The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline

Indeed, today you will learn about strength as a practice, as a skill that can be applied to sports, that can be applied to general fitness, to getting leaner, to getting faster, and to improving your endurance. As Pavel Satsulin explains, by building one's strength through bodyweight exercises, free weight exercises, and occasionally machines.

One can develop incredible levels of fitness at any age. We discussed some of the spectacular examples of people in their 70s and 80s performing strength feats like 100 pull-ups per week. And we emphasize that one does not have to be seeking hypertrophy. One does not have to be seeking getting larger muscles in order to get exceptionally strong.

I myself these days am focusing primarily on trying to get stronger and build endurance for sake of health and for general life reasons and because getting really strong turns out to be very beneficial. in every aspect of life. Today you're going to learn how to get extremely strong. You can add muscle if you want in parallel with that. Or, as Pavel Satsulan explains, you can pursue strength

and flexibility for their own sake, and there's tremendous value for doing so. So today's discussion pertains to women, to men, and frankly to people of all ages. I do think that pursuing strength as its own thing, independent of muscle growth, right, which we hear so much about these days. Everyone wants hypertrophy, grow muscle, this and that, pursuing strength as its own thing is a tremendously valuable endeavor.

Today you're going to learn how from the world's premier expert in this topic. You're in for a very special episode with Pavel Satsulin. He is truly in a class all his own when it comes to fitness and strength. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Pavel Satsulin. Pavel Satsulin, welcome.

How do you conceptualize fitness? Meaning, do you look at things through the lens of are we focused on nervous system, bone, connective tissue, or muscle? Do you look at things through the lens of Anterior chain, posterior chain, hypertrophy strength. I would just like to get your sort of high-level conceptualization of this thing that we call fitness.

With the idea in mind that most people would like to have some level of endurance, some level of strength, and feel healthy and presumably look however they want to look. But let's set aesthetics aside for the moment, how do you think about this thing?

are gonna be much higher if you're able to, you know, squat this much or bench this much and jump this high and so on and so forth. And this is easy enough to find these numbers for your individual sport. various coaches. For people who are not competitive athletes, who just want to enjoy life, you just need to think about uh having a reserve of strengths for whatever So look at some P T standards in let's say in the military or in law enforcement and possibly.

I don't want to impose my set of standards because there are many different like I might prefer, you know, pull ups and X and Y and Z. But if we're looking at strengths as the foundation for general physical preparation, right? So there's such a thing as general strength preparation, that's part of that. There's also, you know, special strengths, which is sports specific work, that's different.

And uh there are different ways of getting this done. But as you and I know that uh certain exercises are going to have a great carryover outside.

As long as you're mobile, as long as you're symmetrical, and those are the things you have to address first, you need to look into work of uh Greg Cook, for example, then strength has to be your Once you have reached a certain level of strength that's appropriate for your sport or appropriate for your lifestyle, at that point you can just maintain it and focus on. So I will um give you an example. Soviet scientists, Vysocin Dzniesinka, they measured

And number of athletes in twenty different sports. Athletes of different levels. So they evaluated various quality, one was absolute strength. Another was rate of force development, pretty much possible. And the third was is the rate of muscular relaxation. So how quickly the muscle can relax after contraction, which is very, very. And they have found that Strength grew just very little from the intermediate level to the advanced level. There's not Power increased a little more.

But the speed of relaxation is just just shut up as the athlete bec became more advanced. So it's again, so strength it is the motherable qualities, but that's not the end of it. So reach the level that is appropriate for your sport or activity, then just maintain it efficiently and Focus on. If we talk about strength, if we talk about other qualities Well we'll get to that.

simple, very low tech, high concept ways of addressing uh reaching their knees because for one reason or another, for this individual the barbell is the preferred tool. For another it's the kettlebell or body weight or some or something. So I'm not going to say that if you don't do kettlebell swings or barbell squats.

But you can pick some you can pick some events. So you definitely ought to do something for a posterior chain. You absolutely If we are looking at uh at the barbell I would start out with the narrow sumo deadlift.

And then they start standing on a bowl and juggle oranges doesn't make a lot of sense to me because that doesn't look like my life or yours probably, right? But if you have to get a heavy bag of groceries or something, you got a deadline. And the narrow sumo deadlift. So if you look at power lifters, an example would be classic example would be EDCO. narrow stand sumo. That's a very sport

And uh you practice that first. You learn how to hip hinge. It's extremely important to learn how to hip hinge. Again, uh Stuart stressed that how important it is for your back health and for your longevity. So you learn to do Then whether you decide to pursue the deadlift or not, if you decide not to pursue high numbers in the deadlift, maybe it's not appropriate for you, or maybe you like in the coaching, a fantastic exercise for everybody is a Zerture Squad.

So in the Zercher squat you hold the bar like this in the crooks of your elbows. So it's resting right here. It's possible to pick it up off the ground but it's you know it's it's an advanced skill. It's an advanced skill. Better just to walk it off the rack. The advantage of the Zercher squat over, let's say, the back squat or the front squat is even if you have messed up shoulders, wrists, elbows, you still Coaching uh the Zercher squad is very easy.

And you have tremendous reflexive stabilization. So you acquire that skill of getting So getting high numbers on that exercise in the searcher. So let's say an athlete could shoot for double double body weight. It that's that's a

Well these days they also check out the biggest.

So you can do several sets of five once a week in the bench press and keep getting stronger. Good luck doing that in the overhead press or in the one-arm push upper. So those are just a couple examples. Uh there are many other examples. You can do snatch grip

you can uh list is very, very long. We can address the same thing in the same way with kettlebells. You can look in the body weight exercises, but you need to find several exercises that have a reputation for building strength that reaches beyond

the ability to do this exercise. So Canadian uh Canadian scientists back in the eighties the D B C L and his team made some interesting Some interesting discoveries think and they just found that doing something like extension is not gonna carry over The coordination is So you find several exercises that you enjoy. That uh you Have the equipment of it.

that you got the proper coaching for and you pretty much stick with them. And there is absolutely no reason for you to It's possible to change them on the margins, you know, from a wide grip bench press to narrow grip bench press. squats with the paws and so on and so forth. But you don't really have to do uh a great variety Variety it's a good topic, we can discuss this later. But uh like looking at the example of weightlifting.

As much as we can find many reasons why variety could be beneficial, improved neuroplasticity, uh reduced uh reduced risk of repeat of strain injury and so on. But the so it's the statistics in weightlifting, there's no correlation between the number of exercises and uh the platform results. And for people outside the sports it's gonna be So find this limited, just limited battery of exercises that you can do well, you can do pain-free, and just enjoy them for a while.

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would a combination across the week of some sort of squat, let's say the Zercher squat, a um perhaps a kettlebell swing or something else for a posterior chain pull up and dip be a very fairly comprehensive program. I'm a fan of dips. I like dips a lot. I heard you say that you uh were uh some years ago you said that you were using dips for economy of time.

Um and I started getting into dips. I um haven't quite figured out the best way to load dips once because once you get past fifteen, twenty repetitions of the body weight dip it gets Sure. Uh it turns into aerobic exercise, perhaps. Uh

So it means you're hanging upside down, you know, look up what it means for. So you gotta be able to get yourself in that position. So if you're able to do that and if you're able to go get out of the position, you know, strongly and confidently, there's a good chance that you can start up and doing dips and become If you can't probably So either try to build up to that unless there are medical restrictions or not.

Uh you mentioned the example of pull-ups. Absolutely pull-ups are one of the best general strength exercises. And again, to your listeners, uh general versus special. Special in Soviet terminology is So the carryover when you start doing pull ups, when you excel at pull ups or the dips, you are going to get a carryover so far beyond the So I like your choice.

So pretty much by gripping tighter, you are instantly increasing your strengths in any situation. And uh so a very simple example for your listeners. Take some um and do as many strict traps as you possibly can the way you normally do. You will immediately be able to knock off the biggest. So that makes you so much stronger. And again the value of a strong wrist and grip is obviously very important.

Uh for whatever reason, obviously it correlates with longevity. We don't know why. We have no idea correlation is not uh causation, so we don't know whether getting stronger a stronger grip is gonna make us live longer, but statistically it's worth a try, right? One can either find exercises that train the grip in the context of development

Or train the grip directly. So either way is is great. So the first examples would be climbing the rope or doing pull ups and weighted pull ups on a rope. That's a great way to train. So what you do the way you program it is uh let's say once a week you climb the rope and a couple days a week. You don't need to do that. And another example would be some exercises like the kettlebell snatch. When you start snatching a heavy kettlebell and you drop it from overhead, that eccentric loading.

is is very, very powerful. And that develops And again right now we're talking more about what P what people in the grip world called the crushing grip. There are other types of grip that they differentiated, but this type of crushing grip is what's going to help most Athletes and non athletes. And uh I will also warn you that Hanging on the bar? And doing farmers' carries, beneficial as they are for many reasons. It's not going to do that much for a development like

Uh doctor Mike Privost, who used to work with the US Marine Corps and Navy, he developed this very interesting protocol and a test. He called the kettlebell mile, where you take a kettlebell that's approximately thirty percent of your body weight, and uh he he has good reasons worldwide. And you pretty much run with this kettlebell.

And you switch hands as much as often as you want. And it's a fantastic way to uh improve your running posture, to develop very stabilizing muscles, and to improve your ability to rock, but it doesn't beat you up as much, right? You know, rocking carrying heavy weight, that's it's wrong. So it's a fantastic way, uh it's a fantastic way to m to train your endurance. Yeah.

And so what we're doing right now here is kind of a form of anti glycolytic training. If you c muscle contracts briefly and then relaxes, contracts, relaxes with and the contraction cycles are really short.

you're able to avoid glycolysis, you're able to keep that muscle working aerobically for a long time and not beat yourself down. So To listeners who'd like to try it, start by walking with a kettlebell, pass, you know, switch hands off, and then eventually build up to running and obviously build up.

It's hard because of the shape of the thing and so you're moving it from shoulder to uh to you know to football carry to uh you know uh infant carry and uh you're not talking about that. You're talking about suitcase on the right. Correct. Are you trying to crush the grip with

And their grippers are the golden standard. Some years ago, my colleague uh as strong first Brad Jones and I, we decided to get serious about it. And we spelt spent many, many months we were both able to build up to the first time. Closing the number three gripper uh from a parallel set. That means that gripper takes two hundred eighty pounds to close. And uh when you're using very small muscle groups, it's extremely extreme.

And the observations that we both made and uh other colleagues and people have made that once you are able to do that, everything becomes so much easier. However the training Because people are thinking that when you're training the grip is just some kind of isolated thing. You can you can ride it drive the car and you can kind of squeeze this little uh pink thing that you picked up at uh at the department store.

When you train with a heavy-duty gripper like the one from Iron Mind, it's a full-body effort. And you need to use pretty much every neurological trick in the book in order to g to uh exert yourself. So for example, if you If you've ever seen uh Sanchez Stan. Which is uh it's a stance where the knees are kind of pulled inward and uh shoulders are pressed down, there's a lot of a lot of tension, and everything everything's very, very seriously engaged.

The toes are gripping the ground. So you're pretty much gripping the ground with your toes. You're contracting your glutes. You're bracing very, very hard. You're compressing your viscera. Your lattice firing and you're sending this all this effort everything the only thing they're not working like you try to keep your traps in face out of this.

And you're directing this effort into your group, you get just as tired from doing that work as from uh doing like heavy squats or something. That's remarkable. But if you like that, it's a fantastic.

the motor neurons that are responsible for more distal musc muscles, um that is further from the midline, sit outside of those. And so as you get out to the movement of the digits, you know, the fingers and toes, um Those are the most distal from the midline. The rate and pattern of degeneration of motor neurons as a function of aging, even if there's no ALS or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or anything, is always

We don't know why this is. It may relate to the presence of the enzyme SOD, superoxide dimutase, but it does seem that people that train their peripheral strength. They can offset some of that outside to in or distal to more

discussion outside of here. We'd need to get some diagrams up for people to really um conceptualize that. But It's also the case if you look at older people, seventy, eighty, ninety, their calves are generally atrophied even if their torso is still very So I feel like obviously training the core and the torso is so key, but training the the peripheral muscles, at least from the perspective

And so he would have her do deadlifts and they were concentric only. And uh the reasoning for that is is exactly that. You're able to get stronger, you're not uh putting And in programming in programming. protocol for somebody who's not necessarily in that in that boat. It's still just for the sake of variety you may want to choose to avoid the avoid the eccentric uncertainty. Like you're trying to recover, accelerate the recovery. So you uh lift the weight, but then you step down.

Eccentric work of the It's supposed supposedly very helpful to promote hypertrophy, but there are a lot of ifs and buts in there. I'm going to talk right now about the eccentric strength war eccentric work for strength specifically. It's very because the muscle is strongest whenever you're lowering the weight, it's very easy to uh do something that can Jim Burroughs does that all the time. And instead of doing that, what the wise much wiser approach is to get a perfect spotter, great competence.

And put on after you've done your normal couple of low repetition Add maybe five ten pounds over your mouth. And make a perfect eccentric with an intention of lifting. So you're lowering this bar that you just uh you know, the bench press You're lowering it to your chest and you're loading yourself like you're ready to press it back. You pause on your chest without losing tension, you're ready to blast it back. And then your spot is ticket up. You do this about do this about two, three.

This uh this sort of a strategy Or variation of it was uh used by Reek Will He was uh he was able to bench press over five hundred pounds wearing a t-shirt uh at the body weight of Buck eighty one back in the eighties, one of the great greatest uh bench pressers, who was extremely intelligent about his training. And he did the same thing with his habit. And incidentally, even better not even better, I should say you do this in a different

When you combine this ex the same type of eccentric with a very uh con perfect assisted trap, not force trap like bros do. It's oh you bro, you know, the guy shaking there and died. No. So again, let's say that your best bench press is, you know, 315. So you load up 325. you lower it perfectly. And you're not and you're lowering at the speed of your

Max attempt. So you're not going very, very, very slow. You know how guys do it. They take the first uh quarter of the range of motion very slow and then they fall through. That doesn't do anything at all. No. You lower it at that A rhythm of your maximal weight, you pause and then you press it, and your training partner gives you enough assistance to make it feel like it's about your nineteenth.

So the fact is you're not re you get to feel a super maximal weight, but you're not experiencing any uh psychological stress. It's very, very powerful. And again, you do this uh you do this maybe for one or two single days. This uh also ties with the Soviet research on gymnasts. They came up with something called artificial controlling environment. So they compared a group of gymnasts that was uh working up to some strength demanding skill with doing typical regression.

And at the same time, they were also working on um typical strength training. And the other group would have the coach provide this perfect assistance to enable the athlete to perform the skill at a high level, as they put it, uh living their motor future. But with enough help not to to make it hard but not stressful. And the difference in gains were just just just dramatically so much gained so much faster. So I would say that would be a very good way to use uh eccentric.

Isometric isometric training calls can also be very powerful for strength. And A great value of isometric training is in its ability to coach you to live properly. And not just lift properly, other uh other athletic advances. Well, if let's say that you're trying to learn to throw front gears, And you're doing it deal over the place. But if you place your foot on a wall and if your coach or sensei positions your body your foot in a certain way.

and teaches you to start to start applying pressure to that wall and the ground at the same time and kind of a pulse it against the wall, adjust your body And then you relax, shake off your muscles, and you go hit the bag and suddenly you're gonna do so much better. The same thing, let's say that you're trying to optimize your uh position for the bottom of the deadlift. So you load up more weight than you could possibly lift.

And then you wedge yourself under and you start applying pressure and it doesn't feel good. So you change it. Isometrics are very powerful for Not just for strengthening the sticking points, but also for optimizing the aim. Then we're also dealing with something that um there is also great disinhibition effect. So what your listeners might not know is uh so there are two you're you have two pedals in your nervous system as and pardon me for telling you this, you don't need obviously know all the

But there's the excitation inhibition. There's the gas the gas pedal and the brake pedal. And There are various influences, some of them psychological, but not all of them, that are taking away from your strength. That's called inhibition. And under certain circumstances, there are documented cases like a lady lifting off the front of a thirty six pound thirty six uh uh hundred pound car to save her son, and there are documented cases. So that disinhibition takes place.

So isometrics does have some disinhibition effects, properties, very, very powerful. Also, isometrics teaches you to teaches you not to give up on a heavy attempt. Because if you put um The experiments were done in a safe manner on the machines, obviously, but if you put an inexperienced person and The machine is moving at a slow at a slow rate. So if when it starts up the speed starts approaching zero, uh that Inhibition takes place.

So pretty much the subject thinks the gig is up. I'm not going anywhere, that's it, I'm done. I'm just giving up because But training with isometrics allows you to develop to develop this kind of a neural drive endurance that you need to grind through safely through a heavier tap. So very, very popular. How would you incorporate isometrics into it so you can do this uh as a part of your warm-up? You can uh also do pause reps.

It's when you combine combine uh eccentric, concentric, and isometric contraction all in one. So perfect example for the squat, you lower to parallel and you stay tight and you stay there for three to five seconds, and then you explode. So that's uh that's a great way to train.

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I'd like to talk about neural drop. I attribute you with popularizing maybe you invented it, but um certainly popularizing the the term like greasing the groove. Uh in one of your books. And by the way, we provide links to Pavel's books in the show note captions. I'm a collector of your books. Thank you. I love them. Getting to be collector's items that are a little bit harder to find, but you'll have to compete with me on eBay. But some of them can be found elsewhere, and we'll provide links.

uh to those. But this notion of greasing the groove completely changed my conceptualization of strength. Because I was weaned uh more or less trying to run cross country during the cross country season. Only ran it once, but I greatly enjoyed it and continued that sort of training, or trying to put on strength and size. Kind of a numbskull young male approach to things. But

And you'll explain what it is, but the idea that more frequent training or practicing of a movement opens up a tremendous number of opportunities for development of strength. Size, hypertrophy, if one wants. And I would say just generally more flexibility over one's total fitness program. Once one understands this concept. You no longer look at this split or that split or this many reps or that many reps or this volume or that volume. All that is important.

But you can start to think about it through the lens of the nervous system. And to me, it was like uh water in a desert to finally encounter something that brought together all these different concepts. So could you ex please explain for people what greasing the groove is and then I think the implications of it will become obvious but we'll also spell out what we're doing.

And then you walk out of your garage and you shoot an arrow. And you just go back to going about your business, just working in your garage. Or let's say you're a kid who uh who practices martial arts and every on every break between classes you just go in the corner and you practice your kata. This is the best way to practice your kada. in small portions in a spaced out metal. What's really fascinating is uh

Traditional education and traditional strength training, it's based on the cramming model. So remember cramming for an exam. So you're studying at night and you somehow squeak by and you pass Okay, great. And then a couple of days later you happily forget everything. So in contrast, imagine that you are, let's say you're studying a foreign language. You write uh words on cards. At every opportunity you're standing in line in the bank. So the lesser mortals are fooling around on their phone.

Going through your deck. Like, oh, can I translate this word? Go put it back in the deck, flip it over. The next time you're in some other place, you do this again. So this is an example of space practice versus the traditional mass practice. And the evidence of the superiority of space practice is just overwhelming. It goes back to the nineteenth century and there is at least like a more than a thousand papers published. And still very few people do that, which is really sad.

And uh strength is a skill. So two th interesting things happened in the fifties. One is uh Thomas Rush, he was an American uh exercise physiologist, he proposed that strength adaptation was largely uh skill largely uh skill. And uh he looked at pretty much the adaptations, he noticed that there's no correlation between the muscle growth and strength.

Then uh at the same time, a Soviet scientist uh Stepanov was his last He was measuring the electrical activity in the muscles of weightlifters who were pressing overhead, and back then the press was one of the companies. And what he found is as the athletes got stronger after some months, the EMGs started dropping off when they're lifting. So pretty much he found out that the nervous system activity became more economical. They were able to try less hard, yet still live the same way.

Or pretty much they're they could try harder and lift him and heavier. And hypertrophy could not explain that because in the fifties the Soviets were very anti hypertrophy. They were just doing doubles, triples, singles pretty much. So If we look at what's going on, it's uh The Hebian mechanisms, so pretty much every time that you activate a particular connection, synaptic connection, you know, between the neurons, that connection becomes uh stronger.

So if you do it over and over and over. So the grease the groove is the analogy is that command that's coming in from your brain to your muscles, that's the groove. That's a pattern. And the more you use it pretty much the more greasy it becomes. So it's like becomes a super con

So in the future you don't have to try as hard to lift the same amount of weight, or you can try the same amount and you can lift harder. So we're not ev we haven't even addressed the neural drive yet. We just pretty much made the motor neurons more responsive more responsive. And um it's a very easy and very simple way to train and uh strength comes very easily and very, very unexpectedly.

To make sure that it does happen, you have to address uh the issue of specificity. So specificity pretty much means without getting too uh too much into the weeds, to get stronger, first of all, you need to lift weights at a heavy. And uh if you're looking about percentages of one rep max, we're looking at like seventy five

If you go too light, you don't make the impression on your nervous system and it's just not specific enough. If you go too heavy, very quickly you're just gonna burn yourself out. And uh so pretty much like it's a weight that's heavy enough to respect and light enough not to be. And the second of all, and this is very surprising, is you only do about half or fewer reps that you possibly can.

So for example, let's say that you're lifting eighty percent of your one rev max. And let's say that you're able to do eight reps maximum with it. That's your that we're just fairly fairly comfortable. Well, you're only going to do about three uh three to four reps per set, and that's it. And the Jim Bros at this point go crazy, like where's the intensity?

Intensity in strength training is just how heavy the weight is. It has nothing to do with the effort. And it's been proven over and over that that's much more important than how hard you're exerting yourself. There are times for that. There are absolutely times for that. But if the weight is heavy enough, And if you do half the repetitions that you possibly could do, you're going to get stronger. It's very safe.

And you're not going to burn out psychologically and it's also very easy on your body. Also that builds muscle as well, purely because you're able to do a very high I'm not able to explain the mechanism why it builds muscle, but as the Soviets found out in weightlifting research there's a correlation between the volume and

Robert Troman, uh between the volume and the hypertrophy, everything else being equal, you're going to get bigger. So almost every day you're doing the sets of three, four reps, maybe even five, and they start to do that. And before you know it, you're stronger and at the same time you have developed muscle. So to summarize the grease the groove, you're trying to train m moderately heavy as often as possible while staying as staying as fresh as possible.

And uh if you decide to do it in the gym, a very simple protocol would be a set every ten minutes. It sounds really bizarre. Like why? Why why would you would you rest for so long? This apparently has to do with initial memory consolidation. There's so much is still unknown. So we do know the Grister group works great. But we speculate that some of it has to do with some of the same phenomena related to uh to learning in other

So if you're doing something over and over, like like you're saying two plus two is four, two plus two is four, you're just using your short term memory. You're not memorizing anything. But if you say two plus two is four, you go get a coffee, you come back and you try

Two plus two, four. So there's that desirable difficulty that you have in there and you have to process that instead of just go through the groove. That uh that apparently helps helps this adaptation. So rest for at least 10 minutes. do sets of about the repetitions of half of what you're possibly able to do.

And you know, listen to your body. Typically train two, three days in a row and then take a day off, but listen to your body. Incidentally, this grease the groove is the topic of uh my next book. I've completed it. It's not published yet. If you look at uh I can't pronounce the Hungarian professor's last name. Chiksumahai. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that. So he's talking about that perfect uh challenge, perfect practice lies in that channel between boredom and

So if you put yourself in that channel and if you keep lifting this moderately heavy weights with a moderate effort over and over and over, you're going to get strong. That's one of the many

And uh another option is you can do that. You can incorporate this into if you do only one exercise, you can squeeze it into your lifestyle or your athletic practice. So for example, In uh let's say you're teaching uh track uh track uh practice or martial arts And every ten minutes on the clock you would just have the class do

Drop and do three hard uh let's say three one arm push-ups. Okay, and then get back to the class. So there's no interference whatsoever. In fact, it's better than no interference. Back in the sixties, Soviets found out something called the Uh strength after effect. So if you do strength work that's not exhausting in nature and that's not novel to you, it has a tonic effect uh just for any any uh

Anything that you can do with your brain or with your body. Anything. So what they would even do, some coaches do this so called strength warm-up. Warm up as usual for a track class, let's say. Then they would do let's say three sets of three of something like with eighty percent max. And they start they start their practice. Then the coach notice that the athletes are starting to droop a little. He'll repeat

He might repeat that up to three times. So what you have is by having this short uh very small dose like a nanopractice of strength. you rejuvenate yourself and your productivity increases so much. So whether you want to just do the strength exercise, several of them in that one hour period, or whether you want to combine that with writing a great American novel.

You could keep a kettlebell under your desk and do impress it at at every opportunity. And again, the idea is really just practice. You just try to hit a perfect, perfect trap. And notice that If you have some issues, if you're a warm up dependent person for orthopedic issues, I'm talking about warm-up in the very much in the uh body, not the mind, in this particular

Then it might not be appropriate for you. Although, you know, with 10-minute rest, it might still be okay. But uh practicing a skill without the warm-up that means rehearsal. is very powerful for improving that skill. People think they automatically equate performance with improvement, with learning, but it's not so. Not at all. When you're doing something that's just out of the blue

It's uh new, you know, the way a sniper would take a cold shot. That's so much harder because you have to have produced that solution uh or maybe an an example that's closer to most uh viewers. Uh you go to the driving range, you start hitting it, and like, wow, you you're amazing. You just get yourself fine-tuned, you hit, you're perfect.

Then uh then you go and you play the game and you cannot replicate that. Because suddenly different club, uh different topography, everything's different. But and you didn't have the luxury of that tuning yourself up. So it feels it doesn't feel like you're stronger, but you are going to get much stronger.

Uh there's a guy at the University of Pittsburgh named Peter Strick. who for the first time started to map the connections between the adrenals and the brain. And he was able to do this using some really cool technology. The basic takeaway is the following. Adrenaline released from the adrenals. Uh some of the listeners may know, doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, but it turns out it binds to receptors on the vagus, which then stimulates noradrenaline in the brain and provides this increase.

So then the question is, how do you get your adrenals engaged? You know, we can sit here and we can we can do a staring competition which I'll lose um uh for certain. But you know, there are all sorts of psychological tools. We get, you know, caffeine, et cetera. There are all sorts of ways to get cold water. But it turns out what Peter found was that there are particular locations in the motor cortex.

that send a two uh basically a two synapse connection, disynaptic connection directly to the adrenals. And the areas of motor cortex that engage the adrenals cause them to release adrenaline, but just by sheer movement a particular muscle group. are the core, as you were talking about before, like bracing the core, causes the release of adrenaline, which then via the vagus.

Uh causes the brainstem area uh to release noradrenaline, wake up the whole brain essentially, increase learning and performance in anything. Stronger and stronger activation of the motor neurons, deliberate activation of the motor neurons seems to engage adrenaline release. Now, to me, this was a wonderful way of um trying to persuade people.

that they have internal control over this thing that we call motivation, that movement itself can increase adrenaline, which can increase the tendency to want to move.

uh that particular movements and particular muscles being engaged in activity itself changes the neurochemical milieu. I mean of course it had to be, right? It's a big duh. But I think that um anyway I was excited to share with you uh these data. I didn't discover them. So I read The Naked Warrior. I was closed when I when I read it. Um but it's a wonderful book because it talks about body weight um only exercises and this concept of, for instance, like c trying to crush the biggest.

Um one's fist on uh you know, making a really strong fist on the other side and th how that will increase your uh your gripping ability on the other side. This kind of thing.

Paul Anderson, one of the greatest weightlifters of all time, uh he was uh he was a big favorite of the Soviet public, you know, very tough group to impress, but they called him the wonder of nature, he was a good thing. And uh Paul Anderson would do a set of squats.

Then he would wander around, drink some milk, half an hour later do set of presses, now go do this again. And uh so he reinvent not not should say reinvent, no, he invented without knowing neurons from nylons, many of the training concepts that are just cutting And again, so this concept of contextual interference, remember we talked earlier how if it's harder for you to produce a solution, if you're trying harder to remember two plus two is four or how to throw the ball.

Then you're gonna learn more as opposed to if somebody just hands it out two plus So Paul Anderson had both the spacing, time came like so the the groove has been forgotten in the sense of time, and uh the contextual interference he did in another exercise that erased whatever previous groove. And it's uh it's very fascinating how looking at some of these old timers and just how uh how genius.

Some value. I feel like um for creating all around strength and hypertrophy, there's just such a incredible treasure trove of other things that you're sharing with us today that that are just not discussed as much because people don't take the lens of the nervous system completely.

One one thing that I'd love to ask about the nervous system in terms of training, adaptation, and recovery is that I was weaned somewhat under the uh thought patterns of Mike Mencer. This was in the Darien Yates era and I knew Mike a little bit. I paid for a consult uh with him over the phone. We never met in person. Um

So that had my mother asking, you know, why is this grown man calling our home? And why are you wire in the old days you had to wire somebody money? So I didn't um but it was so worthwhile because uh Mike taught me that the goal of training was to induce an adaptation. Anything additional was not

necessary and in his case he he felt was counterproductive, very infrequent training, et cetera. And it worked tremendously well to take me from like a hundred and fifty pounds to two hundred and ten pounds, which I had no Need to do, but my body just reacted like crazy. But then again, I was 16, 17, and 18 years old in that time, probably could have done any number of different things.

and and experience similar results. Who knows? But the concept, of course, is that you train to induce an adaptation, then you rest, and then you allow the adaptation to serve the you know, moving higher poundages in good form, this sort of thing. The problem, however, is that, and Menser highlighted this, is that training of any kind, running, lifting, et cetera.

Taxes both the nervous system as a whole and the muscles locally and the connective tissue. How should we think about training and recovery? So when you describe Greece the Groove, I could imagine if I had a home setup or I'm going to the gym, I could maybe do four or five rounds of this training. But at some point

is the classic American powerlifting system from the seven from the eighties. And uh when people argue about training methods, what they need to understand is uh There are many ways to get the job done. You know, Atkovio, his research in Estonia found because there's so many different combinations of stimuli and the different ad different adaptations that result, you can arrive to similar outcomes in a lot of different ways. So to say this is right and this is wrong

You cannot sometimes do that. I mean I can say most of things are right. But I can also say there's multiple right ways of training, and they can be radically different, and they're different because they rely on very different phenomena. So in this particular case you're talking about recovery and frequency, which is a again a great way to address it. I'm gonna talk about two systems that are completely different. And yet have that same pedigree that they have m m brought so many gold

So one system is the Soviet weightlifting system, is again where athletes would train several times a day. And Bulgarian system is a more extreme example of that. And every day. And the other extreme would be the American powerlifting system, exemplified by uh uh Hugh Cassidy, Marty Gallagher, Ed Cone, Kurt Kowaski. So starting from the 70s through the nineties. Those are really glorious day for use powerlifting. And in that system, they would pretty much do one or two heavy sets per lift.

So it's kind of a little bit like Mike Manser's work, kind of but n but we'll we'll we'll address why. So, how can that be, and how can both systems work? So, you address the recovery. There's a concept called heterochronicity, which hetero means different. Chronicity refers to time. So the different systems in the body to cover recovery. And if you don't take that into account then uh you're going to Oh.

The Soviet system took uh if you look at the Soviet system with frequent training, they looked at okay, we want to do frequent practice, which is exactly what we We don't want to beat the muscles up so much that they that takes them very long time to recover, you know, not too much eccentric stress, not too much acidosis, avoiding things like that. Uh And they were able to adjust the loads in such a way. So let's say your weights are heavy but not too

The reps don't go too high, so you're able to recover pretty much pretty much overnight. And the benefit of that is it's been shown that if you fragment a given workload over more days and more sessions, you get better. And it's uh your body is able and your ner nervous system, endocrine system, your carcass, everything is able to handle much more if it's split into small doses. So let's use an example of a meal. Let's say if you were trying to an eating competition.

How much you can eat in twenty four hours. So it's not like those Coney Island, you know, how many hot dogs you can eat in one city. No. But you'd probably eat a lot more if you spread. This is the same idea. So it's like that parable from Nasim Taleb about uh the king that got angry on his son. The King's name's war. So he ordered his uh peons to break up the rock into So that's the same idea. So fragmentation, the load always uh allows you to do more and So something else is related to that.

Some training systems, some training systems rely on adaptations, let's say for strength, uh that go in the muscle that go beyond just the contractal proteins. you know, my fur m part that make uh that create force. So for example, the Soviet system, they also tried to increase the storage of creatine phosphate, which is the kind of immediate fuel for for muscle contractions for this type of work, for lifting heavy weights over and over.

And so by training sometimes easier, you're able to keep stimulating that creatin phosphate adaptation, but without still allowing muscles to recover. So this kind of a dance. And it's fairly complicated. Then on the other hand the American system did something completely different. And uh the explanations for what happens in the muscle with this within this American system, we don't know for sure. But there's a hypothesis by a Russian specialist Vladimir that's seems quite credible.

So again the system, here's the system. You train hard, you do one hard set once a week, or two hard set.

So but that damage has to be very, very specific. If you beat up the muscle with a baseball bat, you're just gonna get a whole lot of scar tissue and you know some satellite cells will just die and others But if the cross bridges in the muscle, the cross bridges is that part that does create force in the muscle, if they do tear in a very specific way, it seems to do the So the way the muscle contracts is so there is uh

Imagine that you're rowing a boat on the water. So water is one protein, it's called actin, and myosin is the ores that are moving. So the ore dips into the water, hooks and pools. And that or relies on available energy in the muscles. So these uh ATP molecules of you know stored energy, they're floating around. And they had myosin had need Needs that ATP in order to bolt, to hook to produce force, but it also it needs ATP to unhook and

And it's in this in-between stage it's called a rigor. So whenever the muscle has produced force, but there is not enough energy for it to relax. So the muscle is stuck in rigor. So think of rigor mortis. So if you tear a dead body's muscle, you know, there is it's gonna tear. And supposedly this is going to happen only when you're able to when the consumption of ATP is really high in the muscle. But the but the supply.

And so if you're if you do that in the first let's say twenty, twenty, thirty seconds before acidose set in, that's what that's what should happen. Because if you wait longer when there's a lot of acid in the muscle, acid uh it kills that reaction that uh it kills that reaction to use. So you're not using as much anymore. Sure, the demand is down, the supply is down, but it's on demand, so it's not so good. So if you erase that fatigue point,

So, if you try to deplete that creatine phosphate, that kind of rocket fuel of the muscle within about 20-30 seconds, then presumably some of these hooks, some of these ores are going to get stuck. And when the muscle is lengthening and the And that's a very specific tear. It doesn't happen on the outside of the muscle, it happens just on the inside.

Whether this is true or not, I do not know, but it's a pretty good theory that does explain Mike Menzer's method and explains the uh American powerlifting method.

Interesting about Mike Mansur, and again to the listeners who are not aware of the method, that means train the muscles really hard, very infrequently, with very low volume. Professor Yuri Virkashansky before he died, you know, a famous Soviet sport scientist, known uh known in the West mostly as the father of what is called And but he's also done many other things as well. He spoke very highly about Mencer. He thought Mencer was brilliant, Mencer is an innovator.

But many people some people get good results from it like you did, and a lot of people do not. And uh So pretty much what Pratasenka suggested that might happen is eventually uh you'll reach the limit of adaptation of how much you can deplete how much you can deplete the creatine phosphate in that window. That's when And this is where the American system comes in. This system was called cycling. The history of cycling is fairly.

The relationship, uh the interaction between the Soviet and American strength schools is absolutely fascinating. So uh just to go back for a minute. Soviet track app. In the fifties we're using the typical stupid high rep uh high rep reps to burn. Then in then in late fifties, uh some very sharp young specialist uh Vitaly Chzinov, he uh made a case at a conference.

Let's look at what he said, let's look what Paul Anderson, Dyke Hebburn, Bruce Randall, these North American strength sites. Let's look what they're doing. They're lifting heavy stuff for Cecil. Let's knock this down since off. Soviet track athletes started. So this is how the Soviets for example learned from the That's an example of how when the other one is.

the classic periodization as it's known, Matveeus periodization, in which you kind of start out with higher volume and uh less specific to lower you know, to lower volume, more intensity and so on. That uh lifters. Lifters thought that's just completely not it's just not usable. It's just inappropriate for their needs. Arkady Varabyov, the professor and uh Olympic champion, made a very strong case. Why? But Americans who got some

limited information about it. American powerlifters, not weightlifters, were able to develop their own training system based on that premise, something that the Soviets didn't do. And the way it worked is is like this. But you start to I'm gonna give you a most classic example of this type of cycling. Again, this is again Cassidy, Gallagher. Four weak blocks. That there's like gonna be three, four week blocks maybe four. So you do lift once a week.

On week four, you go for a PR. So let's say this is a month of five. So this is on your week four you're going to do a PR set of five. Week three is somewhere around your old pier. Week two is lighter, week one is lighter still. Okay. And then after that, you may increase the weight, but still relative effort is going to drop, and you're going to kind of repeat the process.

So it does multiple things On the muscular level, so what uh Partasinka explained, you pretty much decondition yourself temp tempor temporarily and you progressively increase that creatine phosphate use so initially When you're deconditioned, it doesn't take as much to get the stimulus. You don't have to push really hard in the first week. You push harder in the second. And hardern horse.

There's a concept, uh their concept in uh periodization, so it's port science of reactivity versus resistance. Reactivity means how responsive your body is to the stimulus. And resistance, kinda like in the medical terms, you know, how much it can you know, it it's uh it's not effective. So when you're starting light. After a layoff, your reactivity is high and your resistance is low. It doesn't take much. So boom, suddenly you build this muscle.

And then you keep building up. And when you reach when you reach a peak, then you just then you just uh step back again. And uh on the side of the nervous system and endocrine system, much later Soviet research, they said you can train hard maximum two weeks out of the way. That's it. More than that you cannot handle.

Franco Colombo, who uh passed unfortunately, was not just a great bodybuilder. He was a great chiropractor and great strength athlete. Super strong. Very strong. And brilliant. So he told me about one of how his deadlift. Week one, moderate, week two, heavy, week three, moderate, week four very heavy. Again, this is a different way of arranging the same concept. And these American power lifters were able to build a system that built the muscle probably exactly in this manner.

What was happening at the same time oh yeah and there is also another angle how that system possibly has worked. This is fascinating. Any type of exercise that you do uh makes your muscles more slow. It's just the way it is. It's very, very bizarre. Yeah.

Then they took a couple of months off and then they experienced they called it MHC overshoot, mice and heavy heavy chain, again like fast fiber overshoot. So they had something like seventy more percent uh fibers after that. Wild.

Training programming. So in the American system, first of all, the infrequent training, it reduced the stimulus for the conversion of the fibers towards towards a slower isoform, slower.

And the second all the taper that they did later. So suddenly switching for five to like one triple, one double for If you do that for just a few weeks, you're do like a one triple, one double, you're not gonna lose much muscle mass because it really takes over But it there's enough time for the So that's probably what happened.

Interesting. And neurologically I think what happens probably they exerted themselves very strongly once uh once, twice a month. So it's again in you know neural drive probably with strength and disinhibition and other things like that. And the irony is

The system has lost its popularity. Some records in the deadlift, like Dan Austin's record and possibly Naba's, said back in the nineties and eighties. There's oh yeah, Lamar Gantt. Lamar Gantt is this is the Strongest deadlifter pound per pound in history. six eighty three at Bucks thirty two or something like that.

So he trained that way. Don Austin. In other lists, records have increased in part because of the equipment changes and some other reasons. But uh Ed Cohn dominated the platform for a decade. So there are some great, great lifters who train this way, but then the system lost its popularity for reasons have nothing to do with its effectiveness. It doesn't mean it's appropriate for everybody though, because train a lift once a week for one or two sets, there's not much practice.

And that's a problem. So unless you're training under a very high level coach or you're already coming in with great skills, it's really good. Second, if you need any kind of a level of endurance, or if you're playing other sport, you're going to be very sore from this type of training. So it's a great system.

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Based on what you just told us about Franco's training and and the rest, seems that shorter training cycles might be advantageous, even just conceptually and and practically. Like I I've tended to break up my year into twelve to sixteen week training cycles. Been doing that for a long time and now that I'm forty nine, this is the year that I decided I was going to start modifying my training a bit because

Certain little things aren't working for me as well. Okay. Um, you might laugh. I'm actually curious uh whether or not you'll laugh or approve um I switched at some point to uh using the belt squat, these belt squat platforms. I just feel like that's a good idea.

I have no relation to any of those companies. And you wear a big thick um lifting belt but it's kind of sagging in the front and then you uh as if you were gonna attach a weight to it, but you attach yourself to usually it's a cable or a um or a lever. uh between your legs. Sounds scary, but that lever or cable can drop below the level of the platform you're standing on. And you can load up quite a bit of weight on this. What I love about it is um

You can get uh very vertical if you want or of l just a little bit of forward tilt'cause you can place your fingers on the on the handles, you can grip them if you like. The point being there's a lot of degrees of freedom in terms of stance and um

I like that you're not loading the shoulders. True. I I you know, I don't want to sound like a wuss, but I'll do it. Um, you know, I I moved from standard squats, back squats to front squats, then to hack squats, and then now I've been um playing around a lot with uh the belt squat and really enjoying it because you can go really deep.

You can blast out of the bottom position. You can load up lots of plates on there if you have the strength to do so without the feeling that you're just compressing your whole spine um or worrying about dropping the weight. So I'm enjoying working with it. I love your thoughts on belt squats. True. Um but in general I I am hearing you and I'm thinking that moving away from this uh twelve to sixteen week cycles is going to be advantageous because what I'm finding is that

It's hard to account for life events in that way and and plan training and travel and all this. But four weeks is kind of a manageable thing. This month, this is what I'm gonna do. And of course the months work together. The body doesn't know the difference between February and and March, as it were. It does, right. It does, right, exactly. The seasonal cycles are real elsewhere. But I'm thinking shorter training cycles might might be a strong conceptual and practical framework.

And um yeah, I'd love your thoughts on both of those. The belt squat or uh uh legwork that's non spine compressing and uh shorter training cycles as a general theme that people might think of incorporating into their training.

So let's say you're doing some shrug pools or something. You got that taken care of, or you're doing some deadlifts. And also for power lifters, what power lifters do, it's a tactic. Is um When you're training the same lift, especially if you train the same lift very frequently, there is always that that heterochronicity. Something is not catching up quite as fast. You're going deadlifting, and uh your hands are beesy.

Because then you're gonna have to do some additional exercises. You're gonna do something else. So may I suggest for your listeners uh and r and viewers to do Zert. Again, a fantastic exercise. It does not beat up your shoulders. It does not build up your elbows or your wrists. It may leave some bruises, you know, but it's okay, you can live with that. And uh

Does that answer for the bell squat? Yeah. And by the way, machines in general here's also very interesting. Machines are very useful for advanced trainees. and uh fairly useless for beginners.

To a lifter. And uh this is going to increase strength on your leg drive without beating up your back, but you're already doing your deadlifts, you can definitely do that. So advanced lifters may make a good use of machines and they don't need to be taught how to do that. They can figure it out. But beginners really should just use exclusively free.

I'm not saying everybody should do squat bench, deadlift, kettlebell snatch, and this and that. No. There's a large menu of exercise to cho choose from, but you gotta choose just from that menu where you discover the weight that's free. That's truly true.

Shall we move on to the cycle, shorter cycle?

And interestingly enough, in this classic American cycle, there's a wave there, even though the weights keep going up every week. But if you uh if you did a set of five with five hundred pounds on the fourth week of your And then you went to 520 for triple. 520 for triple is a lot easier. So there is a D-load built in there, just people don't realize it. So it is a form of waveload. Then there is also the step low.

Stop loading is a very interesting way of going about it, and I believe it's the preferred programming choice for do-it-yourself people who not necessarily aspire to records but want to train in a very simple manner. And step loading pretty much means where you start out. It's kinda like a reverse. Think of George Costan's approach to Progressive over. So it's like regressive overload. Do the opposite. Instead of starting light and going heavier start fairly heavy.

And then stay with it. And then stay with it and stay with that until it becomes fairly. In that case you're staying this longer. So that's a good approach for less experienced people. More exp there are limitations. And finally, there is variable overload, which is what's used in the Soviet uh weightlifting system and later in Russian powerlifting, and there's no progression. It is just based on pure apiriodicity, irregularity.

So it's like imagine muscle confusion, but the smart kind and nervous system confusion, where it lows whiplash like at least 20% every time in volume from session to session or week to week. And exercise their change and so on. So there's no progression whatsoever. If you're using a fairly conventional linear or wave progression, the shortest cycle is generally a good idea, at least for Like in uh using the American power lifting experience, older lifters

Back at Ernie France, Ricky Crane, Ricky Crane especially, who passed recently, unfortunately. So they were observing how uh an older lifter can't afford to start as light because he ends up losing ground too much. And he can't afford to go as heavy as well. So they pretty much switched to shorter cycles, something like eight, eight week cycles, even possibly six week cycles. So it's uh it's illegit. It's illegit.

But there are many different ways obviously because you're looking at the at the big picture. You kinda have to look at it uh you know from up close and from and from afar. But overall I'd say yes. If uh for older and more experienced lifters it's uh it's a good idea.

Earlier we were talking about what um why the Soviet system and Training for strength has has been the tradition. And here why things are s just so different in how we conceptualize resistance training and I'll just go out on a limb and say what I believe and have thought for a long time, which is that what screwed up everything in terms of people's conceptualization about how to use resistance. That you know, I mean no knock against people that want to b make bigger muscles but

And getting it to you know, sure you get some window into your potential future self if you go home and and eat a bunch of food and sleep, but but somehow it it's so um unathletic in its approach. And I have friends who've done competitive bodybuilding and that sort of thing, not too many, but So I've I've respect for the sport at some level, but I feel like the way it's spilled over into quote unquote gym culture has um done

equal harm and good. And and what I like so much about your work is that it's really about strength as a skill, strength as a an asset for longevity. Yeah. Um and I guess when I think about somebody who wants to be strong, somebody who wants

It's clearly not making America that much healthier. Um and I just think there's such a vast landscape of opportunity in training for strength and endurance, but they seem at such odds. with one another for most people. So maybe we could just kind of throw up on the on the whiteboard here this notion of tr training to get strong. Strength is a skill. Strength is something that's valuable for longevity. I think we touched on that a little bit earlier.

and then endurance. The ability to carry two suitcases to the airplane without coughing up along at the end.

Also the ability to take a hike with your partner or your kids, maybe actually have a backpack on your back and not have to stop every fifty paces. Just being a fit overall person. Which one forgive me for the duration of this question, but when one travels to Europe I haven't spent too much time in Eastern Europe, but when you get over to uh you know, Switzerland or Austria, y you see people who are strong.

There's still there's still a number of guys out there who are following traditional methods and are strong. Also, interestingly enough, the bro split, you know, hit once a muscle a muscle once a week. It's not necessarily bad if you again follow more of a into this classic American powerlifting model. So instead of training three times a week, you train five, you know, in addition to your squad day, deadlift day, bench day, you can have shoulders day. Arms Day and What?

But you go heavy. You know, look at Reg Park, you know, with his uh sets of five. And if you focus, if you emphasize this medium reps, and again Soviets eventually came to the conclusion that uh for strength you should stick in the one to six repetition range. And you shouldn't do a lot of singles and doubles. Threes and fours should predominate. But fours and especially fives and sixes, this is where you get both hypertrophic strengths. That's that beautiful combination.

And fives have a great tradition in American powerlifting as well. If you train with fives, you're going to get muscle and you're going to get strength, and you're not going to complicate saying. There are some bodybuilders out there who train in this particular manner and they're fantastically strong. Just not many of them, unfortunately. But I also would like to add that there's another influence that messed things up.

I would take the bros of the nineties with the big bench press and the chicken legs to these Guys who stand on balls and juggle oranges and whatever the hell they're doing. I I mean this uh the idea is so there's the concept of neuroplasticity, which obviously you know so much more than I about, that

That's always thrown her out. Oh, you need variety. And so they throw every circus trick at the uh at these poor clients. And by the way, I use the word clients purposefully. Like at Strong First at our School of Strength, we have students. But in that world they're definitely clients. Well, today you're going to stand on one foot and then you're going to pull on this cable. And then tomorrow you're going to kneel and you're going to do this kind of thing. While asymmetrical loading.

And uh symmetry are absolutely something that's needed under certain condition. You need to do it in a professional way. Like if you look at Gray Cook, Gray Cook's work, Gray will tell you, just get yourself symmetrical and start lifting. Instead of uh resort to this unlimited uh what uh colleague of mine, Mark Griffin, called random X of variety. So I'd say that's the other there are way too many choices.

And when there are no constraints, when everything's available, you go to a store, everything's available, you don't know what to pick. And you can stick with that. So that's that's a very big problem, I would say. So I would say The less time people spend on the internet

Unless, you know, you're looking up research papers or doing something else valuable or fine, watching a good movie. That's all right. So unless you're looking up a research paper or watching a movie, forget about it. Or your podcast or my website. That's it. The rest of it is off limit.

But strength and endurance uh Endurance is a very broad term. And if we talk about let's talk a little bit about training for athletes for endurance, and let's talk maybe a little bit for the general population we're trying to do for health, and again for just going for a high.

Because while he has uh his slow fibers can keep going forever, but not at the intensity that's required for this particular sport.

So then when people realize that oh let's start smoking these MMA guys and martial arts guys and uh BGJ guys, let's just make them puke and that's going to improve their endurance. And it does improve the endurance but a very high cost. So in the Soviet sport science, there's a term, the cost of adaptation, comes from uh Felix Miefson, professor. Well, re a cardiopathologist originally, but later again, his research the research and stress is amazing. So there's the cost of adaptation.

And it's the same thing is uh pretty much as buying a buying a car or a table. You can get the same table for for a lower price or you can pay the top dollar. So you can increase your strength while at the same time blowing your back out, or you can increase your VO2 max while uh getting arrhythmia in the process, or you can do it in the health. So one of the issues you have to look at they trying to lower the biological cost of the adaptation.

So in strength training we do that by very careful and not training hard too often. So again, the American system's two weeks out of four. The Soviet system pretty much the same, although the planning the planning is gonna be different. First, if we look at the cardiovascular adaptations, the f before we before we're looking into the um into the mitochondria and into the muscle. Most of the work should be done below the threat.

So what's the threshold? So for runners, let's say you're running and you you're able to maintain the conversation, and when you start running too fast and you cannot maintain the conversation, you pass the threshold. It's like you're going faster and you're breathing harder linearly and suddenly it goes like this, like a hockey stick. So at that point your body is no longer able to uh process all that acid and uh things are starting to get.

So there are certain implications. There are certain implications for your muscles for sure. We'll discuss that in a few minutes. But for your heart, There are two things we're primarily trying to train. One we're trying to train the stroke volume, so pretty much how much uh blood the heart can pump out with each contract. And it's a very simple thing to do. You get up to like uh You know, seventy to seventy to eighty five percent uh of your maximum heart rate.

So the heart starts stretching, literally. So Kochoon, Kung, Kung. So this blood is incoming and the heart starts stretching and it requires bottom. Some uh Tour de France riders, they might throw the uh throw the food in the back of the cycle and they ride all day.

Because that's what they've gotta do. And that's requires that adaptation. For people who just do for health, you don't need to do that much. You know, thirty, forty minutes several times a week is enough. But for a high level you have to stretch the If you start redlining the heart rate, the heart starts twitching. So there's no time for it to uh to fully to fully relax and stretch. You're no longer really increasing your stroke volume.

And what you're doing right now, you're strengthening your ejection fraction, which is like the strength of the heart, which is needed for athletes whose sport require red lighting the heart rate. You know, if you're a fighter, if you are a four hundred meter runner, you absolutely need to do that. What they found, it went back to German research going to decades later and then the Soviet research. If um you start redlining your heart rate.

before you have that volume that you put in and built up the stroke volume, you're just heading for pathology. So there are arrhythmiaus, there's all sorts of different things that that the aphibs, all sorts of things that can start happening that are bad. And also your performance is not going to be very high because again your stroke volume is not there. And even for athletes who do that, they should do it for a very short period of time. It's just too stressful.

And it's just not needed. Typically it's a peak, it's peaking phase for some weeks before leading up to the competition. So pretty much steady state steady state I uh exercise like riding a cycle or jogging or hiking when you're still able to talk. It's the best, most efficient and healthiest way to im to promote that quality when you're increasing your heart stroke volume. If you decide to get a little more intense at some point interval training is appropriate.

But unfortunately it's completely and totally messed up and misunderstood. It's like a catch-all term, high intensity interval training. And uh Brent Roschall, a professor out of San Diego, said this is nonsense. This term is a nonsense. What does it even mean? Like what's high intensity? And also here's a question. What does low intensity mean?

Uh going back to taking us taking a uh step to the side, but that's discussion will help us when we discuss what happens in the muscle terminology. So there are different rest periods between sex. There is uh there is the ordinary rest period. So which means you pretty much recover your function. It's like you're just as strong or just as enduring as as from the previous. There is the supramax rest period when you if you rest extra, sometimes you get some extra performance out of it.

And uh there is this stress rest period when the next set is gonna be harder. Your performance may or may not be compromised, but it's gonna be So with the ordinary stress or ordinary rest periods, that is called in track it's called repeat training. You know, so you're on a hundred meters, then you rest for, you know, whatever, ten, fifteen minutes, as long as you need longer possibly, then you repeat it again.

And your performance stays this way. Interval training, again, is established. It just means that things are gonna get worse from set to set. So that's the definition of interval. The irony is that interval training was designed to To increase the intensity of exercise while re reducing the demands on the body. So if you look at the works of work of uh Fox and Edwards, uh their uh pioneers of interval training in the United States.

They gave some great examples. So let's say you're running for 30 seconds and you're at this speed, and you're going to produce this much acid and your heart rate. Well, if you run for ten seconds with short periods in between, at the same speed that You're going to produce a lot less acid and your heart rate's not going to climb to the stratosphere. And uh that type of training is very, very useful. And interval training can be used for promoting any type of adaptation. You can use it for

So here's uh here's one training method I learned from my colleague Fabio Zonin. It was designed by Professor Massoni in Italian Mr. Universe and uh professor. Okay, you take eighty percent of your one rep max, let's say presumably eight rep. Set of five, rest for three. Set of five, rest for thirty two. If you cannot do it anymore, you're done. And then you come back maybe ten minutes later do it again. That's an example of interval training again.

And you can structure interval training to uh for adaptations within the muscle, uh, mitochondria, and you can also do that for your heart. So here's how you do it for the heart. Today there are a lot of fancy popular protocols, but all you have to do is go back to what Germans did many decades ago. Here's the premise. Your vegetative system, your heart, your lungs, your plumbing, uh they have inertia.

For example, uh imagine yourself as a kid. You run really, really hard. You know, you run for, you know, a hundred meters or something or less. And everything's fine. And then you're talking to your body, and suddenly you start sucking with. So that's an example of uh of this inertia. So if you get your heart rate up to about eighty five to ninety percent on one remote.

And then you suddenly switch to jogging. You don't want to stop because that's just way too way too hard for your heart without getting that venous return from uh muscles work. What happens is uh the heart slows down. But there's that blood keeps on moving and the blood literally stretches the walls of the heart.

to look things up. It's like German interval training that was done. It is based on very definite physiological events, like this is what the heart does. This is what we're trying to do with the heart. And is a in instead of inventing some things that are just simply trash the body for no reason whatsoever. And part of the problem also, Andrew, is It's very easy to get uh misled by quick game.

So uh and it happens in strength world and in endurance world. Let's uh let's remember uh the the years when you and I and every other male listener bench press their max once a week. Mm-hmm. You're strong. Next week you're stronger. Third week you're stronger. Like you're doing the math you're doing the math like okay, well, I should be setting the national record by Christmas and maybe going to the world by by summer.

And then at six weeks you're done. And for experienced athletes happens sooner like after three weeks. The same thing with endurance. When you start doing glycolytic work, when you start redlining heart rate and increasing the access, your performance jumps so quickly.

very contagious. It's like oh not contagious, pardon me. It's very uh exciting And you think that you're gonna keep going forever, but you really absolutely will not. If you want to train for if you want to train uh your heart A good way of doing that is steady state work. If you decide to do some sort of intermittent intermittent work, there's several different ways. One is um Intermittent exercise that's more of a repeat in nature, not interval, which is very bizarre

Let's say that you go moderately hard for ten seconds, you go easy for ten seconds, and you do this for thirty to sixty minutes. Imagine doing that.

uh you're able to not produce a lot of acid but just go very, very hard. And you're gonna be able to uh train your heart and your lungs in this manner too. You can also do And you also have m uh peripheral adaptations in the muscles, mitochondria and so on, vascularity, so some capillarization happening too.

But you know it's also interesting there's one particular type of I hate the fact that it falls under the high intensity interval training umbrella because it's not Because everything that s sounds like hit it's not good to me because it's just made up label. But there's one type of training that delivers great benefits to your uh cardiorespiratory system, and at the same time it also does that for, you know, for your mitochondria and even builds muscle.

In track it is called glycolytic power repeat. And in uh the last twenty years there's several good uh papers that were done on that. Dibala, Burger Master, I think, pardon me if I'm mispronouncing their names. But pretty much you take do a wing gate, like a 30 seconds of heart exercise. Followed by approximately five minutes of time. Here's what's unique about this time. It gets your heart rate up to about that eighty five, eighty five, ninety percent.

Then you're gonna walk it off after that. So you are going to get adaptations for your heart. It's not the most effective way, but it's uh for healthy people, it's a healthy way and it's very efficient. At the same time, we'll discuss later what happens on the mitochondria level. But also what's interesting, you're also likely to get built some microbiome. And uh Typically there is the conflict we are which we're getting to this point about like strength versus endurance.

Typically there's a conflict of strength versus endurance. Because you know if you're looking in the uh MTOR on one side, AMPK on the other side, things seem to be like, okay, this is pulling one way, this is pulling the other way. But somehow this particular load, while promoting peripheral and central endurance, also endurance at least in the fast, in the fast and intermediate fibers, also does promote.

And then we just jog till the heart rate comes down and then we take this leisurely power lifting rest. And we're gonna do the And it's a fantastic way to promote uh various uh aspects of fitness. So you're gonna get in cardiorespiratory endurance, you're gonna have get peripheral adaptations, endurance in the muscle, and you're also building muscle at the same time. The reasons for that

Here's the theory. Again, all we t all the conversations we have about this is what happens in the muscle, all these are theories. We We know pretty much if we do X we're gonna get get you know, Z, whatever, or Y, some kind of a result at this point, but we may not necessarily know for sure. So the following is another one of the theories, but it's another good credible.

So this is uh Professor Viktor Sulianov. So, according to him, the preconditions for muscle growth, in addition to the obvious like food. Food and things and hormones So when you reach a certain level of acidosis, only a certain level of acidosis, not necessarily m very high, that those hydrogen ions will make the membrane permeable to the hormones. So they're gonna enter and go into the nucleus and start do So that's one of the part of that.

Then at the same time also the uh free creatine when creatine phosphate that hot fuel gets burnt off, that's also anabolic for one reason or another. So there are some explanations. Whether that's how it is or not, I don't know. But the fact is doing a hard 30-40-second set. Followed by a very generous rest. We're talking about five, ten minutes, and repeating it five times, possibly more. It it works very

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What should I do during my rest period?

Uh then the second thing is you want to do exercises you want to do relaxation, myorelaxation, muscle relaxation exercise. What they are is if you watch boxers how they You know, shake off their shake off their shoulders and drop and drop their hands and do things like that. These exercises go back to the thirties, Soviets used them since the thirties and they used them with elite athletes.

Kids in grade schools and everybody. So these exercises serve several um functions. One is if you are doing an exercise that Is strength exercise in nature? Some of the cross bridges are stuck pretty well. And so your muscle is uh thixotropic, it's like gel. So by moving your muscle in a passive manner you get you get it unstuck and so you restore circulation.

And uh the other reason is again control of muscular tension is very, very important. It's important to learn how to contract the muscle for strength. It's very important how to relax for For endurance, just for a happy life. If you look at the best sprinters, note how relaxed their faces are when they're on their jaws, relax how relaxed their necks are. So relaxation is something that's practiced just like ten minutes.

So regardless of what exercise that you just did, shaking off, we call this fast and loose drills, shaking like passive, like turn your muscles. So you want to do this for a little bit. Then after that, uh it it depends how long is your rest. So if you're taking uh and depends what exactly they should do. In some extreme examples, let's say that you're a sprinter. Remember we talked like doing sprint repeats with let's say hundred meters and then fifteen minutes. Great, great trading.

So these poor athletes really have a complicated dress protocol. There's really no no rest for the weakness. If you are a lifter who's taking very long rest periods in between, let's say you take those 10 minutes. Then after your heart rate is down and after you shook off and after you walk till you can just sit down.

Do not sit a slouch because obviously Stu McGill explained why that's not a good idea. And speaking of slouching, One reason that uh runners get their backs jacked up after running or some endurance event is again they go into their knees and they you know get into that collapsed posture.

And uh their discs are really pliable and warm after the run and then suddenly put'em into flexion and they get messed up. So yeah, you also gotta like you point out to watch our posture. But you really gotta watch your posture during recovery because you slump between your sets of squats and then, you know, you could blow something out right.

And I think um I mean nowadays there's all this excitement about walking. I don't know if you you know I don't know how much time you spend on social media, but like walking's the new thing for twenty twenty four. Okay. You know, people discovered walking to lower, you know, postmeal blood glucose. I mean all stuff that was that's intuitive, great thing to do. Um we'll see what happens in twenty twenty five with the with the new thing.

So you either have to sit ramrod straight, you know, you can sit in a lotus or cesar or something like that, or uh you can, you know, half kneel still upright, or you can lie on your stomach. So we do not allow this this collapsed posture because this is a great great way to get hurt. Plus, you know, you look like a slacker and when you're a slacker, uh mentally you're not going to be focused on whatever you're supposed to be doing. So I think that's I think that's a good idea.

And to bring us back to do you want to talk a little bit about the peripheral adaptations from endurance? Please. Okay. And then maybe we can talk about like what should people uh what should people do who are not athletes. So A much bigger thing than the VO two max. is the adaptations, the ability of your muscles to extract and use the

So this again calls this revolution, anti glycolytic revolution, comes from uh also Yudivar Koshansky. Again he's known as the father of plymetrics, but he's so much more than that. And Back in nineteen eighty, he looked at the typical endurance training protocols and he says, Okay, everything everybody's trying to push the athlete to the greatest degree of discomfort and make the athlete accustomed to that degree of discomfort.

And he says that that's just wrong. Instead, we need to figure out how to postpone the fatigue and how to fight the mechanisms that produce the fatigue, and he says glycolysis, anaerobic glucolysis is the primary cause. We could split a lot of hairs whether it's uh you know, it's the glycolysis itself or it's uh the acid from coming from ATP breakdown or whether it's uh non organic phosphates or whatever, but whatever it is, it always happens when the acidosis is running high.

when acid becomes high. So that doesn't really matter which which exact uh exact factor So he figured out you need to promote aerobic metabolism in the working muscle fibers. So he decided that endurance training for high-level athletes and people who are not athletes, it will apply to you as well, has to be specific. That's exactly why like that m uh that Marathon Rana, who joined the M A MMA uh class and then sucking wind, his endurance is totally not specific.

Here's an example of Specific endurances where you're using the same muscle fibers in your sport and in a mode that's consistent with that sport. So Verkashansky would have people like Skiers, for example. Do this very long push off on this key and then glide. Push off and glide. And uh yeah, Suleyanov who came after him. So an example of that, you have this really powerful contraction of the muscles that are used in your sport.

And then there's that relaxation during which the muscle recovers is its myoglobin oxygen. That there's a small amount of oxygen in the muscle. And it requires that creating phosphate fuel that is used for that short term. So pretty much instead of relying on that acid producing

Metabolism, glycolytic metabolism that you start using on one hand to use lifter's metabolism. You know, creating phosphate, that's what fuels uh, you know, a set of three reps. And on the other, you're using this marathon ronders or aerobic bit. So you're like putting glucolysis in a vase. And a great example of that comes from Dirkoshansky is not the only one who came up with this idea. It's been reinvented by others. So in boxing, Leon Spain.

To the uh viewers who don't know who he is, Leon Spinks was a professional boxing world champion and uh he defeated Mohammed Ali. So he's a great champion. And he hired uh Arthur Lidyard, who was a great uh running coach from New Zealand, to work in his conditioning. And Lydyard had him do work in the heavy bag for an hour and a half to two hours. Non stop. And he says, No, of course you're not going all out, sometimes harder, but you're definitely not tapping the bag, you're not shut.

And so if you're putting your muscle fibers in a very specific metabolic window and do it over and over and over Fast fibers start developing mitochondria. Fast fibers start developing capillaries. Fast fibers don't lose their strength. But they start developing the plumbing and the ability to use the oxidative system to recover rapidly. But going back to again this larger periodization idea is

When you start with a new stimulus, it's uh your body's highly reactive but the resistance is low, you cannot take much of it. Then that teeter totter goes the other way, you'll no longer so you have to figure out how to restore that reactivity. And different training systems do it differently. So an example of the American powerlifting system, you basically go go lighter, start over with a lightweight. So you decondition yourself purposefully. Like two steps forward, one step back. Mm-hmm.

And that's uh another example would be to use what um the Soviets call specialized variety. And this is something that you could see in the Soviet weightlifting system with Medvedev and uh Alexei Medvedev, uh one of the scientists and coaches. And also with the West Side Barbell powerlifting. Specialized variety, as opposed to random variety, is when you have the same lift and with just very slight modification.

So the motor program, the intention stays the same. But again, imagine that instead of uh deadlifting deadlifting from the platform, you're deadlifting standing on a off a plate. So it just slightly increased the range of motion, but you're still doing the same. Or imagine that you uh bring your grip in the bench press a couple of inches.

Or imagine that you use a block just as a popular exercise in powerlifting, you put a like imagine putting a brick on your chest, something the size of a brick, lowering it to that, pausing and pressing back to work that very specific sticky.

But if you look at Like in Medvedev, Alexei Medvedev's when he coached the national team, for the s clean and jerk and snatch for the two compet compet competitive lifts, they had one hundred variations. But all these variations were like, Okay, so now we're snatching from hang, now we're snatching from blocks, now we're jerking from the rec. D sh do you see what I mean? They're all this reminds me of uh This reminds me of this humorous book about Scandinavia. Written by Scandinavian,

Explaining how very different different Scandinavians are. And so this book has pictures of the same guy wearing different sweater.

You know, I feel like those three things, you know, people think I had a great workout or my new trainer is, you know, I finished just completely depleted. You know, this and then these are the same people that are complaining about an injury or they quit or they don't have the motivation because You know, they they're not taking whatever pre workout is required to generate that kind of quote unquote intensity. Um

I'm not looking for agreement, but would you agree or disagree? I mean, you know, and then maybe by comparison we could sort of throw up on the wall the things that we should be seeking when we train, as opposed to these kind of um

That can also be done with strength exercises as well for wrestlers and MMA fighters. So you can do the bench press, you can do bench press and develop endurance. in your fast fit twish fibers. The nature of endurance is very very peculiar. You know, in Uh team sports there is a term repeat sprintability.

So repeat sprintability means that let's say that you sprint for twenty meters, rest for less than a minute, sprint for another twenty you know, just something like that. So sprint rest, sprint rest, which is which reflects the nature of uh team sport, football, soccer, and so on. On the it's totally different from running four hundred meters around the track. In strength endurance is the same thing.

Uh NFL combined, you know, that's it's it's a fine test, whatever. It's a nice bodybuilding exercise, good pump. But on the field, you're not doing thirty reps. You're doing one rep, and then a little bit later you're gonna do another rep.

Then the other group, antigly group, This athletes would live the same seventy percent on one rep map. For three rounds. Uh they do one exercise, second exercise, third exercise, rest for one minute, do it again and again and again. So to the listeners, 70 rep max. An average athlete can probably crank out about twelve reps with it. A fighter is probably gonna crank out twenty some reps with that easily. So they only do three.

And so three reps, uh another exercise, another exercise, rest for one minute, do it over and over and over. And the end result was really fascinating, the outcome. There is one particular test discovered by the same researcher that like correlated has the highest correlation competitive performance for MMA five years. So this test was R0.888. It's very, very high. And the very interesting thing, what it is, it's the rate of heart rate recovery after an all-out set with 70% water at my.

It's hard stuff. It's brutal. Very very brutal. Interestingly enough, the reps with 70% one rep max correlation was not so good. Even the deadlift strength was not so high. But is that recovery from that was was very, very high.

Because you're able to so you take imagine taking a weight that's that you can lift maybe uh twelve to twenty And you lift it about three times. Rest for a minute and do it again and again and again. This is very much like a blue collar worker's uh And you're not seeking pomp whatsoever, but as a result you're going to develop that that type of endurance that repeats strength endurance that very much is applicable to most combat in team sports and also for the real life. Whenever you are moving

furniture. You're not trying to look I'm gonna try to get a pump. Let's see get this piano up there and I get another one. Then we're gonna rest for twenty minutes, then we're gonna start over. No. Swedish work on occupational strength. They found that old and crafty and wily workers like loggers and others, they were able to like they

They keep their efforts very brief and then they rest for a few seconds and do it over and over and over. So that intermittent nature of rest is uh is very possible.

wrote a book about it, the iron cardio, because uh he took a protocol, strength aerobics protocol like this Russian protocol developed by another one of my colleagues, Alexey Senach, another one of our instructors. And he just used the whole system and people loving it because uh sorry, I'm gonna go back from the beginning to Alexis Sénar. So he's um he lives in France and he was coaching some he was coaching some uh

uh law enforcement, some law enforcement personnel. And they were on a stakeout where they absolutely had no ability to train normally and they wanted to do something, something effective. So he said, okay, take this. And you keep it in your hotel room, or wherever is your station. Do one clean. One front squat. Put the kettlebell down. Shake it up. One clean, one press, one squat. Put it down. And like a metronome, it's a very rhythmical manner. You're not trying to breathe hard.

You're not trying to get a pump with singles you won't. And you do this for you do this for about, you know, tw thirty minutes or whatever amount of time amount of time that you do. And it does develop that repeat strength endurance fantastically well. There's additional secondary effect of some cardio because you're you're breathing in between pretty much. Your recovery your heart is recovery.

And um you're not getting sore because you talked earlier about like people seeking pomp and seeking soreness. One of the reasons soreness comes from is obviously a lot of eccentric contraction. That's very true. But what people don't realize that soreness also comes from too much acid. In the past uh the coaches used to tell oh, you know, acid burns holes in your muscle.

Uh some people get sore all the time see no progress in anything. Some people don't get sore, they keep getting stronger. And everybody in between. So there's no correlation. If you're looking for pump. On the other hand, if you're trying to build muscle, one very while building strength, one very simple guideline would be I achieve some pomp with a heavyweight and lower reps.

If you keep your reps to five and at fewer, even three, but you achieve a little pump, that means you've performed a sufficient volume of work to stimulate. What exactly happens in the muscle? I cannot tell you, but it absolutely happens. Strengthen both. Both hyper

on the the sex of the individual, then you activate hair growth, you activate breast growth, you activate muscle growth, thickening of the vocal anyway, that's through gene uh changes in gene expression. Um in this configuration that you described before, you know uh

Because trying to develop everything to a high level at the same time it's impossible. Simultaneously training in parallel everything only is good for young kids when they're developing because you know, you gotta try everything. Nothing's at a high level. Later on, uh there are different models of how to structure addressing different qualities.

So one example would be block training. So here's one really good example how strength and hypertrophy can be Can be addressed at different periods of the same. The experiment goes back to nineteen seventies. It was done on Ivanov, Kisilov, I forgot the third uh third houser. Uh experiment done on throwers, and they were doing squats and bench presses.

And uh one group was doing eighty five percent for five triples, you know, typical heavy type stuff. The other was three sets of ten with sixty percent Which is fairly typical hypertrophy work. Uh Jim Bros would say that's too light for six sets of ten, and I say no, it's not, because you still have to throw the shotput. If you if you do your 10 sets of 10 reps to failure, you're going to be completely done. Your strength will be down by about 40% for the next few.

So and so the one group did this, the other group this this, they both made good gains. And the third group but up to a point then they they plateau. The third group they alternated two weeks of the And they in the squad interesting I have to say it didn't make that much difference, but in the bench press there's a huge difference. That alternating these two type stimuli. So that's an example of block training, how you can do But what you can also do is you could simply maintain a quality.

So fortunately it takes a lot less work to maintain anything that you reach than uh than to to get there. So typically training some quality once a week at a moderate effort is enough to maintain it. Like in strength, example of strength, if once a week you lift eighty percent of your max for three sets of three reps, you can maintain your strength easily for Easily it just doesn't

And you don't want to stop your strength training ever, totally, because again it has that um it will improve everything that you do, even your endurance. But then you can switch the priorities in the same manner. And people can do that So whereas Stu McGill he trains two days a week of strength, two days a week of mobility, two days a week of endurance. which is uh which has a very good and balanced balanced model. But what you could do for a while is you switch to doing one, two, three.

So let's say one quality gets three days a week, one quality gets two, one quality gets one, and then you shift the priority. So this sort of a serial specialization is a very good tactics for

One very simple way is just to stop stop your sets earlier before long before failure and you know later on in some weeks just get a little bit closer to that. So that's an example of that classic American cycling, powerlifting cycling. So when on your week four, you're gonna do five reps with your five rap map. But on week one you're doing five reps with your perhaps ten rep max. So that's that's a very simple way of doing that where you

Go easy and then you go harder and then you start over. But there are many, many different other ways of structuring it. But generally speaking, I'd like to warn people that. Training hard has to be done, but it's not something it has to be done in really small doses. Like let's use singles as an example, heavy singles.

Heavy singles are the special sauce of strength training. It they cannot be used as the foundation of your training unless you are except for some very few genetically gifted individuals. You know, we all know the Bulgarians have done that in the weightlifting, but again these guys were specially selected. specially assisted and they were broken very quickly.

Uh Soviet champions state there are some Soviets who uh won the Olympics at the age of thirty six, like Plugfelder and uh Alexeyev. For weightlifting that's just uh absolutely old man. And Rigert said David Riggard said I think what? Sixty three world records. Because they were very careful about when to use this A near maximal stimulus. They figured out this. And the system itself, the Soviet weightlifting system was totally empirical, which is really fascinating.

They just looked what works, what doesn't, compare it and just kept kept trying. So they've experimented with everything. And they simply have found that uh certain observations, like, okay, lighter lifters can do more heavy singles than heavier. M intermediates can do more than the advanced gates. Uh it's gonna vary from lift to lift, a lifter to lifter, no difference between guys who are on drugs and guys who are not, but you have to individualize.

And they found that if you do too many heavy singles, you're going to not progress rapidly or hurt yourself. You don't do enough, you don't progress as quickly. So it has to be you have to find that sweet spot for yourself. And they also were very definite that the singles are max. So that's what competition. So they would go to ninety, maybe ninety-two and a half m percent once the blue moon ninety-five, but you're not there to test.

There's even like uh like Russian power lifters what they do a couple of weeks before a meet, they have this uh work up to A weight that's kind of max. So the word for this prikitka and prikitka it translates kind of like as well.

It's like an estimate. This is not, you're guessing like, you see, this is where I'm at. That gives me an idea what's going to be my first attempt, what my opener is going to be. Instead of, oh, I'm going to test myself, I'm going to show them. Gym is not the place to show anything. That's what the platform's for. So you need to find uh if you're interested and serious about strengths, you need to find how often you can go heavy in the different lifts.

Start with you know, start with something maybe once a month, about ninety percent, and then try to see doing it more, doing it or doing it uh fewer times. But the meat and potatoes of the training has to be again this moderately heavy weight. Heavy enough to respect, not light enough not to fear, and most of the work has to be done with that. So it's like those sets of three, four, maybe five reps with eighty eighty percent, something something.

And that's fairly universal across the training system. because the American powerlifting system uh you know is organized the cycling s organized totally different. But that's again, there's going to be, you know, fives and threes and fours. That's gonna be a big deal. Soviet system, different, but a lot of threes, a lot of fours, some fives, some variations. But why it is so? Some of it possibly has to do with skill practice because

This goes to an example it's a Western study of uh a discrete skill. A discrete skill to listeners that means something that happens once, kinda like a throw or a lift, as opposed to continuous skill like running. And in an experiment they tested these athletes to this discreet skill for six sets of one, three sets of two, or one set of six.

And uh two sets of three did much better. So supposedly it's like there's a certain amount of repetitiveness, like when you hit the perfect trap and then you're done. So again, three triples have that very special.

Every single repetition, high quality. The rest period, high quality. Whatever that may be. Walking around, shaking it off. The the structuring of the program, high quality. I think people are far too haphazard. and seeking the pump and soreness and some sweat so that they can have their post workout shake. Well I'm not trying to be NSelfie uh between every set. Um and just kind of check the box.

I even for people that aren't competitive athletes, I think there's just such a an enormous range of things to be gleaned from taking one's fitness training seriously. Um even the word fitness is kind of a strange word. Training, seriously, right? I've never even called it a workout. I think I picked that up from Menso. You train, you don't you like I've never

Strength athletes understood the importance of not training on the nerve. So they understood you you just train and then eventually you're gonna go for a PR. But m the rest of the time you don't kill yourself. And when he's describing kind of this uh early adherent of this high intensity, whatever, and he's referring to him, he says he has literally worked himself out.

And he says that that's something that strength seeker cannot afford. So semantically, when you're trying to work yourself out, that's you're trying to exhaust yourself, or are you trying to practice to excel to get better at something, and that applies to any quality. Because endurance very much has a qu has a skill component just like strength, because the ability to uh reuse the elastic properties of the tissue. the ability to relax between the contractions to restore the circulation.

The ability to maintain the proper posture and so on and so forth, these are all skills. The breathing, breathing skill, huge. Extremely important for strength, for endurance, for absolutely anything. And if you're going through this mindlessly, it's uh yes yeah, nobody's gonna get

you mentioned earlier about the rucksack. I'm not such a fan of the rucksack because of being pitched forward, but I like this idea of carrying the kettlebell and switching sides. Now nowadays they also have some weight vests that are a little bit more um Yeah, close to the body that distribute the weight um What are your thoughts about

going into the gym in order to do the strength training and then generating the endurance work elsewhere. To be blunt, like how would one combine lifting and running in a way that allows one to get stronger and develop endurance, perhaps simultaneously.

then it's important to be fresh when you're doing the exercise. It's not really doesn't matter as much what happens after So which means that you could do some heavy deadlifts, you know, heavy deadlifts uh and then a few hours later you can go for your high. On the other hand, if your uh lifting is more hypertrophy oriented,

It's less important if you come in tired. It's okay even if you just hiked in the morning and then you went uh did your curls. But afterwards for thirty-six, forty eight hours, it's ideally to restrict endurance. So because you're really going to have a massive conflict right there and uh it's uh it's not a good idea.

If you're doing our preferred work of let's say sets of five reps. Five reps again, they address both endurance and strength. Well, I guess you better keep a window on both hands right there. There's always a conflict. You know, Thomas Sowell said there are no solutions, there are only They're only uh compromises.

So you just have to decide which way you want to compromise. But that separation in time really does help. The other thing is spending different times when you focus on one thing versus the other. So the next two months you're gonna spend on hitting your strength hard and you're just gonna do two hikes a week just to just for your health, just to maintain.

And then summer rolls around and you put your lifting on uh on the back burner, you l left lift less, not necessarily lighter, just less, and you spend a lot more time outdoors and uh and do these different things. Keeping in mind also the duration of uh the duration of training. So the longer your training session is of any kind, the more you are triggering adaptations that are

that are more in favor of endurance. So your cortisol level goes up and there are some other things that do happen that drive you towards endurance as opposed to strength. So even in your strength training, don't make the sessions too long.

The uh as I mentioned earlier, Soviets established the correlation with the volume of lifting and uh uh muscle mass. That's one thing. But there also extra established correlation between volume of lifting at eighty percent or higher and strength. And the correlation is very strong, zero point eighty four. However, uh if you're talking about the muscle mass with that lighter stuff, some lifters would just get great results and some lifters would just get more endurance.

And they found that guys who are juicing, they can keep doing higher volumes and skill still keep getting more muscular. But uh the guys who are not who are clean, they're just not able to do that. So trial and error, probably like Marty Gallagher says, fill an hour. I think that's a safe I think that's a safe guideline.

Of our ability to hold our attention is dependent on epinephrine, norepinephrine and acetylcholine release in the brain. And of course, muscle muscular contractions, acetylcholine being the dominant transmitter from nerve to muscle, communication. But this idea that If we exercise too intensely, or even if we just do cognitive work that's very intense for a period of time,

That there's this post-exercise cholinergic depletion, and then we get this what people typically call brain fog, although that's not a real medical term. So I think from the practical standpoint, a lot of people who would Like to train more for strength, train more often for strength, do strength and endurance work. The the challenge sometimes isn't just scheduling it, it's that we feel depleted and tired afterwards.

Have you observed this? And is there a way to use strength training or other forms of training to improve cognitive function? Because I c you know, I again, as you pointed out, only compromises, not solutions. But I do see a world in which one could use their physical training to give them a

For lack of a better word, a a boost into the day. So you're getting stronger, you're developing your your health, and you're also able to then lean into your day with with more focus and attention. That would be the ultimate scene. Okay.

feedback. You know, you have to listen to your body pretty much. Soviets stressed very much that you have to take the cybernetic approach. You have to have the feedback. No matter what the training plan says Arkazyvarabyov says you have to listen to you have to listen to that feedback. And freshness in the Soviet system of strength training and not just in weightlifting, freshness was paramount.

It's even better. Let's talk about uh how track athletes in the Soviet Union train for strength, and that's more that will be even more applicable to a lot of the listeners, because they definitely didn't spend too much.

They spent a lot of time doing just singles and doubles and it was absolutely essential that they stayed fresh. And part of it was just the how they felt, part of it is the performance, how well they jumped and so on, and how they felt after. So they found if you're really obsessive about it, you have that tonic effect that lasts at least until the next day.

And the tonic effect is both for your strength, for your power, but uh also for, you know, your cognitive functions as well. But it's also very, very interesting that Here's an idea. Uh do a bench press before the next day before you're competing in the jump. Or do a heavy squad the day before you're competing as a thrower. So it's again it's very interesting how the opposite part of the body stimulating that was uh was very, very helpful, very interesting phenomenon.

So they found if the strength work is is familiar and non exhaustive, it absolutely facilitates whatever is that you do afterwards. And um Restricting th the this is where the difference this is where track athletes were very different from a lot of other people. They tried to restrict their volume as much as possible of strength training, in part because well they had to do other things.

And because they had to stay fresh. So uh if you look at the volume, if you look at general speaking, how many repetitions that you want to perform per exercise, per uh per training session. And again, these are purely empirical numbers. They come from Soviet weightlifting, but they were also applied in track. So the minimal volume is ten to twenty reps. minimum. And uh optimal is twenty to thirty. Maximal it becomes thirty to fifty.

So when you're looking at twenty to thirty reps, maybe on the lower end right there, you're going to build strike. And if you're also are going to not go to failure and rest sufficiently between sets, unless greasy unless you're greasing the groove, you need to look at at least five minutes pretty much, and that's both for neural and biochemical reasons. But more is really better.

Uh unfortunately really a lot of it is just comes down to listening to your body and just using your judgment. I wish I had any

professional or high level strength training where this mentality of a workout or try to get smoked or pumped or throw up in the bucket. they're they would look at you as that's insane. One of the reasons that the also Soviets restricted the number of reps in the squad, because you do sets of ten in the squad, you're gonna definitely put on some masks, no question.

But one of the reasons they re restricted that, very few people did Sats of Ten except for heavyweights who were had a hard time bulking and even more, is like, okay, that's too much cardiorespiratory stress. And even though Soviet weightlifters did some general physical training like uh cross country running or playing soccer, but they're not trying to get their cardio in the uh on the lifting platform. That has just made no sense whatsoever.

So restricting the reps will go a very long way. Restrict uh increasing the rest periods to at least five minutes would go a very long way, and restricting the number of exercises. Because people don't realize that you're using different muscle groups but still using the same brain. You're still same using the same adrenals. And uh all that stuff really adds up. And so I would say two uh uh during one practice, one training practice Maybe two, maybe three exercises max, lifts.

And yeah, if you want to, you know, do your curls and whatever calves later, that's fine. But you can tack it on in the end, or you can do it totally separate. Those things don't really zap you. You can just come in on a separate day and just do your enjoy your calf.

So I'd love your thoughts on on stimulants generally and how they can support or hinder performance. And I'm also curious about Um just the what's lost in that model in terms of learning how to cycle one's energy up and down. You know, several times today you've mentioned this this thing of of the ability to relax the muscles and relax the nervous system in between sets. Between reps, who knows? Um but usually between sets and certainly

For the next two weeks they're they're just gone. They're completely flown. Because they're two adaptations to Yeah. Take place in strength training, proper strength training. So on one hand, it's much more economical function of the adrenal glands. On the other hand, it's much higher economic. So these are the guys and gals who are able to crank it up really, really high when they want to. But they're also able to really keep it keep it down when they don't have to.

And they do know that for the next two weeks after after the competition or after some idiotic gym max, you know, that might take a week, they are they're gonna be flat. They're gonna be completely. So you really have to spare your adrenaline. The lifters who take heavy lifts in the gym, they still typically stay at the training max, not the competition max. So what's a training max?

It's uh the heaviest weight that you can possibly lift without uh getting too excited about it. And uh back in the fifties, uh Uh Luchkin, he was uh one of the fathers of Soviet weightlifting, he came up with a great uh tactic how to find that weight. If your heart rate goes up before the set So that's you gotta be like you gotta monitor yourself. Unless you're in competition. Of course that's that's a different game.

If I will defer to others about how much uh one should or could take stimulants before training, uh lifting, I'm talking what, but generally speaking, you've got to do it moderation. And especially you gotta save it for the times when you really need it. Like in the American powerlifting system, when you have during week three and four, that's a good time to do that.

During the weeks one and two and the weights are lighter, let your adrenals recover and you don't need to push yourself as hard anyway. So it's just one example how to how to go about If you have to drink some stupid energy drink to just get yourself up to training, there's something wrong in your life by It is something that's a lifestyle choices and you need to address it. If you always feel exhausted after training, you're missing out on life.

I mean if you're doing a very uh a a desk job that does not require high cognitive ability, something that's really mechanical with pen and paper or computer, and you choose to just destroy yourself on a daily basis with

lot of cess to failure or meth counts or whatever it is. Well, it's your choice if you want to destroy your life like that. But again, if you look at your adrenal profile, if you look at uh your sympathetic dominance, if you look at your how you're just feeling, it's gonna be really, really awful. The other angle to this is um

As we talked to earlier, in learning and skill training, skill practices, learning, current performance is not indicative of learning. So just because you're able to lift five pounds more because you got yourself old jack top on some drink doesn't mean you necessarily got strong.

So you just need to come in and put in your practice and walk away and come back. And then when there's time and it's the day to go heavier, that's that's when you do that. So don't want to discourage you from drinking coffee. In fact, if you drink a stimulant coffee should be the only thing, the rest of this stuff is

Coffee, tea, and uh then uh figure out again, figure out what is that moderate, moderate amount. Figure out how to use it when you truly need it as opposed to be relying on it all the time.

So what they did is they developed this game where essentially the potential payoff in this game while recording from neurons in the brain is either low, medium, or very high, or the occasional jackpot. Like you could just win the whole thing and th the payoff is Very considerable. Then they looked at the amount of upper motor neuron recruitment, so essentially the areas of the brain that drive coordinated mm muscular behavior.

Or action. And what they found is that it basically scales with the level of reward. So you get more um neuronal engagement as the reward scales up. However, every time the jackpot was offered, It overengages too many motor neurons. And so th this notion of choke of like choking when the stakes are really.

And so it turns out it's it's a brain it's a brain thing at the level of over recruitment, which just speaks to this idea of being able to maintain arousal within a certain range is an essential skill to any I just thought I'd share that because it's a fun set of results and since I was a little kid if I learned something I I I have to share it with somebody who I think might might uh

Kara. So if ever people wonder about the n uh why people choke, it's it it is a hyperarousal at the level of the brain, not uh uh apparently not so much the brain.

And uh he was a he was a sports psychologist and he discusses this various various skills. It's fascinating. His control of excitation and inhibition was such that he would sleep between A couple of minutes before the attempt his handler or coach would wake him up. He would wake up, he'd get himself into frenzy, he'd lift the weight, he'd go back to sleep nine times a day throughout the day.

Now that's a mastery of excitation and inhibition. You're on switch and off switch. So part of that are is sports psychology. There are tools in sports psychology.

Part of it is uh training, is whatever you do in the gym, some of your habits and some of your practices. Like, for example, David Riggert is one of the greatest weightlifters of all time, some people would say the greatest weightlifter of all times, and uh when he was discovered by Udolf Bluckfelder, his coach, who was another uh Olympic champion, world champion.

One of the things that the coach was impressed with is that Riggert would do his set and then that after his set he would just go completely limp, like a rat. And he was very impressed with that. Later um in Rigger's career when he was a world champion already. In the United States, so there's uh there's an American coach route writes how he saw him in Columbus, Ohio or Cleveland, Ohio competing back in the seventies, he was uh lying and smoking a cigarette.

And uh then he gets up, he snatches sixty kilos, like hundred and thirty five pounds or something once. Then he just picks up something else equally trivial, and then he goes and does uh goes his first attempts and then ends up with a superior property. At a different time, Riggard bet uh box of cognac to uh that he would snatch ninety percent of his max, which was His max was probably around three seventy or something, so he was able to snatch ninety percent of that no warm up whatsoever.

And uh so this is this ability of that incredible control. So part of it is whatever you're born with, part of it is sport psychology techniques, but part of it is developing some habits. As soon as you're done with your lift, just power down. Incidentally, after training. A strength athlete ought to perform a cool duty.

And uh Russians l did some uh did some numbers on power lifters and they found that the top power lifters they spend time in cooldown and the guys who are not so good they don't. Because not only it just allows you to bring your excitation down, get your parasympathetic, get you to start recovering. So you do some easy stretching, you do some meditating, you do some breathing exercises.

whatever you do, but even after each set, so you so you put up that s heavy deadlifter squat and then you just immediately come down and then you walk around and you chill. So you just try to tune your uh switch so breathing exercises come in handy for that. There are breathing exercises to increase your excitation.

puts you in a state of inhibition, very deep inhibition even. Some of them are hypercapnic, some of them are hypoxic, which means, you know, you're trying to increase carbon dioxide or you're trying to decrease oxygen. There are some very sophisticated yet really quite simple techniques that uh That can help that can help you do that.

He was just a fantastic lifter and a fan and just brilliant scientist. So he tried to direct a lot of the training uh towards disinhibition. So he even developed special techniques that are largely forgotten. But yes, disinhibition is huge. And it's uh also one of the one of the things about disinhibition too, it's also very important to avoid failing because

Never failing a lift, that's part of this inhibition. So like we talked about Ed Cohn earlier, another one of the power lifting grades. Ed Cohn competed over several decades, set over 70 world records in several weak classes. uh only missed a couple lifts in competition, never missed a training lift whatsoever. Always calm, always composed, an amazing lifter, amazing guy. And what's very likely happened is that his Inhibitory pathways just shriveled and got pruned and died.

What people don't realize that, you know, greasing the groove, that's the term proper term long term potentiation, is like when you are getting better at like that transmission gets stronger. It's like your nerves become superconducted. But there's also its evil twin, long-term depression. So pretty much what happens is now you're trying as hard, but your muscles are not jumping in response anymore. So one of the ways to uh

get this long term depression is by by failing. So whenever you're attempting certain thing and if it doesn't happen, that that's a way that pathway starts starts firing weaker and the inhibitory pathway start become stronger. And it becomes even worse if you're emotional about it. So you said quite a few things about adrenaline, but uh Adrenaline has adrenaline does promote neuroplasticity, but not always in a good way. So if you look at the PTSD treatment.

You will find that if uh a person re experiences that bad whatever thing that happened, and then it gets into the feedback loop. That positive feedback positive doesn't mean good. Positive it just means it keeps increasing. Because every time that there's a spike of adrenal adrenaline that reinforces the memory.

So if you missed that tempt and you also got really upset about it, and then you remember it again, so you're making yourself weaker and weaker, which reminds me of a very fascinating way that the ancients used for uh To record some events before before there's writing. So let's say there's a wedding between VIP families. They bring a kid, young kid, seven-year-old, let's say, and make the kid watch the whole thing. And after after the festivities, they throw the kid into the river.

And the kid climbs out of the river and he's gonna remember that wedding for the rest of his life. He's gonna hold that road.

And also as you start training to failure, you also are you're converting more of your fibers to a toward slower towards slower types. So on the other hand, if you don't train to failure, you don't. So there's an interesting Spanish study. When uh they found that when athletes trained to failure, again they're uh some of the myosin and type 2x, fast fibers, they converted to 2A, so they they became slower, probably because now it's an endurance.

When you're training for as many reps as possible, it's really an endurance event. On the other hand, the athletes that trained with half the maximum possible repetitions, they did not experience that decline.

Which goes back several decades to when Arkadzy Varabyov, Varabyov, Olympic champion, scientist, head coach, incredible, incredible person. Uh he said there is a big difference between six sets of three and three sets of It because uh and you think like this sounds like the most obvious thing to say. But the fact is you build just as much strength with six sets of three as three sets of six, you get a lot less tired, you get to practice for three extra sets, and you can drain soon.

So that's uh that's fundamental. So pushing to fail are also the other thing is about the control of your technique. Towards the last travels there's no control left. But imagine that you always have that perfect technique. So you grease that pathway that becomes a reflex. In fact, early on the Soviet sports scientists very much view strength adaptation as just the development of conditional reflex, kind of like you know, Pavlov with the dogs, drooling dogs.

And then you go into the competition and you psych yourself up and you don't even know what's going on, you're not aware, but you only have one pathway. There's no plan B. You only remember how to do your deadlift in this particular manner and no any

Even hiking's a practice. You're trying to stay tall, you're trying to breathe in a particular manner.

And on a sentence where you you kind of know what the next sentence could be, perhaps to seed the unconscious mind for the next day, but but that you don't want to run right up until a wall and like bang your head against that wall, um metaphorically speaking. Um because it places a kind of frustration into your nervous system that you arrive

I guess the opposite could be R too, but but it fits very well with um with what we're talking about here. I because of the early Mike Mencer training uh or the influence

I should say, um, I've tended to train to failure uh purposefully and used to do forest reps and drop sets and all that stuff. As the years have gone by, I've started only incorporating a few sets to failure and my volume has increased somewhat and I'm training heavier at lower repetitions and my progress as I get you know toward my fifth decade just continues to

And so I I just decided, as you were saying uh the last couple of sentences, that for the rest of the year um I'm gonna not train to failure because I really want to experience what it's like to do that for a long period of time as opposed to just reducing the number of

that I take to failure. I'm also I'm very stringent about form and always have been. And I do want to ask what are your thoughts on um unless somebody's training for isometric or eccentric specific training Full range of motion, not just for sake of building strength, but can using a full range of motion also improve flexibility without some dedicated flexibility to

It's it's one of the easiest ways to promote flexibility. And uh Flexibility also has a very much uh a neural component as well. So part of it obviously, you know, you're looking at you're looking at what's happening in the joints, of course. part you're looking at uh you know the length the length of the the length of the tissues too. But a lot of it is also the ability to reset the regulation of muscular muscle length and tension. So it's uh like the ability to do a split for each other.

It's part of it is yeah, well if you're provided your hip joints are built for that sort of thing. a lot of it is really in your mind because you're experiencing defensive inhibition. You're just afraid you're gonna get torn torn in half. So which brings us to a very interesting parallel as we keep talking about um quality and is also talked about that flow channel Exactly. Thank you. So between uh boredom and anxiety

So when you're trying to do a split for example, so you see somebody trying to get into that stretch and that person goes, Oh sitting there in panicking and being in total pain and nothing good's gonna happen. You're pretty much just uh facilitating this pain pathways and you're just learning to hate this exercise.

A smarter individual would get to the point to the edge of pain and then stay there for a while until owning it until this the uh until the spindle's reset, you know, okay, accept the new range of motion. Add some contraction, relaxation, contraction, relaxation, you know, isometric stretching, you know, progress, progress even further. So in any type of training forcing the adaptation is just not going to work, whether it's flexibility,

it's strength, whether it's endurance. There's time for a very high level of effort, but there's never time for ripping yourself in half, right? There's never time for hurting yourself in purpose. So uh but yes, do do uh long range of motion work to increase range of motion. For the upper body. I'm obviously very partial to his kettlebell.

But one of the great many benefits of kettlebell training, you know, a bow with a handle, is uh the way it's designed. So you press it from here overhead that offset center gravity, helps to pull your arm back. So you're just improving the shoulder flexion, you're improving thoracic extension. It's so much easier to place yourself in exactly good position and then just stay there. So it's very important to stay open to keep that keep that useful posture and keep that good uh

Good shoulder function. So, but yeah, with squats you can definitely do that just very progressively. One warning about squats. If you're going for a parallel squat, like it is in power lift. It's a parallel defined as the top of the knee is a little higher than the crease on the hip.

But we applied that strong first to use that for teaching people that upright squat and developing the uh developing the mobility for deep squat. It's uh it's a foolproof. It's like uh Gray Cook would call this a self correcting exercise, and those are really the best. When the coach can walk away and, you know, have a cigarette and the student is still gonna be able to do

And uh he decided to get serious about getting strong. So he healed up until he was healthy. He started uh lifting cattle. Then after that he started powerlifting and he started doing uh proper stretching. So he's uh right now his Steve is in his late sixties, he holds uh a bunch of American masters records in the deadlift, even though he's back with Lifts without a bell. He's you can break your fist on his abs. I like having people punch.

Just don't hurt yourself. But he also worked up to suspend his side splits. And you know, that's at that point he was uh probably in his fifties when. Maybe sixties possibly. And then he even competed in this crazy all around meets where there's one lift where you hang between two chairs and then you pick up a dumbbell.

You can find the footage somewhere on the internet. So here's a man who took uh who did not take his uh injury lying down. So once he was cleared to train he decided to approach his training with a Uh attitude of a musician because he's a music professor.

And in my experience that people who who become very successful in uh in strength Musicians and martial artists are among the people who who can succeed Because they're used to practice for many hours, they're used to paying attention to small detail and they're used to doing whatever other people consider boring over and over.

So again, here is this sixty some year old man with abs you can break your hands on, deadlift records and uh and full splits. That's that's what a human mind is capable of.

um acquired some significant strength. Could you just share some of his um his abilities to inspire both the uh the people um in the second half of their life or so and to um motivate slash intimidate the younger ones and um get them going because Yeah.

and uh he deadlifted uh in the low four hundreds uh without a belt, body weight of one ninety eight. And in fact when Back at that point when uh Professor Stuart McGill, who is a very good friend of mine, he uh came to watch my dad Uh I think he pulled like three to five for triple before competition in at Gold's Gym Venice. And uh Stu examined his back and he said he had a you know, uh m muscularity in the back of a forty year old, so I thought it was pretty pretty pretty cool.

You know, and he does that. He does push ups and things like that. So he just stays on top of that. And he's still maintaining very good strength, very good muscularity. So the approach to building muscle for him is It's not saying volume with medium reps and medium effort. It always works because it builds strength, it builds muscle, it's very safe, it's uh it's very enjoyable.

And uh my mother, she uh she used to be a professional ballerina and she got started training since she was six. So she because she had to train all day, she hates exercise, but she still does it because And uh she came up with uh great uh anti glycolytic training protocol. So this is something she invented, I had nothing to do with it, but it's just totally goes with Verkashansky's work. She climbs stairs at a high risk. And she will climb stairs from one floor to the next.

She'll walk the hallway, come back, and then go to the next floor. So that's the same idea that Verkashansky had. Intensify the intensity of contraction and then give it a little time to not so in order to for the acid not to pile up. So you keep that effort creating phosphate powered and aerobic power.

And you know, so she does that for seventeen floors or whatever, a few times a week and plus other things. But yeah, I'm very fortunate, uh very proud of my parents. My father in law, Roger, he's a great example, and a great Greister Groove. So he is a retired firefighter and marine. And uh at the age of sixty-four and he always uh lifted. Very unusual for his generation. He started when he was fifteen. And uh never stopped. But he couldn't quite do twenty pull-ups.

So at the age of sixty four he got on the Greister Groove protocol. So at so at that point his max was ten reps. So I said Roger, every time you go by the pull up bar hit hit And when they become really, really easy and then you can add a rep. Well a few months later he finally he uh when he worked up to nine daily reps.

uh he tested he could do twenty pull ups. So at sixty four he finally aced the US Marine Corps pull up PT test, something that he couldn't do as a young jar head. And uh yes, seeing these older folks who are Not taking their age lying down and taking their training very seriously. It's just uh very admirable. And you know, you see much younger people start complaining. Some thirty year old comes, Oh, I'm aging, I'm getting older, what should I do?

a as a noun, it's not as effective as practice as a verb. I'm going to practice. Okay. Not that just for me. This is just my own internal thing. You know, my neuroses insist that I share this. But I do think that semantics are important, as you pointed out before, because It has a lot to do with how uh we feel about ourselves um and what we think our we're capable of.

It starts with being inspired to try something, but also like I didn't grow up in a particularly athletic family. Um, you know, not none of us are unathletic, but I didn't think I could be reasonably strong, have decent endurance and I wouldn't consider myself an athlete by any stretch, but um

But I imagine a strength athlete starting out using the Soviet system. And later, by the way, the Russian powerlifting team uses exactly the same training methodology. Which means you training many times a week, let's say squad four or five days a week. Uh you're doing a lot of reps with this moderate effort. And you do this for for years and you achieve high level.

And then at some point you switch to this American powerlifting system because your skills are already fully honed and you're fully adapted to the type of stimulus that that uh first system brings and you switch switch to this once a week

I'd love to talk about body weight training. I love, love, love the book Naked War.

one arm pull ups. I'm not there now. I have to return to that level of of upper body strength. Um but it's remarkable what one can do with body weight training. And you described some really beautiful progressions in the book. I highly recommend this book, folks. Um So maybe we could just take the push-up as an example and a handstand push-up as the extreme of that, right?

What I love so much about that book is for instance, you talk about doing a push-up against the w a wall is trivially easy for most people. Doing a handstand push up free free standing, very difficult. But there's a series progr of progressions in between that maybe you could describe to us that once you realize that oh I can work through this over time and if I'm not in a rush to get through it and I just do these a few times a week or more, ah

Or a few times a day, a few times a week or more, I could do a handstand push-up freestanding, or a pistol squat, or a one arm push-up, or a one arm pull up. It's not outside one.

So you can do a push up absolutely anywhere. So that is that's a really huge selling point because for some people, somebody who travels all the time and uh somebody who's in places where gyms are not available, so that's that's a great idea. Some people just simply enjoy it greatly. That's that's just fine. The downside of bodyweight training is it's a lot harder to learn these skills. then it is let's say to learn some many knife skills or even some barbel skills.

So it seems very innocent and so easy, but the uh it may take time to really get it. So that may take time s to do it long. Well first of all, the satisfaction of lifting really heavy stuff. If you don't, maybe it's not for you, but if you do it's it's incredible. Then the ability to adjust adjust the weights in small increments. So you can prescribe 87.5% one rep max, and you can do

You cannot do that with body weight. In fact, with body weight, it's very hard to calibrate resistance. That's another one of the problems because you do need to have some skills, figure out the regressions and progressions how to do that. And uh the other thing, the other great benefit of the barbell is Some of the lifts, especially the three power lifts, allow you to make great gains in strengths. And if you choose muscle mass with a very low volume.

It's uh it's possible to do three sets of five once a week in the squat and get very strong. Try to do that with pistols. So reasons for that we can speculate. We know some reasons, we don't know others, but it it is what we're doing. Beauty of the kettlebell for strength specifically is it's very easy to teach the body language of strength.

You would think that with the b with the body weight it should be easier because a lot of the skills that I teach in uh in my book The Naked Warrior, they are either gymnastics or martial arts. Okay, here's the hollow position from gymnastics, or here's this little trick from uh heart style martial arts.

So they're all both use body weight. Nevertheless, it's it takes a lot more processing to figure out how to do this right from scratch, like especially contracting your abs properly, especially if you don't have abs to start. By the time you have them, that's good, but if you don't have them, it's hard.

With a kettlebell, for example, you take uh you start doing double front squats with a pair of kettlebells, it's gonna be like zertures. You're gonna your abdominal wall is gonna light up. You suddenly learn exactly, oh, this is what it means to get. Or you stick your elbows inside the knees and do goblet squat. Oh, this is what the proper proper squat feels like. And just very easy to uh very easy to integrate uh integrate all your body in one lip.

One is simplicity. You only can have a couple of bills and do a lot of things. But the other is When you go, when you suddenly let's say that you've been pressed 53 pound kettlebell, and you're doing a lot of sets, and your goal is to press a seventy pound kettlebell, it's a big job. So what you're going to do is first of all, you're going to have to put in a very significant volume of work.

that foundation of the pyramid. Many strength uh authors throughout history, Bill Starr and many others use that analogy of volume as being Foundation of the pyramid. You're gonna have to press that twenty-four kilo many times properly before you're going to have a run at seventy. You have to develop the confidence. The other thing is you're gonna have to acquire the skill of tension.

Total body tension, everything is linked up because when you go up a couple pounds, it doesn't make a difference. You're doing the same thing, you're not noticing. When you go up a lot, everything So as you are doing going through your sets of five with a fifty three pounder, you're also doing just cleans with a seventy pounder, you're starting

You're doing get ups with it. You're starting to see acquiring, see how that weight feels like. Again, we're talking about disinhibition here. You're planning and owing this weight. So you're forced to put in a very significant volume of work, which me which is very healthy and will lead to a lot of really healthy adaptations, and you will force to develop the skills to make that transition.

And plus, you're also having that desirable difficulty. In skill, in learning, there is that concept by Robert Bjork about desirable difficulties for learning. If uh learning is very easy, something is presented and you don't learn much. If you have to struggle, like even if you're reading something and the font is ineligible, ironically you're gonna end up learning better. So that's an example of a desirable difficulty as you're progressing this way.

So that is for strength. Obviously kettlebell have their benefits for uh for endurance and for for other things as well, but just for adjusting the resistance. Oftentimes it's just a matter of preference and a matter of accessibility. So I'm not gonna say you pick this tool, you pick that tool, you pick the other tool. But if you decide to pick the body weight.

Uh my recommendation would be just be ready for patient for a long road because you have to patiently learn these little subtleties of micromanaging your body. Again, you watch the body language of gymnastics. You watch the Sanchin Kata in uh

some styles of karate and you'll see that amazing uh linking of the different parts of the body into the one chain, how the tension is used. So it's um It's very rewarding, but I would say that's probably the most attention demanding, even though it seems so innocent and so simple and so safe, but it demands a lot of attention. But if your that's your speed and if you enjoy practice, true practice that's as a

The big issue is you have to hip hinge, not lift the kettlebell with your back or with your And for that we have very, very specific progressions. You cannot go move beyond this until you do this. Okay, here you are doing this particular hip hinge drill with no weight. Okay, good. You got that down. Now you're going to do a kettlebell deadlift, which is just a you know sumo deadlift with a light kettlebell.

Then you're gonna progress with a very particular type of swing. So it's about patience. But the benefits are really worth it. So what are the benefits, let's say, of the kettlebell swings? As opposed to or snatch is again snatch is more of a less democratic exercise. Like the dips. Parallel bar dips, fantastic for those who can do that. But you know, if you can, that's too bad. But they're alternative.

So again the snatch is great. If you cannot do snatch you can do swing. So the swing It allows you to train power and power endurance in extremely safe manner. Because if you try to develop power in a lot of conventional ways, uh you will find like, okay, you try doing Olympic lifts. It's very skill intensive trying to learn how to do that. And besides for some athletes not appropriate. Racking the bar

And uh over stretching the wrist ligaments. Like for example for fighters that's a case of death. That's a really bad idea, destabilizing the wrist in this manner. And for many athletes, other athletes too. You know, a pitcher doesn't want to do that. So high you know, then you try to do things like sprinting. Sprinter requires a lot of coaching, proper coaching, much more than a kettlebell swing, and it's very, very easy to rip a hamstring or something like

So it's this kettlebell swing allows you to train power and power endurance in a very safe manner. And what's also very unique about it is you don't have to use a lot of weight. What's unique about the kettlebell and the kettlebell swing, another thing about the design, you can swing it back between your legs, but you don't have to let it passively.

You can choose to accelerate it. This is called over speed eccentric. So some years back, uh our colleague, one of our instructors, Brendan Hetzler, he put uh several other Of our colleagues instructors on the force plate and we started doing swings. With over speed eccentric, which means accelerating it downwards and upwards. So we were using just a fifty three. So the most experienced guys were able to generate over ten G's of So basically we made that fifty pound bell we five.

But if uh to the listeners who know about how uh how the tissues, how the passive tissues can handle the load, when the loading is really rapid, it's amazing how these tissues can handle that very, very safely. So you can apply tremendous amount of load. Of course you don't start with that. It's not how you start your swimming. So and you can develop power endurance, so you can do a whole lot of different many different sets.

You've had Megan Kelly, Vonaboe were uh certified instructors out of UK, you know, she set a Guinness world record for a crazy number of swings done in an hour. And uh so she would just go her training is she would go and do swings, uh uh she would do a few reps, pick up, set it down, and she would do it for let's say ninety minutes, and she would do it with a heavy kettlebell. And the adaptations are fantastic from

In the kettlebell world we refer to the what the hell effect. So what's the what the hell effect? What the hell effect is when you're getting an adaptation, that's not a beginner's gain, but it's an adaptation that's totally unexpected. There's some collateral benefit, how suddenly you're able you're able to do something. And uh the improvements in bat loss, improvements in resilience. So resili like for example, speaking of resilience.

So some of the tactical teams that I worked with in the US here, when they added either swings or snatches to their training with the kettlebell, plus one legged uh kettlebell deadlifts as well, they stopped tearing their hamstrings. Hm. So you have this amazing way to do eccentric loading for the hamstring, but it's very safe and just really prepares you. Uh one of my friends is still playing baseball in his sixties. He says thank you for the kettlebell.

You know. He went through the course in one of the federal agencies twenty years ago and he's still doing that. He's retired. But he's still he's still doing that. So that's a great benefit. The amount of pure workload that you can do in this amount, that's why you can burn a lot of calories, you can develop cardio, whatever. But also, like why would anybody want to do power training who is not a power athlete?

Because for so many reasons right now, I don't need to speak about it that your other guests have, for the reasons of longevity, how important it is to to have high levels of power. And uh the kettlebell swing is one of the ways one of the ways to develop it. And interestingly enough, going back like you know, these accelerations. Prof. Jakov, Nikolai Jakovlev, top Soviet biochemist.

He was just talking about sprints during added sprints when you were adding sprints just to a jog, you know, this kind of a fart like work, he was saying how important how good it is for elderly and for teenage. How good it is. So the kettlebell even if you're not sprinting, if you don't know how to sprint, you're able to get so many of this uh youth promoting benefits.

And again you have one tool that can train all the qualities. You can develop uh mobility, you know, the bent press. That's a tremendous exercise. The bent press where the mobility of the T spine, the uh mobility of the shoulder. So like you wore a watch f and uh watch, for example, uh doctor uh doctor Pope Mosley, he is one of our instructors and he's also uh a doctor and biomed researcher. I mean the gentleman is seventy years old.

And he's doing this beautiful bent presses, getting himself in the range of motion that young guys, you know, on their phones can't possibly get into, and he's doing it in a healthy manner. So you can develop mobility, you can develop strength, you can develop endurance and uh resilience and all one pattern. So obviously I'm biased and I'm not saying it's the only way to go, but that's one relative benefit, uh one of the many relative benefits of chemical.

But in the overall lifelong journey, like if you're looking at three things right now, your nearest strength, what should I start? I would say start with the kettlebell. It's the best entry point. We find it so easy to start coaching people in powerlifting or transition to some bodyweight strengths after training them with kettlebells. It's uh it's extremely easy because they've got that bodyweight language.

I'm gonna I'll be happy to answer.

I don't know, maybe it's takes me back to P E class when I was in high school or something when we do these fitness fit tests. Um it's usually some pull ups and push ups, a reach and a and a run or something like that, like a like a you know, straight legged Toe reached pr who knows if it's a meaningful metric. But in any case, um something so satisfying about going from struggling with push-ups to being able to do a one-arm.

Um and you describe it in in how to make that progression in the book. For people

uh American bench press record holder and uh coach for the power lifting team USA. I mean watching him do one push ups, you gotta love that stuff because normally big guys hate bodyweight works.

uh generic design but with certain uh you know feedback loops in there okay if this happens you have to go back and make some changes. Deliver much better results than customized programs very often. So find something that's simple. Find something that does not have a lot of moving space.

And uh and just stick with this for a long time if it's working. Do not look for the for the next thing because the next thing maybe it's as good, maybe not. But also do keep in mind that every time you change gears, you lose momentum. Uh you know, you're uh you're a neuroscientist Uh I don't know if you spoke to your audience about the law of neural Darwinism, but the there's a competition between the synaptic sites, so you have the pathways. So you can only do so many things.

So a child can do everything, but not but poorly. But as we get older, some you know some of these pathways get pruned, but others get reinforced. And unfortunately we can't excel at everything. So there's this classic example with, and not just physically, mentally as well, cognitively as well, this classic example with uh taxi drivers.

Back in the days before GPS, taxi cab drivers they were supposed to pass an extremely challenging test how to navigate through the city that was not designed to be navigated. And uh they found that Uh certain part of their hippocampus was more developed than than in others. And so this you know, so they thought, well, maybe it's just pre pre selection, maybe whoever made it through the test were the guys with more muscular hippocampa, you know.

And then they monitored then they monitored two groups of students over several years and they said they start with the same size. And in the group that passed their brains so to say got bigger in that part and the others they didn't, okay. But then at the same time in a different test of a different test of memory, the the guys who passed the test they were not. So they lost something in the process.

It's just life. It's uh many things in life are zero sum game. You wanna seek some balance up to a point, but there comes a point where you know you cannot do it all. We are limited in time, we're limited in our adaptive capacity.

Neuroscience, whether it's okay, how do they you know what are the martial arts skills, how do the martial artists do for striking or somewhere else? I think that's just really interesting to kind of a step a little bit outside your comfort zone and sometimes you see paths.

And young people training. Uh I don't know what the going word is now as to whether or not there's a, you know, too young to w to resistance train age. You know, some people say there isn't. Um when I was growing up it was thought that if you squatted heavy or you deadlifted heavy before you reached your um natural

Uh limits of your height that it could s quote unquote stunt your growth. Uh like your comments on that. But based on what we were just talking about, it seems that If a young person is interested in Developing a super skill in one area, one sport, okay, but there's a real trade off to that. And perhaps what we should do as kids um is a little bit of soccer, a little bit of swimming, a little bit of gymnasti gymnastics seems like a wonderful all around sport.

Maybe a little archery, you know, try a bunch of things. Some ballet, you know, try try

And uh specialist athletes break. They they break. They really do. So that balance between general and specific, uh it's a tough balance.

Some some people prefer to be decent in many things and it is healthy. But you still have to decide. You still have to make decisions. Very much you're looking like at a budget. Do I want to buy a couch or do you want to go on a vacation to Italy? Or do I want to go on a much lamer vacation and buy a lamer couch and do both? And I'm not saying what's the right answer right there, but just people do have to understand there uh there are limitations.

They can't successfully compete in two sports, for example. It's not going to happen, especially if it's a power sport and endurance sport. And uh they can't study everything to a high level just. If you want to be a polymath that could that w that was fine in the

Child prodigies, very few of them are like Josh. Most of them don't actually succeed in doing anything else at a very high level except hopefully survive and thrive in their personal life. Who knows? Uh after being ultra successful as a young child, probably because their nervous system is so you know, they grease the groove so heavily for one endeavor it's very hard to cross over. Josh is

Um tried an L sit, failed miserably, tried to the you know hang from uh the bar and just getting into a chair position and could just barely hold that. The progressions are what matter, right? Slow progression and patience. Now five sets of five pikes, trivial.

It there's a thousand different exercises and people like, oh you gotta have varieties, this many reps. That's not the point. The point really is tension and attention. So those are the And uh Ideally your best first step is really learning abdominal tension through something like a Zercher squat or double kettlebell front squat, where the load distribution is such that it forces reflexive stabilization and you feel oh that's what tight apps feel like.

And getting somebody just weak in the plank it's it's hopeless. There are ways of building up to it, yes, by rolling in the back and so on. So but if you don't have that option or if you choose not to exercise it, you have to be extremely attentive to the details of what's going on with on your abdomen. So you need to learn things like for example, you need to learn to contract the pelvic diaphragm, pull your butt up.

Because you're trying to evoke Cont you know, trying to constrain the interabdominal pressure, then you need to learn how to direct attention to the different parts of your abdomen, almost like a body bodybuilder, but really not quite, more like a gymnast.

There is this argument about in strength world about, you know, internal focus, external focus and queuing. And the agreement is in motor learning, well, external focus queuing is so much better than focusing on, you know, whatever happens within the individual muscle. It may be true in the beginning and it may be true outside of the strengths game, but any top strength athlete that you will meet, they have their own internal cues, how they do something.

Later on they may forget them. It just fires them, you know, but they know how to this is how I this is how I engage the lat in the in the bench press. Uh George Halbert, bench press world record holder, famously said it took him many years to finally understand how the triceps is used in the bench press. Many years. So there is a lot of internal component and for the abs very, very much. So you have to learn how to very much direct your attention there.

To get high tension you have to keep the reps low. Like you said, five sets of five, perfect. High reps are not necessary. You're not gonna burn off fat by doing more reps, you're just gonna irritate your back. That's all you're gonna do. Nothing else. So you treat your app training very much like a like a s like a strength strength event. And if you do that, uh you're gonna get those results. And finally, the final detail is you need to use That interabdominal pressure as you heard about

In lifting like a deadlift or a squat or something, an interabdominal pressure helps you, it supports you. When you're doing abdominal work, you work against that abdominal press intraabdominal pressure. You just create that pressure and contract again it. This is something called internal isometric. So it's kind of interesting it's just a combination of a classic strength work with very internalized kind of almost like a martial arts approach.

Then you need to learn also how to obviously use your abs in the lifts and lifting. And once you do, and this is the beauty, you don't really have to train your abs. So Franco Columbo, for example, great example. In addition to winning, you know, being super strong and winning Mr. Olympia, he won the best abs. He didn't train abs. He said, he told me I hate ab training. He just would stay tight whenever he did his heavy lift.

And this is pretty much what happens when you reach a certain level of strength and a certain level of awareness, simply staying tight during your strength work and also employing power breathing, which is very important. Uh you're gonna be able to to get as strong as as you need in the abs and get your six back or whatever provided you know you don't need the twink.

So how do you pressurize the in fact, may I show an abdominal exercise right now that is just sitting at this table that's also going to teach you how uh teach your audience how to properly pressurize for lifting. So normally it's better done standing. So and it's not for people with high blood pressure or heart concerns, you know, check with your doctor if that's the situation.

So you take a normal breath in your abdomen and you uh pull up your butt pretty much. Like imagine you have to go to the restroom and you try and just you can't quite you know, it's far away you're trying to stop. And you put your tongue between your teeth and you start

So everything around your waist is going to contract. And uh you're gonna strain your abdomen. You're also gonna start learn how to properly how to properly stabilize yourself under under heavy weight. The difference between using this technique for lifting and for just training the abs, when you're training the abs, there's going to be some spinal flexion. Not a whole lot. You don't want to do a lot of that. There's going to be some spinal flexion.

When you're doing that under a heavy barbell squat, you're maintaining your spine. So like your body stays a cylinder. And um You're going to hold your breath pretty much. But the idea's the same. So it's like So the Valsalva manoeuvre, one uh Russian coach called it it's it's an ex it's uh it's an exhalation that didn't

Okay? Because people don't know how their breath properly. They just and then eyes are bulging out where there's no stability right here. So first of all, you gotta inhale low. And how do you do that? If you watch top lifters, how they do that, they will do it You can also do it through the nose, but you cannot do it through big wide open mouth. So I'll show you why. So if you you can tr your folks can try it at home. So if you put your hand on your stomach and trying to do an abdominal breath.

Doesn't go very well. Now, for contrast, pinch off one nostril. Take an abdominal breath. Or you can do that through purchased lips tried again. So you see...

So right now I can speak to you, but I'm still just as tight and so you see what you're doing. So the way we test it at our the way we teach it at our workshops is you lie on the ground, I tell you to tense up, then I'm gonna stand on your stomach and I'm gonna have you sing a song.

And you're gonna have to learn to properly maintain that pressure while still containing, containing, uh can continuing to breathe. So you're able to stabilize your spine, but you're not going to pass out from maintaining that by uh by holding your breath.

And then finally what you gotta do learn to do is you gotta learn to match the breath with the force. So synchronize synchronize when you're punching, when you're throwing, when you're Lifting, you have to learn how to match that contraction, the timing of the abdominal contraction and the pressurization, sometimes exhalation, sometimes just pretending to, with the Once you learn how to match the breath of the forest.

And what people don't realize it's not just purely mechanical. Mechanically, yes, of course it works. You know, Stu explained this so well about the stiffness of the structure, the analogy of the bicycle frame. It's the same thing. You're getting an expensive bicycle frame when you have strong ass. As opposed to the cheap one that rattles and uh wiggles. But there's also something that it's never never spoken about in the West for some time.

The Soviets studied that decades ago. This is something they called uh the pneumo matic reflex. PNU is uh P N E U M O, so air. So there are other Receptors, receptors for sensors for pressure inside your abdominal cavity and thoracic cavity. So whenever these receptors are stimulated. What they do is they automatically increase the sensitivity of alpha motor neurons. So which really means to uh the audience is this. If you imagine your brain is the uh music

And imagine your muscle is uh is a speaker. The amount of interabdominal pressure is your volume control. So by by increasing that pressure, you're increasing the strength. But by By releasing that interabdominal pressure, you relax the muscles. So that's why in stretching, as I mentioned before, you can't be sitting in a half split and groaning. No, you need to. Release. So if you release that passive breath, again you're gonna your muscles are going.

So controlling your breath is uh very much as is known in martial arts, it's very much synonymous with controlling.

And it's very easy for the uh listeners to test that, get a dynamometer, hand gripper, and just test yourself on that and just see test it out on different uh with different breathing patterns and just see what happens. And whenever, you know, this idiotic practice at some gyms, oh you can grunt right here and it's just well, I guess you can be strong.

And yeah, of course if you're doing this on purpose, you're walking in with the bros and you're just trying to just to make noise to attract attention, that's wrong. But Strength is a noisy endeavor. So there may be some hissing, there may be some grunting. It's uh it's just absolutely unavoidable. And it's uh if i if you're if you're trying to be quiet and if you're trying to be a lady or a gentleman, well maybe it's not for it's for it's for somewhere else.

Are we um checking our uh bicep vein in the mirror? Just kidding, don't do that folks. Um During a lift, w where should our eyes be? Is there any idea that looking up it makes it easier to drive up out of the bottom of a squat? Has this been explored?

Uh for some other lifters, especially those with pronounced lordosis where they're very arched, big arch in the back, that may arch them too much. That might be inappropriate or just kink their neck. It's it's all possible. And uh so A lot of coaches these days in lift like a deadlift, they try to include uh Andy Bolton. Andy Bolton is the Legendary deadlifter. He is the one, the first uh lifter to lift over one thousand pounds in the deadlift.

And uh Andy and I we co authored the book, The Deadlift Dynamite. So Andy's got a most beautiful deadlift, just the most incredible, beautiful deadlift. So Andy's d what Andy does is pretty much what the standard recommendation for most people is these days, where you're maintaining a neutral neck. And your eyes kind of a go with it.

So you get yourself in the position, you know, on the bottom of the deadlift, like where your head is the continuation of your body, like you're an insect or something. And then you look at the spot on the ground that's appropriate and your eyes will come up. So that's a good general standard recommendation.

For people with long necks looking straight ahead, it's it's a good recommendation. Some lifters succeed with crazy ideas. Lamar Gantt, that again, pound per pound, the biggest dead lifter. He was in tremendous hyperextension. He was looking at the ceiling. Uh then at a high level of competition there are some other subtle ways, uh some things people try. So Konstantin Konstantinov from Latvia, he was another uh great deadlifter who passed.

He uh he would look down at the start. He would look absolutely down. He was pretty much uh

But from that there are a lot of fancy ways to do it. As for closing your eyes, closing your eyes is not recommended. It changes the coordination of the lift, but for advanced lifters lifting blindfolded is really So Robert Roman, one of the top Soviet uh specialists He pioneered that and he would have his lifters do some of the sets blindfolded and it's really amazing at how much not relying on your vision, relying on your kinesthetic sense, what that does. It's uh it's quite remarkable.

And also just to add one more thing, at a competition, at least in powerlifting, a lot of uh I mean the top guys they don't see any You know, they are just deep inside their rage, they're not. Uh there it's a total tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, everything. So it's uh whatever their heads in p i their head in whatever remembered position, but don't ask'em to look at you or see you. It's not gonna happen.

'Cause I know it makes you uncomfortable. It's perhaps the only thing that makes you uncomfortable. But in all seriousness, I don't think any I can't uh d sense any discomfort. I I wanna just thank you for a number of things that are reflective, I'm sure, of what other people are thinking. First of all the level of rigor that you've approached, this whole thing of strength and fitness and flexibility and breathing and you know every one of these topics, too many to list off just now.

is i it's remarkable. It's really fantastic. This comes through and um and it's rare these days, um, but it's rare in any age to find people that are so dedicated to Um this level of rigor i in a given area. And and it's so

You know, I couldn't help but notice as an as an academic, but your attention to proper attribution for people that have done the work and accomplished the various feats from whom you've gleaned various aspects of this knowledge is not to be overlooked because that's something that's so.

as well, perhaps uh to get the opportunity to train together uh so I personally could learn from you. But in the meantime, on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, thank you ever so much, Pavel. You're thank you, Andrew. You're a real pleasure.

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