:44 and easy hops, or whatever, using the same muscle groups.
2:01:47 So these poor athletes really have a complicated rest protocol.
2:01:50 There’s really no rest for the wicked there.
2:01:55 If you are a lifter who’s taking very long rest periods in between, let’s say you take
2:02:01 those 10 minutes, then after your heart rate is down and after you shook off and after
2:02:04 you walked it, you can just sit down, you can do whatever you want.
2:02:12 Do not sit a slouch, because obviously Stu McGill explained why, that’s not a good idea.
2:02:18 And speaking of slouching, one reason that runners get their backs jacked up after running
2:02:22 or some endurance event is, again, they go into their knees and they, you know, get under
2:02:28 that collapsed posture and their discs are really pliable and warm after the run and
2:02:31 then suddenly put them into flexion and they get messed up.
2:02:34 So yeah, you also got to, like you point out to watch your posture, but you really got to
2:02:40 watch your posture during recovery because you slump between your sets of squats and
2:02:42 then, you know, you could blow something out right there.
2:02:43 Interesting.
2:02:48 I used to think that I would, this recurring sort of lower back hip thing that I finally
2:02:52 feel is under control and I used to think that it correlated with travel and something
2:02:55 about maybe not sleeping as well and traveling, perhaps.
2:03:00 But what I’ve noticed is even if I just sit too much after training my legs hard, I end
2:03:02 up with this back issue.
2:03:06 So just moving to standing desk configuration after training legs, irrespective of travel
2:03:07 has really helped.
2:03:11 And I think, I mean, nowadays there’s all this excitement about walking.
2:03:13 I don’t know if you, you know, I don’t know how much time you spend on social media, but
2:03:16 like walking is the new thing for 2024.
2:03:17 Okay.
2:03:20 So I discovered walking to lower, you know, post meal blood glucose, I mean, all stuff
2:03:22 that was very, that’s intuitive.
2:03:23 Great thing to do.
2:03:28 We’ll see what happens in 2025 with the, with the next housing and I’m a fan of walking,
2:03:34 but in no small part because it just feels like it loosens up everything after training
2:03:36 and I like to train early in the day if possible.
2:03:41 And I notice a dramatic reduction in kind of aches and strains as well.
2:03:45 So the last thing you can do, I remember when I watched your podcast with Stu McGill, you
2:03:51 mentioned that, uh, the, uh, upward facing dog, Cobra or Cobra helps you, right?
2:03:52 Yeah.
2:03:53 Putting yourself in extension.
2:03:59 So for people who, for whom that works, it’s, uh, you can just lie on the, lie on the floor
2:04:01 in your elbows and just read a book.
2:04:06 So for example, add strong first, uh, courses when people do exercise and then we teach
2:04:07 them.
2:04:09 So we have several authorized postures.
2:04:13 So you either have to sit Ramrod straight, you know, you can sit in the Lotus or Cesar
2:04:19 or something like that, or, uh, you can, you know, half kneel still upright or you can
2:04:20 lie on your stomach.
2:04:25 So we do not allow this, this collapse posture because this is a great, great way to get
2:04:26 hurt.
2:04:29 Plus, you know, you look like a slacker when you’re a slacker mentally, you’re not going
2:04:32 to be focused on whatever you’re supposed to be doing.
2:04:34 So I think that’s, I think that’s a good idea.
2:04:38 And to bring us back to, do you want to talk a little bit about the peripheral adaptations
2:04:39 from endurance?
2:04:40 Please.
2:04:41 Okay.
2:04:42 And then maybe we can talk about like, what should people, uh, what should people
2:04:43 do?
2:04:44 We’re not athletes.
2:04:54 So a much bigger thing than the VO2 max is the adaptations, the ability of your muscles
2:04:57 to extract and use the oxygen.
2:05:03 So this again, called this revolution, anti-glycolytic revolution comes from, uh, also Yuriy Verkoshansky.
2:05:08 Again, he’s known as the father of plyometrics, but he’s so much more than that.
2:05:14 And back in 1980, he looked at the typical endurance training protocols and he says,
2:05:20 okay, everything, everybody’s trying to push the athlete to the greatest degree of discomfort
2:05:23 and make the athlete accustomed to that degree of discomfort.
2:05:26 And he says that, that’s just wrong.
2:05:31 Instead, we need to figure out how to postpone the fatigue and how to fight the mechanism
2:05:33 that produced the fatigue.
2:05:37 And he says, glycolysis and aerobic glycolysis is the primary cause of that.
2:05:42 You could split a lot of hairs, whether it’s, uh, you know, it’s the glycolysis itself
2:05:52 or it’s, uh, the acid from coming from ATP breakdown or whether it’s, uh, non-organic
2:05:56 phosphate or whatever, but whatever it is, it always happens when the acid dose is running
2:05:58 high when acid becomes high.
2:06:03 So that doesn’t really matter which, which exact, uh, exact factor is.
2:06:10 So he figured out, you need to promote aerobic metabolism in the working muscle fibers.
2:06:14 So he decided that endurance training for, for high level athletes and people who are
2:06:18 not athletes, it will apply to you as well, has to be specific.
2:06:25 That’s exactly why like that, uh, that marathon runner who joined the MMA class and then sucking
2:06:29 wind, his endurance is totally not specific.
2:06:35 Here’s an example of, uh, specific endurance is where you’re using the same muscle fibers
2:06:40 that in your sport and in a mode that’s consistent with that sport.
2:06:46 So Virgashansky would have people like skiers, for example, do this very long push-off on
2:06:51 the ski and then glide, push-off and glide.
2:06:54 And, uh, yeah, Suleymanov, who came after him.
2:06:57 So an example of that, you have this really powerful contraction of the muscles that are
2:06:59 used in your sport.
2:07:05 And then there’s that relaxation during which the muscle recovers is, it’s myoglobin oxygen
2:07:09 that there’s a small amount of oxygen in the muscle and it requires that creatinophosphate
2:07:11 fuel that is used for that short term.
2:07:17 So pretty much instead of relying on that acid producing metabolism, glycolytic metabolism
2:07:23 that you start using on one hand to use lifters metabolism, you know, creatinophosphate, that’s
2:07:27 what fuels, uh, you know, a set of three reps.
2:07:30 And on the other, you’re using this marathon runner’s aerobic metabolism.
2:07:34 So you’re like putting glycolysis in a vise.
2:07:41 And a great example of that comes from, Virgashansky is not the only one who came up with this
2:07:42 idea.
2:07:44 He’s been reinvented by others.
2:07:51 So in boxing, Leon Spinks, to the viewers who don’t know who he is, Leon Spinks was
2:07:57 a professional boxing world champion and he defeated Muhammad Ali, amongst, among others.
2:07:59 So he’s a great champion.
2:08:04 And he hired Arthur Lidyard, who was a great running coach from New Zealand, to work in
2:08:06 his conditioning.
2:08:14 And Lidyard had him do work in the heavy bag for an hour and a half to two hours nonstop.
2:08:18 And he says, no, of course you’re not going all out, sometimes harder, but you’re definitely
2:08:19 not tapping the bag.
2:08:21 You’re not shadowboxing.
2:08:26 So if you’re putting your muscle fibers in a very specific metabolic window and do it
2:08:31 over and over and over, that, uh, they start adapting to it.
2:08:34 Fast fibers start developing mitochondria.
2:08:37 Fast fibers start developing capillaries.
2:08:41 Fast fibers don’t lose their strengths, but they start developing the plumbing and the
2:08:45 ability to use the oxidative system to recover rapidly.
2:08:51 But going back to, again, this larger prioritization idea is when you start with a new stimulus,
2:08:55 it’s, uh, your body is highly reactive with your resistance is low, you cannot take much
2:08:56 of it.
2:09:00 Then that teeter-totter goes the other way, you’ll no longer see, you have to figure out
2:09:04 how to restore that reactivity and different training systems do it differently.
2:09:10 So an example of the American power lifting system, you basically go, go lighter, start
2:09:11 over the lightweight.
2:09:15 So you decondition yourself purposefully, like two steps forward, one step back.
2:09:21 And that’s, uh, another example would be to use what, um, the survey is called specialized
2:09:22 variety.
2:09:26 And this is something that you could see in the Soviet weightlifting system with Medvedev
2:09:31 and Alexei Medvedev, uh, one of the scientists and coaches, and also the West Side Barbell
2:09:33 powerlifting club.
2:09:40 So specialized variety as opposed to random variety is when you have the same lift and
2:09:42 we just very slight modifications.
2:09:47 So the motor program, the intention stays the same, but again, imagine that instead
2:09:55 of a deadlifting, deadlifting from the platform, you’re deadlifting standing on a off a plate.
2:09:59 So just slightly increase the range of motion, but you’re still doing the same thing.
2:10:06 Or imagine that you, uh, bring your grip and the bench press, a couple of inches in or
2:10:11 imagine that you use a block, this is a popular exercise in powerlifting.
2:10:15 You put a, I can imagine putting a brick on your chest, something the size of a brick,
2:10:20 lowering it to that, pausing and pressing back to work that very specific sticking point.
2:10:22 So you’re still benching.
2:10:26 So what you’re doing is you resume, you’re resolving this conflict between accommodation
2:10:28 and specificity.
2:10:31 And like you, on one hand it’s novel, but on the other hand it’s really, it’s like same
2:10:32 but different.
2:10:34 It’s a very good tactic.
2:10:40 It requires, it requires, uh, the knowledge of knowledge of the iron game.
2:10:44 That’s not something, because if you go from the bench press to the military press or dips,
2:10:50 you might see improvement, but or might not because that’s not specialized variety anymore.
2:10:57 But if you look at like in Medvedev, Alexei Medvedevs, when he coached the national team
2:11:03 for these clean and jerk and snatch for the two company competitive lifts, they had 100
2:11:05 variations.
2:11:10 But all these variations were like, okay, so now we’re snatching from hang.
2:11:11 Now we’re snatching from blocks.
2:11:13 Now we’re jerking from the rack.
2:11:14 Do you see what I mean?
2:11:20 They’re all, this reminds me of, uh, this reminds me of this humorous book about Scandinavians
2:11:25 written by a Scandinavian explaining how very different different Scandinavians are.
2:11:29 And so this book has pictures of the same guy wearing different sweater.
2:11:30 Sounds about right.
2:11:31 So yeah.
2:11:33 My Scandinavian relatives will chuckle at that.
2:11:40 I feel like one of the, again, I’m not trying to point out the ills of the fitness culture,
2:11:44 but I feel like if I were to put up on a wall, the two or three things that have caused the
2:11:50 most confusion and, you know, reduction in people’s potential results from fitness would
2:11:55 be seeking the pump as its own thing and seeking soreness as its own thing.
2:11:59 And then confusing panting hard and sweating a lot with intensity.
2:12:02 You know, I feel like those three things, you know, people think I had a great workout
2:12:06 or my new trainer is, you know, I finished just completely depleted, you know, this and
2:12:10 then these are the same people that are complaining about an injury or they quit or they don’t
2:12:15 have the motivation because, you know, they, they’re not taking whatever pre-workout is
2:12:20 required to generate that kind of quote unquote intensity.
2:12:23 I’m not looking for agreement, but would you agree or disagree?
2:12:27 I mean, you know, and then maybe by comparison, we could sort of throw up on the wall the
2:12:32 things that we should be seeking when we train as opposed to these kind of, you know, before
2:12:35 I answer this question, since we’re talking about the peripheral adaptations, you made
2:12:37 a great point about seeking pump.
2:12:41 I’m going to give you a great example how when not seeking pump is going to do so, can
2:12:43 I deliver great adaptation for you?
2:12:48 So do you remember that idea of punching the bag for an hour, let’s say, or two hours?
2:12:52 That’s how that promotes mitochondrial and endurance development, the fast-switch fibers.
2:12:57 That can also be done with strength exercises as well for wrestlers and MMA fighters.
2:12:59 So you can do the bench press.
2:13:04 You can do bench press and develop endurance in your fast-switch fibers.
2:13:07 The nature of endurance is very, very peculiar.
2:13:11 You know, in team sports, there’s a term repeat sprint ability.
2:13:16 So repeat sprint ability means that let’s say that you sprint for 20 meters, rest for
2:13:19 less than a minute, sprint for another 20, you know, just something like that.
2:13:24 So sprint rest, sprint rest, which is, which reflects the nature of team sport, football,
2:13:27 soccer, and so on.
2:13:30 It’s totally different from running 400 meters around the track.
2:13:33 In strength endurance, it’s the same thing.
2:13:36 NFL combine, you know, that’s, it’s a fine test, whatever.
2:13:43 It’s a nice bodybuilding exercise, good pump, but on the field, you’re not doing 30 reps.
2:13:47 You’re doing one rep, and then a little bit later, you’re going to do another rep.
2:13:53 So your conditioning for a fast-switch fibers can be structured in the same manner.
2:14:00 So there’s Russian research, a researcher named Bob Wieken, he put his several groups
2:14:03 of athletes in different protocols.
2:14:07 So one of them was doing the typical high intensity, whatever, circuit training, smoker,
2:14:08 right?
2:14:12 So you take 70% of your one rep max, and you do this for 30 seconds, and you go push hard,
2:14:16 and then you do the next one, and very typical.
2:14:21 Then the other group, anti-glycolytic group, these athletes would lift the same 70% one
2:14:25 rep max for three reps.
2:14:29 They do one exercise, second exercise, third exercise, rest for one minute, do it again,
2:14:30 and again, and again.
2:14:36 So to the listeners, 70 rep max, an average athlete can probably crank out about 12 reps
2:14:37 with it.
2:14:40 A fighter is probably going to crank out 20 some reps with that easily.
2:14:43 So they only do three reps.
2:14:48 And so three reps, and other exercise, and other exercise, rest for one minute, do it
2:14:50 over and over and over.
2:14:57 And the end result was really fascinating, the outcome.
2:15:03 There is one particular test discovered by the same researcher that correlated, has the
2:15:08 highest correlation competitive performance for MMA fighters.
2:15:13 So this test was R0.888, it’s very, very high.
2:15:20 And very interesting thing, what it is, it’s the rate of heart rate recovery after an all
2:15:23 out set with 70% one rep max deadlift.
2:15:27 It’s a hard set, it’s brutal, very, very brutal.
2:15:32 Interestingly enough, the reps with 70% one rep max correlation was not so good.
2:15:34 Even the deadlift strength was not so high.
2:15:39 But it’s that recovery from that was very, very high.
2:15:44 So the group that did the anti-glycolytic work never did more than three reps, completely
2:15:48 blew the traditional training group out of the water.
2:15:52 Then in addition to that, they were able to bang out a lot more consecutive reps as well.
2:15:54 They weren’t even training for that.
2:15:58 Then after that, they also saw competitive better results in competition and so on and
2:16:01 so forth.
2:16:08 It’s a great way to train because you’re able to, so you take, imagine taking a weight
2:16:15 that’s, that you can lift maybe 12 to 20 times, and you lift it about three times.
2:16:18 That’s for a minute and do it again and again and again.
2:16:25 This is very much like a blue color workers day, and you’re not seeking pump whatsoever.
2:16:30 But as a result, you’re going to develop that, that type of endurance that repeats strength
2:16:35 and endurance that very much is applicable to most combat and team sports and also for
2:16:36 the real life.
2:16:42 Whenever you are moving furniture, you’re not trying to look, I’m going to try to get
2:16:43 a pump.
2:16:46 I’m going to put this piano up there and I’ll get another one, then we’re going to rest
2:16:49 for 20 minutes, then we’re going to start over.
2:16:56 No, Swedish work on occupational strength, they found that old and crafty and wily workers
2:17:02 like loggers and others, they were able to like, they, they keep their efforts very brief
2:17:05 and then the rest for a few seconds and do it over and over and over.
2:17:10 So that intermittent nature of rest is, is very powerful.
2:17:13 It seems like this is a repeating theme.
2:17:14 By the way, thank you for spelling that out.
2:17:18 So for people that perhaps want to try something like this and I intend to, four exercises,
2:17:26 three, three exercises, excuse me, done each at roughly 70% of your one repetition maximum.
2:17:29 So what you could do for about 12 repetitions, but you’re only doing three repetitions, rest
2:17:31 a minute in between exercises.
2:17:35 And the rest active again, just walk around, shake it off and do this for, do this about
2:17:37 15 times, possibly later.
2:17:38 15, 15 rounds.
2:17:40 Up to 15 rounds.
2:17:50 And so this could be a Zercher squat, pull up, dip, deadlift or something.
2:17:52 Maybe going deadlift in the Zercher squat.
2:17:54 You know, you use really good examples.
2:17:59 So this is, this is a protocol that I did for, for a couple of friends of mine for their
2:18:00 high level BGJ competition.
2:18:01 We did exactly that.
2:18:06 They did Zergers, they did pull ups on towels and, you know, more, more specific and more
2:18:09 grip and they did the closed grip bench press.
2:18:10 And there isn’t as close.
2:18:13 It doesn’t put on quite as much mass, but it, you know, works at triceps really quite
2:18:14 nicely.
2:18:17 But yeah, but you can even do it with one exercise.
2:18:21 Three reps, rest for a minute, three reps, rest for a minute and so on.
2:18:23 How many times per week is one repeating?
2:18:27 You can repeat this three, four times a week easily, but it depends on what else you do.
2:18:29 And it’s twice a week is enough.
2:18:32 Even twice a week is enough and it fits your strength training regimen.
2:18:34 It doesn’t take away from your strength day.
2:18:38 So it pretty much, you can treat that as your light day for your strength for the same lifts.
2:18:39 Okay.
2:18:47 So, and this would, is going to increase endurance, but is also going to increase strength somewhat.
2:18:50 It’s going to increase strength somewhat and Bovick and Bovick and his experiments it
2:18:55 definitely did, at least on fighters, but realized fighters typically are not that strong.
2:18:58 So up to a point, up to a point, it is going to increase your strength as well.
2:19:01 And at the very least, it’s going to support your strength.
2:19:06 And it’s, it’s a great way to just perfect your technique, perfect your skill.
2:19:07 It’s wonderful.
2:19:08 It’s very, very meditative.
2:19:14 My colleague at Strong First, Brad Jones, he even just wrote a book about it, the Iron
2:19:20 Cardio, because he took a protocol, strength aerobics protocol, like this Russian protocol
2:19:24 developed by another one of my colleagues, Alexei Senar, another one of our instructors.
2:19:29 And he just used the whole system and people loving it because, sorry, I’m going to go
2:19:31 back from the beginning to Alexei Senar.
2:19:40 So he’s, he lives in France and he was coaching some, he was coaching some law enforcement,
2:19:45 some law enforcement personnel and they were on a stake out where they absolutely had
2:19:50 no ability to train normally and they wanted to do something, something effective.
2:19:55 So he said, okay, take the schedule bell and you keep it in your hotel room or wherever
2:20:01 is your stake out, do one clean, one press, one front squat, put the kettlebell down,
2:20:06 shake it up, one clean, one press, one squat, put it down.
2:20:11 And like a metronome at a very rhythmical manner, you’re not trying to breathe hard.
2:20:14 You’re not trying to get a pump with singles you want.
2:20:18 And you do this for, you do this for about, you know, 30 minutes or whatever amount of
2:20:20 time that you do.
2:20:25 And it does develop that repeat strength endurance fantastically well.
2:20:29 There’s additional secondary effect of some cardio because you’re, you’re breathing in
2:20:32 between pretty much, you’re recovering, your heart is recovering.
2:20:37 And you’re not getting sore because you talked earlier about like people seeking pump and
2:20:39 seeking soreness.
2:20:44 One of the reasons soreness comes from is obviously, you know, a lot of eccentric contraction.
2:20:45 That’s very true.
2:20:49 But what people don’t realize that soreness also comes from too much acid.
2:20:54 In the past, the coaches used to tell, Oh, you know, acid burns holes in your muscle.
2:20:56 It doesn’t.
2:21:01 But what it does do is when the acid levels are high in the muscle, it stimulates production
2:21:04 of free radicals, which pound the cellar membranes later.
2:21:09 It also stimulates activity of lysosomes, lysosomes and phagocytes that just eat up,
2:21:11 eat up the tissue, the muscle.
2:21:16 So if you do too much, if you do too much acidic work, you’re going to be sore as well.
2:21:22 So seeking that makes no sense whatsoever, especially as we know not even from scientific
2:21:25 studies, but from athletic experience.
2:21:28 Some people get sore all the time, see no progress in anything.
2:21:29 Some people don’t get sore.
2:21:32 They keep getting stronger and everybody in between.
2:21:34 So there’s no correlation.
2:21:40 If you’re looking for pump on the other hand, if you’re trying to build muscle, one very
2:21:47 well-building strength, one very simple guideline would be achieve some pump with a heavy weight
2:21:49 and low reps.
2:21:54 So if you keep your reps to five and a few or even three, but you achieve a little pump,
2:21:59 that means you’ve performed a sufficient volume of work to stimulate that adaptation.
2:22:02 What exactly happens in the muscle, I can not tell you, but it absolutely does work
2:22:08 for both strengths and both, both hypertrophy.
2:22:11 So many theories about what causes hypertrophy.
2:22:15 At least you and I know that we don’t know, we’re just speculating here.
2:22:21 I really appreciate that you always acknowledge that, that we’re not totally in the dark about
2:22:22 hypertrophy.
2:22:30 I like this theory about the hydrogen creating a permeability of the cells, and you mentioned
2:22:32 that then it gives the hormones access.
2:22:37 Some folks might know, and some people might know, the steroid hormones like testosterone
2:22:41 estrogen and others, they combine to cell surface receptors, but they can also go into
2:22:46 the nucleus of a cell itself and cause changes in gene expression, which is sort of, if you
2:22:50 just think about puberty as the most salient example, there’s all these latent potential
2:22:55 in the cells of the body, but then once the testosterone and dihydrotestosterone and estrogen
2:23:01 arrives in the body, depending on the sex of the individual, then you activate hair
2:23:05 growth, you activate breast growth, you activate muscle growth, thickening of the vocal, anyway,
2:23:08 that’s through gene changes in gene expression.
2:23:13 In this configuration that you described before, you know, of doing this three repetitions
2:23:15 and repeating, you may be doing that three times a week.
2:23:17 Up to three, you can even do one, as you mentioned, yes.
2:23:19 Right, three times a week.
2:23:24 Could I also train for strength simultaneously, same days or other days?
2:23:25 Other days.
2:23:26 Other days.
2:23:29 So on the intervening days, I could go in and do my real strength work.
2:23:32 Yes, and you look at your priority.
2:23:37 If your strength is more important, do this type of a strength aerobic work no more than
2:23:39 twice a week.
2:23:44 And you know, then you do strength on that kind of additional three times or four times.
2:23:48 If that type of endurance is more important, do real strength work once a week and then
2:23:51 three, four times or the other kind.
2:23:59 This is also a very good idea in general for training different qualities, because trying
2:24:02 to develop everything to a high level at the same time, it’s impossible.
2:24:08 It simultaneously training and parallel everything only is good for young kids when they’re developing
2:24:10 because, you know, you got to try everything.
2:24:12 Nothing’s at a high level.
2:24:18 Later on, there are different models of how to structure addressing different qualities.
2:24:21 So one example would be block training.
2:24:28 So here’s one really good example, how strength and hypertrophy can be addressed at different
2:24:29 periods.
2:24:32 The experiment goes back to the 1970s.
2:24:39 It was done on Ivanov Kisilyova, I forgot the third author, experiment on throwers.
2:24:44 And they were doing squats and bench presses.
2:24:50 And one group was doing 85% for five triples, you know, typical heavy type stuff.
2:24:56 The other was three sets of 10 was 60%, which is fairly typical hypertrophy work.
2:25:00 Team bros would say that’s too light for six sets of 10, and I say, no, it’s not, because
2:25:03 you still have to throw the shot for the next day.
2:25:08 If you do 10 sets of 10 reps to failure, you’re going to be completely done.
2:25:13 Your strength will be down by about 40% for the next few days.
2:25:18 And so the one group did this, the other group did this, they both made good gains.
2:25:22 And the third group, but up to a point in the plateau, the third group, they alternated
2:25:25 two weeks of this, two weeks of that.
2:25:29 And in this quad, interestingly, I have to say it didn’t make that much difference, but
2:25:33 in the bench press, there’s a huge difference that alternating these two types stimuli.
2:25:36 So that’s an example of block training, how you can do that.
2:25:41 But what you can also do is you could simply maintain a quality.
2:25:46 So fortunately, it takes a lot less work to maintain anything that you’ve reached then
2:25:48 to get there.
2:25:54 So typically training some quality once a week at a moderate effort is enough to maintain
2:25:55 it.
2:25:56 So here’s an example of strength.
2:26:00 If once a week you lift 80% of your max for three sets of three reps, you can maintain
2:26:02 your strength easily for months.
2:26:03 Easily.
2:26:05 It just doesn’t take much at all.
2:26:11 And you don’t want to stop your strength training ever, totally, because again, it has that,
2:26:14 it will improve everything that you do, even your endurance.
2:26:19 But then you can switch the priorities in the same manner and people can do that in
2:26:20 their own way.
2:26:21 Oh, okay.
2:26:22 Here’s a great example.
2:26:25 So I love Stu’s biblical week.
2:26:30 So where Stu McGill, he trains two days a week of strength, two days a week of mobility,
2:26:36 two days a week of endurance, which is a very good and balanced model.
2:26:40 But what you could do for a while is you switch to doing one, two, three.
2:26:43 So one quality gets three days a week.
2:26:45 One quality gets two, one quality gets one.
2:26:47 And then you shift the priority.
2:26:54 So this sort of a serial specialization is a very good tactics for experienced trainees.
2:26:56 Maybe switching it up once every month, perhaps.
2:26:58 Once a month is good.
2:26:59 Once a month is good.
2:27:05 And maintaining that moderate, hard, what was it, moderate, very hard?
2:27:08 What was Franco’s, what was the cycle?
2:27:09 Forgive me for forgetting.
2:27:11 You can do that as well.
2:27:17 Yeah, Franco had four weeks of deadlifts, moderate, heavy, moderate, very heavy.
2:27:26 And again, we can define them a lot of different ways, but we definitely need to vary the effort,
2:27:29 not just the intensity somehow, somehow in our training.
2:27:36 It can be done differently in different, in different training systems.
2:27:42 One very simple way is just to stop, stop your sets earlier before, long before failure
2:27:46 and you know, later on in some weeks, just get a little bit closer to that.
2:27:51 So that’s an example of that classic American cycling, powerlifting cycling.
2:27:57 So when on your week four, you’re going to do five reps with your five rep max.
2:28:02 But on week one, you’re doing five reps with your perhaps 10 rep max.
2:28:07 So that’s, that’s a very simple way of doing that, where you go easy and then you go harder
2:28:09 and then you start over.
2:28:12 But there are many, many different other ways of, of structuring it.
2:28:18 But generally speaking, I’d like to warn people that training hard has to be done, but it’s
2:28:21 not something, it has to be done in really small doses.
2:28:25 It’s like, let’s use singles as an example, heavy singles.
2:28:28 Heavy singles are the special sauce of strength training.
2:28:33 They cannot be used as the foundation of your training unless you are, except for some very
2:28:36 few genetically gifted individuals.
2:28:40 You know, we all know that Bulgarians have done that in weightlifting, but again, these
2:28:48 guys were especially selected, especially assisted, and they were broken very quickly.
2:28:49 Soviet champions stayed.
2:28:57 There are some Soviets who won the Olympics at the age of 36, like Plugfelder and Alexeyev.
2:29:00 For weightlifting, that’s just the absolutely old man.
2:29:06 And Rigard said, David Rigard said, I think what, 63 world records, because they were very
2:29:11 careful about when to use this near maximal stimuli.
2:29:15 They figured out this, and the system itself, the Soviet weightlifting system, was totally
2:29:17 empirical, which is really fascinating.
2:29:21 They just looked what works, what doesn’t compare it, and just kept, kept trying.
2:29:23 So they’ve experimented with everything.
2:29:29 And they simply have found that certain observations like, okay, lighter lifters can do more heavy
2:29:35 singles than heavier guys, intermediates can do more than the advanced guys.
2:29:41 It’s going to vary from lift to lift, a lifter to lifter, no difference between guys who
2:29:45 run drugs and guys who are not, but you have to individualize it.
2:29:50 And they found that if you do too many heavy singles, you’re going to not progress rapidly
2:29:51 or hurt yourself.
2:29:53 You don’t do enough, you don’t progress as quickly.
2:29:57 So it has to be, you have to find that sweet spot for yourself.
2:30:01 And they also were very definite that these singles are maximal.
2:30:03 So that’s what competitions are for.
2:30:10 So they would go to 90, maybe 92 and a half percent once in a blue moon 95, but you’re
2:30:12 not there to test yourself.
2:30:18 There’s even like, like Russian power lifters, what they do a couple of weeks before a meet,
2:30:25 they have this work up to a weight that’s kind of max.
2:30:30 So the word for this prekyutka, and prekyutka, it translates kind of like estimate.
2:30:32 It’s like an estimate.
2:30:33 This is not.
2:30:34 Like I say, this is where I’m at.
2:30:39 That gives me an idea was going to be my first attempt, what my opener is going to be instead
2:30:41 of, well, I’m going to test myself, I’m going to show them.
2:30:43 Gym is not the place to show anything.
2:30:45 That’s what the platform is for.
2:30:50 So you need to find, if you’re interested in serious about strengths, you need to find
2:30:54 how often you can go heavy in the different lifts.
2:31:00 Start with, you know, start with something maybe once a month, about 90% and then try
2:31:04 to see you doing it more, doing it, or doing it fewer times.
2:31:10 But the meat and potatoes of the training has to begin this moderately heavy weights.
2:31:14 Heavy enough to respect, not light enough, not to fear.
2:31:16 And most of the work has to be done with that.
2:31:22 So it’s like those sets of three, four, maybe five reps with 80%, something like that.
2:31:27 And that’s fairly universal across the training systems, because the American power lifting
2:31:33 system is organized, the cycle is organized totally different.
2:31:36 But that’s, again, there’s going to be, you know, fives and threes and fours.
2:31:38 That’s going to be a big deal.
2:31:43 Soviet system different, but a lot of threes, a lot of fours, some fives, some variations.
2:31:52 But why it is so, some of it possibly has to do with skill practice, because this goes
2:31:57 to an example, it’s a Western study of a discrete skill, a discrete skill to listeners that
2:32:02 means something that happens once, kind of like a throw or a lift, as opposed to continuous
2:32:04 skill like running.
2:32:09 And in an experiment, they tested these athletes do this discrete skill for six sets of one,
2:32:12 three sets of two, or one set of six.
2:32:14 And two sets of three did much better.
2:32:19 So supposedly it’s like there’s certain amount of repetitiveness, like when you hit the perfect
2:32:20 trap and then you’re done.
2:32:24 So again, triples have that very special quality.
2:32:29 And presumably there’s a drop off of ability to concentrate and really execute properly.
2:32:30 Absolutely.
2:32:34 I mean, one thing that keeps coming through here is that whether or not one’s talking
2:32:39 about high volume or low volume or endurance or strength, quality, quality, quality.
2:32:41 Oh, no doubt about it.
2:32:44 Everything else is potentially detrimental.
2:32:48 And frankly has added a lot of confusion to the fitness literature, where people, I think,
2:32:54 you know, they’re doing, you know, five sets of five or do I do 10 sets of 10 and it, if
2:32:57 I may, you know, this isn’t my field of expertise.
2:33:02 But again, having been in and around it for a while, I feel like the message that keeps
2:33:07 coming through that’s going to deliver the results is every single repetition, high quality,
2:33:12 the rest period, high quality, whatever that may be, walking around, shaking it off.
2:33:18 The structuring of the program, high quality, I think people are far too haphazard and seeking
2:33:22 the pump and soreness and some sweat so that they can have their post workout shake.
2:33:30 Well, I’m not trying to be enoselfy between every set and just kind of check the box.
2:33:34 Even for people that aren’t competitive athletes, I think there’s just such an enormous range
2:33:39 of things to be gleaned from taking one’s fitness training seriously.
2:33:42 Even the word fitness is kind of a strange way of training seriously.
2:33:43 Right.
2:33:44 I’ve never even called it a workout.
2:33:46 I think I picked that up from Mentor.
2:33:47 You train.
2:33:48 You don’t, you like, I’ve never.
2:33:49 You practice.
2:33:50 You practice.
2:33:51 I like that very much.
2:33:53 I also like the distinction between students and clients.
2:33:56 That’s a very, these are not just, these are not just labels.
2:33:57 I think they really.
2:33:58 No, they’re really not.
2:33:59 Change our cognitive frame.
2:34:04 In the Soviet system, when you’re talking about your training session, oftentimes it
2:34:06 was referred to as a lesson.
2:34:10 When various qualities were developed, like strengths and endurance and so on, Verkaczanski
2:34:15 for example, often mentioned that like education of qualities.
2:34:21 And at strong first star, we talk about a practice, not a workout.
2:34:28 And a great line that was written a hundred years ago by Earl Litterman and his secrets
2:34:30 of strength.
2:34:36 And back then, strength athletes understood the importance of not training on the nerve.
2:34:40 So they understood you, you just train and then eventually you’re going to go for a PR.
2:34:43 But the rest of the time you don’t kill yourself.
2:34:50 And when he’s describing kind of these early adherents of this high intensity, whatever,
2:34:55 and he’s referring to him, he says, he has literally worked himself out.
2:34:58 And he says, that’s something that strength seeker cannot afford.
2:35:03 So semantically when you’re trying to work yourself out, that’s you’re trying to exhaust
2:35:08 yourself, or are you trying to practice to excel to get better at something.
2:35:15 And that applies to any quality, because endurance very much has a skill component just like
2:35:21 strength, because the ability to reuse the elastic properties of the tissues, the ability
2:35:27 to relax between the contractions to restore the circulation, the ability to maintain the
2:35:29 proper posture and so on and so forth.
2:35:30 These are all skills.
2:35:35 The breathing, breathing skill, huge, extremely important for strength, for endurance perhaps
2:35:36 is the only thing.
2:35:41 And if you’re going through this mindlessly, it’s, yeah, nobody’s going to get very far
2:35:42 this way.
2:35:43 Okay.
2:35:47 So while one could use resistance training in order to generate strength and endurance,
2:35:49 you explained how to do that.
2:35:52 There are a good number of people out there, including myself, that sometimes like to get
2:35:55 outside for a run or to hike.
2:35:59 As you mentioned earlier about the rucksack, I’m not such a fan of the rucksack because
2:36:02 of being pitched forward, but I like this idea of carrying the kettlebell and switching
2:36:03 sides.
2:36:08 Nowadays, they also have some weight vests that are a little bit more, you know, close
2:36:12 to the body that distribute the weight.
2:36:17 What are your thoughts about going into the gym in order to do the strength training and
2:36:20 then generating the endurance work elsewhere?
2:36:24 To be blunt, like how would one combine lifting and running in a way that allows one to get
2:36:29 stronger and develop endurance, perhaps simultaneously?
2:36:33 If we’re talking about right now, people who are just active, people who are not athletes,
2:36:35 there are several things they need to keep in mind.
2:36:40 One is the timing, a relative timing of strength work and endurance work.
2:36:46 If the strength exercises that you’re doing are primarily neural adaptations, which are
2:36:52 targeting, which means lower repetitions, heavier stuff, then it’s important to be fresh
2:36:55 when you’re doing the exercise.
2:36:59 It’s not really, doesn’t matter as much what happens afterwards.
2:37:03 So which means that you could do some heavy deadlifts, you know, heavy deadlifts and then
2:37:06 a few hours later you can go for your hike.
2:37:14 On the other hand, if your lifting is more hypertrophy oriented, it’s less important
2:37:15 if you come in tired.
2:37:20 It’s okay even if you just hiked in the morning and then you went, did you curls?
2:37:26 But afterwards for 36, 48 hours, it’s ideally to restrict endurance exercise.
2:37:32 So because you’re really going to have a massive conflict right there and it’s not a good
2:37:33 idea to do that.
2:37:37 If you’re doing our preferred workout, let’s say sets of five reps, five reps again, the
2:37:42 address both endurance and strength, well, I guess you better keep a window on both ends
2:37:43 right there.
2:37:48 There’s always a conflict, you know, Thomas Sowell said there are no solutions, they’re
2:37:49 only compromises.
2:37:55 So you just have to decide which way you want to compromise, but that separation in time
2:37:57 really does help.
2:38:01 The other thing is spending different times when you focus on one thing versus the other.
2:38:05 So the next two months you’re going to spend on hitting your strength hard and you’re just
2:38:09 going to do two hikes a week just for your health, just to maintain.
2:38:16 And then summer rolls around and you put your lifting on the back burner, you lift less,
2:38:21 not necessarily lighter, just less, and you spend a lot more time outdoors and do these
2:38:24 different things.
2:38:31 Coming in mind also the duration of training, so the longer your training session is of
2:38:41 any kind, the more you are triggering adaptations that are more in favor of endurance.
2:38:45 So your cortisol level goes up and there are some other things that do happen that drive
2:38:48 you towards endurance as opposed to strength.
2:38:52 So even in your strength training, don’t make the sessions too long.
2:38:53 What’s too long?
2:38:56 It’s really hard to know at this point.
2:39:01 In the Soviet weightlifting practice, the top guys would spend two and a half hours,
2:39:05 they would, for them, that work that seemed appropriate, but then again, don’t forget
2:39:07 at that point, they’re juicing.
2:39:10 And in the pre-steroid areas, those times are shorter.
2:39:13 And this is one of the differences in steroids, by the way.
2:39:17 That’s in your training when you’re steroids or not.
2:39:23 As I mentioned earlier, Soviets established the correlation with the volume of lifting
2:39:26 and muscle mass.
2:39:27 That’s one thing.
2:39:34 But they also established correlation between volume of lifting at 80% or higher and strength.
2:39:37 And the correlation is very strong, 0.84.
2:39:43 However, if you’re talking about the muscle mass with that lighter stuff, some lifters
2:39:48 would just get great results and some lifters would just get more endurance.
2:39:52 And they found that guys who are juicing, they can keep doing higher volumes and still
2:39:54 keep getting more muscular.
2:39:59 But the guys who are clean, they’re just not able to do that.
2:40:03 So trial and error, probably like Marty Gallagher says, fill an hour.
2:40:06 I think that’s a safe guideline.
2:40:07 Fill an hour.
2:40:08 Yeah.
2:40:09 I like the fill an hour.
2:40:16 I spent more than an hour of actual work in the gym, maybe 75 minutes or so.
2:40:21 I noticed if I train longer than that, I pay a serious price in terms of post-exercise
2:40:23 fatigue later in the day.
2:40:26 I’d actually like to talk about this concept.
2:40:27 I looked it up before sitting down today.
2:40:32 There’s a little bit of literature starting to emerge, not as much as I would like, about
2:40:35 post-exercise cholinergic depletion.
2:40:40 So much of our ability to hold our attention is dependent on epinephrine or epinephrine
2:40:43 and acetylcholine release in the brain.
2:40:47 Of course, muscular contractions, acetylcholine being the dominant transmitter from nerve
2:40:50 to muscle, communication.
2:40:56 But this idea that if we exercise too intensely, or even if we just do cognitive work that’s
2:41:02 very intense for a period of time, that there’s this post-exercise cholinergic depletion and
2:41:07 then we get what people typically call brain fog, although that’s not a real medical term.
2:41:13 So I think from the practical standpoint, a lot of people who would like to train more
2:41:18 for strength, train more often for strength, do strength and endurance work, the challenge
2:41:24 sometimes isn’t just scheduling it, it’s that we feel depleted and tired afterward.
2:41:28 Have you observed this and is there a way to use strength training or other forms of
2:41:31 physical training to improve cognitive function?
2:41:36 Because again, as you pointed out, only compromise is not solutions.
2:41:41 But I do see a world in which one could use the physical training to give them, for lack
2:41:43 of a better word, a boost into the day.
2:41:48 So you’re getting stronger, you’re developing your health and you’re also able to then lean
2:41:50 into your day with more focus and intention.
2:41:51 That would be the ultimate scenario.
2:41:52 Okay.
2:41:53 Yeah.
2:41:55 Well, there’s obviously, we’re looking at a zero-sum game.
2:42:00 So there’s, you only have so much, your resources are limited.
2:42:04 One thing that will absolutely help is fragmentation.
2:42:10 It’s been proven that dividing up a given workload into smaller chunks allows you, doesn’t matter
2:42:14 what it is, whether it’s endurance training or strength training or some cognitive work,
2:42:16 you’re able to do more.
2:42:19 And that’s one thing that to consider.
2:42:24 The other is obviously the feedback.
2:42:27 You have to listen to your body pretty much.
2:42:31 Soviets stressed very much that you have to take the cybernetic approach.
2:42:32 You have to have the feedback.
2:42:37 No matter what the training plan says, Arkadzev Arbyov says, you have to listen to, you have
2:42:39 to listen to that feedback.
2:42:43 And freshness in the Soviet system of strength training and not just in weightlifting, freshness
2:42:45 was paramount.
2:42:46 It’s even better.
2:42:50 Let’s talk about how track athletes in the Soviet Union train for strength.
2:42:55 And that’s more, that will be even more applicable to a lot of the listeners, because they definitely
2:42:58 didn’t spend two and a half hours in the gym.
2:43:04 So Professor Vladimir Diyachkov, he was a head coach and he was one of the first to
2:43:07 implement heavy lifting for the track.
2:43:11 After right after the Soviets decide, hey, look at these Americans lifting heavy weights,
2:43:16 Bruce Randall and Paul Anderson and Canadian Doug Hepburn.
2:43:21 So these lifters, he has absolutely, he says, always do low reps.
2:43:25 So they would never do more than three, four reps, even with the lightest weight, even with
2:43:27 a warmup weight.
2:43:30 They spent a lot of time doing just singles and doubles.
2:43:33 And it was absolutely essential that they stayed fresh.
2:43:36 And part of it was just the, how they felt.
2:43:40 Part of it is the performance, how well they jumped and so on and how they felt after.
2:43:45 So they found, if you’re really obsessive about it, you have that tonic effect that
2:43:48 lasts at least until the next day.
2:43:54 And the tonic effect is both for your strength, for your power, but also for your cognitive
2:43:55 functions as well.
2:44:01 But it’s also very, very interesting that, here’s an idea, do a bench press before the
2:44:07 next day before you’re competing in the jump, or do a heavy squat the day before you’re
2:44:09 competing as a thrower.
2:44:12 So it’s, again, it’s very interesting how the opposite part of the body, stimulating
2:44:16 that was very, very helpful, very interesting phenomena.
2:44:23 So they found, if the strength work is familiar and non-exhaustive, it absolutely facilitates
2:44:26 whatever is that you do afterwards.
2:44:32 And restricting, this is where the difference, this is where track athletes were very different
2:44:34 from a lot of other people.
2:44:39 They tried to restrict their volume as much as possible of strength training, in part
2:44:44 because, well, they had to do other things, and because they had to stay fresh.
2:44:49 So if you look at the volume, if you look at general speaking, how many repetitions
2:44:56 that you want to perform per exercise, per training session, and again, these are purely
2:44:57 empirical numbers.
2:45:02 They come from Soviet weightlifting, but they were also applied in track.
2:45:08 So the minimal volume is 10 to 20 repetitions total, so minimal.
2:45:16 And optimal is 20 to 30, maximal, it becomes 30 to 50, not window.
2:45:20 So when you’re looking at 20 to 30 reps, maybe on the lower end right there, you’re going
2:45:23 to build strength.
2:45:30 And if you also are going to not go to failure and rest sufficiently between sets, unless
2:45:33 you’re greasing the groove, you need to look at at least five minutes, pretty much.
2:45:38 And that’s both for neural and biochemical reasons, but more is really better.
2:45:42 Unfortunately, really, a lot of it just comes down to listening to your body and just using
2:45:43 your judgment.
2:45:46 I wish I had any better answer here.
2:45:48 I think it’s a terrific answer.
2:45:54 I like to leave the gym with some gas in the tank because, well, I get paid to think and
2:45:57 to speak, as it were, not to lift.
2:46:02 And many great thinkers in the strength world starting from leadermen back a hundred years
2:46:12 ago to, to Soviet weightlifting authorities like, you know, Rodzionov and Roman, and later
2:46:19 on somebody like even Steve Justa was a very colorful individual, just brilliant, brilliant
2:46:25 strength athlete, a farmer from Nebraska, who just came up with some fantastic protocols.
2:46:29 But he would say that you’ve got to finish stronger than when you started.
2:46:36 And that seam is very much permeates professional or high level strength training, where this
2:46:41 mentality of a workout or try to get smoked or pumped or throw up in the bucket, they
2:46:44 would look at you as that’s insane.
2:46:49 One of the reasons that also Soviet restricted the number of reps in the squad, because you
2:46:52 do sets of 10 in the squad, you’re going to definitely put on some math, no question
2:46:53 about it.
2:46:58 But one of the reasons they restricted that very few people did sets of 10, except for
2:47:03 heavy weights who had a hard time bulking and even more is like, okay, that’s too much
2:47:06 cardio respiratory stress.
2:47:10 And even though Soviet weightlifters did some general physical training like cross country
2:47:15 running or playing soccer, but they’re not trying to get their cardio on the, on the
2:47:18 lifting platform, that was just made no sense whatsoever.
2:47:23 So restricting the reps will go a very long way, restrict increasing the rest periods
2:47:28 to at least five minutes would go a very long way and restrict a number of exercises because
2:47:32 people don’t realize that you’re using different muscle groups, but still using the same brain.
2:47:37 You still same using the same adrenals and all that stuff really adds up.
2:47:43 And so I would say to during one practice, one training practice, maybe two, maybe three
2:47:47 exercises max lifts and nothing wrong with doing just one.
2:47:52 And yeah, if you want to, you know, do your curls and whatever calves later, that’s fine.
2:47:56 But you can tack it on in the end or you can do totally separate.
2:47:58 Those things don’t really zap you.
2:48:02 You can just come in in a separate day and just do your, enjoy your calf burn.
2:48:03 Love it.
2:48:07 There seems to be an over reliance nowadays on pre-workout stimulants.
2:48:12 I’m a big consumer of caffeine in the form of Yerba mate and coffee.
2:48:14 I’m old school that way.
2:48:15 Not that I don’t.
2:48:16 I don’t like coffee.
2:48:17 Yeah.
2:48:18 You, you still drink coffee every day.
2:48:19 Yes, I do.
2:48:20 Yeah.
2:48:21 But only twice.
2:48:22 Got a moderation.
2:48:29 Um, these days, there’s a lot of emphasis on just trying to get as, you know, absolutely
2:48:33 wired and geared up for training.
2:48:38 And I think that in part contributes to why people feel this post exercise fatigue, you
2:48:43 know, they go hit the gym hard after a pre-workout and then they’re doing their post-workout shake
2:48:46 and a bunch of carbohydrates to replenish their glycogen.
2:48:49 And then of course, two hours later, you want to take a nap.
2:48:50 I mean, it’s amazing.
2:48:53 Anyone could study or do anything at that point.
2:48:56 I think that’s very different than the kind of training you’re describing.
2:49:01 I also, um, just, so I’d love your thoughts on, on stimulants generally and how they can
2:49:04 support or hinder performance.
2:49:10 And I’m also curious about, um, just the, what’s lost in that model in terms of learning
2:49:15 how to cycle one’s energy up and down, you know, several times today, you’ve mentioned
2:49:19 this, this thing of, of the ability to relax the muscles and relax the nervous system in
2:49:22 between sets, um, maybe even in between reps.
2:49:23 Who knows.
2:49:27 Um, but usually between sets and certainly and sometimes between reps under a certain
2:49:28 circumstances.
2:49:29 Interesting.
2:49:30 Yeah.
2:49:31 So, so maybe we talk about stimulants.
2:49:34 Uh, before we started today, we were talking about, you know, when stimulants can actually
2:49:36 hinder performance, um, when they can help.
2:49:41 And then maybe we talk about the cycling of, of, um, tension and relaxation because I look
2:49:46 at training physically as a, as a, as a venue for exploring nervous system function and
2:49:49 control over nervous system generally that one can apply elsewhere.
2:49:50 So that’s the kind of theme.
2:49:52 I’ll just roll, roll out onto the table.
2:49:56 Well, first of all, I’ll preface it by saying that, uh, stimulants and any kind of pharmacies
2:49:57 totally out of my wheelhouse.
2:50:01 So what you’re about, what I’m about to say is purely reflected knowledge.
2:50:05 You know, with your neurobiology background, you can tell the listeners so much more than
2:50:07 that I could possibly can.
2:50:12 But top athletes, when they compete after a competition, uh, talking about strength
2:50:18 sports like powerlifting or weightlifting for the next two weeks, they’re, they’re just
2:50:19 gone.
2:50:27 They’re completely flat because they’re two adaptations that take place in, uh, in, in
2:50:29 strength training, proper strength training.
2:50:34 So on one hand, it’s much more economical, uh, function of the adrenal glands.
2:50:37 On the other hand, it’s much higher capacity as well.
2:50:42 So these are the guys and gals who are able to crank it up really, really high when they
2:50:47 want to, but they’re also able to really keep it, keep it down when they don’t have to.
2:50:52 And they do know that for the next two weeks after, after the competition or after some
2:50:57 idiotic gym max, you know, that by take a week, they are, they’re going to be flat.
2:50:59 They’re going to be completely gone.
2:51:02 So you really have to spare your adrenaline.
2:51:09 The lifters who take heavy lifts in, in the gym, they’re still typically, they stay at
2:51:12 the training max, not the competition max.
2:51:13 So what’s a training max?
2:51:20 A training max, it’s, uh, the heaviest weight that you can possibly lift without, uh, getting
2:51:22 too excited about it.
2:51:29 And, uh, back in the fifties, uh, uh, Luchkin, he was, uh, one of the fathers of Soviet weightlifting.
2:51:33 He came up with a great, uh, tactic how to find that weight.
2:51:39 If your heart rate goes up before the set, that’s the heavy.
2:51:44 So that’s, you got to be like, you got to monitor yourself unless you’re in competition.
2:51:47 Of course that’s, that’s a different game.
2:51:56 If I will defer to others about how much, uh, one should or could take stimulants before
2:52:00 winning, uh, lifting, I’m talking about, but generally speaking, you’ve got to do it moderation
2:52:04 and especially you got to save it for the times when you really need it.
2:52:09 Like in the American powerlifting system, when you have during week three and four, that’s
2:52:13 a good time to do it during the weeks, one and two and the weights are lighter, let your
2:52:16 adrenals recover and you don’t need to push yourself as hard anyway.
2:52:20 So it’s just one example of how to, how to go about this.
2:52:25 If you have to drink some stupid energy drink to just get yourself up to training, there’s
2:52:29 something wrong in your life, possibly it is something that’s a lifestyle choices and
2:52:31 you need to address it.
2:52:36 If you’re always feel exhausted after training, you’re missing out on life.
2:52:42 I mean, if you’re doing a very, a desk job that does not require high cognitive ability,
2:52:46 something that’s really mechanical with pen and paper or computer, and you choose to just
2:52:51 destroy yourself on a daily basis with, uh, a lot of sets to failure or meth counts or
2:52:52 whatever it is.
2:52:55 Well, it’s your choice if you want to destroy your life like that.
2:53:00 But again, if you look at your adrenal profile, if you look at, uh, your sympathetic dominance,
2:53:05 if you look at your, how you’re just feeling is going to be really, really awful.
2:53:12 The other angle to this is, um, as we talked earlier in learning and skill training, skill
2:53:16 practices learning, current performance is not indicative of learning.
2:53:20 So just because you’re able to lift five pounds more because you got yourself all jacked up
2:53:24 on some drink, doesn’t mean necessarily got stronger.
2:53:27 So you just need to come in and put in your practice and walk away and come back.
2:53:30 And then when there’s time and it’s the day to go heavier, that’s, that’s when you do
2:53:31 that.
2:53:34 So don’t want to discourage you from drinking coffee.
2:53:37 In fact, if you drink a stimulant coffee, it should be the only thing the rest of this
2:53:40 stuff is, uh, I don’t know.
2:53:41 Yeah.
2:53:42 Coffee tea.
2:53:43 Coffee tea.
2:53:48 And, uh, then, uh, figure out again, figure out what is that moderate, moderate amount,
2:53:52 figure out how to use it when you truly need it as opposed to be relying on it all the
2:53:53 time.
2:53:56 Uh, would you mind before we go to the next question, if I, if I just share with you a
2:54:00 result that I just wanted to plant in your brain, uh, because I’ve been excited to tell
2:54:03 you about this, because it’s new results from the field of neuroscience that I don’t think
2:54:08 anyone’s discussed anywhere, but I think you might find interesting for your sake of discussion
2:54:09 here, but also.
2:54:10 Thank you, I’m looking forward.
2:54:11 Looking forward.
2:54:12 Um, I didn’t do this study.
2:54:18 I wish I had the, the study very briefly is interested in the neural basis of choking
2:54:24 choking, not choking someone out or not anything else related to choking, but when one feels
2:54:28 that the stakes are really high and suddenly ability falls away.
2:54:29 What is that?
2:54:33 So what they did is they developed this game where essentially the potential payoff in
2:54:38 this game while recording from neurons in the brain is either low, medium or very high
2:54:40 or the occasional jackpot.
2:54:47 Like you could just win the whole thing and the payoff is very, very considerable.
2:54:50 And they looked at the amount of upper motor neuron recruitment.
2:54:56 So essentially the areas of the brain that drive coordinated muscular behavior or action.
2:54:59 And what they found is that it basically scales with the level of reward.
2:55:03 So you get more, um, neuronal engagement as the reward scales up.
2:55:10 However, every time the jackpot was offered, it overengages too many motor neurons.
2:55:14 And so the, this notion of choke of like choking when the stakes are really, really high radiation
2:55:15 that you cannot control.
2:55:16 Exactly.
2:55:18 It’s like spillover of like it’s like too much.
2:55:21 We could call it too much excitement, but it’s not adrenaline in this case, although
2:55:23 that’s probably associated with it.
2:55:25 But you think, oh great, you know, I’m going to, I’m going to get an award.
2:55:27 I’m going to get bigger or even bigger.
2:55:28 Okay.
2:55:29 Oh my goodness.
2:55:30 This could change everything.
2:55:33 And all of a sudden performance just tanks.
2:55:37 And so it turns out it’s, it’s a brain, it’s a brain thing at the level of over recruitment,
2:55:42 which just speaks to this idea of being able to maintain arousal within a certain range
2:55:44 is an essential skill to any performer.
2:55:48 I just thought I’d share that because it’s one set of results and since I was a little
2:55:52 kid, if I learned something, I have to share it with somebody who I think might care.
2:55:58 So if ever people wonder about the, why people choke, it’s, it is hyper arousal at the level
2:56:01 of the brain, not apparently not so much the body.
2:56:07 Well, being able to control arousal, it’s such a key skill for an athlete.
2:56:13 And part of that, obviously it should be directed as sports psychologist and there are some fantastic
2:56:14 techniques.
2:56:20 For example, Dr. Jad Baesoto, who is an author who published the book with strong first.
2:56:25 Dr. Jad squatted 602 at body weight of 132 and that was back in the eighties.
2:56:30 He was in his forties after serious back injury surgery.
2:56:33 And he was a, he was a sports psychologist and he discusses this various, various skills
2:56:35 is fascinating.
2:56:41 His control of excitation and ambition was such that he would sleep between attempts a
2:56:44 couple of minutes before the attempt, he is a handler or coach would wake him up.
2:56:48 He would wake up, he’d get himself into frenzy.
2:56:52 He’d lift the weight to go back to sleep nine times a day throughout the day.
2:56:55 Now that’s a mastery of excitation and ambition.
2:56:57 You’re on switch and off switch.
2:57:00 So part of that are, is sports psychology.
2:57:03 There are tools in sports psychology for that.
2:57:07 Part of it is training is whatever you do in the gym.
2:57:10 Some of your habits and some of your practices.
2:57:13 Like for example, okay.
2:57:16 David Rigert is one of the greatest weight lifters of all time.
2:57:19 Some people would say the greatest weight lifter of all times.
2:57:25 And when he was discovered by Odof Pluckfeldt, his coach, who was another Olympic champion,
2:57:27 world champion.
2:57:33 One of the things that the coach was impressed with is that Rigert would do his set.
2:57:37 And then that after he set, he would just go completely limp, like a rag.
2:57:39 And it was very impressed with that.
2:57:46 Later in Rigert’s career, when he was a world champion already in the United States.
2:57:50 So there’s a, there’s an American coach who writes how he saw him in Columbus, Ohio or
2:57:53 Cleveland, Ohio competing back in the seventies.
2:57:57 He was lying and smoking a cigarette.
2:58:02 And then he gets up, he snatches 60 kilos, like 135 pounds or something once.
2:58:06 Then he just picks up something else, equally trivial and then he goes and does, goes his
2:58:10 first attempts and then ends up with a superior performance.
2:58:18 At a different time, Rigert bet a box of cognac to that he would snatch 90% of his max, which
2:58:23 was his max was probably around 370 or something.
2:58:27 So he was able to snatch 90% of that norm up whatsoever.
2:58:30 And so this is this ability of that incredible control.
2:58:35 So part of it is whatever you’re born with, part of the sports psychology techniques, but
2:58:38 part of it is developing some habits.
2:58:41 As soon as you’re done with your lift, just power down.
2:58:48 Incidentally, after training, a strength athlete ought to perform a cool down.
2:58:54 And Russians did some, did some numbers on power lifters and they found that the top power
2:58:59 lifters, they spend time in cool down and the guys who are not so good, they don’t.
2:59:04 Because not only it just allows you to bring your excitation down, get your power sympathetic,
2:59:05 get you to start recovering.
2:59:10 So you do some easy stretching, you do some meditating, you do some breathing exercises,
2:59:11 whatever you do.
2:59:16 But even after each set, so you, so you put up that heavy deadlifter squat and then you
2:59:20 just immediately come down and then you walk around and you chill.
2:59:25 So you just try to tune your switch so much.
2:59:27 Breathing exercises come in handy for that.
2:59:30 There are breathing exercises to increase your excitation.
2:59:35 There are breathing exercises that are able to very much put you in a state of inhibition,
2:59:37 very deep inhibition even.
2:59:41 Some of them are hypercapnics, some are hypoxic, which means, you know, you try to increase
2:59:44 carbon dioxide or you’re trying to decrease oxygen.
2:59:50 There are some very sophisticated yet really quite simple techniques that, that can help,
2:59:51 that can help you do that.
2:59:57 I love this concept of just learning to push on the accelerator, push on the brake and to
3:00:03 play with disinhibition as a first person to come on this podcast, even among the neuroscientists
3:00:05 I’ve spoken with to talk about disinhibition.
3:00:06 Really?
3:00:07 Thank you for bringing that up.
3:00:08 Well, the history of that.
3:00:10 That’s a beautiful concept and an important one for how we function.
3:00:13 That’s a, that absolutely is there.
3:00:18 Regional research was done in the 60s, Icai and Steinhaus, 1961, I believe.
3:00:23 And then later on, that was a big part of the training method of Dr. Fred Hatfield.
3:00:27 Fred Hatfield is a legend in the, in the iron game.
3:00:34 He was one of the first to squat a thousand pounds in competition and he was a, he was
3:00:38 just a fantastic lifter and just brilliant scientist.
3:00:43 So he tried to direct a lot of the training towards disinhibition.
3:00:48 So he even developed special techniques that are largely forgotten ironically.
3:00:50 But yes, disinhibition is huge.
3:00:55 And it’s also one of the, one of the things about disinhibition too, it’s also very important
3:01:02 to avoid failing because never failing a lift, that’s part of disinhibition.
3:01:06 So like we talked about Ed Cohen earlier, another one of the powerlifting greats.
3:01:13 Ed Cohen competed over several decades, set over 72 world records in several weight classes.
3:01:18 Only missed a couple of lifts in competition, never missed a training lift whatsoever.
3:01:22 Always calm, always composed and amazing lifter, amazing guy.
3:01:28 And what’s very likely happened is that his inhibitory pathway is just shriveled and got
3:01:30 pruned and died.
3:01:34 What people don’t realize that, you know, greasing the groove, that’s the term proper
3:01:39 term, long-term potentiation is like when you are getting better at like that transmission
3:01:40 gets stronger.
3:01:43 It’s like your nerves become superconductors.
3:01:47 But there’s also its evil twin, long-term depression.
3:01:51 So pretty much what happens is now you’re trying as hard, but your muscles are not jumping
3:01:53 in response anymore.
3:02:00 So one of the ways to get this long-term depression is by failing.
3:02:06 So whenever you’re attempting certain thing and if it doesn’t happen, that pathway starts
3:02:11 firing weaker and the inhibitory pathway starts to become stronger and it becomes even worse
3:02:13 if you’re emotional about it.
3:02:21 So you said quite a few things about adrenaline, but adrenaline does promote neuroplasticity,
3:02:23 but not always in a good way.
3:02:29 So if you look at the PTSD treatments, you will find that if a person re-experiences
3:02:34 that bad, whatever thing that happened, and then it gets into the feedback loop, that
3:02:38 positive feedback, positive doesn’t mean good, positive, it just means it keeps increasing
3:02:43 it, because every time that there’s a spike of adrenaline, that reinforces the memory.
3:02:48 So if you missed the attempt and you also got really upset about it and you remember
3:02:53 it again, so you’re making yourself weaker and weaker, which reminds me of a very fascinating
3:03:01 way that the ancients used to record some events before there’s writing.
3:03:05 So let’s say there’s a wedding between VIP families.
3:03:08 They bring a kid, a young kid, a 7-year-old, let’s say, and make the kid watch the whole
3:03:09 thing.
3:03:15 And after the festivities, they throw the kid into the river.
3:03:19 The kid curls out of the river, and he doesn’t know, he doesn’t expect it.
3:03:22 And the kid climbs out of the river and he’s going to remember that a wedding for the rest
3:03:23 of his life.
3:03:24 He’s going to hold that record.
3:03:26 Because of the adrenaline spike associated with the cold water.
3:03:27 Exactly.
3:03:31 So that really did increase in neuroplasticity, so that memory became really deeply ingrained.
3:03:38 So yeah, part of disinhibition is not promoting inhibition, it’s just not failing.
3:03:43 So Fred Hatfield had a beautiful line, success begets success, failure begets failure.
3:03:45 According to success, not to fail.
3:03:50 Do you recommend actually avoiding training to muscular failure?
3:03:51 Absolutely.
3:03:53 There’s really no reason for that.
3:04:01 If you’re doing that with single joint bodybuilding exercises like curls, it probably doesn’t
3:04:03 matter.
3:04:07 And if you’re doing it for bodybuilding, but I still don’t see the point, because every
3:04:13 rep closer to failure, that is going to increase exponentially recovery time.
3:04:19 So you’re not going to get quite as much, yeah, you might get more muscle gain from
3:04:25 that particular last rep, but your recovery is going to be increased so much.
3:04:30 And also, as you start training to failure, you’re converting more of your fibers towards
3:04:32 slower times.
3:04:34 So on the other hand, if you don’t train to failure, you don’t.
3:04:41 So there’s an interesting Spanish study when they found that when athletes train to failure,
3:04:47 again, they’re some of the myosin and type 2x fast fibers, they convert it to 2a.
3:04:52 So they became slower, probably because now it’s an endurance event.
3:04:56 When you’re training for as many reps as possible, it’s really an endurance event.
3:05:01 On the other hand, the athletes that trained with half the maximum possible repetitions,
3:05:06 they did not experience that decline, which goes back several decades to an Arkadze Varabiova
3:05:12 Olympic champion, scientist, head coach, incredible, incredible person.
3:05:19 He said there is a big difference between six sets of three and three sets of six.
3:05:24 Because anything like this sounds like the most obvious thing to say.
3:05:30 But the fact is you build just as much strength with six sets of three as three sets of six.
3:05:31 You get a lot less tired.
3:05:35 You get to practice for three extra sets and you can train sooner.
3:05:38 So that’s fundamental.
3:05:43 So pushing to failure, also the other thing is about the control of your technique.
3:05:46 Towards the last reps, there’s no control left.
3:05:51 But imagine that you always have that perfect technique.
3:05:54 So you grease that pathway that becomes a reflex.
3:06:00 In fact, early on, the Soviet sports scientist very much used strength adaptation as just
3:06:05 the development of conditional reflex, kind of like Pavlov with the dogs, drooling dogs.
3:06:09 And then you go into the competition and you psych yourself up and you don’t even know
3:06:10 what’s going on.
3:06:13 You’re not aware, but you only have one pathway.
3:06:17 There’s no Plan B. You only remember how to do your deadlift in this particular manner
3:06:19 and know any other way.
3:06:22 The neurons are trained to complete the execution of the movement.
3:06:23 Exactly.
3:06:25 And all in a very specific way.
3:06:29 Because there’s no Plan B. When you start failure, so you start, okay, this is the stressful
3:06:30 situation.
3:06:34 So I revert to Plan B. But there’s Plan B for amateurs.
3:06:39 Top athletes don’t have Plan B. Watch a top lifter fail an attempt.
3:06:43 He or she is going to shake with that bar, shake, shake, shake, shake and finally is
3:06:44 going to come down.
3:06:48 But it’s not like the butt’s going to shoot up or something ugly is going to happen.
3:06:52 So going back to that point you made earlier about the quality of practice, quality is
3:06:53 absolutely paramount.
3:06:56 And it’s strength training is a skill practice.
3:06:59 Any athletic training is a skill practice.
3:07:04 Maybe writing will be elliptical is not a skill practice, but it’s just not a sport
3:07:05 anyway.
3:07:07 It’s not anything.
3:07:08 Even hiking is a practice.
3:07:09 You’re trying to stay tall.
3:07:12 You’re trying to breathe in a particular manner.
3:07:13 So practice.
3:07:20 The crossovers between physical training and mental pursuits are astonishing to me.
3:07:25 As we’re talking about this, avoiding going to failure, I’m in the process of writing
3:07:26 my first book.
3:07:29 I know you’ve written several books and I’m finding it to be very different than anything
3:07:30 else I’ve ever done.
3:07:36 And the experienced writers tell me that you should end on a sentence where you kind of
3:07:38 know what the next sentence could be.
3:07:42 Perhaps to see the unconscious mind for the next day, but that you don’t want to run right
3:07:49 up until a wall and bang your head against that wall, metaphorically speaking, because
3:07:54 it places a kind of frustration into your nervous system that you arrive to the page
3:07:55 with the next day.
3:07:59 I guess the opposite could be hard too, but it fits very well with what we’re talking
3:08:00 about here.
3:08:06 Because of the early Mike Mencer training or the influence, I should say, I’ve tended
3:08:11 to train to failure purposefully and used to do forced reps and drop sets and all that
3:08:12 stuff.
3:08:18 As the years have gone by, I’ve started only incorporating a few sets to failure and my
3:08:21 volume has increased somewhat and I’m training heavier at lower repetitions.
3:08:27 And my progress as I get toward my fifth decade just continues to just continues.
3:08:32 And so I just decided, as you were saying, the last couple of sentences that for the
3:08:37 rest of the year, I’m going to not train to failure because I really want to experience
3:08:41 what it’s like to do that for a long period of time as opposed to just reducing the number
3:08:43 of sets that I take to failure.
3:08:47 I’m also, I’m very stringent about form and always have been.
3:08:51 And I do want to ask what are your thoughts on, unless somebody is training for isometric
3:08:57 or eccentric specific training, full range of motion, not just for sake of building strength,
3:09:02 but can using a full range of motion also improve flexibility without some dedicated
3:09:03 flexibility training?
3:09:06 And I’d like to use this as a segue to talk about flexibility training.
3:09:07 Yes, it can.
3:09:10 So sarcomeres can grow in length as well.
3:09:14 So they contract all part of the muscle, they can grow lengthwise as well.
3:09:19 It’s something that needs to be done carefully and cautiously, of course, and it’s with not
3:09:24 with heavy weights, eventually it’s possible for a person to perform, you know, flexibility
3:09:29 feeds with heavier weights if it is desirable, but initially it’s something go lighter.
3:09:30 So yes, absolutely you can.
3:09:36 And it’s, it’s one of the easiest ways to promote flexibility.
3:09:43 And flexibility also has a very much a neural component as well.
3:09:46 So part of it obviously, you know, you’re looking at you’re looking at what’s happening
3:09:52 in the joints, of course, part you’re looking at, you know, the length, the length of the,
3:09:59 the length of the tissues to, but a lot of it is also the ability to reset the regulation
3:10:01 of muscle muscle length and tension.
3:10:06 So it’s like the ability to do a split, for example, it’s part of it is, yeah, well,
3:10:11 if you’re provided your hip joints are built for that sort of thing, a lot of it is really
3:10:14 in your mind, because you’re experiencing defensive inhibition, you’re just afraid you’re
3:10:17 going to get torn, torn in half.
3:10:23 So which brings us to a very interesting parallel as we keep talking about quality and is also
3:10:29 talked about that flow channel by Professor Chikismat, exactly.
3:10:30 Thank you.
3:10:33 So between boredom and anxiety.
3:10:37 So when you’re trying to do a split, for example, so you see somebody trying to get into that
3:10:43 stretch, and the person goes sitting there and panicking and being in total pain and
3:10:44 nothing is going to happen.
3:10:49 You’re pretty much just facilitating this pain pathways, and you’re just learning to
3:10:51 hate this exercise.
3:10:56 A smarter individual would get to the point to the edge of pain, and then stay there for
3:11:04 a while and owning it until the spindles reset, you know, okay, accept the new range of motion.
3:11:08 Not some contraction relaxation, contraction relaxation, you know, isometric stretching,
3:11:11 you know, progress, progress even further.
3:11:17 So in any type of training, forcing the adaptations is not going to work, whether it’s flexibility,
3:11:21 whether it’s strength, whether it’s endurance, there’s time for a very high level of effort,
3:11:25 but there’s never time for ripping yourself in half, right?
3:11:27 There’s never time for hurting yourself on purpose.
3:11:33 So but yes, do do a long range of motion work to increase range of motion.
3:11:40 For the upper body, I’m obviously very partial towards kettlebells, but one of the great
3:11:46 many benefits of kettlebell training, you know, above the handle is the ways designed.
3:11:51 So you press it from here overhead, that offset center gravity helps to pull your arm back.
3:11:55 So you’re just improving the shoulder flexion, you’re improving thoracic extension.
3:12:00 It’s so much easier to place yourself in exactly good position, and then just stay there.
3:12:04 So it’s very important to stay open to keep that, keep that useful posture and keep that
3:12:07 good shoulder function.
3:12:12 So but yeah, with squats, you can definitely do that just very progressively.
3:12:20 One warning about squats, if you’re going for a parallel squat like it is in powerlifting,
3:12:24 it’s parallel defined as the top of the knees a little higher than the crease on the hip.
3:12:30 Not a right, people will argue about this in some comical ways from time to time.
3:12:33 So when parallel is not right angle at the knee, correct?
3:12:36 It’s parallel at the top of the top of the thigh.
3:12:40 I realize you said it very clearly, but I’m just making sure because debates abound on
3:12:41 the internet.
3:12:46 The top of the thigh should be parallel to the floor or deeper.
3:12:47 Yeah.
3:12:54 But when you do go for that depth or somewhere in the ballpark, you can go wide in the stance.
3:12:58 You can progressively increase the width of the stance if you do for flexibility.
3:13:03 You’ve been people who are doing squats like in almost like a horse stance, style squats
3:13:06 and progressively developing great level of flexibility.
3:13:08 It’s possible to do that.
3:13:12 But you’re doing that, you’re going wider, but not necessarily deeper.
3:13:19 So it’s okay to go wider, but you still, your femur should not be dipping too much.
3:13:24 So if you’re trying to go rock bottom in the wide stance, your hip architecture is not designed
3:13:25 for that.
3:13:26 Right.
3:13:27 You can do squats, right?
3:13:30 Famous for squatting very, very deep.
3:13:31 But he used the narrow stance.
3:13:32 Got it.
3:13:35 So glutes on calves practically, but he was a shorter guy, right?
3:13:36 Does that help?
3:13:40 But he also, he was, but also he was also squatting in a pretty narrow stance.
3:13:44 So in this particular case, you’re not experiencing with the hip, you know, with the hip limitation
3:13:45 right there.
3:13:46 So it’s okay for you.
3:13:50 But imagine if you try to go wider and then you try to go, it’s just again, this is not
3:13:51 a good idea.
3:13:52 If you’d end up on the floor.
3:13:53 Yeah.
3:13:54 Literally on the floor.
3:13:57 It’s a great way to develop flexibility for this type of rock bottom squat.
3:14:03 If you’re not there yet, uh, initially been without resistance, assume your normal squat
3:14:04 stance.
3:14:07 And I’m talking about a narrow stance, you know, shoulder with or somewhere there and
3:14:14 approach the wall, face the wall, put your arms out and start squatting.
3:14:16 And you will find the wall is going to teach you.
3:14:19 So it is the feedback from the wall.
3:14:23 If you start doing something funny with your spine, you’re going to hit your head on the
3:14:25 wall and fall back.
3:14:27 So it’s, uh, it provides terrific feedback.
3:14:33 It is something that I learned originally from, uh, uh, from Shikun, a Shikun practitioner.
3:14:38 And again, quite a number of skills that my system are picked up from, uh, from martial
3:14:42 arts, but we apply the strength first to use that for teaching people that upright
3:14:46 squat and developing the developing the mobility for deep squat.
3:14:47 It’s, uh, it’s a foolproof.
3:14:52 It’s like, uh, great cook would call this a self-correcting exercise.
3:14:56 And those are really the best when the coach can walk away and, you know, have a cigarette
3:15:00 and the student is still going to be able to do it right.
3:15:03 I love your book, relax and to stretch.
3:15:07 I think it’s a really important concept, this idea that the nervous system and our mental
3:15:13 state is preventing, inhibiting a good amount of our natural flexibility and that we can
3:15:19 work with the mental state and progressive relaxation and contraction of muscles and related
3:15:20 tissues to.
3:15:21 Absolutely.
3:15:22 Absolutely can.
3:15:23 And it’s very much mined over the matter.
3:15:24 I have a great success story.
3:15:29 So one of, uh, one of my, uh, senior instructors, a strong first, he freed us.
3:15:36 So met him a couple of decades ago and, uh, he had a severe back injury.
3:15:40 So he spent eight or nine months in bed in Percocet and he was not, he was not athletic.
3:15:43 He’d done some jogging or things like that in the past.
3:15:46 And, uh, he decided to get serious about getting strong.
3:15:49 So he healed up until he was healthy.
3:15:52 He started, uh, lifting kettlebells.
3:15:57 Then after that, he started powerlifting and he started doing, uh, proper stretching
3:15:59 like this.
3:16:02 So he is, uh, right now he is Steven in his late sixties.
3:16:06 He holds a bunch of American master’s records in the deadlift, even though his back was
3:16:09 totally messed up, lifts without a belt.
3:16:11 He is, you can break your fist on his abs.
3:16:16 I like having people punch, would you please punch Steve, just don’t hurt yourself.
3:16:21 But he also worked out to suspend the side splits and, you know, that’s, at that point
3:16:26 he was probably in his fifties when he did that and maybe sixties possibly.
3:16:31 And then he even competed in this crazy all around meets where there’s one lift where
3:16:35 you hang between two chairs and then you pick up a dumbbell from the ground.
3:16:37 You can find the footage somewhere on the internet.
3:16:43 So here’s the man who took, uh, who did not take his injury lying down.
3:16:49 So once he was cleared to train, he decided to approach his training with a, uh, attitude
3:16:53 of a musician because he’s a music professor.
3:17:01 And in my experience, that people who could become very successful and, uh, in strengths,
3:17:06 musicians and martial artists are among the people who, who can succeed because they’re
3:17:08 used to practice for many hours.
3:17:12 They used to paying attention to small detail and they’re used to doing whatever other people
3:17:14 consider boring over and over.
3:17:18 So again, here is this 60-some-year-old man with abs you can break your hands on, dead
3:17:20 lift records and, uh, and full splits.
3:17:23 That’s, that’s what a human mind is capable of.
3:17:30 I love this concept of a practice or of practice, not of a practice, but instead of training,
3:17:34 I always thought, uh, training is such a better word than working out and it probably is.
3:17:39 But I think practice, uh, is such a better verb than training is also good, of course.
3:17:44 But the practice is, uh, it puts you in the right, in the right frame of, frame of mind.
3:17:47 You imagine the word workout like Litterman quote.
3:17:49 He literally worked himself out.
3:17:56 Uh, as long as you’re highlighting, um, remarkable instances of people in the second half of
3:18:03 their life, let’s, let’s say, um, getting quite strong, developing impressive skills.
3:18:06 Before we started recording today, you were relaying to us, uh, that your, your father
3:18:09 has, um, acquired some significant strength.
3:18:14 Could you just share some of his, um, his abilities to inspire both the, uh, the people,
3:18:19 um, in the second half of their life or so and to, um, motivate slash intimidate the
3:18:23 younger ones and, um, get them going because they really have no excuse.
3:18:28 I’m very proud of my parents and, uh, they’re both 87 years old and, um, my father has always
3:18:29 been an athlete.
3:18:34 And then at the age of 71, I brought him to powerlifting meet and I see him in the warmup
3:18:38 area picking up, you know, 225 pounds with bad forms like that.
3:18:39 What are you doing?
3:18:41 He got interested.
3:18:47 So fast forward a few years and, uh, by the time he was 75, he had several American records
3:18:56 in, uh, in several weight classes and, uh, he deadlifted, uh, in the low 400s, uh, without
3:18:58 a belt body weight of 198.
3:19:05 And in fact, when, um, uh, back at that point, when, uh, professor Stuart McGill, who is
3:19:10 a very good friend of mine, he, uh, came to watch my dad, uh, I think he pulled like
3:19:16 three to five for triple before competition and it goes Jim Venice and, uh, Stu examined
3:19:20 his back and he said he had a, you know, a muscularity in the back of a 40 year old.
3:19:23 So I thought it was pretty, pretty, pretty cool.
3:19:28 So, uh, he’s not deadlifting right now because an old injury cut up to him.
3:19:33 He fell off a tracked vehicle, you know, like imagine a tank without a gun, uh, military
3:19:38 tracked vehicle on ice in the winter and, uh, but 40 years ago and there are some things
3:19:39 that cut up to him.
3:19:45 So he cannot deadlift right now, but he’s still, uh, twice a week, he does over 50 pullups
3:19:51 in total and, you know, and at least twice a week, he does over a hundred perfect body
3:19:56 weight squats, like powerlifting style squats, you know, and he does that.
3:19:58 He does push up some things like that.
3:20:02 So he just stays on top of that and he’s still maintaining very good strength, very good
3:20:03 muscularity.
3:20:09 So the approach to building muscle for him has, it’s that same volume with medium reps
3:20:11 and the medium effort.
3:20:13 It always works because it builds strength.
3:20:14 It builds muscle.
3:20:15 It’s very safe.
3:20:18 It’s, uh, it’s very enjoyable.
3:20:24 And, uh, my mother, she, uh, she used to be a professional ballerina and she got started
3:20:29 training since she was six or she, because she had to train all day, she hates exercise,
3:20:37 but she still does it because she must, and, uh, she came up with a great anti-glycolytic
3:20:39 training protocol for a cell.
3:20:41 So this is something she invented.
3:20:47 I had nothing to do with it, but it’s just totally goes with Berhashansky’s work.
3:20:54 She climbs stairs at a high rise and she will climb stairs from one floor to the next.
3:20:58 She’ll walk the hallway, come back and then go to the next floor.
3:21:03 So that’s the same idea that Berhashansky had, intensify the intensity of contraction
3:21:08 and then give a little time to not, so in order to, for the acid not to pile up.
3:21:13 So you keep that effort, creating phosphate powered and aerobic powered.
3:21:16 And you know, so she does it for 17 floors or whatever a few times a week and plus other
3:21:17 things.
3:21:21 But yeah, I’m very fortunate, uh, very proud of my parents.
3:21:27 My father-in-law Roger, he’s a great example and a great Greaster groove success story.
3:21:34 So he’s a retired firefighter and Marine and, uh, at the age of 64, and he always, uh, lifted
3:21:35 very unusual for his generation.
3:21:41 He started when he was 15 and, uh, never stopped, but he couldn’t quite do 20 pull-ups when
3:21:43 he was a Marine.
3:21:47 So at the age of 64, he got on the Greaster groove protocol.
3:21:49 So at, so at that point he’s max was 10 reps.
3:21:54 I said, Roger, every time you go by the pull-up bar, hit, hit five.
3:21:56 And when they become really, really easy, and then you can add a rep.
3:22:01 Well, a few months later, he finally, he, uh, when he worked up to nine daily reps, uh,
3:22:03 he tested, he could do 20 pull-ups.
3:22:10 So at 64, he finally aced the US Marine Corps pull-up PT test, something that he couldn’t
3:22:11 do is a young jar head.
3:22:18 And, uh, yeah, seeing this older folks who are not taking their age lying down and taking
3:22:22 their training very seriously, it’s just, uh, very admirable.
3:22:24 And you know, you see much younger people start complaining.
3:22:26 Some 30 year old comes, “Oh, I’m aging.
3:22:27 I’m getting older.
3:22:28 What should I do?”
3:22:30 It’s like, “What’s wrong with your son?”
3:22:31 You know?
3:22:32 Yeah, I completely agree.
3:22:35 These are inspiring stories, truly inspiring.
3:22:37 And people of all ages should pay attention.
3:22:40 It’s, um, not done in one leap.
3:22:43 There’s the progressive nature to it.
3:22:47 And I think not training to failure, I’m just, is resurfacing in my mind now as we have this
3:22:53 discussion, you know, the idea is to, to grind it’s to just grease the groove, get in there
3:22:55 and do it as a practice.
3:22:56 That’s right.
3:22:58 Actually, I’m going to change my language around this.
3:23:04 I realize that when I call it a practice as a, as a noun, it’s not as effective as practice
3:23:05 as a verb.
3:23:06 I’m going to practice.
3:23:07 Okay.
3:23:08 Not just for me.
3:23:09 This is just my own internal thing.
3:23:13 You know, my neuroses insist that I share this, but I do think that semantics are important
3:23:20 as you pointed out before because it has a lot to do with how we feel about ourselves
3:23:22 and what we think are, we’re capable of.
3:23:27 It starts with being inspired to try something, but also like I didn’t grow up in a particularly
3:23:33 athletic family, um, you know, not, none of us are unathletic, but I didn’t think I
3:23:38 could be, you know, reasonably strong, have decent endurance and I wouldn’t consider myself
3:23:41 an athlete by any stretch, but, um.
3:23:42 You’re being too modest.
3:23:47 And my consistency, I have, I have confidence in like, if I bite down into something, there’s
3:23:49 a good chance I’m going to do it for the next 30 years.
3:23:55 Well, in consistency, my, uh, my friend, uh, Jim Wright, who passed, uh, he used to say
3:23:59 consistency over intensity and that, that’s absolutely true.
3:24:04 If you’re doing, if you’re doing things correctly with proper form, if you did over and over,
3:24:09 you will win over longterm, which also interesting kind of brings me to an interesting point.
3:24:13 You made me think of the longterm development, athletic development.
3:24:16 Here’s what I’d like to see in a perfect world.
3:24:22 Nobody has tried that yet, but I imagine a strength athlete starting out using the Soviet
3:24:23 system.
3:24:27 And later, by the way, the Russian powerlifting team uses exactly the same training methodology
3:24:30 derived from that, which means you’re training many times a week.
3:24:35 Let’s say squad four or five days a week and, uh, you’re doing a lot of reps with this moderate
3:24:40 effort and you do this for four years and you’re a chief high level.
3:24:44 And then at some point you switch to this American powerlifting system because your
3:24:50 skills are already fully honed and you’re fully adapted to the type of stimulus that,
3:24:57 that, uh, first system brings and you switch, switch to this once a week cycling method.
3:25:03 It’ll be very interesting to see what, uh, what would happen, how far one could go.
3:25:06 So folks in your twenties and thirties get going on it now and we’ll have a podcast in
3:25:12 a couple of decades to check back, uh, send us a note or put in the comments.
3:25:14 I’d love to talk about body weight training.
3:25:17 I love, love, love the book, naked warrior.
3:25:18 Thank you.
3:25:22 Uh, I got that book initially because in the early days of starting my laboratory, I was
3:25:27 traveling a ton and I didn’t always have access to gyms and I wanted to try and grease
3:25:32 the groove when I arrived in my room in the middle of the night in Germany or whatever.
3:25:39 So, um, I still have not succeeded in doing pistol squats on both legs.
3:25:46 So one is, I have some dominant and weakness as it were, um, but I without any natural strength
3:25:52 ability to speak of, uh, was able to learn one arm pushups, um, uh, one arm pullups.
3:25:53 I’m not there now.
3:25:58 I have to return to that level of upper body strength, um, but it’s remarkable what one
3:26:03 can do with body weight training and you describe some really beautiful progressions in the book.
3:26:05 I highly recommend this book folks.
3:26:11 Um, so maybe we could just take the pushup as an example and a handstand pushup as the
3:26:13 extreme of that, right?
3:26:17 Um, what I love so much about that book is for instance, you talk about doing a pushup
3:26:24 against the wall, it’s trivially easy for most people doing a handstand pushup, free,
3:26:30 standing, very difficult, but there’s a series of progressions in between that maybe you
3:26:34 could describe to us that once you realize that, oh, I can work through this over time
3:26:38 and if I’m not in a rush to get through it and I just do these a few times a week or
3:26:44 more, ah, or a few times a day, a few times a week or more, I could do a handstand pushup
3:26:49 free standing or a pistol squat or a one arm pushup or a one arm pullup.
3:26:51 It’s not outside one’s reach at all.
3:26:52 Absolutely.
3:26:56 And do you fill in some of the gaps so getting people to think about the kind of physics
3:26:58 of this and the principles behind it?
3:27:03 It’s such a valuable system and one that, um, is a lot of fun too.
3:27:07 Before talking about the system, Andrew, may I speak about the relative benefits of different
3:27:08 types of resistance?
3:27:09 Please.
3:27:10 Okay.
3:27:11 Yeah.
3:27:15 So the body weight resistance, I’m going to talk about, uh, body weight, kettlebells
3:27:16 and barbells.
3:27:19 And obviously there are other things as well, but you know, it’s going to take too long.
3:27:26 So body weight training, the great advantage of body weight is its accessibility.
3:27:29 So you can do a pushup absolutely anywhere.
3:27:33 So that is, that’s a really huge selling point because for some people, somebody who travels
3:27:38 all the time and, uh, somebody who is in places where gyms are not available.
3:27:40 So that’s, that’s a great asset.
3:27:42 Some people just simply enjoy it greatly.
3:27:44 That’s, that’s just fine.
3:27:52 The downside of body weight training is it’s a lot harder to learn these skills than it
3:27:58 is, let’s say, to learn some many kettlebell skills or even some barbell skills.
3:28:03 So it seems very innocent and so easy, but the, uh, it may take time to really get some
3:28:04 of this.
3:28:10 So that may take time to do it longer, it might take a longer time.
3:28:17 The beautiful thing about the barbell is, uh, well, first of all, the satisfaction of
3:28:18 lifting really heavy stuff.
3:28:21 Some people find it extremely satisfying.
3:28:24 If you don’t, maybe it’s not for you, but if you do, it’s, it’s incredible.
3:28:29 Then the ability to adjust, adjust the weights in small increments.
3:28:33 So you can prescribe 87.5% one rap max and you can do that.
3:28:35 You cannot do that with body weight.
3:28:38 In fact, with body weight, it’s very hard to calibrate resistance.
3:28:43 Another one of the problems because you do need to have some skills, figure out the regressions
3:28:46 and progressions, how to do that.
3:28:53 And the other thing, the other great benefit of the barbell is some of the lifts, especially
3:28:58 the three power lifts, allow you to make great gains in strength.
3:29:03 And if you choose muscle mass with a very low volume, it’s, uh, it’s possible to do
3:29:09 three sets of five once a week in the squat and get very strong, try to do that with pistols.
3:29:11 It’s just not going to happen.
3:29:13 So reasons for that we can speculate.
3:29:18 We know some reasons we don’t know others, but it, it is what it is.
3:29:26 The beauty of the kettlebell for strength specifically is it’s very easy to teach the body language
3:29:27 of strength of the kettlebell.
3:29:32 You will think that with a, with a body weight, it should be easier because a lot of the skills
3:29:37 that I teach in, uh, in my book, the naked warrior, they are either gymnastics or martial
3:29:38 arts based.
3:29:42 So it’s like, okay, here’s the hollow position from gymnastics or here’s this little trick
3:29:45 from a heart style martial arts.
3:29:47 So they’re all both use body weight.
3:29:51 Nevertheless, it’s, it’s takes a lot more process into figure out how to do this right
3:29:52 from scratch.
3:29:57 Like especially contracting your abs properly, especially if you don’t have abs to start
3:29:58 with.
3:29:59 By the time you have them, that’s good.
3:30:01 But if you don’t have them, it’s hard.
3:30:07 With the kettlebell, for example, you take, uh, you start doing double front squats with
3:30:08 a pair of kettlebells.
3:30:10 It’s going to be like searchers.
3:30:12 You’re going to, your abdominal was going to light up.
3:30:16 You suddenly learn exactly, oh, this is what it means to get tight.
3:30:19 Or you stick your elbows inside the knees and do goblet squat.
3:30:23 Oh, this is what the proper, proper squat feels like.
3:30:31 And just very easy to, very easy to integrate, integrate all your body in one lift.
3:30:39 And there is an, an apparent disadvantage of the kettlebell, which also can be an advantage.
3:30:42 There’s no, you can’t program 87.5% body weight.
3:30:47 I mean, one rep max because kettlebells jump in large, you know, like for example, from
3:30:52 53 to 70 pounds, for example, that’s a big jump.
3:30:57 And, uh, I mean, these days, some companies will manufacture kettlebells with small, like,
3:30:59 you know, small jumps.
3:31:00 What’s the point?
3:31:05 You’re defeating some of the, uh, reasons for the being for this particular piece of
3:31:10 equipment and, uh, here’s what they are.
3:31:11 One is simplicity.
3:31:14 You only can have a couple of bells and do a lot of things.
3:31:21 But the other is when you go, when you suddenly, let’s say that you have been pressing a 53
3:31:27 pound kettlebell and you’re doing a lot of sets and your goal is to press a 70 pound
3:31:29 kettlebell as a big jump.
3:31:35 So what you’re going to do is first of all, you’re going to have to put in a very significant
3:31:37 volume of work.
3:31:44 That foundation of the pyramid, many strength, uh, authors throughout history, Bill Starr
3:31:49 and many others use that analogy of volume as being the foundation of the pyramid.
3:31:54 You’re going to have to press that 24 kilo many times properly before you’re going to
3:31:55 have around a 70.
3:31:57 You have to develop the confidence.
3:32:03 The other thing is you’re going to have to acquire the skill of tension, total body tension.
3:32:06 Everything is linked up because when you go up a couple of pounds, it doesn’t make a
3:32:07 difference.
3:32:08 You’re doing the same thing.
3:32:09 You’re not noticing.
3:32:11 When you go up a lot, everything has to be just so.
3:32:17 So as you’re doing, going through your sets of five with the 53 pounder, you’re also doing
3:32:19 just cleans with the 70 pounder.
3:32:21 You’re starting to see what it feels like.
3:32:22 You’re doing get ups with it.
3:32:25 You’re starting to see acquiring, see how that weight feels like.
3:32:27 Again, we’re talking about disinhibition here.
3:32:29 You’re planning and owing this weight.
3:32:34 So you’re forced to put in a very significant volume of work, which means, which is very
3:32:35 healthy.
3:32:39 It will lead to a lot of really healthy adaptations and you will force to develop the skills to
3:32:41 make that transition.
3:32:45 And plus you’re also having that desirable difficulty in skill, in learning.
3:32:51 There is that concept by Robert Bjork about desirable difficulties for learning.
3:32:55 If learning is very easy, something is presented, you don’t learn much.
3:32:59 If you have to struggle, like even if you’re reading something and the font is ineligible,
3:33:01 ironically, you end up learning better.
3:33:05 So that’s an example of a desirable difficulty as you’re progressing this way.
3:33:11 So that is for strength, obviously kettlebell have their benefits for endurance and for
3:33:15 other things as well, but just for adjusting the resistance.
3:33:18 Often times it’s just a matter of preference and a matter of accessibility.
3:33:23 So I’m not going to say you pick this tool, you pick that tool, you pick the other tool.
3:33:28 But if you decide to pick the body weight, my recommendation would be just be ready
3:33:34 for patient for a long road because you have to patiently learn these little subtleties
3:33:35 of micromanaging your body.
3:33:42 Again, you watch the body language of gymnasts, you watch the Sanchin Kata in some styles
3:33:48 of karate and you’ll see that amazing linking of the different parts of the body into the
3:33:51 one chain, how the tension is used.
3:33:58 So it’s very rewarding, but I would say that’s probably the most attention demanding, even
3:34:04 though it seems so innocent and so simple and so safe, but it demands a lot of attention.
3:34:08 But if that’s your speed and if you enjoy practice, true practice, that’s a great way
3:34:09 to go.
3:34:12 I haven’t explored kettlebell training so much.
3:34:15 Whenever I’ve tried the standard kettlebell swing, just kind of if there is such a thing,
3:34:19 but you know, between the legs, two handed kettlebell swing, I tended to get some right
3:34:24 side lower back pain medial glute thing and I’m sure I’m not doing it correctly.
3:34:28 And I wanted to learn kettlebells properly.
3:34:30 You have an online kettlebell course.
3:34:32 Yes, we do have several resources.
3:34:39 So we have the book, Kettlebell Simple and Sinister, which is available on Amazon.
3:34:43 We have an online course under the same name.
3:34:49 We also obviously have workshops, live instructors that you can find locally at our website,
3:34:51 Strong First.
3:34:54 But I can tell you that of course, some people are not supposed to do swings, as is true
3:34:56 for every exercise.
3:34:59 For example, in McGill’s work, say some people who have problems with shear, sometimes they
3:35:05 might have issues, but a great, great number of people, majority people, can do swings
3:35:06 very successfully.
3:35:11 We have seen some really pretty broken people when they’re clear to do that and when they’re
3:35:13 coached properly.
3:35:20 The big issue is you have to hip hinge, not lift the kettlebell with your back or with
3:35:21 your arms.
3:35:23 And for that, we have very, very specific progressions.
3:35:26 You cannot go move beyond this until you do this.
3:35:30 Okay, here you are doing this particular hip hinge drill with no weight.
3:35:31 Okay, good.
3:35:32 You got that down.
3:35:37 Now you’re going to do a kettlebell deadlift, which is just a sumo deadlift with a light
3:35:38 kettlebell.
3:35:42 Then you’re going to progress with a very particular type of swing.
3:35:45 So it’s about patience, but the benefits are really worth it.
3:35:51 So what are the benefits, let’s say, if the kettlebell swings as opposed to, or snatches?
3:35:55 Again, snatch is more of a less democratic exercise, like the dips.
3:35:58 Barrel bar dips, fantastic for those who can do that.
3:36:01 But if you can, that’s too bad, but they’re alternatives.
3:36:02 So again, the snatch is great.
3:36:05 If you cannot do snatch, you can do swing.
3:36:12 So the swing, it allows you to train power and power endurance in an extremely safe
3:36:20 manner, because if you try to develop power in a lot of conventional ways, you will find
3:36:21 like, okay, you try doing Olympic lifts.
3:36:25 It’s very skill intensive, trying to learn how to do that.
3:36:31 And besides for some athletes, it’s not appropriate, racking the bar and over stretching the wrist
3:36:35 ligaments, like for example, for fighters, that’s a case of death.
3:36:37 That’s a really bad idea to stabilize in the wrist in this manner.
3:36:42 And for many athletes, other athletes too, you know, pitcher doesn’t want to do that,
3:36:43 baseball pitcher.
3:36:47 So high, you know, then you try to do things like sprinting.
3:36:52 Sprinter requires a lot of coaching, proper coaching, much more than a kettlebell swing.
3:36:56 And it’s very, very easy to rip a hamstring or something like that.
3:37:03 So this kettlebell swing allows you to train power and power endurance in a very safe manner.
3:37:07 And what’s also very unique about it, you don’t have to use a lot of weight.
3:37:10 What’s unique about the kettlebell and the kettlebell swing, another thing about the
3:37:15 design, you can swing it back between your legs, but you don’t have to let it passively
3:37:17 swing between your legs.
3:37:19 You can choose to accelerate it.
3:37:21 This is called overspeed eccentric.
3:37:27 So some years back, our colleague, one of our instructors, Brandon Hetzler, he put me
3:37:32 and several other of our colleagues instructors on the force plate.
3:37:37 And we started doing swings with overspeed eccentric, which means accelerating it downwards
3:37:38 and upwards.
3:37:41 So we were using just a 53 pound bell.
3:37:47 So the most experienced guys, we were able to generate over 10 Gs of acceleration.
3:37:51 So basically, we made that 50 pound bell weigh 500 pounds.
3:37:59 But if to the listeners who know about how the tissues, how the passive tissues can handle
3:38:03 the load, when they’re loading is really rapid, it’s amazing how these tissues can handle
3:38:05 that very, very safely.
3:38:07 So you can apply tremendous amount of load.
3:38:08 Of course, you don’t start with that.
3:38:10 It’s not how you start your swings.
3:38:14 So and you can develop power endurance, so you can do a whole lot of different, many
3:38:17 different sets, many sets.
3:38:21 You’ve had Megan Kelly, one of our certified instructors out of UK.
3:38:27 You know, she set a Guinness World Record for a crazy number of swings done in an hour.
3:38:31 And so she would just go her training as she would go and do swings.
3:38:36 She’ll do a few reps, pick up, set it down, and she would do it for, let’s say, 90 minutes.
3:38:38 And she would do it with a heavy kettlebell.
3:38:41 And the adaptations are fantastic from that.
3:38:44 In the kettlebell world, we refer to what the hell effect.
3:38:46 So what’s what the hell effect?
3:38:50 What the hell effect is when you’re getting an adaptation, that’s not a beginner’s gain,
3:38:53 but it’s an adaptation that’s totally unexpected.
3:38:58 Some collateral benefit, how suddenly you’re able, you’re able to do something.
3:39:03 And the improvements in fat loss, improvements in resilience.
3:39:06 So like, for example, speaking of resilience.
3:39:10 So some of the tactical teams that I worked with in the US here, when they added either
3:39:16 swings or snatches to their training with the kettlebell plus one legged kettlebell deadlifts
3:39:19 as well, they stopped tearing their hamstrings.
3:39:24 So you have this amazing way to do eccentric loading for the hamstring, but it’s very safe
3:39:26 and just really prepares you.
3:39:29 One of my friends is still playing baseball in the 60s.
3:39:31 He says, thank you for the kettlebells.
3:39:34 You know, he went through the course and what a federal agency is 20 years ago, and he’s
3:39:35 still doing that.
3:39:38 He’s retired, but he’s still he’s still doing that.
3:39:40 So that’s a great benefit.
3:39:44 The amount of pure workload that you can do in this amount, that’s why you can burn a
3:39:45 lot of calories.
3:39:48 You can develop cardio, whatever.
3:39:55 But also, like, why would anybody want to do power training who is not a power athlete?
3:39:58 Because for so many reasons right now, I don’t need to speak about it or your other guests
3:40:05 have, for the reasons of longevity, how important it is to, to have high levels of power.
3:40:09 And the kettlebell swing is one of the ways, one of the ways to develop it.
3:40:18 And interestingly enough, going back, like, you know, these accelerations Professor Yakov
3:40:24 Nikolai Yakovlev top, Soviet biochemist, he was just talking about sprints during added
3:40:25 sprints.
3:40:29 When you’re adding sprints just to a jog, you know, this kind of a fart like work, he
3:40:34 was saying how important, how good it is for elderly and for teenagers, how good it is.
3:40:37 So the kettlebell, even if you’re not sprinting, if you don’t know how to sprint, you’re able
3:40:41 to get so many of these youth promoting benefits.
3:40:43 And again, you have one tool that can train all the qualities.
3:40:48 You can develop mobility, you know, the bent press, that’s a tremendous exercise, the bent
3:40:55 press where the mobility of the t-spine, the mobility of the shoulder.
3:41:03 So like you watch and watch, for example, Dr. Pope Moseley is one of our instructors
3:41:09 and he’s also a doctor and bio-med researcher, I mean, the gentleman is 70 years old.
3:41:13 And he’s doing these beautiful bent presses, getting himself in the range of motion that
3:41:18 young guys, you know, on their phones can possibly get into, and he’s doing it in a
3:41:19 healthy manner.
3:41:24 So you can develop mobility, you can develop strength, you can develop endurance and resilience
3:41:26 in all one package.
3:41:30 So obviously I’m biased and I’m not saying it’s the only way to go, but that’s one
3:41:35 relative benefit, one of the many relative benefits of kettlebells.
3:41:39 But an overall lifelong journey, like if you’re looking at three things right now, you’re
3:41:40 new at strength.
3:41:41 What should I start with?
3:41:45 I’ll say start with the kettlebell, it’s the best entry point.
3:41:50 We find it so easy to start coaching people in powerlifting or transition to some body
3:41:54 weight strength after training them with kettlebells.
3:41:57 It’s extremely easy because they’ve got that body weight language of strength down.
3:42:02 I’m going to have a few questions in the upcoming months about kettlebells.
3:42:08 I’ll try not to bother you too many times, but I’ll use the course as a guide.
3:42:14 But I’m determined to derive some of these benefits of kettlebells because kettlebells
3:42:17 have been around me for over a decade now.
3:42:21 And I just haven’t quite taken to them, not through some aversion, but I’m going to approach
3:42:22 it correctly.
3:42:24 I love the body weight work.
3:42:29 The body weight work, I don’t know, maybe it takes me back to PE class when I was in
3:42:34 high school or something, when we do these fit tests, is usually some pull-ups, some
3:42:40 push-ups, a reach and a run or something like that, like a straight-legged toe reach, who
3:42:42 knows if it’s a meaningful metric.
3:42:48 But in any case, something so satisfying about going from struggling with push-ups to being
3:42:51 able to do a one-arm push-up or something like that.
3:42:55 And you describe it in how to make that progression in the book.
3:42:56 For people–
3:42:57 People are going to be just to interrupt you.
3:42:59 And it’s also cool that you’re a bigger guy and you’re doing that.
3:43:02 This is what I love to see, and we’re seeing that as strong first a lot.
3:43:09 We love to see bigger guys and gals getting into the body weight exercises, because that’s
3:43:11 not typical of their strength.
3:43:15 We like to see skinny people getting into the barbell and just go against the– like,
3:43:20 for example, seeing somebody like Dr. Mike Hartle, one of our master instructors, he’s
3:43:25 a former American bench press record holder and a coach for the powerlifting team USA.
3:43:29 I mean, watching him do one-arm push-ups, you got to love that stuff, because normally
3:43:31 big guys hate body weight work.
3:43:32 It’s humbling.
3:43:34 And little guys hate barbell.
3:43:37 And we just get– and not just guys, women.
3:43:42 We have these ladies, these skinny little ladies lifting amazing weights.
3:43:43 That’s just always awesome to see that.
3:43:45 It is awesome.
3:43:49 And I love that strength training, resistance training is starting to really make a showing
3:43:51 here in the US and the general public.
3:43:56 I think it’s one of the best things to happen in the last few years, and this discussion,
3:43:58 your knowledge is going to put even more momentum behind that.
3:44:05 If I just made to guide people just briefly on a very high level, great news, you have
3:44:06 so many choices.
3:44:08 Bad news, you have too many choices.
3:44:13 So pick one program with an established track record and just stick with it and follow it
3:44:14 for a long time.
3:44:17 Do not try to over-customize everything.
3:44:22 Daniel Kahneman spoke how much algorithms outperform humans so often.
3:44:28 I’ve seen this over and over how a properly designed strength program or endurance program
3:44:36 that was generic design, but with certain feedback loops in there, OK, if this happens,
3:44:38 you have to go back and make some changes.
3:44:41 Deliver much better results and customized programs very often.
3:44:45 So find something that’s simple.
3:44:49 Find something that does not have a lot of moving parts and just stick with this for
3:44:51 a long time if it’s working.
3:44:57 Do not look for the next thing because the next thing, maybe it’s as good, maybe not,
3:45:03 but also do keep in mind that every time you change gears, you lose momentum.
3:45:09 You’re a neuroscientist, I don’t know if you spoke to your audience about the law of neural
3:45:16 Darwinism, but there’s a competition between the synaptic side, so you have the pathways,
3:45:19 so you can only do so many things well.
3:45:25 So a child can do everything but not but poorly, but as we get older, some of these pathways
3:45:32 get pruned, but others get reinforced, and unfortunately we can’t excel at everything.
3:45:37 So this classic example with, and not just physically, mentally as well, cognitively
3:45:47 as well, this classic example with taxi drivers, back in the days before GPS, taxi cab drivers
3:45:51 were supposed to pass an extremely challenging test, how to navigate through the city that
3:45:59 was not designed to be navigated through, and they found that a certain part of their
3:46:06 hippocampus was more developed than others, and so they thought, well, maybe it’s just
3:46:11 pre-selection, maybe whoever made it through the test were the guys with the more muscular
3:46:17 hippocampus, and then they monitored, then they monitored two groups of students over
3:46:22 several years, and they said they start with the same size, and in the group that passed,
3:46:27 their brains so to say got bigger in that part, and the others they didn’t, but then
3:46:31 at the same time, in a different test of a different test of memory, the guys who passed
3:46:37 the test, they were not so good, so they lost something in the process, it’s just life,
3:46:44 it’s many things in life for a zero-sum game, you want to seek some balance up to a point,
3:46:48 but there comes a point where you know you cannot do it all, we are limited in time,
3:46:50 we’re limited in our adaptive capacity.
3:46:56 Yeah, amen to that, and I appreciate you highlighting the London cab drivers experiment, your knowledge
3:46:58 of neuroscience is truly impressive.
3:46:59 Your way to Jenner’s, thank you.
3:47:05 No, it’s true, no other guest on here has discussed long-term depression, which is cool.
3:47:10 My dad said Andrew you know something, my dad taught me early on that is good things
3:47:16 happen at junctions of fields, if you’re always stay exactly just in your own narrow field,
3:47:21 and you’re just the same thing as repeated, but when you start going to somewhere else
3:47:27 a little bit outside, it’s adjacent, whether it’s neuroscience, whether it’s okay, what
3:47:31 are the martial arts skills, how do the martial artists do for striking or somewhere else,
3:47:34 I think that just really interesting to kind of a step a little bit outside your comfort
3:47:37 zone and sometimes you see patterns, that’s what happens.
3:47:44 Your father’s a smart, smart man, kids and young people training, I don’t know what the
3:47:50 going word is now as to whether or not there’s a you know too young to resistance train age,
3:47:55 you know some people say there isn’t, when I was growing up it was thought that if you
3:48:02 squatted heavy or you deadlifted heavy before you reached your natural limits of your height,
3:48:06 that it could quote unquote stunt your growth like your comments on that, but based on what
3:48:12 we were just talking about it seems that if a young person is interested in developing
3:48:17 a super skill in one area, one sport okay, but there’s a real trade off to that and perhaps
3:48:23 what we should do as kids is a little bit of soccer, a little bit of swimming, a little
3:48:27 bit gymnastics seems like a wonderful all around sport, maybe a little archery, you
3:48:29 know try a bunch of things, some ballet, you know try it.
3:48:34 Well that’s the time to do that, that’s exposed that neurodiversity and the things that you
3:48:39 can possibly do and then find the things that you click with and for the physical body early
3:48:46 specialization destroys athletes, it is really terrible because early on kids absolutely need
3:48:51 to do a wide variety of different activities and really pursue a fairly balanced development,
3:48:55 you know there may be a bias towards strength or bias towards endurance but they really
3:49:01 need to do it all and specialist athletes break, they break, they really do, so that
3:49:05 balance between general and specific, it’s a tough balance.
3:49:10 And psychologically sometimes too, we had a guest on here who’s become a psychologist
3:49:16 but she was a concert level violin player that injured her finger and it was like the
3:49:22 most devastating thing, you know when we put all of our sort of identity into one thing,
3:49:26 sure you get your Michael Jordan’s and you get your Tiger Woods’ and you know.
3:49:33 And seriously there’s no right answer, wrong answer, so I remember Yvonne Abadjiyev who
3:49:40 was head coach for the Bulgarian weightlifting team, he says if Paganini played whatever
3:49:46 instrument you know in addition to his own instrument playing in 15 hours a day he would
3:49:52 not have become Paganini and that’s true but I’m not saying that specialization is necessarily
3:49:58 the right choice for everybody, some people prefer to be decent in many things and it
3:50:02 is healthy but you still have to decide, you still have to make decisions, very much you’re
3:50:06 looking like at a budget, do I want to buy a couch or do you want to go on a vacation
3:50:12 to Italy? Or do I want to go on a much lamar vacation and buy a lamar couch and do both?
3:50:16 And I’m not saying what’s the right answer right there but just people do have to understand
3:50:21 there are limitations. They can’t successfully compete in two sports for example, it’s not
3:50:27 going to happen especially if it’s a power sport and endurance sport and they can’t study
3:50:33 everything to a high level just as well. If you want to be a polymath that’s fine in
3:50:36 the 18th century, right now it’s a little bit tougher.
3:50:40 The previous guest, you may know him, Josh Waitskin of chess prodigy fame, he’s gone
3:50:48 on to do several things at world class level by severing from the previous endeavor completely.
3:50:53 He hasn’t picked up a chess piece since he was 16 which is remarkable, pivoting to other
3:50:59 things but when one looks at the data on child prodigies very few of them are like Josh, most
3:51:03 of them don’t actually succeed in doing anything else at a very high level except hopefully
3:51:10 survive and thrive in their personal life. Who knows? After being ultra successful as
3:51:15 a young child probably because their nervous system is so, you know, they grease the groove
3:51:19 so heavily for one endeavor it’s very hard to cross over. Josh is exceptional in that
3:51:20 regard.
3:51:25 Well exceptions prove the rule usually.
3:51:30 Not to say too mechanical and specific but I’d love to talk about abdominal or rather
3:51:36 core work. Another thing I love in the Naked Warrior are the abdominal exercises. I must
3:51:41 tell you after years of doing some crunches here and there and different, you know, for
3:51:46 whatever this class or that class are trying to, I never really cared about having my abs
3:51:52 defined for its own sake. One should probably be able to at least contract their abs, okay?
3:51:53 It’s the level of-
3:51:55 We assess them by punching them.
3:51:59 Right, exactly. But there’s some wonderful exercises in there about learning to brace
3:52:06 the entire body and some, dare I say, some rather unorthodox ways of assessing stability
3:52:10 at the level of the core. I’m thinking about the plank where somebody tries to either kick
3:52:14 you over or push you over. This might sound violent. This is not where you start folks.
3:52:15 It’s kind of gentle.
3:52:20 But I never thought I could do like hanging pikes for instance. I like now pikes are standard
3:52:26 part of my weekly routine. I love doing five sets of five of hanging pikes and I will tell
3:52:31 anyone that decides to go down this path that when I first tried to do a pike, I failed
3:52:38 miserably. I tried an L-sit, failed miserably, tried to hang from the bar and just getting
3:52:42 into a chair position. I could just barely hold that. The progressions are what matter,
3:52:47 right? Slow progression in patients. Now five sets of five pikes, trivial for me.
3:52:48 Great.
3:52:53 But when I just want to emphasize that when I started, I was far, far away from that and
3:52:57 it’s the progressions in the book that really helped me and I’ve maintained that pike ability.
3:52:58 So thank you for that.
3:52:59 Thank you.
3:53:05 And I say it not necessarily to highlight what I can do but to highlight what I do believe
3:53:07 most anybody can do if you put the work in.
3:53:13 They can if they put a lot of attention in. So midsection training is one of the most
3:53:19 misunderstood and messed up areas of physical culture. There’s a thousand different exercises
3:53:24 and people are going to get a variety of these many reps. That’s not the point. The point
3:53:29 really is tension and attention. So those are the two things.
3:53:36 And ideally your best first step is really learning abdominal tension through something
3:53:42 like a Zercher squat or double kettlebell front squat where the load distribution is
3:53:47 such that it forces reflexive stabilization and you feel, oh, that’s what tight abs feel
3:53:52 like and getting somebody just weak in the plank is hopeless. There’s absolutely not
3:53:58 going to help. There are ways of building up to it by rolling in the back and so on.
3:54:03 So but if you don’t have that option or if you choose not to exercise it, you have to
3:54:08 be extremely attentive to the details of what’s going on with on your abdomen. So you need
3:54:11 to learn things like, for example, you need to learn to contract the pelvic diaphragm
3:54:19 for your butt up because you’re trying to constrain the intra-abdominal pressure. Then
3:54:25 you need to learn how to direct attention to the different parts of your abdomen, almost
3:54:30 like a bodybuilder, but really not quite, more like a gymnast. There is this argument
3:54:36 about the strength world about internal focus, external focus and queuing and the agreement
3:54:41 is in motor learning. External focus queuing is so much better than focusing on whatever
3:54:46 happens within the individual muscle. It may be true in the beginning, it may be true outside
3:54:51 of the strength game, but any top strength athlete that you will meet, they have their
3:54:55 own internal cues how they do something. Later on, they may forget them. It despires them,
3:55:02 but they know how to, this is how, this is how engage the lat in the bench press. George
3:55:06 Halbert bench press world record holder famously said it took him many years to finally understand
3:55:11 how the triceps is used in the bench press, many years. So, there is a lot of internal
3:55:18 component and for the abs very, very much. So, you have to learn how to very much direct
3:55:23 your attention there. To get high tension, you have to keep the reps low. Like you said,
3:55:27 five sets of five, perfect. High reps are not necessary. You’re not going to burn off
3:55:30 fat by doing more reps, you’re just going to irritate your back. That’s all you’re going
3:55:38 to do, nothing else. So, you treat your ab training very much like a strength event.
3:55:43 And if you do that, you’re going to get those results. And finally, the final detail is
3:55:52 you need to use that intra-abdominal pressure as your friend because in lifting like a deadlift
3:55:55 or a squat or something, the intra-abdominal pressure helps you, it supports you. When
3:56:00 you’re doing abdominal work, you work against that abdominal pressure, intra-abdominal pressure.
3:56:04 You just create that pressure and contract against it. This is something called internal
3:56:10 isometrics. So, it’s kind of interesting. It’s just a combination of a classic strength
3:56:16 work with very internalized kind of almost like a martial arts approach to it. Then,
3:56:21 you need to learn also how to obviously use your abs and the lifts in lifting. And once
3:56:25 you do, and this is the beauty, you don’t really have to train your abs anymore. So,
3:56:30 Franco Colombo, for example, a great example, in addition to winning, you know, being super
3:56:34 strong and winning Mr. Olympia, he won the best abs. He didn’t train abs. He said he
3:56:39 told about hate ab training. He just would stay tight whenever he did his heavy lifts.
3:56:44 And this is pretty much what happens when you reach a certain level of strength and
3:56:50 a certain level of awareness, simply staying tight during your strength work and also employing
3:56:55 power breathing, which is very important. You’re going to be able to get as strong as
3:56:59 you need in the abs and get your six pack over whatever provided, you know, you don’t
3:57:06 need the Twinkies. So, how do you pressurize the, in fact, may I show an abdominal exercise
3:57:13 right now that is just sitting at this table. That’s also going to teach you how, teach
3:57:18 your audience how to properly pressurize for lifting. So, normally it’s better done
3:57:23 standing. So, and it’s not for people with high blood pressure or heart concerns, you
3:57:28 know, check with your doctor if that’s the situation. So, you take a normal breath in
3:57:35 your abdomen and you pull up your butt pretty much like imagine you have to go to the restroom
3:57:38 and you’re trying to, you can’t quite, you know, it’s far away. You’re trying to stop
3:57:49 yourself and then you put your tongue between your teeth and you start and you start hissing
3:57:57 and you do this in this ratcheting kind of manner. So, try to keep all the pressure out
3:58:02 of your head, out of your neck, direct all the pressure. All this pressure is just to
3:58:10 really stay in below. And so, this type of hissing, you will notice that very rapidly
3:58:14 you’re going to contract everything around your waist. So, everything around your waist
3:58:18 is going to contract and you’re going to strain your abdomen. You’re also going to start
3:58:24 learn how to properly, how to properly stabilize yourself under heavy weights. The difference
3:58:29 between using this technique for lifting and for just training the abs. When you’re
3:58:32 training the abs, there’s going to be some spinal flexion. Not a whole lot, you don’t
3:58:37 want to do a lot of that. There’s going to be some spinal flexion. When you’re doing
3:58:41 that under a heavy barbell squat, you’re maintaining your spine is neutral. It’s like
3:58:48 your body stays a cylinder and you’re going to hold your breath pretty much. But the idea
3:58:55 is the same. So, it’s like, so they’ve all salve a maneuver. One Russian coach called
3:59:02 it, it’s an exhalation that didn’t happen, okay? Because people don’t know how to hold
3:59:07 their breath properly. They just, and then eyes are bulging out where there’s no stability
3:59:12 right here. So, first of all, you got to inhale low. And how do you do that? If you watch
3:59:18 top lifters how they do that, they will do it through per slips. You can also do it through
3:59:23 the nose, but you cannot do it through big wide open mouth. So, I’ll show you why. So,
3:59:27 if you, you can, your folks can try it at home. So, if you put your hand on your stomach
3:59:34 and trying to do an abdominal breath, doesn’t go very well. Now, for contrast, pinch off
3:59:41 one nostril, take an abdominal breath, or you can do that through per slip, straight
3:59:50 again. So, you see more resistance, more resistance. And again, you’re engaging the diaphragm instead
3:59:57 of just your thorax right there. So, you take that breath into your abdomen in like through
4:00:05 a small opening through your nose, or through your per slips, you draw it in right there.
4:00:11 And then, you know, down below you pull it up. And then after that, it’s that exhalation
4:00:19 that didn’t happen. Do you see? I see. So, I’m familiar with sort of bracing my abs.
4:00:24 What I’ve not done before is the resisting going to the bathroom thing that you mentioned,
4:00:28 the pulling up of the butt. And then, so you’re creating compression from the bottom and from
4:00:32 the top. And also from all around that happens reflexively as well. I see. So, that’s the
4:00:37 position to get into before say like a hard zircher squat or something like that. Absolutely.
4:00:43 And if you’re doing that for an exercise that’s long, long in duration, you know, if you don’t
4:00:48 want to be holding your breath too long, then we have an expression that comes from one of
4:00:55 the carotestiles breathing behind the shield. So, so right now I can speak to you, but I’m
4:01:00 still just as tight and see what you’re doing. So, the way we tested it, our where we teach
4:01:05 it at our workshop says you lie on the ground. I tell you to tense up. I’m going to stand
4:01:09 on your stomach. I’m going to have you sing a song. And you’re going to have to learn
4:01:14 to properly maintain that pressure while still containing, containing, can continue
4:01:19 and to breathe. So, you’re able to stabilize your spine, but you’re not going to pass out
4:01:24 from maintaining that by by holding your breath for a period of time. And then finally, what
4:01:29 you got to do and learn to do is you got to learn to match the breath with the force.
4:01:38 So synchronize synchronize when you’re punching, when you’re throwing, when you’re lifting,
4:01:42 you have to learn how to match that contraction, the timing of the abdominal contraction and
4:01:49 the pressurization, sometimes exhalation, sometimes just pretending to with the effort.
4:01:53 Once you learn how to match the breath with the force, it’s like magic. And what people
4:01:58 don’t realize is not just purely mechanical. Mechanically, yes, of course, it works. You
4:02:02 know, Stu explained this so well about the stiffness of the structure, the analogy of
4:02:06 the bicycle frame. It’s the same thing. You’re getting an expensive bicycle frame when you
4:02:12 have strong abs as opposed to the cheap one that rattles and wiggles. But there’s also
4:02:19 something that it’s never never spoken about in the West for some reason. The Soviet study
4:02:26 that decades ago, this is something they called the pneumo matmatic reflex pneumo is P N E
4:02:34 U M O. So air. So there are bearer receptors, receptors for sensors for pressure inside
4:02:42 your abdominal cavity and thoracic cavity. So whenever these receptors are stimulated,
4:02:46 what they do is they automatically increase the sensitivity about alpha motor neurons.
4:02:53 So which really means to the audience is this, if you imagine your brain is the music player
4:03:00 and imagine your muscle is is a speaker, the amount of intraabdominal pressure is your
4:03:09 volume control. So by by increasing that pressure, increasing the strength, but by by releasing
4:03:14 that intraabdominal pressure, you relax the muscle. So that’s why in stretching, as I
4:03:20 mentioned before, you can be sitting in a half split and groaning. No, you need to release
4:03:26 if you release that passive breath. Again, you’re gonna your muscles are going to relax.
4:03:33 So controlling your breath is very much as it’s known in martial arts. It’s very much
4:03:41 synonymous with controlling your body and your mind. Very fantastic. When one throws
4:03:48 a punch, is it true that excellence is actually providing additional power? No question about
4:03:54 it. Yeah, it’s been it’s been measured. It’s been measured in the fighters. It’s also been
4:04:00 measured in lifting as well. There was a study that was done in the West even when screaming
4:04:05 increases strength significantly. Again, this is not just a psychological component. I mean,
4:04:12 there may be some psychological component to that. But again, there’s this very distinct
4:04:19 increase of strength through through that through that reflex. And it’s very easy for the listeners
4:04:24 to test that get a dynamometer hand gripper and just test yourself on that and just see
4:04:30 test it out in different with different breathing patterns and just see what happens. And whenever
4:04:34 you know, these idiotic practices, some gyms, oh, you can grunt right here and it’s just
4:04:39 well, I guess you can be strong here. And yeah, of course, if you’re doing this on purpose,
4:04:42 you’re walking in with the bros and you’re just trying to just to make noise to attract
4:04:51 attention, that’s wrong. But strength is a noisy endeavor. So there may be some hissing,
4:04:58 there may be some grunting, it’s it just absolutely unavoidable. And it’s, if you’re if you’re
4:05:02 trying to be quiet, if you’re trying to be a lady or a gentleman, well, maybe it’s not
4:05:04 for it’s for it’s for somewhere else, not for the gym.
4:05:11 So some potentially trivial questions, but I think they are not trivial. I hope they’re
4:05:19 not in any case. Where should we place our eyes when we’re in exertion? Close our eyes
4:05:26 and grind it out. Look at form in the mirror. I’m a big fan of gyms without mirrors, because
4:05:33 I have to concentrate on the form. Vision is a powerful tool and source of feedback,
4:05:38 but also a source of a lot of things. There must be a rule about this or at least a set
4:05:46 of guidelines for are we eyes closed in grimacing? Are we checking our bicep vein in the mirror?
4:05:51 Just kidding, don’t do that, folks. During a lift, where should our eyes be? Is there
4:05:55 any idea that looking up it makes it easier to drive up out of the bottom of a squat?
4:05:56 Has this been explored?
4:06:04 Well, it has. There’s several, there’s several sides to that. Part of it is the spinal safety.
4:06:09 So Stu will tell you that extending the neck is going to facilitate the entire posterior
4:06:14 chain and he’ll also tell you that lifters with longer necks may be able to get their
4:06:21 heads up and that might work better for them. For some other lifters, especially those with
4:06:26 pronounced lardosis where they’re very arched, big arched in the back, that may arch them
4:06:34 too much, that might be inappropriate or it just can’t get their neck, so it’s all possible.
4:06:41 A lot of coaches these days in a lift like a deadlift, they try to including Andy Bolton.
4:06:49 Andy Bolton is the legendary deadlifter. He’s the one, the first lifter to lift over 1,000
4:06:55 pounds in the deadlift. Andy and I, we co-authored the book, The Deadlift Dynamite. Andy’s got
4:07:01 the most beautiful deadlift, just the most incredible beautiful deadlift. So what Andy
4:07:06 does is pretty much what the standard recommendation for most people is these days, where you’re
4:07:12 maintaining a neutral neck and your eyes kind of a go with that. So you get yourself in
4:07:16 the position, you know, on the bottom of the deadlift, like where your head is the continuation
4:07:21 of your body, like you’re an insect or something, and then you look at the spot on the ground
4:07:26 that’s appropriate and your eyes will come up. So that’s a good general standard recommendation.
4:07:31 For people with long necks looking straight ahead, it’s a good recommendation. Some lifters
4:07:37 succeed with crazy ideas. Lamar Gantt, that’s again, pound per pound, the biggest deadlifter.
4:07:43 He was in tremendous hyperextension. He was looking at the ceiling. Then at a high level
4:07:48 of competition, there are some other subtle ways, some things people try. So Konstantin
4:07:56 Konstantino from Latvia. He was another great deadlifter who passed. He would look down
4:08:04 at the start. He would look absolutely down. He was pretty much. And if you look at it
4:08:08 from your perspective, when your neck is in flexion, interestingly enough, that facilitates
4:08:13 the knee extensors, which is really, really weird. Yeah. And that’s when I put my chin
4:08:18 toward my chest. Not all the way down, but yeah, you will find that your quads are going
4:08:22 to be strong. Yeah. But it’s not for everybody. For somebody else, that’s a great way to
4:08:27 mess up the back. So there are some subtleties. And there are also some people who really
4:08:32 get fancy with the eyes, eye movement, follow the bar, do these other things, like it counts
4:08:39 from gymnastics. Good rule of thumb is if you look straight ahead more often than not,
4:08:43 you’re going to be okay. But from that, there are a lot of fancy ways to do it. As for closing
4:08:49 your eyes, closing your eyes is not recommended. It changes the coordination of the lift, but
4:08:54 for advanced lifters, lifting blindfolded is a really good idea. So Robert Roman, one
4:09:01 of the top Soviet specialists, he pioneered that and you would have his lifters do some
4:09:06 of the sets blindfolded. And it’s really amazing at how much not relying on your vision, relying
4:09:12 your kinesthetic sense, what that does. It’s quite remarkable. And also just to add one
4:09:18 more thing, at a competition, at least in powerlifting, a lot of, I mean, the top guys,
4:09:23 they don’t see anything really, you know, they’re just deep inside their rage. They’re
4:09:28 not, it’s a total tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, everything. So it’s whatever they
4:09:33 had in, they had in whatever remembered position, but don’t ask them to look at you or see you.
4:09:35 It’s not going to happen. There’s someplace else.
4:09:43 Pavel, I must say, this has been a spectacular voyage through your very kind, Andrew. It’s
4:09:47 been, it’s been a real pleasure, very, very stimulating conversation.
4:09:53 Thank you. And I’m going to just embarrass you a little bit further by, by telling you
4:09:58 more positive things about you. Because I noticed it makes you uncomfortable. It’s perhaps
4:10:02 the only thing that makes you uncomfortable, but in all seriousness, I don’t think I can’t
4:10:07 sense any discomfort. I want to just thank you for a number of things that are reflective.
4:10:14 I’m sure of what other people are thinking. First of all, the level of rigor that you’ve
4:10:19 approached this whole thing of strength and fitness and flexibility and breathing and
4:10:26 you know, every one of these topics, too many to list off just now, is, it’s remarkable.
4:10:27 It’s really fantastic.
4:10:29 Thank you. I love my job. So that’s, that’s easy.
4:10:35 This comes through and, and it’s rare these days, but it’s rare in any age to find people
4:10:43 that are so dedicated to this level of rigor in a given area. And it’s so appreciated.
4:10:44 Coming from me, it means a lot.
4:10:49 Yeah. We really, we need people like you. You’re, you’re truly a scientist and a practitioner.
4:10:53 You embody the principles that you discuss clearly, which is also important.
4:10:55 If I could blush, I would write.
4:11:02 Blushes don’t blush. No, no, got it. A topic for another podcast. So that the, the rigor
4:11:05 and the quality of the information that you put forth in your books and on this podcast
4:11:12 and elsewhere, your online courses just absolutely spectacular. And I hope people noticed, you
4:11:17 know, I couldn’t help but notice as an, as an academic, but your attention to proper
4:11:22 attribution for people that have done the work and accomplished the various feats from whom
4:11:27 you’ve gleaned various aspects of this knowledge is not to be overlooked because that’s something
4:11:32 that should go without saying, it’s just, it’s so, it’s, it’s remarkable and it’s important
4:11:37 to go without saying, yeah, it should go without saying, but it doesn’t. You know, these days
4:11:43 it’s more about who can glean the most attention as opposed to shed light on others and, and
4:11:48 their work. And in doing so, as, as we’ve observed, there’s absolutely nothing is lost
4:11:52 and so much is gained. It’s for everybody. So thank you, that’s a proper attribution.
4:11:53 Thank you for the kind words.
4:11:59 Is, is spectacular. And I really look forward to sharing the resources where people can
4:12:03 learn more. But all right today, you’ve just provided such a wealth of knowledge for us.
4:12:08 And it’s a real honor to sit here with you and to learn from you. I plan to listen to
4:12:14 this podcast several times over and take detailed notes. We time stamp it all. And I just hope
4:12:21 that we’ll have the opportunity at some point to sit down again and as well, perhaps to
4:12:24 get the opportunity to train together. So I personally could learn from you. But in
4:12:28 the meantime, on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, thank you ever so
4:12:29 much, Pavel.
4:12:30 Thank you, Andrew.
4:12:31 You’re a real pleasure.
4:12:32 You’re a real gem.
4:12:33 Thank you.
4:12:37 And thank you for spreading the, spreading the word of health and strength, strength
4:12:38 and health.
4:12:39 Wonderful.
4:12:40 Thank you.
4:12:43 Thank you for joining me for today’s discussion with Pavel Satzulen. I hope you found it to
4:12:48 be as interesting and as actionable as I did. To learn more about Pavel’s work, including
4:12:53 his books, his online courses and other resources, please see the show note captions.
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4:13:27 For those of you that haven’t heard, I have a new book coming out. It’s my very first
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