Bonus Episode: Overcoming Plateaus, Running, DOMS, Ibuprofen and GainzZz, and More

0:03Hey, it's Jordan from Barbell Medicine. Now this episode preview is from exclusive content that regularly goes out to our Barbell Medicine Plus subscribers. In addition to exclusive content, Barbell Medicine Plus subscribers get early access to episodes and products, ad-free listening, discounts on products and services, and the ability to ask Dr. Baraki and I questions, all for about the cost of a cup of coffee each month. And in case you were wondering, the first month is free. To join, head over to barbellmedicine.com slash plus and sign up to be a Barbell Medicine Plus member today. That's barbellmedicine.com slash plus.

0:35All right, thanks for your consideration. On to the show.

0:42All right. I don't suspect many people are going to be awake right now. It's 315 on the West Coast. And Leah Lutz, veteran coach, our lovely Leah, is competing in Cape Town, South Africa. So I got the live stream going. And, yeah, this is what friends do. You wake up at 3 a.m. and you watch your besties compete. So she's already done her opening squat, opened at 140 kilos, 308 pounds. That was very, very easy. We're targeting somewhere around 152 kilos for her third. We'll see how her second goes. And, yeah, my plan is to live stream each one of these things, squat, bench, deadlift today. Hopefully it's going to be done by like 7 a.m.

1:23So if you're awake, you like powerlifting, you can check that out. Otherwise, I'll be answering questions or talking. Otherwise, in the middle, Leah's in the Masters II Division, 76-kilo weight class. And this is her third appearance at Worlds. It's taken her eight years to get back to the platform. We're so proud of her and really just excited for her to show her stuff. You know, the sport of powerlifting is interesting. It's like you do all this training in the gym, right? And everyone thinks, oh, the whole sport is just about getting stronger and then, you know, just go do that on the meet.

1:57Well, the reality is powerlifting, the sport, is mostly about probability. and you're picking attempts on meet day that you're very confident that you can get at least you should because the goal is to maximize the total that's the sport it's not just recreational you know recreationally lifting weights and then you know there are no consequences to your decisions with weight selection powerlifting the real sport is probability of you being able to hit the weights that you're that you selected and maximizing your total on a given day so yeah it's nice to get strong in the gym definitely got to do that definitely got to train but the actual sport is attempt selection on meet day, and you hope that you have a great day.

2:40Let's see. Plavsic underscore four asks, how to adjust training stimulus to low for a specific individual? Well, that's actually a great question, perhaps a million-dollar question, multimillion-dollar question. First thing I'd ask is, how did you arrive at the conclusion that training stimulus is too low? So the reality is, you know, all programs are going to stop working at some point, a plateau, right? We just draw an arbitrary line in the sand. Like, what is a plateau? You know, for most training related adaptations, it would be no demonstrable improvement in about three to four weeks. That's, that's like a true plateau.

3:16The idea that week over week, like one week at a time, that doesn't really work. That's not consistent with how long it takes human adaptations to develop with respect to training anyway. So yeah, three to four weeks of no demonstrable improvement, you can call that a plateau. So then you have to decide, is it too much training stress and the person is unable to recover from that to demonstrate increased fitness or is it too little stress? You can try to tease that out with some questions. How sore are you? What's your motivation to train? How are you sleeping? How are you feeling? All sorts of stuff.

3:50But ultimately, it's an educated guess. So anyway, that's now a long story long. Now, if we think it's too little training stress, that means that the elements of the programming that determine the training stress, which is the experience of the program. So you have the reps, sets, exercises, rest periods, proximity to failure, volume, all that sort of stuff. That is the training stimulus. That's the external loads, what to get applied to the individual. And how they experience it is the training stress, internal load. so you would just increase training volume you could increase intensity you could increase the types of exercise the stress from the types of exercises that you pick for example with mostly machine stuff you could do more free weights generally because more muscle mass is involved in freestanding exercises but not my preferred method for increasing training stress so yeah Anyway, that's a long story, but you just increase the training load.

4:51And ultimately, that is the goal of a coach, goal of a personal trainer, goal of a fitness professional. We're trying to maximize people's training loads. And that's just an umbrella term for the amount of training you're doing and the type of training you're doing and how that all integrates together. So more training load, more fitness adaptations, more health-related adaptations. and the two biggest bottlenecks there are time, logistics, and the two, physiological tolerance. So how much can you recover from? It's not just volume, but it's like training load. You would increase that if you thought somebody wasn't getting enough training because they're as demonstrated by being in a plateau.

5:33How do you modify training with heart rate around the 170s at RP78 for aerobic activity like running? Yep, slow down. Um, if you're trying the, when people are trying to get into running for whatever reason in lifting, you know, people that we've been lifting with for a long time or otherwise involved in like the strength training, bodybuilding scene, whatever running is becoming more popular. Maybe we're just getting older and people are more interested in, in cardiovascular health, or maybe it's just like between high rocks and, and high, this hybrid stuff. Don't know. Um, it is, it takes a pretty long time to, uh, improve, uh, running economy sufficiently that you would be able to sustain a much lower heart rate while still running at a decent, decent pace.

6:20Um, and that includes obviously cardiorespiratory adaptations too, but even if you developed a bunch of cardiorespiratory adaptations on like a bike, a Stairmaster, elliptical, rower skier whatever it's just running is its kind of own unique beast from a you know musculoskeletal uh requirement uh an energy standpoint so um if you're running and your heart rate's in the 170s it's not rp7 to 8 it's higher than that you're just going too fast um for your current level of running economy uh that you've developed and cardamist pro fitness you got to slow down so usually i'll have people do like a run walk um and just have a heart rate cap um on it and And, you know, if you're somewhere between like 25 and 45, I just put a heart rate cap at like 140, 145, something like that.

7:05And, yeah, you walk whenever you get above that. And then otherwise you run. And it's going to take a while to develop that. But if you're in the 170s, yeah, that's probably too fast a pace for your current level of development. J.M. Fetterman, hey, good morning. In strength programs on accessory work, I assume that the isolation exercises should be treated as hypertrophy work. This is just my face at 3.30 in the morning, so don't take that personally. It's actually an interesting question, kind of a philosophical question on some level. It's like what definitively, you know, makes something a hypertrophy exercise or even an accessory exercise versus a supplemental exercise or, you know, otherwise just a regular exercise or strength work.

7:54You know, like just drawing these lines. I mean, some people would be annoyed by that answer. They're like, what do you mean you can't look the main lift for the main lift and everything else is either accessory or supplemental? That's fine. But then, you know, drawing the line in the sand, it is kind of arbitrary, right? Right. So and the reason why I think it's kind of arbitrary and maybe that this will help answer the question is that I don't draw a line in the sand between this is hypertrophy work and this is strength work. The overlap for most types of strength work and most types of work that would otherwise generate hypertrophy, that Venn diagram, it's not a circle, but it's it's pretty there's a lot of overlap there.

8:31So I don't know that I would go into a particular exercise, especially if it's a like a strength training program and think this is hypertrophy work solely. And, you know, if this is like more of a mindset thing. So like, look, if I'm thinking about just hypertrophy work, I'm thinking about I want to use basically the lightest weight I can to get the maximum amount of stimulus to the muscles, loading of the muscles. So whether that's a more controlled tempo, I don't really personally buy that because I think you should try to move the weight as fast as possible on the concentric on the way up.

9:09I think that that's better than controlling the tempo intentionally on the way up, the way down. I think controlling the tempo can be useful for maintaining a particular posture, particular relationships of joints as far as a lengthening or range of motion, muscle length, those sort of relationships. But yeah, I don't think that I would just approach an exercise differently because it's an accessory exercise or a main exercise. I would try to do both with good technique. Good technique is repeatable, sufficient, meets the points of performance for the exercise. I would pick the load appropriately based on the rep prescription and proximity to failure.

9:50and I would try to move the weight as fast as possible on the concentric. And I think that you're going to get a decent stimulus for both strength and hypertrophy. So what advice would you give to someone who struggles to adhere to the amount of conditioning including in your templates, particularly the newer ones? Yeah, I wouldn't give any advice first. I'd listen. Just general rule of thumb. If your health, fitness professional, really anybody deals with other humans, and you have to interview them or gather information, you should be doing about twice as much listening as you do talking. So in this particular case, I'd ask why.

10:31In your opinion, what's the deal? Is it a time thing? Is it enjoyment things? Is it scheduling back to time? Is it because you get shin splints every time that you try to do conditioning because it's just running, for example? You know, I'd be curious. So I would start there. I would try to identify what are the barriers and then try to come up with either solutions to those barriers, real or perceived, and then move forward with a shared plan. So after identifying those barriers, yeah, the advice then is specific to what the issues are. That's what I'd want to know first before just giving you some flippant advice, you know.

11:07Just do it. I don't think that's good advice. uh do you think that set volume should increase in order to stimulate overall gpp general physical preparedness or focus should be towards intensity for power lifting um forgive me but i don't i'm not sure that i understand the question uh mainly because there's not a specific goal here that we're comparing so like to me you have two choices you could uh you know organize training around general physical preparedness, which would involve strength, hypertrophy, power, carter, fitness, effectively every physical adaptation that we can get out of exercise.

11:47That's one trajectory, you know, two roads diverge into the woods and I took the road less travel. That's one, that's one path. The other path is like full kill mode, maximal strength development, like powerlifting, right? And there are differences in how you would approach those sort of things. And so from a general programming heuristic, what we're trying to do is maximize training load that a person is able to adhere to. And so, yeah, logistics, big bottleneck. The other big bottleneck is going to be training tolerance. So how much can they recover from? And then so that's like the central organizing like paradigm here that the concept I keep coming back to and then how that training load is formulated.

12:31It has to be specific to the goal. so it's not just volume for gpp because you would want exposure to many different rep ranges some of them would be higher intensity some of them would be lower intensity approximative failure would always be like pretty similar within about four to five reps of failure um but you would have some maybe dedicated power work you'd have more conditioning for sure than a pure power lifting template um and then in power lifting uh for for maximal strength stuff you really want to preserve a high fidelity of force production. And so that means staying pretty far away from failure for the majority of the training, because if you think about like a heavy set of five, like a five rep max, right?

13:10Let's say it's 500 pounds, 227 and a half kilos. Rep one moves like that and rep five moves like that slower. So think about the force production on rep one versus rep five, which is where is it higher? Rep one. to get more strength stimulus out of the first rep than the last rep. A lot of fatigue out of the last rep compared to the first rep. And so instead of doing that weight for one heavy set of five, I'd like to have that person do multiple sets of two and do more sets, more volume, but at that sort of load that has met the threshold for strength development, which is in the literature they call it 60%, 65 % of one rep max.

13:53I think it's probably closer to 70 % generally speaking for like powerlifting. But yeah, it's not like it's 80 % or 90%. So anyway, long story long. I've said that a number of times here. I think it just depends on what the goals are. But we want to maximize training load and we want to make sure that training load is formulated in a way that's specific to the goals. So what are the goals? Yeah. So in response to that last question, if somebody had a powerlifting meet, you know, I would focus the training load, that training load being very specific to the powerlifting meet for probably 20 weeks, you know, half the year, something like that.

14:30And then if it's just one meet a year, the rest of the year is going to be more generalized off-season work. And so, yeah, changing, that's how I generally approach programming for people that even like very highly competitive powerlifters, there's some off-season stuff that doesn't look like powerlifting. There's still some strength work, but it's just not specific to the sport of powerlifting. This podcast is brought to you by Biggs. At Barbell Medicine, we spend a lot of time talking about what it takes to build a body that can handle high-level performance, but the recovery in the health side is just as critical.

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15:34And of course, the style comes in red, white, and blue. Now, if you want the gear that the medical team behind the world's best athletes are wearing, check out the limited edition Team USA collection. You get 15 % off your first order at wearfigs.com with code FIGSRX. That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX. hey doc long time barbell medicine fan when uh is gen 2 power building 2 coming out yeah uh this week so loaded in the app um i've been testing it for the past few months with some folks and i'm pretty happy with where it's at uh what we're doing is power building 2 and power building 3 the gen 1 uh gen 2 is going to replace both of them they were pretty similar just some structural differences, but the training load was awfully similar.

16:20So I thought, let's just do an update generation to second generation power building two. That'll be the update for the current PB2 power building two and power building three templates. So release that. And then at some point we'll do a separate new power building three. It won't be a replacement of the current power building three, because that's going to be this new second generation power building two and have three programs, a three day version for to prep people if they want to do an actual powerlifting meet or test their one rep maxes. There'll be a four-day option. Same sort of thing. People want to go to a powerlifting meet.

16:52They want to test their maxes. And there'll be a four-day non-competition version. So there's no peaking block, but it's power building-ish training for folks who like, I like training. I like strength training. I like the, you know, the big three, but I'm not going to a meet. And I'm like, great. We don't need to compromise your training as much as somebody who would go to a meet. So best of both worlds, ideally. So you have three programs. They're all 16 weeks long. That's a lot of training, theoretically, if you want to do all of them. And, yeah, should be up this week. Adam Meekins, what's up, buddy?

17:26It's funny. I was at a car show on Saturday and met this guy. The Viper attracts dudes. It's a dude magnet. And anyway, he's like, oh, you got an Instagram? And I was like, sure. Here's the barbell medicine, you know, whatever. He's like, oh, Adam Meekins follows you. I love his stuff. And I was like, that's cool. And he's like, Jeff Nippard follows you. That's awesome. How do you know these people? And I was like, they're Myron in the gym. That was pretty cool. That did happen. I did not say the Myron comment. But yeah, that's nice. It's nice to get a little immediate vetting of the quality of your information based on mutuals.

18:07So anyway, hope you're doing well. It's 406 here on the West Coast, San Diego. I feel like a radio host. That would have been a fun job for a little bit. Let's answer some questions. And Andre is all right. I have a planned workout this morning, but also my shoulder hurts. Can I take some ibuprofen or will that impact results? Yeah, so when this has been tested, it doesn't matter. And in fact, individuals taking anti-inflammatories or other sort of pain, over-the-counter pain medications, effectively, if that gets you to exercise, your results are better than if you didn't exercise. So I'm not giving you medical advice.

18:45This is infotainment purposes only. We do have some material on this on our YouTube channel. But what you'll see in the research is like muscle protein synthesis rates an hour after a workout if you take an anti-inflammatory are lower than if you don't take an anti-inflammatory. It's like, who gives a shit? It's one hour. I don't care about muscle protein synthesis rates for an hour. I care what they are for the next 24, 48 hours, 96, for weeks. and ultimately does not seem to impact hypertrophy or strength results. So better to train most of the time than it is not to. Most of the time. Bossman.u.

19:22Hey, Jordan, how do I build lean muscles? I tend to get large with heavier weights. Do I lift lighter with more reps? Nope. No, that's not quite right. And actually, I'll tell you this, and some coaches get a little, a little irked. People say lean muscles, like, whoa, as opposed to fat muscle? Like, that doesn't exist, right? So if you're building muscle tissue, it's always lean. And you can build that with high reps and lighter weights. You can build it with lower reps and heavier weights. I think I said that right. Yeah, you can do it with any and everything in between, right? So anything between, like, four reps and, like, 25 reps, that's all fine.

20:05Some of those are going to be heavier. I'm going to be lighter. Some exercises you prefer to lift with more reps, some, some less, that's fine. Pretty much pretty similar hypertrophy stimulus. If you're gaining weight and you feel like not most, most of it is not muscle. It's probably not the programming. It's probably the diet. But yeah, provided that you're training, you know, somewhere between 10 to 15 working sets for the major muscle groups of the body per week. That's kind of like what I want people to target. If they're just getting into training, working up to that after a few months or a year or something like that, it's a good place to be.

20:42And then people will need more training and more manipulation of the training variables after that. Things get more individualized for sure. And so, yeah, of those sets, some of them are going to be lower rep, some are going to be higher rep. But ultimately, if you're unhappy with the body composition, it's mostly a dietary thing. And it would also layer in some conditioning recommendations on that. So I would recommend any of our templates. This week, the Power Building 2 second generation template is coming out. It's going to be a banger. That may be useful if you're really interested in strength development 2 outside of muscular size.

21:17But if muscular size is maybe the primary goal, one of the hypertrophy templates or the bodybuilding templates that we have, that's how I'd do it. Speaking of bench press, I am the 0.01 % that dislikes bench press. Does the bar have to hit your chest? um so i depending on how you would judge how much people like the bench press like like how are you rating that i actually think a lot more than 0.01 percent um dislikes the bench press you know most people don't exercise so we could assume all those people probably don't like the bench press if they loved it if they really enjoyed it they'd probably do it right um as far as does a bar have to hit your chest.

21:59This is made up. We're lifting. We've made up these arbitrary constraints for various lifts, right? So the squat has to be below parallel, you know, whatever bar on your back and powerlifting. That's the sport of powerlifting. If you're not competing in a particular sport that has specific rules that you must abide by, you don't have to do anything. If you're limiting range of motion due to shoulder pain, I don't love that because my goal for most folks is unrestricted training, unrestricted as far as exercise selection goes, range of motion goes. You can do anything you want to do and everything you want to do.

22:32To me, that's, I mean, that's the purpose of, of doing all this, right? We want to enjoy not only a long life, but a healthy life and active life and be able to do everything, um, that, uh, that excites us. And so, um, that's legal, of course. Uh, so if you can't touch the bar, if you can't train the bench press with a bar touching your chest, I think that that might warrant some specific being addressed specifically with some rehab stuff. We have a shoulder rehab program that might be useful for you, especially you said you live in the United States and your insurance or your access to health care is not awesome because you live in the United States.

23:09I can definitely understand that. So yeah, that would be my advice. You don't have to touch your chest, but I want to make sure that's a decision that's not based out of pain or injury because I want you to have access to that. What are the benefits of floor presses in training? Yeah, I mean, generally, when I think about exercise selection, you know, it's always like, well, what are we replacing and why are we doing, you know, if anything. and if we're not replacing an exercise like floor press for incline bench press, for overhead press, for close grip bench press, for regular bench press, we're not doing something like that.

23:47We're just adding it to the program. Then why are we adding it? The unique aspect of the floor press is that the range of motion is shorter on the bench press and it's stopping you in that range of motion, meaning that you don't have to hold it like a Spoto bench press where you would pause it, but there's nothing stopping you, stopping the bar from going down. So most people will be able to lift more weight, handle more weight on a floor press. So some of that overloading stuff can be useful. Your muscles are about 120%. They're much stronger eccentrically than concentrically. And so some overloading stuff can be useful.

24:24That partial range of motion stuff can be useful, especially if where people pause on a floor press is a little bit below their sticking point. The way I think about sticking points is that the reduction in muscular force production occurs just before the observed sticking point. So if people stick on a raw bench press a couple inches off their chest, I think slightly before that is where the actual reduced force production has occurred, and so that's where you'd want to train. um also if somebody really wanted to try like a super wide grip bench press but ultimately has some pain sensitivity when they when they do that floor press can be useful there you could also do with the pins you know a pin bench set at mid chest in that case the bar is actually being stopped by the pins rather than your elbows being stopped by the floor some people prefer that because maybe the actual physical pressure on their elbows might be uncomfortable, but that's what I think about when I think about floor press.

25:2339 installing my lifts, is it over? I mean, I think it's a programming issue or maybe expectations or maybe both. So my question to you, what program are you running? Um, and how are you determining that it's time to add weight? Because it is inconsistent with human physiology to add weight to the bar every 48 hours every week. That's not how strength development works. That's not the time course. And it's certainly not linear. So yeah, I think when people say they stalled, I'm like, what program are you running and what sort of, and how are you figuring out when it's time to progress? If you actually have hit a plateau, which I view as like three to four weeks of no demonstrable improvement in performance for a particular metric that we're tracking, then yeah, programming update.