#744 - Dr Mike Israetel - Exercise Scientist’s Masterclass On Building Muscle

24:20Another thing is, range of motion. If the exercise doesn't expose that target muscle into a deep stretch, you could do better. So for example, floor press. Yes, sure we'll have a video on the YouTube at some point about this. The floor press is just you hold dumbbells or barbell. You go down until you're lying on the ground like an animal. It's benches for civilized people. My gym are made of gold. No, it's platinum. I think it's diamonds. It's very uncomfortable, but the wealth alone keeps me comfortable. So you touch down here and you can't possibly physically get a big stretch. So in some context, can be a great exercise, but just on the raw probabilities probably isn't that great.

24:59So those are some of the exercises that I would say like deadlifts floor presses anything you do with a partial range That's not on a length and deep stretch position is is probably not ideal for hypertrophy rack pulls or another one Exactly a rack pulls training fuck a fine. Oh, I think they train mostly the ego because you load 18 plates on each side that one girl You still look at she's like oh my god. You're like a fucking separate hair. Oh, and you're like yeah, you want to see me fucking Etc. I mean you get laid. I think that's how it works All right, so that's exercises is you guys I think have been at least for me the one of the main reasons why I've reintroduced tempo into my training fun everything now everything is tempo whole life so given that we've yes yes slow in slow out that sounds good talk to me about what good technique looks like yeah yeah Yeah, that's a great question.

25:53So good technique is a huge diversity and variety of expressions. So you can't really look at a person doing an exercise and for sure be like, that's bad technique because it could be good for them. It could be good for the context. But there are a couple of generalities that apply to almost everyone to almost exercises that you can sort of check boxes saying, if you have these things, probably your technique is pretty good. If you don't have them as a scientifically -minded person, or at least one attempting to be scientifically -minded, at the very least, if you're doing a technique that doesn't check the following boxes I'm about to talk about, I at least want to talk to you and get some reasoning out of you.

26:31Because you could have good reasoning. Be like, yeah, my shoulder's fucking injured. I can't do any more range of motion. Okay, no big deal. But a lot of times you don't get any reasoning out of people that just like, yeah, it's looking like works, brother, and you're like, my man, buck thinking, sucks, painful, annoying, why do it? So one is, a good technique should be focused on targeting a specific muscle or muscles. And by sheer biomechanics, you know, if you're doing this motion, it's not your biceps. So sometimes people will be like, I'm training delts and they'll do like alternating like like lifts like this with their fist pointed up.

27:09And that hits the front delts, but it can't really possibly hit the side delts. And so if you're like, again, I'm trying to get big side delts and you do that technique, I'm gonna be like, that can't is that you can do like a stick and rope model of the body, where you're like, that does not the muscle that does that. So that automatically means like, if you want big lats, you're gonna do pull ups or rows because it's the sheer mechanics. And there are more particularities where, if you pull out like this, It's probably not as much lats as it is upper back. If you pull down, it's more lats just because of how the muscle attacks show.

27:39That's kind of the king variable of good technique. So for example, if you say you're training your quads and you do a squat that's sumo stance, you're sitting back really far, you're getting a very small degree of knee flexion, there are better ways to train the quads. That is not the best technique for the quads almost for anyone because the better technique would be like, well, we target the quads. that means we expose them, that means we give them a high degree of range of motion, which means like as you squat mostly down, your toes should go over your knees should go over your toes rather, and you should go nice and deep, that really biomechanically has to train your quads.

28:17So that's number one. Another one is to have a movement that has a considerable degree of stability. So if you're unstable, so for example, if you're doing upright rows and you keep coming up on your toes and you're wiggling around, that's reducing your force production. So good technique means stable. Because your body will dial down how much force your muscles can deploy if you're stood on a vibrating plate or if you're on a balanced beam or if you're on something else. Oh, sooball. Yep. 100%. It happens completely automatically. I've been directly involved in laboratory testing for something like this.

28:52We had this as an insane study we did. We had lots of spotters. We had people max out in the high bar back squat. And then we had them max out on a bozo ball. Well, good news. They only squatted about 60 % of the one rep max. That's still quite a lot. 60 % is quite a lot, right? About a fucking boss who's totally, right? But to put it another way, unless you're doing profoundly high repetitions, if you're doing sets of five to 10 with 60 % of your true one rep max, would it be instability? You're getting almost no hypertrophy as an intermediator advanced trainee. This is not. You're learning how to squatted a boss who ball, which is cool.

29:24Parties you can show off, maybe you laid, maybe not. But it's not, it's no good because you want to be nice and stable. So for example, if you and I are training together and you start doing incline dumbbell press, but I notice your feet are hanging off for kind of dangling. There's only two things that can happen. One, you're a short king like me who never grew up to be an adult height and then I'm just going to be like that socks, but good luck. But if you're a tall king like yourself or a medium king, how tall are you? Fletan. Oh, perfect. The perfect man height. I would say, hey, hey, Chris, try to put your feet down and really corks through them into the ground to get that stability, you'll find you'll get more reps and be able to do more weight with inclined dumbbells, which is a really good thing.

30:01So it's stability is a technique universal, generally speaking. When people talk about sort of grinding, you're grounding themselves into the floor, there's no chi that's happening here. This is the body responding to us being more stable. And the forcefully the force production is. Yes, I believe, I believe chi is entirely a myth also, like all pretend things. If you really want to go down that road, there's a lot of very sad YouTube videos of actual MMA fighters challenging Qi practitioners in China. Fucking them up. I mean, fuck man. One lady thought she could block like a running punch just standing there and the guy just went right through her eye stop watching after this very sad.

30:39The sad part is that they get physically hurt but it's more sad to watch their ontological understanding of the world collapse. I must have misaligned my Qi. That's what happened. only Steven Segal can do shit like that. I want to be on the record saying that. All right, Control Decentric. So Control in general, especially on the eccentric. Most people can't help but control the concentric because it pushes back. Like, you can only move a concentric so quickly, especially with heavier weights, especially close to failure. So someone can't really spastically do the concentric. They're, oh, they push against it, it's kind of auto -controlled.

31:14If you're trying to gun your car up a really high hill and you have anything other than a Tesla, it's going to be seemingly like you're controlling it, but it's just pushing back. It's auto control. On the eccentric hover on the way down, people a lot of times are like, ah, just let it drop, which again, isn't terrible. It does marginally increase your chance of injury, but what it does is it takes a very muscle growth promoting part of the movement, which is the eccentric. And the eccentric actually requires less nervous system stimulus to do the same amount of physical work, which means it's inherent stimulus to fatigue ratio might be higher, because because it's probably a little bit more stimulative than the concentric as a phase by itself, but requires less nervous system fatigue.

31:54So over the weeks of controlling your centric, you may get more out of your muscles with less payment on the nervous system fatigue side. Well, you've got to lift it back up. So it needs to come down. You've lifted it. It has to come down. And you might as well collect all the coins on the way down. That way you're like, there's free hypertrophy coins. Just do it. It's like watching someone play son of the hedgehog, but they jump over all the coins. At least the Jewish part of myself, I'm like, oh, but you missed the coins. What are you doing? reset the level. Yeah, yeah, just try to pick up any case.

32:19This will get us canceled for sure. So controlling these metrics is a big deal. Controlling general is a big deal. And then another checklist we want is I used to say full range of motion. And I still think that's mostly correct. But we're learning there are different parts of the range of motion, which are more or less hypertrophic. And so I think it's a mostly full range of motion is good technique. So if I see you like a quarter squatting, I'm gonna be like, you probably want lower that's a good thing. But more importantly, still from an empirical perspective is just not robbing yourself of the deep stretch.

32:49So if I see you do cable flies and you're stopping here, I'm going to talk to you and I better hope you have two fucked up shoulders. Because if they're totally healthy, I'm going to say go ultra deep for that super big stretch. Don't avoid that. What's happening in that deep stretch? If I could find no science and shit. You're the guy. Yeah. Look, man, we don't know all of the shit. I'm saying, put me on a spot like that. There's molecules in there and cells. God knows what else, Chris. No, so we don't actually know exactly why a stretch stimulates hypertrophy. There are several candidate mechanisms being investigated, and I can regale you with the details, but it's a little bit pointless because all the details should be totally wrong.

33:26It's a candidate mechanism that fails inspection, right? So in a few months, few years, we'll know exactly why that occurs, but we have something better than a candidate mechanism, we have very good control trials, where the only difference between groups or applications as one group goes nice and deep and the other does not. We have studies on, for example, the quadriceps where the volume and the load is identical between groups even got clever studies where people train one leg with a deep stretch only, bottom third, and the other leg they train only at the top third of leg extension. That's a big deal, because auto control.

33:59It's not like genetics doesn't matter, nothing matters. the same body. You've got to split tests, right? On the right. Amazing. How great. A lot of those studies are showing that the deep stretch just causes more growth. Now, it's 5 to 10 % more growth. So you can do top -end partials. You can bench like this and get plenty of muscle growth, tons of IFB pros and jacked up juice heads do it and they're still jacked. But from an efficiency and effectiveness perspective, all those guys could have been bigger if they went in for that really deep stretch. So to me, that's a big part of really good technique.

34:30It's really interesting to look at sort of all of this as a suite, especially when it comes to the technique for muscle growth, that you have this If we're looking at stimulus to fatigue ratio, it's something that's important, especially as everybody slowly makes the inevitable Journey toward death and getting old. Jesus Christ, man. There's this one. Incredibly macabre way to put it. I'm a poccaleptic guy in British. Yes, of course. Yes, the battle of Britain and never got over that. So death is always imminent to understand. Everyone's getting older. Everyone wants to avoid injury by reducing down the amount of weight that you use.

35:07This is one of the reliable ways by focusing on a controlled eccentric. Yeah, that also helps because you're not going to allow you're not gonna surprise yourself and get into a place or a range that you didn't mean to get into. Totally. By focusing on deep stretch as well, also going to reduce down further the amount of weight that you need to get the amount of. So yeah, stability, unstable exercise is much more injurious than stable exercise. If you have feet coarse through and in and you're just moving exactly how you want, you're probably not gonna fuck up. If you have quite a bit of weight on a bose ball, I'm sure you've seen you two videos of various accidents like, yeah, you can fuck you shit up if you get really unstable.

35:43What, when it comes to tempo, because obviously we're talking about control eccentric and concentric that's at least got something behind it. Jeff Neppard did some study, so him on TikTok talking about it. How long do I need to take on that eccentric portion? Yeah, it's a good question. The literature we have so far as far as I'm aware of it, and because I am science, I'm very aware of it. It didn't impress you. No one's claimed on your show before that they are science itself. You fused about one. Yes. It seems to not matter much. Anything between a repetition that in total takes one second, including eccentric and concentric and all the way up to a total of nine seconds, which is a lot of pain.

36:30It seems to be that if you do more quick repetitions, you can get more repetitions. If you seem to do slower repetitions, you get fewer but each one has a lot more stimulus. It's kind of like filling up a glass of a certain height. If you go really slow, it takes you longer, you fill up the glass. If you go really fast, it doesn't take as long, it fills up the glass. The glass filling is what we want anyway. There's a certain amount of stimulus you can drive to your muscles. You could do it more slowly. You could do it more quickly. it doesn't seem to matter for hypertrophy. However, under control is the big caveat.

36:59So if you just dump the stuff on you and then crank it up and then dump, yeah, that's not going to be as hypertrophic as some modicum of control. Now, if I go down this fast and come back up, I still can 100 % control the eccentric. As long as I'm doing that, I can go ultra slow. I can go a little bit more quickly and anything between at least tentatively for now. We can say one thing almost for sure. It doesn't doesn't make a huge difference. Presumably when it comes to practically functionally doing this in the gym, focusing on a little bit more of a tempo, let's say maybe a two counter or a three count down, ensures that control is something, because the difference between half a second down and one second down in terms of control, everyone's done a one, everyone's thought that they're doing a three count tempo, but it's actually been like a one -ish.

37:46Yes. And a lot of it is still like, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm. But that, if you actually hit a two to three count, to me, that seems like, oh, I can't escape this. Yeah. I can't escape the degree of control that I need. Yes, that's absolutely true. And I'll layer another thing on top of it. One of my last points for what makes good technique is repetition consistency. Most of your ups should look about the same. It doesn't mean identical. There's actually a little bit of an injury preventative benefit from exposing yourself to slightly different bar positions. It makes you more resilient. If you're one machine -like thing all the time and you get out of it in real life, you could find yourself a little bit hurt.

38:24But mostly the reps should look the same. The ability to make the reps look mostly the same and also move in the movement arc in which you want. Because remember the first principle of good technique is like, are you moving in a biomechanical way that targets the muscle? That's a lot easier to ensure if you slowly work into the eccentric hitting the right positions. Like if I just squat down, however the fuck my body tells me, I'll do a fine job I've been squatting a long time, but maybe I'll sit back a little too far, I won't expose my quads as much. If I can take the time to go a little bit slow on the eccentric, I can actually figure out how my quads feel tension wise while I'm doing it, and regulate my exposure as I'm doing it.

39:00I'm sitting back a little too much, I'm like, don't go, I sit forward and my quads get fucked up, I can feel the tension right away, only because I'm controlling the eccentric a little bit longer, am I able to get that feedback right away. It's like during a football play you coach can't tell you what to do during the play You got to play beforehand you fucking figured out the ball is fucking hiked and then shit happens It's too fast, but if you can go a little bit slower You can auto regulate your technique and do a better during the exercise and small bonus is your injury probability At least nominally on theoretical grounds will reduce and I'll take anything that reduces my injury probability by some amount and and doesn't reduce the mechanisms if I purge a feed all.

39:40So some people say tempo doesn't matter. And I say, totally, it's like if you get the same high quality meal at two restaurants, same fucking meal, it doesn't matter which one you go to. You know what's the price? If one is 75 % cheaper, my fucking Jewish ass is there, ASAP, I'm there early at the door. No way that I could be investing instead of doing that. In any case, I'm there as soon as it opens, blah, blah, blah. So if you get even a theoretical downside of injury risk, that's a little bit smaller, I'll fucking take it. With that in mind, does it make sense for trainers, athletes as they get older to focus more on tempo?

40:14As you increase in age, the focusing more on tempo means that you use less weight, reduced injury risk. When you're younger, I saw your video on Sam Suleck, Homeboys, very strong, lift in full stack, all the rest of it, but he's made of rubber and magic. He's 22 or something. Yes, we were all made of rubber and magic back then. Yeah. In my case, it was a type of rubber that wasn't able to get erect. Huh? Oh, I'm, shit, I'm unsaid. Again. Uh, yes. So what I would say is this, it matters for everyone because injuries are no fun in any case. There are also injuries that can go with you the rest of your life.

40:49You do a major, distal, pectoral tendon rupture, fully volition. You're just never going to be the same again. We need another 15 years of medical tech to reattach that thing in a way that doesn't look fucked up or feel fucked up. You don't want to do yourself dirty when you're 22, rip a peck off, you just never the fucking same. You don't look the same, you don't perform the same powerlifting. It's kind of done for you bodybuildings, kind of fucking weird at that point. So people say, yeah, when you're young, you can get away with shit when you're young, but statistically it's still a downside.

41:17What I will say is I'll put it another way, exactly agreeing with your point. And that's my favorite kind of point, one that exactly agrees with you. Why do you think I'm on the show? I'm just here to feed the ego and be like, yes, Chris, I would I'd like to feed with something else, but we signed a couple of papers that said I couldn't physically touch you during the show When you are young I Fuckin get it. I get it. Yeah, I can do this the fucking bitch over there. See you do it. You're getting late. Whatever Ego shit live your life When you're older and this is like a particular pet peeve of mine I see like a fucking balding 48 year old man swinging the fucking dumbbells around about come here dumb motherfucker What are you doing?

41:59How old are you? It's like I've talked to, I've actually talked to a few women in my day. Nothing sexual. When you're 13 years old, 17 years old, and you have what I would describe as very understandable, but kind of a childlike relation to body image and stuff like that, like you're unable to go through a muscle gain phase because any amount of extra pudge on you just feels totally wrong. You're 17, fuck it, I get it, I get it, fucking we all had body in the tissue. I talked to 37 year old woman or 47 year old woman who knows she needs to gain muscle but is unwilling to gain an extra half centimeter of punch.

42:36I'm like, look, Linda, how old are you? She's a 47 years old. What do you do for a living? I'm actually a managing and accounting firm. So you're intelligent and responsible and you can see ahead, right? She's like, well, yes, of course. I'm like, you can't make the trade off to gain a fucking half centimeter of fat on your ass you gain more muscle and she's like god damn it you're right So just the same way if I see an older you see younger guy swinging weights are I'm like whatever to be 20 again My man I see a 40 year old doing it. I'm like dude Come on. It's like seeing a 45 year old like just after watching fast and furious 18 or whatever Like rev his shit up against a younger guy and the fuck the fuck really this is what we're doing So it's always good for everyone, but for older people, you just have no fucking excuse.

43:21Slow your shit down, control your shit. We talked about concentric, eccentric. You mentioned about stretch at the bottom. Pause, pausing reps, and isometrics. What needs to be said there? Isometrics just don't seem to be as hypertrophic. Isometrics in a stretch position are plenty hypertrophic, and are contracted one they're not. So for example, if you're doing cable flies, if you stop at the squeeze, oh, sorry, if you stop in a squeeze, people will give vacuum. It's totally cool for variation. It's fine. It's awesome. It grows muscle. I wouldn't say it's essential. It might be a downside. All that energy you're spending stopping at the squeeze, you could put into the centric, which probably grows more muscle.

43:57So if you were going to do a pause, you're going to be pausing at the stretched position, not at the contracted position. More often. Yeah. Pause at the stretch is cool for a couple of reasons. One, it absolutely reduces the injury probability. That reversal at the stretch is the single generally most dangerous time for muscular injury. Right. because you've got weight going down and you're about to contract while it's, yeah, that's how I ruptured my Achilles. Yeah, oh, I heard that story. It was terrible. Yep. The ultimate scary story of warm up for forever if you've come back to sports. Correct.

44:26Yeah. The direct force plate measured pulse of force at the bottom of the movement as the highest it will be in its entire movement, reversing. It's also technically your chest at its weakest position. So it's, if you want to pause there, again, the absolute risk of injury in the gym is Fucking tiny. It's way way less engerious than rugby or tennis or anything like that. It's so funny because like Rich people like myself will be like, oh, I'm going to ski in the veil and they'll see like a lifter lifting 200 pounds Like isn't that bad for your back? Well, fuck you just hit a tree on your last trip.

44:59There's half your brains out of your fucking face Lifting is super super safe. So I don't want to be like you got a fucking pause at the bottom or else you're gonna die But on a small relative injury risk it is reduced when you're pausing at the bottom Absolutely. And you get more time experiencing tension in your muscles at that length and position. So there's an argument that pausing at the bottom is actually maybe a little bit more hypertrophic. And you need less weight on the bar. So all those things stack up and like the good column is at least as good. Probably not much better, but the bad column is a little smaller.

45:31To me, it seems like at the very least, it's a great option. I'm not going to say it's the only way to try and fuck that. But it's a good option. Good idea to try. In other news, this episode is brought to you by a product I've used. every single day for over three years now. That's AG1. Dr Andrew Hubeman and Tim Ferris and Dr Peter Atier and Joe Rogan all use AG1 because it is the best all -in -one foundational nutrition supplement on the market. They've upgraded the recipe 52 times over the last decade, as new researchers come in and as they've improved the ingredients. And it really works. I tried pretty much everything on the planet and this is the best.

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46:38Okay, how do we warm up before we start? Fuck final, I just get in there and fucking rage, bro. First thing, when driving to the gym, there are only a few types of music you're allowed to listen to. Chris, let me judge your music soundtrack for warming up. What's in the headphones there for you? Sleep token at the moment. That's nonsense, because I have never heard of it, it must be the wrong thing. Okay, what are you listen to? Oh, well. Dark thoughts. Oh yes always. My psychiatrist says we have to help a few different kinds of medication to make them maybe go away. Blink went 82 really is the correct answer because you reached the age of 13 and never actually aged psychologically.

47:19Oh god I probably never made it to 13 11 maybe. Yeah. Um Yes So what do for kind of music is that I'm trying to think of what's the top sleep token metal like how oh my man Never mind, I take back. I thought it was like, bring me the, like, kind of in the world of bring me the horizon alone with misery signals. Misery signals. Yeah, all of my, all of the bands represent the landscape of my mind. Holy shit. It's got dark. Oh, yes.

47:51Okay. Yes. Warm up music aside. There is actually a study that was recently conducted by Dr. Bradshone Felt, the world's expert on hypertrophy and his laboratory. Yeah. And they have illustrated something that most lifters of a certain degree of intelligence level and long time participation have realized. And it's that there are two different kinds of warm up. The general warm up, which is when you go in and you do the elliptical for 15 minutes, maybe you foam roll, maybe do some dynamic stretching, that's all fine and good. And then there's the specific warm up, which is whatever lift you have first in your program, you do it for about a set of 12.

48:2812, very light weights, a set of 12 with maybe your 30 rep max. Then you do a set of 8 after a few minutes of rest with maybe your 20 rep max. Then you do a set of 4 -ish 2 -to -4 reps with something like your 10 rep max. Then you rest a little bit and then you're ready to do whatever load. That specific warm -up is a very good idea from a variety of perspectives. It warms up your tissues, it makes them more pliable, less likely to get hurt. It also activates and wakes up your nervous system. It aligns your actual muscle fibers more into the direction of pullover exercise you're doing. It decreases the sensitivity over the called Golgi tendon organs, which are detectors in your muscles for how much force is being transduced.

49:09And they start out, unnot warmed up by being like, holy shit, that's a lot of force. And they actually tamper down how much your nervous system can activate. After a few warm upsets, you literally are strong. Which is why you can't cold -ball you at one rep max. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. The GTOs need to kind of cool down. And after a few reps, a few sets of progress will be heavy away. I was safe here. This is okay. Yeah, that's fine. Okay. So I'm just, again, I'm thinking like functionally when we get into the gym, what this means. Let's say that we're going into a chest day. Let's say we're going to do a chest and back day, like just a full, like a push pole day.

49:41You're going to start off with incline dumbbell press. Does that mean that the 12, 8, 4 method for incline press. Do you then need to do the same thing again for back? Yes. Right. Would you do those two together? Would you go, would you maybe alternate from, okay, I'm going to press a little bit and then during my couple of minutes rest, I'll go and row a little bit and whatever. What I like to do is I like to warm up for the exercise I'm doing next. Once I warm up, I do that exercise. And then whatever exercise I have after is one of two options. One, it's the same muscle group just more exercise.

50:18After inclined press, I'm on to pushups or something. Same muscle group. Then I only have to do what the great J -Cutler actually termed as a feel set. It's like you just put some weight on there, maybe not your working weight, maybe your working weight. You just do a couple reps, maybe five to ten, maybe fewer, just to feel out just to get the technique right. So the first time you're heavy dumbbells on your hand, you're like, what the fuck is going on? Just feel it out. That's all you need. So between every single exercise, that's not the first. Afterwards, you just need maybe one set to feel it out and then you go, you don't need all three.

50:49But if it's a muscle you haven't trained yet, let's say we do chest and then we do back. If I just did a whole bunch of bench press and then I'm doing pull ups, yeah, it's 12, eight, four on the pull down or assisted pull up machine that last fours, maybe four actual pull ups, rest, put your weight belt on and then go real quick. The general warm up, the idea that you come in and do elliptical or whatever, if you take a thorough specific warmup, like a 12 .8 .4 system, that one study by Dr. Benjamin Holtfeld showed that you don't have any benefit performance -wise from the general warmup. And unless you really need it, like it's fucking just super cold outside and even a specific warmup isn't good enough, I would say be careful on wasting too much time with the general warmup.

51:32One of the things that happens in fitness is there's really good stuff baked into the fitness cake, and every now and again we add ingredients just on fluff alone. They don't make a whole lot of sense. One of the major sources of fluff is increasing the complexity and duration of your general warm up because of reasons. Some guy will, if he foam rolls as elbows, it's a night and day and then he can do skull crushers. But that's just that guy's fucked up. You see it and he's in advanced lift or you're like, fuck foam rolling bro, everyone's got to do it. You start doing it. You take your general warm up and you do elliptical, then you do some kind of box step -ups, then you do some Pilate stuff, then you do dynamic stretching, 45 fucking minutes later, you're like, it's time to work out, motherfucker, you're work out, over already, you gotta go back to the office.

52:12So the general warmup is just not necessary if you do a specific warmup. So what I do in the gym, I come in, I do some arm circles, I do, because I'm Russian, I gotta do some side bends and stuff. And then I just go 12, 8, 4, first exercise, after the first exercise. I'm generally warm as fuck, I'm fucking sweating, and then I'm fucking golden. So you can do a general warmup if you want, but I would say for folks listening, you don't have to. but a specific warm -up, 12, 8, 4, or something like it. The basic reasoning is just slightly lighter weights, go to heavier weights, the repetitions fall, then you're ready to go train and get the most out of it.

52:45All right. How about rep ranges and how heavy to lift? Yes. For there are recommended target rep ranges for every single human physical quality that we know. So for example, for strength, basic strength building is like sets of three to six repetitions. You do a whole lot fewer than six. Let's use you do singles. You can get stronger doing singles, but you could have gotten stronger because you would have gotten more volume doing still very heavy weight if you did like sets of four. It's just not an efficient use of your time. Still works not as efficient. Can you get stronger doing a sets of eight?

53:18Yes, but you get a lot of hypertrophy work from eight. But if you do your eight rep max, it's just not heavy enough like sets of three or six would be for you to get as much strength out of it as possible. So these are all spectrum ranges. There's not like at some repetition and begins before it you get nothing and then you get all hypertrophy and then after you get no hypertrophy, it's kind of more of a normal distribution kind of situation. But for hypertrophy, it seems that anything roughly between sets of five repetitions that are challenging close to failure and all the way to 30 to 35 repetitions seems to be on average for the average person for the average muscle in In medium term, several months of testing to promote almost, I'll say it better, undifferentiable amounts of muscle growth.

54:07So we got a group of people training sets of 5 to 8, got another group of people training sets of 25 to 28 reps, as long as they go close to failure and it's the same exercise. They get essentially on average the same results. Now within a different muscle, it could be different. Some people's biceps respond really well to heavy shit, sets of 5 to 10, you do sets of 25 to 30, they just get tired. and they don't have much hypertrophy. It works differently between individuals too, but the overarching theme is anywhere between sets of five and sets of 30, is kind of unlikely to be a ton of really wrong answers.

54:39You can gain muscle doing sets of four, and three, and two, and one, it's just gonna take a lot more sets to get that down and obviously your joints and connective tissues are taking a fucking hell of a panic, because that's a really heavy weight. It's not ultra efficient. You're not putting your best cards on the table if you're doing that. Can you get really good muscle growth with sets of 30, 40, 50 plus reps. Actually, yes, but you have to do more sets to accomplish that. And each set is psychologically fucking great. Three minutes long. I was fuck that, right? So you do like 10 sets of 52 reps, the playing card workout, fuck that.

55:10It's a shitload of systemic fatigue, crapload of psychological fatigue. For the same growth you could have gotten, was just doing 10 sets of eight, which is way easier on the whole system. So five to 30 reps is really good general advice, but experiment on your own time, find out what seems to be giving you great proxies. Pump, burn, tension, soreness, whatever rep ranges give you that. It's awesome and another thing is try some variety. So if you train back twice a week, have one of the days be slightly heavier? Like mostly sets of 5 to 10, some sets of 10 to 15 reps. Try the other day being mostly sets of 15 to 20 reps and even some sets of 20 to 30.

55:47out of a heavier and lighter, that diversity, there are a few studies that show diversity in rep ranges, even within several months of time, can help you grow. So I wouldn't write that off. And also, more sustainable from a joint connective tissue perspective and an enjoyment perspective. It's nice to be able to have some slightly different days, shine out like up, another day of 28 reps, fuck that. But 28 you get sick of after one day, the next day you come in, it sets of, you know, five to 10, like, okay, fuck, like, this is different, it's cool, and it's equally effective on average. What about weight?

56:17the amount of weight that you choose Should fall into two categories or two kind of clearance variables to make sure it goes through one is Can you lift it to with good technique between five and thirty times in one set and two is that Exhibition of your lifting at least within three reps ish of failure here, because people will say like, you give someone 10 pound dumbbells that can lift the 30s and they do five and they put it down to like hypertrophy. I hit five like that, but the caveat there is you have to challenge the muscle. So the weight you end up using is whatever weight gets you within five to 30 reps range close to failure.

57:05And you have to warm up to find that out and it's different for everyone. but the idea that you gotta go ultra heavy to grow is true, but it's not the only true thing. You can also grow from light, high rep shit, you just have to push it close to failure. Why not to failure? To failure is a totally fine thing as well. There are downsides of going to failure all the time. It seems that as you get closer to failure, the amount of stimulus per set rises. So if you have a set where you stop at two reps shy failure, and another person has a set where they stop just at failure or someone has to drag the barbell off of them, the person who went to failure is gonna grow more muscle.

57:47That's a good thing, but it's by a small margin, maybe just several percent more growth. The downside is training to failure generates a lot more fatigue. Probably not a few percent more. Maybe if you dozen percent more, which is a big deal. If you're going to use a program which mostly has you do three or two or one rep shy failure, you'll get great stimulus and you'll be able to recover from lots of sets over the course of weeks and months, which means you'll get a great stimulus and a great hypertrophy result. If you insist on going too failure even beyond in your sets, you can get very good results, but you have to reduce the total volume if you're training because the amount of fatigue accumulate is going to be rapid, it's going to happen fast.

58:27So if you've ever heard of like like hit training, mic mencer, high intensity training, HIT, mic mencer and those folks were fans of going to failure and beyond with drop sets and crazy shit like that, they got really good results, but they don't do very many sets, a few sets per muscle per workout, all they do because they realize we can't recover from this. You can recover from more if you stay a little shy of failure. My suspicion is that if you want the best overall muscle growth and you have all the time in the world to train that somewhere between three and one rep in reserve on average for a program is a really good idea.

59:00But you also want to test your shit every now and again. It's difficult to say this as two reps in reserve if it's been months since you've actually gone to failure. That actually is because you can be fucking lying to yourself. Yeah, it's two RIR. Someone puts a gun to your head, literally maybe. And then they go to failure and you get six more reps. Well, shit. It turns out you weren't even in that best growth zone of three to one. So what I would say is a method that we use at RPR, app does this automatically. It starts you a few reps shy failure, and then it presents incrementally slightly heavier loads over the weeks, or repetition goals that are slightly higher.

59:33So takes you from 10 reps to 11 reps to 12 reps, or takes you from 100 pounds to 105 to 110. Automatically, because your body can't adapt that quickly, you're going to reach failure a few weeks in, four to six weeks in, you'll not only have a whole range of going from three ish in reserve all the way to zero, which means you checked every box, but you'll now know something about yourself. You'll know exactly how high your best performance is. So for the next mesocycle, next program you construct, you can be like, okay, I know how strong I am. Let me start a little bit less than that and progress again to see if I can go a little bit higher.

1:00:06So I would say going from some number of reps in reserve all the way to failure in a single mesocycle is probably a good practice for many people, but not required. You can always go two or three in our reps in reserve. as long as you do enough sets, you'll get very close to ideal hypertrophy outcomes. And you'll do very well in muscle growth. If you just take everything to failure, you just have to really watch your fatigue management and not do too many sets because then you'll burn out. What about sets? Sets are influenced by a few things. One of the big ones is your proximity to failure. So what I'm going to say next about how many sets you should do is if you go close to failure all the time, you do on the lower end of this range, at least start there.

1:00:42If you do, you know, two or three reps in reserve, you can be on the higher end of this range. Couple ways to think about sets. They're sets per week and they're sets per session. I like to think of per muscle group per session. Some people get overly obsessed about how many sets do I need to do per exercise? There is an answer to that question. But it's much more interesting to talk about per muscle group. Because you can train your chest with three exercises and do two sets each. or you can train it with two exercises and do three sets each, the total amount of working sets is by far the biggest determinant of how much muscle you're going to grow per session.

1:01:19So in a session, theoretically, you can do anywhere from one set for your muscle, just one set of curls and leave, and as a beginner especially, you'll get some robust gains. war, as someone who's more advanced, if you train your biceps every single day, just one or two sets of curls ends up being a lot of weekly volume and plenty of stimulus and that's totally fine way to grow. On the other end, in the session, you can do as many as 12 to 15 sets for the biceps or for the chest. The downside there is on the higher ends of that spectrum, you are reaching into what's called junk volume, where yeah, you're training, but your nervous system is so tired, it's not even recruiting as many of the muscle fibers as you want anymore.

1:02:07It's like it's taken the day off and you're just kind of robotically moving through. That 30 rep cut off, theoretical, very rough cut off of anything lighter than your 30 rep max. Probably won't grow as much muscle. That's always in everywhere. You're fresh 30 rep max. So if you're on exercise number five for your pecs, you're doing cable flies with a hundred pounds for sets of 15, even if it's a failure. That is to failure as we observe it externally. With this pre -fetigue. But oh my god. And at that point, your nervous system is fucking checked out. A lot of you are faster to which muscle fibers, the ones that grow the most, they're not even fucking contracting anymore.

1:02:44And you look at a hundred pounds and someone's like, how many reps do you do 15? How many could you have done if you were fresh? I don't know, 40? Well, let's tan away from 30. That already is starting to get junky. It's just the stimulus isn't worth the fatigue anymore. A couple of studies have been done, actually, more than a few, and a lot of good meta -analytic data has been synthesized. Probably some of the best of which is by gentleman named James Krieger, who has lit review, the wait -ology lit review, I sign up for it, I pay real money for it. My own money, Chris. You know how painful that is to part of my own money?

1:03:16And he has hinted at the fact that close to the best answer on average, huge caveat on average, is something like 5 to 8 working sets per muscle per session. So if you're training your biceps and you do three sets per session, totally cool. You just have to do more sessions per week. If you're doing something like nine sets for biceps, again, totally cool. who just have to train them less frequently so they can recover for a lot of night sets of work. But if you're doing 15 working sets for just your biceps in one session, the literature would say that's not optimal and the reasoning would be like your last five sets are just a gigantic fucking waste of your time.

1:03:58You're just not, you're cashed out. It's like frying an egg after it's already fried. Just gets more burnt and nothing good happens to it. On the other hand, if you're doing just one or two sets for biceps procession, you had better be doing a lot of sessions over the week. And if you're only training once or twice for biceps, it's a look, man, your muscles could take more of a hit, which brings me to my next point. How do you determine if you're doing the right amount of volume for you? And I would actually keep this relatively simple. However many sessions you have per muscle in a week, which I'm sure we'll get to, how many sessions is it going to be?

1:04:30Let's just say it's two. Let's say you train your chest on Monday, you train chest again on Thursday. If, after Monday's workout, let's say you're doing three sets of chest, by Tuesday evening, you're like not sore, you're not tired, you're fucking ready to go, your strength is as high as it'll ever be, someone could ask the theoretical question of why the fuck are you waiting? Wednesday, as a whole day, to just go Thursday, you could have already hit it again. So if you're well beyond recovered, next Monday, you can do four sets or five sets for chest to get you close to just barely recovered for next Thursday.

1:05:05If you're just barely covered, let's say Wednesday, you're still a little tight, little sore, little weak feeling, and Thursday morning, you're really good to go. Perfect. Is that M -O -V? Yeah. So if you go over that value, you might have exceeded your M -R -V. Well, there's more technical way to diagnose that maximum recoverable volume, but a kind of way to make sure you're not excessively over it, so make sure you're healed on time. But if you're healed too early, then you could be at your minimum effective volume, or you didn't maintenance volume. You think you're growing, but you're really doing so few sets that you're not accomplishing a whole lot.

1:05:36So the point is to challenge your body such that it is recovering until G a day or several hours before you hit it again. If you do eight sets of chest on Monday, by the time Thursday rolls around, you're still sort of a touch. And you're weaker than usual. You're not going to get as robust of a stimulus. And thus, you next time shouldn't do eight sets, maybe you should do six. So by adjusting the number of sets week over week for any given muscle to challenge yourself to recover close to just on time for the next time you hit it Not too far back definitely not under recovered you end up auto regulating yourself into probably close to your ideal volume for how much muscle you can gain How long do you rest in between sets?

1:06:20Yes. Oh in between actual sets. Yes you go. Yeah, okay So I have a unique take on this You might not hear it in a lot of other places. It's just one minute and it's the right answer for everyone next question. No way, wait, that's not it. A lot of answers you'll get on the internet from folks that also know what they're talking about is some number of minutes. And I understand that answer because it's very usable. Let's say two to five minutes or something like that. The problem is that is not a theoretically based answer. It's just a, it's just a notional answer like here's the number. You're not really sure why, and there are many exceptions.

1:06:55For example, if you train your calves and calf raises. Are you telling me I need to rest five fucking minutes after my calves? 10 seconds after, I don't even feel like gas it anymore. I'm fucking totally good to go. So we do at RP as we have a four factor checklist model. Or if you can checklist four things after your last set is over, you can begin your next set as soon as those checklist items are checked. You can wait longer and there may be some small upsides to it, but someone could say if you wait much longer, you're just kind of wasting time. So here are the checklists. Number one, your cardio can't be a limiting factor.

1:07:30So if you just did a set of squats and you turned to your training partner, you're like, should I do another set? No, because then what's going to stop you in your set of squats is you can't breathe. It's not your local quad musculature that's being brought close to failing. And remember, the local musculature brought close to failure is the way we get the most robust gains. That's the mechanism by which we grow. So that's no good. So wait until you're back to at least normal -ish breathing. That's checklist one. Another one is kind of your neural nervous system strength, which means do you feel strong like in here, you know, not in the pecs, in the heart, which we all know emotion comes from the heart.

1:08:13No way, it's the brain. If you're fucking like, yeah, let's fucking do this, you're ready. If you still feel like curved up in a ball and defeated, how are you going to push it close to failure on the next day? You're gonna suck. So number one, cardiovascular system needs to be mostly recovered. Number two, you need to have your neural strength back. You need to be like, yeah, fucking, let's do this. The second to last one is the synergists need to no longer be a mini factor. For example, in the squat, you can say, okay, after three minutes, I'm breathing normal. I feel fucking strong again. And my quads feel like we're ready to go, but my lower back is still cramping, and still has lactic acid, and it's still weak.

1:08:51If you do another work set, what do you think's gonna be the limiting point? It's gonna be your lower back, which means your quads are like, eh, the, the, the anything happened? Did we just try or what the fuck went on? If your lower back has five good reps in it, but your quads have 10 good reps in them, it doesn't matter if you tell yourself on one rep in reserve, your six reps in reserve for the quads, for the muscle that matters. So the synergists have to be good to go. Another example is forms in the lap pulldown. If your form is still throbbing and you can't grip anything, it's not time to do lap pulldowns again.

1:09:23You gotta fucking rest out. Even if your lats feel quite good, then that last four factor model checklist is, does the target muscle have enough recovery in it for it to be able to do at least another five repetitions? Because any set less than five reps can be hypertrophic, for sure, but it's not the most efficient use of your time. You're not sufficiently confident. So let me give you two extreme examples. One is calf raises, just on a seated calf machine. Not the one where your legs are bent, but the one where your legs are straight. That leg calf raises actually mostly hip the soleus muscle, which is deep to the gastroc.

1:09:57It's not the cool big diamond -shaped one. It just sucks. I learned a lot about this while I was trying to regrow the bottom half of my right limb. Yeah. Yeah. That sucked. What it worked. Yeah, I actually overshot it. I overshot it and how to regrow the other one more. That's awesome. Yeah, well Yeah, and the third limb looks quite good as well. Oh So calf raises cardio Three seconds later you're breathing normally you might have been breathing normally the whole time check When do you feel strong again could be five or ten seconds later again my calves feel fine? There are no synergists. The machine starts at your hips and goes down.

1:10:35There's no synergists to that auto checks itself. And then how long until I'm not feeling like my calves are full of lactic acid? Oh, maybe five or ten seconds. So there is a world in which ten seconds between sets is the right amount or a correct amount of time to rest for calves. Can you rest longer? Sure. No big deal. But you may be taking incrementally, exponentially more time for linearly better gains. Which generally is just like just do another set and someone's like, well, if I do five sets where I rest longer I get just as much growth is if I do Seven sets where I less rest shorter. Yeah, but the rest longer takes you eight total minutes to train and the rest shorter Takes you three total minutes.

1:11:16Why don't you just do two extra sets? You'll be four versus eight minutes wise and get the same hypertrophy So if a muscle is fucking pretty recovered and you're pretty good to go I say just go again And if you need more stimulus just add more sets so on calf raises It could be a correct answer to say it's 10 seconds rest. War factor model, I'll check down on squats for sets of 15. Holy fuck, I've rested. I did this one thing once, which is on YouTube somewhere where I did 405 pounds for plates in a squat for five sets of 10. And I rested for something like seven to ten minutes between each set.

1:11:50I also after set three and four and five, I threw up independently after each one of those sets. So it's gonna take some time. And honestly, it was four factor model based, even though I didn't know at the time I came up with that shit later, but like it took me four minutes to stop breathing hard. It took me another several minutes for my fucking lower back to be like, okay, I'm healed enough. So very different answers, but generally the most simple way I can condense this whole conversation, if you're ready to go again, if everything's fucking working and you feel strong, go. If you're not ready, if you're breathing hard, if you still feel weak, if your muscle is still cramping, you have to rest no matter what you saw on the internet, one to two minutes, two to three minutes, those are all heuristic Ideas, this is a theoretical basis.

1:12:32That's a bit more sound outside of the practicality of people just having lives outside of the gym Some people that aren't you would know anything about it. I'm so excited for the gym Is there a upper bound on how long your session length should be is there some accumulation of something that's happening in there when you just take time in the gym. Yes. Assuming you're going pretty hard, generally what we see is after about two hours of consistent hard training in the gym, the amount of systemic fatigue you're going to have, acute systemic fatigue, short -term fatigue that lasts hours, is going to be so high that you can no longer recruit individual muscle fibers very well for whatever you're training.

1:13:20And it's kind of like it's just yeah, you're doing training, but not much is happening. You're much better off cutting off that session, going and getting some rest, doing more weekly sessions. Some people be like a train toys week, but it's three hours each time. Yeah, but that last hour kind of fucking sucks. Three times a week for two hours. Better. In most cases. Now, some people can train up to two hours and have really good performance, especially of a intro workout drink with some protein and carbs. I was gonna say, obviously, you're gonna run out of fuel by this stage as well. Totally, totally.

1:13:54It should certainly run down on fuel. Where's only some sleep token songs or blink one and two that you can listen to as well? That's right. Yeah, you're going through your playlist to see what, what fucks. So yeah, generally under two hours, for many people anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour and a half is where their best workouts will occur. And you can have great workouts the last less than 45 minutes, but I would say it's a bit of a technical efficiency question there, especially with people with lives outside of the gym, which is a nominal concept I don't know how to tell you about. I allegedly, if you fucking got to the gym, you went in the locker room, you stared at some dicks, you put on your workout clothes, you came out, it's already such a sunk cost, you might as well go crush out an hour, an hour and a half workout.

1:14:34I'm gonna be able to have like a one to one travel to training right? Right. Right. Yes. And that's for some people not bad. You just don't want it to go much worse than that. So a lot of times people will say, well, aren't 20 minute workouts effective? Yeah. If you do many of them throughout the week, sure, if you have really low ball fitness goals, but I would say, yeah, get in there and 45 minutes an hour and a half is a really good answer for many people. If you do much longer than that, the only question I have for you is, do you still have a lot of fucking energy to keep going? And if the answer was like, dude, I fucked my shit up after two hours and 15 minutes, hey, Slow clap, these are all averages, apparently works for you amazing, but ask yourself, like, am I really doing the kind of work?

1:15:10It's like, you see a guy talking to a girl to a club after five drinks, he's fucking, what is it? What the kids call it? He's got the Riz. You've got Riz. Oh, fuck off. No, I don't. Whatever that is. I don't have it. You don't know. I don't know what it is. You might do have it. Oh, God. Okay, is there a test I can take for Riz? The nurse comes out and she just gives you a pamphlet. You want positive for Riz. This isn't a death sentence. I'm like, oh, fuck, I got a new one. Is it terminus? Dr. Doctor. I peed blue yesterday. I knew it was bad. It comes out and tries to tell you that it's terminal, but just gets lost in your eyes.

1:15:39Oh my God. What's terminal again? I'm like, I don't know. You tell me, I try to like do with locks in my hair, but I realize I'm fucking bald. See? That's why I don't have a rhythm. So five drinks in my man's kickin' it. You know you ever see someone lay down some game and you're kind of like in the booth next to him and you're like, fuck it and hit it. She's like, oh my God. That's you in the gym after an hour, right? After two and a half hours, you're like that guy laying down game after 15 drinks. and you know, like, you know, I'm like big on YouTube. And she's like, look, man, I'm gonna leave when my girlfriend's here great.

1:16:11And you know, I see a KLC. She's like, it was Karen. She walks off and you're just watching it from the periphery like, that guy should have stopped fucking drinks ago, you know? That's two hours and 30 minutes than gym guy. Just quit while you're ahead, come back next time. How often should people train each week? Sets, muscle groups, training frequency, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. So there are two questions there. One is how often should you train any given muscle per week? And the answer to that is generally anything can work between one and six times. You can train the same muscle even seven times a week if you like.

1:16:46Generally, you can train it once. Neither one is going to give you the ideal, although six is probably a better answer than one. Muscles just don't take that long to recover. So people say, oh, I just hit my chest once a week. Well, how long were you sore for? They're like, well, halfway through the week I was healed. Did you feel strong after that? Yeah. So the fuck are you waiting out of three or four days, just leaving like, you could be fucking doing it again, but you're not. So I would say anywhere between two and four times a week for the same muscle is a good idea. Two is great for a lot of people.

1:17:16Three and four is more for like specialization phases and folks that just recover really rapidly. Like, yeah, your chest might not heal three times a week for many kind of normal training, but your forearms might heal just fine. and you might be able to train him for five days or maybe 18 days a week like you seem to, with your father. Everyone's got something, you know what I mean? I had nothing for a long time for us at nothing and now one. That head though. I didn't even have the head back in the day. You how many? When did you get that head? When I started doing drugs, I'm kidding. Actually, a photograph of myself when I was lifetime drug free and my head is almost identically shaped, quite sad.

1:17:49As a matter of fact, there was an interaction I had in high school, right? I was talking to a acquaintance, a flash friend, more acquaintance than friend, and I had an interaction with a girl and I was like, insanely low self -esteem in high school. And I was like, what did she think about that? And he's like, yeah, she actually thinks you're really cute. Other than the way that you acted school, so it's a total introvert, fucking weirdo, she's like, and the shape of your head. And I was like, the fuck, I didn't even know my head was shaped weird back then. Say hair and stuff, I was like, huh?

1:18:18I just never made sense of it. And then later, the internet told me that my head was shaped really funny. So in any case, two to four times a week is a great per muscle session number. The other question is how many total sessions, how many total times in the, do I go into the gym? So I'll say this for folks that just want to be healthy and already have a decent amount of muscularity, two times a week is totally cool. You train with weights, mundane Thursday whole body, you're going to get a ton of great health, a ton of benefits, ton of physique, it's going to be awesome for just general recreational fitness.

1:18:50You know, like fit dad, that kind of body. If you're a professional bodybuilder, I'd like to see you training anywhere between five and that's on the low end in more like six to nine sessions breaks. So Jared Feather, IFB Pro, my biological son, he's currently in Thailand, I think, lost, found in a sense, but also lost. Slowly colonizing something like that being colonized. In any case, colonizing. Oh, lots of that. Yes. So that's why he's there. So he trains usually nine times a week, which means some days he does two a days. He's literally a professional bodybuilder. It's his job to do that.

1:19:32What else are you gonna do? He's got nothing else. He sits in his apartment, stairs at a fucking wall, or he's training. No, wait, that's me. Jesus. He sits in his apartment with ladies, I've been told. for a serious effort at changing your body composition, at trying to get more jacked and lean, if you've had enough of adult fitness and you wanna be that guy at work that's fucking people are talking about, three to five times in the gym per week, each of them an hour in length, hour to an hour and a half, that's what I'd call a serious effort. So if I'm in the elevator with someone and they make the mistake of talking to me and asking me about workout routines and how they can get more jacked, and they're like, yeah, I've been seeing games blah blah, I'm gonna ask the question of how many times do you go to the gym per week.

1:20:12If they say two, I'd be like, you could definitely benefit from going like three or four. But if they say four or five, any addition of days beyond that outside of an attempt at professional bodybuilding, just yields a very small return on investment. That's what they're doing within the session that you're going to look at is. That's what happens next. If they say, well, I train five days a week, my next thing is to ask them a series of other questions, which you and I think we'll get to at the end of this is how to troubleshoot, because there's a lot. There's a big counterworms. Some of those questions may not even be training related.

1:20:40It's automatically be like, how much are you sleeping and what's your diet like? And then you get the whole like, well, you know, ever since I started fucking my secretary, I sleep a lot less and I'm like, hey, my man, but you could do less of that and grow more muscle. How should people progress weights over time? That's important. Secretaries? Oh, just in hypertrophy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Progression over time, very, very important question. So there are many ways to do it. But some of the ways run into problems. If you just add reps or load when you feel like it, you could be on to something.

1:21:13But also, you could just be being a little bitch. You know, like when exactly when you're squatting over four plates, do you feel like squatting more than fuck that? Never. I feel like not squatting at all. On the other hand, if you go up by very large amounts, you risk some technical decay and some injury probability. Your body's used to squatting four plates. You put a fifth plate on there. sure you're still good for a few reps but it is a very different exercise at that point. Your connective tissues are used to four plates, they're not used to five, some shit can go zig when a shit is agged and then you're fucked.

1:21:46So what I would say, the safe bet and a good bet, good bet from the perspective of kind of mandating yourself to progress, safe from the perspective is not extreme, is one of two options, media combination of both. Adding just a little bit of weight to the bar every single week while you're in what's called your accumulation phase until you get tired and need a deal of, or adding a repetition. Maybe two. So for example, if you're doing push -ups at home by yourself, no one loves you, no one cares if you liver die. The male man might say the smell is bad after a while and your cats have started to eat you, you know, that sort of thing.

1:22:18If you're at home working out with push -ups, you can do a set of 18 fresh, close to failure. Next week it's 19, the week after 20, the week after that try 21. When you can't beat 21, then you get 20 and your pectoral cell tired and sore, it's time for a few days off or a few days of an active rest kind of situation recovery until you come back and start hitting it again and then you slowly climb back up 19, 20, 21, 22 all time PR amazing. So adding reps is an awesome way to progress. The other way is adding load, small loads, right? The only kind I'm blown nowadays. Hey, anyone? No one. All right.

1:22:53So you go a hundred pounds on dumbbell press. Then maybe your gym goes up, I will fucking dumb up our soul's terrible example. Say why not a sec? Barbell, regular barbell bench press, 100 pounds, 10 reps, week one, week two, try one of five, still 10 reps, then one 10, then one 15, then so on and so forth. If you can't match or beat your PRs, then you have to take some rest, take it easy, recycle those numbers, and then try again. The trippy thing about lifting and progression on hypertrophy and strength is you progress by these tiny little increments. But tiny incremental progressions over months and months of training lead to big gains.

1:23:29Some people get impatient and they want to fucking slap the wheels on. Like they've been like pressing four plates for a while. Yeah, man. Fucking feeling it today. Put five on that motherfucker and it's like, okay, did you get it? You do have smaller plates. We do have smaller plates and you'll be baffled as to why we have them. It's for that slow study progression. Well, there's another thing that happens as well, which is people who are still using the exact same weight that they were 10 years ago. It's my weight that I use. I've heard people describe that like yeah, I used three plates on the bench like okay, you've attached yourself to a load.

1:24:02Very interesting. I imagine them. I was tapping a lot to you. Attach yourself to a load. Oh boy Chris, if you saw our dungeon slash gym, you, I get attached all sorts of things through the skin. Do you ever, do you ever total side note, but there's this thing where people put hooks through their like back skin? Yeah, I've seen it a few times on the internet just browsing. It's not what I finished to, but midway through. Start. In midway through, I start with some seduction. It's like a carry session. It's like an interest session sort of pick me up. Little break. Very nice. Yeah, but people do, like, you know, I mean, this is, we can go on the troubleshooting, but from my side, someone who's trained for 15 years and seen from the front line vanguard of the, fuckery of the gym floor, yeah, the fuckery.

1:24:50One of the biggest pieces of fuckery is that no one's progressively overloading because nobody's tracking anything. Totally. And you go away. I'm an app for that. And it's like, it'll link below. And it's like, 12 reps at 18 kilos on side laterals. Like that's, you know, that's like on a good day, that's how I feel. And like, that's what I do. And like, you've been locked in there for five years. Yes. At that weight. Yes. And if you want to just get the same physique at the end of the day, every single time, that's a swell way to do it. But most people in the gym to get the same physique they want better.

1:25:26One of the really cool things about either increasing your load and or reps is it forces you to fucking try. Yeah, £100 for 18 was something you could do. This week you do 105 for 18. It might be really close to your limit or not. Kind of two extreme scenarios there. One is like you hit your limit real quick. Hey, congratulations, you were training hard this whole time. Good for you. But you tested it now you know the other one is you'll one hundred for eighteen reps 105 110 115 120 Finally at 135 hit 17 reps. Guess what motherfucker? I got news for you You've been at 10 reps in reserve your whole fucking life and all of a sudden the reason that you haven't been progressing is like Oh shit I've never been training remotely hard enough So that can fix that problem big time.

1:26:12That's why I really like that kind of a a forward looking progression formula? Yeah, there's feedback in the mix, but you have to challenge yourself in ways that are programmatic, that might not be your preferred thing to do. When I have a leg press session, like so I use the RPIperture Fiat for my own training, and legit, yes, it's my app, but I actually fucking use it because it's fucking awesome. It doesn't always give me things that I wanna do, man. Last week I did XYZ and the leg press. Now it's one rep more and fucking five pounds more. I don't wanna see that shit on there. I'm gonna go by feel and go light, but the apps like hey science predicts you're gonna be Mr.

1:26:48Algorithms says yeah, Mr. Algorithms says shut the fuck up and do it and then you can find a lot of Interst rank if you have a goal that's a little bit outside of your ability you can find the inner Strength to go you know what okay, okay, okay, fuck it. I'll try and then you win and then you win again next week and you Winning again next weekend when your body is physically to fucked up to keep progressing You'll know because you'll be unable to match your old rep yours in a week before you did 500 for 19 to leg press last week this week you put 505 on like the thing says your goal is supposed to be 19 reps you get to 14 you're like oh shit help help people fucking press it up for you you get out you're like huh maybe it's just a one -off next will I session you come back you do the same thing on Hackswatt your legs are fucking done they need at least half a week maybe a whole week of easy time to deal load but then you've earned your deal load you're not just dealing with it because you're like yeah fuck it I'm not feeling training you know for a fact objectively you are no longer able to overload your musculature because you're not strong enough anymore.

1:27:43You're not making progress. Then it's time to pull back. So you get this amazing thing of, you know, exactly what to do each time. And when you're done, you know you're fucking done. It's like, how do you know, like, how does the hero stop chasing the bad man in the movie that captured a little girl? When he gets hit by a fucking truck and he can't walk anymore, you know he didn't give up. You want to be that guy. Get hit by that truck of just a little bit more weight or load weight or reps than you could do. How should people periodize the way that they put all of these all of this together? By downloading the RPR birch rap, Chris.

1:28:14But if you're a person with too little money, I would never associate you with you in person. My butlers might see you at the store or something like that, but they don't generally look in your direction. So generally the progression should be roughly linear. You add a similar small amount of load over time or repetitions. Sometimes both, you keep progressing over time, over some number of sessions, until two sessions in a row, you can't hit that same PR you hit in the last session. You're no longer a strong. That means your current level of cumulative fatigue is too high to present the most robust overload.

1:28:53At that point, you continue to progress linearly until you cannot progress anymore. Then it's time to do one of two things. one is a recovery half week, which means for half a week, whatever you are going to do, you take that same session and you divide everything roughly by half. Half the load, half the reps, half the sets, it's all fucking easy. It's a warm up, the whole workout takes 20 minutes. That lets your muscles recuperate a ton so you have another few weeks of progression later. If multiple muscles have arrived to that breaking point at the same time, and systemically you feel fucked up, your desire to train is really low, you're kind of sore all over and all the joints, you're maybe your sleep is kind of thrown off, your appetite is lower, that means you're just overreached total body.

1:29:38Then you probably need more like a week of half of everything. That's called a deload week. You take one of those and then you restart the progression of starting a few reps away from failure and next week add a little bit of load, add a rubber to, and go up up up up up up up up up up, relax, drop the fatigue. How long long how many weeks does this tends to be? Great question. If you're training pretty fucking hard in the first week, which you should be through your upshadow failure, at least above your minimum effective volume, something to give you a pump and a little bit of soreness, most people training that hard, if they train four, five or six times per week because the systemic fatigue is huge from that much training.

1:30:17Most people can't last longer than about four to eight weeks. If you were a beginner, you could go one year without deloting because you just don't, you're not strong enough to accumulate enough systemic fatigue. You see a guy squatting 500 for 10, you're like, my motherfucker's going to be feeling, I don't give a shit how good a shape he is. He's going to need a deal load pretty soon. It's so extreme that at the top ends of power lifting of very fatiguing lift like the deadlift. Some of the world's best deadlifters go heavy in the deadlift really heavy and hard. Once every two or three weeks only for the deadlift every other week is a deal.

1:30:54Two thirds of the week through the year deal. That's how much one week it can fatigue you but that's insanely exceptional. So I would say for most hard training people four to eight if you really know what you're doing four to six because if you really know what you're doing in training super fucking hard, you accumulate fatigue faster. If you're a beginner, if you train twice a week or three times a week, if you're training smaller muscles like arms and stuff, you may be able to go 12 or 16 weeks without needing a deal. How do you know that? You keep adding load to the bar or reps and you keep getting stronger.

1:31:23Then you're good to go. Keep going. One thing we haven't spoken about is training splits. Is it chest and back? Is it chest and triceps? Yeah. What is the, from a science perspective when it comes to blitz? Yes, let's go to the test tubes and the measuring devices, you know, old science. There are a few things I like to consider theoretically before designing a training split. One of them is within the context of the workout itself, when you ask, like, what am I doing today? Just make sure whatever your training gets high quality training if you pair it with whatever else you're training. Here's an example of one that does not happen.

1:32:02You do legs first and then you do chest. For many people who are advanced in training hard, you know this, after legs, my fuck, you ain't doing shit. You might be peeling yourself off the gym floor, the urine stain below you, maybe even a shit stain if you really squatted heavy. If you're not doing anything but going home and eating and drinking and recovering, so legs and then chest just might not make any fucking sense. On the other hand, if you have something like biceps and legs, bicep training doesn't make you that fucked up. It's just not a very big muscle. It doesn't make you systemically tired.

1:32:38You can't do it after legs because you've got nothing after legs, which you might be able to do it before. So maybe you'll do biceps first, leg second, that's a workable split in and of itself. That's part one. So muscles need to gel well together. Here's another example. If you do back first and then legs after can be done, but generally your lower back and mid -back are now so tired, you're going to be all of your squats and good mornings. You're going to fold over because you're back, not your legs. You have fucked up a limiting factor. Now that's the really big problem. So as long as the exercises play well together and the muscle groups play well together, which is to say you can train everything you want at hard and the muscle itself is limiting factor, there's no wrong answer.

1:33:15Is it cool to train chest with back or chest with quads or as long as you can hit all the muscles hard, no wrong answers? The other construct that we use in program design is if the muscle has been trained already, the next time we train it, is it recovered enough to train again? So for example, if you say, okay, here's my program. All right. I'm training three days a week. Okay, great. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. And it's chest, chest, chest. I have to ask you the question of, by Wednesday, what is it that you're doing with your and pathetically deflated super reaches. Now, you're going through the motions, your superfuckers are like, ah, the sucks.

1:33:56If you simply move the routine to Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you can hit chest all three days and there's enough time to recover between. So one thing that I look, if I'm looking over someone's program, I look for just generally, heuristically describe a symmetry, like where I look for each individual muscle group, like quads, where they at? Quads Monday, quads Thursday, seems to make sense. An in -hamstrings, Tuesday and Saturday, seems to make sense. But if you look, have hamstrings on Tuesday, day and then hamstrings on a Wednesday. I'm going to be like, can you at least try to explain that?

1:34:24Does that make sense? Like, there's an amount of time you want for healing. It doesn't have to be exactly symmetrical, but it's generally stimulating. Let it recover. Stimulate again. Here's nothing. People say, a whole body training doesn't work for me, whole body every day. It can, if you lower the volumes of everything. So if I'm doing back five days a week, someone could be like, this bullshit. What if it's three working sets of back. No problem because the stimulus is small, the recovery isn't great, and then the next day I'm ready to go. But if you're doing eight or ten sets of back, yeah, you're going to be training back two or three times a week.

1:34:57So with those two constructs, are the muscles getting their due justice, the way you've arranged them in each session? And also, is each session sufficiently far apart to get good recovery, but also not sufficiently so far that it's just too much recovery and you're sitting around doing nothing? Those Those are the two core elements of program design or splits as they're called. There are so many right answers within that universe, but also many wrong answers, that I can't say XYZ is the optimal split. So good bullshit detector for anyone listening to this. If anyone talks about like this is the best split for legs, this would have two options.

1:35:33One, YouTube, thumbnail title, game, total respect we play it to, I love it. or categorical fucking bullshit because there are so many right answers to what's the best leg split, so individually based as long as you do those two check marks. So splits, I'm very agnostic about. There's lots of wrong answers, but so many right answers, I can't say this is the best split. Whole body every day, push pull, upper lower, push legs pull, complex splits, Jared and I, I'd rather have to do multi -day splits. We do like, chastened shoulders in the AM, biceps and forms in the PM, tons of right answers. As long as, within each session, all the muscles are getting just desserts.

1:36:14Like, I've hung out with people at the gym where after like, deadlifting and squatting, they're over there doing forearm curls. I'm like, how much are you getting that? Dude, I'm fucking, I'm not even here. Like, it's a ghost curling. It's 15 reps in reserve. What's a fucking stupid split? Whereas, here's another example. You really wanna beef up your back. And you're gonna do tons of heavy -bound roast because coach said you need to fucking mid and thick lower back. But you do it the day after you've done a crap load of deadlifts and stiff leg dots. What are you doing? That's the wrong answer.

1:36:40You need to do it three or four days later when your back is fresh again. So those two things of exercises are getting checked marked within the session and they're spread roughly evenly earned away that allows for recovery between sessions. All that, everything that lives in that universe is a correct answer to splits and everything else is minor. Why haven't we talked about myoreps, arrest pause or drop sets. Why hasn't that factored into this? Is this just sprinkles on the top of topping on the top of cake? Yes, it's a detail that comes from at least two other variables. One, are you training sufficiently close to failure?

1:37:16Three reps, two reps, one rep zero, or even beyond, beyond failure? That's the first question. The other question is are you training in a proper repetition range of five to thirty repetitions? If you're doing those two things, there are many different set paradigms to get those two things. I say the third one is, are you doing the four factor rest model? So for example, if you're doing myoreps in the curl, you do a set of twelve, you put it down, five seconds later you pick up and do a set of six, put it down, set a four, or so on and so forth. Can we say that you're going close to failure? Yes.

1:37:57Can we say it's the right load selection? We can. What about that four factor rest model? Well, if after you curl for 12 and you're about to pick up and do your six reps, my reps, if you're like, don't do it. Then it's an exercise that's not good for my reps. And you'll notice something you'll see in RP all of our talk about my reps. We don't often do my rep, barbell back squats. There is no my wrapping that. When you go close to failure, you're fucking done for minutes. You don't just go back and do it. But for calves, you can myorep till you're blue in the face. You can superset. You can do all that stuff.

1:38:29So if you're bringing the muscle really close to failure, the rep range is appropriate. And whenever you're doing your next work set, be it a superset, myorep, cluster set, occlusion, whatever, the muscle is limiting factor because all the other things are cool. There are like at least eight different kinds of training paradigms, different modalities. you can use straight sets, downsets, drop sets, myoreps, what's it called, supersets. There's tons of other options, no wrong answers. As long as, just to read it real quick, you're getting close to fear on everything. The load selection is appropriate, not too light, not too heavy, and you're actually targeting the muscle itself as a living factor, which means you've checklisted the four factor rest model.

1:39:07What should people do if they're not making progress? They're at a plateau, they're the guy that's been using 18s on side laterals for five years. What's the trouble shooting checklist for you're not growing? You might be a bitch or there might be something up with the training. Yeah, just quit. I would say that's my best. Throw yourself out of window. I'll back it. When has training ever paid off? Was the number of times, Chris, that you've physically been laid in the gym? To me, it's zero. And everyone else also zero. I don't even know I don't have a lot of other fun to do this anymore. I just anytime people say, I'm really having struggling with lifting weights, my first answer is just like to stop.

1:39:42But if they don't accept that, there's a couple other good ideas. The list technically of troubleshooting ideas is kind of infinite, but there are a couple of big picture items you really wanna think through a talk, through if you're struggling with the sole situation, with gaining muscle. one of them sounds very pedantic but nonetheless it's worthy of repetition. How do you know you're not gaining muscle? At a very interesting interaction once on social media where this gentleman asked me how come he can't gain weight even though he's eating a ton of calories. I looked at his calories, looked at his body and I was like, fuck and I was like, look man my number one suspicion is that you're not actually eating this much food consistently.

1:40:31He is like, dude, I'm telling you I am and I'm like, okay, fine. I believe you. I rule that out. In order to be after I thought about it for a bit and asked him a few more questions, he actually was gaining weight just not as fast as he wanted, but the rate was like half a pound per week. It was totally fine. So his initial submission of, I'm not gaining weight was wrong. With some people when they tell you I'm really not putting on muscle size, go, how do you know that there's only really one golden fleece way of figuring it out? has your repetition strength in the exercises for that muscle group been going up over time, or has it been staying really steady?

1:41:04Let's say we're talking about back. How's your one arm dumbbell row? How's your bent row? How's your cable row? How's your pull ups? How's your pull downs? If you're like, again, man, we're last year. I've really put on fucking just tons of fucking strength onto them. Conversation over, mother fucker. Why is it coming from? Of course it's fucking muscle gain at some level. You can't get neural efficiency for that long. But if you are stalled in your exercises, you're stalled in your body weight. Yeah, you might not be growing. So one big one off that body weight thing is Are you giving yourself enough nutrients to actually gain muscle?

1:41:36One of my quote myself what a fucking egotistical move that is I do it all the time my man quoting me or quoting yourself both my man If you weigh 150 pounds There's no way to gain pain or main gain your way to 180 by the laws of physics you have to gain weight. And the only way to gain weight is either strangely to reduce your physical activity, which most people won't do, or increase the amount of food coming in. So sometimes people will struggle with muscularity, younger folks, oftentimes males in their 20s, 30s, 40s, begin, man, I'm just not putting on size. They'll be like, how's your eating?

1:42:10And you often you get this like, whoa, book, and you know, man. And he's sentenced to begins with well. Yeah, here's a already off the cliff. You know, my boss is riding my ass, I have a family. I asked him how to get diet. right. I didn't give a shit about your boss. You can fucking while you're getting fired, you can eat a burrito, it doesn't matter. Maws is in retrograde. That's a real problematic one. When you know what's funny about astrology, is it always says something is in retrograde? You know it's not astronomy, because one thing I like to ask astrologers is, so which planets are in anterior grade?

1:42:40And they're like, what's that? Like that's the opposite of retrograde dumb other fuckers. Read an actual astronomy book. Just kidding. People watching this were in astrology. You know what I'm saying? A lot a lot of finance white bitches love that shit. Am I right, Chris? Is that your jam? Dude, at one of my live shows that I did in Austin, I did some work in progress shows, and this girl came up after a... we'd finished and she was very nice, but I asked to what she did for work, and she said that she uses quantum healing in the fifth dimension to inform her crypto investments. I've been doing it in the fourth dimension this whole time, I'm no wonder my crypto shit is fucked.

1:43:18Damn you San Bankman freed. That's intense man. What did you, what did you say it? Did you just assume she was... I asked him to say it again. I said, hey, can you tell me that again? She did and I said, that's the most Austin job I've ever heard of. And she probably danced away on her Bitcoin Ethereum carpet, I don't know. Dogecoin. Yeah. Do you have you ever gotten San Bankman freed on the show? No, he's in jail. Nah, fuck, can't you do like a jail episode where you set this whole thing up in prison? I wanted to do it with the guy that run Fire Festival, Billy McFarlane. Oh, Christmas, I, I, my brown belt, and you Jetsu, and I'm a little jacked.

1:43:56And I'm Russian too, I got the tough guy face. If you have to go to prison to interview him, bro, I'll be one of your security guards, free of charge. Mm -hmm, I wanna meet him. You just wanna be a run man. Him particularly. He's out of jail now. So... What the fuck am I doing? on a stupid muscle shit on your show. You got a huge platform interview people that matter. Martin Schrely canceled this episode. Yeah, I'm trying. Oh, he's the guy that like did the whole like shorting of each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He could have is on the economics of it. It's actually totally valid what he was doing.

1:44:29Believe it or not. Get Brian Kaplan on here and he'll explain all that. Oh, no way. Oh, that's right. I watched him on. You're amongst illustrious. Get him on here again. He is. He's a fucking man. Yeah, he's ignoring my emails as usual. So the Martin Schreley guy, what are first of all very unfortunate name. Second of all, the way he phrased everything was like, do you have a PR firm that's working against you telling you to do this stuff? In any case, fuck did we get on this bullshit? Yeah, 5D, 5th dimension, quantum powered Ethereum, quantum... Crypto trading, informs my crypto trading. This is like...

1:45:06She was... I mean, she's going to be richer than all of us, so... or hopeless and alone with no quantum powers. Yeah. Something else I've been thinking about during this conversation, which we haven't spoken about yet, motivation to train. Is that even a thing that's studied scientifically? Yeah. Okay. What's the TLDR? Motivation is something spoken about an awful lot. It's kind of like the god of the gaps of a lot of psychology because people want to make doing things that they want to do, but maybe difficult to do easier, and that is motivation for them. Yes. For the most part. Yes. What does science have to say about motivation?

1:45:46Yes. If you care, please remind me to come back with no stupid bullshit jokes about the troubleshooting stuff. We get back to that. Yes. We'll do the thing. Yes. Yes. So there are a couple of things to say about motivation. One is motivation itself is technically in the construct of adherence, is just one of the parts of it. There's inspiration, there's motivation, there's habit, there is interaction between sort of willpower and all that Goggins shit, which is super valid in context and then there's something called passion Which one's you have a passion for something? You no longer ask questions of motivation?

1:46:23Like people ask me like what motivates you to go to the gym? I'm addicted to going to the Getsick -Askin' a crackhead like what's motivating you do that light up that rock? You know what? That's what I want to do, right? So there is a whole rich psychology around just the one part we call motivation. But that richness actually informs a lot of the things that it's a good idea to employ to increase your motivation. We're really trying to increase this adherence. Try to make you get to the gym. Make sure you get in there. How you get in there doesn't much matter. So one is having good sources of inspiration.

1:46:56If you surround your social media, if you're feed as a lot of people who look like you kind of want to look a little bit like them, and they've got a lot of positive and encouraging shit to say and I can do attitude. That's a good start. It's not going to keep you in the gym, but it might get your ass in there on a fucking rainy day. Another thing is to set goals. Motivation is in many senses defined as the pull towards a goal. You get rid of a goal. You're technically not motivated to do shit. Like animals in a lab are motivated at a goal based, at least neurochemically. You could have puberty on here.

1:47:29I'll tell it to you better. is like motivation is goal oriented, even if the goal is equalized this amount of chemical between one brain cell and another. So if you have a goal of like, I want xyz amount of reps on my lifts that's realistic, or even a motivation like, I want to be able to tell myself, I'm mad enough to go to the gym four times a week every fucking day this year. That's my goal, a process goal, instead of an outcome goal. That's a big deal. If you're goalless, if you're going to the gym for some very general construct like get fit or have abs or something you haven't really quantified in any way at all or really contextualize, it's easy to be like, eh!

1:48:10It's like you have to be able to answer the question in your head, if you're sitting like you got home after work, tough day at the job, you sit down on your couch, you have to give yourself a reason to get up. If your reason is nebulous and like, I think fitness is something I told myself I do, you're not getting up. When push comes the shove, you're fucked up, beer and you're done. But if you're like, I told myself, contract with myself, I'm gonna fucking make it four times a week. Awesome. There is another part of this motivation thing that comes in with how easy are you making it on yourself.

1:48:40You don't want to have a big barrier to entry. Training partners help a lot. You sit down on the couch and your training partner fucking text you're like, where are you at, pussy? You're fucking probably gonna show up. If it's just you, it's gonna be tougher. If your gym is 15 minutes away, you'll fucking do this in California traffic for 15 minutes. If it's 45 minutes away, holy fuck, that makes it really tough. Another thing is doing the kind of stuff that the gym you like. That's where the favorite exercises comes in. If you fucking can't wait to smash some deadlifts, hey, by all means, fuck that optimal shit.

1:49:10Go and then engage us in deadlifts. So there's a lot of stuff coming together. Another thing I will say, this is just my own little bullshit. Spin on it. This is a much richer conversation we could have in great depth. I want to put this in a way that's both charitable and sufficiently comedic to be expressive. If you have to ask how to get motivated to go to the gym, you don't need to be going to the gym. You don't want it enough. When you're sick and tired of looking and feeling like shit, you'll show up on the fuck. I'll see you there because you're going to look in the mirror and you're going to be like, fuck that.

1:49:44You're going to want to be in the gym. And if you're gonna make this a lifestyle, you have to lower the barriers, make the gym cheaper, closer training partners, exercises you like, and you have to raise the impetus, goals, inspiration, and fucking goddamn real desire to be there. The people that have no problems showing up to the gym are the people that want to be there. And no amount of Rocky Balboa fucking movies are gonna get you to that place. A lot of that is also built with the experience of having the gym be a place where you get results by pushing yourself, winning little mini challenges and having fun with it.

1:50:25When I think about what does the gym mean to me, I still remember what it meant to me when I was 15 and first walked in. It was a scary place full of scary people that had scary things going on and I was bad at them I didn't want to be there. After 25 years of training, the gym is my spirit home anywhere I go. I could be anywhere in the world. One thing I like to do is I come into a gym. Let's say I'm traveling, go to Thailand or some shit like that. After enough ladyboys, you gotta hit the gym. Should I even strong enough to lift them off? Anyway, so I come into the gym and I've been doing this for a generation.

1:50:54I grab a barbell and I just cinch in like a deadlift grip. It's some kind of fucking spirit connection. I belong in the gym because to me the clanking and the and the smells and the machines, they are experiential symbols of progress, of love, of passion, positive feedback, secondism. Yes, of a good time. So one thing is get yourself into the gym. However, you see fit consistently. Have a good fucking time there doing what you love, push yourself, get those little mini victories, RPI purchase apps, those are doing a little better over time. And let that fill you up. Let that grow on you. And then after a while, also, it feels great, especially after the workout.

1:51:35Like after a really solid leg workout, someone could punch you in the face. You'd be like, ah, I was pretty sweet. And dolphins. See you next time, buddy. That's it. You don't give a shit. That stress relief, everything you're driving home after the jam, hard day at work, blah, blah, blah. You're like thankful for shit. It's like a post mushroom trip clarity every single time. And as good for your health, it's just all these fucking massive green chalk boxes all around. You get into that habit and that's the big part of habit. You get the habit of doing the gym and It's oldest hurricane of positive influences and reinforcement.

1:52:07You're not going anywhere Three days after not being in the gym like you know, you're fucking mother -in -law drags the family to like some fucking cabin in Northern California Just us having fun as a family. No gym after three days. You're like you guys this is gonna turn some man's shit about to get to my god Here you're at the local gym doing this and then everything is right again And so getting up to that point, don't push yourself so hard that you hate the gym. Remember, it's all voluntary. It's all for fun. It's a leisure activity. I have a PhD and a fucking leisure activity. Some of the PhD in bowling is equally amount of social value.

1:52:39A lot of the more. So it's all good. Start, start easy. Get to the gym twice a week, maybe three times, 30 minute workouts, 45 minute, get some progress going. Get into the habit. Make it easy on yourself. Once you're in the habit for long enough, you can start to crank up the intensity and you're gonna want to be there. And you never have to ask yourself the question again of what motivates you to go to the gym because the answer is, it's where I want to be. What else didn't we cover in troubleshooting? What are the other big ones? Yeah. Have you been to our earlier conversation purposefully progressing in loads or reps?

1:53:11You haven't been pushing yourself? What the fuck is wrong with you? Like, we're one of those guys that you mentioned, like he's doing the 18 kilogram dumbbells all the time. Have you tried the 20s? Have you tried doing more reps? So making sure that person is kind of gun to the head treating it as a thing. Another one is where are you on the balance of recovery versus under recovery versus over recovery? If you ask someone like, oh man, my legs haven't fucking grown. Okay, how hard are you training your legs? Pretty fucking hard. How long do they get sore for? Like, wow, I just don't get sore anymore.

1:53:39I got sore for the first couple months of training. Bullshit, anyone training legs properly. Properly, is this gonna be sore from when they finish the leg workout or a few hours later until the day before their next leg workout out unless it's a deal a week in perpetuity if you train intelligently. That's definitely something I think that people get used to, which is this conditioning to training where you only are sore after the Christmas break. Yes. You only are sore after the deal a week. Yes. And then your background and it's like, ah yeah, you know, like weeks fall through eight. I'm fine.

1:54:15I'm just like, I'm just recovered. Ask yourself to the person who is in that position. and ask yourself the philosophical question. Oh, is what I do? I've answered that in the affirmative vlog ago. I tried the whole mirror thing where I looked at the mirror and I'm like, you're a world renowned power button. Still, oh yeah, well that I earned. Um, ask yourself a philosophical question. If you're used to some shit and it's no longer experientially challenging for you, are you really so sure you're growing your best? Overload is a principle in training, but it transfers into psychology as well. Your body's pretty fucking good at detecting what's challenging for you.

1:54:59If you're psychologically pushing yourself to the limits quite often, you can rest assured you're probably working hard enough. If you've been used to some shit for months and you're wondering why it's not growing you, why the fuck would it grow you? The body generally likes to resist being changed in many ways because in our evolved ancestral environment, we're very resource constrained. You don't want to piss away tons of resource -fighting hypertrophy. You have to continually challenge yourself. So if someone's like, well, yeah, I'm like recovery is not a problem. I'm going to be like, try training harder, try training more.

1:55:26If they say, dude, I basically can't recover, I'm going to say pull back. So it's two different answers based on how you're doing it. It's like, it's like if you're helping someone with your area, one of your many areas of expertise, which is I assume talking to women for the eventuality of getting them to do fun things with you. If a guy's like basically saying nothing and he comes up to you, he's like, what are I'm wrong. You got to talk motherfucker. He's right. You got to raise it up. But if he sits there like me and he's like She's like, oh, you're off. Let me keep going. You're like, come here.

1:55:53You have to talk less same with the recovery thing pluses and minuses. I already mentioned the nutrition. The food thing sleep is huge. I'll put it very very simply for sleep I could talk a lot more about sleep and other technicalities. I'll say it this way. If you are chronically under slept I actually don't need to hear about your program or your diet. I don't give a shit because it's all just downhill It's like telling me about how awesome your new fighter plane is, but I'm like, well, kind of fuel you're using. You're like, I, we're supposed to put fuel in it. And I'm like, the fuck out of my face.

1:56:21You have to sleep. It's critical. It's the cornerstone of everything. How do you know you need enough, you're not getting enough sleep? If you can't stay awake throughout your day without like a medical dose of caffeine, you need to sleep more. Could be nine hours for you consistently. Could be six. Ronnie Coleman, apparently slept five or six hours a night, more or less of his whole life, it looks recovered to me, you know, huge genetic differences there in sleep requisite, but you have to be getting enough sleep. So enough sleep, enough food, the training has to be sufficiently hard and you have to recover.

1:56:54And then everything else is details. It could play with the rep ranges, frequencies, so on and so forth. That's a troubleshooting list that's available on our YouTube channel. There's like an hour long bullshit, but those are kind of the big pictures that I want to talk to people about. Dude, you're a legend. I really appreciate what you guys are doing over at It's genuinely genuinely a big change. I think back to when I first started training 2006, 2007, scraping the bodybuilding .com forums trying to find a meme that might have the insight of how to get bigger and putting horny goat weed in your custom my protein.

1:57:31I still do that. Did I not get the memo? Right. No, it's just, it's really great. I really, really appreciate what's happening with this sort of evidence -based community. I think that a genuiney think that what you guys are doing is making way more people way more jacked with way less Uncertainty so if that's not moving humanity forward in a good way. I don't know what is Chris. Thanks so much, man That really is our shit at RP like all the fucking PR and marketing lingo aside and all my rich guy jokes We're trying to help Intelligent careful people get the best information and digital tools they need to make their best results because Mr.

1:58:12Nick Shaw and I The co -founder of RP we came up in a similar world in which you did where is all bro science nonsense And we saw that just normal fucking smart people were not getting answers to their questions They had the money they had to intelligence. They have the time. There's just too much goddamn bullshit around So we start our P. Well, you know what we're not gonna do bullshit just facts Sometimes that doesn't sell that well. And some people ask us like, hey, can you put XYZ types of workouts in your app? The answer is no, because there's nowhere near optimal. You want someone to hold your hand and do things that you think are fun?

1:58:43Don't tons of other great companies do that. You want results? You come see us in a few of the other evidence -based folks in this space. Why should people go? They want to download the app. Fuck fine, oh man, I get that shit free. My butler's downloaded for me. Can we get my butler's on the show? You imagine like three hour episode with one of Dr. Mike's butlers. You're like, what's your name? He's like, I'm butler 57. you're like, oh, oh God, you don't have names. No, absolutely not. Sir, doesn't like us to look at him in the eyes. Yes, sir, doesn't like us to know him by name. Asking answers to that, he kind of like tells his eyes away.

1:59:10Like, that is an abused man. I've seen that before. That's hot. Honestly, the best place to go is probably just the YouTube. So, Renaissance Prudization on YouTube, if you can't spell that, I can't spell that. RP Strength, if you can't spell that, Dr. Mike Mussel searched the channels in black and red, it has RP just get in there, watch the videos, great thumbnails and very well optimized. We had some advice from Mr. Chris Williams and back in the day. Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you for coming through. I love being on here. Thanks so much, Chris.