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22:48Austin Baraki:I've had some clients who like to do that over the years. And so that sort of alternating ends up being less of like a deliberate bulk and cut, but more of like, you're just kind of like eating based on the demands of your sport. And then the training almost takes care of the rest. So they naturally will tend to lose weight when they shift their dietary pattern and they're like running, you know, 50, 60 plus, you know, a hundred mile weeks or something like that. And then when they cut all that back, uh, doing just like a minimum and then they're focused more on powerlifting and eating to fuel that, then the weight gain and muscle muscle tend to come back a little bit.

23:14Austin Baraki:So it's almost more like accidental rather than very deliberate. Uh, but short of that, again, not being a bodybuilding coach, I don't tend to, you know, subscribe to that, uh, idea or put it into practice very much myself.

23:24Jordan Feigenbaum:Yeah. Yeah. I just think generally speaking, trying to increase muscle mass, if that is your primary goal, straight up maintenance, meaning that your body weight doesn't go up at all. Unlikely to get you there. Yeah. Yeah. Difficult. This podcast is brought to you by Factor. Eating well isn't a willpower problem for me, and it's probably not for you either. It's a setup problem. There's something healthy in the fridge that I should be making. And then it's 8 p.m. I've been at the track all weekend or the workout went too long. And then the gap between should cook and will cook is roughly the size of the Grand Canyon.

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25:01Jordan Feigenbaum:The EPA's health-based goal for lead in drinking water is zero, and we're nowhere close to that. The problem is that there are millions of lead service lines still in the ground across the country. So the pipes, the solder, and the plumbing between the treatment plant and your faucet break down over time, and that's how lead gets into the tap water. There's a federal mandate to replace them, but it's on a 10-year timeline and most of that work hasn't started yet. In adults, chronic low-level lead exposure has been linked to all sorts of things like kidney damage, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease.

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28:40Jordan Feigenbaum:Something we hear a lot from people who run our programs is that they finish one and then they immediately want to start the next one. Or that their goals or preferences shifted part way and they want to switch to something different. Which is actually how training should work. It should adapt to you as things change. Now, the problem is buying programs one at a time every time that happens. Well, that can be hard on the wallet. So we built Barbell Medicine Premium, one subscription, and you get the entire program library in our app. All the strength, hypertrophy, conditioning, rehab, general fitness, beginner programs, and everything in between.

29:12Jordan Feigenbaum:You can switch whenever you want. And as new programs get added, you get them in the subscription. No per program fees ever. Austin and I build and maintain every program and podcast in both libraries. Same people, the same standards as everything else we put out now all in one place. It's$19.95 a month,$199 for the year. You can cancel anytime. And if you already subscribe to Barbell Medicine Plus or the programming library separately, you can upgrade and we'll sort it out so that you're not paying twice. Link is in the description below. Check it out now. All right. This next question is about training when you're extremely short on time.

29:48Jordan Feigenbaum:So the question is, if someone is extremely short on time, training just once a week for less than an hour and their goal is health and overall well-being what is better focusing on two to three heavy compound exercises or doing a larger variety of technically easier movements to give the body more movement diversity so just to make sure i understand the question if it's two to three heavy compound lifts so multi-joint exercises like the squat bench press deadlift right and what's the comparator because it says technically easier and i don't know that those exercises are super technically demanding i mean you can make the argument that a machine-based type training plan would be less skill dependent right because you're not freestanding there's no real balance component there but i don't know that that necessitates a greater or smaller amount of exercise variation, right?

30:47Jordan Feigenbaum:You know, it's certainly not going to be like dumbbells, right? Because I think like a dumbbell split squat or Bulgarian split squat with dumbbells may actually be like more technically demanding. I also think it's important to point out that because the exercise variety is not likely to be different,

31:03Austin Baraki:it's just a variable that you can, you know, go up or down.

31:06Jordan Feigenbaum:uh i don't think that that's really part of an important part of the the calculus here the decision making when it comes to exercise prescription um generally speaking when i when i think about exercise selection i'm thinking it's mostly personal preference right like what does the person want to do and what they have access to and then the trainability which is it's a made-up word that i use to refer to can a person do the exercise with minimal discomfort and pain? Um, is their technique acceptable? So it's repeatable, it's fairly efficient. It meets the points of performance. Can they load it?

31:40Jordan Feigenbaum:Um, you know, throughout a relatively wide range of different intensities. And then, um, you know, is it, uh, uh, something that they can do a lot of without getting too fatigued? So for example, somebody may want to train the overhead squat, but their technique isn't there yet. They have some pain when doing it. Um, they don't really have access to a lot of different intensities they can use because of these things, for example, and then it causes a lot of fatigue because they're not really able to do the exercise that well. Doesn't mean they should never do the overhead squat or train that movement pattern, but it, you know, does it deserve a full slot in their exercise program, especially when the time is limited, like a regular back squat or a leg press even, right?

32:24Jordan Feigenbaum:Like in that case, if somebody can't really train the overhead squat, they're mostly just doing, you know, practice practicing the movement compared to the leg press where they can load it you know relatively heavy a lot of different rep ranges no pain um they can do a lot of that without getting generating too much fatigue when you think about you know health um sort of uh benefits from resistance training that's clearly going to be the winner there so so to start this out i don't know what the comparator would be between like two to three heavy compounds that are presumably barbell based versus other multi-joint exercises that are not barbell based right if that if that's the comparator, we're just talking about health.

33:00Jordan Feigenbaum:They're the same, right? And if we're talking about performance, you know, like strength, well, then it matters how we're measuring strength, right? So for example, you could have somebody do like Smith machine squats or a leg press and compare it to, you know, that person's evil twin just doing only barbell back squats, right? And then you test their leg extension strength, you know, in three months, I would not predict there to be any differences, provided they did similar amounts of training load, which is the real goal here, right? The goal with exercise prescription, um, when you're making a plan for somebody, making a program for them or yourself is to maximize training load where training load is not only the amount of exercise that you're doing, but also the nature of it.

33:40Jordan Feigenbaum:Right. So you think about like five sets of five on the squat versus five sets of five on leg extensions. The volume is the same, but the nature of the exercises are different. So you're going to get differential effects, including the fatigue costs of each one. So why would we want to maximize training load, you might ask? Well, we think there's a dose response relationship between training load and both health and fitness outcomes or performance outcomes. And really, you could just say training adaptations, right? Just lump all of that together. The more training that somebody can do, specifically training loads, it's not just volume, the better sort of, or the more adaptations that they're likely to get and there are two big bottlenecks here one is time in this case once a week for less than an hour and the second uh bottleneck here uh or or generally speaking is the physiological uh tolerance so not just can a person perform the exercises listed on paper um but can they recover from it right and so as you go along your training career um things are going to change you're gonna have different logistical um sort of constraints time and training resources.

34:45Jordan Feigenbaum:So yeah, that'll be a constraint on, on training load and, and your physiological tolerance, your recovery capacity will also change sometimes better as fitness goes up, sometimes less fitness goes down. These things are all dynamic. So the other thing I want to say about training load is that, you know, I'm less concerned about the training load in one specific session as I am concerned with training load over a longer timescale. So it's not just one workout, not just a week of workouts, and not just like a month of workouts, but like six months of workouts, I want to know how much training load did the person do.

35:21Jordan Feigenbaum:And I want to maximize that. So as a practical example, let's say you had somebody had a four day a week program. And one week, they did three days a week. And the other week, next week, they did five sessions in a week, right? So the training load is just the exact same as it would otherwise, if they did four days on week one and four days on week two, to me, that all washes out, you know, over over a long enough time time period uh in this particular case we only have one day a week so uh you know we really have to get as much out of that uh as we can so within that and i think maybe more pertinent to this question exercise selection is another way to sort of distribute and manipulate training load uh mainly based around fatigue costs and we think that fatigue costs are related to how much muscle mass is being used right more muscle mass a little bit more fatigue how much range of motion um is the individual moving through where a much larger range of motion is likely to cost more fatigue than a much smaller range of motion where things that are relatively closely related like squat to one inch below parallel to a squat to three inches below parallel that probably washes out probably not big enough the absolute loading contributes so heavier things tend to be a little bit more um uh fatiguing than lighter things again And the gap has to be big enough to matter.

36:37Jordan Feigenbaum:People always say things like, oh, the deadlift is more fatiguing than squat when it's actually tested. Not so much. The real big thing there, and this is kind of an aside, is that most people have done way more squat training than they have deadlift training. So they're more tolerant of the squat. That's another aside. We think skill requirements likely affect fatigue where something like doing a power clean or a snatch or something would be more fatiguing than, you know, like a leg press. due to the skill differences. Again, the gap has to be big enough to matter. And then things that are a little bit more concrete that the gaps don't have to be so big to matter would have to do with volume, right?

37:15Jordan Feigenbaum:More reps, more sets, increases fatigue and proximity to failure. Closer to failure or all the way to failure, even that momentary failure would generally increase fatigue. So you can select exercises that use more or less muscle mass, more or less range of motion, have substantial differences in absolute loading skill requirements, things that kind of allow you to do more volume or less volume. And, you know, the proximity to failure thing is just an exercise prescription sort of variable that we use. So at this amount of training load, though, you know, one session a week, I don't think this is that important.

37:54Jordan Feigenbaum:It's more like, what are the exercises the person wants to do? What they have access to? What will they do? And then just, you know, try to do as much as possible. This is the same analogy, and we'll come back to another question, between conditioning intensity, like the intensity of somebody's cardio, right? Where you have people saying, look, you got to do all the zone one, zone two, easy stuff. And while that can be useful as a sort of heuristic or a general rule of thumb, if somebody doesn't have a lot of time to do conditioning, then that is the wrong sort of prescription. so for example if the current guidelines say look you do somewhere between 150 to 300 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity that would be like steady state type stuff uh but the person only has an hour per week well they would be better served by doing higher intensity conditioning work whether it's discontinuous so high intensity high intensity interval training or more continuous stuff but still at a higher intensity that would be better because of the limited time than doing lower intensity stuff for the same amount of time right it only matters when you get to higher volumes and we'll come back to that so it should be clear by now that the real issue here is that one time a week with one hour of training the training load is going to be very very limited um that said you can still get a lot out of a little um you know like muscle strengthening activity uh correlates with roughly a 10 to 17 percent lower all-cause mortality in in uh um in data sets pretty large data sets where most of that benefit comes from doing like nothing to moving to just doing 30 to 60 minutes a week you can get like you know a lot out of a little are you going to maximize somebody's performance or health benefits in response to resistance training in that little training load probably not because they're not going to build enough muscle enough strength bone mineral density you know other sort of uh effects we see particularly with respect to um metabolic health most people will need more training um than that the other big concern here is that i'm assuming and you know there's risks there that within this one hour per week workout they also have to get all their conditioning in too and similarly there is a dose response relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness training load and cardiorespiratory fitness improvements so like each one metabolic equivalent increase where a metabolic equivalent is basically a measurement of how much energy is being used during the activity each each one met in increase.

40:21Jordan Feigenbaum:Um, this is, uh, also used to, to measure somebody's cardiorespiratory fitness, their capacity. So, uh, because it correlates to energy, um, where we're sitting at rest is like a one met activity and like an eight met activity would be running at a pretty good clip. Um, you're using eight times as much energy. So if you can increase somebody's cardiorespiratory fitness by one met, then, um, that correlates to a 13 % lower mortality for each met there. If you can't do any conditioning, it can be challenging to increase your cardio respiratory fitness. Lifting doesn't really do that unless somebody has really, really low cardio respiratory fitness levels to start.

40:57Jordan Feigenbaum:And then, yeah, you get a little bump, but then it plateaus very quickly. So we would have to do all of this, some lifting and some conditioning in that hour, and then basically try to do as much as we can within that hour. So what would you do? um we're going to try to do as much uh resistance training volume as we can while preserving some some time to do some conditioning um the way i would do this would look a lot like our time crunch template our two day per week time crunch template and i would just split that over two weeks and i think supersets would be very useful here because we can get more training load in here um by doing so specifically if we do what are called alternate peripheral supersets where you would do something like an overhead press superset it with the leg press right um because they just don't have a lot of crossover muscles and so we can preserve training load right so not only how many reps and sets the person's doing but how much weight they're lifting intensity also contributes here uh compare that to doing like bench press and flies agonist agonist superset well the train load suffers so i would think that and so i would basically do our two day per week time crunch template and split it up every two weeks so you're kind of doing workout a on week one workout b on week two workout a on week three workout b on week four um so you basically just have different exercises for all of the major movement patterns the squat press the uh a pull and a hinge so it could be like a back squat and a leg press for the squat pattern um it could be for the press it could be a bench press and an overhead press could be machine press and a dumbbell overhead press whatever uh for the for the pull it could be a chest supported row and a pull-up chest supported row lat pulldown something like that and then hinge could be like a deadlift and a hip thrust i'm just making it up and so yeah workout a you'd have uh you'd pick four of those right one squat one press one row one hinge set them up alternate peripheral and the next week do the other ones also set up with that alternate peripheral sort of superset and i would do some uh conditioning afterwards and because of the time crunch there's probably going to be higher intensity um stuff high intensity intervals probably bordering on sprint intensity um intervals for this for this individual so if the goal is overall health and you only got one hour per week the best use is sort of this hybrid approach um yeah i think most of the exercises should be multi-joint exercises so they can become compound movements they should be compound movements but they don't have to be barbell based.

43:28Jordan Feigenbaum:They could be machine based. They could be some blend of the two either way. Um, and you should do some conditioning at the end. All right. Next question in the progressive loading episode, you explained that the nervous system, muscle tendons and bone adapt to strength training on different timelines. Do they atrophy the same way? Uh, so if you have a long layoff, do you lose muscle faster than bone density? Does muscle atrophy outpace the weakening of tendons yeah so this all depends on why the person is experiencing detraining because that answer drives most of this uh and more than than the specific tissue so for example you can detrain because you have had an injury um right that it plus or minus being immobilized you could be immobilized for some other reason those two things can be are different you could uh write like uh uh if without having an injury and being in a cast you could be sick for example with a body wide infection or some sort of severe disease uh or you could just be outside of the gym normally you know walking around living your normal life just not exercising so all these things are different um and i think most of the scary data with respect to like detraining and muscle loss strength loss bone loss tendon remodeling a little less so that the data is not not so great there comes from what I would call severe detraining environments.

44:55Jordan Feigenbaum:Either the person's bedbound, they're immobilized, either a research study or due to injury, or they have some sort of medical condition that keeps them bedbound. On top of that, they have an illness that is actively like kind of detraining them. So let's start with the mobilization. This is a pretty fast and dramatic case, especially around the muscle mass. If you put a healthy young person's leg in a full cast, their quadriceps cross-sectional area, the size, can drop by 3.5 % in five days and roughly 8 % by two weeks or 14 days. You put somebody's dominant arm in a sling and their grip strength can go down by 20 % in just a few days.

45:37Jordan Feigenbaum:pretty dramatic pretty scary sounding stuff but we think the mechanism here is because the the limb is unable to move right it's being immobilized that it compromises the excitation contraction coupling um between basically your central nervous system and later into your peripheral nervous system how that tells the muscle to contract in a coordinated manner so that's why you see these relatively like dramatic decreases in strength. This is different than just not going to the gym for a little while because you're busy, right? So it's a different scenario. And further to this point, or the last thing I'll say on this point, there is a cross training phenomenon that if you take somebody who has an immobilized limb and they work out the rest of their body, particularly the opposite side of their body does seem to preserve some of the muscular adaptations, strength and strength and size to some effect.

46:29Jordan Feigenbaum:That seems to wane longer term, right? You know, we're not talking about immobilizing somebody for six months and you can prevent any loss, but certainly for a few weeks, you can see less of that loss. That's case number one. Case number two would be someone's on bed rest with an illness can be even more dramatic than just the immobilization because not only is the person functionally immobilized, they're in bed, but they also have the potential to have an illness that is actively sort of, you know, reducing their adaptation, actively decaying their adaptations. So you think about a catabolic illness like sepsis, right?

47:07Jordan Feigenbaum:Some body-wide infection that's gotten into the blood that actively increases muscle protein breakdown. You can see a drop in muscle size, muscle cross-sectional area, 26 % in one week, which is significant. So you have the unloading that's already happening because you're in, you know, bed bound, right? So you are functionally immobilized. But on top of that, you have the condition that's adding on top of that's additive. Injury is a little bit different. It's not people aren't always immobilized. And they're generally not completely immobilized. But we see that strength falls pretty dramatically early on, but it doesn't keep getting worse.

47:44Jordan Feigenbaum:So basically, you see like a drop in the first few days, it kind of stabilizes. And then as the person recovers, heals, gets better, tends to recover relatively quickly. It just tends to be proportional to how long the person is unloaded for, right? We're not exercising. And so some of the stuff we talked about in the previous sections apply here. But I think if we're just talking about an otherwise healthy person who's, you know, still, you know, active, maybe not exercising, but just, you know, about their normal life. The detraining stuff is pretty unimpressive. I mean, top end strength seems to be preserved for at least a couple of weeks.

48:23Jordan Feigenbaum:They've got this in power lifters and division one strength power athletes, football players off the top of my head. No real meaningful loss of strength or size after a few weeks. Those are like highly trained individuals. Over two to three months, strength loss does occur, usually capped around around 10 % or so, although this does vary between individuals. And even if it's been years, people are still stronger than their baseline, generally speaking. Again, unless we're talking about immobilization, some sort of illness that is keeping somebody outside of the gym or otherwise from exercising.

48:56Jordan Feigenbaum:Yeah, so it just depends why, right? As a general heuristic though, strength is lost before size. We see this in sarcopenia too, right? The rate of strength loss is about triple or three times as much as that of muscle size loss. But we see this in detraining data too, again, with people who are otherwise healthy or otherwise doing their normal activities of daily life. They're just not exercising anymore. We see that. We see relatively little data here on tendon adaptation or we'll call it de-adaptation or decay. There's just not a lot of evidence here. But you would predict that things to go something like this strength goes first size next tendons later and then bones way way later uh than that um you're not going to see a big drop off there unless something else is going on within strength there is a little nuance here um you know you think about the different types of strength strength stamina right how long can you do a submaximal effort repeatedly um before before uh getting to failure uh we think about maximal low velocity strength like a one rep max squat and then we think about maximal high velocity strength so power seems like strength stamina falls first some of those energy related adaptations um you know mitochondrial density capillarization energy buffering systems that seems to decay a little bit sooner so the strength stamina seems to go down first then maximal um low velocity strength so one rm stuff and then later still would be the maximal high velocity strength power loss which is why it is assumed at least by some that the loss of power, that's why it tends to be more predictive of sort of poor health trajectories because you're further along down the pike there.

50:47Jordan Feigenbaum:Now, after some detraining has occurred, for whatever reason, many of you, myself included, have experienced a relatively quick sort of return, muscle memory effect. The question is, why does that happen? And is it even like something real? Are we just all making it up? Well, it has been documented, but as far as why it happens, there are a number of theories here. None of them are perfect. So I'll just, you know, instead of burying the lead or whatever, I'll just say, look, I think it's some combination of all of these things. But the first theory, the one that's most prominent has the most sort of, let's call it mechanistic data for support.

51:24Jordan Feigenbaum:It's called the myonuclear domain theory. Now, Now, myonuclei is basically the cell, muscle cells depot or area that it stores the muscle's DNA, muscle cells DNA. It governs or is responsible for the upkeep, remodeling, repair, et cetera, of an area of muscular protein. And so we call this the myonuclear domain. Its domain is the protein it has control over. now when a person detrains the myonuclei activity goes down right and so as a result the protein in its domain the muscle protein its domain also goes down but the myonuclei is most all intents and purposes retained not all of them some of them go away but many of them remain it's just the area gets smaller because the body's not asking it to do anything and then when you start retraining the myonuclei are sent a signal to hey wake up man we got stuff to do and then the muscle grows and strength is recovered as well so that's size and strength that's one theory here there's some data to support this other data is not quite as clean it's at least one of the major theories as far as why muscle memory occurs the next one has to do with these sort of lasting neural adaptations.

52:49Jordan Feigenbaum:So coordination, movement, efficiency, etc, that allow the sort of rapid restoration in strength, specifically less to do with muscle size. And so again, there's less data on this. But that's a thought that look, if you've done an exercise before, you've accumulated some sort of neural adaptations, coordination, related adaptations for how to do the exercise efficiently, that those are kind of stored somewhere kind of like a software system, and you get to kind of pull it from your memory bank when you are re-exposed to the activity. Now, another theory actually has to do with sort of an epigenetic theory, which basically describes how the environment and your behaviors, et cetera, produce these sort of long-lasting changes at the level of the DNA and subsequently how that DNA is expressed and basically tells your cells and body and various tissues like what to do.

53:39Jordan Feigenbaum:So the idea is if you previously had trained a lot, you've basically changed your DNA to some level. And so, yeah, when you remove that sort of training signal, the DNA is like, well, what am I supposed to do now? But then when it returns, it's like, oh yeah, I remember what to do. And so that's one of the sort of methods by which muscle memory occurs. Now, the interesting thing here is there's a thought that there's also some negative potential changes that can happen at the level of the DNA due to various disease processes. It's been most well-studied in cancer. When I say well-studied, that's doing a lot of heavy lifting there, pun intended.

54:11Jordan Feigenbaum:But the thought would be that sort of these negative histories that could potentially affect the DNA may also like attenuate, reduce, or otherwise compromise future adaptations. I don't know, man. There's a lot to this. It's just not cleanly explained by one of these theories, so I suspect that all of them to some degree are involved, and you can watch this space. But overall, the rate of decay really depends on the cause. If it is an immobilization that's pretty severe, we'll give that a pretty strong sort of signal for detraining, reductions in muscle size, strength, strength going first, then size, then tendons, then bone.

54:59Jordan Feigenbaum:if you paired on top of that unloading due to the immobilization with some sort of systemic illness that on top of that causes additional detraining well it's the same sort of um uh ordering but just more dramatic because you got two things right a little double hit type thing going on there on the other hand if it's more just like haven't been in the gym for a while it's going to take longer for any of those adaptations to occur but still generally speaking strength, size, tendons, and then bones. Now with strength, you can't really decouple the decrease in muscle size and like the neural sort of stuff.

55:36Jordan Feigenbaum:So that's just wrapped up in there. Hopefully that answers your question. All right, that's four of the questions. Now in the full episode, we also break down what the enhanced games actually proved about PEDs, the biggest resistance training paper in 17 years. What moves SHBG, that's steroid hormone binding globulin, when you're on testosterone replacement therapy and what we learned the hard way running our own supplement line, plus a bunch more questions. Speaking of things we sell, the full episode, the archive of past episodes, and a new direct line every month come with Barbell Medicine Plus, and you get discounts on coaching and templates plus our other products while you're there.

56:10Jordan Feigenbaum:As of this week, Barbell Medicine Plus is bundled with Barbell Medicine Premium, which adds unlimited access to every training program we've published past, present, and future. Strength, hypertrophy, conditioning, rehab, switch whenever your goals change. It's$19.95 a month. And yeah, we named one thing plus and the other thing premium. We're much better at programming than naming. Now, if these questions were useful, head over and check them out at barbellmedicine.com.

56:44Jordan Feigenbaum:Quick public service announcement. We at Barbell Medicine are running our red, white and blue sale for America's 250th. And I'm required by law to inform you that your path to freedom and independence starts by choosing strength and wellness. Look, that's just the official copy. I'm just here for the 30 % off. So let that eagle soar, brother. Here's the deal. Apparel and accessories are 30 % off. That's hats, t-shirts, everything we have in stock. It's closed out pricing on the whole selection. So grab your gear before it's gone. Consultations are also 20 % off. That's real one-on-one time with our coaches and our physicians.

57:16Jordan Feigenbaum:That's myself, Dr. Baraki, and the other Dr. Baraki. We're here to answer your questions and point you in the right direction. Programs are 20 % off too. Now we just released our new second generation Hypertrophy 2 template, but all of our other templates are on sale. 20 % off pre-built templates for whatever you're training for. And we also take FSA and HSA. So head to the website and see how your pre-tax dollars can pitch in. The deal ends July 6th at midnight. The discounts are automatic, so you don't need a code at checkout, but you can't combine it with any other offers and some exclusions may apply.

57:45Jordan Feigenbaum:Head over to barbellmedicine.com and go be free.