¶ Life/Episode Updates
what's up guys happy tuesday welcome back to the final episode of train prosper for the year of two thousand twenty two brian and i are going to give a little bit of a recap of the year talk through pretty much just some of the biggest kind of take aways for us from the year things we may be changed our mind on were pretty profound moments us and hopefully you guys as listeners can find that information helpful as always before we jump into the topic for the final episode brian what's the latest
yeah it's been like
yeah
two weeks since we spoke to you guys so we miss you and it's cool to chat again i realized as i was writing my up dates i had to actually look back at what my updates were from two weeks ago because i was like what in the world has even been going on in my life and then i was quickly reminded by this awful ringing in my ears that believe is called tennis or tenets or one of those two
tenitis
how did you say it
tenitis
so i actually thought it was tonight is as well but three out of four of the last people i've talked to have told me it's tenedos which makes sense sort of because it has a double end but it doesn't sense because every other disease is an itis so i'm going to leave it to the listener and see what they have to say but
i was going
yeah
to say i'm gonna go out
yeah
on an on an ego branch here and say you and i are right and everyone else is wrong
okay here we go well my mom and dad are
yeah
both really smart well read people and they both said tenedos so
we're probably
so
wrong
that that excuse my my perception a little
m
bit but so silly you all know i got sick with this awful hand foot and mouth
oh
disease a number of weeks slashed months ago i was actually curious when i got sick again just recently how long ago it was and it was actually under two months so this has been by far the worst like fall winter sickness season of my adult life and i think it makes sense like when we actually look at the fact that we've been in some version of isolation in quotes for the last two and a half or three years we've been wearing masks for periods of time before that i actually made it through
that entire pandemic without really getting sick at all i think i caught covid but didn't get tested for it just because i lost sense of taste for five days but that was my only symptom so i really didn't get sick for for almost three years then in two months i get sick twice and this time was a weird one because one thing that is usually pretty ubiquitous across ear infections is that if you have a bacterial air infection you get a really high fever and if
you have a viral air infection from like a cold other seasonal sickness type things you usually won't get a fever or it won't be as high of a fever so i have these two ears like a week and a half ago that are just ugging me and it keeps getting worse and worse but i have no fever so i'm like continuing to train and go about life and like really unaffected aside from the the the ear infection itself the pain and then the kind of discombobulation of where i am in space type thing
but turns out i went to the doctor because kim urged me and was like hey this isn't getting better like go get it checked out and he was like yeah you have bacterial or infection in both ears and your right ear looks like it's about to pop so um so i started out anbiotics that day and m on day seven right now and i still have this tendadus or tonihtis and some of the have some pressure in my ears too like they're definitely not painful or anything but i think i let it
go a little too long because i feel like this is a lingering thing that's pretty shifty so that is up date number one really awful city season of sickness second my knee as i mentioned on two episodes or two weeks ago when we last spoke i was recommended by my p t to do glut meat activation before any of my squading movements and i've been continuing to do this and it's been incredible like my knee in the last two weeks i think has made more progress than it did in like the twelve weeks
prior to that since i got the p r p and so yeah i'm just huge testament to nicole for telling me to do that and then to anybody else out there that's having any sort of like instability issue at all um what it's exactly supposed to do is stabilized the knee so the big thing being you know what i would notice it would be i would descend down in any squat movement and like right in the last three or four inches before i was approaching the bottom my knee would kind of like
wabble side to side not not super dramatically but enough that i could feel it i don't know if you could see it or not since i start doing the glut meat activation work prior the knee doesn't wobble as i approach the bottom of the any squat movement any more so that's been huge and then kind of that self test that i have where i just love to go at the bottom of a squat in body weight i call it like the palio chair and i just kind of like to sit down there for a few minutes a day i'm actually
having a number of times where i go to do that where there is no tugging pulling or anything like that sometimes there still is i don't know exactly what affects it but at least there's sometimes where i do it and it's it's basically like i'm back to new so so that's pretty cool and then i have some updates on some programming things for my program and for paragons program but let's jump over to strike because he's in ball right
yeah
now and i want to hear all about this
yeah so officially back in polly my girl friend jenny and i will be here for a year we have a year least we have a year kites switches it's kind of like a temporary residence
yeah
permit i would imagine similar akin to like a derivative of us green card
yeah
sort of thing
m
um super excited about that brian and i were talking off ere it was rough traveling and this was this was my fault a hundred percent jenny was like we need to buy flight we need to buy the flight we need to buy the flight and i was just like i don't know why i was just dragging my feet you know
yah
i was like we'll do it later i'm just too busy with work stuff and
h
then there was only like one kind of flight
oh
option left it wasn't like
yah
terrible but it was still rough
yah
day so we had like six hour flight from d d c to san francisco then went from san francisco to type which was fifteen hours and then we had another
o
six and a half hour flight
yeah
from type into bolly and then we had a four hour essentially cab rider with we know a car to get to the villa so it was just like brutal um and then spent the week end like i'm very much so the person like i will immediately sacrifice to try and like i want to get back to my routine right ive on my routine and i really hate the longer time away from it so over we got in a sentially like friday night all day saturday and sunday i was just like mowing through
check lists of like upgrading the internet and having someone come in stall different things like going into town running our motor bikes like setting everything up getting like set up ordering desks you know char as for the office sort of thing so
m
that hopefully by once we're here like a week i will be like cruising altitude again like back to just mowing through work and training and all of that stuff
yeah
so it's been hectic
oh
first couple of days but the one thing i will report is i've done it three times now so i feel like it's not coincidence but something about being here like shifts time schedule forward like eight thirty rolls around i'm getting yawn and stuff which is going to be interesting for the podcast because
m
of recording at nine p m you know my
yeah
time but then i'm up like five thirty five forty five like naturally
m
you know and and i'll lay there and be like can i go back to bed and i'm like no i'm just up and that's what's happened every single time i've come to volley like and those it's the only places where it ever happens where my
huh
circadian rhythm just shifts into like that specific um set up
interesting i noticed that in the winter verse the summer and so like with with the time change that we have like that one hour time change it really affects me even more than the hour that it should you know the point where i go from waking up naturally at like six thirty to waking
yeah
up at like four or four thirty or something like that in the mornings so like for our podcast today i set in alarm for five thirty to get up but i was up at four fifteen
oh
it's kind of like just a non issue you know
yeah yeah it's it's really wild and then let's kick it over to you for work up dates because then i have one big work up date that i'm very excited to finally share
colum so on my program it's kind of cool that i can talk
yeah
about like what i'm doing with my training and then have it also be what's happening with my program that i offer on the app so so for my programming currently at this moment as of twelve twenty we're in the beginning of week five of what's going to be a six week mesocycle and these aren't actually weeks there like weekend have but so there's like maybe two or three weeks left in the hypertrophy mesocycle that we're doing and then i am jumping into what will be called
a three the six week strength phase and i haven't done one of these since the fall of twenty twenty one when i did it in the wrong way and and i didn't enjoy it at all we've tale a lot about this on the podcast where i still had that emotional tie to like my low bar back squat and my conventional dead lift numbers and m yeah percentages are a tough thing when like your one at max dead lift is over five hundred pounds or it used to be and then you're like yeah
triples at eighty percent and that doesn't feel super light i kind of beat myself into the ground pretty quickly in that cycle but this time what we're doing is we are going to focus on staying mostly in the four to eight rep range four to seven for most things so there's going to be a lot of the benefits of the strength cycle i think come down to resensitizing to certain movements and certain rep ranges but since i tend to train in relatively lower rep ranges anyways
like five to ten is usually my norm and we're just shifting that to lie to seven i don't think there's going to be a ton of recensitization that occurs from rep ranges but i am taking out a lot of movements so the programming is going to be three times a week full body which i'm really excited about just from like opening up time in my life perspective and i am essentially choosing like one movement for each body part twice a week so like if i have quads for example they will be like one
day with pendulum squat and one day with hack squat and then i don't even think i have a leg extension in there at all for hams i have one day with r d l and one day with a leg girl and i am eliminating the forty five degree hip extension and then saying you know same deal across the upper body there's like two days of the three that will have a chest move and two of the three actually i think every day has a back movement just because the back is like the bats the back the rear dealt the all
the different things um and then i think there's only one day with any arm work at all and i think i'm doing those like also in the know five to seven rep range or something along those lines like you know standing hair or curls so i'm really excited for that i i'll get into the next thing in a second but paragon's programming also has some cool stuff dropping in the winter so like in the january for the new year so the way that the cycles are working out as we're finishing up an
eighteen week hypertrophy program right now and so the neck thing in sequence is also a strength cycle for paragon and so january sixteenth were jumping into a strength cycle there for paragon we programme these strength cycles a little bit more in the lowering rep ranges like the one to five is range because we really like to give people the opportunity to ex their strength set new pris things like that most of our members aren't twenty five years into their
training journey and so they are actually still kind of setting pres and it's really cool for them to be able to show off all that hard work so so we love programming those cycles with an approach to one at max and then because not everybody wants to do strength and because we know that as far as nutritional periodization goes that it's probably not the best thing in the world to be working up to a one rat max if you're in a calory deficit and we know that a lot of people jump into
a calory deficit in the new year whether it's to be you know leaner for the spring and summer or whether it's like a new year's resolution something along those lines we created a specialty eight week hypertrophy cycle that starts whenever you want to start it so it's it's it's a the way it's created is instead of it being like hon a specific date like most of our programs run on a calendar this one is like a special program that you can just add when you're ready
so if you join our program january second you can start at january second if you want to finish the hypertrophy cycle that ends january fifteenth and then you don't want to go into strength next but you'd rather do this special hypertrophy cycle than you could start this special hypertrophy cycle on the fifteenth from the beginning without having to back date the calendar or anything like that and then the so anyway those are those are kind of some of the options we have there across you know
the various programs that we offer so pretty much something for everybody regardless of what your goals are in twenty twenty three
before i jump into mine i just wanted to say like kudos to you else k for pretty much like saving people from themselves
¶ Online Coaching Upgrade
yeah
because i mean there's a there's a time run
yeah
i was strictly nutrition right or like i don't want to take the training it's just i don't feel confident enough in my skill set there sort of thing but that's something that you will find a lot of people do is like people will run like we're in a calory deficit we'd be in like the deep end of a twelve six week calory definite and i find out like my client was running like a wen ler five three one or something like that and why
right right
why are you
right
doing this and sometimes
yeah
people just don't know like you don't know what
yeah
you don't know and like i said just shout out to you and lckfo'relike hey this is a just foresight right of it's a new year people have read olutions people are going to want to improve body composition drop body fat they're going to be eating less we probably don't want them one at max dead lifting right because
yep
one year decreased capacity to recover
ye
you're at a decreased capacity to
yeah
perform and express maximal strength so
yep
really really cool there for you guys
thanks dude
anything else from you
yeah no no no we'll jump into to more things later on i'm pretty good on my updates
okay i am so excited to share this this project has been underway
oh
since july and then by the time this episode releases we will have released like the intro from it so myself and jackson pas
yeah
who is a coach in ph d out of australia have a project launching that is called the online coaching upgrade it is aimed at aspiring coaches office coaches who want to get into and grow within the industry the right way so the first cohort will release or will open and start early february january and it is nine education modules and then also the every every system that i have ever built to run my business is include and in it all the systems that jackson uses to
run his business are included in it and you get basically then at the end of the eight weeks we have a live open round table call as well so if you are someone who's very new green to the space or interested and interest interested in entering this is a very very well put together project from myself and jackson that we've been grinding away on for for months and i'm very very happy to be able to finally start releasing public information about it
that's so awesome dude i'm so for you i of course had no idea that this was happening in the background i knew you were working on something big but
yeah
jackson is obviously somebody like that's pretty well known in this pace his content and his researches
oh
is extremely well respected so how did you actually connect with him and get this whole project going
so i mean bully is one of the places where people like you get a lot of influence or type type of people in different things
hm
because it's very instagram able per se um i ended up just at dinner with jackson one night through like a mutual friend and then we just were talking about work and coaching and stuff um and we realized were like really really similar and then him and i just got such another time and we're talking about business stuff and he just like pitched this idea he's like listen this is a fantastic thing and then the person that i had viously mentioned a few weeks back that i
had and hired as like a consultant to to move like a coach on to these systems was jackson
m
so that was like a big project and it was really really cool to see like someone okay we have an existing now large client roster um what are the things to do like these are the things that we want to shirts are done like really really well and it was really cool for me because i mean obviously they've done few client checking system is out there which is a part of upgrade and then the only other tool that i have out there was the muscle gain and fat muss models which are obviously
in um upgrade and what thing was really cool there is prior to me ever meeting jackson like his muscle gain model is in the model that i built um
that's awesome
and so it was really cool for him to just like oh i built this thing based on like
ah
all like your logic that you
uh
put out in this in this book
h yeah
and yeah it's been really really cool to just like okay it kind of helped me with like some validation because it was like so much in entrepreneur ship it can just be like you want an island and i'm like i just built these things that i needed to help me organized in all of these things and then as it is getting into hands of other people with established businesses and stuff it's just been like pretty cool to see can help like more people and i think this is goin to be a really
really great project in the space that i think the cornerstone is like integrity
hm
i think especially for people younger people coming in and stuff there's a lot of like what i would consider kind of like dishonest practices right people are like okay here join this program you're going to make ten thousand dollars a month in like people don't really know how to coach yet and all these things and it's they're super super expensive programs and it's just kind of like i don't know it doesn't sit right with me so i'm really happy be able
m
to do something about it and that we're
hm
giving you like the educational resources but then also like here are the systems to run your business like take them and implement them and i think it should be a really fun and fulfilling project on just numerous fronts for both of us
yeah dude i'm super amp really really excited to see how this all plays out for you guys
yeah so we probably won't put anything in the show notes whatever but you can find information on myself and jackson's instagram and you can also visit the online coaching up grade dot com where you can drop your email and stuff for when we do officially launch
sweet very cool and then you just posted on your story about this gym in bolli that
yeah
had this amazing leg press last time you were here and the range of motion
yeah
was insane and it looks like you said
yeah
they replaced it with a
like
seated
a
like horizontal leg
yeah
press
like a selectorized seated
yeah
like
yeah
breast yeah
so that's pretty absurd so how do you feel i mean
ah
how do you feel about
yeah
that is are you going to stay at that gym like what is what is talk to me about the gym and molly what are you doing
so there's that was a gym that i would go to like one day per week because they had that leg press but they also have like an old technogym leges sion that is like ungodly lengthened to overload
m
for le extension which is cool because the other gym that i would go to the leg extension has to be one of the worst ian's for
yeah
a leg extension ever built like the thing that is so absurd about it is the like the pad that you sit on like
yeah
that it's like three and a half feet long i like they built
m
his fort fucking shaw and bradley like no one's femersare this long it's
right
just but and then you it's literally just like the only range of motion is short on it like you can't even get
m
to a ninety degree
okay
on it um m another gym just opened that is going to be you know
¶ Updated thoughts on reverse drop sets
almost exclusively outfitted with arsenal strength however their equipment isn't coming in until mid february
yeah m
um so i will be back at you know body factory which is the gym i went to you last time and and there's like another one opening to and i might like bounce around a little but i think eventually i'll probably pay for two which will be absurd because
m
the gym prices here for like the nicer
m
ones
oh
are way
yah
there like i just paid
yah oh
for the first month at body factory and think it was like a hundred and eighty dollars us for the month
wow that's
yeah
huge
yeah
that's like one of those boutique gyms here that would have like a son and a hot tub and a steam shower and like all that stuff
yeah they do but that's another upgrade to the i don't
yeah
i don't even know what that month is but because i paid for it last time and then i went once
yeah
i'm like okay well not going
it
to do
must
that
be
again
so expensive to ship in all that equipment though to bally from
yeah
i mean insane i can't imagine the initial start up cost of something like that
you you have to be very well
yeah
funded but i mean
yeah
people are paying for it there
yeah
it is a very interesting business model now to see how it's grown in stuff since the first time i was here
yeah i'm done
okay
yeah you want to jump into the topic
let's jump into it yeah so like like i said when i when i opened it we're just going to have a discussion on kind of a year in a view and some of the biggest more notable things for us that we either change our minds about or just really really happy and kind of have been profound for us that we wanted to share with you
hm
so first one is updated thoughts on reverse drop sets you want to kick us
yeah
off there brian
yeah yeah so i basically phrase all of these as likeupdated thoughts on and so i think that it doesn't necessarily mean on all of these that i did come let
oh
one eighty
yes
or we did a complete one eight or anything like that it's more just like hey these are things that we've talked about throughout the year on the podcast and here are some thoughts that i may have that are slightly different and how we originally talked about it so the reverse
oh
drop that was something i was like super
yeah
big on maybe even more than a year ago yeah because we had i was talking about reverse drop sets with helms on the episode we did with him which was like
a
august
year and a half
september
ago yeah
of twenty twenty one was like a year and a half ago but reverse drop sets have been something that i've been like super intrigued by
oh
for a while
yeah
and essentially what reverse drop sat is is you like a short overload movement i always love to use the example of a cable row because i think that that is a perfect short overload movement where it's it's short it's short on the strength curve meaning your body just it's weaker as your hands get closer to your body um and it's not as short as like a dumb bell row would be in that lie at the bottom of a dumb bell row there's not actually any tension where as in a cable row there's
some so it's a little more even of a resistance curve but the strength curve is is short either way that's that doesn't exactly matter essentially the reverse dropset is that you take a set to one or two repshi of failure it can't be actually to failure or it doesn't really work and then you quickly add twenty percent weight so maybe you have a hundred pounds on the cable stack you go to eight reps to one to two r r and then you quickly shift the pin to a hundred and twenty pounds and you
continue again and you more or less try to match the reps that you achieved on the first set so if you got eight range emotion wraps you would get eight on the heavier set but you would understand that maybe you get like one or two full raps and then the rest or partial raps where you attempt to get a full rep um so i used reverse drop sets for a really really long time in my program and part of the reason i was super intrigued by them was this whole idea of biasing
the length and position of a movement that kind of lax sufficient tension there um but over time as i've continued to use these reverse drop sets in my programming i also started incorporating something that i've been calling a lengthened set which is basically the same thing as a s drop set except instead of doing it immediately after the first set you would take like a full two to three minutes rest and then do it and so in comparison to a reverse drop set i think that
the length and set provides a couple distinct advantages one is that you can actually take your full range of emotion set prior all the way failure because you have that full rest so you don't need to leave anything on the table in that first set um second you can go heavier potentially on the length and set because you have that two to three minutes rest so oftentimes it will be more of like a twenty five to thirty per cent increase in weight instead of that like kind of fifteen to twenty
per cent that we used for the reverse drop set and there was another one oh yeah and cardiovascular fatigue so that was one of the reasons like i was a couple of months ago just sitting there doing a reverse drop set and i was like man i am so gast from this first set the full range emotion set i was like i'm going to go into those reverse drop set right now but i'm not going to get as much out of it as i could and so kind of in that moment i had the realization that the length in set
is just better every way and that's when i kind of worked backwards and realized that you know you can take the first step to failure and you can use heavier weight in the length in set and then you're not cardiovacularly or psychologically fit ged going into it so you can actually i have a better mind muscle connection and focus more on the movement itself when doing it as a lengthen set and so in the past i also used length and sets but i would use them as a progression where it would go
like first we do partials then it would be reversed drop sets then it would be length and sets more recently i've kind of just gone from partials directly into length and sets and i like this approach much much better i think that it's significantly more productive and ve started doing the same thing with clients and i'm still it's still kind of like a nice transition piece that i'm using in general programming to throw in like one week of reverse drop sets before going to the length
and set so that the general population isn't like slammed by this idea of like now we're going to increase the weight and see what happens it's like hey you know we did some partials now let's take this like intermediary step and then we'll do the length and sets in the subsequent weeks but but those are kind of some updated views have on that
what i really like there what i think would be really helpful is if we try and just give the listeners like a very practical approach so do you with how you're approaching it now are you still being trying tokay did my first set second set whatever of full range of motion reps i'm going to go to
m
failure do you try and match your reps again on the lengthened overload only set that is after the full rest
yeah i do i do i do and so that's actually a really good question and you know it's okay if i don't sometimes like usually it works out that i do and so there's a couple of example s recently where i would get like either seven or eight raps on the full range of motion set and then i would jump into my length and sets and get usually it's two full range of motion raps at the heavier weight and then it would be five or six partial reps
oh
um there's certainly cases
oh
where like some movements that aren't super duper short overloaded like i think a chest supported t barrow is an example of this where despite the fact that it is more short than lengthened there's still quite a bit of tension on your upper back when your arms are hanging and you're like just like braced over that that pad you know
yeah
and so i find oftentimes on that one that i either have to take a smaller weight increase so instead of twenty five to thirty percent usually twenty percent is pretty good
yeah
or else i just have to expect that i'm going to get fewer total reps and it won't necessarily be like a match to what the full range of emotion set was um it's a good question
yeah
yeah anything else any other
yea
questions on that
not so much a question but i think in this again like following up on the last episode where we talked about individual considerations for nutrition
hm
one thing that i know i is
yeah
very very true of myself like
oh
i am a i am someone who's very well slated for the reverse or the kind of length and only set because my rep dropped off and drop sets is astronomical so
m
in like you know times a lot of program i go at twenty per cent drop like i'll do like ten reps drop
yeah
twenty percent and get like three raps
yeah
and then like so that's something that i've always really known about myself in order to get at least
m
like five or six rep i'm generally dropping fifty percent load
hm
um and i don't know if that's from a neurological thing it doesn't feel very cardiovascular it's just like it just starts to fall off super super hard so for something like this it gives me a full rest again and then more
hm
time in that length and position which for a majority of body parts we can't unequivocally say oh it's just more tension more time spent in the longer muscle length so
hm
if you find yourself like me i could be very very very very wise approach
yeah
for yourself as well
yeah when you do you do rest pause sets or mio reps or whatever
yeah
sometimes right
i've been doing them a lot like this week since i'm like you know what i'm not i'm not going to try and follow like my program that i was i'm not mentally capable of putting together a new one yet i'm going to go
¶ pdated thoughts on ways to bias lengthened
in have fun train and try get in and out and just i've been doing like my raps and stuff ye
ah how much rest do you take from like the main full full set to the first or second or whatever what are your rest periods between the rest pas sets
i generally do like five big long breaths and when
maybe
i
twenty twenty five
it's
seconds
yeah about like eighteen to twenty three i'd say
okay um and then assuming you're working in the six to eight or eight to ten rep range what would you get what do you usually get after like say you do a set of eight to failure what would you get on like those little rest plase sets
threes is like like if i can get to if i can go three if i can get four rounds of rest palatbreast pas t three that's
yeah
pretty good
with like an eight rep first setter like a ten rep first
like
setter
a like a nine nine to ten first yeah
okay
yeah
interesting yeah
if
so
i was
that's kind of hat that supports what i was thinking as you were talking about the rep drop off and that you do tend to
oh
run a little bit more fast twitch in most of the areas in your body and so now jeff hayne he's
yeah
a he has a podcast and yeah so i'm actually working one on one with him right now which is which is super cool as he's kind of trying
yeah
some of the methods that i use and what i've noticed with him is that in his upper body
yeah
he's getting like he'll do an initial buy in set of ten reps and then he'll get six and then five or something like that
yeah
on his on his rest pause sets and the other i think he got leven and seven um
wow
on one of his movements and and i was like i asked him about it the other day and i was like man this is so wild to me and we both kind of realized that it probably is cause he has this like proclivity to just grow legs without even really having to do anything
yeah
so we assume you like his legs are probably a little bit more fast twitched dominant and he's always struggled to build mass in his upper body
yeah
so we kind of deduced that that maybe he's a little bit more slow twitch in his upper body but i'm more like you where if i'm somewhere in that like nine to ten rep range on the initial set yeah i'm like three raps on the rest paw um and if i'm like in the six to eight rep range on the first set then i'm only getting two on the and the rest pause so i think that's an interesting and interesting point that you brought up and probably another for sure good reason that
somebody would opt for a length and set over reverse drop set
definitely
yep cool the next one that i had was up dated thoughts on ways to bias the length in position and so this is kind of a continuation of the first because that first thing on reverse drop sets first lengthened s is certainly biasing the length and position but what i wanted to discuss here was some things that i have only just begun using or haven't used vary commonly in my programming um and so the one that i have been using this entire cycle that i've discussed
on prior podcasts is what i'm doing on my forty five degree hip extension where i'm attempting to set a different range of motion as my target range of motion so if you think of that forty five degree hip extension as you're fully bent over the pad and your ham
m
strings are stretched at the bottom and then
m
you come all the way up so that your torso is in a completely straight line and your gluts contract at the top um and what i'm trying to do to bias the lengthened portion of that movement more is create a hard stop at around seventy or eighty percent of the range of motion essentially right as my torso passes gravity horizontal because the movement gets super super hard at that point and a lot of the tension shifts off of the ham strings and into the gluts as we pass gravity um so that has
been quite challenging but it's something that i think has a lot of utility and yeah it kind of forces you to have to create a bit of self awareness in your body control too and so as i've gone through the process week to week it's been interesting to try to understand the difference between what it looks like on video and what it feels like in my body as it's happening um but it's cool because like like i was saying you really develop a better connection with your body through doing this
whereas you're so program to do a full range of motion all the time that you actually can really kind of learn something about yourself aside from the benefits of actually training at longer muscle lengths and stuff like that oh
yeah so i mean i don't want to add too much on to the back of this
oh
one just for kind of times
yeah
sake and because there's a lot
yeah
of really good things i want to get into but that like what you were
¶ Updated thoughts on cardio / concurrent
just describing there it really is like the awareness in understanding
ah
the the bias that you are attempting to to i guess bias
kay
is a
oh
poor choice of words there and just understanding the movement and what you're
oh
actually using that movement for is huge and that's one of
yeah
those things that generally just comes with training age because you've just spent
hm
more time kind of paying attention to your body through movement and end creating that connection i guess
yeah and then the second one that i have used in the past actually i use this a long time ago when i first started working with cass maybe like a year and a half or two ago he recommended that i incorporate like some one and a quarter or one and a half reps as a way to bias the ling in position but i kind of moved away from it because it sucks it's really really hard and so i think that that's something that's going to make an appearance back into my training and
into group program in future cycles because it's really a really great way to spend more time in the length and position so already like i think pauses in the length and position or something that's basically ubiquitous like i kind of expect people pause in the length and position on every movement more or less um but now if we can pause in the length and position only come half way up or a quarter way up basically just initiate movement from the bottom but then go back to
the bottom again immediately then we're getting all of this extra time spent in the length and position and so i think that there's benefit to that especially on compound movements because you can't do like lengthen sets as i would say where you're just doing like bottom range they're a little more complicated to do on something where you actually won't be able to stand up and complete the rep when you get tired like you can't imagine doing a back squat where you're like i'm just going to
do the bottom quarter reps until i can't do them any more and then you're like oops what now so i think that doing something like a one and a half rep on a lengthened movement like a pendulum a hack a back squat something like that where you go down you come half way up you go down again and then go up and that's one rap that still gets you to the top you can still kind of use r i r and be like hey we're going to go to one to two r i r or whatever the intent is and
you know that you're not going to get completely read at the bottom um so yeah those are those are kind of two ways that i think well will continue to use the length and position here
all things that i agree with i think a very great revelations to me this year as well
yeah but um next was something i was just recollected of yesterday i re posted to my story a post that i made in july and it was a update thoughts that i had this summer on the cardio idea and concurrent training and so this has kind of been building throughout science for the last couple of years there's been a number of studies that have of reference concurrent training and whether it has deleterious effects on muscle growth and strength but you know i had been experimenting with
it a lot throughout the late spring and early summer before i tore my planner fatha i was starting to bike a lot and incorporating that more towards the end of that period and actually you know what it was almost it was it was kind of towards the very end and then into the early summer because what my views are on here are that cardio or concurrent training is probably xtremely useful if you're in a maintenance or a surplus of calories um but still do i stand
true to my initial statements of years ago that were that it should just be a tool that is pulled when you need it during a deficit and so that was kind of how i was using it at the time because i didn't really do any cardio in the first two months of my three month diet and then as latter spring approached i was getting leaner and leaner and i needed to pull the trigger on kind of just creating a little bit more caloric deficit that's when i began of the biking and the
the additional movement in there and then after i came out of the deficit tore my planner fash i couldn't walk any more i really really went hard into the biking ing and ramped it up a lot over the summer and i kind of did this as a personal experiment because i wanted to see how far i could push the viking like how many days a week and how intense i could do it and how close in proximity i could do it to leg training and have it still not impact my strength progressions and
i was very surprised that being in a significant caloric surplus doing intense spiking three or four days a week had no effect on my strength progressions and when i did it even on the same day so i tried it twice where i would either do it before a leg session and then come back and do legs or i would do legs and then do the bike right after the leg session and still noticed no negative effects from the cardio on my leg training or progressions week to week and so at least for
this end of one experience what i've kind of realized is that hey if you're in a caloric surplus or if you're eating enough to be at maintenance meaning that you have to account the calories that are burned during the cardio to get you back to maintenance um that it doesn't really seem to have a negative impact and i think that that's really cool information for people that just hey enjoy cardio like i just love going out for a run or a bicride or those that are
getting older and want to still maximize muscle growth but also want to you know keep your heart health in your vio to max and like kind of some of these more important things that you know decrease as we age
my thoughts on this specifically are much much more aligned with the latter of what he just kind of wrapped up on this year more than
m
ever and i'm sure
oh
this will probably continue to happen as i s i get older unfortunately can't change that i have been having a really hard time kind of
yeah
slowing like training and you know physique apart from like health
yeah
sort of thing because it's the age old testament like the cardio
yeah
or ten not cardio sort of thing and
yeah
i do think a little bit more like as you learn more and continue to dig and start getting
yeah
labs and stuff like that
oh
i think objectively right let's say okay you're in a mass gain bulk whatever you're going to call it if you're to pull labs at like peak bulk
oh
y're not goin to look good because you're like purposefully overfeeding yourself to put on weight things like lipids are probably going to get worse insolent sensitivity fasting blood glue cost all these things like these you know generally important health markers grant yes it's just a response to the environment that you're creating but i think like for years
m
i
yeah
just like took a blind eye to it and like was like no why would i want to do cardio like i don't need cardio
yeah
or maybe i'll use it when i'm dieting but now i'm not and now i like i said it's hard for me to separate
m
that so i would say even more in the in the winter times or when i am like gaining that was one of the things that i was excited come back
oh
here and get access to a stair climber again i'm like hey
m
i want to do it like twice per week fifteen probably going to start at ten
yeah
minutes i'm not gonna lie or on sucking fall apart but
oh
it's kind of what i'm getting at like
oh
i'm in from a from a body
yeah
composition standpoint i'm always in great shape but i wouldn't really say i'm in like a cardiovascular shape at all like there's times here i'm like kind of sucking huffing
¶ Updated thoughts on metabolic cycles
and puffing
uh
for no good reason right now and when those things start happening i maybe i do need to no hit some
yeah
cardio and stuff like that and sometimes i just want to get really sweaty you know
hm
was something that i've definitely kind of two shifted gears with harder this year i was one of those coaches who was always like we're never doing cardio it's unnecessary sort of thing and now i'm just like is it necessary for an overwhelming majority of people know will it help us move the needle within the proper context like yes and maybe you have a deadline like hey i have this whatever bachelor party i want to be ripped for in like ten weeks then like yeah we're going to do some
ah
fucking card he to help
m
us further facilitate that process so i think i just became a little bit more i should say less judgemental to
hm
its utility for when the context warrants it
yeah i still like i still hold strong i think to the idea that the if you're doing cardio too early in a diet or just too much in general while dieting that it is going to have some some impact on your strength training and your progressions and your recovery and like these are all things that you really have to be careful of when you're in a caloric deficit because you don't have the recovery capacity to recover from all the training you're doing plus additional training so
like my my default in a diet is still to have people cut calories first focus on strength training and if and when we reach a point where we can't really go much lower in calories and you can't can you're doing more steps then at that point it probably makes sense to use a little bit more of that middle intensity or high intensity cardio to to elicit additional caloric deficit but something you have to be very careful of whereas you just think if you're at maintenance or
in a surplus you have so much more freedom with how much cardio you want to do because then you can just eat more food to compensate and it kind of he balances out and there almost isn't that recovery deficit that you end up falling into when you're in a deficit
you really did hit hit the nail on the head there in a surplus cardio is kind of like a
yeah
like a health safe gap sort of thing whereas like in a calory deficit it might become like the complete antithesis of what you just used it for in the surplus
yeah
so environment as always is paramount to the utility
ah and i just i just love that that's something
oh
now that kind of seems to be supported by science too because i forgot how much i love that like as you said you just want to get sweaty but that like a dorphin feeling of you know finishing the cardiosession and just being like oh
oh
man like just so rewarding you know um it's a it's a very unmatched feeling when it comes to that so so something that i'm glad that i can incur brad in you know more throughout the year as it starts to get certain things like that
definitely
um so this one next one shouldn't be too long but it's updated thoughts on metabolic
yah
cycles
yah
and i just the more that i go through training others and training myself and talking with other peers in the industry i just don't know if if we need them any more i kind of think that maybe has a utility for small periods of time like we've talked about like maybe two or three weeks at the end of a strength cycle would kind of be the place that i would put them where it would be like we're pretty de conditioned right now we just shifted all our rep ranges lower we even started
resting longer we lowered volumes we reduced training frequency kind of some of the things that happened during strength cycles in general so maybe like here is reason to improve conditioning after a string cycle so that you can then facilitate a better hypertrephy cycle but i don't think that you have to do metabolic cycle in the sense that you don't have to super set large compound movements back to back like you don't have to go squat pendulum squat to bend over row as a super set you
don't have to do things like little minny circuits or anything like that i think that you can get a lot of those cardioofascular benefits that you're looking for and like the work capacity benefits by just adding in some cardio for a few weeks so it's not that metabolic cycles have no use but it's maybe like it's a pick your poison kind of approach instead of having to use metal balance cycles to do like cardio with weights sort of you could just continue to lift weights but
then do some cardio and so that's an approach i'm still kind of toying with but but something that i think probably may have more utility as far as programming for the masses goes you know it's often difficult to construct cycles in a commercial gym where you're having to move from one piece to another piece quickly of course you can be creative and you can do like i said like pendulum squat to bend over row where you bring dumb bells over to the pendulum squad and then
you can that whatever but but a lot of people just don't like that that noise of having to piece meal things together like that and so i know i don't like i would rather just do straight sets in in the gym and rest and move to the next movement and so if i can get some of these work capacity benefits that i need by doing ten or fifteen minutes of cardio at the end of my training session or a different time throughout the day um i think that that would be preferable for me
and i know that a lot of people i've talked to would feel similarly
yeah i'm in agreemance with you there i i i'm okay being wrong you know for for what it's worth i love being wrong
yeah
because then i get to learn right
yeah
um m
oh
personally i don't like the utility of them i had that one that i ran when i worked with alex bush
yeah
earlier this year
m
i think that was the period of fairy
m
it's very
m
uncommon where i like very strongly disliked training i hated it and it was very strange were like again i think this also plays into what we talked about earlier
¶ Updated thoughts on volume / intensity
in the episode with my just like kind of let's say like lower than average maybe endurance muscular endurance but i'd have
ah
to use
here
such a light wait to be able to complete the raps i felt like there was nothing to recover
ye
from you know and it
hm
was very it was a very strange period for me i'm generally not going to be programming that with clients like except for the sole use case of someone who has comes in overweight health isn't in a great spot and we want to improve health markers right we want to get fasting blood lucas down and get fasting insolent down if we have insolent resistance and maybe they needed to eat like a very low carbohydrate diet but they don't necessarily want to because of how limiting it is
or because you food volumes lower and that isn't great for satiety and those sorts of things like you can use it as a tool to help just shuttle a bunch of glucose uptake into the muscles
hm
using a lot of your larger muscles but then again we're not talking about body composition physique we're talking about getting you back to a base line of health so that
hm
we can transition into more productive
yeah
like hypertrophy training sort of thing so there
yeah
i think the utility is quite applicable but for probably you know eight out of the ten eight point five
ah
out of the ten people listening to the podcast like yeah i think you may ever truly need need that
yeah i think maybe it's important as you were speaking i realized i didn't make i didn't distinguish between
ah
metabolic cycles for systemic versus like local musculature and so i think the way i was talking about not needing metabolic cycles was definitely based more on systemic
jusstemic
like you can just kind of increase your cardio to increase your systemic ability to do your capacity and you ask their endurance and things like that to what to the point of what you are saying there definitely probably is some like small utility to doing the local metabolic phases in the glucose piece um and insolent sensitivity and then also potentially in um just making that muscle specifically better at endurance if that's something that's important to you within the
parade of your training like like doing those leg extensions you know those i r ms where you take your fifteen r m and then you do sets of eight until you die with like a second rest in between i mean that's the sort of ship that like if it doesn't make your quads better at quad endurance it makes your brain better at dealing with pain and so for that i feel like there may be utility but to be completely honest when i program i usually program
stuff like that in throughout hypertrophy phases like here and there so instead of having like an entire period of time where we're just doing local muscular tur metabal work it's like hey we're having a hypertrophy cycle and maybe part a and b are straight sets of compound movements and then part c is like a leg extension i r m or something like that so i think that maybe for that purpose there is a little bit of utility but it maybe doesn't need its own cycle necessarily
again very very well said i think there is utility in using like im stuff to make sure like you not necessary to make sure but to help you keep your edge or help you develop an edge of really
hm
really pushing yourself sort of thing
yeah
again bringing that out in small parts as parts of hypertrophy cycles i think again
yep
there is solid utility there
all right well this one you added at the end here so it's up dated thoughts on volume and intensity so i'll let you kick it off
yeah
and then i'll pick up from there
yeah this one there was someone who was deming me asking me questions as listener to the podcast and he was like hey he asked me a question like hey i'm thinking you 'vebeenthinking about the volume versus
yeah
versus intensity and i think i'm going to take everything i'm just going to go a low intensity sorry a high intensity lower volume approach and just take everything to failure you know like back squads and dead lives and stuff and i was like
oh
absolutely not but it really made me kind of think through like having to explain it to someone else around like
m
the kind of note that that i be boiled it down here is like the more experienced you are more intensity in a lower volume approach is probably going to have a better application there the more you want to gain experience
ah
to become more experience you can gain experience through doing more volume which is just
yeah
getting more practice at doing it the the thing that there was like an example
yeah
that i thought of like okay we have a novice like painter or something like that
m
they can paint their masterpiece but it might take them like forty sixty hours or
oh
some like that the like fifty year old career painter can paint his same masterpiece that maybe took him fifty hours when he was twenty he can probably do it in five now right so
yeah
it's the same kind of thing you have to put in the raps literally which comes through volume to just
m
learn how to control and contract your body forcefully
m
enough and really start hitting wraps with intent
yeah
instead of just completing things
hm
and i mean this is something that this year was the year where things really really finally clicked for me like almost all of my body parts you know little things like i'm doing you know like a prone incline
m
rear dealt row like i can feel my rear deltas contracting line i know that arm path is like locked in in years
oh
prior i would just like okay you know i'm leaning over the thing this approximate arm motion just go you know
hm
and and i think it's one of those things where it it's really kind of interesting there is like you don't know you're there until you're there and that's i can tell you that's not
m
a very helpful statement
yeah
and to kind of
yeah
give what hat i would immediately popped into my mind doing this back when i first got into lifting i really wanted to be able to move my chest you know
yeah yeah
and and my step dad
ah
could do it um and he just told me
oh
i was like you could just do it one day and i was ike what the fuck do you mean like that that's
oh
not helpful and then like literally
ah
i was probably like
yah
sixteen whatever one day i could like
yeah
and i was like he wasn't lying like it just this
right
one day you can just do it um and i think it's just like a good kind of silly but accurate representation is like you don't
m
know that until you're there and i think if you are younger
a
still maybe five years of training or whatever which i would still not even really quite considered
m
advance yet based on my own progressions unless you had liking credible tutor
yeah
and was really kind of brought through run the volume
m
until
ye
you realize that if you continue to train that volume with your new capabilities of intensity you're going to fuck in a part and that i think is where you when you can realize like i can't i can't do five really hard sets on a hack squat or i can't do any other exercise that day and then
yep
i'm not really reaching my thresholds
yeah
for other muscle
m
groups and stuff that i needed to train so i think realizing that is that was a very very big vital one for me this year
that's awesome yeah i
yes
i feel like that's why the journey of volume throughout the stages is like when you're a dead novice you don't need much because you do one set of something and you get sore for like four days but quickly maybe in the first six months or so you graduate from like super an office to just like novice slash early intermediate or whatever it is and then you're in the intermediate stage you know you're a novice intermediate than an intermediate than a late intermediate and like throughout that
entire journey which is five is probably i think your volume for the most part is going to be significantly higher than it is either in the beginning of your journey or thereafter and it's for those reasons that you mentioned like it's almost in my mind one of the defining ways of you being advanced if we look beyond just how quickly you progress week to week is when you realize that the volume you were doing was absurd because now just so much more accurate that's like a
huge tell tale sign of okay i'm kind of graduating into this advanced stage right now and we see this across everybody man like like fucking three d m j just did a podcast on this where brian minor nunez and brad basically just spent an hour talking about how they do half the val you now that they were doing three or four years ago and these guys aren't even like it's not like they were intermediates three or four years ago like they were advanced they were just
stuck inside this evidence based ramp of a volume ascent which we all realize it's just now when that first bread show in field study came out that was you know up to forty five sets for muscle group was better than thirty sets which was better than eighteen sets which was better than in sets or whatever it was and everybody just started like jumping on that volume train like how can we cram more volume in and like i think those guys at three d m j like they sort of fell for it too
got it's just it was the pervasive belief for a number of years in there and it's only really in the last couple of years as we've become so much more meticulous in assessing these studies and understanding the individual variation that occurs within side of them that that we've actually realized that it actually isn't volume that is driving all of this it's doing the right volume for you with the amount of effort and accuracy that you possess and so it's always like like you said it's always
that delicate balance of volume and intensity and it is no surprise to me that all of my peers in the industry have lowered their volumes down over the last two to five years or two to three years or however you want to look at that kind of time frame so one of the i'll just tease it real quick but i was in a chat as i am with abel and dave like two weeks ago and i just started thinking about all of these studies that that we have and how these days it just seems like the end result of the
study is just like hey it doesn't matter like whatever it doesn't matter and so i coin this term evidence pace niolism which is basically just like whatever you do it doesn't matter until you look at the individual data and so that's one of the cool things that studies they're doing now is they're not just releasing the the conclusion on like a population level but they're showing you what happened to each participant within the study and so when you delve into these visual reactions you can see
that it doesn't matter is completely false because it matters a whole ton it just matters a whole ton to you the individual and not as much on the group level so that is the project that i'm working on now for our next episode which will be some time in early mid january and hopefully i'll have some cool data to discuss as we go or that
yeah i'm really looking forward to that when that something that we didn't tuck into the end of the episode but that was a big one for me this year and i think it's a really really great part to wrap up the fact is like reading research is really difficult and it requires like a substantial time
a
investment to really
yeah
like t get a grasp of what you're actually looking at you know and understand that like hey the abstract or the conclusions or suggestions whatever they are reporting population means in aver is and you may find yourself within that you know population average you might be a the fun are they called an outlier
yep
and if you're that outlier those findings like that it's that that i could be really really important for you could be a big nothing burger but until you can really dive in and dig in and see that again its population averages which applies to the greatest you know range of people that is mostly
hm
helpful for everyone but you may find that it is not particulr really helpful for you if re an outlier
one quick clarification there is that an
please
outlier is an extreme on either
yeah
end and so if we
yeah
say
oh
that say fifteen sets per week is like the mean average that works for most people an outlier would be like thirty plus or like under five or probably even less than five or over thirty five or something like that like it would be it would be huge right so you don't have to be an outlier you could be twenty five per you could be in the twenty fifth percentile or the seventy fifth percentile and that would even have a dramatic impact where if you're in the
twenty fifth percentile you would need say seven eight sets instead of fifteen or twenty two or twenty three sets instead of fifteen to be an outlier i mean you're like so far on the spectrum that it's like two per cent i think an outlier means like one percent on either end or two per cent on either end or something like that
i can't remember specifics yeah
it's something like it's something really small like that so you could literally be just part of the general population but be slightly skewed one way or the other way and it still matters a lot you know what i mean
yeah
so yeah just kind of some some closing notes
semantics
on that
no some antics
yeah
are definitely important so thank you for for bringing that up
yep
i think maybe maybe in the new year it would be a great episode to bring someone on with intimate knowledge research as name participated and could help us you know walk through kind of some gotches and stuff like that that are maybe common misunderstandings i think that could be a cool episode
yeah i dig that let's think about who
cool anything
all
you
right
want to add on this one brian
ope
so as always guys thank you for listening thank you for making year two
yeah
of train prosper
m
continued success this
oh
has grown into something that i honestly never imagined it would so thank you to everyone listening
m
thank you to brian
oh
as well for being a part of this and we will talk to you guys next week the week after whenever it hits the week after we are going to take off the
yeah
week tween christmas and new years so early twenty twenty three for the
ah
start of train prosper year number three
yep
yeah