034 Voluntary activation deficit: exercise selection, muscle mass, and form

Hello, good morning, good evening, wherever you are. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Hypertrophy Past and Present. in twenty twenty six, our second episode for the year. So thank you everyone for joining us for another year. Well, hypertrophy past and present, we are talking about a golden era plan today. So we've for you guys who uh don't know that we do this, we've started contrasting plans that we saw from the silver era and then plans we saw in the golden era.

So before and after anabolics were being widely used in bodybuilding. And we're using it as a bit of a way to uh I guess uh assess some of the changes we see feed into bodybuilding and hypertrophy training. after the influence of anabolics is introduced. And we're we're speculating a little bit here. Obviously this is sort of us looking, uh you know, applying a lens, looking backwards in time and seeing and asking the question, maybe why did some of these changes occur

Um, but it's certainly been an interesting thought experiment so far. And this is the I think the third plan, maybe third or fourth plan we've looked at from the post anabolic uh era and Today, this is an interesting plan because it's actually the first Mr. Olympia winner. So, this plan we're looking at is from the 60s.

and we're gonna look at a plan that supposedly Larry Scott followed. Now Larry Scott was the first uh Olympia winner in nineteen sixty five and he won uh nineteen sixty four, he won again in nineteen sixty five. So he won the first two years and Uh obviously he would have been enhanced when he was winning these competitions. And this plan was from about that time, so maybe a little bit before he was winning the Olympia, but he was certainly winning competitions at this point in time.

And as the story goes, he was given this plan by Vince Gironda. Now, we've not talked about Vince on this show before, and at some point we will, I'm sure, cover one of Vince's plans directly, not one that he's indirectly given to someone else. Um but i Vince I don't know if I've told you this Chris, but Vince is one of the people I get asked about the most.

I get so many requests for us to cover Vince's plans. Um, Vince and and Dorian. So we will cover both of their plans at some point in the future, I assure you. So this is uh Larry Scott's plan. Again, this is just um, you know, supposedly the plan he was following. I don't know how long he was following it for, uh, but in the early sixties he was apparently following this plan. Now it was full body. And it was the same workout repeated three times per week. So again, obviously

you know, up until the golden era it is most common for people to repeat full body programs AAA uh, you know, three times per week. We did see that start to shift, uh, particularly sort of in their more kind of seventies. Uh and so this is I guess uh on that sort of cusp before we start to see some of these splits emerge.

So we have a uh I'll what I'll do actually is I'm gonna start with the exercise selection and then I'm gonna tell you how it is performed because it was performed in a relatively unique way, uh, and that will uh I guess be an interesting conversation in and of itself. So, the exercise selection. We start with bench press to neck. So a a wide bench press. I guess what some people call I think they call it a guillotine press. Is that what you call it, Chris?

Yeah, you're looking at me like you don't know. Okay, I think some people will call it a guillotine press or just a a wide grip bench. Um and then we move from that into a barbell squat. And then go into a calf raise and then behind the neck barbell press.

And then a front pull down. I'm sure we'll be happy to see we've got a a a pull down here. Now, this was called front pull down. I don't believe they mean frontal plane. I'm assuming that they mean just in in front of the neck, so probably more I guess scapular plane would be my guess here, but I'm not entirely sure.

And then we go into a lying barbell triceps extension, a preacher bench curl, biceps curl, which I don't think we've seen that before. This might be the first time we've seen this exercise listed. And then we conclude with a bent leg knee raise. So it's a relatively condensed workout in terms of exercise number of exercises. However, it's not short in terms of total number of sets.

So each exercise barred the bent leg knee raise, which is done for one single set of a hundred repetitions, each other exercise was done for six sets. and for six to eight repetitions. There was one or two exercises where the repetitions changed a little bit, calf razors went a little bit higher. But generally they were done for six sets of six to eight repetitions.

Now this bit's important and I think this is why people are so interested in Gironda's work, is they were done with short rest periods. So this workout I couldn't find exactly how long the rest periods were, but the instructions were to use the same weights For all sets. And repetitions. And if you can complete all of them, then you add load next workout. So obviously doing six sets or six to eight repetitions.

where and and doing shorter rest periods as Grunda was known for doing, I would be assuming that we those first few sets would be at least a few repetitions in reserve. So a different plan to what we've looked at so far. Chris, what are your thoughts so far on all of that? Yeah, so there's a couple of interesting things to say here. I mean, obviously, you know, nobody's going to be surprised by what I'm gonna say about exercise selection. I mean, you know, there's there's some pretty big

uh gaps in here as regards to, you know, maximising muscle growth across the whole body. But there's two interesting things that I c think we can say um that I that I don't often say.

Um, firstly, um, I think that it's interesting to see how this golden era uh kind of plan is doing something to try and uh essentially uh limit the potential damage to the tendons that might uh occur with the combination of using anabolics and um strength training simultaneously. Because that's that's the issue. When you've got uh kind of an anabolic

uh sort of state in the system as a result of ex exogenous um pharmaceuticals, what you end up with is the inability to repair the tendon properly after the damage that can be caused by strength training exercise. So if we have got this um kind of um

uh fatigue being uh used to manage that problem. Essentially they're using multiple sets and short rest periods. Essentially that means that you're doing fewer repetitions with a lighter load than you would do if you were kind of leaving, you know, long rest periods and training to failure and what have you.

Essentially uh managing the exposure of the tendon to the potential damage that could occur. Now, I think there are better ways of doing it. You know, I think we can use blood flow restriction and potentially other, you know, kind of ideas around that sort of uh uh approach. But ultimately fatigue is a very simple way of doing it if you've got no equipment and no kind of um you know, sort of uh

you know, knowledge around BFR, which obviously would have been the case back then. So that's the first thing that I think is interesting. The second thing is this um this idea of doing super high repetition set. Um so got this I I'm not actually sure what a bent legg knee raise is. Um I think you'd probably have to describe that to me.

I'm assuming what that exercise is would be lying on a uh a bench, like an inclined bench with your head uh at the top and then doing like reverse crunch. I'm assuming that that's what they mean by this. So it's it's a hip flexor exercise. Yeah.

It could be done s like with a a a pull up bar. Obviously that's how people usually do it today, hanging for like a a a dead hang and then pulling their their knees up towards They midline or a bit higher, but I'm assuming that this is done on a bench as that's what I normally see in the photos of these magazines.

In which case there are two interesting things to say about this and not just one. So um The the the the thing I was going to say was that with really high repetition sets, what a lot of people don't realise if they don't have the basic kind of physiology behind them is that once you go um to a a rep range uh higher than around about sort of um you know, if we're thinking about percentages of Walmart Max, approximately thirty percent of Walmart max.

Um, you know, and it depends on the exercise and the muscle group that you're training what that corresponds to in terms of rep range, but a hundred to one hundred and fifty is absolutely you know, kind of off the top end of that. So it's definitely lighter than thirty percent of my

Once you get past thirty percent of warrant max, you're not gonna stimulate any hypertrophy. Now the reason for that is fascinating and a lot of people, I'd say the vast majority of people who are kind of uh influencers in this space don't know about this thing. Essentially. Um in order to um accumulate metabolites inside a muscle, you need to actually create vascular occlusion. Now I'll come on to how blood flow occlusion um blood flow restriction works in this context in a minute.

But basically when we have a a muscle that is contracting and it's producing whole muscle force higher than around about thirty percent of what max Then essentially the veins get squeezed closed during a muscular contraction. So isometric or concentric contraction, you're closing the muscle it closes the veins. Now essentially that means that

You're essentially trapping the blood inside the muscle. So it starts to create that kind of muscle pump that people talk about to a degree. I mean there's a bit more involved in muscle pump, but that's the starting point.

Now, the metabolites then can't leave the muscle. They're trapped inside the muscle because the blood is what takes the metabolites out of the muscle. So If you're i like using a heavier load than thirty point thirty percent of one bit max, then you're essentially trapping the blood and the muscle, trapping the metabolites, you're going to get metabolite related fatigue mechanisms.

If on the other hand you use a lighter load than that, then even when you do a concentric or isometric contraction, you're actually squeezing the muscle, you're not closing the veins. What's gonna happen is you're just gonna squirt the blood. out of the muscle and it's going to take all the metabolites with it. So you don't get metabolite related fatigue. So there's these two is basically an inflection point that's really, really critical to understand how the fatigue mechanisms are working.

So just quickly there, I know you've defined this in the past, but when we're talking about fatigue, obviously a lot of people will hear fatigue and that'll have a negative connotation and I think all fatigue is bad. But ultimately when we're talking about That's mostly because of me. I mean, prior to me coming along, everybody thought fatigue was good and it actually stimulated hypertrophy. That managed to at least change change the conversation in that regard.

And but that's I I think the the fundamental uh m mistake people are making here is not understanding what fatigue is, right? And that's why people are Yeah. Yeah, exactly it's just an outcome, it's an observation, it's what happening underneath the surface that tells you whether it's good or bad. Yeah, exactly.

So all that's happening is fatigue is telling you that there's reduction in performance. Yeah? Correct. And so you're saying, Hey, the thing that's causing the reduction in performance here in this s in il in a a normal set of, say, twenty repetitions, is this build up of metabolites. That's okay. Mostly. Mostly, yeah. Yeah, so other fatigue mechanisms as well, sure.

Totally. But ultimately metabolites are the are the the bigger player and ultimately what that means is that we don't have much of a negative effect on um either recruitment. or single fibre tension. And as a result, the presence of the metabolites is uh is completely innocuous. It doesn't cause us any problems.

And it facilitates us slowing down the movement speed and ultimately getting to a point where we can produce high levels of recruitment at the same time as high levels of mechanical tension. So you get a high perturbation stimulus, how the stimulation So the fatigue is necessary to get to that stimulating part of the set.

If you're not going to use a five ret max or heavier, yeah, you need some of that metabolite related fatigue in order to get to the point where you can stimulate um hypertrophy. Yeah, totally true. So the problem with light loads are off the end of that thirty we tend to call them very light loads, but that's just terminology.

So if you go lighter than thirty percent of warm rate max, you're now not able to squeeze the veins closed, you can't create metabolite related fatigue. The only types of fatigue now that you are gonna generate are going to be types of fatigue that either reduce recruitment

or that reduce mechanical tension. You're either going to have calcium mulated D mechanisms in the muscle fibers, or you're going to have supraspinal or spinal CNST mechanisms in the central nervous system and they're going to produce a reduced uh level of recruitment. So essentially

once you go off that kind of uh sort of limit of rep range and you know, again, it can be any number really depending on the muscle and the exercise, but you know, kind of a roundabout sort of, you know, maybe thirty plus repetition set.

you're gonna find that you're not actually stimulating hypertrophy. And that is really interesting that we're seeing that here in the golden era, in a situation where we're expecting that people are using anabolics because ultimately we've divorced this connection between what we're doing in training and what we're getting as an output because if your anabolics are automatically creating muscle growth while you're a asleep and not even in the gym.

then ultimately, you know, you're not necessarily gonna know that an exercise isn't working properly. And that's really, really cool to see that here, just from a historical perspective, really cool to see that here, you know, where we've kind of lost the ability to know that what we're doing is working. When I look at this plan, one thing I find interesting is this is kind of

kind of the first iteration we see moving away from the traditional way the silver aerial plans were done. And so we've still got most of it there. We've still got the full body. We've still got the AAA. We've still got a similar exercise selection. We've got in some way similar repetitions. Yes, we've got this one exercise which has been done for over a hundred repetitions, but everything else is six to eight um or thereabouts.

So looking at it it's like, oh this is this is most of what we expect to see, but then we start to see a couple of things introduce themselves and like you said, you know, the the higher set number, the shorter rest periods. Is that potentially to do with injury prevention? Possibly. We don't know. Um but it's just interesting to see how things are starting to shift and this is only

I mean, what are we talking? Maybe five years. It's within the decade of anabolics being used and so within only a few years we're starting to see some of these shifts start to occur. But equally, as you say, it's not a horrible programme. I mean, I really like this wide grip bench combined with um wide grip overhead press. I mean that's a if you're looking for two pressing variations that are gonna give you some really good coverage

across the upper body pressing musculature. That's a really nice combo. Yeah. Um You know, and again I like the fact that we've got a pull down, which, you know, probably a scapular plane, so it's not amazing. You know, it's probably a kind of a bit of a mix of um some upper and some lower lats, but you know, okay, not a problem. Uh at least we've got something in there that's training the lat, which is one of my major criticisms about, you know, kind of the silver ear routine.

Um, you know, and then okay, so we've got some direct triceps work, we've got some uh direct biceps work. Um, but again, you know, nothing really on the hamstrings. But then again, that is a feature of silver era programmes. We don't tend to see, you know, much hamstrings um kind of work being done in those situations. And of course, you know, obviously squats were getting

you know, kind of and calf raises, we're getting, you know, decent coverage for quads, calves, uh maybe to a certain extent glutes as well. So yeah, I mean it's it's it's it's you could do a lot worse. I mean we keep saying this. Every time we look at the silver era routine and the same thing applies here really, apart from the kind of strangeness regarding sets and reps, you know, y you could do worse than this programme. You really could.

Yeah, I mean if you drop those sets down, if you halved those sets, Yes. If you did three sets of eight, um this would not be a horrible programme at all. And then what would we I mean, I like the bench pressing neck. Obviously Gironda uh my understanding is Gronda basically didn't allow standard bench pressing in his gym. Like his whole thing was He didn't like benches, I don't think, a whole lot at all, but he did do this sort of more guillotine style.

is not a bad variation, is it? I mean obviously taking that that wider grip. I he's not I guess it'd be better if he was potentially adding in something else that was gonna get maybe a little bit more upper chest and there's not really anything else here that's gonna do that. But it's still a a fine I guess it does reduce a little bit more

of the triceps and so we're getting a little bit more chest anyway. But, you know, I look at a plan like this and I think it's good for I w I would say this exercise selection is like relatively good for maybe a beginner. Yeah. Like someone who's like, hey, I just want to kind of hit as much as I can.

I don't wanna get too sort of bogged down in, you know, a whole lot of different exercise variety. I'm not sort of looking at competing. I'm not I you know, I don't wanna maximally develop everything I can. Um, but to see that an Olympia competitor or or winner was f using this, like that's a little bit surprising, don't you think?

Yeah, I mean I think that's that's kind of where the anabolics comes in, isn't it? I mean that's where we kinda say you know, ultimately anabolics make everything grow and you can kind of I mean that's that's one of the things that I think is is probably uh the biggest uh uh sort of

thing that differentiates um you know competitors who are using anabolics from from from the natural lifters. I mean a lot of people go, Oh well the anabolic users can they can do loads of more volume and they can recover and all that nonsense.

I mean there probably is a little bit of a difference in recovery, but I don't think it's as big as people think it is. The real thing is that You know, people using antibiotics can literally do any silly exercises they like and leave gaping holes in their routines regarding certain muscle groups and those muscle groups will still grow.

I mean this is why you kinda got you know kind of people arguing Oh no no I don't need to do all these exercises uh you know, I can just do you know, I don't know what sort of silly things they say. But you know you might have people saying, Oh, I can just do squat bench deadlift and I'll grow the same as a bodybuilder would do. And I'm like You know, yeah. Really topical what you're saying there because

plans like this and you said a moment ago, look, it's not a bad plan and it's not. It's not awful. It could be way worse. And you look at this and it's like, well, you know, there's decent chest, decent shoulders, decent quads, you're not getting wrecked femme unless you're counting that bent leg knee raise that he's doing. You know, arms, okay, we've got some arms, direct arms working there, got some lat work, but th we're not maximizing what we can achieve by any means, right? Not all.

There's a lot of people who are pushing plans like this. Um and again, not to say that these are bad plans and I use plans like the I was gonna say on honest honestly I could take I could t kind of take that loss to be honest. I mean uh this this i if if this was the worst that we were seeing, I'd be actually pretty happy.

Absolutely. I mean as an AIA plan, this is great. Again, for someone who doesn't want to maximize every single thing that they can, who just want to build a decent physique, I think this is phenomenal, yeah? But where the conversation is headed is this.

is all that one needs to maximally develop. Yeah? Because you know, you look at something like a behind the neck press and the argument goes, Well, you're gonna get anterior delta, you're gonna get middle delta, you'll get some trap work in there. This is great. That's all you need. You look at the

bench press to neck, you're getting upper chest, you're getting middle chest, a little bit of lower chest. Okay, great, that's all you need. And, you know, we would look at a plan like this and say, Yeah, someone's gonna build a good physique with this, but can you maximally develop every muscle region using just one exercise for that whole muscle group.

That's the problem. Um, and I think ultimately that's that's what I wanted to talk about today under the, you know, kind of um well, through the lens of three errors that I'm seeing um, you know, generally in the in the social media. Um today. Um, I mean we were chatting about this before the podcast and I was saying, look, there's these three things that I keep uh seeing and you were telling me you've seen them as well. Essentially there are

uh people are arguing about exercise selection, which is kind of what we've just been talking about. They're saying basically that, you know, if you're doing an exercise that involves a muscle group, then it automatically, you know, means that you're, you know, training that muscle group to a maximal extent.

Um, similarly, you got um people who don't really understand what happens when you change the total amount of muscle mass that you're, you know, using. So like you go from a squat to a knee extension, what's actually different there and why is it different? And then You know, um we've also got uh situations where people are arguing a lot about exactly how to perform an exercise and whether there's, you know, specific uh tempo or, you know, kind of form that has to be used.

And these three things, what I think most people don't realise is that all of these three arguments, these three discussions that are taking place, are actually um, you know, subservient to one fundamental observation in sports science that most people are just completely ignoring. And that's something that we've already covered in great detail. And I was actually just looking back to see what episode number it was. It's number thirty.

So if you haven't come across what a voluntary activation deficit is, then please go back and listen to episode number thirty because we did a really, really good, long, detailed discussion of exactly what's going on with voluntary activation deficit. But today I just want to show how voluntary activation deficits uh explain or at least provide very important context to each of these three separate arguments and we can you know, if we if we want to, we can start with the exercise selection one.

Because that was the one we were we were just talking about. But very briefly, before we kind of go through each of these three areas, let me just explain what a voluntary activation deficit is in uh brief because as I say, we did a full episode on this previous. So when we say voluntary activation deficit, it is a measurement. So again, like fatigue is a measurement, strength is a measurement, this is a measurement. So we're taking a measurement and showing that um

When somebody p performs a maximum um effort contraction, often in a very controlled environment, to minimize, you know, the issues associated with stability and muscle mass and that kind of thing. Somebody does a maximum effort contraction. Then what we can do is we can superimpose electrical stimulation on that to see if there are any muscle fibers that are not being activated. Okay. So essentially we're gonna get an idea of how much more force, or in the case of a dynamometer torque,

uh somebody could generate if they were able to fully activate the entirety of their muscle to the, you know, theoretical maximum extent. And generally speaking When we do these tests again in the controlled environments in which they're being performed, we get kind of large muscle groups like the quad.

um showing deficits of maybe around twenty percent. So they're what we call hitting a a voluntary activation level of eighty percent and their deficit is, you know, essentially twenty percent. So that's uh a forced production. Rydyn ni'n ymwneud â hynny'n ymwneud â hynny'n ymwneud â hynny'n ymwneud â hynny'n ymwneud â hyn.

under maximum voluntary effort conditions, uh, which we could activate further if we're, you know, applying an electrical stimulus, which is what's done in these tests. So that's what a voluntary activation deficit test is. Now it's not the same thing as muscle activation, it's got nothing to do with electromography.

So when people come along and say, Oh, well, you know you're talking about muscle activation and that's electromaghy and that's not related to hypertrophy, I'm like, no, we're not talking about that. It sounds similar, similar terminology, but it's actually completely unrelated. There is no electromagraphy involved in the making of a voluntary activation deficit test. So it's literally false comparisons. So it's very, very, very secure in terms of how we are interpreting this information.

So essentially what we're saying is that even when you are producing a maximum um effort, now this could be in a test like in a dynamometer. or you could be in muscular failure when you're reaching the end of a strength training set. It doesn't really matter. Um, in fact the muscular failure will actually involve an even bigger voluntary activation deficit for

supraspinal um fatigue reasons. But ultimately, um essentially maximum effort you're not getting every single muscle fibre activated in the muscle. And this is ultimately the key that helps us understand these three separate conversations that are taking place at the moment regarding exercise selection

Uh the amount of muscle mass that's involved in exercise, which is kind of an exercise selection issue, but it's a very specific example of one. And then thirdly, this idea around form and coordination.

So essentially if we start with exercise selection now, imagine you've got two exercises that are essentially um very similar in terms of like for example the total muscle mass be being used, but they're actually involved potentially different either um directions. So maybe you're, you know, moving the shoulder in a slightly different direction, uh maybe you're working a different plane of motion. Um or alternatively maybe the resistance profile is different, so you're producing maximum

effort at one end of the uh joint tangle range of motion or alternatively the opposite end of the joint tangle range of motion. You could imagine, say for example, a biceps curl, where maybe in one exercise variation you've got maximum effort with the elbow extended, and the other example you've got maximum effort when the elbow is flexed. I mean These are kind of ways that you can manipulate exercises um to kind of create different effects.

Now, if we understand that um neuromechanical matching essentially tries to get us to send the activation to whichever muscles have the best leverage, then what's going to happen is you're going to first of all start sending activation to those um muscle uh muscle regions that have the best leverage and you're going to carry on, you know, working your way up the motunit pool.

Now, ultimately, because we have a voluntary activation deficit, you're going to stop before you get to the maximum possible limit that you could get to theoretically. Essentially, you're going to get to a level at which you have to stop early. Now that happens in the case of, you know, strength training and also in the case of any other type of exercise because we reach our maximum tolerable perceptions of effort. But ultimately we're going to find that we get to a level

of activation, we've activated a certain number of muscle fibers and we cannot now activate the remaining however many percent. In the case of big muscle groups, maybe it's like, you know, up to twenty percent. In the case of smaller ones, it's probably more than like two to five percent. But the point is there are muscle fibers that are not being activated.

Now essentially, um in one of the exercise variations we've proceeded by sending activation to one, let's say for example in the elbow flexors we've started with a extended elbow position, we're starting out sending most of the activation towards the biceps brachi.

You're going to work your way through most of the biceps brachi um muscle fibers, and then you're going to move on to other muscle fibers in other parts of the alboflex complex that can contribute, but you're going to stop before you hit the maximum possible level of activation of those muscle fibers. So you're leaving behind some muscle fibers in the brachi radialis.

whatever that aren't actually being activated. So there are fibers there that are not being activated. Now that's because the motor units are not being recruited. So don't get distracted by people saying, oh well you know muscle fibers and motor units then that's not the same thing. Well in this context it is.

Um When we then look at the opposite example with producing peak force, say for example in a flex position, then we start off sending all the activation to the brachiradialis, we fill that up, and then we move to another muscle like the biceps brachi and the fibers that can contribute.

And again we stop before we reach the maximum level. So the fibers that are not being used now are not the ones from the brachy radialis. The ones that are not being used are from the brices brachy. So essentially what we can see is that if you choose these two different exercises you just uh essentially leave untrained fibers from different parts of the elbow flex complex depending on which

um exercise variation you use. And that's just a resistance profile example. You can do the same thing with movement direction or plane of motion examples. Exactly the same idea. So let's move slowly here. Let's leave no stone unturned because this is a topic that gets very confused online. So let's say you are doing the example exercise you've just given. You're doing a bicep curl and you're doing one that is harder in that stretch position. You're gonna be using more biceps brachi.

Now, why does the body not or the the brain not use a hundred percent of the available biceps brachy motor units before using brachialis or brachy radialis? Like why would we be in a situation where we're getting, say, Maybe 85 90% activation devices brachi. We're getting still relatively high activation in Brachialis, Brachi Radialis. Why are we not getting Why are we not sending all central motor command to that one muscle that has better leverage in that movement?

It's entirely possible that that does happen, but it probably doesn't, because generally speaking you are gonna have some motor units in the brachy radialis that have better leverage than the motor units in the biceps brachi that have worse leverage.

Yeah. So ultimately what we're looking at is is let's say you can use a hundred motor units. Obviously this is just an arbitrary number. Say you're you're you're gonna use a hundred motor units to do that exercise, you're gonna use the motor units in order that have the best leverage to do that ac that function.

Yeah, I mean basically you can think of it as a Venn diagram. So essentially there will be regions of the um each of the uh elbow flexors and the brain kind of thinks in terms of motor units rather than muscle regions and muscles, but ultimately uh what it will do is it'll go, oh, this area here has amazing leverage for the task I'm about to perform and the reason the range of motion I'm in.

Um and then it'll go there and it'll then work on Hennemann's size principle. So people get really, really upset and confused and angry about how Hennemann's size principle interacts with um the principle of neuromechanical matching. The principle of new mechanical matching tells you where to go to start with and the Helleman's precise principle then tells you what to do when you get there.

So essentially henumman seismic is gonna work once you arrive in the area of the muscle, um or the region or the or the specific muscle, depending on how it's constructed and how uniform it is. It's very uniform, then it's just gonna treat it as a whole thing. But ultimately

It's gonna go to the area that it wants to uh use for the movement and then it's gonna follow Hennemann's size principle once it gets there. So essentially um'cause some people go, Oh, you don't need uh neumechanical matching, you'd use Hennemann's size principle. I'm like, really? So if I'm like I want to walk across the room, you're gonna start using muscle fibers in my deltoid because they're smaller than the muscle.

Yeah. Yeah. need a starting point of location first and that has to follow leverage,'cause otherwise if it doesn't have lever this is like the people who I mean anyway, I'm getting onto that another day, but um Yeah.

You have to start with leverage'cause that's the only thing that guarantees you're gonna be able to do the movement that you want to do. Um and then after that you follow Henneman's Sarge Mentor. But yes, in answer to your question Theoretically, if every single motor unit and muscle fibre in the biceps brachy had better leverage than every single motor unit and muscle fiber in the brachi radialis, then yeah, what what would happen is

you would end up with the entirety of the biceps brachium being activated before any of the muscle fibers in the brachiobi dialis. But that's not going to happen. You are going to have some mi mix and match. So it's going to kind of use

some of the fibers in or some of the motor units in the brachi radialis and you're just gonna move forward. But on on balance you're gonna use um you know, the muscle fibers and the motor units in the in the bicep brachy faster, more of them are gonna occur earlier and you're gonna end up maxing that out pretty much.

with that exercise that involves peak forces or peak efforts in the extended elbow stretch position. And then As I say, you're going to move on to the remaining ones that you can activate in the brachiradialis and then you're just going to have to cap out at a certain point because your maximum tolerable perception of effort's not going to allow you to send any more or create any more centromotor command to send to that um that area of the body.

And that's the point when you're gonna leave those muscle fibers untrained inside the Brachirialis. So just keep saying this and people just keep denying it with n giving zero explanation. I mean This is kind of where we are at the moment on social media. As I I explain exactly how this is working. I show them physiological and then people just post a like a one line comment saying, That's not how it works and then they walk away. And it's like

You're giving no explanation of why you think that. You're not giving any details. You're not giving any mechanistic explanation. There's no physiology in what you're saying. Um you know, if people are following you, that's kind of on them at this point, really. That's not um that doesn't sound like a me problem. That sounds like a them problem. Yeah. Generally people online are just shouting very loudly that you're wrong and then offering very little by way of explanation as to why

Why? And people believe those people. I think that that's a them problem. That's not a me problem. Yes, but if someone shouts loud enough, at a certain point it does become quite compelling to some people. Now, one argument on this topic that I've seen several times is that well hang on, if you do multiple sets then each time you do a set, you will be using different mode units.

And so just do the same exercise, do multiple sets of it and in the first set you might get a little bit more of the biases brachi, in the next set you might get a little bit more brachialis and if you just do enough sets and you're kinda getting everything. Has anybody proposed a mechanism for how that should happen?

Because that's impossible. That's impossible. So what's gonna happen is that if you do exactly the same movement repeated uh times, then what's gonna happen is that you get the same motifs being used. That's that that's that's what's gonna happen. Except Σας ευχαριστώ. You're gonna get total yeah, you're gonna get l less total motinets being recruited. You're gonna lose even more of your in this case brachiradialis ones in that um stretch position exercise that you're doing. So

you're gonna get make it even more focused on the kind of muscle group that you're originally trying to target, really, in a in a way. Um, not because it's doing anything positive, but just'cause you're losing stuff um, you know, in in that top end of the motinate pool. Yeah. I mean ultimately the only way that argument would make sense would be to would not even make sense, but the argument is predicated on as one gets more fatigued, they're essentially using more mode units and that's

No, that's that's again going back to this old idea that fatigue was somehow involved. I mean, like I can go back and I can pick out uh I mean they try to memory hold this stuff, but I can go back and I can get reviews written by hypertrophy researchers that literally say that

fatigue increases motinic recruitment. I'm like, that is a physiological impossibility. I would be ashamed to I mean, I probably did write something that silly at some point in my life, but I'd be ashamed if if I if I wrote that these days. You know, I mean it's just such a i i i absolutely ludicrous idea. You know, the brain is in control of motivate recruitment, not not the local fatigue, you know, mechanisms that happen.

Okay, so I guess so far that explains kind of why we've made uh the point in the past that it would make more sense to do, say, one set of two different exercises like the two curl variations you just gave as opposed to doing two sets of one. Yeah, totally. So that I mean that's that's kind of like the basic idea of changing exercises.

you know, within um the parameters of of using the same kind of total amount of muscle mass uh like we were describing, with a uh biceps curl with different um uh points of peak effort in the range of motion.

You can also kind of look at a different problem which is What happens if we go from an exercise that has a very small amount of muscle mass, like a single leg knee extension, and compare what's happening uh, say for example in a in a back squat? Um like what

Do that in the reverse order because I've this is again something that's that's getting a lot of airtime at the moment and I have seen people arguing that a squat is going to be better than a leg extension and no one could build good legs doing a leg extension, but doing squats you can build great quads.

And also I've seen the same argument with Dells that in fact if you're doing an overhead press, it's a waste of time doing a lateral raise. So both of these examples where one is starting with more muscle mass and then saying that using exercise that has less muscle mass is going to be useless.

I think this is people mistaking um perceptions of effort for um you know they're using a perception of effort as their proxy for So ultimately, um what we know from and like you can start with the bilateral force deficit observation, which is where you do, you know, two exercises.

Sorry, you do well yeah, you do two exercises. You do one exercise um with uh basically a single limb uh variation and then the same again uh with a two limb variation. So maybe you're doing biceps curls with two arms or maybe you're doing biceps curls with a with just one arm. Now what you'll notice is that you can uh lift more than fifty percent of your two arm biceps uh curl weight with one arm.

And the reason for that actually has been studied and it is because you can achieve a high level of voluntary activation, mochinic recruitment, when you're using um one arm compared to when you're using both arms at the same time. This is because when you have more muscle mass operating simultaneously, the brain is sending multiple central motor commands to different places.

And as a result, it can't get to the same level of centrometer command that it would be up to if you're only sending centromed command to a single place. We've got a whole load of fatigue literature that does exactly the same thing, showing that the more muscle mass you are involving in an exercise

the smaller the level of local peripheral fatigue you can reach at muscular failure. So you reach failure but you haven't got to a very high level of m local muscular fatigue and it's simply because you're not getting to a very high level of motinic cream and you're not activating the fast rich fibres that are generally responsible for generating the ton of metabolites.

So it it it all fits together in terms of showing us that the more total muscle mass you're using, the lower the level of recruitment is gonna be in any one muscle that you are interested in. So it's a physiological impossibility To get to the same level of moting equipment in a squad. or an overhead press compared to a knee extension or a lateral raise. It just is never going to happen. It can't do

And literally every time you send me a screenshot of people arguing about this, they're literally just one liners saying, No, they're the same thing. I'm like, Okay, tell me how that's possible then. Tell me how that's possible. Don't just yell at me telling me that you think it's not possible, that it's a hundred percent not true, or whatever you wanna use on social media to make yourself look good. Tell me why it's happening or why you think it's happening.

'Cause I'm really, really clear when I look at the literature that it's not happening. I'm trying to play devil's advocate and think thinking to myself, how could one argue that uh one of these exercises that uses all this extra musculature like a squat will be superior for quad development than an isolated uh knee extension? And Uh beyond what you said there, that truck said, therefore it works.

I mean to b to be generous I would say I think some of this is purely anecdotal in the sense that plenty of people in the silver era only did squats because they didn't have leg extensions. And so we can certainly look at it and say, well of course people built quads just doing squats. And who has access to just a leg extension and not a barbell? No one, hardly anyone. So we don't have as many anecdotes of people who build gray quads just using a leg extension as we do using a squat.

But that's not an a physiological argument or explanation as to why the leg extension would be inferior and I I can't even I can't even come up with a possible argument as to why one would make that sort of suggestion. No, which is why I think people retreat to anecdotes because they don't have a model, they don't have a physiological explanation for how this is working, or might work, or could work, or is supposed to work. I mean

For me, this is really open and shut. It's like bilateral force deficit. You've got, you know, uh the fatigue literature as I say, and I've done a summary post of all of those studies so people can look at that. And it just those two things together, you know, make it really clear that you can't activate and it

It's logical as well. I mean, you've got centre metal command building up, doing different things. You're not going to be able to get to the same level of centre mode command in a single place as you would do with a you know, a small muscle mass exercise. So really

it comes down to, you know, we've got voluntary activation deficits going on, stopping us getting to maximum levels of recruitment and as a result, that voluntary activ uh well just to be clear, the voluntary activation deficit is happening because

we are generating centromotid command. When we get to our maximum tolerable perception of effort associated with the maximum level of central motor command, we can't get any further. We're using that central motor command to do multiple things in the case of a large muscle mass exercise. We're only using that centromot command

um at maximum tolerable perception effort to do one thing in the case of a small muscle mass exercise. So ultimately a small muscle mass exercise is always going to be better for maxing out a specific region of the body. So let me ask you this. People talk about redundancy a lot and I'll be honest, I there's terms that they just

don't sit well, I I don't personally like it when people talk about redundancy in a programme. I feel like that's quite reductionistic. But nonetheless, if when people talk out about redundancy, they're essentially claiming that adding in another exercise is not giving us anything Single best example of redundancy in a train in a training program is doing more than one set for an exercise. Mm.

So I'm assuming that anybody who wants to argue about redundancy is going to be doing single set protocols. If they're not, then they are basically what we would say uh hoist by their own petard. Did you just come up with that then about the dynasty multisets? It just isn't a good idea. No, just it just again. It just occurred to me as you were saying it. Great. It's one of those ones where I hear you say it and I'm like, damn you. Damn it. I wish I thought of that.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make is I used to have a pre uh a former podcast co host that used to say that every week. Yeah. So in the case of a lateral raise. And the overhead press. We gave that example before. You could actually make the argument that if s if one is starting with a multi joint exercise, or the or the squat, I guess.

And the second exercise that they're talking about adding in is a exercise that's using less musculature and it's so in this case the leg extension or later graze. Ultimately. By default, that smaller that exercise using less muscle is not like can't really be redundant. Like it's never going to be redundant because it's always sh unless there's, you know, insane amounts of fatigue mechanisms that have occurred in that previous set.

There's always going to be more motornetic recruitment in that target muscle using that isolated exercise. But if we flipped it, And someone started with, say, the lateral raise or the leg extension, you could actually make a better argument for then doing the squat or the overhead press as those exercises being redundant, couldn't you?

For the target muscle that you are describing. I mean that that's kind of where it gets weird because um that and that's why I like programs that at least start with an understanding of what each exercise is good at and where it's good at in different ranges of motion. So if I was programming a lateral raise, then I would look at my overhead press variation and I'd be like, well

Maybe I do my press variation more in the um sagittal plane instead of in the frontal plane. And I start to focus more on other muscle groups that you know. No, no. Because that overhead press is not gonna give you anything for the middle delt that you're not getting with a

You haven't already got. Or I could just keep my wide, you know, grip and use the frontal plane, but I could work in the overhead uh range of motion above shoulder height. So which I actually find very Yeah, that top is yeah, get much more anterior dealt in that top half of the range of motion.

Yeah, I mean like uh uh for me as an older lifter, doing like a lateral raise for the for the middle though and then doing my wide grip overhead press in the upper part of the range of motion is just so much kinder on my shoulders. uh than, you know, kind of doing an overhead press starting much much lower down.

in the frontal plane. So, you know, I think just but again, what we're doing there is we're saying, well, you know, if I move peak effort around in the range of motion, it's starting to, you know, send activation preferentially to different places. Yeah, it's an interesting way of thinking about it just in terms of the the total amount of muscle mass being used.

I mean I guess ultimately, just to consolidate my point, any time an exercise that you're you're using, like you're using a new exercise that's using less total muscles, a fewer total muscles, that exercise is not going to be redundant. 'Cause it's gonna be getting motor unit recruitment that you you didn't have.

Yeah, as you say, and unless you get really gassed doing your kind of multi joint variation, then you run across the room to do the single joint one, then sure. I mean like if you've just done your squats and you're crawling along the floor and then you try and do near extension straight afterwards, yeah, that's probably not gonna help.

But you know, if you've got full recovery, you know, leave it five minutes or just go and do something else first and come back, then yeah, at that point you are gonna get higher recruitment in the in the quads than you would have done in the squat variation that came uh prior to it. Um and the same thing would apply with lustra rays after overhead pressing. It's it d this is just how physiology works. It's like, um, I don't understand why people are struggling with this.

I mean it's the same thing you started talking about the uh bilateral um deficit. So it's the same thing ultimately with following up with a unilateral version of that exercise. That unilateral exercise, you are going to get motor unit recruitment that you didn't get in the bilateral version that's Yeah, I mean it's kind of like I I kinda question whether you would want to do it that way. Well it depends on the purpose, doesn't it?

If you're gonna do s if you're gonna do single limb variations for an exercise, why would you do a bilateral one as well? I mean that For the exact same exercise. Yeah, you would... Ultimate. Yeah. You want to change it slightly. Yeah, pake resistance, yeah. But if if you're gonna I'm just thinking about it practically in my head now, but if you're gonna drop one of those, the one you would drop would be the bi bilateral exercise. You would keep the unilateral. Of course.

And it's ultimately and like but then why? So here's the thing, right? If you're doing both of those, you're doing a bilateral curl and a unilateral curl. and someone says, No, you can't do that, it's redundant, then you say, Okay, well, which one should I get rid of? And they say, Well get rid of the bilateral because you've got greater motor unit unit recruitment in the unilateral, then the same argument goes for the multi joint exercise or or a single joint exercise. Correct.

Right. But but people see there's emotion emotional attachment to certain doing to certain things. Okay, I don't want to get bogged down in this. So you had another point then.

Yeah, so basically what we've done then is we've talked about how having this um limit on the number of or the amount of it strictly speaking the limit the reason we've got a voluntary activation deficit is because we have a limit on the amount of central motor command that we can generate before we hit maximum tolerable obsession of effort. That applies in the case of exercise selection that we started with. We've also applied it in the case of total muscle mass and exercises.

And there's also now a an argument, you know, this is taking place regarding, you know, using specific form and technique. And I just want to make a couple of comments about this to set the context. Now I'm not taking sides here and I'm not saying that people should throw weight around with no regard to I think that's what people are calling this

Well, I think people are g probably going a little I mean, this is one of those pendulum things and people kinda swing from one from one extreme to the other. So I'm just gonna say a couple of things about this and try and set the context and then relate it to what's happening physiologically. So, um essentially, um, starting at uh you know, at the beginning, um, we've got to classify exercises according to how much form and technique concentration they are going to require to perform.

So if you're describing an exercise that is very complicated and very difficult to perform without concentrating, you know, greatly on exactly what you're doing and where the weight is going and what the balance is like, you are creating a very large um

energy uh in your brain for that problem. So you're essentially uh requiring effort perception to be dedicated towards the solving of that coordination problem instead of two motor unit recruitments. So you're never gonna have the same level of recruitment

an exercise that is difficult and complicated and requires a lot of uh your focus of attention on that movement pattern uh in comparison with something that has a constrained movement path. So the very big difference between, say, you know, a squat on an unstable surface which is gonna require an enormous amount of concentration from you to do correctly without hurting yourself.

uh, in comparison with a leg press where you you're kind of stuck in the range of motion and the path of the bar you know, according to the device that you're sat in. So Um and that creates a difference in terms of um the number of muscle fibers and the amount of motor recruitment you're gonna get in those two exercises. You're gonna get a better recruitment level

in the more stable, uh constrained path exercise than you are in the less stable uh less constrained path exercise. That is again just how physiology works. If you're dedicating effort perception to coordination, you can't dedicate that effort perception towards Moting and Krumin, and as a result we want exercises that are largely constrained rather than exercises that require a lot of concentration on the formula technique. Uh.

There's two issues with that as well though, yeah. So there's also this stability issue in that yes it there's the cult national aspect. Degrees of freedom and stability. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I mean you can you can go down that route as well. I mean you can argue that any exercise that involves a lot of

you know, kind of uh stabilization is gonna introduce a whole load of extra muscles that are responsible for stabilization and then you're not training the target muscle as effective'cause you've got a muscle mass problem as well. Um totally So we're we're hitting both of these issues you've just talked about then. We are, yeah. Um essentially though, um, it's just kind of uh introducing this new idea of um if the brain is focusing on

coordinating a movement, it's not using the same effort perception to drive motor recruitment. So you're getting this um kind of uh diversion of mental resources away from producing centre mode command and towards

um, you know, coordinating the exercise properly. Now if you kind of go the next step and say, Well, I am using a constrained exercise, I'm using a knee extension or a leg press or whatever and I'm not, you know, kind of using a complex exercise, but I'm going to focus on doing it in a very specific way. you are actually going to create some of the same problem. Because if you're focusing on doing the movement in a specific way

then you are ultimately going to be using your mental resources to do that particular uh movement pattern in that particular way instead of just uh using your mental resources to produce motinucryon. That is inescapable. Now you can argue, oh no, no, but I

And there's basically two arguments. Um I need to do the form in this particular way, uh maybe to standardize it or you know, maybe because I uh or alternatively because I want to target this particular muscle and I think performing them exercise in this way targets this muscle better. So you kinda got these two issues. Standardization. Yeah, absolutely.

We do want to do exercises in the same way every time, but ultimately you want to standardize things externally rather than internally. So get your external range of motion standardized. um you know, by having constraints on the system that you're working with. So for say for example, um I mean this is

obviously not a machine example, but in the case of uh like squats, you can put um like a elastic resistance band to show what your depth is. And when you touch depth you know you touch depth and it's like that's your constraint, your external constraint. So External constraints are much better than internal ones where you're trying to remember where you are and do it the same time every uh the same way every time. Um and ultimately

You know, that's going to give you a better uh cue for knowing that you're using the correct range of motion or whatever. Now, um, tempo is one of those things I would just not recommend that people standardise because It's like just just you know, push the bar, you know, and don't think about tempo because if you start standardizing tempo, you're gonna end up um, you know, changing your your your your sort of um

uh number of reps you can do per set and it's never really unless you're following a metronome, uh which is fine. If you want to do that, that's totally fine. But, you know, it's much more difficult to do that, um, voluntarily because you won't necessarily keep track of the exact count and it'll give you something else to think about instead of what you're supposed to be thinking about, which is producing motinochrome.

Um so ultimately the people are I think oversundarising um, you know That's going to lead them if they're not careful into territory where if they're not using external method of standardisation, which is like you know, uh cues, tactile cues for determining range of motion, or metronomes for determining tempo. If they're using those, that's fine, because they're not out they're outsourcing the thinking process to an external agent. That's the issue.

I have no problem with people actually using a tempo, but they've got to externally outsource it. Because otherwise their brain is doing the thinking and that's not really a very good idea. And when you're saying tempo, I mean you're meaning standardized tempo.'Cause you can say, Okay, well, you know, lower under control. Well, that doesn't mean that you need to be counting to you need the exact precise, you know, same.

you give your brain something to do other than pushing the bar, you are pulling resources away from your brain producing motinic acumen. So if you want to follow a a metronome in the lowering phase,'cause honestly You know, anybody who's lifting with heavy or moderately heavy loads probably can't introduce much of a tempo anyway in the concentric phase. If they can then they're probably a lot further away from failure than they think they are.

Um, ultimately it's gonna be a lowering phase tempo. Just follow a metronome. If you can't do that, then you need to you're gonna end up with a mental resource issue that is taking you away from your ability. If you're counting in your head. Yeah? Yeah. So'cause like I guess the point I wanna make here is there's a difference between doing like a two zero, one zero tempo where you're doing a two second E centric and

And that's the way I would write it down. But I don't need someone necessarily counting one, two. This is the way you're learning to perform this exercise and you're just thinking, I'm not I'm just not dropping the load. That's all I need you to think, right? Compared to if someone were to do I remember back in the day I would do stupid things like ten second eccentrics or eight second eccentrics. Yeah. And then just stuck in your head, one, two, and you're counting perfectly.

You need to be using a metronome and it in ideally in those situations it probably needs to be counting for you so that you don't have to count the beeps. Um you know, be uh uh this is just me illustrating that. Um, if you're concentrating on something that isn't pushing the bar, your brain is pulling away the ability to do motivating equipment to do other things instead, and that's not helpful for hypertrophy.

And this is not I I don't feel like this is contentious. I mean when I was working in the gym, if we got new clients in the gym, everyone knew good coaching technique was we do not give the client ten cues to think about at the start of each set.

Give them one thing at most. You say, Okay, this is the only thing I want you to worry about. I'm not gonna tell you, have your chest up and feet here and this down and whatever. No, no, no. I don't need you stuck in your head thinking about a billion different things. We know that that's gonna take you away from the exercise.

And really it's the same thing here. Yeah, you know, perfect your form this way and you need to be counting this number of repetitions or, you know, this slow tempo or whatever. It's like, well, there's just more thing it's it's the same as cues, it's just more to think about. Exactly. Exactly. So ideally we want to be p pulling away from that. Now, if somebody goes to the extent where their um they're they're starting to change their form in order to create an internal focus of attention.

So they're like, I'm I'm actually using I want to change the way I'm doing the exercise in order to focus more on this particular muscle group, then that internal focus of tension is now gonna follow the basic rules of internal focus of tension. So what is gonna happen is that you're going to get um

activation pulled away from other muscles in order to activate the muscle that you're interested in. Now, in traditional bodybuilding situations, that muscle that you're pulling um activation towards is usually the target muscle. So for example If somebody is doing uh you know a traditional kind of

uh bodybuilding approach. They're going, I'm gonna squeeze this muscle while I'm training it. Okay. That internal focus attention, that mind muscle connection, you're pulling activation away from many of the other muscles that would be helping you perform the lift in question. So

Essentially what happens in those situations is that the number of reps per set uh generally goes down, your ten rep max becomes your eight rep max or seven rep max or whatever. Now, in that scenario, um you end up actually activating that target muscle to a slightly higher degree, which is one of the reasons why people are very excited about using my muscle connection and and and potentially, you know, you know

could it create more hypertrophy? Well, in the short term it will do, but what will happen is if you try and use progressive overload from that point, then what will happen is that your brain will start pulling you away from using the internal focus

on that muscle root because it will go back to using whatever it can to drive the number of reps up. So you can't really the internal focus attention and progressive overload are incompatible with each other because What happens if you look at your logbook and go, Oh, I got seven reps last time, I need to get eight reps this time, your brain immediately goes, Well, the easiest way to do that is to stop using the internal focus attention and to start using the way I was doing it before.

So you gradually just end up diluting your internal focus back to uh essentially what you were doing before that, which is uh a goal directed exercise rather than a uh muscle mass directed exercise. Now, if on the other hand somebody goes

I need to make sure that I do this exercise in this exact way and that requires me to contract these stabilizing muscles. Yeah? So they're now driving an exercise uh, you know, kind of coordination pattern or form or whatever by using certain stabilization muscles, then the internal focus of tension happens the same way, but it now pulls activation away from the muscle that you're trying to train.

And that's the thing I think a lot of people are not understanding. If you do an exercise and you're having to brace yourself in a particular way to force the barpath to happen in a certain particular way or you you you're trying to make the exercise happen in a way that is unusual to you or different from where you Yeah, uh the same thing will happen. You'll drop repetitions, you'll d drop down from ten to seven or whatever.

But you won't be then forcing the activation towards the muscle that you were actually trying to train in the first place. And the same thing will happen with progressive overload. When you start with using pro progressive overload and you try and treat beat the logbook, your brain again will go

Well the easiest way to beat the logbook is to just stop doing these silly things with the uh co contractions and the, you know, kind of forcing activation away from the target muscle and it'll go back to what it was doing before. Ultimately Neuromechanical matching will try and send activation prior in pro in priority terms to the muscles that help you do the exercise. If you override that by signing to contract and

co contract and do all kinds of weird stuff with internal focus of attention, then it'll do that for a short period of time. Uh but as you start to try and push the load up, it'll just delete all of that and go back to what it was doing before. I remember a competitive power lifter telling me once that when he was benching, he wanted to lift with his ears. That every muscle that could possibly help him out, he wanted to use it. And

Yeah. And what you're saying there, if you're focusing on mind muscle connection, you're certainly not lifting with your ears, you're lifting just with your chest or whatever the muscles you're focusing on. So the outcome or the performance is going to decline, but what you said there is you you will actually get more motor unit recruitment in that particular muscle.

then you go back to lifting with your ears. And it is it's literally just uh I used to say toes in the mentorship programme when I was describing this as like you you bench pressing with your toes. I mean i is the is that's how you end up moving the weight up. Um

So I think a lot of people at the moment are probably getting very excited about the fact that they've changed their form and their number of reps per set has dropped and they think that that means something. I'm like, well Not really, because what's gonna happen is that you're gradually gonna move back to where you were three or four weeks ago over the space of you know, kind of next few working. As you start reducing your

And you just go back to how you were before. And you'll have just had a bit of an experiment and and and like you'll realize that it doesn't really do that much. Uh so this is why we talked a while ago and I think maybe the Isometrics podcast perhaps were talking about ways that one could use internal focus of attention.

um and not be limited by this progressive overload challenge that you presented there. And using it with something like an isometric, which you're kind of limited in tracking progressive overload anyway, could be a viable uh, I guess, situation or circumstance where one could do it.

Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean and ultimately that's, you know, kind of going back to the uh you know, even pre Silver Era bodybuilding uh period of time, you know, that's that's that was a big feature of of of the flexing kind of um Um so yeah, I mean there's nothing wrong with doing that. again, I'm just trying to provide context for how um physiology is happening in the background'cause I think there's this th human human nature is a fascinating thing.

Uh, we tend to think that we get an idea in our heads and we tend to think that physiology will just follow the idea. It's like we wanna do this and we think physiology is gonna fall into line with that and it doesn't do that. It's like physiology is going to carry on doing exactly what it's always been doing and if your strategy doesn't take that into account, it'll end up doing something you don't quite expect. It'll have unintended consequences.

And I think that when um people are focusing on a very, very strict type of form that goes above and beyond just being safe. then what they're going to do is they're going to pull away motivatment from the um muscles that they're trying to train and either send it to other muscles or just not create it at all because it's being used to uh the perception of effort is being used for something else.

So this whole form debate and I know that we don't want to get too go too down into it, but ultimately if we're looking at an exercise and we're looking at at what makes quote unquote good or bad form I mean, ultimately the purpose of the exercise is to train whatever that target muscle is, right? So the form should be done in a way in which that muscle

is ultimately going to be the the main muscle being trained in that particular exercise, right? So for example, if you're doing an overhead press, then

Well, I I'm gonna stop you because I think that's a little bit uh potentially misleading if if somebody doesn't understand what you're saying there. So um I don't think you can phrase it as, um, we wanna do the form in a way that trains the target muscle because if you do that then you're gonna be using an internal focus of attention all the time.

Um I think we select the exercise and the range of motion and those things on the basis that it automatically targets the muscle that we want to train or the reason the muscle we want to train without us having to change the form to make that happen. And then really form is about safety in the context of that exercise. So really when when somebody starts talking about form, my my my my reaction is um are you safe? I thought it was going to be the second. Talking about form then.

So because anything beyond safety is gonna pull you away from creating Motia Crew. Yep, yep. Yeah. So from an exercise selection standpoint. And I think I know this is a a little bit of a semantics argument, but I still think it's an important one. So I think we're looking at it from a different entry point. So what you said there is that exercise is chosen because it it achieves that outcome. Right. It's it's training that muscle.

And so in the case of let's say an overhead press and you're saying, Okay, if I want to train let's say the middle delt, then I might select a behind the neck overhead press. Right. And so that's your starting point. What exercise can I select for this? Okay, great. And now how do I perform this without getting injured?

And I agree completely. Now, what you said there is you're going to program in that example a behind the neck overhead press done in the frontal plane. Now, I think the people are not being specific enough with exercise selection. And so what we're seeing a lot is people are saying, do an overhead press, do a bench press. Joe out.

And it's like, okay, but unless you give me the specifics there of we're doing it behind the neck or we're doing a sagittal plane or we're doing top partial or whatever, unless we're getting very specific, that exercise can feasibly be done in a way that's gonna train

And so that's I guess what I meant when I was, you know, coming out saying, Does it train what we want to train? But if we wanna use our the the language of just being specific, very specific with the the actual exercise selection, I I'm happy with that too. But I think we're not seeing that. No, I th I I agree. I think that's that's the problem. It's like uh people are being cavalier about describing the exercise that they're programming and then trying to make up for that cavalier behaviour by

you know, changing the um, you know, kind of description around the way that the exercise is performed under the heading of of form. Um, I think there's two interesting human um kind of psychology issues here that are worth pointing out. The first is that in in relation to the arguments around form, people are trying to push it into being a binary uh conversation. They're trying to go, you either care about form or you don't.

It's like no, that's not unacceptable. That's an emotional tribal kind of argument. Let's just let's just stop that right there. I've been in a box two minutes, you know, you're going to fit a neat thing into a box. Yeah.

So like people are as soon as I say you don't need to or you I I'm not saying you don't need to, I'm saying it's actively unhelpful to overfocus on, you know, performing an exercise in a very specific way. They're like, Oh, you don't care about safety? I'm like, No, don't be childish. Um I'm saying you do the form in a way that is m you know, ensuring your safety in the exercise. That is

you know, obviously, you know, kinda goes without saying. Beyond that, any focus on form, you are going to take away effort perception from your ability to create routine agreement and is therefore not going to be very helpful.

If you're using it to push activation towards uh muscle groups, you're gonna run into the internal focus attention problem um and you're better off just getting your exercise selection correct, like you've just been pointing out. So ultimately that's kind of where I see the the debate really. The other interesting human psychology point is that um I think that we're we're in the performative um problem that bodybuilders have have been milking for the last few decades.

where they basically, you know, there's you know, historically if you look at competitive bodybuilders, they've been, you know, finding things to convince people of that they do that are different that somehow has created their amazing physiques and it's not the pharmaceuticals, you know.

So like a bodybuilder's basically been kind of saying, Oh no, you need to do this, you know, kind of pause in the contractor position and squeeze the muscle and it's like and that's somehow magically how I've managed to create my amazing physique and it's not all of this kind of gear that I've been taking for the last kind of ten years.

And I think there's this performative aspect where the bodybuilders are trying to show people specific things that if they only did this, they could get those results. You actually see this going all the way back to Sandow.

they're like, Oh well you can just you don't have to lift the weights and you don't have to do this, you can just do these muscle control exercises. I'm like, Well that's a bit debatable but you know, okay. I don't know. And you see it the same thing with them with bodybuilders. It's like if you just do the form in this way you can get the same results as me and it's like

not the you know, in the case of natural blood readers, it's not the five years of extremely hard work and dedication and not eating, you know, kind of uh the things that I want to eat and all of those so so

suffering and and in kind of difficult times that they've gone through to get their results. And it's like, Oh no, no, no, you can just do the form in the way that I'm doing it and you'll get the same results. And the bodybuilders who are, you know, competitive and using pharmaceuticals, they're they're arguing the same thing but from a much more comfortable position. I'm not

you know, kind of uh whether it's anabolic users or non anabolic users. I'm just pointing out that um people are trying to distract from what actually creates results. and pointing out that maybe it's the form thing that makes the difference. I'm like, no it's not. That's performative. That's marketing. That's trying to get you to believe that they have some secret source that's different from everybody else. And it's not.

it all just comes down to exercise selection, you know, execution of um high levels of motivating and dedication to that over a very long period of time. I mean I there's a big perform performative aspect here, I think. Yeah, it it is sort of that secret knowledge thing, isn't it? You know, this it's done this special way and that's what leads to this result. I mean ultimately, like, if form is so

bad, if we can use that that word, then ultimately one's not even performing that exercise anymore. So like either you are performing that exercise or you're not, and if you are, why do we need to get so boked down in in the finer details really? Yeah, I mean like people have been posting videos of uh for example, there's a um a rather famous science based lifter who does

um their their rowing form is is quite something to behold. It's basically a hip extension exercise with a kind of a bit of an elbow movement tag tacked on. And they're kind of They they're moving backwards and forwards so aggressively that you you could argue that it's no longer the exercise in question.

I mean look, that's a great example, yeah,'cause someone might then come to you and be like, Oh, well, you've just said form doesn't really matter and look at this, does this mean that I can just perform and grow like this? And Ultimately you've just said that, well, you push it far enough and it's not even that exercise anymore and you're not actually gonna be getting much out of that muscle. Yeah, I mean I think um m my point would be that if if the person is not I mean like I think

this particular individual is deliberately doing that to get views. But um I think that if the exercise naturally pushes you uh let me let me be really clear about this'cause I think this is important. Um If you're doing a an exercise like a row um and you find yourself being moved out of position

So if you are naturally doing the exercise and you are pulling the rail or you're pressing whatever and you find that your body is being moved out of position, that is not a good exercise. That is an exercise that is for whatever reason um the combination of forces. is pushing you out of the position that you need to be in to perform the exercise correctly. And I would simply suggest that person find a more comfortable machine exercise that doesn't allow them to do that. For example,

In the case that I'm thinking of, the individual is doing a um a seated uh chest supported row and their chest is flying back from the chest support every time they do a row because they're doing this huge amount of hip extension. Now In the individual's case, if they were to do a um an inclined T bar row, they would probably find it a lot more difficult to launch themselves into space.

if they were just sitting in that kind of uh you know, machine seated chest support row. So in the case of that particular individual, if they genuinely want if like, oh, you're telling me I can't concentrate on form, but look at how I'm moving my body away from the chest support every time I do the row. It's not a good exercise for you. Pick an exercise where you don't have to do that.

Yeah. And I actually as I say, I think that most people are not gonna fly back from the chest support in that situation. I think that most people probably are gonna be quite comfortable. I think this person is probably just, you know, playing it up for the camera.

Um, but you know, in the case that that is true and that person genuinely is struggling to make that exercise work for them because for whatever reason their body dimensions just mean that they push them pull themselves away from the chest support. Just do a different exercise that doesn't require you to think quite so hard.

So is there anything else that you think would constitute, again to use this term bad form? Obviously you've mentioned they they're doing it in a way that could get one injured. But are there are there examples like the one you've just given that you think would be a a good uh maybe encouragement for someone to then select a different exercise instead?

Well as I say, i i it i I don't think there is anything else uh that I can think of right now other than uh just if for whatever reason your body dimensions don't fit well with a machine or a particular exercise and for example, I mean like I gave in the machine exercise example of the seated row, which I've seen video of people doing uh this or one particular person doing Um and they tend to get shared quite a lot. Um

Uh i barbell exercises are probably easier examples. Like the uh standing barbell row I think is just a bad exercise because everybody ends up with so much body English and they end up doing massive amounts of hip extension. Now again in specific context you can see people are doing so much hip extension it's almost uh kind of a bent over power clean. I mean like you you get those kind of people who are using so much hip extension that it's not a but that's a bad exercise for that reason because

It actually doesn't allow you to control it very well. But equally you can find people whose body dimensions are not suited to squatting. You know, you can find really tall people and if they've got unless they've got ridiculous ankle mobility, you know, they are not going to be able to squat very well without changing the form into something that you would look at and go, Mm, I'm not happy with that. That looks like a

That looks like a uh a squat morning to me. I'm like the dude is six foot seven, what do you expect? I mean it's unless he's got ankle mobility like Constina, he's not gonna get into that position very easily.

Now, okay, you can have arguments about whether that needs to be addressed or whether you just do a different exercise or not. But from a bodybuilding point of view I'm be like, just do a different exercise because for whatever reason your body doesn't fit that particular exercise very well. There are plenty of other good alternatives. You don't need to do an exercise just because somebody on social media told you that you needed to do it.

So I think there's it kind of there's two things here, both I mean they're the same thing but just looked at from different perspec perspectives. On the one hand there are some exercises that are just bad because they force almost everybody to use poor form, uh in the sense that it's not doing what you want to do. This the standing um bent over barbell row is not designed to train the hip extensors, but most people end up training the hip extensors. And the lower back.

Because the exercise naturally ends up promoting body English to get progressive overload. Uh Yeah, and so that's not a form issue then, like you're saying, that's an exercise like that exercise is just not a Well it what it what it does is it falls into this category of like if you imagine

like ver very few people probably are going to be in the category of a seated machine row, chest supported row, being a bad exercise for them because they use too much body English. Most people are going to be okay with that. Yeah. Like next thing, like so there's gonna but there are gonna be Potentially some people. For whom it's not a good idea because, you know, they just naturally end up using tons of hip extension.

Um but maybe the next thing across is like well what about standing biceps curls with a barbell? Some people again, most people are gonna be okay with that or an easy bar, whichever's comfortable. But some people are gonna find that Inevitably, just because the amount of weight they're using and their centre of mass and the you know, kind of how strong they are relative to body weight, they're gonna find themselves getting moved around. I probably fall into that category.

I tend to get moved around if I start doing bicep skulls and it's standing bicep two arms. Um but then there's uh the third category is like the standing bent over barba row where almost everybody gets moved around. So what you can say is that there are just exercises that are going to be more or less. Even a barbell curl is that even Is that bad form? Is that a bad exercise? Like if you're doing Well that's what I'm saying. If if if your if the weight is throwing you around because it's

String around in in the sense that you would be using momentum at the bottom, right? And if we're doing a bar No, well hang on a minute. If you look at if you look at the world kind of um record and championships around standing barbell curls, strict curls, they do actually have a board that people lean against. And the reason for that is because the weight will literally move you around if you don't have that.

Well, it'll actually move you around all the way through, especially when you're in the middle and it's at the hardest point. Because it's you're you're cre you're changing where your centre of mass is in space. Yeah. And look this might be I'm maybe I'm struggling to conceive this because I weigh like a hundred and five kilos and you weigh

Sure. Sentence. Yeah. Yeah. And so but for me, what I've noticed if I'm doing like heavy barbell curls, I'm not getting moved around like hit mid mid-rep, but at the start, I'm I am getting moved around at at that very beginning.

And I'm looking at that and I'm thinking, well hang on, okay, I might be using a little bit of momentum, a little bit of body English at the very starting point, but that curl ultimately is gonna be more of a brachi ratialis focus exercise anyway. I'm still gonna get to that point in that exercise without s uh compromising that muscle's involvement, is that even bad form? Yes, it looks like a cheating curl a little bit.

But is that even bad? It's still doing exactly what I wanted to do. I'm not getting injured. Like what I'm struggling to even conceive what we even say is bad. Again again. So like this is this is where you would then say well

is the exercise still doing what it's supposed to do even though there's a little bit of bad form in there. I would argue that if you're doing if you're doing seated rows and you're doing them primarily with hip extension or you're doing bent bobaba rows and you're doing them primarily with uh hip extension, that's not now doing the thing that you were setting up to do. Yep. So that's almost the distinction there. Is it still doing what you want it to do? And has it increased injury risk?

And if those I mean if you're doing a standing barbell curl and you need to just kind of nudge it with your hip to get it going, then is that bad form? Not really. And are you standardizing it? I guess that's the other bit. If you're doing that one rep and you're not doing it the next rep, okay, maybe that's bad form because it's stopping you or inhibiting you from actually standardizing and progressively overloading.

Yeah. Yeah. So but again what we're doing is um and just to be clear, a lot of people are gonna listen to this and they're gonna go, Oh, well you're saying it's nuanced and they're saying it's nuanced and you're all agreeing. No. Everything that I'm everything that I'm doing is saying you need to externally constrain what you're doing.

Not internally constrained. Yes. Um the external constraints come from the decisions that you make before you even start about the exercise that you're gonna do and how the exercise is going to be controlled in terms of like if you're going to use a metronome for tempo, if you're going to use range of motion for, you know, kind of guiding it, whatever. You set those constraints in advance externally or you make decisions about things you don't care about.

Internal constraining is where you go, Oh, I need to focus on making sure the bath path is exactly like this and the tempo is exactly like this and I'm going to count. that is pulling stuff away from your ability to create motivating agreement. External constraints is what we're talking about. Doesn't do that because it actually outsources all of your thinking and

you know, concentration to decisions that you make before you even start. So for people who are thinking, Oh well no, you're arguing about different types of form and whether different types of form are acceptable or not acceptable and it's all nuanced and blah blah blah blah blah No, I'm not. I'm following a very, very specific um trajectory here, which is that is it internally constrained by your brain or is it externally constrained by things that you're deciding before you even start?

If you can get in position to do the exercise. And to do that exercise correctly, you then need to be thinking about these specific movements and cues and everything else in your head. Then there's probably better exercises that one can choose.

Exactly, which is why I'm saying uh come i a better approach is to make the decisions before you even start or watch how you're doing an exercise and if you think that your exercise is, you know, kind of breaking form in inverted commas, then you probably are better off finding something that's better suited to your body dimensions than the one that you were doing previously.

As a a coach who mostly works with people online, I live by the mantra of I try to prescribe exercises that uh I guess um I I I guess I could say here unscrew upable. Maybe I'll use different language, but

I don't want to give someone exercise that is there's a high chance they're gonna stuff it up. And I was talking to Declan about this this topic and he said something similar that he uses exercises that have the highest margin of error. You give it to a client and it's it's so unlikely that can screw this up. Totally. Totally. That's what I think a lot of this comes back to.

Yeah, totally. I mean that again, that's you're literally doing exactly what I'm describing here. Um, you know, from uh you're setting your external constraints in advance. You're making your decisions that make it almost impossible to go wrong.

Yeah. You know exactly. It's like, you know, we're we're we're making these decisions because most people most of the time are gonna be absolutely fine with these. I mean, honestly, until I saw this particular person doing seated rows with hip extension, I didn't actually believe that was possible to do that. You know. Uh I actually thought it was it was pretty impossible to screw up a seated row uh cheat seated chest supported row machine. I was like, that that is one of my staple exercises.

How can you do that wrong? But apparently you can. Um and again, uh it may be the case it's either playing up with the camera or maybe the case it genuinely his body dimensions make that exercise a bad fit for him. It doesn't really matter. I just do something different. I mean it's like Yeah. Yeah. Or call it a row back extension and then your form is spot on with your exercise.

Your form is right. Just change the definition of the exercise and then your form is correct for whatever it is that you decided to do here.

Okay. Is there anything else that needs to be said on the topic or is that hopefully covering most of it? Hopefully that is everything. So just repeating a structure that I set out with, um what I was trying to explain here is that the fact that we can't recruit every single motor unit and therefore can't activate every single muscle fiber in a um kind of exercise, whatever exercise it is we're doing

uh that could contribute. So like in you know, we can't activate every single muscle file that could contribute. um means that we are going to end up leaving some muscle fibers untrained uh no matter what we do. And it's which muscle fibers we end up uh uh not training is the important thing for exercise selection. As regards muscle mass,

Uh all we're doing is manipulating the total amount of muscle fibers that we are able to activate, total amount of units that we can recruit. Um obviously using less muscle mass can be better.

And then regarding exercise uh form, um, Tempo, what I'm saying is that if you're focusing really hard and concentrating really hard on a particular way of doing something, then generally speaking you're pulling away recruitment and you're making a voluntary activation deficit even bigger than it actually has to be. Before we uh start the podcast I also mentioned we were you're asking me if there's any other things that we could incorporate into this matrix.

Again, yeah, sure. If somebody's doing like drop sets and finishes and anything that involves high cardiovascular demand, all of that stuff again is gonna make the voluntary activation deficit even bigger. So just because you're hitting failure point in an exercise or a set or a

sort of drop set or whatever, doesn't mean you're hitting the same level of recruitment as you were doing previously. You actually mentioned this in the context of volume earlier and you're saying doing an extra set somehow recruits more motor units. No, it recruits recruits fewer motor units.

And again, the fatigue mechanisms, especially perception related ones, are going to produce a further reduction in the number of rotinets and therefore the number of muscle fibers we're training. So All of this is just explicable by understanding the context that we can't actually recruit every single motor unit and every single muscle fiber that could contribute uh to a movement uh despite reaching maximal effort and we can actually quite easily make it even worse by doing the wrong thing.

So all of that ignoring the form bit because that's not gonna work with what I'm about to ask. And this is my last question. If we then go back to our Larry Scott workout at the start of this podcast, And we evaluate that program against this framework you've just proposed. What do we see? What are the f the shortcomings there? Because ultimately all these exercises are using quite a lot of muscle mass. We I mean, we've got single joint arm exercises, but everything else is multi-joint.

We've got many sets with short rest periods. Causing yes, we did talk about some metabolite fatigue, but ultimately there's gonna be higher perception of effort here. There's gonna be more superspinal CNS fatigue here. We've got fewer total exercises with the multi set. So given what we're talking about in in today's topic of of maximizing activation, you would look at this program and think, ooh, probably missed the mark a bit.

Yeah, so there's there's ways to, you know, take a step from this, but ultimately, you know This is a programme that is getting good coverage, not perfect coverage, but good coverage of the of the of the muscle groups. It is doing that three times a week, full body format.

Um, and as a result, it is going to be a lot better than some of the nonsense that we see, you know, circulating today on social media. So, um It's kind of like a as you po as you kind of pointed out, it's it it could be a really good beginner programme to get someone started, as long as we cut the sets in half and did three sets instead of, you know, kind of you know, six.

Um but yeah, I mean honestly I would much rather introduce uh an extra exercise for each um kind of broad category of of muscle groups that they're tr they're training and and cut the sets down to a single set and just do one one you know kind of Two different pressing variations, um, you know, or three different pressing variations, whatever, and start to expand the variety a little bit at the expense of of losing some of the sets.

I think, you know, we're we're still in this kind of process of getting away from the kind of five years ago territory where people were just spamming sex on four or five exercises. And they were doing like eight, ten sets of each exercise. You know. And it's like we're now getting to this uh moving away from that, we're now going, hang on a minute, much better to just do a couple of exercises instead of doing, you know, spamming sets for every single exercise that you do. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Makes no sense. Yeah. There's there's no scenario. I mean you you've made this case really well in the past. There is no scenario in which doing two sets of one exercise is gonna be better than doing two exercises for one set each for the same kind of broad kind of area of the body that you're trying to train. There's no scenario in which you can argue about doing two sets of you know Yeah. Bench press is better than doing, you know,

sort of uh w you know one particular grip width bench press is better than doing it. An inclined an inclined close grip versus a a flat bench wide grip. I mean there's no scenario in which that is ever possibly going to be true. If someone wants to make the case, then make the case. The interesting thing is nobody ever sends this stuff to me and says, This is what I think, why do you disagree with me? What they do is they just like

sort of slander me behind the scenes and say rude things about me. And then I hear about it from other people who say, Oh, this person is insulting you and saying that you

this, that and the next. I'm like, well, they've not actually communicated to me what they think and they've not actually tried to persuade me that they are correct and I'm wrong. They're not taking they're not taking me seriously in that respect. They're not actually saying, Well, here's my idea and here's your idea and this is why we're different Uh, they don't want to be compared in that way. They just want to, you know, throw kind of uh mud at me from from from from a safe place.

Um so but anyway, uh that's beside the point. Uh the th the the the thing I'm I'm I'm I'm pointing out here is that I if somebody believes that there is a mechanism, a physiological mechanism by which Two sets of one exercise is can be better than uh single sets of two separate exercises that train broadly the same area but with slight differences. They're welcome to make that case and we'll listen to it. But I cannot see any possible way that they can win that argument.

Yeah, I mean look, that's a g a good challenge. Like if someone does have a a mechanism as to how that's possible, then you know, that's our challenge to like let us know, send Chris a message, send me a message, send uh talk about it online, I'm sure it'll it'll end up back to us at some point anyway, and then we can talk about it on a podcast.

Yeah, I mean I that letter approach doesn't really work because there's just uh what I think most people don't realise, I mean there's a there's an absolute army of tiny creators on, especially TikTok. who are all just kind of um positioning themselves against um this model that I presented and saying, you know, Chris is an idiot because he doesn't believe this or he he disagrees with me on these these issues. What they don't realise is that there are a billion of you guys.

And there's only one of me. So, y you know, ultimately i doing what you're doing may get you, you know, another five hundred and seventy three followers if that's important to you. B but it's not gonna get you any further than that. You're not gonna go anywhere with this. But you know, if if that's what you want, if that's the sites that you've set for yourself, then fine. But

ultimately it isn't really gonna do anything interesting in this universe that we're living in and I'd hope that you would play for slightly higher stakes than that. But that's it's your decision, I mean it's not it's not my my life to lead. Well, I look forward to seeing what physiological explanations come up for why multi sets would beat single sets of multi exercises. And if it's compelling enough then by all means I'm going to start programming that way, but I am welcome to hold my breath.

Okay. Thank you everyone for joining us for another episode in 2026. I hope you've all had a wonderful start to the year and I hope you'll join us again next week for another episode.