032 Common training mistakes to avoid in 2026

Hello everybody. Thank you for joining us again for another episode of Hypertrophy Past and Present. Um coming up to the end of the year, and this must be Oh, episode thirty five or something like that. So we're yeah. Chris is looking shocked. Yeah, it's been feels like just last week that we started. Um, but it's been a big year and thank you for you guys who've been with us since the beginning. So we decided that since it's the end of the year, we're going to do a bit of a topical

uh, episode today. And we're gonna talk about kind of what people might be doing next year, next week when they get into the gym. Maybe they've had a bit of time off. Obviously a lot of people have had you know, different holidays and stuff at the moment where maybe they've fallen out of routine or maybe some people are going to make

Some New Year's resolutions to actually uh, you know, get into the gym for the first time next week. And so we're gonna talk a little bit about maybe some ways to do it well, or at the very least, some mistakes to avoid when you do it. Um and some mistakes that we both have seen in the gyms that we're part of and with clients and just what we've seen in the industry over the years.

So that's gonna be where this conversation's gonna go. And look, to be honest, I don't know exactly where the conversation's gonna go and it's gonna be a bit of fun. Um but we also wanna follow it up next week with a part two. And we're gonna talk about, especially for you guys who are coaches or PTs, personal trainers. how you can effectively structure routines for clients next year and you can deliver what clients maybe want or think that they want.

but do so in an effective manner. Now, if that doesn't make sense to you, it will next week when we talk about it. Um, but that's been something that has been a a challenge for me over the years in del in finding a middle ground of what I know a client needs and what it is that they think that they need or at least that they want. And so I'm excited for that conversation.

Now, before we jump into today's conversation, obviously I've got a a plan to talk about, but before I do all of that, I am not alone. I do have a co host with me. Chris, how are you doing today? Ha ha. I did start to think I was being forgotten. I'm just here to kinda wave at you and Facial expressions and thumbs up and you just like wingman. I'm doing fine, thank you. Yes, very well. Okay. What?

Great. So I've got a silver area plan to talk about today. Um one that we thought would contrast nicely to some of the mistakes we're about to talk about in a moment. So Here we have and this is uh coming from a magazine from nineteen fifty two. So we've talked about anabolics recently. I think last week we talked about anabolics and obviously we discussed that when they sort of were widely being used in bodybuilding was the early sixties.

uh you know, any time from sort of nineteen fifty four onwards they were being experimented with. And so this was a a routine that was published in a magazine in nineteen fifty two. So presumably before anabolics were being used by sort of any bodybuilders in America. And this routine was uh what George Eiferman referred to as his favorite routine. So George Eiferman, obviously very uh you know, significant silver era bodybuilder, he won

Both Mr. Universe and also Mr. America competitions. He won Mr. America in the uh late forties, I think forty eight. And then he continued competing. Um, actually for quite a long time. I think his Mr. Universe win was in the early sixties. So he was uh active in competing for yeah, I mean, close to two decades.

uh and the plan, like I said, is is coming from nineteen fifty two. So we can be fairly confident that t this was a plan he was following when it was natural. There's no evidence that I'm aware of that he did in fact use any anabolics, uh but obviously since he was competing in the sixties, it's hard to know that for sure. So we are back to a full body plan. Last week, obviously, with our golden era example, we had what did we have? Was it a s it was?

I think it was a six day a week plan. It was a weird split, wasn't it? I'm just remembering now is um oh no, I'm getting confused. Actually, we talked about Mike Mental last week. You know what? For a enhanced plant, it was actually quite good. I reflected on that this week actually, Chris. I didn't tell you about this, but

I've actually uh been been enthused to write a immensa inspired revamped plan. I know you're shaking your head at me, but as much as a made this mayos, not everyone will train full body and so for those who want who won't

I want to provide the lesser of two evils and I think a mentally inspired plan might get us there. Anyway, before I lose you completely, let me talk to you about this silver era full body plan. So George, I from Chris is about to leave. I'm gonna do this podcast solo, I have a feeling.

So George Eiferman, we have full body three times per week, as was a usu. Obviously almost every single silver era bodybuilder was doing that. Full body three times a week. That's just a nor don't listen to anyone who tries to tell you otherwise'cause it's simply not true.

And we had three sets per exercise. So every exercise was following the same structure. Three sets, seven to ten repetitions, double progressive method. And we start with a hack squat. Now when I say hack squat, I do not mean a machine. I mean a barbell hack squat. So if you haven't done this exercise, it's where generally you would have your heels elevated. You don't need to, but usually heels elevated, you'd have a barbell behind you. Imagine like a deadlift.

but with the bar behind you instead of in front of you. So um yeah the bar is kind of following directly down behind your back and behind your legs and you're squatting down with it. So starting with a hack squat and then we go into a barbell bench press. Then into a uh dumbbell fly, which they didn't call flies at that point, they called them bent arm laterals, but for all intents and purposes it was a fly. And then a dumbbell lateral raise.

A standing alternating dumbbell shoulder press. And this was done in the sagittal plane. So interesting exercise selection that I don't think we've seen a lot of in plans previously. And then we have a bent over one arm dumbbell row. Now this was actually done in the transverse plane. So if you imagine bending over, dumbbell, we're not pulling up elbow kind of uh, you know, close to our uh torso. We're actually pulling elbow directly out to the side. And then into a standing barbell curl.

And then a dumbbell concentration curl? And then wrist curls. We didn't see a lot of wristwork. I mean some I guess some of Hoffman's guys did do this, but here we have Iverman doing a seated dumbbell wrist curl. Now I believe he did high repetitions with this. Um I didn't have it noted down here, but I think from memory he did.

Uh and he did sort of talk about the purpose of this exercise was to make other exercises easier. So he he thought it sort of made his grip more effective and um easier to handle other wakes. And then he went into dumbbell side bends. Now with this he was actually holding your weight overhead when he was doing the sidebends and then concluded with sit up.

Now that's eleven exercises in total. Obviously we've got a couple of, you know, non conventional exercises towards the end um with the side bends and wrist exercise. But there we have what's that, thirty, thirty three sets in total, uh full body.

Wow, yeah. Um I don't think anybody's gonna be surprised by my kind of complaints at this point. I mean I'm just gonna say the same things that I've said many times before. Um, I mean, we were actually talking about that before we uh jumped on the podcast today. There this doesn't seem to be very much hamstrings work in general across most of these programs. Um

So, you know, straight away uh I'm not seeing any hamstrings work there. There's no um I mean obviously there's no machines uh potentially available to do the kind of classic leg curl type uh exercise that we would want. But e you know, even then there's no there's no kind of deadlift variation in there. Um, and you know, following on from that there's very uh little, you know, lat work. I mean, arguably there's no lat work in there because the row is out to the side.

And there's no uh there isn't even a an isometric with the deadlift variation. So we're really, really struggling for lats. And I don't understand why that is. There's something weird going on. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if like in, you know, sort of uh years time Somebody goes to the right. Oh, well didn't you know that all bodybuilders used to do pull ups as part of their warm up, they just didn't tell you.

Yeah. It's one of those things is like you can just imagine them kind of realising, Oh, uh we forgot to tell you we Because everyone knew. I wanted you. But yeah, there's no there's no kind of uh there's no kind of lat work in there which is really disappointing. So yeah, hamstrings lats, nothing there. And then as you you know, mentioned to me when you were uh telling me about the program that we're gonna do, um, you know

there could have been some direct triceps work and it's strange that there isn't direct triceps work in there given that there is so much um you know direct biceps work. So again, some weirdness uh there. Having said that, um I uh I really like the way that we've got um frontal plane and sagittal plane pressing. So you get that really nice kind of balance between the um the lateral and and um anterior delt.

And just by the by, I don't know if you have a a mental image of what Eifferman looked like in your mind, but he had great developed chest and shoulders. And arms, you know, were were obviously not bad either. Biceps were quite well developed, but certainly I I would say that they're um sort of high point of his seek of his physique where he see his chest and shoulders, which kind of checks out with his programme. Yeah, that's what this programme is doing, I think. Um you know, I think uh the

the sort of bench I mean, to be honest, bench plus dumbbell fly for me would be a bit too much. Um you know, but maybe he was a uh sort of an a del or a triceps dominant bencher. So I mean uh You know, I'm not saying that is not possible to do three sets of bench followed by three sets of flies. Involved in a bench press. Um but I think it's it's it's it's probably not gonna work for some people.

So your point with that obviously I assume you're referring more around like damage and volume, but in terms of exercise as well, what are those two from a chest perspective, what are those two exercises doing differently or or not doing differently just so people are aware?

Well, it depends on how the bench is performed. It depends on who's doing the bench. If you've got someone who's a chest dominant bencher and you're in the uh definitively in the transverse plane, you know, you're a wide grip bench. then really um the the the kind of the the act the regional activation will be almost identical between the the the the uh dumbbell fly and the bench press. What you'll get is a little bit of a higher level of activation.

in the fly simply because you're using a smaller amount of total muscle mass. So it allows you to recruit more motors in the target muscles. But regionally you'll be basically getting more or less the same output. So if you're using a wide grip of the bench, effectively there's just not really any scenario where the bench is giving you anything for chest that the fly is not giving you.

Exactly. Uh whereas um you know obviously the bench is gonna do other stuff as well, um, you know, on top of that, especially with you know the tricep. So uh that's why I always say it's like it depends on your uh plane of motion. You start to bring the the bench press into a more sagittal plane range of motion if you're tucking your

kind of elbows and you're trying to make it more sagittal plane, you get obviously a different sort of focus. It becomes a much more clavicular exercise. You don't get any of the costal pec at all. So you kind of really change the way that the peck is working in that scenario.

But again, you know, a person who is not chest dominant at all, like I'm not, they're gonna find that it becomes a very much a triceps exercise in that scenario. Um So i the bench press I think is one of those scenarios where you have to just be a little bit aware that how you do the exercise and what type of uh you know, leverages you've got is gonna start

move the effect of the exercise around a bit. I think the dumbbell uh flies a little bit more kind of um precise. You know, obviously a a machine will be even better in that regard. What's interesting with the bench in this situation, assuming he's using a wider grip, and you know, it doesn't say close grip, so I'd imagine he is.

then in fact what would make this the most effective uh what w what would give the bench the most eff uh efficacy possible would actually be if he was not chess dominant in his benching. Because if he was chest dominant he's getting the same as the deflies but less. Exactly, exactly.

It's interesting, isn't it?'Cause someone would look at this and be like, Oh, you know, I'm only gonna use a bench if I'm chest dominant Well actually that's gonna give you the least return on investment in this situation. Yeah, for me this would work fine because I there wouldn't be very much chest at all in that bench press and there's no other triceps exercise. For me that bench would be mostly a triceps exercise. Yes, which is what you would want in this situation.

What I would want in that situation. With the overhead, so the the standing alternating dumbbell shoulder press done in the sagittal plane, is one likely to get much or any upper chest in this? Yeah, I guess. I mean, um that sagittal plane really does call the clavicular pec into um the movement. Um and obviously the peak external momentum length is at ninety degrees, which is

you know, kind of where the clavicular pec is handing over to the anterior deltoid if you kind of phrase it that way. So yeah, I mean I think it's um it's it's definitely getting some some involvement there.

So just as we conclude with this, what did we wha what do you think was done well here? What is good if we wanted to emulate this in a plan today? Um well straight away I think the the the Delt work is is definitely uh exemplary and it's something that we don't we we have seen before in other programmes of this nature. We don't tend to see so much today. Um, you know, because a lot of overhead pressing is done on machines.

Um and those machines kind of tend to be scapular plane, really. Um and so they're kind of neither one thing nor the other. Um if they are in a plane, it's generally kind of frontal plane where they're sort of either side of the head. Yeah I c I actually get quite excited when I go in the gym and I see that there's a proper Sagittarius possibility. It's kind of like oh that's fine because I couldn't start to make use of that.

And when people use dumbbells to do their overhead pressing, they don't tend to do them in this way that we've seen described here. They almost always do that. I very, very rarely see anyone do that. And if they do do it, they're so weak that they don't want to do it because they feel like it must be inferior because how much less weight they're using. I've been using it. I mean that's a that's a whole can of worms really right there. I mean um I think w There we go. something you're not...

No, th th there's an issue there. The reason there's an issue there is because um a lot of the time I think we need to not it I think a lot of the time it's unhelpful to focus on the amount of weight that's being used in an exercise. Oh absolutely. My point is that people assume that the weight matters. Yeah, but equally there are other people running around thinking that if the exercise requires a small weight, that's also helpful. So

Um they're trying to increase the moment arm. So like people are like, Oh well if I do a lateral raise I only can only use this tiny dumbbell to do this exercise and therefore it must be really I'm like, No, hang on a minute. The instability you're creating there is causing the problem. Um so I think this is one of those things where the weight is almost irrelevant. It's like go back to basics and figure out why it is that the exercise is

you know, kind of requiring a small weight. Is it because you're creating a gigantic lever and therefore it's probably quite unstable, or is it because, you know, the muscle that you're using is underdeveloped and that's actually a good sign. It means that you've got a lot of capacity to improve, which is probably the case here. So is almost when I say the weight is rather than the same. But it's also that you're using less muscle mass, right? Like you're not going to be using

Yeah, you're using it as well. Yeah, exactly. So Are there good reasons for using less uh weight or are there bad reasons for using less weight? That's that that's the that was the thing that was making me chuckle. It was the fact that It's almost impossible to just kind of say, Oh, the amount of weight I'm using is telling me something. No, it's not. Uh it's the thing that comes before that that determines why it is that you're using less weight. That's the interesting bit.

On this exercise I was gonna say I've been using I don't know if they called is it a a Swiss bar or f a a f what do they call it, a a football bar, I forget what they're called now, where it's a barbell that has like neutral handles. Neutral grip handles. So I've been using like a close grip, neutral grip barbell essentially, and doing sagittal overhead with that. I love it. It's so good. I wish I'd been doing this sooner. It's such a great exercise.

Yeah, I don't see those bars very often actually in the gyms that I've frequented. But I know what you mean. I've I've seen them in the past, but I think they've fallen slightly out of favour. Um but no that's Now, that's a really interesting possibility. So, yeah.

In terms of stuff that's good, um yeah, I think Uh the yeah, the um the the Delt work definitely jumps out at me. Um I can't say very much else positive, I don't think. Um I really don't He's letting go out. I mean, yeah, sure. Three times a week and three sets. And I did you mention that it's seven to ten rep? Seven to ten, yeah, I think I did say that.

Uh I mean which is uh you know, a nice rep range. I mean what I would describe as moderately heavy in that sort of lower half of the of the moderate rep range, which is great. It's you know, generally requires very little warm up. to do, you can, you know, kind of jump from one exercise to the other. But he's doing three sets. I mean he's doing a lot of work. Um I mean total workload I think is toppy. Yes. But you know some of that exercise selection is fluffy.

I mean some of it's tough. I mean he's got squats and bench in there. I mean that's a lot. But a lot of the others, I mean concentration curls, wrist curls, side bends, sit ups, I mean, come on. I mean that From exercise eight onwards it's a bit fluff, right? So one to seven. So we've got what, twenty one sets of good quality work in there. Some of it's not gonna be that demanding last raise.

Bent over row in the transverse plane I'm not a fan of either. I mean I've been doing I haven't been doing that exercise, but I've been doing a single arm uh like a cable uh single armed row in the transverse plane. And that feels so uh the way I've been doing it is you can actually uh stabilize yourself, like wedge yourself into the cable setup. So I'm fully sandwiched in it. I couldn't be more stable if I tried. And doing it like that. And I've been finding that a really nice feeling exercise.

Interesting. You mean disapprovingly? No, not disapprovingly, skeptically. Skeptically. That's my master's. I'll film it and post it and you can see see what you think of it. Um it's I think it's I think every time I've tried to do Rose in the transverse plane, I've kind of just caught myself thinking, why am I not just doing a rear delt fly at this point?

Especially when I try and do some s anything single arm. I'm like, just why am I not just doing weird alpha?'Cause that would be so much more kind of, you know, appropriate for what I'm trying to achieve. As soon as I start bringing in kind of biceps movement, elbow movement, I'm like, what am I adding here? What what's the purpose of this? What's it doing? Yeah. I guess it'd be if you were trying to get some trap in there as well. I think you're trolling me at this point.

I mean there's not a there's not a lot of trap work in this. I mean this is That exercise It's giving us all more of the back development. Is horrid. Is really horrid. ترجمة نانسي قنقر Well, Yeah. So um I mean but this this is one of those situations where, you know, for people who may be coming to this episode

um you know, cold and going, Why are these guys describing this routine and hating on it when they're supposed to be kind of promoting silver era routines? It's because we've done all of the good ones. Yeah. Hey, I'll get some good ones up my sleep. It just so happens to be people we've talked about in the past and you'd be like, Oh my god, here we go again. Six planned for Reg Park or Exactly. Yeah.

We've we've covered some really, really good silver area routines. We're kind of like now starting to cover stuff that's uh you know, a little bit fringe compared to the stuff that we've done before. Yes, there's some really, really big issues with this particular programme. But Fundamentally it's still, as you said, three times a week, we're still looking at, you know, kind of uh three exercises sorry, three sets, uh, you know, as the kind of uh top end volume. Uh moderately heavy rep.

There's a lot of stuff, you know, full body, it's a lot of stuff that is fundamental about this routine that we've covered before. We're just kind of arguing about exercise selection. I'm being really fussy about back exercises because it's my thing. So ultimately, you know For me, it's horrid. It really is. Like single art dumbbell, you know, kind of uh transverse plane row. It's like you couldn't have made up a routine that I would hate more. As far as the back is concerned anyway.

As far as exercise selection goes. Exercise selection goes for the back, yes. I mean Everything that he's doing is gonna get well developed because it's good frequency, it's good volume, and he's not changing the exercises. So it's a hell of a lot better than most of what we've seen.

Absolutely, absolutely. And that's the point, isn't it? It's like even when these guys are making exercise selection errors, they're still getting, you know, pretty much everything else right. And that's the point. That's the whole point of this, you know, kind of uh focus on these on this era of time because they they knew how to do things you know, structurally correctly.

And you know what? If you do that, if you're getting everything else right and you've stuffed up excise selection, the fact that you're getting everything else right means soon enough you're going to see what it's about. I'll pick it up. Yeah. Because everything is getting developed that you're training at the moment.

You'll kinda look in the mirror and go, Why is that not working? Everything else is fine and then you'll fix it. Yeah. Uh to be fair, you know, I've had uh that argument has been made to me a number of times by people over the years. It's like Why should I kind of listen to you about exercise selection when I can just do this, you know, routine and then I'll see what I'm missing and then I'll fix it by adding the right exercises in. I'm like, yeah, if the rest of your routine is good and you've

Exactly. As long as the bones are good. Yeah. Then yeah, you will notice that. But if you're doing a whole bunch of silly stuff in your routine and you're kind of making a lot of other mistakes, then no, you won't notice that. Because nothing's gonna work.

So and you know, this is not us throwing shade on people who are joining the gym next week. I see a lot of that happening online. There's no need to do that, no need to spread hate for people who are joining the gym for the first time in January. Obviously that's something we want to encourage, but there are a lot of pitfalls and mistakes that people are likely to walk into. So we want to identify some of those mistakes now and hopefully we'll avoid some people making them.

Yeah, absolutely. So we were talking about this, um well sort of going through a list of possible things um before we jumped on the podcast and I've got a list here that I've written down. There isn't or when we were talking about it you started analysing out categories, uh which I've kind of resisted a little bit because I think some of them blur the edges of those categories and so it starts to I start to lose

uh the in the the entirety of of of what I want to kind of get into the into the episode. But um basically uh This was inspired by the fact that I've already started to see um personal trainers in the gyms that I go to starting to bring in new clients around this time. I think they're getting ahead of the the January rush.

uh and they're starting to do routines with those new clients and I'm looking at them and I'm kind of taking notes of the things that they're doing that I think are less effective than, you know, what we'll probably talk about next week, which will be a you know a really good approach. And you know, part of that is probably because the client is expecting a certain type of thing.

Uh and part of it is possibly because those, you know, personal trainers maybe are getting information from other sources. I don't know. It doesn't really matter. The thing is that there are these uh things that I'm seeing that I think are probably not very uh effective.

And for me at the moment still, and that could this could just be regional. It doesn't have to be that everyone in the world is experiencing the same trend, but I'm seeing a uh this persistent tendency for um people to program unstable exercises. And stability is a continuum. So this is like, you know, from one end of the spectrum to the other. So like if you imagine

maybe kind of ten, twenty years ago there was a fad and people were taking instability to the m absolute maximum level. They were kind of doing exercises balancing on, you know, kind of wobble boards and sort of

bosu balls and stability balls and you know, Swiss balls and you know, any other unstable structure you can think of, people were doing exercises on those things and it was requiring tiny amounts of muscle uh sorry, tiny amounts of weight. Um enormous amounts of focus and concentration on balancing rather than actually producing effort towards motor unit accrument.

And so you end up with an exercise that is very good at teaching you how to balance and ac and simultaneously very, very bad at producing high levels of recruitment in the muscles that you're actually trying to train. Um I'm not seeing that level of instability, but I'm seeing something almost there. So I'm seeing a lot of exercises where people are using cable stations.

standing um, you know, a long way away from that cable station with no means of support other than the floor. And they're trying to do an exercise that involves them using the floor as their only point of support and then they're moving the cable in some particular direction. It might be kind of a a lap

sort of straight arm pull down, it might be something uh with the rear dough out to the side. You know, it doesn't really matter what it is. It could even be a triceps extension. It does it doesn't matter what it is. The point is that their only point to support is the floor. And they're trying to arrange their body in space to avoid themselves falling over to one side the other or forwards or backwards.

while they're doing the exercise in question. Of course what that means is they end up using a much smaller load than they would be able to if they were, you know, supporting themselves by holding on to the machine in in question. So for me, that's the thing I'm seeing most in the moment.

I think is really, really unhelpful because of course what it means is you end up spreading your activation from the brain across the entire body to try and stabilize yourself and you end up using a much lower level of recruitment in the target muscle that you're trying to train.

It's so much better to either do the exercise similarly using a point of sport or multiple points of support, or even better to just go and use a a machine that kind of gives you all of that support automatically, you know, rather than messing around with the cable.

Yeah. One encouragement uh encouragement I would make to people on this is don't be scared to perform an exercise in a slightly variant way that makes it more effective for you or more stable in this situation. And this is something that honestly I've only learnt over the last few years. You know, I would think, Oh, I have to do an exercise the way that exercise is meant to be done.

And there might be little tweaks one can make, especially if you're using a cable station where you might, for example, pull to the other end of the station so then you can you can wrap your arm around one of those columns and you can stabilize yourself like that.

Or it might be that if you're s you know, doing like a seated cable exercise, perhaps you have one leg on the floor instead of both legs on the pads. And you might find that some of these little tweaks while looking unconventional will enhance your stability significantly.

And then all you need to do is just make a mental log. Okay, this is where I perform that exercise. And when I log my weight, I'm logging in for this version of that exercise. It doesn't matter that it's slightly different how someone else is performing it. I would really encourage people to to play around and find ways they can do that. You know, I use cable sections quite a lot, but I know for me, if I were to do a single arm behind the back standing cable curl,

And I then so if I'm standing so that the cable's behind me, I'm standing, I'm doing that. Compared to I just move a little bit more forwards to the other end of the cable station and wrap my other arm around that beam and I do it like that. I'm gonna lift almost twice as much load doing it like that. Yeah. Here is an example going back to that point we raised earlier, here is an example of where the amount of weight actually is an interesting piece of information. Yes.

So yeah, absolutely. I mean but equally i you've got to kind of be aware, i have I just increased the load because I've changed the um external levers? So Uh cable stations can be really annoying in that respect'cause if you start moving your body and space around relative to the machine, you are absolutely going to change the levers. So you have to be aware that you know if an X from the

You need to look at the angle of the cable coming towards your body. Yeah, so that's how people can see what's shifting here. Is is the cable further away, closer to my body, am I gripping it further or closer away from my body? So that's that's an issue there. But equally if if nothing is changing about the actual pattern, the the movement in space

but the exercise becomes suddenly a lot easier and it's you you know, potentially because you just increase the support um availabilities, then that is absolutely gonna be an increase in recruitment of the target muscle that's done that. So Um there's a little bit of navigation to be done there. But yeah, in the context of keeping the movement pattern the same, if you suddenly discover that the exercise has, you know, apparently got easier and you've had a load more weight by some additional

tweak that you've made, then that probably is a positive one. But as I say, um it just comes back to this thing, it's like it changes in load aren't automatically good or bad. It's like they just are. They're information, but you've got to kind of go down a level to figure out what is going on. Yes, exactly. A classic example here would be using a cuff instead of a handle for a cable latter raise and then suddenly you're lifting more load with the cuff. Yeah. Like you changed the lever link.

Yeah. Yeah, so it's not always easy to just look at the load and think that that's telling you something. It's information, but you've kind of got to take a big kind of Sherlock Holmes sized leap to try and figure out what it is that's actually created that effect. Yeah, absolutely. It's it's not simple information at all.

Now the final point I want to make on on how one can tweak this scenario to work better for them is i if it were me, in these cable station scenarios, I would be using a lot more single limb work. So generally and usually that's just to limit the load, right? But if you're using a heavier load, like you've identified it's pulling you all over the place, uh you're having to like counter that load from pulling you up off the floor, whatever it might be.

It's you know, imagine triceps if you're doing like a triceps press down with a cable and you're using bilateral, I mean a lot of people if you're even remotely strong, you're either gonna have to do thirty repetitions or it's going to be pulling you up every single repetition. So suddenly if you go to unilateral, then you know, you're using almost half the load and it's gonna be a lot more stable.

Totally. And on that point obviously there's a there's a um uh another positive and another negative. Uh the other positive is you've now got a free limb that you can use to stabilize yourself. Thank you. Which is a huge positive. A negative is that if you are actually strong then you will rotate. Uh yeah. So this is an issue that uh those of us who kinda done a lot of one arm pull up uh type work would have discovered that you instantly just rotate into the direction that you're pulling.

So um there's kind of a positive and a negative there. But as I say, if you've got the other arm to stabilise yourself then that shouldn't happen anyway. Um so I think on balance I I I would definitely go down the route of single arm stuff in that scenario. Um, but you know, primarily because I can then use the other arm as support. I think that's that's why I would do that. Yeah. Yeah.

Anything else to be said on stability or does that about cover it? I mean it's a fairly basic concept. Don't do unstable exercises for the sake of being unstable. Aga again, it's like um, you know, kind of we were joking before we got on the podcast today and I was like, How many times can I just say this?

You know, you've got a whole gym full of this wonderful equipment that's been specifically designed to give you more stability. Please, please go and use it. It's like you know, it's like don't have to kind of create I think it's this This is something I think we'll dwell on next week to a certain extent, because there's this perception that if an exercise looks kind of complicated and requires this difficulty in the balance re you know, uh

sort of realm, if you like, that suddenly it's doing something really interesting and technical and exciting and therefore it's more attractive and it's, you know, kind of uh more interesting for the client. I think that's something we'll probably have to kind of dwell on next week. But ultimately

If we can avoid doing that, I think it's better because those those balance requirements are going in the opposite direction from what we want to do, which is create, you know, a high level of motor recruitment in the target muscle. And if someone's listening to this and they're thinking, but hang on, I wanna work stabilizers, I wanna work my balance, wanna work whatever it is you wanna work.

Okay, do one of those exercises at the end or at the start of your workout. Don't do it as a hypertrophy exercise. Do not try to achieve both things with that one exercise. To which I would also add that balance is extremely specific to unless you're a kid, I mean No without neither. They learn balance and it's a separate issue. But um like uh sort of in the context of adults going to the gym, which is our remit.

Um, balance is very specific to the exercise that you're training. You can't learn to balance in one exercise and expect that that's gonna transfer. It's just the main. Balance in some other scenario. You're not gonna be, you know, suddenly some kind of, you know, superhero being able to balance on all kinds of weird things.

It's it's very specific. So if you if you've got a particular skill, calisthenics skill that you're learning, then yeah, tr practice that either separately or at the beginning of the work. Exactly. You get better at it, that's not the same thing as, you know, doing a m making a strength training exercise have a bigger balance requirement and expecting that to transfer something'cause it's not going to. Yeah.

Okay, what is our next listed mistake? I I've put these in order of of like uh things that offend me so I was literally gonna say, did you just put an auto how much they annoy you when you say that? This is in order of how much they offend me, yeah. So this this this second one is probably a contender for the first position. I just kind of at the moment I'm not seeing it quite so much.

I'm seeing the instability stuff more. Um, but absolutely this is this is a primary offender and it's the cardiovascular sensations um kind of thing. So essentially what I'm seeing is that when personal trainers are trying to um you know, uh deliver value to their clients, uh they tend to just try and make them get out of breath. Um and that's the opposite of what we want to do. So

you know, I I see them using a lot of uh high repetition work, a lot of uh short rest periods and generally um, you know, kind of large muscle mass involved in the exercise selection. So

you know, sort of large, uh kind of squat and deadlift type variations, um, you know, big sort of uh lateral pull down rows, which, you know, are great. I mean I do them all the time, but they're kind of building routines around full body kind of um multi joint exercises um which again there's nothing wrong with that but when you combine it with short rests and and and um you know high repetitions you're basically just getting people out of breath

and they're gonna find that therefore they get nowhere near to high levels of motivate accrument in the exercise that they they're doing. And again, combine that with the previous one where the exercises are generally unstable and you're a million miles away from high levels of motivatment. it. So it kind of really just becomes like you would uh say weighted cardio. And it blows into the first point anyway in that hey if you're trying to achieve a

goal with this. Like if you're thinking, Oh, well I'm doing this to kill two birds with one stone and getting some cardiovascular work in by doing this as well, okay, then do the cardiovascular work but make it more effective and do it actually separately and either, you know, do it at the end of the workout or on a separate day. I think you're kinda mildly bruising two birds with one stone. This is only killing going on. Yeah. Yes. Yes, precisely.

And yeah, to the extent that you're gonna do one of them, a as soon as you lean into into doing one of them adequately, the other one is going to be done very poorly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, there's th th there's not really a a a a zone where you can get both uh the best of both worlds. In in you can't even really get, as you just said,

anything approximating a satisfactory result on either of the two worlds simultaneously. It's really you kind of just go as far as you can in one direction and then as far as you can in the opposite direction. And really, you know For me, if people are doing cardiac fat loss, I would just bring the intensity right the way down to something that's very, very, very kind of um you know, sort of low uh

Uh something that's much more agreeable. So that's not kind of going into this sensation uh disagreeable sensation territory. You know. So I think uh really tr you know, so treadmill walking. Um, you know, for me I prefer the cross trainer. I think the impact phase is not great about treadmills. So, you know, cross trainer.

Especially if you've got the arms working at the same time, you can really bring down the activation of each muscle group that's working, keeping the cardiovascular system ticking over nicely. And you can do that and just kind of or go outside and go for a walk. Whereas um You know, in in the gym we kinda want to be trying to uh minimize disagreeable sensations that don't come from the motivated recruitment signal.

Wanna make sure we get as high recruitment as possible. So that would be for me the thing that I see uh, you know, as the second but again, possibly time for first. With the cardiovascular stuff, I mean, don't underestimate, you know, the ability or the benefit of, like you said, going for a walk or doing some kind of, you know, sport or some outdoor activity.

I mean, I love using that stuff with clients'cause it a lot of it is learning a skill. Like you you're actually getting additional bank for bank beyond just the cardiovascular benefit. Um, what do you think of something I use a little bit with clients who especially clients who want to be in the gym, you know those clients who are like, Yeah, I want I want six days a week. Sometimes I'll give those clients a modified strongman on two of those days.

where they feel like they're doing weights but we're not using eccentric parts of that lift and we're using it more for conditioning, obviously knowing we're not going to be getting much or any hypertrophy benefit out of that. Do you have any feelings around strongman type exercises? So I think the they definitely do kind of fall into uh a couple of categories there. So there's the category that is definitively, you know, concentric only, um, you know, like sled pushers

Yeah. Uh I mean I think that's really interesting'cause you definitely are going in the territory of creating a a really nice cardiovascular challenge, which, you know, is something that you may wish to obtain. Um, but you know, you're not creating a lot of eccentric, uh induced muscle damage, which is you know, important when you're talking about cardio. So

Um and if if that is fun and enjoyable and you can get a couple of people doing an you know kind of competitive environment and you know and and it's meeting uh another set of goals, fantastic. I think there's the other kind of category which I would look at with strongmen which is Stuff that, you know, you don't really want to be doing unless you're going to compete in strongman.

Yes. I think there's there's a couple of bits and pieces in there that I think are interesting for maybe the rappling sports, but mostly there's a bunch of stuff in there that I think it's like, you know, there's there's a relatively high uh risk of injury in in some of that stuff. And there's a bunch of eccentric loading. So I'm straight away I'm just like, what am I even talking about this for? Unless the guy's gonna be

uh uh competing in strongman. I'm just not interested in programming any of that stuff. But so I think for me it really does fall into two categories. There's some really interesting concentric only stuff. This is great for conditioning, if that's a goal. Uh and there's some stuff that I would really just kinda be like, no, this is uniquely for, you know, athletes competing in a specific sport. Yep. Yeah, that checks out.

So someone to avoid the cardiovascular demand of the exercise they're doing for hypertrophy benefit, ultimately that's gonna come mostly down to rest periods. Actually that's a point I wanted to make on that topic. And rest periods, yeah.

Now, what if someone thinks, Oh, hang on, I've only got half an hour though, so therefore I need to do short rest periods, I need to do forty second dress periods so I can do my two to three sets of each exercise and get my full body session down'cause you keep telling me full body's the only way to go. And that means that I'm gonna be having my heart ratings are gonna be coming down the whole workout. What do they do?

So straight away in that pen portrait that you just sketched for me, the error that that person is making is assuming that they need to volume max instead of frequency max. Yeah. So they're going, I need three sets, my No you don't. Yeah. To do one set. You do quality. And

Better to do the three times a week than to get the three sets in the one workout. So uh yeah. So straight away I'd be like, No, you need to carve your workout down to a smaller amount of stuff or you need to do some very clever strategic stuff around clusters and, you know, reps in reserve and Which we might talk about next week, perhaps.

do next week. But uh ultimately it's like straight away you look at the pen portrait and what assumptions are being made here that are not correct. And for me, straight away the volume one is the one that's not correct. Cause in that scenario what's interesting is okay, you're getting more volume of work done, but each one of those sets is less effective than if you just did single set.

And let me just very briefly kind of um go off on a rabbit hole here, which has been a a topic that other people have been making um comments about recently correctly, which is that there is a difference Between Um the rate of progress and how far you can go. Um, so r rate of progress obviously is what it sounds like. It's like how fast are you moving forward in terms of growing muscle mass? But how far you can go is a separate question.

Um If you're constantly doing exercises every time you go in the gym with a high level of effort perception related to cardiovascular sensations, you are basically lowering your m your final kind of Yeah. Yeah, you're stopping yourself getting to a, you know, maximum level of muscle mass because you are never, ever, ever, ever going to recruit the highest motor units in the muscles that you're training. You just can't do that.

So ultimately I think that's a really important point, which is that if you set up your routine to do that routinely, as in all the time, you're never going to reach the same level of development as somebody who, you know, kind of maybe takes a slower route um does smaller amounts of volume each workout, but gives themselves the rest period in order to achieve higher recruitment in each uh set that they do. Yeah.

Yeah, that's an important distinction. So you you may actually progress more qu like quicker if you're doing the multi sets, but only for a very limited amount of time. Potentially, yeah. I mean it it's hard to say, but yeah, they they may find that they especially with muscle swelling being a factor, but at the end of the day they might see slightly faster periods to begin with, but it will yeah, ultimately not go as far.

That was another uh thing I was inspired to do this this past week post talking about Mensa was I went back to single sets this week. Just'cause I've been too busy. It was simply uh I don't have time to get this stuff done. I'm doing one set per exercise. It was amazing. It was done in like fifteen, twenty minutes. But each one of those sets, I'll tell you what, I was adding one into repetition. Yeah.

Every single time without fail. Every single time without fail. Like Um you know and you really kind of start to go if I'm adding stimulating reps up and trying to calculate the stimulating rep number for each I mean, again, there's a diminishing returns, but the point is that Even if you just go off stimulating reps and you start calculating the number of stimulating reps, you realise that in three set protocols, you first set maybe around three or four rather than five.

Ha ha And then you're kind of like, Well and how much am I losing due to fatigue? And you kind of add up your what you thought was fifteen stimulating reps is probably close to eleven or twelve. And then you do that so maybe now you can see why three sets is more like, you know, double the hypertrophy of two sets or even less, but sorry, double the hypertrophy of one set or even less. Yes.

Yeah. And a simple hack is just do two different exercises, one set of each for the same muscle. If you're like, you know what, I really want to volumize it, okay, go for goal, but still do single sets and see how well you perform.

better to use more exercises rather than um more sets of the same exercise. I mean that is absolutely true. Uh and just kind of flowing into my the third item on my list with that observation, which is um, you know, very similar, which is that What I see a lot um of the personal trainers doing in the gyms that I go to is uh varying the exercises either over the week or just kind of changing them completely. Making it up each session.

Uh uh so either either it's like they're they're kind of switching exercises from session to session, which means that you're not training the same exact muscle fibers, or they're just completely changing them and just sort of doing like You know, completely new stuff. And technically it hits the muscle. And that's probably the one of the statements that's done the worst damage to the fitness industry in in in in kind of like modern era.

You know, the idea that you can you know, train a muscle. It's like that statement is wrong. You cannot train a muscle. We're training muscle fibers or if you want to be really specific and technical motor units. You know, there's no way that you can train a muscle. That's not a thing. You know. Um It's just not not something that's possible to do. So ultimately, um

changing exercises too frequently, whether it's just across the week or changing exercise completely, whether you just kind of as you say, making it up as you go along, doing one exercise and then coming back the next week, Oh, we're doing a different exercise for the same muscle group. Mm. That's a horrible approximation of what's happening.

There's there's basically no time you should be changing exercise except for within the session. Like we've just said, more exercises for single sets as opposed to multi sets on a single exercise.

But aside from that, like if you're changing across sessions in the week, obviously you're missing out. Yeah. If you're changing across weeks, you're missing out. Even if you're changing across phases, you're still missing out. Unless you need to change that exercise'cause You've plateaued for ages, it's hurting, you're going backwards, whatever that necessity is.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting you made the observation when we were talking about this podcast, you made the observation to me that we had this kind of historical phase where um periodization was constructed mainly of people changing rep ranges. And then as people realise that Ret Range, you know, kind of doesn't really do anything, start They wanted to keep the periodisation and they got rid of it.

Yeah, you you and I could probably have a kind of a whole conversation about the philosophical nature of human kind of thought processes that require them to keep things that don't work. You know, Hegelian dialectics and all that kind of stuff. But you know, for the purposes of this podcast, yeah, people kinda wanna keep uh trappings or, you know, elements of previous kind of practices um and just kind of modify them to lose some of the less kind of uh desirable bits and pieces.

So we kind of kept the periodization idea and left behind the reparines changes and we kind of now people want to change exercises. It's like Let's kind of get rid of that as well. Yeah. Let's kind of just get rid of all of that silly idea and just kind of stick with stuff and do it repeatedly until it actually produces an effect rather than kind of changing it all the time and not expecting it.

I made the point online a while ago that in fact if I were to periodise I would much prefer periodized rep ranges with the knowledge that it's not doing anything. But if you want it for novelty, go for gold because you're not losing anything unless you're doing something stupid. Yeah, two four people.

How to fool people into thinking that they're getting that that entertainment value. Um but yeah, so no, the idea of periodizing exercises is definitely not not a cool idea. I mean, okay, fine. If like I've said before, I really like full body A B

Mm. You know, I feel like um it's a really nice compromise in many ways. If you don't want to do a billion exercises in a single session, you can kind of split it across two workouts and do three workouts. So we I really, really like that compromise. Um but

That's as far as I would go because that's the kind of the limit that you've got in terms of atrophy happening within the training week. Yeah. Um other than that, I don't think we should be changing exercises between sessions if we want maximum kind of uh efficacy of the programs that we're writing. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's fairly simple. I think there's a lot more we're gonna say to that, is there?

Not really. But then it ties it ties into the fourth item on my list, which is the I don't see anybody tracking numbers and progressive overload. You know, it's like I go in the gym, I've got my notes app and straight away I'm like, What did I do last time? What was the number? Okay, here it is. That's what I did last time, this is what I'm gonna try and beat this time.

And that's it. That's that simple. Um, you know, and I don't see anybody doing that. I mean there's occasionally you can see some people kind of doing the same thing, but very, very rarely. Uh it's not a theme. And I think If we want to make pr sure programmes are working, we've got to be tracking that progressive overload over time.

Why does it matter?'Cause there's there's multiple moving parts to this and it's and and in fact the reason people think it matters is not one of their things as to why it matters, right? People assume okay Oh wow. So there's this there's this whole subculture. There's this whole subculture of people who think that progressive overload is what drives hypertrophy. I mean on a Honestly, like like is this controlling me? This is amazing. I mean seriously?

I mean, unbelievable. So the idea that you can um kind of the idea that the exercise or the machine or the weight is somehow acting on you rather than the other way around. It's like that that's that's not what's happening here. You know, it's it's like You can't I and I think maybe the I've said this before, but the terminology is unhelpful because it sounds overload sounds Although it doesn't make sense. Yeah.

No, it doesn't. We're doing something to the muscle, no. The muscle is doing everything. I mean it's it's just progressive loading, isn't it? Like essentially It's progressive o yeah, progressive loading, not overloading, because overload is an excess of something and you can't have an excess of something because you can only have what the muscle is capable of doing.

So it's like the progressive overload is the sign that the muscle has got stronger. That's it. Now, as you kind of hinted at a moment ago, there are a number of other reasons why you might have got stronger. You know. Now some of them are actually helpful for hypertrophy. So if you like if you're relatively uh kind of um sort of new to the exercise, you might be improving coordination, which is not really a you know big deal, but um it will provide a large increase.

Well that ties back into the exercise selection piece because you change exercises all the time and all you're doing is coordination.

But you also do need to get through that phase so that you can start to get to the increasing emotions recruitment phase. Because if your brain is focusing on a coordination and exercise, it's not really hitting max recruitment. Therefore you won't be increasing recruitment in the muscle. So you've kind of even though Even the coordination uh improvements in coordination induced improvements in strength are not Overtly helpful. They are necessary to get Really?

Yeah. So like if somebody is improving strength rapidly in a in a and it's a good exercise, you know, it's not just silly kind of kneeling on the floor waving the table in the air exercise, as I would say. Yeah, i i it's a good still a good thing. It's like, yeah, fantastic, let's keep moving forward. And then yeah, you'll start to see the strength gains slowed out even better. That's like that's the point where we're now starting to see recruitment gains and starting to get some really nice

kind of high levels of motion equipment that are going to produce and good hypertrophy. So even when it's a coordination improvement uh that is driving the strength gun, I'm still not unhappy. I'm just kind of like I'm just cognizant of that is what it is. You know something I learned from Charles and and people who follow Charles and Stefan Guzolt was in people who are less experienced at these more complex lifts, say using a multi joint exercise, like let's say a squat.

So what they would teach is you would actually use that squat in later series in these less advanced clients. So you'd say you're doing whatever the split is and you might have a a leg extension as well. Well you would start with a leg extension.

And then you would do this squat. And then you have an advanced client and they would often swap it and we could argue about whether you should or should not swap it. But I like that idea of okay, if I've got a new lift which I know has a coordination demand I'm not thinking of that really as a hypertrophy exercise initially. I'm just gonna put it somewhere where it's not gonna mess anything else up in the program, let them get coordinated it, and then we'll use it later for hypertrophy.

Uh yeah, I mean that's that's um that's a strategy, isn't it? I mean that's uh I mean I probably wouldn't even programme the exercise in the first place. But if you want if you've got a client you know you want to get them squatting

I mean, I'm not gonna get them like we're not getting very far with quad development initially if they're you know, say say we wanna learn a front squad or something like that. You know, a lot of people still wanna learn some of these more complex exercises and they're just not gonna do a whole lot initially.

Yeah, I mean I think we're starting to move into uh athletic domains there where you're saying, you know, you wanna have a you wanna develop a skill. Uh I mean that's just a whole kind of separate uh kind of uh category of of conversation. But um Yeah, absolutely. C as as as a strategy, if if somebody has multiple goals and bodybuilding is one goal and learning how to do an exercise is another goal, then yeah, you kinda treat them as separate things, don't you? I mean.

Um and we kind of put them in different places in the workout and we try and avoid, you know, interference between the two things. Uh and ultimately it really depends on the emphasis that the client wants to place on each of those things. How we strategize that. But yeah, I mean, um from a bodybuilding point of view, I'm just not gonna program that stuff. It's like Yeah.

Doesn't make any sense to me. Um something else that I've seen uh that uh is Probably not and I'm now I'm now getting to the point on my list where you

New point. This is a new point on your list. Obviously I I I want to quickly play devil's advocate. So If one were not logging their weight, but they're doing the other stuff we've mentioned. So they're repeating the exercises, they're doing it frequently enough and you know, they might come in and and maybe they do the same load as last time, or they do it they do a couple of kilos less or whatever, right?

Well, if you're saying, hey, there's about five stimulating repetitions that are set to failure, give or take, and and let's say they're, you know, not logging in the load and so they've gone a little bit lighter than they could have. They're still getting stimulating repetition. So why does it actually matter? Like you've identified, it's not the fact that progressive overload is causing the adaption. So why does it matter if they log or if they don't log?

So what tends to happen as we progress over time and get stronger is that the number of adaptions that are available to us that increase strength get smaller. and their contribution to strength gains also gets smaller. So for example, like we were just describing, when you first go and start a new exercise, you've got these gigantic improvements in coordination.

And so you experience these huge improvements in strength and every time you go back to the gym, like you're bumping the weight up and everything just feels, you know, kind of very easy and it's just this wonderful experience. And then that starts to go away and it starts to get trickier.

Now the problem is that our brains get conditioned to think that that initial phase is kinda how it's supposed to be forever. That's why you get these people who start lifting for the first time and then they their bench press goes, you know, kind of Up by sort of 10, 20 kilos over the space of a couple of months, and they start imagining that they're going to be benching the world record in two years' time. Everybody goes through that phase.

So, um the problem with that though is that as the contributions of these adoptions shrinks, um, people start to um not push to increase the weight quite so much. They start to uh expect that it's just gonna be easier. And actually, when you get to the point where you're plateauing on pretty much all of your adaptations apart from hypertrophy, the amount you actually have to work to get that extra rep is quite a lot.

And naturally people just tend not to do that. They just tend to kind of just stick where they are. So what you tend to find is that people who aren't logging will just end up getting they'll go through these plateau phase so they'll go through these early phases where they're getting these gigantic strength gains. And they've just been conditioned to expect that's how it should be forever and they just just stop improving.

And so ultimately we just get trapped at a particular uh kind of rep uh load combination and without the the logbook in front of you telling you that that's what you're doing, people just kind of just sit there and and I think that's what we see in gyms a lot. We see people going through the coordination phase, getting their strength up a in a notch, and then just stopping there because they expect that the rest of the journey should be the same.

So ultimately they must be training at a certain repetitions away from failure. Like to to stop seeing any adaptions occur or almost any. Yeah, it's basically that I mean if you want to really get granular, what happens is that we get to a certain uh rep load combination. And then what's gonna happen is you g you do get a little bit of an adaption with that replic combination. Let's say you're either at failure or one rip and reserve or something like that.

And you you achieve a little bit of hypertrophy, but don't you achieve any other adaptions that are helping you increase strength because at this point you've kind of got pretty much all of that. And technically now you could do an extra

uh rep, but you don't feel like you can because it's just still that kind of zone where you're expecting a an easier feeling to be accompanying you as you get stronger, but you haven't got any of that other stuff going on at the background as well. You literally just got high virtual

So you start to get a little bit further away from failure. And then you get a little bit further away. And then you get a little bit further away. And now you're kind of in that zone where you're kind of always in that sort of three or four reps in reserve. Combine that with the idea of what we've been talking about, which where you're in a multi set situation, you probably already were, you know, kind of two reps away from the stick. Yes.

number anyway, you're probably just kind of literally now running on fumes where you're just putting enough in the tank every single time you go to the gym to k tick you over to the next workout and you're never actually going to make any long term progressions. So I think It's it I'm describing a scenario where people have have used, you know, kind of have have gone on the journey, they've done

you know, kind of three to six months worth of training. They've got all the coordination stuff, they've got a lot of the motivating agreement stuff, all of the other bits and pieces. And now they're just hovering around that zone where the only thing that can really move them forward is hypertrophy. They ex

they've been conditioned by the previous six months to expect the feeling of of getting stronger to be a lot easier than it currently is and they therefore start to just drift back into the zone where they're

you know, multiple reps in reserve away from uh failure, which already is probably only three stimulating reps, as we were talking about earlier in the context of many exercises uh with multiple set protocols. Cause w the reason I'm pushing on this is'cause I think that that's probably the big part of what's happening here is essentially this motivation aspect.

'Cause as we've just said, okay, if you do a single set, you're probably going to get one, two, at least repetitions more than what you would normally So maybe we're arguing, hey, there might be and you know we we did our podcast a few weeks ago where we talked about they were doing three to five repetitions and saw similar games, right? So maybe we're now saying there could be three or four stimulated repetitions for some people in a set, yeah. And so if In multi set protocols.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so now if if there's say only three stim maximally simulated repetitions and they've allowed themselves to drift No, two repetitions shy of failure. Well we're getting like you've identified enough to hold over those gains, but not really enough to see anything new occur. So when you have the logbook

It keeps you honest. It keeps realizing, okay, this is my target. This is motivating me. It's giving me a target, a goal. I think that that's where most of the value is.

Well yeah, absolutely. I mean it's it's it's pushing people to be honest with themselves about where they currently are and the fact that if they don't and I think this is an important point, which is that if if we don't s sort of add reps onto our current Uh kind of rep load combination, we aren't going to it that that that's telling us we're not adding Yeah.

I just to be clear, people are still really confused about this because they go, Oh, every time I raise this issue they're like, Oh well no, strength and size are not the same thing. No, they're not the same thing. That's correct. But But You you cannot add muscle tissue but not get stronger. Okay? So there's no scenario in which you can be doing the same rep load combination now and in six months' time and have added muscle mass in that period of time. It is not possible.

if you've if you've increased but equally you could have got stronger and not added muscle mass. So the other way around is fine. I mean that's the bit that people can seem to like their brains seem to explode when I when I when I kind of raise this point. every single person, no matter how smart they are, and how well read they are and how

tightly constructed their arguments are. Every single person is using reverse causality on this argument to make their point. Every person is doing that. They're all going, look, I can get stronger without getting bigger. Therefore you're wrong. I'm like, no.

I'm accepting your argument that way round. I'm not accepting your argument the other way round. You can't add muscle mass and not get stronger. That's not possible. I have a feeling I'm gonna see videos in TikTok this week being like, Look how stupid Chris is. Hang on, this is probably where it's gonna go. I think that are gonna say you can get bigger without getting stronger, it's called sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.

So psychoplasmic hypertrophy is not an adaption, it's a a phase that muscle fibers go through as they're progressing from one state to another. That's that's that and that's actually not that controversial. I mean, you'll find most hyperture researchers, you know, kind of more or less in that in that zone, I think. Um so yeah, I mean that's

That's only really slightly more long if you want to kind of look at time periods. Like muscle swelling is like a maybe a week long phenomenon at most. Psychoplasmic hypertrophy is maybe a couple of weeks phenomenon before you phase back out of it. Interestingly, if you look at um the cross sectional studies that measure the difference in myfibrillar density between uh'cause ultimately socoplasmic hypertrophy is basically just saying myfibrillar density is going down. That's all it's saying.

So um if you kind of look at uh uh cross sectional studies, what you'll find is that the myfibular density of people who've been training for a longer period of time, say four years, is higher than the people who've been only training for a few months. So um

it does look like over time we gradually move towards a slightly more dense arrangement of myofibrils, which is the opposite of um psychoplasma hypertery. So um In the context of what we're describing here, which is, you know, people who've been training six months to a year or two years or whatever.

Um and we're describing how progressive overload keeps us adding more muscle mass, psychoplasmic hypertrophy is just not even on the table as a thing. It's not a conversation that we c it's like it's just not relevant. It's a thing that happens to people, you know, in in in contexts that are much shorter in duration and probably less well trained. Cool. Okay. Well hopefully if you get stitched they add that part of the conversation in as well.

Uh I we could have an entire conversation about why I don't care. I mean ultim ultimately, um You know, ninety nine point nine percent of social media that discusses the issues that I'm talking about is doing so in order to accrue social

um credibility and power. They're not doing it because they're trying to you know, educate. They're not doing it because they're interested in finding an answer. And so they're not having a conversation with me. And people get like they they they get upset that I don't want to talk to them. I'm like, I don't want to talk to you because you're not doing the same thing as me.

I'm trying to figure out how this stuff works. Um you're trying to accrue social power. That's just not the same thing. It's like you know, and I'm not gonna play your game because I'm not here to to do that. So anyway, there you go. What's next on your list?

My next thing on my list is actually something that you pointed out when we were having this conversation, because this is actually now entering the zone of things that are not high on my list of things that I see being problematic. And the reason And and again, this is something we talked about. Uh the reason I'm not saying this is on my list of something that's problematic is because it actually gets negated by another error earlier on my list.

So because you're seeing more of that first error, you're seeing less of this one. This error. Yeah. So this error is where people do um exercise or training variable combinations that are very muscle damaging. So essentially um maybe they're doing um a lot of uh focus on eccentrics, maybe they're

Uh, they're doing a lot of uh intensification uh type stuff where they train to failure and then do drop sets or uh, you know, lengthened partials or whatever. Essentially uh or, you know, they're doing tons and tons of um, you know, sets to failure, high volume. This is really being negated by the cardiovascular sensations error.

Yep. Because if you have high level of cardiovascular sensation in the actual exercise you're doing, you can't really get into this territory where you're hitting high levels of motif accrument. um um with uh you know sort of high volumes and therefore produce a lot of muscle damaging effects. So it that's why this isn't really on my list, but it absolutely could be on my list if somebody was approaching things in a different way. I just I just I'm not seeing it right now.

It's very interesting how one mistake can actually protect you from another mistake. You know, it's something we've touched on a little bit with some of the golden era plans where there was this high, you know, density, low uh rest periods between sets.

high repetitions, high cardiovascular demand. And we look at it we're like, how are they doing so much volume? Well they're doing so much volume'cause it's not muscle damaging,'cause it's low quality volume essentially. So it's interesting that there's sometimes a protective effect of some of these errors. Um or you know, like we talked about last week, maybe they were being done

intentionally or or unconsciously or subconsciously, intentionally in in a way, um, to protect from injuries or whatever it might have been. But either way there's there's a potential upside to one of these downsides.

Now, this was a point I brought up because I see this a lot with either you have new people in the gym, uh especially like younger guys and there's sort of like a little bit of a an ego, a like, you know, alpha male kind of sort of mentality or approach going on and they try to outwork the people that they're training with and they do things like run the rack with the dumbbells and they do, you know, four hundred sets of dumbbell curls or just excessive amounts of volume.

Um, or the other sort of flip side here is you get people who've taken a couple of weeks off, a month off, whatever, in December they've been busy. And then they get back into the gym and they kinda think, Well, yeah, I kinda need to make up for all this time I lost and if they've lost some of that protective effect that they had in place from, you know, they had not trained now for a month and so repeated bad effect essentially has been lost.

And then suddenly they jump in with high volumes or the the volume they had previously been doing and that's high enough that they now cause more muscle damage initially than they would have previously been causing when they were more, um, I guess, trained. So that's something that I think people need to I know everyone wants to see results yesterday, but for the first week

maybe just kind of chill out a little bit, drop the volume a little bit, maybe keep your repertoire in reserve. Don't try to kill yourself with damaging exercise and and high volumes and just kind of, you know, ease your way back into it. Oh yeah, definitely. I mean that's always the right answer. I mean it's a marathon, not a sprint, so

So that's all I've really got to say on that one. I mean I I as I say, it's definitely an error, but I don't actually see it that much at the moment. And in fact the next on my list is also pretty much the same, which is that

Um, technically it would be an error for people to, you know, kind of use um bruce blitz or, you know, even really upper lower I'm not a fan of. But again, uh because of the cardiovascular sensations chasing, I'm tending to see a lot of personal trainers just throwing their clients through full body routines um because they're trying to make them as uh out of breath as possible and that's the easiest way of doing that.

And so I don't tend to see that uh error. I think that error is much more uh in our niche kind of bodybuilding sort of uh part of the fitness industry rather than the kind of client facing part which is, you know, ninety percent of the of the of the industry really. So um yeah, it is again, uh something we've talked about a hundred million times, but uh it's just not not something that I'm seeing when I go to the gym.

I see that less amongst personal trainers. I certainly think that PTs nowadays are using more full body or upper lower. I'd say upper lower is probably a little bit more mm popular, but either way it'll be one of these splits. Where I see this m mistake being made is by general population individuals who are not using a coach and not using a PT.

uh and either just googling a workout routine or they've got a you know, a mate who's been going to the gym and they write them a routine or whatever. And in a lot of the work I do with clients and and consultations that I do

I see this not like you'd you'd think, okay, maybe enhanced lifters are doing it. We all know that there's this carryover from what we were seeing in the golden era and okay, maybe that's a mistake that's been grandfathered in. No, no. I'm not just seeing it with that type of client. I'm seeing this with like you know, your your middle aged female client who's new to the gym, I'll do a consult with them. Hey, you know, what's your exercise routine look like? And it's very sweet.

And I'm like, Mm, Michelle, are you sure you really need an arms day? Like I I don't know that that's achieving what you think it's achieving. So I I think maybe it's not a thing over there, but over here it's it's certainly an issue. So like you said, is there much more we need to say to it? Probably not. I'm sure everyone who's listening to us has heard us say this a million times, but there's I mean, God, th like what is a bra split doing correctly?

Yeah, it's getting you in the gym. Like I I can't think of really anything else it's doing it's it it there's nothing it's doing well. There's only things that it's It's doing neutrally or poorly. Um, God, I'm trying to rack my brain for anything it's doing even remotely well and it's not. So

Yeah, not a good option for for anyone. I can't think of anyone then it's a good option for. And there's a lot of this is what we see, and again, this is a philosophical statement I suppose, but people have a tendency to do something which is nonsensical and then retrospectively of apply sense to it and be like, Well this is why. This is why I do it very split and somehow they try to justify how it makes sense. And

That was that was the refrain that we had on the Chris and Paul show for like two years. His name is Robert Paulson. There's nothing wrong. It's the fight club scene where basically they they're kind of looking at each other, trying to figure out how to overcome this kind of discrepancy between two sources two two pieces of information which are mutually contradictory.

And then they kind of like they battle their way through live on screen to produce the synthesis of this of this uh problem. And that's that's what you're describing. I mean Exactly. Exactly. Yes. And so I see people justifying why to do a pro split all the time. And it's oh like just don't do it. Just don't don't retrospectively justify your actions.

like if you use the information to construct what you're going to do, not to to to explain what you did do. Um but, you know, I hear people talking about, oh well, you know, if I'm doing a brosplet like frequency is high because, you know Muscles are being trained isometrically what I'm doing. Again, the whole with the whole muscles being trained. I mean hitting muscles, draining muscles, whatever vocabulary we use is o absolutely invalid.

you know, the only thing that happens is muscle fibres or motor units are getting recruited or activated. There's no there's no scenario in which you can kind of go, Oh, this exercise and that exercise, they both train the same muscle and like, that's not a statement that means anything. Yeah. train the muscle. It's not that's not how this works. You know? So i that is that that idea has done so much damage to to the um understanding of how this stuff works.

Yeah, I mean I guess essentially if you just start with hypertrophies muscle fibre specific and there's diminishing returns of of gains in terms of additional sets, then take those two principles and then think about it. It's a silver era routine, you will. You will and you'll realize hey this bracelet makes no sense. Yeah. And you realise that all the very split stuff is just because steroids got arrived in the nineteen sixties.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And a point I've been making online at the moment, and I'm convinced of this, obviously it's speculation, but I think a lot of what we see in the way the plants have evolved since steroids were introduced are is probably a way or are ways to manage some of the downsides of steroid use. And so then what we see is naturals who are following steroid inspired plans, but they don't have the same limitations.

And so you're following a plan that was never made for you. You're following a plan that m hopefully was designed to meet the limitations of a particular population, of which you are not. I mean you may be. If you're on a handslift, okay.

And I'm and I'm s and I'm still not really clear how that works either because um and I and and and that's me saying that I'm I'm interested in how to make this uh make sense because At the moment I can understand the risks that we talked about last week in the episode about um anabolic steroids and the di uh, you know, the the uh injury risks associated with connective tissue.

Um there's definitely something going on there that caused people to, you know, maybe or maybe caused people to move away from the silver era type routines towards something else, but it doesn't really line up perfectly with me yet. I can't quite see how volumes increased. That doesn't make sense to me. Uh I can understand my frequencies might have gone down, sure.

Um, but I still can't quite understand why vo and I can understand why intensification techniques came in and rest periods got shorter and all that kind of thing. I mean that all of that makes sense where you're trying to increase fatigue to reduce the strain on the tendon. Fine. But I still can't quite see how we ended up doing crazy workout volumes um at the same time. To me it would have made more sense for them to unless you kind of say, Well, that's the performative bit.

Yeah, I mean obviously this is a a whole you know another conversation we could have, but I think what's interesting if you look at that is There was there's obviously bodybuilders we can identify who were doing single sets or two sets and there's bodybuilders who are doing six sets, ten sets, and their frequency exercise selection, all that looks the same. So it's like okay, what's the the what's the thing here that's causing the outcome? Common. Exactly.

Sure, sure. So the r the reduced frequency fine, you know And um, you know, they try and use fatigue to minimize um, you know, kind of the the the the tendon uh sort of damage, fine. But Some people are doing high volumes, uh, some people are doing low volumes and it just doesn't seem to make any difference. Yeah. Um, fine. Okay. No, I mean I can get my head around that. Um, but ultimately, as I say, there's definitely that performative aspect where people have to keep sort of selling

the fact that they have this knowledge that tr is what's driving the, you know, kind of success rather than the steroid itself. Um I think that's that's kind of muddying the waters because that definitely exists. And you know, there's no no surprise when you look at some of these magazines at that time, you know, these people are being described as as, you know, Superman. You know, this person is a superman, they're able to do this many sets. The average man cannot do that many.

Exactly. So you know it's it's um part of the the the kind of the mythology that grows up around that that area. So you kind of Although we like to reduce stuff back down to single reasons for things, sometimes when you especially in sociological situations like this is, you kind of got to maybe accept that there's a muddier answer to to the uh kind of uh question. Um, which may be what we're stuck with. So was there anything else on your list or was that?

I have a bonus item on the list which is related to what we talked about last time, which is injury risk. So essentially I don't I don't see this Uh as being a huge deal. Uh I think uh a lot of the personal trainers, if not all the personal trainers that I see are cognizant of injury risk and I do. After that cliers, so I don't think and again with the cardiovascular stuff.

Generally speaking, that we're keeping, you know, kind of um you know, muscle damage relatively low. People out of breath all the time, they're not gonna be able to do tons and tons and tons of reps of stuff. Um but equally I think there just are a couple of observations to be made. Yes. Um firstly, if we are doing exercises that have huge uh amounts of variation possible, so like if the exercise is not a fixed bar path, if the exercise is not

kind of constrained, then there is potential for, you know, kind of movements in directions that you weren't expecting, to compensations that you weren't expecting. And that does kind of potentially lead to the possibility of an injury occurring. So that's a minor thing, but it's just something that I'm aware of.

Um similarly, if you are doing really, really high numbers of repetitions, then y you kind of are drifting especially with somebody who hasn't got um previous strength training experience. then you are drifting into territory where the tendon is going to be bouncing around quite a lot. So a light load does allow the tendon to strain and recoil. A heavier load doesn't allow it to do that. Strain and recoil is what damages the tendon, not the force that's applied through it.

I keep saying this, people just keep like, you know, sort of ignoring me and it's absolutely how tendon damage happens. So tendon damage is a strain and recoil phenomenon. Lighter loads with high repetitions are going to allow the tendon to strain and recoil many, many times. That is basically going to create sort of a damaging effect, which could lead to a problem in the future. Is that more of an issue with fast tempos? Uh I'm not sure actually.

is a really difficult one to answer. I would say um Probably. Uh yes. But again, I wouldn't want people to run around with the idea that that means that if they do their light load sets with slow tempo, they're immune to this problem because I don't think that's true. Um ultimately I wouldn't do high rep uh kind of work, especially high volume high rep work, with somebody who hasn't already got a stiff tendon.

Ultimately, just kind of as a very, very brief rabbit hole, this is what calisthenics athletes run into. when they start doing tons and tons and tons of reps of pull ups uh or whatever other skill they're trying to improve on. They're like and they' some for some reason their coach tells them they need to do high rep pull ups because they think that's good for the connective tissue, which is actually opposite, it's bad.

Um, if they instead did like heavy sort of weighted polluts in small uh volumes, they would actually not have those issues because what's happening is the tendon gets stiffer from the heavy load. and then is able to resist being lengthening lengthened in other scenarios. So for somebody who's done a bunch of heavy strength training, they then go and do some high rep work'cause they want to or they fancy a change or whatever, it doesn't really matter. They're not going to have the same issues.

'Cause the tendon's already stiff. Uh if you kind of take somebody who's never done any of that and you start throwing high rep work at them, then they're kind of I think that risk uh is increasing. Now, as I say, you can minimize that effect with the cardiovascular sensations because the

Cardiovascular sensations stop people doing as many reps as they would do if they weren't kind of fresh. But it so it does kind of start to mitigate that problem. But again, something to be aware of uh in that particular context. Um and then equally again for people who don't have sort of um strength training adaptations like costumer addition and psychomarigenesis, um, I think again potentially there is a muscle strain injury risk issue if you start

throwing them too much into a muscle damaging routine and then kind of, you know, doing that again and again and again and again. Again, not something I'm seeing people doing. I don't see that is uh on the radar right now. But potentially if you did like you were saying perhaps people who've maybe had a month or so off because of busy period of time, they then come back and they start throwing themselves into make up for lost time.

And they start doing really muscle damaging stuff and they keep doing that really muscle damaging stuff week on week on week,'cause that's ultimately what creates muscle strain injury. People don't realise. People love to do this armchair quarterback thing where they look at exactly what somebody was doing at the point where the muscle kind of strained.

And they're all kind of analyzing it and drawing lines on a graph going, Oh well, this is what they were doing and that's why it went wrong and like No, it was literally what they did for the month prior to that point that was causing the problem.'Ca m strain injury's literally just a progressive effect of um of uh Yeah. So again, not seeing that happening at the moment but uh as like as a bonus thing we can kind of uh medium.

Now from an injury perspective or standpoint s uh argument I still see being made is that the way to prevent this or at least mitigate against it is simply just do multiple warm-up sets. sets and the best warm up is simply to do the exercise that you're going to do for the working set. And so you do your three sets of ten warm up repetition sets. And then that's going to somehow magically protect you from getting injured. And that's simply not doing what people think it's doing, is it?

Oh yeah, I mean that's the Luke Skywalker meme. Everything in that sentence is wrong. I mean I mean everything in that sentence is wrong. So Yeah, basically the best as you said, the best way to mitigate muscle strain injuries, for example, is not to do answers. That's not the best way to do it. It is a it is a way of helping, but it is not gonna h well, even that's arguable actually.

Um the best way to do it is to not create the fatigue accumulation in the first place. That's in fact that's pretty much the only way to The only way you're gonna do it. Because ultimately, even if you were doing the most perfect warm up in the world every single time, if you were still accumulating um strain injury, minor strain injury from session to session by doing really muscle damaging stuff and not recovering from it, then it

All that would happen is your muscle strain injury would happen, you know, further down the line instead of earlier. That's all that would happen. You would just delay it a few weeks. Just buy yourself a little bit.

So it's not actually going to save you from so the The the ultimate thing that does cause those strain injuries is the accumulation of very, very tiny strains in t inside single muscle fibers that eventually kind of accumulate to the point where the entire kind of section of muscle uh fails.

Um If we talk about what warm ups are doing, if you do a temperature uh improvement increase in the muscle by uh either putting it in a warm bath of water or doing a rubric exercise for fifteen to twenty minutes prior to a strength training session,

then what will happen is that the muscle fibers will be better able to resist the strain injuries from occurring, whether that's on a single fibre level or across the whole muscle level, it's irrelevant. in the scenario which you are kind of putting them in. So it's like a yeah, you give them a bit of a defensive uh strategy for but again, all that will happen is it will just increase

the amount of fatigue accumulation that you need before you're going to cause a failure to occur. So all it will do is buy you a couple of weeks. Um Strength training sets aren't achieving that anyway. So if somebody does a say three or four strength training sets as a warm-up prior to their main set, that is not achieving a muscle temperature increase.

Because it's just nowhere near enough exercise to be able to do that. You need fifteen to twenty minutes of aerobic exercise or sit in a warm bath of water. Yeah. Not a couple of w especially given that most of us when we're doing warm sets we're probably not doing, you know, high reps anyway because we want to try and avoid the fatigue that is associated with those. So

Really, I don't know where this idea has come from that you can do a couple of warm up sets and that somehow reduces a muscle strain injury risk. It doesn't. That's not what it's doing. It's getting you comfortable with the weight and making sure, you know, especially at like at my age, I want to make sure that nothing is gonna break when I when I do a set because, you know, I could have aged in the last I don't know.

When I look at what happens on social media, I feel like I have aged years in this I'm like, you know. Just keep going back to this thing about uh I forget whether it's a a genuine Einstein quote or whether it's one of those just that got attributed to him where he says, um, you know, about things that are infinite. You know, and there's only two things that are infinite, um, you know, the universe and human stupidity.

I don't know what the exact quote is, but broadly speaking it's kind of you know, you just see these insane things being said about all kinds of stuff. And um but yeah, strength training sets are not creating a temperature increase. They're not doing that. If somebody has a study that shows that they do that, please um you know kind of wave it around and you know triumphantly tell me that I'm wrong, but I don't think such a study exists. And it doesn't make sense.

Studies on warm up sets are pretty weak. Yeah, there's pretty much nothing out there. Um and It's you know, if if somebody wants to go, oh well but it improves performance, I'm like fine, there's a potenti post activation potentiation effect of doing a um you know, high uh uh a a short burst of high recruitment activity prior to doing another, you know, we call it conditioning traction. prior to doing east strength training, so that's not the same thing.

Yeah. That's not preventing you from getting injured and may not be doing much from a hypertrophy standpoint either, we don't know. But it's n it's not the muscle temperature thing. That's the important bit. It's a phosphorylation and myosin regulatory light chains. It's a separate

uh kind of uh phenomenon entirely. When we're talking about the the evidence base that exists for reducing muscle strain injury, there is some really nice data showing that if you warm up a muscle temperature wise, it does reduce the risk of injuries. That's absolutely one hundred percent true. But strength training sets are not doing that.

I genuinely think this is where a lot of the confusion comes in because the studies that talk about. It's word thinkers. It's people that go, I see the word warm-up on the page and that must mean This is warm up elsewhere. Precisely. Scott Adams has done this. He's done a beautiful analysis of word thinkers, which is I mean, there's probably a very rude way of describing it, but basically he's like, you know, people who are trapped by this kind of use of words.

They think that words always mean the same thing in every single context. It's like that's not how language works, that's not how concepts work. We use words to describe concepts. You have to be aware that the map is not the territory. You've got to be aware that sometimes when we're using the words as a map

that is not perfectly describing the underlying physiolog physiological reality. You've got to go and just check that you are in fact describing the same thing and warm up set Is not the same thing as a muscle.

Yeah. You know, and so but the problem is again, somebody who's just not focused on being precise and telling, you know, things how they are, who's just focusing on accruing, you know, followers and being popular can just kind of rely on the fact that a lot of human beings are word thinkers and they just get trapped by this kind of oh, that's that word there in that context, that means the same thing as that word in this other context.

And they can rely on the fact that people don't question that and then suddenly they're, you know, kind of blowing up their social media account making a point that's completely invalid. Yeah. That's the world we live in. Social media. So there you have it. That is our list of pitfalls to avoid next week or for all time. Whenever you're in the gym, avoid these pitfalls. Um that was the new list, wasn't it? But we didn't miss anything.

My list, absolutely, yeah. That's uh all of those things, including the bonus one at the end, which I don't really think as I say to be fair to personal trainers, I don't think they do um run that risk. Um uh it's just something that is uh a little aggravating when people talk about it online. Yeah, again, personal trainers don't have the time to do some of these to make some of these mistakes. Their their mistakes are limited usually by time availability.

And the desires of their clients to be you know kind of to feel Something that they think is effective and more upsets don't feel effective either. Hello. what we'll tackle, I think, next week. I'm excited about that one. Because I think as I said before, when we were talking about this as a series of two podcasts, I think I think the way that you've written your programmes, the way you design your programmes, is definitely uh successful on that.

Up front, you've you've kind of cracked the code um in terms of delivering your clients things that they are going to enjoy at the same time and feel valuable at the same time as actually being valuable. Okay. Mm-hmm. How to manipulate manipulate the clients into seeing results. I was phrasing it in a nice way. The topic of next week.

Well, thank you everyone for joining us. Um we will see you or you'll hear us more accurately in the new year. So we do hope you'll join us again for another year and I hope or wish everyone a happy new year.