016 Powerlifting part 2

So, as I said, we're going to talk about accessory excises today and the justification for why we might want to program those. Essentially There is a group of or a school of thought, if you like, that states that ultimately the principle of specificity is going to mean that focusing on the main lifts is going to be potentially either, you know, the all that's necessary even to actually achieve maximum powerlifting performance.

Um and I think that ultimately uh misunderstands um what the principle of specificity is resting on. So the pr when we talk about principles in strength and conditioning, principles are essentially observations that have led to a general guideline that we can follow. without necessarily needing to delve into the reasons or the uh physiology behind it. If you actually go looking into the physiology that supports the principle of specificity, there are a lot of really interesting exceptions.

Uh and ultimately it just arises because physiology is messy and isn't always doing exactly what you think it's doing. So principle of specificity is a really good principle. I actually wrote a book about it once.

Um, but ultimately it is underpinned by specific physiological adaptions and so it's far more uh kind of accurate to go back to those individual adaptations and look at what's happening if we want to figure out what our programming should look like. So with that being said Um essentially, um when we talk about the justification for accessory exercises, what we are going to start with is neuromechanical matching.

Now, essentially neuromechanical matching tells us that um motor units or to be kind of um, you know, move it into practical terms, regions of muscles or muscles within a group are always going to be activated preferentially if they have better leverage for a movement uh or an exercise that we're doing. So essentially the central nervous system prefers to send activation to places that are going to produce high joint torques for low muscle activation.

inputs. And, you know, uh at a separate occasion we can talk about the justifications for that and we can answer, you know, criticisms about that. I've done that before, but that isn't the purpose of today's podcast. So Basically what happens with the principle of new mechanical matching is that when we use an exercise and that could be one of the main lifts, so let's say we're doing a bench press or a

squat or a deadlift. When we do those exercises, the brain or the central nervous system are going to um send activation to the muscles and muscle regions that have best leverage to contribute to those joint talks that are necessary to complete the exercise. Now The important thing that is driving our justification for accessory exercises is that as we perform those exercises, we're going to produce the most hypertrophy in the regions that have the best leverage.

And since leverage is actually partly determined by the size of the muscle, the next time we then come to use the exact same exercise, that leverage of those specific regions has now increased relative to the other regions which will have grown to a lesser extent.

So what happens over time is that the relative leverages of the l regions that were originally kind of better, uh, is gonna get um better and better and better relative to the other areas and we're going to find that we um ex display a much greater stimulus in those areas, a much greater reliance on those areas as we continue on with our training program.

So essentially we end up with an exercise that is much, much more focused on those specific regions or reliant on those specific regions than it was at the beginning of the training program that we started. And that's really something that actually can cause a bottleneck. Because essentially and I'm a great example of this, whenever I do any kind of pressing exercise, my um central nervous system goes

Hey, this is what your triceps were born for. We're just gonna use those and you know, everything else is just completely unimportant. So it actually it's quite comical the way that I look like when I'm pressing it. Looks like I'm trying to shoot um a cannon out of a canoe. It's literally just a hundred percent triceps. So um you can end up in a situation where the central nervous system really starts to rely very heavily

on this, uh, in the case of uh, you know, uh at a a macro level, you could be saying, Well, is it in a bench press, is it, you know, kind of delts, pecs, triceps? Or you can go even kind of even within each each of the individual muscles as well if you want to get really granular with it. But

you know, fundamentally it's happening at multiple levels and the CNS essentially is just gonna keep pushing activation to wherever has the best leverages. Now if we want to um, start to avoid that bottleneck because ultimately those individual muscles and muscle regions have a maximum limit to the size that they can get to.

If we want to get to a point where our bench press or our squat or our deadlift is reliant on much more muscle regions and then gradually increase the sizes of all of those regions so that they can ultimate uh end one rep max that we're able to perform is essentially governed by the sizes of all of those areas and not just one area or very heavily reliant on one area, then what we're gonna need is accessory exercises

Uh, if I focus much more on doing accessories for the delts and the pecs, I'm going to allow my bench press to rely much more on a sort of distribution of muscles and that then ultimately increases the maximum strength that I will uh be able to achieve at the end of a long term um set of training programs that has uh accomplished that. goal. So that's the justification for having um accessory exercises in a training program.

So with that all being said, uh what we're gonna do, I'm gonna ask Rob to explain uh and describe some of the accessory exercises that he uses or programs in the training programs that he's got at the moment with powerlifters, and we're gonna talk a little bit about how those accessory excises might differ.

depending on the person's leverages. I've just given you an example of my case, but I'll talk about other people, but also in cases where maybe there are sticking points in different parts of the lift. So, Rob, let's start out um talking about squat. Um Can you just describe to us a couple of the accessory exercises you're programming for the squat and when you might be programming them?

And, you know, the classic line of thought, a lot of people would go about programming things that were very much like the main lift. You know, they do a squat and then a pause squat or squat and then a hack squat, something like that. Um, and not really go for very specific movements. So I prefer these days to opt for, you know, if I want quads, I've already squatted, I'm gonna go for something like a leg.

So leg extension, you know, versus another squat pattern is gonna get all all parts of the quads, whereas the squat will not. And it's gonna be more isolated, um, you know, short position focus as well, which is a bit less damaging. and uh maybe would impact recovery less and still get, you know, everything in the quads that I need to work to keep building the squat, increase uh increasing recruitment, all those good things for adductors like adductor Magnus.

I'm usually gonna be, I mean, you're getting it out of the bottom of the squat for sure. If I want to target it more, I'll use just something like an adductor machine or maybe a cable adduction, something like that. And depending where, you know, peak effort is in the the movement as well, you can target the adductor magnus.

uh a bit better there. So really like though is if you don't have an adductor machine, there's a few good straight leg cable options, um, few bent leg cable options you can use. I've even used uh like an incline back extension where you place

the inside of your leg against the pad and you bend sideways out over the thigh pad. Um, nice one for the ad hoc ears. Most people have an incline back extension at their gym. So super easy to load, you know, once you're strong enough, you can do body weight and then just hold the dumbbell.

Um if anyone is struggling to see what that looks like, could probably post a video of one on my Instagram later on. But definitely a good one most people would have access to. And then for glutes, usually something like a hip thrust. um something that's more isolated and sticking more towards the top range of the thrust as well. You know, if I'm getting adductors and quads and all that stuff from other exercises, I'm really trying to split up my accessories.

to each be as specific as possible. So I kind of avoid the ranges where other muscles might be kicking in. So yeah, just keeping the hip thrust the top range, glueprints, things like that. If you don't have those, like a good hip thrust, You know with the barbell of course, just as good. You could do something like a horizontal back extension where peak effort is in the contracted position. Also very nice for glutes, or even like a reverse hyper where you're just a bit more strict with it.

A lot of people would kind of tend to use the swinging motion with a reverse hyper, but if you're nice and strict, focus on actually just using glutes and getting a good bit out of that, that can be a really nice accessory for that as well.

if you're using smaller muscle mass exercises, you're going to hit a high level of recruitment in those muscles and that is a better stimulus for gains in recruitment as a long term adaptation. So that's one of the really cool things about accessories.

is you can actually start training recruitment as an adaptation to a greater extent than you can in the main lift. So I think that's really, really interesting one. I think it kind of falls down a little bit because we tend to program the accessories after the main lifts when we're unlikely to be able to hit high levels of recruitment.

But, you know, we can maybe do variations like isometric contractions for three to five seconds, maybe before as part of our warm up, um, and then kind of come back and do more hypertrophy work on the same thing later on. So I think there's maybe an interesting way of bracketing that a little bit.

to try and capture those two adaptions. But really, really good point. In terms of the uh kind of accessories that you mentioned, um really awesome to see basically, you know, like a knee extension, some kind of aductor exercise, and maybe then obviously the hip thrust. A lot of it focusing on contractor position. Again, really cool because we're trying to avoid

adding extra fatigue in for something that isn't as important as the mainlift. I mean, I gave a big sort of pitch for the value of accessory exercises, but let's not forget that, you know, powerlifting still does have a huge coordination element and we do want to focus on the mainlifts as the priority. So

uh contract position really cool because obviously we are going to end up um getting a lot less damage from that particular uh exercise variation. Um looking at the adductors, this is an interesting one because Um the leverage data we've got for the adductors and the various different adductors isn't amazing. And it's not amazing in the seated position, certainly. There's some nice data in a standing um position. Um The data that I've got suggests the adductor magnus starts to

Uh, reduce its ability to do adduction when we are in a uh flexed hip position. So we're in the seated hip ab hip adduction machine. I think the adductor magnet's probably gonna do a little bit less of adduction because it's mainly doing actually hip extension in that particular position as we know,'cause that's what what it was doing in the squat. So I think that variation you described of the straight leg would actually be really interesting.

And I think that uh also working in slightly different ranges of motion of that, obviously we can use elastic resistance, we can use you know, as you say, uh other ways of adding resistance. Maybe just change the uh ranges of motion we're working in there and uh target the adduct magnus to a greater extent. So I think there's some really interesting stuff going on there with

um, the adductor side of things. I mean the knee extension and the uh and the hip thrust obviously self explanatory and uh very, very straightforward. The adductor one I think is worthy of further investigation. I think there's some cool stuff that could be done there for supporting uh the adductor magnus in um in uh those um kind of powerlifting contexts. And actually it's got me thinking about whether there could be a really interesting isometric that we could create.

Because if I want to increase a doctor Magnus motin recruitment, I think that would have to be done in some kind of straight leg adduction exercise. I don't know if you've put any thought into that before.

adductor magnus from I'm just looking at the graph now. I think most of the uh range of motion that we're likely to see uh going from the midpoint, the standing position to out uh to the side, thirty, forty degrees of adduct of abduction, sorry. that's likely to be uh all the Ductomagnus, uh, with grass Grassellis along the side of it as well. So honestly I think um any any of that range of motion would be fine. Um but yeah, I think there's definitely scope for an a an isometric to uh create um

interesting effect from increasing motunic chromosome. As I say, that's a separate thing. We're talking about more about the hypertrophy side of things but these are totally valid ways of approaching the problem. I think it just means you end up doing a little bit of a kind of a warm up with those things. Um the cool thing about recruitment increases is that they are totally non

uh kind of um th th they're not likely to go away once you've created them. So you kind of get months and months and months of them sitting around. So if you kind of just dedicate a couple of weeks here and there to that type of thing, I think it could be a really, really interesting um kind of long term benefit.

Cool. So that was the squat. Talk to us about the uh bench press then. So how would you go about selecting uh or no, to start with, what would be your go to uh kind of accessory exercises for the Bench press and then we'll talk about why you might select them in certain circumstances.

staying generally away from, you know, kind of like a more old school thing of going from bench press to dumbbell press or something like that. Where someone might, you know, in the past I've heard the argument that you're training like a neglected range of motion because you get

further down the dumbbells, you're still just training your pecs in a a less stable variation. So if you do like a machine fly, machine pectic, something like that, again you're gonna get better recruitment, better hypertrophy out of it.

And all the regions of the pec are very active in just that horizontal adduction. So you don't really have to worry about adding in really much for, you know, shoulder flexion for upper pecs or anything like that. Um, and if you're just trying to boost the bench press, I don't really think you need to target specific upper pec anyway. I would not really see a good rationale for that. For um triceps exercises.

Um, you know, people tend to think you get a lot out of benching and depending on the person, you know, you get more than some people, I certainly get a bit more trizeps out of it, but you still don't get Um really much a long head at all. You know, not really any. So if you really want to grow all the portions of your triceps, you're gonna need some kind of elbow extension just with a fixed shoulder position. I really like just the standard pushdown.

Um, you can do an overhead extension if you like. Uh, you know, a little bit more stretch position, maybe a little bit more damaging. So I really do tend to opt for just pushdown, double arm, single arm. Or uh the old like polycorn push down where you lie on an incline bench and just

Do a push down on that incline bench there, like forty-five or fifty-five degrees. The angle doesn't really matter too much unless you you know, you just gotta set the cable up appropriately. But any of those are gonna be really nice. Just make sure that if you really want to grow all three heads of the tricep, shoulders not moving around while you're doing the exercise. Um, you could use something like a J impressor or close grip for the the lateral and medial heads, but

Again, you you're gonna get a lot out of just the elbow extension like by the side or overhead. I don't really see a reason to add much onto that. 'Cause it could potentially take away from your bench press performance through the week if recovery's taxed. So

in the muscles you want. If you're doing something like a dumbbell press or something like that, you know, I don't have a huge problem with it, but if your elbows start flaring out wide as opposed to staying like, you know, reasonably

narrow, more sagittal plane, you'll wind up getting less of the front delts and things that would contribute to the bench. And then, you know, especially if you go on like very frontal plane, probably a bit more middle delt, things like that, that might not help as much. Um, if you want to grow your shoulders a ton, still throwing a lateral raise, something like that, but specific to the bench, I'd prefer just some kind of sagittal plane. Um, usually machine process.

So at that point if I look at a person and they have, you know, say very, very large triceps, um and not a lot of pec, I'll immediately default to using more accessories for the chest. Um usually like twice a week to make sure recovery's okay. If I have someone say benching like uh Monday, Wednesday, Friday, something like that.

usually throw in a peck fly on day one and on day three, which is currently what I what I'm running myself from Declan as well. He has a very similar style for accessories. Um so I really like that. If someone has very, very large pecs and not a lot of arm size, obviously go the opposite. You know, they probably seem like they're going to get a lot out of just benching. So I'll tend to default to a bunch of tricep work, maybe some front delt work.

Still for triceps, you know, keep it to like twice a week. I don't really see a reason if you're doing a ton, ton of bench to try to go more than that. I mean, maybe you could, but You know, if you're growing on twice a week training with just a couple sets. Just keep growing consistently. Don't get to a point where maybe elbows are getting beat up.

Um, maybe you have to like taper back, you know, if you have something you can just run for a very long time, just run it out. So yeah, but basically it's just looking at how built someone already is in an area and then training whatever is lagging.

Nothing wrong with those exercises by themselves, but uh you know to me if you're already benching and you're looking to get just the hypertrophy out of those without fatiguing yourself, just go for the more targeted accessories. hitting whatever, you know, is going to be involved in the sticking point.

to get, you know, more quads and adductor, but still opt usually for the leg extension. And then if you have someone who's very upright, maybe using a high bar um position, something like that, you know, make sure you get a little bit more glutes, things like that out of it with your accessory work. Yeah, and then same sticking point analysis, wherever they tend to fail, look a little below that.

I'm gonna lock out because there's nothing really stopping me from doing that. But um yeah, so so yeah, really cool. Um I would just add in another observation which really only is something that um is possible if you've got a decent uh kind of database of multiple exercises uh and the and the lifts of uh people in those exercises uh that the one maxes or training weights people in those exercises. But I've noticed that if you can kind of um

Um, but they're not really noticeable. So again, i that's gonna do exactly the same thing in a bench press. They they're still just gonna get involved and do everything because it's not really about how big the muscle is, it's about how le how good the leverage is.

So um this is ultimately I think something else that you can do is if somebody has if you know what somebody somebody's lifts are, say uh like you know that they're sort of Uh they look at their training weights and you can see that their pec fly is, you know, kind of relatively modest, uh their overhead pressing numbers are relatively modest and their dip numbers are horrible, which

you know, just uh horrible in the sense that they're just off the charts, which is is is describing me perfectly. So, you know, my you look at my p sort of peck fly numbers and you're like, that's um relatively kind of uh modest, you know.

the uh, you know, overhead pressing doesn't really look like anything special. Um, and who is this a specimen doing dips? It's like then you would immediately know that I'm just gonna use my triceps to do everything in a bench press. So I think you can kind of get the same information from

But that's harder because you don't always have that data. I mean you can always just look at somebody and kinda get an appreciation for what they look like. You can always look at them doing the lift and you get an appreciation of where their sticking point is. And I think that's really cool that you identified those are the two sources of data that's gonna be most common and easiest to access. But

Adding on top of that, I think if you have got the information about some of these other lifts, you can kind of draw pretty much the same conclusions because you can just see that they're clearly really strong in the pair c or the delta or the triceps or whatever and you get the same answer. Yeah.

Cool. So deadlift. Essentially, um, same question again. Um, what's your go-to accessories for the deadlift? And then second follow-up from that, you know, when are you going to program them?

kind of, you know, sort of changing shape of that doing a curl exercise, usually a preacher curl, uh, you know, and it just looks horrible. But I mean, have you seen anybody posting anything about hamstring strains in a deadlift situation?

more likely that it's a tendon injury or a t uh muscle tendon junction injury. That's my gut feel is that what we're actually seeing is a rupture of the um kind of junction between the two structures. So I would kind of c classify it more as a tendon failure. I mean I don't know. I mean It just in the context of my understanding of the mechanism of a strain injury to a muscle and my understanding of uh damage to tendons, I I just can't see how it could be a

a genuine muscle strain injury in the sense of the word that we use it in case you know, sort of c cases like, you know, sprinting and in and and that kind of thing. So Yeah.

Um, and then just like girls seated or lying, you know, whatever you have access to. I'm not really a big stickler for one or the other. Get a little bit more near the knee with the the line, get a little bit more overall hands and hands near the hip with the seated. So either can work really well there. Um if I have someone doing, you know, maybe like stiff leg deadlifts.

on one day or just stifoid deadlifts in general. I might throw a lion like curl in on, you know, some of their other sessions so it's not quite as fatiguing maybe as a seated, but, you know, kind of dependent on the person there. For glutes, again, just back to the hip thrust. Really, really like the hip thrust, um, short position focus.

gets you increases in recruitment, gets you increases in hypertrophy, all those good things. And then it's not gonna be as taxing as some other things you might do. Um, you know, in the past, I've I've definitely known people and even I have used, you know, something like split squat lunge variations like that that'll hit glutes in like a a stretch position. But I don't really, you know, see any reason to focus on those at this point. Definitely like the thrust or uh

Um glute bridge, things like that more. And then adductors, I mean, you're gonna get them out of a stiff leg would be great. Um, gonna get them out of an RDL, gonna get them out of oh, out of your squatting, or you can use any of the same accessories for the squat. Same kind of variations and we'll do the same thing. So I'm not usually programming separate variations for adductors and adductor magnus. Just the one that covers the squat covers the demo.

And and basically there's going to be sections um you know, obviously less almost almost minimally, if not minimally, in a stiff leg. But there's going to be sections of the lift, um, in the RDL and the and the classic deadlift where the knee is extending.

And if the hip is extending and the knee is extending, the hamstrings aren't going to be working'cause they're going to be producing antagonist talks at the knee if they if they try and work. But that doesn't mean that they won't, you know, work at all. There'll be sections.

Yeah, but that's but that's also interesting because, you know, in terms of crossover between squats and deadlifts, you know, I think there's there's a lot less crossover in many people. Um um I mean I guess some people see a lot of crossover, some people don't. Cool. Okay. Um so is there anything else that you would have a program in terms of accessory exercises other than the what we've already gone through?

For the erectors, you know, I kind of tend to assume I'm getting as much as I really want or need out of the deadlift variations. Uh I don't usually see a need to program anything else, but I know people that like some like spinal flexion, um maybe like Jefferson curl exercises. I don't use them, but no no problem with them at all. I do like them.

High volume is obviously a relative term. But some people tend to program lower volumes for deadlift than they do for the other two lifts, simply because they don't tolerate deadlifting very well. And I definitely drop into that category. So I think that's the kind of scenario where an accessory uh to kind of

pull the spine kind of upwards and resist the deadlift kind of bending you over. I think that's a really interesting idea to have that in a program. Um have you ever kind of programmed anything like that?

All I'm pointing out is that in certain people who tend maybe, especially the taller people, you're gonna find that they can't maybe and and if those people aren't tolerating enough volume on the deadlift to be able to get that training effect, they're gonna end up needing to do that accessory that fills that gap. And I definitely fell into that category.

So that was that was always my kind of issue when I was deadlifting, which is I just got kind of bent over at the top. Um and that was just because my torso is quite long in that in that regard. So, okay, cool. Um I think you've already mentioned I mean, we tend to finish these episodes just by mentioning a couple of uh things that we see that are definitely not great ideas.

Um, the theme that you've been kind of giving us all the way through is that you're seeing people programming accessories which are basically just kind of variations of the main lift. And that's the thing that you're seeing, which is the most egregious sin in this regard. Um are you seeing anything else that you think is um silly or is that really the overriding problem?

And then like four sets of twelve on a dumbbell press, um, four sets of twelve on a pull down, four sets of twelve on an extension, like three or four sets, things like that. High reps, not really training, like a lot of times a close enough proximity to failure to be super useful. So you're just kinda like stacking up volume.

in those muscles, it's gonna be, you know, quite fatiguing for not really a huge hypertrophy benefit. Um, especially if it's something like, you know, you use those less tar weated exercises. So you do like a bench press and then three sets of twelve and a dumbbell press.

And then three six to twelve ones. I mean it's like, you know, you're you're using very redundant exercises and then fatiguing yourself excessively for not a big benefit. Whereas if you just did a good exercise One or two sets, you know, maybe a little more if you need to a couple times a week with, you know, maybe a rep in reserve, maybe two reps in reserve for moderate reps, like low to moderate reps.

Um, you know, I still really like like five to eight for accessories, provided, you know, people always like to complain about that. So provided people can execute a lift well with that kind of weight. Um but yeah, if you just go that approach, much more recoverable, gonna grow you better than, you know, say three sets of twelve till I can RPE seven, RPE eight, something like that. Yeah, it which I see a lot if you do twelve reps with a few in the tank.

You really likely haven't gotten very many useful reps out of that. So yeah, you do set of six. one rep in reserve. Um, first of all, easier to gauge the proximity to failure, especially on a very targeted exercise. And then you've gotten quite a few good reps. minimal sets and you don't I mean save time, you don't fatigue yourself. Definitely much, much more useful.

Um so but I I just wondered if you'd seen that. I do think that there's a lot of this inclination. I do see that inclination of people go, Well, you know, powerlifting has that kind of sort of mentality of reaching for the the the free weights instead of the machines when actually they could

cut down their warm up sets and cut you know, increase the stability, increase recruitment, get all these benefits and, you know, get through their accessory stuff a lot more easily if they ha just use the the machines instead.

But I mean, if you're up to even like, you know, kinda uh the point where I've been at my strongest in that maybe, you know, squatting around two hundred twenty KGs, deadlift about two seventy five, stuff like that. You know, I can get through a session. um a full body session with multiple mainlifts in an hour and a half. And that's like with good rest between not really taking, you know, not really rushing anything, taking my time on accessories, because I'm only doing one or two sets.

of moderate reps and like you said I'm picking exercises where maybe I need a warm-up rep.

Whether we do a power powerlifting part three will depend on whether we get questions um and whether there's interest in talking about other stuff like maybe tapers, splits, that kind of thing, but we have talked about all that stuff before in other contexts. So uh let's see what happens, uh but uh whatever happens, we will be back next week with another episode talking about something.