036 Dorian Yates, Maximalist Programming, and Neuromechanical Matching

Thank you for joining us for another episode of Hypertrophy Past and Present. And today we have the long-awaited Dorian Yates program. I've had so many people asking us to assess one of Dorian's plans. So we said, hey, let's let's just do it. Let's just jump in and get it done. Now, for some of you guys who are wanting us to look at the blood and guts plan, we will do that in the future. But I wanted to start with one of Dorian's earlier plans.

So this is actually from uh before nineteen eighty five, supposedly before Dorian was enhanced, which I think is quite interesting. Uh and it was a plan that he was using before he was competing and obviously winning Olympia shows. So I think this is a cool little bit of history. Um he actually followed this plan for several years actually before he changed it up. Uh and that's actually something that I think is quite interesting about a lot of Dorane Yates' plans.

uh just in general is he actually stuck to a lot of the same exercises often for years and he has been quite vocal about the lack of necessity to change up exercises that are working.

So I quite like that'cause a lot of the time there's this idea that we need to change exercises every four weeks or eight weeks or however long, and we look at someone like Dorian and obviously this is NF One, but you know, there doesn't seem to be a a need for that and obviously we've talked about why that might be. Now Before I jump into this plan, I'm not here alone. Chris, you're with me. Do you wanna say good day, say anything before I jump into it? Ha ha ha.

I am indeed here for the episode, so yes, great to be here, Jake. How are you doing? I'm I'm doing uh very well, thank you.

So, Dorian Yates, here we go, pre-1985 plan. This was an A-B split. So he did this routine three times per week, alternating these two workouts. And I know some people are gonna be happy about this. This was actually a effectively it was a torso limbs split. I know that's a split that's gotten a fair bit of attention over the last year or so and a lot of people are

Really enjoy it. Uh personally it's not my favorite plan uh uh split, but I know a lot of people do love it. So I'm sure there's a lot of people celebrating hearing that. So uh two different workouts, workout A, workout B, the torso. In fact, before jumping into the torso workout, Uh what he did do is he started each workout or each exercise with one warm-up set and then he went into the working set. So I'm not gonna mention the warm-up set every time there was a warm-up set for each exercise.

And each uh I'm pretty sure every single exercise here. Yeah, every exercise was done for sets of eight repetitions. Uh, and he suggested increasing the load when that set of eight became one uh rep in reserve.

So that's the structure for all of the of both the workouts. So I'm just gonna talk about the exercise selection now. So workout A, which was essentially a torso routine, was a flat bench press for two sets. An incline press for two sets, and then incline flies for one set. So that is his chess work. And then we've got close grip chin-ups for two sets, and then a bent over barbell row for two sets and a deadlift for two sets. So that was his back work.

And then we've got behind the neck press for two sets, side later rays for one set. and a bent over, like a rear dealt fly, he called them bent laterals for one set. So that was his delt work. And then we've got two sets of crunches and two sets of hanging leg raises. Workout B, the limbs workout, was squat. Now this was the only exercise he did for a third set. So three sets of squat, uh, and then two sets of hat squat, two sets of leg curl. Two sets of standing calf raises.

Two sets of barbell curls, and then one set of one arm preacher curl, two sets of a triceps pushdown, and then one set of lying triceps extensions. Now the format, in case you guys couldn't work it out from listening, was he was essentially aiming to do three exercises per larger muscle group.

And then two exercises per smaller muscle group. The exception there that he said was for quads, where he just had those two squat variations, and that's why he added an additional set for their uh the squat. But everything else he's looking at adding at essentially doing two to three exercises for one to two sets per muscle group. What do you think of that, Chris?

So obviously the exercise selection here is the really interesting stuff. Um and it's interesting because we're getting multiple exercises for the same um body part. um in the same workout. So this is ultimately the the kind of the really interesting thing. It's like he's not just doing a single exercise for each muscle group. He's actually doing multiple um exercises. Even though he's actually doing multiple sets.

for those exercises. And he's able to do that of course because he is doing a split. So, you know, he's doing this kind of torso limb split. So he's able to do um you know, more exercises relatively easily, but he's also able to do more sets for those exercises. So what we've got here then, um essentially you've got a flat bench bench press followed by the incline press. So um I'm guessing he's probably gonna be using slightly different grip width.

in those scenarios, probably with the bench press uh flat bench he's probably doing a wider grip. I'm guessing with the incline he's probably doing a slightly narrower grip. So he's kind of getting um sort of more, you know, sternal maybe some costal in the or probably some costal in the flat bench and then he's getting more clavicular um in the incline press. And then he's actually doing some flies as well. So I would say that the the wide grip bench plus flies would be a little bit

uh kind of essentially just adding volume for exactly the same muscle fibres, but fundamentally he's got, you know, multiple exercises there. Um I mean obviously in terms of k putting those incline um flies last he's actually uh, you know, choosing to use a smaller muscle mass exercise later on, which is gonna give him better recruitment. So in many ways you could say, well, it would be better to do a single joint uh fly exercise after the

um multi joint pressing because you actually are able to keep the level of recruitment high rather than allowing them to drift downwards, as happens if you just carry on doing multiple sets of the same big muscle mass exercise. So Just literally in the first three exercises I'm seeing so much cool stuff. It's really

There's that's an interesting point you made then. I think we touched on it last week in a podcast about the ability of using either a single a single joint or using that smaller, um, you know, muscle mass exercise at the end of a series.

and how you've just said there that'll allow one to maintain high levels of motor energy recruitment. And we talked about how some people, depending on the workout plan, you could put that at the start if you're using that for the purpose of increasing motor energy recruitment in that given muscle.

So I just wanted to clarify that because some people might be looking at this and being like, well, hang on, haven't you guys said put that at the start in the past? Maybe we have in the context of using it for that particular purpose. Here he's using an inclined fly, not a flat fly. Can you just speak to what difference that would make? So, um... The thing about the incline is it depends quite a lot on how inclined it actually is.

Ultimately, as you start to incline, you are going to start prioritizing the delts instead of the pecs. But if it's a relatively shallow incline, that effect is quite small. Um, really, in inclined pressing we tend to keep the grip width a little bit narrower and I would argue you really want it as narrow as possible as well not a na not as narrow as possible, but certainly shoulder width. So

uh you want it in the sagittal plane. So and that really makes the exercise very effective for the clavicular pec. And then if you uh make it a very steep incline it starts to shift it towards the anterior delt. But you're still gonna get a decent amount of clavicular. Um but with the with the incline flies, you're actually kind of starting in the transverse plane as you're on a flat and as you kind of raise up, you start to move more and more and more towards the frontal plane, not the sides.

So it starts to look a little bit kind of like middle dot and anterior doubt involvement. Um, but ultimately a lot depends on the exact incline. So I would guess if the incline is relatively shallow, it would still be kind of more or less the same thing as the flat pinch. It would still be mostly uh the three divisions of the peck.

you might get a little bit of anterior delt extra in there, but I wouldn't have expected it to be too much. But again, the problem with changing um planes of motion and going in between them. So we tend to talk a lot about scapula plane. So people are like, Okay, well I've I've got I'm starting out with my frontal plane, uh out to the side, I'm gonna compare that with a shoulder width uh kind of grip sized plane and people are mostly happy that halfway in between those two is a scapular plane.

Um and it's kind of like a recognized uh concept. In contrast, if you start on a flat bench and you're doing transverse plane, pushing upwards And then you start to incline, you're then moving closer towards the frontal plane from that transverse plane position.

And that isn't a recognized kind of thing. It's like we don't have a name like scapula that we do for um the uh kind of uh sort of equivalent between sagittal and frontal. So But as you are going from transverse to frontal, you will start to gradually introduce uh uh muscles that would be more

um accustomed to working in the frontal plane, which is of course the middle delt and the anterior delt. So you're just gonna get a little bit of uh those coming in, but as I say, uh unless the incline is really steep, I wouldn't expect it to be very much. Yeah, that makes sense. So m going on moving on with exercise selection. So chest work, you're saying you're pretty happy with what we're seeing here chest wise.

I just think it's really interesting the way you structured that because as I say, you've got uh three exercises, two the first two of which are definitively doing very different things. Yeah. And the third is uh uh an exercise that is essentially uh performing another physiological function which is to allow higher levels of recruitment even though he's already done four sets for that entire muscle group. So physiologically it's really, really interesting design of that arrangement of exercise.

The next um three exercises then are kind of back exercises. And we've got close grip uh chins, so we're getting a sagittal plane um pulling exercise, uh, which is really cool because we're gonna get um a lot of posterior delt there, we're gonna get a lot of um thoracic lat. and then it pairs that with a bent over barbell row, which is a very transverse plane. Now

It is fundamentally different. It is getting a lot of uh different uh kind of uh sort of ex uh stimulus, but it's not my it wouldn't have been my preferred. I would have probably gone with a wide grip pull down. Um but ultimately that's kind of what he's chosen to do. Um and then the deadlift I think is probably not the best idea at this point. Um I think really for me uh a close grip pull down, wide grip pull down plus a um

A a Kelso shrug probably would have been my preferred selection. But ob o obviously I mean that selection of three exercises is gonna get some similar coverage. Uh but I think lum lumbar lats may be you're gonna be over relying on the um on on the kind of the secondary effects of the barbell row and the secondary effects of the deadlift.

really being primary target primar primarily targeting that area, they will use that muscle uh region a lot, but they won't be as targeted as a wide grip pull down would be. It is interesting having the deadlift there on that day. Obviously this is the more torso day, so he's got his lower body stuff on the upper deck. The thing is when you kind of when you look at deadlifters and or even just people deadlifting.

there is a very, very, uh, strong tendency for people to fall into either backlifting uh camps or leg lifting camps. And obviously anyone who looks at Dorian is gonna know without even needing to do any analysis that he's a back lifter. So you know, it's just obviously that's his strong point. So I think, you know, having the deadlift in there

All you would need to do is put it on a little bit of a block, um and immediately it would become a very, very back uh kind of targeted exercise in his particular case. And I'm guessing that's probably what he did.

The thing I dislike most about this torso, not this specific torso limb split, but a torso limb split in general, is there's always going to be some degree of overlap and generally that split is done as a four times per week plan. So you'll do torso limbs, day off, torso limbs, day off, day off. Sure. And what I like here is he's done it

it with a day a rest day in between each workout. So even if there is overlap, which there clearly is some overlap, for example with the triceps or, you know, with the deadlift, He's still got that day off in between those workouts and he's not doing it any more than two sets.

So we're assuming that there should be recovery by the time he's then hitting that next workout, even if there's some overlap. It's a similar thing we saw with the Mike Mensa plan, where Mensa was doing that two way split, but he was doing Work out, day off, work out, day off. And I think that's a really interesting way of using these two-way split plans is having that rest day in between.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean that's um I mean that's just kind of managing the the kind of the the fatigue that's building up with doing this kind of volume.

In terms of the next couple of exercises, I think it Probably again, not my preferred uh kind of starting point for Deltwork. I mean, I really liked Behind the Neck Press. I think that's a great starting point. Um

probably relatively similar involvement of anterior and middle delt. Um, but then he's going into um lateral razors. So he's kind of adding, okay, fine, an extra amount of middle delt work, which is again single joint, so you're gonna get more Doing the same thing you were doing with the same thing.

Same thing as doing with the chest, which is great. But I feel like my anterior adults are getting neglected a little bit. And then when I go to the final exercise, which is uh kind of leaning forward laterals, so essentially um rear adult flies. Yeah. Um I th that again feels like I'm now really doubling back on what I did before with the close grip chinnies and the bent over rows. I'm like, why do you need so much rear delt work and why haven't you got any anterior adult work?

So are you not satisfied with the the bench, the incline press? This is what I'm coming back to. So when I when I look at this program in in its entirety and so My my first pass of the analysis is is is largely ignoring what I know about the lifter. I mentioned obviously Dorian's tendency probably to be a back lifter in the deadlift'cause I think it's very relevant, but

My first pass is just kinda going, What would this program do for the average person who I don't know anything about their individual leverages? But when I get to the end of the programme and I look at it or end of this workout A and I look at it, I go, I can clearly see that whoever has written this programme is probably and if they know how they respond to exercise, which is almost, you know, a hundred percent certainty in this case, um

You would say they're probably going to be someone whose anterior delt probably does a lot of work in pressing exercises. Because there isn't much specific anterior delt work. it's relying on the pressing at the beginning. The what would we would look at as pre predominantly peck work, he's probably getting a lot of anterior adult stimulus from that and as a result doesn't feel the need to specify.

uh any further uh kind of work in that area. Whereas there's a lot of metal dot work by contrast. So I would look at this and go, This is someone who's identified that they need a lot of middle and probably posterior deltwork in order to get the physique that they want. Uh whereas anterior they don't need to w focus so much on because it automatically gets involved. The same thing you could argue for the lumbar lats. It's just like

This uh lifter knows that anything that that they do when they pull something, they immediately get lumber la activation. They don't and you can just look at the guy from the back and know that. Um but you know, it's gonna be something that they don't need to worry about. So this workout A, if if say this was being written for as a generic plan, not for Dorian but just for as a generic lifter.

Yeah. Then what are those tweaks you would make? Like it immediately we've mentioned the deadlift. So if in my mind it makes more sense to put that bent lateral, the the rear delt fly up with the back work. Well it's just not necessary. It's just not necessary. So you could you could do so if you go from the top, you would have your flat bench, you'd have your narrow grip, incline press.

And then you'd have your you'd you wouldn't do an incline fly, you'd probably do a f uh a flat bench fly for that third exercise. Then you'd go into uh as I said before, close grip pull down or chin, um, wide grip, pull down or chin, and then your third exercise there would you could do a read out fly, as you said. You could do a read.

And if you swap those, so you've got the close grip chin, you could turn that into a frontal plane pull down or or pull up, yeah. And then that transverse plane row, you turn that into a sagittal row. And we're I'd say we're a lot further ahead. Y yeah. So same idea. So either either a narrow grip pull down or or or a row is fine, a wide grip pull down obviously. But I I wouldn't go to the to the trouble of having that rear delt fly in there because I know I'm getting it in the

Um in the narrow grip row or pull down. I would choose to have a a a a Kelso shrug in there. I think that makes a much bigger difference to someone's physique. And maybe we're losing some of that with if we get rid of the deadlift. Yeah, exactly. Um and then So it follows that same format of using a smaller muscle mass exercise.'Cause I really like that. I love that format of finishing that little tricep for that muscle group with a smaller muscle mass exercise.

No, it's great. And then um then what we can do is um Then we can look at the final set of exercises and we've got I love the behind the neck press. I think it's a great starting point. Uh I think um ultimately the The side laterals isn't a a bad choice, but I would wanna do it last. Yeah, do it last and then put something in for the front delt in the middle.

then I would want a front delt focused press in the middle and I would obviously look for something probably um in the overhead range of motion. Now can either do the behind the neck press partial Yes. Out to the side. Or you can do it as a sedative plane press again, um as a partial overhead. Um either of those two options is fine, it's whichever is most comfortable, whichever is um easier to set up in the gym.

The way I would program that, given how much load one is usually gonna use with a behind the neck compared to sagittal, uh usually someone will use a bit more load behind the neck if they've been doing this exercise for a while. I would do exactly what you mentioned there, the behind the neck to begin. And then the next exercise would be using that same load and I'd just be doing a partial, that top partial. And that way you don't need to set up a new exercise, don't need to take too much load.

I think that's the easiest way. I agree. I think that's the easiest way. Even though it's nice to do different planes of motion, I think you're right. I think uh just sitting in the same um kind of apparatus and just changing the range of motion is probably the easiest way of managing that. Um then as we said uh the the the side laterals middle uh del uh kind of focused exercise single join um as the final of the three.

Um and that would probably be I think a really solid kind of programme that would work for most people most of the time. It wouldn't it wouldn't be just geared towards one person's um, you know, kind of uh strengths and weaknesses, as it were. Yep. Yep, yep. It's I think that's a very nice routine there.

In terms of the uh second workout, the workout B, um, so Here things are, you know, kind of uh different. He's really doing a lot less exercise variety for um for the for the lower body. I don't see a lot of uh variety there at all. I think that it's nowhere near as sophisticated as the upper body, uh kind of exercise selection.

I think that a barbell squat and a high squat are literally doing exactly the same thing. Not exactly, exactly in terms of everything else that's working, but in terms of quads, at least it's pretty much exactly the same thing. Technically speaking, he's followed that format of having that slightly more kind of isolated exercise second.

Yeah, if you like, but ultimately it's still a multi joint exercise. So, you know, it's not it's not really doing uh what we want. And um you know, there's no knee extension, which is terrible. I mean that's that's really a huge So off the bat, if we just swap out that hack squat for leg extension, then

Well I would just I would s get rid of the barbell back squat because honestly, um you know it's it's always gonna be harder and um you know, kind of uh to fit into a workout when you've got to spend so much time warming up. Um So you swap the hack squat and the barbell squat. So hack squat is now A one, and then we now get rid of the barbell squat and make that a leg extension.

Exactly. And I think that would suddenly make things a lot better. Um and then we've got a a leg curl. I don't remember whether you said it was seated or lined. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, again it's just one leg curl which is not amazing'cause it's impossible to get all of the hamstrings uh I'm assuming it's seated just based off the videos I've seen of him. So yeah.

So so so yeah, um not not great just having the one uh leg curl variation there. And then we've got the but again, I think that one I think just looking at this programme, that the reason why we've got so few exercises in this workout compared to the other one is that barbell back squat at the beginning.

Yeah. I mean it takes twenty minutes for a strong person to get to the point where they're happy with their work weight um and their movement patterns and everything is comfortable to be able to do work sets on a barbell back squat. You know, so y just like it chews up a third of your workout.

Well, especially if you've got a strong person like Dorian and you're doing set to eight, one of the one thing that I think is a huge problem that I'm seeing online is this idea that one should always train in the five or you know, four to six strip range or five to seven or whatever.

And I understand what people are saying from a stimulus standpoint, but then they're taking that and saying, Well, every exercise should be done in that r rep range and then you've got people doing squats or doing standing calf rays or doing deadlift or whatever and it's like Well, hold up. You need every single weight plate in the gym to be able to achieve that and it's gonna take you half an hour to set up that exercise. It's just not feasible a lot of the time.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I'm I'm I think really we've got to be pragmatic and look at the exercise and go, you know, how long does it take to warm up or get comfortable or steal all the plates in the gym or whatever it is that you need to do to make to make the mission happen?

You know, I I just contrast how long it used to take me to warm up to do my barber back squat sets. And I contrast that now with, you know, going to a uh really nice um leg press machine and doing s single leg leg presses in a really I um I I there's a fantastic leg press machine, forty five degree leg press machine in the gym that I'm in at the moment.

and it's huge. I feel like I disappear inside it. I mean it's like a car. I feel like I'm sitting in this gigantic m like piece of machinery. And it's so stable and so comfortable and so well. designed that, you know, I can do single leg uh work in that and it's a really heavy piece of kit, so you only need a small amount of weight and you're already working pretty hard with single leg stuff.

So honestly, I just go there and I just take a couple of, you know, kind of plates from wherever I can find them and straight away I'm within um two minutes I'm doing my work set. And that's just amazing, you know, for somebody who's obviously not interested in, you know, driving their squat up anymore like I was fifteen years ago.

Um, you know, now I can just get my m sort of uh quad work done very, very quickly and it's very, very uh convenient. So I would look at that and be like, Yeah Hack squat or leg press uh straight away would be what I would do, then the knee extension. Um, leg curl, I think you could do two different leg curls at this point. You could do um both uh lying and seated because you haven't had the twenty minute kind of warm up for your back squat. Um

Then standing calf race, fantastic. And that's it for the lower body. And that's pretty solid. You know. Um I don't I don't I don't I think that the barbell squat is doing a lot of harm in this workout by chewing up resources that it's not really giving much back for.

Yeah, especially with the deadlift on the other day. Like arguably if there's any sort of minor benefit you're getting, not from a quad perspective, but just from a general perspective, you're gonna be getting that with a deadlift as well. So I I don't I don't see the value in this heavy compound when you've got something like a hip hinge elsewhere.

So in terms of the arm work, he's got a standing barbell biceps coat And then he's followed that up with a one arm breach curl. So again, echoes of that idea of doing um, you know, kind of more muscle mass exercises first and smaller amounts second. Um Honestly, a barbell uh standing barbell curl with a preacher curl, they're not massively different. They are different depending on the incline of the preacher curl, if it's a very horizontal incline.

Okay, a little bit more biceps targeted, a little bit less brachyradialis. But honestly there are better combinations, I think. Uh yeah, I don't know if he stayed training at the same gym, but again, if I recall the videos I've seen him training, the biceps curl he's using is usually a a horizontal type machine. So it might be s significantly different enough here.

You know, I think at least if you're gonna do a preacher curl as as one of the exercises, then the other exercise I would kinda wanna really push towards the brachiradialist. So I'd wanna try and find something that has, you know, a cable curl maybe that has um more kind of um peak uh peak effort close to the top of the range of motion.

And then in terms of the tube triceps exercises, um, you know, okay, I mean if you're doing triceps extensions or sorry, triceps pushdowns in a standing position, you kind of that's that's most of the triceps trained pretty effectively. Um lying triceps extension is probably not really doing anything any different unless he's doing that single arm. I don't know whether he's doing that single arm or not. So

So really for me, um I don't I'm not there's nothing wrong re well, nothing wrong. Th there's You can see the you can see that there is variety of those arm exercises and there's they're d they're definitely moving in the direction of being good coverage, but they're not my

preferred exercises for achieving the same goal. How different my preferred exercises would be from that in terms of results I think would be uh relatively small. I mean you're talking about ten, twenty percent difference, but you know, it's not not like uh gigantic differences. It's it's okay, is what I'm saying.

Another thing I like about this format, we've obviously talked about this the third exercise is doing these muscle groupings or second or third exercise and and doing, you know, uh usually a single joint or or whatever the exercise might be. He's also doing that for a single set. So most of the exercises are done for two sets, but that last exercise is a single set. So he's he's actually throwing two different sort of tools at that exercise to increase or maintain mode in its recruitment.

The given that this is nineteen eighty five, the level of instinctual or um Yeah, instinctual understanding of how different exercises are doing different things and what's happening is extraordinary. You know, I mean like you have to bear in mind that the when this workout was designed Nobody knew anything about the physiology that we're talking about today. So the fact that you've got multiple exercises

um, that are doing different things. The fact that you've got a single joint uh l sort of s even single arm or single limb exercise going uh, you know, last to maximise recruitment. That, you know, is an extraordinary uh kind of instinctual understanding of what's happening. It's very, very fascinating to look at. Yeah. And again, this idea of having two or three exercises per muscle group, you know, obviously that's

It's very similar to the Steve Reeves plan we looked at, where Steve just had it all on one day and he's just done a single set of everything. And then Dorian's given us an example here of splitting it over two workouts and adding that second set. And obviously the the Mike Mensor plan we looked at again is a relatively similar format as well, two or three exercises per muscle group, usually two sets.

So it gives one an an example and understanding of how this same idea of trying to train a muscle group with those two to three exercises And you can choose whether you have them on one workout and do an AAA, or you can split it over two different workouts and do some kind of A B variation. But it shows you exactly how that can look in practice.

Yeah, no, this has been a really fascinating uh discussion because th this is very different from what we've seen before. Uh there's um aspect to it that I'm not a huge fan of. The frequency I think is a little bit on the low side. But in terms of exercise selection, construction of the actual combination of exercises, it's very, very uh advanced in terms of the instinctual understanding of how these different exercises are working. Amazing stuff.

The frequency, while you mentioned it is on the low side, even for some of those exercises done with a single set, he's still training them roughly what every what would this be, every four or five days? it's kinda scraping in there as on the very lowest end of what we would want to see. Well the thing is with the exercises that he is using single sets, uh, those are the um the the the kind of the the the function in the workout is carrier.

Yeah. What he's what he's doing literally is analogous to what we were talking about last week in terms of physiological drop sets because he's literally just picking exercise which is almost identical to the one that he's already done and then he's just applying a smaller muscle mass

um, you know, in that context, allowing himself to keep the recruitment high for the final set. So He's doing a better job than he would be if he were literally just keeping a uh same exercise and doing an extra set.

That's the important thing. So he's getting a better stimulus than say he's doing, say, two sets of uh bench press plus a set of flies and someone else is doing three sets of bench press. He's getting a better stimulus for the same uh peck muscle fibers than the person doing three sets of bench press. Ja. Yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at it. That that that last exercise is not there to necessarily provide new stimulus to new fibers that haven't been used earlier.

Is maintaining a high level of stimulus. yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n

So let's transition now into the topic you want to discuss with us, which is very related to what we've just been talking about with Dorian's plan. Do you want to introduce us? Yeah, so basically um what I'd like to talk about is this idea that or this comparison, if you like, between doing a uh program in which um the

uh selection for each muscle group is more limited. So for example, somebody is going to the gym and they just do close grip pull downs or close grip uh rows for the back and that's their only back exercise for the day. And they do a bunch of sets for that. And then they go back to the gym two or three days later and maybe they do

um, you know, white grip pulldowns and then they go to the gym two or three days later and they maybe do, I don't know, um, pullovers or something. So they're kinda doing different exercises every time they go to the gym and they're doing multiple sets each time they go. And that's a very classic Classic. It's very modern classic if you like, isn't it? So the eighties, nineties, two thousands way of training. Yeah. Not classic in our sense, but classic in the kind of modern sense.

Um, now recently we've kind of tried to um sort of push a revival of the sort of silver era way of approaching the same problem, which is instead of doing, you know, say three sets of each of those exercises, A, B, C format, it's to basically just do one set of each exercise in every single workout. So full body A if you like. So it would be again, um, narrow grip row, um white grip pull down and then a pullover or whatever. Um, you know, sort of uh e in each workout.

And essentially what we've seen in the last uh sort of two or three weeks is um people starting to try to make the case that the A B C format of doing, say, two or three uh sets of indi of single exercises is better than doing this kind of multiple exercise approach every workout. And I just want to walk people through exactly what is um happening physiologically and show why it's impossible to make that case. Because it is literally impossible to make that case.

So if we start um by saying what is happening with um the multiple exercise protocol. So we go into the gym and we do three different exercises for a for a particular muscle group and what's happening is that Um obviously there is going to be a different set of muscle fibers at the top end of the motinic pool that are being activated by each of those three exercises. And that's happening because of the voluntary activation deficit that exists.

and the neuromechanical magic principle which um preferentially uses muscle fibers which have better leverage earlier as we progress through Hennemann's size principle sequence. So essentially what's happening is that um in the case of the narrogate row, there are fibers that are better suited to

Wide grip pulldowns that simply just don't get activated because of this voluntary activation deficit. In the case of the wide grip pull down there are fibres that are better suited towards sagittal plane pulling that don't get activated. So ultimately it's just you leave out whatever is least useful in terms of muscle fiber activation.

And what that means is that when we uh do a multiple exercise protocol in each workout, we go to the gym, we do actually activate each of those uh sets of fibers. Um And there's a lot of overlap lower down the motor unit pool, but at the very top there's a different set of fibers that are being activated and therefore loaded. Now what you're therefore going to get is across those three uh say for example you're doing single set.

If you do a single set of each exercise, you're going to get essentially a three set stimulus for the bottom eighty or ninety percent of the muscle. And you're getting a one set stimulus for each of the top segments of the motinit pool in each case. Is that making sense?

Cool. So basically that's gonna happen every single time we go to the gym and because we're doing, say, three workouts a week or even every other day, if we want to push the uh kind of bounds of of possibility here, then ultimately what we're gonna see is uh very rapid uh growth of our overlap

areas, uh the bottom sort of eighty, ninety percent, and um slower but still very meaningful growth'cause three single sets a week is still pretty meaningful growth. You get meaningful growth of two single sets a week on separate days of course. Um Then uh of course we are gonna see growth in both uh regions. We're just gonna see more rapid growth at the bottom end of the um kind of motivated pool than at the top. Okay, fine.

Now let's look at what happens if I do a um A B C protocol where I'm uh doing um, say, literally three different exercises um across the week and only one exercise per workout.

So I go to the gym and I do three sets of uh narrow grip rows, and then I go to the gym on say Wednesday and I do three sets of um whatever it might be, bike grip pull downs, and then my third exercise of the week, you know, uh pullovers or whatever. And What's happening there is that again, my eighty percent my eighty percent um across the week, so thinking about the fibres that are shared across those three exercises, my eighty percent across the week

It's going to behave exactly the same way as my eighty percent across the week is in the previous programme that I described with multiple exercises on every single workout. It's no difference. They're literally identical workouts in that respect. What's different is the top ten, twenty percent of the muscle. In that scenario, my top twenty percent of the muscle is going to get three sets on Monday and then it's not going to get trained again until the following Monday. That's maintenance.

That's maintenance volume. I mean we literally got three or four studies showing that that is maintenance volume. There is no scenario in which you can argue it's anything other than going to stay exactly where it is. It's not going to get any bigger, it's not going to get any smaller, it's just not going to do anything.

And that's the problem that you get with doing a an A B C type format. You are literally going to have atrophy happening across the week uh that negates the hard work that you've done at the top end of the motor unit pool. There's a study where they looked at that it sort of they had people do flat ben what was it, flat bench and inclined bench. They did either two sets of each once a week or they did F the two to three sets once a week of each or four to six sets of one

um or the other. I believe that's what it was. And the combination group where they did two or three sets of each, they performed the worst. And I think that's a a fairly nice depiction of kind of what you're explaining here, that if you're just doing, you know, two or three sets once a week of that particular exercise, you're not getting the benefit of doing different exercises because you're just losing that unique whatever the activation is of that exercise.

Correct. You need to have um a high frequency if you're gonna do small volumes of individual exercises, uh multiple individual exercises. in every workout, otherwise it's not gonna work. Um I mean that's that that's kind of the combination that that is the the winning combination really. But

Well I'm trying to explain here, the c the way I'm trying to explain this is to show people that you have to you have to look at uh two separate concepts when you're thinking about the effect of an exercise. You have to look at the overlap. that that exercise has with other muscle uh other exercises for the same muscle.

And then you have to look at the non overlap.'Cause that's what we're really saying. So and the thing is, when critics argue against this idea, they actually accept the principle because they will say, Ah, well if you do multiple exercises you know, for the same muscle group, then you don't maximise the stimulus for the fibers that are used in that first exercise. I'm like, absolutely, that's totally true. But that's the point. Because you're not

training those of the fibers that you're neglecting in that workout. Um So you're just going to put yourself onto maintenance volume for those fibers. I mean that that's the point. That the the critiques of this particular concept or this training method actually accept the fact that different exercises train different muscle fibers.

I mean, just to be clear, let me just kinda go drop down a level and and spell this out. So the way that the brain controls the muscle. is to uh allocate the musfiers into motor units. So essentially when we talk about motor unit recruitment, what we're saying it's not just a magical spell that we cast on the internet and say, oh, motor unit recruitment.

'Cause that's what I hear people using terminology like as if it's kind of oh if I say the words motor unit recruitment then it sounds like I know what I'm talking about and it sounds like you know I'm I'm saying something meaningful. Motor unit recruitment literally just means that you're switching motor units on.

Um and motor units are essentially groups of musulfiers connected to a motor neuron. So when you say that you're recruiting a motor unit, you're saying that you're switching groups of musulfiers on. That's literally, you know, the kind of the the thing that we're talking about. So we recruit a motor unit. and we switch that group of muscle fibers on

If the shortening velocity of the muscle at the point when you switch those muscle fibers on is slow, then those muscle fibers will experience high enough mechanical tension to experience a hypertrophy stimulus. That's it. That mean that is literally how the hypertrophy model works.

Now you can argue finessing around a few small areas, but ultimately those are largely relevant in comparison with either recruitment um or and or the force velocity relationship that determines the fibre mechanical tension. If you're saying, and the critics have said this, if you're saying that um the use of a single exercise for multiple sets in a workout applies a um, you know, high dosage of mechanical tension stimulus to

you know, all of these fibers. But if you change exercises and do three separate exercises for the same muscle group, then you don't get uh the same A dosage of mechanical tension stimulus applied to the same fibers. The only way that can happen is by different motor units getting recruited and different fibres getting activated. You can't do it by

any other method. You can't change the force velocity relationship. You can't change the amount of tension the fibers are experiencing. They're either on or off. Um now people get really, really bogged down in trying to argue that motorit firing rates or rate coding can change the amount of mechanical tension that muscle fires are experiencing. They don't.

Oh it doesn't for reasons that most people don't understand, which is that the level of rate coding necessary to cause tetanus in a muscle fibre changes according to the oxidative potential of that fibre. So if you look at very slow muscle fibers, um so people will go, Oh, well, you know

you know, you activate muscle fibers at the bottom end of the motionic pool during daily life, but oh no, the rate coding's not high enough for them to experience mechanical tension. We need uh, you know, kind of max effort.

uh in order for those fibers at the bottom end of the motor unit pool to achieve um high levels of mechanical tension. So some people will go'cause I will often argue that walking across the room maximizes the mechanical tension of the low threshold motor unit muscle fibers. So you're getting a hypertrophy stimulus on those fibers in day to day life.

And you don't uh need to have rate coding up in the kind of thirties in order to make that happen. And people go, Oh no, no, no, you can't you can't do that. Those fibers aren't experiencing maxim maximum mechanical tension'cause rate coding is not high enough because your motin at recruitment level's not high enough.

And like you're not looking at the rate coding necessary to recr uh to achieve tetanus in the average fibre. You want to know what the rate coding is necessary to achieve tetanus in a slow twitch.

highly oxidative muscle fiber at the bottom end of the motor unit pool. What's that number? And they look at you as if you say, well they're all the same, aren't they? I'm like, no they're not. You can get tetanus in a um slow twitch muscle fiber at the very bottom end of the motor unit pool at five to eight hertz. Which is nothing.

You know, you're you're gonna be at like twelve to fifteen before you even know it. So really, when we're talking about how rate coding affects um mechanical tension, it's almost negligible.

in the the range of uh speeds that we're talking about in strength training, it's almost negligible. Because ultimately, as soon as you kind of get to a certain level of recruitment, most of the fibers kind of a little bit back from that in the motor unit pool in the Heniman size principle sequence, they're already maxed out. because they don't need high levels of rate coding to max out. But when you're talking about, oh, we need like uh, you know, sort of fifty

uh hertz to max out the uh mechanical tension of high threshold motor units. Well yeah, you do. But you don't need that any anything like that for everything lower down. It's it's it's completely different universe. And that's why rate coding doesn't really work

as hard as people think it does uh to affect mechanical tension in the context of um strength training at the velocities we're interested in. If you want to talk about high velocity movements and sporting situations, yeah, rate coding is massively important. But for what we're talking about in context of bodybuilding, it's pretty much irrelevant.

So again, the only thing you can really do in the context of um strength training to affect how much stimulus the muscle fibers of a particular region experience is either switch them on or off. That's it. There's there's nothing else around the edges that you can really do. As I say, it's finessing really rather than actually uh it's just making physiology a bit messier than it than it is. But oh d sorry, a bit messier than it I'm presenting it as.

Um ultimately, you know, the model I've presenting here is is very close to being pretty much exactly what's going on. Um and as a result, you you can't really say that fibers are somehow being not trained fully but they are not also

Atrophying afterwards because you haven't trained it. It's like you you can't say that you're getting more stimulus for some fibers, but equally they're not um atrophying. That they're th it's binary. It's either you're either switching them on and training them or you're not. It's pick one.

And that's what I'm seeing the critics at the moment trying to do. They're trying to have their cake and eat it. They're trying to go, Oh well, you know, with multiple sets of a single exercise, I'm getting full stimulus on all all the fibers that this exercise trains. But I'm also training all the other fibers, all the other exercises, train, I'm just not training them as effectively. No, that's impossible. Absolutely impossible. You can't do that. That is physiologically impossible.

It's like the fibers are either being trained or they're not. Pick one.

Because ultimately if a critic is going, Okay, so um this one exercise actually trains or at least somehow activates and loads but not very, you know. eff as effectively as another exercise. If an exercise is training all the muscle fibers in the muscle, which is what the critics I think are trying to argue, then you'd actually only need one exercise for every single muscle, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

You don't need to change the exercise in the next workout. Just pick, you know, one exercise for every muscle group. Nobody believes that that would ever work. So if you think that multiple exercises are actually necessary for a single muscle group, because

if they're not actually doing the same things as each other, which I think most people fundamentally accept, then do them in every single workout. Otherwise you're just atrophying the fibre and you're ending up in maintenance volume for um, you know, some of the fibers at the top end of the motor unit pool. I genuinely don't understand why people uh are are fighting this particular point. It really is very shocking to me.

No, it it's you know, I'm struggling'cause I'm trying to think of ways to play devil's advocate here and at least try to do the counter argument justice and there's just no logic to it. Like I'm actually really struggling to think of any way to present it in a in a way that makes any sense at all. Because there's so many holes that every single turn it's like well that doesn't make sense and that doesn't make sense and that doesn't make sense. So th it's just I I don't know a way to present it.

Exactly. And I'm I'm suffering the same thing'cause I'm trying to find different ways of explaining it in a hope that people who have been persuaded by uh you know, the the the critics uh of this uh of this idea, you know might understand better. And I'm kind of tying myself in knots trying to find different ways of explaining. But ultimately that that's basically where we're at. Um you know, and I I read very carefully what these uh critics say and I try to find

the logic in the in the sequence. And we've sent uh you know kind of screenshots backwards and forwards, we're sort of slowly going through and some some of the critiques are actually very useful uh useful, very um helpful.

in the sense that they number the paragraphs of their of the kind of the the sequence of their logical arguments. So we kinda go, Well one follows uh sorry, two follows one, but then three doesn't follow two and we kinda go backwards and forwards going, you know, th that's where the that's where the argument breaks down. You can kind of see that there's like this kind of chain of argument that we're following and going, Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Okay, that's where it breaks That's right.

And then you're like, Okay, so why is that happening? Why do they think that's the case? Um and you know, there doesn't seem to be uh the information available to help us um, you know, bridge that gap at the moment. But, you know, anyway, so

So that was yeah, that was the um that was the thing that I wanted to uh spend time discussing. Um one thing I wanted to throw back to you and um sort of just very quickly cover is this idea that Um if we are going to do multiple exercises for a single muscle group in a workout

Um, what can we do to make that process easier?'Cause some people from a practical perspective have said, Okay, I can understand the physiology. I understand that this is a good way of training compared to just going in and doing two or three sets of single exercises.

Um, but I find switching between exercises takes me a lot of time. I find that I end up spending more time in the gym. I don't want to do that. So how can I make that process smoother? What can I do to, you know, kind of speed up that that um switching of exercises and Um I thought we could perhaps just brainstorm a few ideas and get uh that open, uh that that idea to uh, you know, kind of uh more people.

Yeah, I think we introduced it well with the Dorian plan when we were talking about the overhead pressing and we were saying, Well, you could do the behind the neck and an i a convenient sex uh second option here would be a top partial behind the neck style. Totally. Yeah, totally.

'Cause what we've done there is ultimately we've made a small compromise.'Cause you even said you're like, Oh, you know, like I I would like this sagittal plane press. Yeah. And it's like, Yes, if we were trying to optimize it and and maximise everything we could, okay, this is m potentially a better option. But if we're saying, well, how can we just shift it towards biasing something a little bit different without adding a whole lot of setup time, then that would be a great option.

You know, another and you know, this is something often when I train with people in person, uh and you know, they have done gonna say this exact same example I've been mentioning for years, which is going from a chest supported row to a Kelso shrug. Yes. Exactly the same idea. You literally you already sat in the piece of equipment that's going to

serve as your, you know, kind of next exercise and you just adjust the weight to whatever you need to do and you move on to the next exercise. It's so convenient when you set them up in that order. Yeah. Well I would say there's a continuum, right? So at one end of the continuum we've got well you've you can change e like um the equipment, you can like the entire setup changes.

And then in the middle of that continuum, we've got, well, you stay in the same station, but maybe your setup or the or the weight changes. There's some minor adjustment you need to make. And then at the end, we've got, well, you stay in the same station, you don't even need to change your setup, you just change execution.

And that's the one that's gonna have the smallest difference in in to biasing different muscle regions, but it's the one that's gonna be the most convenient. So and there's sometimes where actually it'll work very well. But you know, one example would be like a a pull-up or a chin-up. So you can effectively use the same load, you do the the stronger version first, you do a chin-up, so a sagittal plane chin-up.

And then you do a frontal plane pull up. And use the same well, actually I in that instance I'd probably do the the weaker one first, but you can use the same load. You're just gonna change repetitions you get slightly. And that's it. It's not taking any additional time that if you're doing two sets of chin up.

And you know the example you you gave with a chest supported row, that's easy. You could even do if you wanted to do a a a wide grip row and then you wanted to do a statittal plane row, you could do that as well. So it's realistically you could look at just about every single muscle group. and you could find a station where you can do two exercises. Like cables are amazing. Like if you're doing

curls. You can do a reverse grip top partial curl. You can do a behind the back curl. It's very easy to do armwork just using a cable and making it more brachi radialis or more bisbrachi. So my encouragement to people when they're coming up with this idea that, hey, I don't know if I can spend that long in the gym, is don't think about setting up a whole new exercise, a whole new station. Think about the exercises you're doing and how can you use that same station and just make a small

Small adjustment to it. You know, maybe you're doing a flat bench. Okay, let's just do one set very wide grip and then one set close grip. You don't need to change anything else.

I was just thinking about how again, this is um like when we talked about Dorian's plan, uh a lot of the really interesting um stuff was in the upper body uh Yeah. Also really section the when it came to the lower body and um I mean okay the arms were similarly interesting, but

we probably would have just selected different exercises. Um but for the lower body it was very uh kind of um minimal in comparison and terms of exercise var variability. And I think the often the the the same issue exists here, which is that For upper body stuff you can kind of do these sequences where you can go straight from one exercise to another and essentially be in the same station, um and ultimately just train a slightly different region of muscle.

Lower body is more difficult. I'm struggling to think of examples where um this can be done. But Simplest is calf for like gastrozenia. So you can do toes in, toes out, neutral toes. But you can also do that in your leg press. Exactly. You would see Switzerland doing. pressure. So I can actually do multiple things there.

uh harder with um hamstrings work'cause you do kind of need the two different leg curve variations. But again, um, you know, that's that's probably one of those things and adductors, abductors, uh glutes, that kind of stuff again is start to get a bit Kind of tricky.

Yeah, it does a little bit. I mean obviously most abductor abductor machines will do both. So at least if you pop them together, it's not like y you're kinda getting two exercises in in one in a sense. You're not having to go find a new machine. Um Your your your Western civilization privilege is showing there. I definitely don't experience that in the part of the world. Machines are not combo machines, okay, there you go. Yeah.

I had a client this week, an Aussie client, who's got a pec deck that does not turn into a reverse pec deck. And I was just like, What is going on? I didn't even know they existed where you kinda Same same same same same for same for me. Yeah. I've not seen one of those double v double excises in a very long time. Not since um not since uh When travelling.

Uh I guess other ways to make it work for lower body, it could be as simple as say you're doing a glute bridge or hip thrust. Yeah. Like if you're gonna do multiple sets, well, arguably you could do one set with a normal foot position, then one set with your toes further pointed out, feet wider apart.

Right. So yes, is it going to be the the best exercise choice for biasing different regions of the glutes? Maybe not. But is it going to start to shift it in that direction? Obviously it will a little bit. So I do think you're a little bit more limited with lower body, but I do think there's still some easy enough options, especially if you're gonna be doing multi sets. Like if you're gonna do multiple sets of a stiff leg deadlift or um, you know, stiff leg grap pull,

Okay, you could do one set stiff leg, you can do one set slight bed knees, Romanian, deadlift and and get something slightly different out of that. Like there's easy enough tweaks you can make to it won't be perfect, but to sh push it a little bit in one direction.

Yeah, absolutely. I think those are the kind of um compromises that you can uh kinda look at if you're really, really struggling to um you know, go the full distance if you like and and do fundamentally different exercises in each case. Another thing that I've uh I think is causing problems for people is that they think they need to do a billion warm up sets before every single exercise.

This I think I just want to kind of make a an observation here, which is One of my major criticisms of um strength and conditioning and the fitness industry in general is that people complicate things that are not actually complicated and then they ignore um complexity that actually exists.

And it's'cause they don't do the reading to see where the complexity really exists. And so they have hugely complicated, for example, periodized routines, massively complicated training splits, and actually it's doing um you know less effective uh kind of you know producing less effective results than um a simpler program that uh maybe recognises the underlying physiological complexities that do exist.

Um and I think one of those things that people get really wrapped up in because it's one of those things that straining condition coaches and uh bodybuilding influencers can see happening is this idea of doing particular con um sort of

combinations of warm up repetitions as so like y you can even see this in some of the textbooks. They're like, oh, you need to do, you know, ten reps of this load and then go up to do eight reps of this load. I'm like, honestly, it's doing zero. Absolutely zero. Um The actual warm up in terms of muscle temperature is happening in a cardiovascular uh kind of section of the uh workout earlier. Um when you're doing multiple repetitions for a

uh for an exercise that's doing zip when it comes to actually warming the muscle. And so really you're just feeling um the weight and then eventually uh getting comfortable with it and then eventually creating a post activation potentiation effect just before you do your main set. That's it.

So I'm literally going to the gym and I'm sitting down in the apparatus that I'm gonna use um and I'll do a rep with a lightweight to make sure that none of my limbs have fallen off in my sleep and then I'll do another weight, another kind of heavier weight to start to feel like it

you know, um, actually pushing and then I'll do one post activation repetition. Um post activation potentiation repetition just before I do my main set and that's it. That's well that's what I'm doing. Um, you know, and um, you know, people say, Oh no, you're gonna get injured doing that. I'm like Okay. Check back in five years because I've been doing this for about fifteen years now, so it's not any different.

But, you know, I think that's something else that people can look at is uh the number of warm up repetitions that they're doing. Um, do they really need to be doing a ton of warm up reps before every single exercise? Probably not. Well especially if you're not sure. Is someone's going towards what we've just mentioned there where they're doing effectively almost the same exercise as making this slight adjustment. You're doing a top partial instead of a full ROM overhead press or whatever it is.

or you're doing a Celso after do after doing a chest supported row. Like no one's going to argue surely. Maybe some people will, but I don't think many people are going to argue you need to do your warm-up sets for your Celso after doing a neutral grip chest supported row. Like that just doesn't really follow the logic test, right?

So at that point it's like, well, if you're doing whatever your warm up set or warm up routine is for the multi set row you were going to do, you're not adding anything new if you're just turning one of those chest supported rows into a calso.

Same with the overhead press. So i even if someone wants to stick with their however many sets of one up sets that they're choosing to do, if you're doing kind of that variation we've just discussed, it doesn't change anything. I personally like I I was travelling a few weeks ago

I went to a new gym and I did a full body fifteen to twenty exercises, single set of everything. I didn't do a single warm-up set. There was one or two machines where I just had to like make sure that it was adjusted correctly. I did like one repetition to make sure it fit and then I just did my work set. And, you know, I was just doing sets of I set it at a low that I thought I'd probably get about ten repetitions out, end up usually getting sort of eight to fifteen reps out.

And nothing hurt. I didn't get injured. Everything felt fine. And that was, you know, single set, no warm up sets. I was done in forty five minutes. And that was a, you know, pretty comprehensive, like I said, what, seventeen sort of exercises or whatever it was. Full body. And I'm not saying everyone needs to go and do no warm-up sets. Obviously, you've just described that you do do some warm-up sets and certainly.

More like warm up more like warm up reps rather than sets. I mean that's the that's the point. I think if we kind of got people to think about warm up reps instead of warm up sets, they would stop thinking that the set is somehow doing something, because the set is doing nothing. literally doing nothing. So, you know, I do literally a rep, as I say, to make sure that nothing has kind of you know gone horribly wrong in my sleep.

And then I do another repetition which feels like I'm actually pushing the weight. And then I do a final repetition which feels like a post-activation potentiation rep. So it's almost my work.

If you're doing those single refs, you don't need to be waiting between them. Yeah, like people think, Oh, you're gonna wait a minute, two minutes between your warm up sets. Like f for what purpose? If you're doing one or two warm up refs, okay, go heavier, that feels good. Go heavier, that felt good, do your Probably fifteen seconds. Fifteen seconds I would say. Exactly. To process the information and make sure I'm happy and and that's it. I'm I'm I'm in there.

Load and go. Yeah. There's no there's no kind of um this is what machines really um in addition to allowing us to train muscle groups, um, that it's much more difficult to train with free weights. This is really the massive advantage of machines because as I say, when I was actually doing a lot of barbell uh bike squatting uh say fifteen, twenty years ago, um this is uh not something that I would say is possible.

You can't do that with with a free weight complicated exercise. It take it took me twenty minutes to go from empty bar all the way up to my work weight.

And it just is a massive investment of time and energy. If you want to get good at that, that's what you have to do. Fine, that's the rule. And the same thing really to a lesser extent with um weighted pull ups. I would work my way up in weight and I'd be making sure that nothing hurt and I'd get all the way up to my there's no way on earth I could jump straight in and start doing

you know, kind of uh super heavy uh weighted pull-ups or dips or something like that. It's just not gonna happen. I would say probably ten to fifteen minutes of warm up for those. Um twenty minutes plus for for warming up for s squats and deadlifts and things.

Um, but what we're talking about is completely different from that. You know, it's totally and utterly different. And if there is an exercise in your plan that you're doing at the moment that takes you twenty minutes to warm up for, then seriously consider swapping it out for something that doesn't. Yeah, it what's the purpose of you using that exercise?

Unless of course you are training to get better at that exercise. Fine. I mean that's a separate goal. But we're not talking about that, we're talking about bodybuilding.

Yes. Yes. Exactly. And that brings us back to what the point I made in the Dorian plan where I was saying so many people I'm seeing online are saying don't ever do more than five or six repetitions And again I understand physiologically why people are making that statement, but in the context of what we're talking about here, if we're using any multi joint exercise and we're saying do your four to five repetitions

you're going to feel best doing a couple of warm up sets. You just will. And is that worth it? Is it worth those two warm up sets that you need to do your set of five compared to one warm up repetition or two warm up repetitions you might need to do your set of ten.

I think in the context of this more sort of maximalist type routine we're talking about, where you might have eight, 10, 12, 15, 20 different exercises, I just don't think it's feasible to do those sets of five and and double or triple your warm-up time. Yeah, I mean I I think it varies between exercises, I think it varies between people. I think for me I can get away with sixes and sevens without really changing the amount of warm up reps I do.

I think six for me is definitely the cutoff. Like that's where I see it really change when I go below six. Six and seven is fine for me. Um that i that isn't a problem at all. Uh I think For lower body, um, I mean I really struggle to go heavier than eight on calf razors, for example. Uh it just doesn't really click for me. I find that's really difficult. I my toes start really hurting.

um when I do when I do super heavy calf raises. Um but then yeah, anyway. So um so yeah, I think there's gonna be a bit of excise uh uh selection issues there. But, you know, I mean I think it is important to recognize that everything that you're doing in the workout for a given muscle group is going to contribute to post workout fatigue. So if you are

trying to do, say, fours or fives because she's trying to limit post work appetite, fantastic. I mean that that's totally true. But If you're then adding on a whole bunch of extra repetitions that you're doing in the warm up to get to the point where you're comfortable with that four or five work set, then are you gonna end up in more or less the same place that you would do if you just did a six, seven or an eight?

Um without those extra warm up repetitions. I don't know. Um obviously this is gonna be something that people are gonna have to figure out for themselves. Yeah.

Yeah. But again, the time issue is the point you're making, which is that, you know, if we're just interested in time because we want to get through an extra couple of exercises and push towards what might be considered a more maximalist type routine, then, you know, ultimately uh we are looking to reduce that time and a six or a seven, eight, maybe even a ten is gonna be a better choice.

Yeah. I mean my biggest thing with that is give it a go. You know, all I hear so many people saying it can't do it, can't do twenty exercises, it's too much, I will never be able to get it done. It's like well Hang on, follow an intelligently designed maximalist plan and just see how you feel. Because it's the feedback I hear from people is generally that that's their preferred way of training once they give it a go.

I think a gateway way for people to get into if they're really sceptical is to start with a full body A B. and do, say, ten or eleven exercises in each of those workouts that is essentially the Maximalist program of say twenty or so exercises split in half. And they start with that and once they get to the point where that workout is taking them twenty minutes

then maybe consider having a go at, you know, combining it and seeing how that feels. I mean, I think that would be a really cool way to start. If somebody is really, really skeptical or really nervous about trying to do that or it just they've tried it once and they just felt it took them, you know, ten years to complete, then okay, fine. Go back to a full body A B and do the smaller versions um and see whether you can get that time down to say twenty or so minutes.

and then twenty five minutes and then um you know combine them and see if see if that works for you. I think that would be the way to approach it from a practical perspective if if trying to do twenty or so exercises in a single workout just kind of blows your mind initially. Um And honestly. Some people may just do the A B and sta stay there. I mean that's kind of where where I tend to to live. I mean I tend to just be in that zone where I'm doing

eight to ten exercises and then I do a different uh eight to ten exercises or mostly a different eight to ten exercises the following session and then I go back to the original workout and I just go A B all the time. And I love training like that because it's so much you know, kind of easier, uh um and it really occupies very little time. And I've got other things I wanna do. So And you know if you do give that a go

Obviously when people tend to do A B splits like that, they tend to add additional sets. Yeah. So what we're saying in that situation is look, if you if you wanna stick with A B and you wanna add multi sets, by all means you can do that. But

in g using that as a as a testing method of what you've mentioned, stick with single sets and then once you've done, you know, those eight to ten exercises, single sets and like you said, you're getting them done in twenty five minutes and you're feeling good. then that's where you can test it with single sets for that full workout routine.

Totally, totally. I mean yeah, I mean there's a number of ways of of of of slicing and dicing it really. I mean, some people may say, Well, um actually I really like the um the A B split because it means I'm not using the same movement pattern every time. It means that my joints are a little bit happier. Um cool. You could if you wanted to, um, push up to two sets on each uh occasion. It's got a very busy gym and it's just not feasible to use too much equipment.

Absolutely. I mean there's all kinds of practical read but so there's l a number of ways of slicing and dicing it, but ultimately Um full body A B is the maximum uh kind of length that you can go without doing an exercise. You can't do full body A B C. That's not gonna happen. It doesn't work. Full body A B works because You're always getting um muscles uh muscle regions trained inside their uh kind of zone of um, you know, kind of uh Minimum frequency you're calling it.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Cool. Awesome.

I think that was everything we wanted to say on um the uh exercise selection stuff. Um I had one more thing I wanted to mention. Um can we move on to that now? Ja, absolut.

Awesome. So basically there is this is a ex this is still an exercise selection concept, so it's all part of the same kind of discussion. It's just um a a separate aspect of it. So Recently, um well not recently, but in the last kind of maybe six to nine months there's been a lot of um people arguing against the idea of neuromechanical matching as a explanatory model for how the brain chooses which muscles and muscle regions or even muscle fibers to use in an exercise.

What I want to do is just answer a couple of the popular criticisms and explain why they have to be wrong. They can't possibly be right.

So firstly. Very quickly, uh before I move on to the main one, um just wanna uh notice uh that or Observe that when people say that there is no um research into neuromechanical matching in humans, that is an incorrect statement. There are nine direct studies um assessing neuromechanical matching in humans and they have all shown that neuromechanical matching happens.

You will find that some fitness influencers say that there aren't any studies. I've literally done a table. You can see the table in multiple places on my social media showing those references of those nine uh studies that have deliberately assessed neuromecronic matching happening in humans.

Before that there were a whole bunch of studies in animals, um, and then that obviously led into the human research later on. So it's not true to say that there aren't any um studies of neumechemical in humans. There are, there are at least nine to my knowledge. Um

Conversely, there are zero studies, to my knowledge, that have assessed any other idea. So when somebody says, Oh, well, I think that it's multiple factors that determine which muscle fibers are being used by the brain, okay, show me which study you're relying on to make that statement.

There aren't any. You can't you can't. You're literally just waving your hands in the air and going, Well, I think it's multifactorial. Okay, well show me the study that shows it's multifactorial then, because you can't. Or they'll say, Oh, I think it's the active length tension relationship. Okay, well show me the study that's assessed

where the brain or how the brain decides which part of the active length tense relationship um muscle fibers should be activated upon. Because you can't show me that study because it doesn't exist. So th what they're doing is on the one hand they are making incorrect statements about the availability of literature supporting neuromechanical matching, because they're saying there isn't any and there's nine, nine studies in humans, multiple studies in animals plus nine studies in humans.

And then they are applying zero requirement for any evidence for their own claims And saying, Oh well we think it's this okay, where are your references then? And they'll show a reference that has no actual intention of assessing a motor control model in humans. It will literally be a study that's

uh examine some aspect of motor unit uh sorry, motor control, uh in a specific context, uh, in order to further advance how motor learning works. It doesn't actually present a model. It literally just has one kind of facet of how motor learning and motor unit control works. And they'll say, Oh we we're referencing this. And like, what does that show? Does it have a model? Does it have a scheme? Does it show you how the brain works? No, it doesn't.

And so they're applying totally different require um sort of um requirements, if you like, or evidence thresholds for their model, which is zero'cause they don't even have a model. And on the other hand, they literally just pretend that there is no evidence supporting neuron clinic magic. It's very disingenuous and it's very, very uh indicative of people's levels of honesty, I guess, that they're prepared to do that.

You know, I mean nobody that I've seen has criticized neuromecolic matching and actually gone through all nine studies and showed them why they disagree with every single one. They literally just pretend that those studies don't exist and I just keep posting them and just keep ignoring them.

And that's that's really disingenuous. I mean that's kind of where we're at with this disagreement regarding neuromechanic magic. So that's the first thing that I want to address. There is a ton of data. I've literally posted it a hundred times. If you're ignoring it or your favourite influencer ign is ignoring it, that's on you. That's no longer my problem. Or it never was my problem really, as far as I'm concerned, but

You can't even pretend it's my problem at this point. So the other thing I wanted to address is this idea that um the active length tension relationship plateau can influence where the brain sends muscle activation. So let me just Explain exactly what that idea

First of all, let me just recap what neuromechanical matching says and then let's compare and contrast uh what an idea would work how an idea might work with active length tension plateau. So in terms of neuromechanical matching, basically what that says is that the brain

selectively or preferentially um activates muscle fibers in regions that have better leverage rather than regions that don't have better leverage. So you can imagine basically you've got like you know clavicular PEC or you know sternal or costal PEC.

And the brain goes, Okay, so if I've got a statute to play movement, the clavicular pec has great leverage there. Uh the costal and sternal pecs don't have great leverage there, so I'm not going to use those. I'm going to send activation to the clavicular pec region instead.

And then it will follow the size principle within that region. So when people go, Oh, well you don't need a uh you know, you don't need an American matching uh concept because you've got the size principle already. I'm like Uh I mean, like, you have to decide where to send the activation first. So are you saying that um the SARS principle will always send activation to the smallest muscle fibre or the smallest motor in my body, regardless of where that is?

you know, just to do the movement. So like if I want to do hip extension but the smallest um muscle fibre or motif is in my, you know, kind of ocular muscles, then I'm gonna start blinking every time I want to do hip extension. That's insane. Si size principle cannot govern the entirety of motif. control you have to decide where the activation is going to go first. need one exercise, wouldn't you? Like that's it for full body one exercise.

And your entire body would spasm every time you tried to do anything. I mean it was the like your eyeballs would be kind of like flashing like, you know kind of uh lights in the background. Just like the idea that size principle is enough is in is absolutely insane. You would have to literally take your brain out and put it on the table next to you to make that statement. And honestly people have made that statement. I was like, honestly, why are people listening to you?

So you have to decide where to send it first. So there's an activation of a region first. And that has got to follow some kind of decision tree. Your brain has got to go, where do I send the activation? Okay. Well it's going to go to this region because that region has best leverage. That's what neumechanical matching is saying. Within that region you then follow the size principle, more or less.

So essentially um that's what and why is neuromechanical matching saying that? It's saying that because you maximize the uh torque output for the energy input, the activation input. So you get the maximum amount of joint torque for the minimum amount of energy that you are

performing. And actually if you look at motor control over time and motor learning over time, that's actually what the brain is consistently trying to do. It's always trying to get more output for less input. I mean ultimately that's more or less how we learn movements, especially movements that are performance related.

So um with wumicary machine is trying to optimize the torque output for the energy input, the um muscle activation input. Um so it's an efficiency seeking engine, really. Okay, so now let's compare and contrast that with what's happening with

The uh the idea that you've got um activation being maximized where muscle fibers are on the active length denture plateau. That isn't going to change efficiency. It's not going to change efficiency because the way that we increase force production by working on the plateau instead of the ascending limb or the descending limb is actually to use more ATP by creating uh to create more cross production.

So if I'm working on the active length tension um ascending limb, then what's gonna happen is I simply create fewer cross bridges for the uh, you know, kind of um situation that I'm in and I use less uh ATP and as a result I'm losing I'm using less energy to create that force output. If I work on a plateau I use more energy to create a higher force output. So it's not an efficiency modifier. It's literally just saying, well I'm gonna create more force output because

Um I happen to be able to use more energy. Making sense? Yeah, exactly. I mean the analogy I would give there is if you're driving somewhere from point A to point B

and you're trying to conserve fuel, okay, you can put your your foot down and you can go faster, it's gonna get you there quicker, but you're gonna use more fuel to get there. So yes, you can either go slower, take longer to get there, use less fuel, or use more fuel for that amount of time, but you're gonna get there quicker, etcetera. So if somebody wants to make the case that um the active length tension plateau is a thing that the brain incorporates into its decision making process.

They are going to have to go back to the beginning and show that what the brain is trying to do is optimize force output irrespective of energy input rather than energy efficiency. And all the data we have in humans shows that that's not true. All the data in humans we have and the animals as well, shows that the brain is constantly trying to maximize efficiency, not force output.

irrespective of efficiency. So it's got a really uphill struggle if you want to make that case. And again, this comes back to the criticism that I just made five minutes ago, which is that when people are making cases for their own crazy ideas, they're not requiring themselves to present any evidence of any nature or any backing or any context. Whereas as soon as they uh look at something that I'm presenting, which is literally from the literature itself, they

ignore the availability of all the evidence and simply pretend that it doesn't exist. So the level of disingenuousness that we're seeing here is just off the charts. It's astonishing. And people think that

in some th people will literally look at the moment and we had this conversation before we jumped on the podcast, people aren't um making critical assessments of what they're seeing in the internet. They're literally just going on the basis of how loud the voices are in different directions. So

We've got a lot of very loud voices shouting against neuromechanic matching. Um none of them are actually engaging with the topic at all. They're just presenting crazy ideas that have no basis in physiology. Um and yet people will look at that and go, Oh well there's a large number of people shouting against it, therefore there must be something there and they're they try and learn information from that and they'll just get confused.

Um, what you need to do is actually critically assess information and I know that social media is making that harder daily uh i uh uh on a day by day basis. But y if you don't do that you can end up getting really, really confused and believing stuff that is just nonsense. Um but okay. I mean that's again, not my problem. Um but the final thing I wanted to mention about the actoline relationship is that um Ultimately.

it doesn't fit with the concept of sarcomerogenesis during strength training. So if you think that psychomerogenesis happens during strength training, and just to be clear, we've got a lot of data now in humans um showing that Um fascicle lengths increase during strength training. Fasciculates are reflective of muscle fibre length increases.

Um, and we've also now got a couple of studies in humans showing that sarcomerogenesis does in fact happen after strength training programs. So um we have got data and obviously absolute ton of data in animals showing the same thing. So sarcomegenesis does happen in humans. Uh fasc lengths increase. Uh also sarcomedogenes in series uh have been noticed to increase in a smaller number of studies, so we've got that starting point.

Sargomogenesis during strength training wouldn't happen if the brain was always activating the muscle fibres on the plateau of the active length tension relationship, because activating the fibre on the descending limb is necessary to trigger sarcomogenesis. So if the brain is always selecting regions of muscles or muscles themselves that only work on the plateau, you aren't going to get that psychomogenesis effect.

Conversely, if neuromechanical matching is working, then the brain just sends activation to whichever muscle has the best leverage, and then what happens is sarcomyogenesis will move to move the plateau to that same range of motion. And that's exactly what we see when we look at um different muscles uh of the body. Uh what we see is that um For example, the gastrock has best leverage in the stretch position, its plateau has moved to the stretch position.

If we look at the biceps brachi, it has best leverage in the stretch position. Its plateau has moved to the stretch position. Conversely, look at the brachiradialis. Its plateau is in the contact position. That's exactly where its leverage is best. Uh glutes. Quads again, you know, plateaus just move to wherever the leverage is best. Um, this is kind of what we see across the whole body. It's just

leverages are creating the initial activation and then the plateaus are migrating mostly um to those positions. Now, of course there will be some fibres that don't get used in daily life and they won't be at those plateaus already, but

or plateaus in those positions already. But of course with strength training we do uh move those plateaus to those positions and that's what psychomerogenesis is doing. So again, if somebody thinks that the active length tension plateau is determining where the brain sends activation, um

during a joint joint angle range of motion. They've got to tell me why they think that psychomerogenesis happens during strength training,'cause it can't do if the brain is only sending activation to the plateau. And that's really for me the kind of slam dunk. It's like uh if if your idea about how the brain controls the body doesn't fit with a whole body of literature, in this case psychomogenesis, then it's wrong.

You know? I mean that's just how how this stuff works. And that's ultimately why I think a lot of um exercise science researchers get trapped and go down very narrow pathways that end up leading nowhere is because they don't take a step back and go, does my idea about how this works fit with everything around it?

Because they don't actually read anything around it, because everybody's siloed, everybody's doing their own research into you know, and they end up you end up with these crazy situations where people believe in th stuff that can't possibly be true, like metabolic stress. Can't possibly be true if you know anything about, you know, the way that metabolites cause fatigue or, um, you know, the way that um metabolites work in non um sort of um

uh kind of uh contractile situation. So if you trap metabolites in the muscle with like a occlusion cuff and just leave them there, does that create hypertrophy or no? Um, you know, and the same thing with muscle damage. People think the muscle damage causes hypertrophy and it can't possibly. Again, because if you look at the muscle damage literature outside of the hypertrophy context, you'll see that it it actually occurs in the post-workout period, not during the workout itself.

So I'm anticipating that I'm gonna see videos in TikTok in the coming week where people are gonna say, Well, no, it is full length tension, but what happens is those fibers that are working on the plateau get activated first and then there might be some secondary activation of fibers that are working on the descending limb and that's why we might get sarcomyogenesis. the same problem that we have when people say, and I've addressed this question before

When people say, Oh well no, um the brain always takes into account the size of the muscle when determining which movement you're gonna do. I'm like, Okay, so does that mean that every time I want to reach my glass of water my glute is gonna try and do the exercise'cause it's bigger?

Like, no, no, no, no, no. Because you are using your arm to collect the water. I'm like, okay, but how does my brain know because you're telling me that the arm is better capable of reaching for the glass of water than my leg, so how does the brain know that it's my arm that's got to do the work, not my leg?

Okay? But you're telling me size is the thing that matters and my glutes' the biggest muscle in my body, so size is the thing that's gonna matter. So why isn't size determining this movement? And then I own they get all confused and I'm like, it's because my arm muscles have the best leverage to do that thing.

So leverage is the thing that matters. Uh and the same thing applies with this active length tension relationship. It's like somebody says, Okay, so it's the elective length tension relationship that determines whether the brain uses the muscle, fiber and I'm like, Okay, so What about uh muscle fibers that are on perfectly on the plateau but they're in the wrong place? Yeah. Yeah, I was just thinking that. It it still needs to be a step one.

You have to you have to start with leverage before you can so anybody who's making any of these arguments has to accept and they they do it without thinking. That's the problem. I mean there's no thinking going.

They're just kind of grabbing concepts and kind of waving them around. Um it's like you have to have a region of the muscle that can do the thing that you wanna do. And that I was giving stupid examples regarding glutes and you know, arms and things because I'm trying to get people to Think outside of their little box or their satin. You have to be able to use the region to do the thing you want to do, otherwise nothing will happen. So leverage has to come before everything else.

So all you're really saying then is leverage is coming first and then you're trying to take the active length tension relationship into account after you've determined I'm like, okay, now if you've accepted that and hopefully everybody who has a bra brain will have accepted that. Okay, so you've accepted that leverage is necessary as your starting point. Um What is your filter? What is your mechanism for assessing which of the two things is more important?

as you go through what is your principle that drives the decision? Like, if I've if I've identified a region of the muscle that's capable of doing the thing, okay. Within that region there is gonna be um different sub regions, okay, and they have different leverages and they have different length tension relationships. We've got some really cool data and like um

uh animal models showing that different parts of a muscle have totally different leverages and also totally different air length attention relationships. That's that data exists. So Have you got this kind of uh region made up made up of sub regions? You've identified that the whole region is capable of doing

um you know, this movement that you want to do. Okay. Let's say you've got one region that's got perfect active length tension relationship but bad leverage and another not bad leverage. It still has leverage, but it's not perfect leverage. You've got another region that's really cool leverage but not quite so good active length tension relationship. What is the brain doing to decide which of those two regions to use in priority to the other one?

What is the guiding principle that sits over the top of those two things? Because you've already told me that you accept that leverage has to be relevant in order to decide which region of the body is going to be used to do a movement. I mean, anybody disagreeing with that can just leave the conversation at this point because it's insane. So you've accepted that leverage has to be Essentially that's the bulk of neuromechanical matching.

And as you've pointed out multiple times, everybody who critiques m uh neuromechanical matching usually ends up replacing it with neuromechanical matching because they end up going and you've literally I've seen you have conversations with people on the internet where they've gone uh this person has been really bombastic and yelling at the camera going, neuromechanical matching is dead or whatever and

And they've and then they've tried to replace it and they've gone the most important thing is leverage. I'm like, Okay, so you've just replaced neuromechanical matching with neuromechanical matching. Congratulations, gold star, go to the front of the class. You know. And and y I've seen you have conversations with these people and they're just like the they are not doing there's no thinking going on at all. They're literally just charismatic people yelling at the camera.

Now when people say, Oh well, we found this study and it shows that the active length tension plateau doesn't line up with the leverage and there's a famous example where there was a modelling study done. And the glutes appeared to have active length tension plateau on forty five degrees, but the leverage is best at zero degrees of hip flexion. That result was created by the assumptions that were put into the model in the first place.

That model didn't create that output because it figured out what sulcomer lengths were in the glutes. The sulcomelinks were entered in as data

So they got the result that they actually wrote into the study as a model. That that that anybody presenting that study as a as a reason why you know, leverages don't always match up with length tension relationships, doesn't understand how models are created and how data input into models affects what if you put the length tension relationship in at the beginning

with the assumption that the active length tension plateau is at forty five degrees, then you'll get the output at the other end, which is that the active length tension relationship is at forty five degrees. How people miss this stuff I don't understand. When you mention EV outcome, that's a pretty good way of going about it. Input equals output because there's no change.

Um, so that's that's not what that study is showing. Um but yeah, ultimately leverages will end up or rather acting attention plateaus will end up matching leverages, uh literally just because of how sarcomer genesis and sarcomode loss work. when you've got passive tension or not having passive tension in the range of motion that you're working.

For people who are listening who are actually following and are interested in the active length tension relationship and how it works, let me try and um present the challenge as as clearly as I can. So But these people who are, you know, understanding the material, they've understood that

basically neuromechanical matching has to be the guiding principle, at least down to the muscle region level uh that is gonna be doing the movement. So they've kind of followed neuromechanical matching to a certain point and they've gone, okay, we've got We've got the region of the muscle and all of this region has leverage. Now within this region, we're now going to uh start to incorporate the active length tension relationship.

But you could stop you could stop there, right? And you could say that's all the moving parts we needed for neuromechanical matching. Yeah, you could at this point you could now just say, uh, all of these sub regions are now going to get recruited in the order of their leverage. You could just do that. And that's what neuromchanical matching does. It just

U neurochinic matching is accepted by everybody, either tacitly or or or not, right down to the point where we're dealing with different regions of a muscle area that has leverage. Nobody can argue with that. They do argue with that, but they're wrong. I mean they're just it's it's they're insane, really. So the the point that we're we're talking about then is um once you get to a region that does have leverage to do the thing that you want to do, um what

area within that muscle now uh is going to get activated first. I are we just carrying on with the leverage, which would be Occam's razor. It's like Just Occam's razor, carry on with the same thing that got you here, and it kind of finishes the movement and you get maximum efficiency and you get uh pretty good, if not maximal, force output anyway, even irrespective of efficiency.

Um and also over time your plateau of your active length tension relationship migrates to the same location as your uh leverage and you end up with maximum force as well. So absolutely everything is going right for us in this scenario. Perfect. Absolutely perfect scenario. In contrast You could say, okay, well, I'm going to try at this point and incorporate the active length tension plateau into my assessment. At this point, you need You have.

Correct. And at this point you then want to introduce something that wasn't there and is not necessary to be there. And now you're going to say, Oh, we're now changing things to maximize force output or torque output. Pick one, tell me which one it is. Either muscle force or joint torque. Um, and you're now optimizing for talk output, let's say, to be generous.

Um and so you're gonna have to choose between um the or ultimately you could say, Well, if if I've got the ability to measure external torque, which is doubtful, but okay, if you can do it in reference to the exercise that you're doing, okay, fine. Um so you you can kind of measure your talk output by proxy from the exercise that you're performing. Fine. Um, okay, so I'm trying to do that. Um now I need to

choose and go, Okay, well am I going to use a region that has or sub region that has better leverage but worse active limitation relationship or conversely I'm going to use a region that has better um you know active limit tension relationship but worse leverage. So One of the two. Um and to do that. To do that, you need to firstly tell me Why

we are maximizing talk now and not um efficiency of talk. So you need to tell me why that's happening because uh in the context of everything that's gone before, we've got no reason to believe that that's the case. No uh biological imperative to tell us why that should happen. In contrast, we've got a very strong biological imperative to preference um efficiency.

Secondly, so that's the first uh problem. First problem is tell me what the context is that allows us to maximise torque or muscle force and let's be generous and say muscle torque'cause it makes more sense. Um rather than um efficiency. Um secondly, you're gonna have to tell me um why we are changing

from the efficiency uh directed scheme that we were using up to this point to now using a force or or talk oriented scheme instead. So there's been a shift in the way that the whole process is working.'Cause as I said before, You know, kind of imagine you could just carry on all the way to the end and just work the way it's been working up to this point. Uh you have to change that and tell me why there's been a shift.

Um and thirdly, you have to tell me what the guiding principle then is for the entire process. Because we've had a s a change in the guiding uh principle from uh efficiency to start with to force output or talk output. Secondly, that there's been a change. One thing up to the regional point has been efficiency, and then secondly it's been um talk output. So why have we changed? What is and what sits over the top of that to make that happen?

Those are the three things that I would ask, uh, in order and in in descending order of importance, um, to understand what it is that's actually going on in someone's model where active mentential relationship plays a role. Yeah, if the model becomes more complex.

it surely has to have either more evidence behind it or do a better job explaining than the more simple version of that model. And at the moment we have a a simple version of the model that has more evidence behind it and does a better job explaining. And doesn't need an overriding principle'cause it just follows its own principle all the way through to the end.

So uh what I'm interested in is why is there a shift in the way that the brain is controlling things from the first part, which is just leverage, to the second part, which is leverage plus local factor determining force output irrespective of efficiency. And then thirdly, what's the reason for that? What's the guiding principle that explains why that has to happen? They're all related questions, but they're three separate questions that I would want answers to. Yep.

Okay. Well let's see if we get any answers. And if we do, we'll do another episode I'm sure um if there's anything interesting that comes out of this. But otherwise, I think we're done. Is there anything else you wanted to conclude with? Okay. Thank you everyone for joining us and I hope you'll join us again next week.