042 How to build the biggest arms possible

Welcome back. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Hypertrophy Past and Present. And this week it's my turn to be sick. You were sick a few weeks ago, Chris, and now I've lost my voice, so hopefully it don't sound too off and hopefully it holds out. But I'm feeling okay, so hoping for the best. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, thanks, Jake. You're not sick. I'm not sick, no. You're the healthy of the pair today. I am indeed.

So today we are doing a requested topic. It's a topic you've had a lot of questions about and it's a topic that's probably been popular for Yeah, forever. Yeah. At least at least a century will be talking about how they're approaching this the best part of a century ago. So it's probably not going away anytime soon. And that topic is how to develop the biggest arms possible.

So there's plenty of fuss to talk about. I'm excited to do it, but we're gonna start by talking about how the silver era lifters thought best to tackle that that approach. Well, maybe not silver, we're kind of talking golden here. Mm, late silver, early golden. We're talking Chuck Sipes. We have talked Chuck Sipes at least once, maybe maybe twice. Once or twice in the past.

So Chuck, he's an interesting sort of, you know, time in in the bodybuilding piece because he was competing in the late fifties, so arguably silver era before anabolics were kind of really widely being used. And then he continued competing into the sixties and he continued sort of

writing and teaching and doing things into the semines. So he's sort of occupied that transitional period. And personally, when I look at his routines, I think it's It's clear that he occupied that transitional period because some of the stuff he talks about makes a lot of sense to me, some of it makes a lot less sense to me. Uh and you know, to be fair, he does claim or he did claim that he was natural, he did speak out against anabolics quite heavily.

Obviously that doesn't necessarily mean anything, um, but just for a little bit of context for you guys. So this is his arms routine.

Now he did split his his arms up, so he did split his biceps work uh from his triceps work. So I'm going to give you guys the biceps portion and then the triceps portion of this workout. So obviously this would be added to your standard workout. You'd still be doing all other muscle groups as well. But today we're particularly focused and interested on the arms. Sorry. Starting with biceps, we have cheats.

barbell curls, which have honestly fallen out of favor nowadays, but they were big in the silver era and I guess into the golden era. And they are something I've actually used a little bit in my groups as well. And I'm interested to hear your thoughts on them in a moment. But Nonetheless. We're starting with cheap barbell curls. Anyone who doesn't know how to do them, it's kind of exactly what it sounds like. Use a little bit of body English to get the barbell curl up.

Um and you don't do like a super slow eccentric. Sometimes when people do do them today, they're doing like five second eccentric. No, it was a relatively standard eccentric. You were just using a heavier load that would have been possible otherwise. Now he did eight sets of these and he would reduce the number of repetitions each time. So you would start with eight and you'd go all the way down to to singles.

He he did a lot of kind of funny repetition schemes. He'd often do like, you know, ten, nine, eight, down to one, sometimes back up to ten, all over the place. So a few fancy things are happening. His next ex exercise he exercise he did was a preacher bench curl for six sets of four. Then a dumbbell concentration curl, four sets of eight. And then biceps, chin-ups. So I'm assuming just supinated, uh, sagittal plane chin-up, four sets of six.

And then we have a barbell wrist curl, so in a in a supernatative position. Four sets of twenty five, which I'm assuming honestly is probably just A weight issue again, that's a pretty hard exercise to to really load up adequately. And then he concluded with a st standing barbell reverse curl, and that was for four sets of eight. It's a fair bit of arms work, a fair bit of biceps work. And then our triceps workout begun with a barbell bench press, so a close grip bench.

And he did the same routine where he did the eight sets, starting with eight and running down to singles. And then we had a dumbbell triceps press, which uh I believe would have been done I assume sitting, maybe it is standing, I'm not sure, but uh it would be like a French press. So um ba uh dumbbell overhead.

and extending it uh above head, which was a fairly common exercise in the sort of later silver era. Gridge Park used this a lot in his arms work as well. And I think even Steve Reeves did a little bit as well. And that was six sets of six. And then we had triceps pushdowns, so obviously with a cable, forced it to twelve.

And then weighted dips, which were another very popular triceps exercise. Again, Dredge Park uses. Um, Marvin Eader obviously is a big fan of these. So they're a pretty popular triceps builder. And this was done for four sets of four. Now I don't know how Chuck did the dips, but generally in the silver era when they were doing dips or triceps, they were pretty intentional about their their form when they were doing it.

And they did usually emphasize having a closer grip, keeping their elbows a little bit more tucked to the side of the body, and usually keeping their torso more upright and less leaning forward is is generally how they would recommend doing it. Now both of these workouts were repeated twice per week. It's a lot of volume. Chris, what do you make of this?

Yeah, I mean th this is very clearly a early golden era program, isn't it? I mean it's it's absolutely not a silver era programme at all. Um there's there's quite a lot With kind of the exception of the excise selection. Sure. So this is kind of like similar to that conversation we had. Yeah. Um I can't remember whether it was last week or the week before.

And there was a program that had that kind of exercise selection, uh, kind of that was reminiscent of the silver era, but then with vo golden era style volumes. Um, I think we've got that again here. Yes. But I think there's actually quite a lot of interesting stuff to say. So the cheap barbell kill. I mean, let's just go through things uh on it one by one. So cheap barbellkill.

Obviously it's technically an eccentric overload exercise. What we're doing there is we're allowing, as you said, a higher level of effort to be used. in the lowering phase compared to what we would get normally if we just um lifted um you know with uh sort of uh a normal form on the concentric phase.

What that means is that you're gonna get quite a lot of calcium amulet fatigue from that exercise. You're gonna get a lot therefore of post-workout muscle damage and it's not therefore an exercise that I would typically recommend people do. But even more so, I would absolutely not recommend doing it as the first exercise in a workout.

Because any exercise you then do for the same muscle groups is going to suffer from that excessive calcium artique, which is reducing mechanical tension, which is reducing the stimulus you're going to get. So um this is why if you look at the dose response curves for uh of hypertrophy to training volume for normal strength training, they are nonlinear, but they are nonlinear in a way that kind of plateaus maybe somewhere between five and eight sets per workout, per muscle group.

If you look at the eccentric dose response literature, which is much kind of l obviously uh there's there's a lot less of it, but you start to see kind of plateaus happening at maybe two or three sets per workout per muscle group. And that's because when you get enough calcium ions into the and to the muscle fibers, they can't experience any tension. And so your additional sets just aren't doing anything.

Um and I think that's the problem that we have if we start doing something like a um a uh cheek curl as the first exercise and a workout that we're gonna do a whole lot of other el elbow flexor work, it really isn't helping our case because we're just going to stop the growth stimulus from happening because we're stopping the tension from being produced or detected. Now, beyond that concern, so beyond the sort of uh I guess exercise order issue that you've highlighted.

What particularly is happening in this exercise or what potentially is being accomplished in this exercise compared to just doing a standard barbell curl? So if you were to ignore the eccentric phase, um, then you would be be getting obviously a lot of assistance in the beginning of the exercise. And now the external moment time is hardest exactly in the middle.

So really your momentum, if it just uh is giving you help in the first part, isn't really doing a lot um because it's not actually that difficult in the first part. So you've got to get your momentum to the point where it it gets you past that sticking point in the middle. So really what you're doing is you're making the exercise slightly harder towards the top, which is going to then obviously give you a little bit more brachiradialis uh kind of involvement because that

That is the elbow flex that kind of starts to become more important in the top half uh or you know, certainly last sort of uh third or so of the range of motion, it's very, very important relative to the other muscles in the group. So You you're kind of getting a little bit of a change in the uh kind of targeting effect of the exercise. But then

Obviously e-centric phase really depends on where you're going to slow down. So if you kind of just allow it to sort of do its normal thing, it will be most difficult pretty much exactly at the external moment time being longest, which is at ninety degrees. So it really depends on what you're doing. I mean like if you're treating it as a kind of exercise where you're not really giving a lot of emphasis to the lowering phase which

Is is is not really how it's done, most people do. Um, but if you're kind of just allowing yourself to get into that top half of the range of motion, then it just changes the focus of the of the moment. Yeah, okay. So you're you're shifting it a little bit away from Bice Drachi, a little bit more towards Grachi Gradialis. Now, obviously he's gone down into some fairly low repetitions here. So the eccentric load that he's using is gonna be a very high eccentric load.

So you are actually gonna get potentially some benefit out of that compared to just standard normal sets with normal loading, yeah? So it's going to be a different effect. So you're going to be applying that um kind of passive tension across the entirety of the muscle. The problem is that The elbow flexors uh seem to have plateaus of the active length tension relationship on the end of the um kind of

exercise range of motion. So basically with the extended elbow position, you're actually still only in the plateau for most of the elbow flexes. So it's actually unclear whether we're going to get any sarcomerogenesis from those muscle fibers anyway. Now the um kind of easy and to go for that would be or easy and to go any training would be the only way you would ever likely to get that thing. But even then I'm not convinced that you would.

C and and I don't know if you want to go into this or not. Um, is there potentially anything else that could be happening from a strength perspective, costume perspective, or is that speculative? Um so yeah, I mean it's you might you might get a little bit more uh well I mean obviously you're gonna get some ecentric related adaptations such as maybe Titan, maybe customers, but you're talking more down the strength route really rather than down the um kind of hypertrophy route.

Yeah. 'Cause what I find interesting with this exercise is the way that it's talked about in the Sylvic era was it was a plateau buster. And the way that I understand that when I see these guys talking about it is it was a strength plateau buster. And it makes me wonder, is it perhaps they associated strength and hypertrophy together, which naturally one would?

And maybe they've realized this exercise was making them stronger. Maybe it wasn't actually making them bigger per se beyond what a normal curl would, but there was something happening from a strength perspective. That's my assumption with it. That's why I personally use it intermittently.

Um, but I mean the passive tension one is an interesting one because yeah, you would assume there's probably not gonna be much benefit to that. So it presumably there's something else happening if people are noticing it's getting them stronger. It's very possible, yeah. What do we have next?

So yeah, we've got preacher girls. Now I think preacher girls are really interesting because um What we're getting here is two changes relative to a sort of standing barbell curl or a standing dumbbell curl. So obviously with a preach curl, what we're getting is a change in the resistance profile at the elbow. So obviously the exercise becomes harder more towards the extended elbow position.

And that does the opposite of what we were just saying with the uh cheek curl. It pushes the um kind of uh activation. across to the non uh uh the other muscles that aren't the brachioradialis, so the brachialis and the biceps brachi. So essentially the those other muscles then start to get targeted instead. So that's the the the first thing that you would notice about the pre

And then of course the other thing that happens is you are you're moving the um shoulder into a more uh flexed position. So essentially we're lifting the shoulder up, we're elevating the shoulder, and that's going to start to because the biceps brachi are shoulder flexors, that's start to shorten. the um biceps brachi uh and that's going to change the leverage of the biceps brachy for elbow flexion relative to the brachia brachialis. So what we've got is two things going on.

Now If you kind of want to start tracking down what you think that implication is gonna be from a uh leverages point of view, you'll find that there's not an enormous amount of interesting uh or useful data. Um, there are some activation indications, there are some hypertrophy training studies implications that imply that maybe the brachialis has got

uh better leverage in that prechikurl situation than the biceps brachi. Recently I actually tracked down a very, very interesting muscle damage study where they did prechurl eccentrics and they showed that the only muscle that swelled in the post workout period was the brachialis.

Um and it's a really massive difference between the brachialis and the other muscles. So that does suggest quite strongly that the prechurl is um kind of targeting more so the brachialis in comparison with the brachiradialis or the biceps brachial. So that's interesting in the context of this workout, because now what we've got is exercise one seems to be more brachi radialis. Exercise two seems to be more brachialis.

And the next exercise we got is a dumbbell concentration curl, which depending exactly on how he's performing it, arguably might have been more biscracky. Yeah, I think a lot comes down to the way that you are performing. I mean, ultimately what we want for a biceps brachy exercise then, by r by by process of deduction, is we want to be in a position where the shoulder is extended.

Uh or at least by the side of the body. I mean, which uh you know, to be honest, as many bicycle curvations are already in that position, or elbow flexor curls are in that position. But what we also want is the exercise to be hardest in the starting point. And that's where most curls are gonna fall down because gravity just doesn't really let you do that. Gravity's gonna make it so the external moment time is hardest with the elbow at ninety degrees. What you want it is for the elbow to be

you know, kind of uh sort of uh zero degrees or one eighty degrees, depending on which way you're measuring it. Uh you want to be at the starting point, elbow fully extended. Um so the way we would do that is by just sitting down in a incline uh bench

situation and using a cable coming from behind us to create the hardest part at the beginning of the exercise with both the extended shoulder and the extended elbow. And that's probably going to give you the most biased bracky uh kind of out of the out of the group.

But in terms of this, what we've got here, I've done my concentration guard, it's just really difficult to know whether what position he's in and where the A lot of the time these guys would actually dead stop between repetitions, which I quite like'cause it does I don't know if anyone's ever tried like people listening, if you guys have tried this, but

When I if I ever perform a dumbbell concentration curl, I actually do prefer to dead stop and it does allow one to use a heavier load and it does allow that that sort of starting position of the exercise. to be more challenging than if you're sort of not dead stopping that exercise. So I find that does yes, obviously external moment arm is still gonna be longer higher up. I get that. But it does make it more challenging in that more extended elbow position than it would be otherwise.

That's my preferred way to do it. I don't know if Chuck did it this way, but it's I do see a lot of the silver golden era guys doing it like that. so yeah so you know maybe that has a little bit more focus on the on the bicycle maybe it doesn't i don't know Biceps chins.

I'm gonna assume that's a reason it is,'cause it's actually not named correctly. Um if if I'm gonna I'm gonna make two assumptions about this. Um I'm gonna make the assumption that the the um grip width is either um shoulder width or slightly narrower. Yes. Um I mean like

Um I would I would even go as far as to suggest that maybe it was even with the hands uh pressed together because when I did a lot of chin uh kind of training, uh if I moved my hands close together I would definitely feel that more so in my elbow flexors than in um in the lap. But that's just kind of um my experience. So I'm going to assume that's at least sagittal or narrower. Um and I'm going to assume that he's actually getting his chin over the bar.

Now that may not be true. In fact neither of those things may be true. I'm just gonna make those two assumptions. Um if those two assumptions are correct, then the biceps brachia are probably not a limiting factor. Because um the biceps bracky are shoulder flexors, especially in the top part of the range of motion. And as a result

I assume they probably did go all the way up. A lot of the again, a lot of the Silvira guys, they made a very sort of concerted effort to actually get bar two chess, so they were fully getting. Well then he's definitely switching the biceps brachial in that position because of the two joint muscle problem or antagonist inhibition or whatever you want to call it. So ultimately it means that that becomes a much more brachialis and brachioradialis exercise.

in that uh kind of sticking point. I mean and just kind of for people who are like sitting there going, Oh, this doesn't make any sense to me, why is that the case? Just think about um a a chin up situation because Ultimately the external moment time has to be hardest in the middle, but there's no way that people get stuck there. They all get stuck trying to get their chin uh over the bar. That lasts little bit. That should

So when you say sort of moment arm, so essentially your body, you're furthest away when you're that that sort of halfway mark. So that should naturally be where it's most difficult.

Getting started and finishing should be easy in the same way that getting started and finishing should be easy for a biceps curl,'cause the hardest part of the exercise is in the middle. Same thing really, to a lesser degree, because multi joint allows you to move your body around a little bit so you don't get quite the same degree of

of of of difference. But it's still going to be hardest in the middle from an external point of view. And also the lat has amazing leverage for um and and just to be clear to people, even if people don't agree with neuro neuromechanical matching and we'll have this kind of we'll make some comments on this later but

Even if people don't agree with new chronic marching, it's not relevant because what I'm saying here is not about selecting muscles. It's about simply how much torque you're able to generate at different points in the range of motion. I'm saying that From a lat point of view, you're able to generate massive amounts of torque in the top part of the range of motion as you're coming to the end of the exercise with the lat.

simply because it has such amazing leverage in that position. So you're not going to be limited by the lat in the top part of the range of motion when you're pulling your chin over the bar. So you're not that isn't the sticking point, or it's not causing the sticking point. So if you're struggling to get your shadow of the bar, it's not the lat that's not doing that. It's got to be the elbow flexors that are not doing that. And the elbow flexors obviously, you know, aren't necessarily

uh kind of all going to be working because of that two joint inhibition problem. So it basically comes down to getting your chin over the bar is a brachialis and brachiradialis problem. So this not correctly named to call it a biceps chin, although we all kind of call elbow flexors biceps all the time, so it's not really that big a deal. Well, it's isn't it though, because It is a big deal because the alternative Well it's caused a lot of confusion to a lot of people, but yeah.

Well the alternative would be a pronated like a a uh think about like a wide pronated grip, right? And naturally people are going to it so we're talking like frontal plane. And people I think will naturally look at this and assume, yes, close grip, supernated, that's going to be more biases dracky. And this is what I was always taught. That's gonna be more biases dracky than doing a a wide frontal plane. It's brachio it's brachiradialis, I think, mainly.

In terms of the the chin-up, like the close grip. Yes. And my point is what you've just said there around the two joint problem with the bises dracky, that arguably is going to be a lot less of an issue in a wide grip pull-up. So you could actually argue you're probably going to get more biceps drache of those two variations in the wide grip pull-up than you would in the quote unquote biceps chin-up, the closed grip supernated.

Yeah, I mean but I also think that with the wide group you end up with a lot more lat I'm not saying you should one should do it as a biceps exercise, but out of those two, which one naturally would you think? Like it presumably Honest honestly, I think i i it's just it's just simply not a good exercise for the biceps brachi. I mean I think ultimately the the narrow grip chin is actually a really solid exercise for the brachy radialis. I mean it's it's very, very effective at that.

I don't think chins of any kind are particularly amazing for biceps bracking. If you were to stop where the external moment arm is in fact most difficult Then it would actually become a lat exercise again. Yeah. Yeah. if you stopped even like maybe sort of uh with the bar level with your eyes, something like that. It depends. I mean everybody's gonna have a slightly different point at which the elbow flexor uh or the biceps brachi shoulder flexion leverage appears.'Cause ultimately this is

This is just kind of a very quick rabbit hole. This is why it's it's important to state this is why it's important to reject this idea that um two joint muscles stop working in multi joint exercises because they're not changing length. This is why we have to reject this idea. This is why when people say, Oh, the hamstrings don't work in the squat because they're not changing length, I stop them and I say, no, that's not correct.

is absolutely not correct. And I can show you it's not correct in two seconds because we've got studies of isometric squat positions where people are doing an isometric uh squat position. uh kind of knee extension and hip extension force production and the hamstrings are not working in that scenario. So it's not because'cause no muscles are changing length in an isometric squat.

But the hamstrings still get switched off. Why are they getting switched off? They're getting switched off because they're producing antagonist torques at the knee, which will be uh knee flexion instead of the knee extension that you're trying to create.

uh even though your hip extension torque will be beneficial to you. So they switch off because it's highly inefficient to have two torques, one that's giving you a positive effect, one gives you a negative effect. So instead we actually use the knee extensors without the disadvantage of the hamstrings.

uh and we switch off the hamstrings and we use just the glutes and the adaptive magnets. That's how it works. The same thing happens in the um shoulder. So when I'm doing shoulder extension, I'm pulling downwards in the surgical plane. Um, I'm going to use the biceps brachi as elbow flexors to help me doing that pulling motion until they start producing a torque at the shoulder.

And that's why we look and we say, Okay, well, where does the bicep spike you have torque producing capacity at the shoulder is shoulder flexion? Well only really within forty five degrees of the anatomical position. And so ultimately what you see is that if I'm pulling from overhead

I get down through ninety and the biceps back here perfectly happy doing elbow uh flexion at that point. But as soon as I get down to about forty five degrees they're gonna have to switch off. And they will do that. Now everybody's probably got slightly different points out. Which is essentially where your chin is getting over the bar in case anyone's

Most people it'll be it' most people it'll be forty five degrees will be approximately getting from where the hand is level with the eyes to where the hand is level with the chin. That lasts sort of six to twelve inches of of distance, that is basically where people are going to be struggling in the chin up, which is exactly what we see. And it's because your elbow flexors suddenly go from having four muscles to two muscles.

Um and it's just like you can't get around that fact. And I think but I do also think that different people have different I mean this is a a true statement of any of any muscle, but everybody's got slightly different leverages and I think that people have different biceps. Um shoulder flexion leverages. And I think if somebody's got really strong biceps uh shoulder flexion leverage, what they'll find is that they probably get their biceps recchi switched off earlier.

And they'll end up relying more on their lat and more on their brachiradialis and brachialis and less on their biceps brachi. Somebody who's the opposite might find that they can get almost all the way down. I believe personally that people who are uh capable of doing a one arm lock off

without really having to train very much for um, you know, kind of weighted chins or one arm chin ups. I think they're probably just people who've got virtually no shoulder flexion leverage of the bicep brackie at all. You know, and I've met people like that and I've just been astounded by how easy it is for them when, you know, I got to the point where actually doing a one on chin and my lock off was still terrible.

S so for those people they would potentially actually be getting a little bit more biceps drachy stimulus throughout this exercise. Exactly. So I think you are going to find there's going to be a little bit of difference there. But I mean fundamentally it is a shoulder flex, it's just at what point does it switch off? And I think yeah pe people are just going to probably find that there's maybe switches off either slightly earlier or slightly later.

Um, but it's a really fascinating uh kind of phenomenon and it actually really changes the way you think about uh narrow grip or sagittal plane uh kind of pulling exercises. And either way you're still gonna be getting some brachialis and brachiradialis. So you know, if someone's listening to this and like, Oh, well this is rubbish'cause I did chin ups and my my arms grew huge, it's like, Yeah, well okay.

My brachiradialis grew like a weed. And in fact, that was the first thing people commented on when I was doing a lot of one arm chin work was like your brachiradialis is gigantic. You know, uh literally people have said that to me. So I'm not saying that I'm going to go to Jason Ops.

work. It's just it's just it's not but this comes back to the terminology problem where people refer to a uh an elbow flexor exercise as a biceps exercise and that's just not it causes a lot of confusion because people don't understand that It's like they think that there's just like one great big muscle that it's like the people who think that a muscle is just one muscle fiber. You know, it's one gigantic muscle fiber, like a big snail.

And it's not it's obviously like, you know, hundreds of thousands of muscle fibers, and obviously in this case divided into four main regions, although we'll talk about some subdivisions of that later on. Um yeah, so no, there's there's some really cool stuff going on there which I think is worth being aware of.

So what else have we got? Well we've got um another oh no, we've got risk curls now. Sorry, I missed that. We've got some risk risk curls which um, you know, um fair enough. I'm not gonna comment too much on that'cause I haven't done much work on um different wrist exercises. Honestly, I think if anybody's interested in training um wrist muscle, they should just look at what the arm wrestlers are doing. I mean they obviously have that down to a pretty fine art

And then finally we've got standing barbell um reverse curls, which obviously is, you know, the reverse grip is gonna give you more brachyradialis. Interestingly, I would say this program as a whole is very much heavy on the brachyradialis side. It is. It's it's definitely a lighter sawn in the biases practice. It's very light on the biceps bracky side. Yeah. Which arguably is the most challenging in terms of using dumbbells and barbells.

Yes. Um I mean really what you would have to do is lie s supine on a bench, um I think, probably. Do you know there's an exercise they used to do I've never told you? Like it'd be like uh it would be like a it would be like kind of a preacher girl situation. Would that work? Um Keep talking, I'll think about it. Let me tell you this exercise because I it it it ticks a lot of boxes, but when you do it it feels like garbage.

And you're literally lying flat on the floor, not on a bench, just on the floor. You have your arms fully extended, and then you do a curl with your arms flat against the floor. That's what I was thinking. Yeah, that's what I was thinking, more or less. Makes a lot of sense and you do it and it feels like trash. 哇

But there are some people who did it. I I saw Celia lift it. I forget who, but I saw it. I'm like, oh my God, they solved this issue. And then when I did it, I'm like, no, they didn't solve it. If you if you if you had a slight a very, very low bent. Incredibly low bench, just like a couple of blocks on the floor, like those kind of steps that people sometimes use in the gym. Um just give yourself like ten, twenty degrees of shoulder extension. Would that help? Yeah, probably.

That would be really interesting to try. Yeah, maybe I'll have a bit of a play. I'm sure that by the following uh week when we talk again somebody would have done something on TikTok about it. But to be honest, y you mean you can just sit in a kind of incline bench uh sort of setup and use a horizontal cable from behind you. I mean that's probably the Easier the cable, absolutely.

And in fact there's even machines I've seen, uh there's a machine in the not the gym that I'm going to at the moment, but the one I was going to um last year, end of last year. They had it literally just a seat um and there was just two cables and Yeah. Portrait behind you. It's very, very simple kind of uh I said that. Anyway, um

Triceps. So we've got a um standard barbell bench press, okay, fine, probably as you said, narrow grip, um perfectly fine for training medial and lateral heads of the triceps. Um the overhead triceps press, um, okay, fine, more medial and lateral head work. Um pushdowns, okay, some long head work and then dips. Okay, so dips are really interesting. So just let me um kind of

comment on this again uh from a two joint muscle perspective. So basically um the long head is a shoulder extensor, so we'd expect it not to work in most pressing activities. But again, you've got to look at where it has best leverage for shoulder extension. It's got best leverage for shoulder extension when the arm is overhead. So really kind of doing that sort of um uh top part of the size to plane um kind of shoulder extension range of motions where it's doing most of its work.

And as you come down to the anatomical position, the leverage is absolutely sailing towards zero. Like just it's really clear that it's going towards zero. And it comes all the way down to zero at the anatomical position. And then of course nobody collects any data past that point.

So it's entirely possible that if you just extrapolate that line you end up actually pushing the long head into being a shoulder flexor in the opposite position. Now, just to be clear, there are shoulder muscles that do do that. You can see them if you go past the range of motion, you can see some like um parts of the deltoid or pec uh complex kind of looking like they're crossing over between um you know one side of a line and the other. So that's not unheard of.

So I think it's entirely possible that the long head could be a flexor in that behind the back position, in which case dips would actually toast the long head completely'cause you'd be asking it to do shoulder flexion at the same time as elbow extension. And that would be really putting it into a position of, you know, requiring to activate very, very extensively.

Now, I think it's entirely possible that's true and it might even be another one of those individual things where some people experience that and some people don't. That might explain why some people have just ridiculous dip strength. Like in my case, it's entirely possible that I've got that ability to use the long head as a shoulder. uh flexor in that in that behind the back position, which is why I can, you know, look like a a twig and still move monstrous amount.

So I think that that that again could be one of those variances. But uh I think that makes it a very, very interesting exercise for people who who, you know, kind of feel it or people who can move a lot of weight on it. I think it it probably does classify as being a very, very interesting uh triceps exercise. And people keep asking that question about the long head and the dips and in the case they missed it I can't and No, no, no.

I don't there is no data. Nobody's collected that information. So, you know, there's a little bit of uh obviously there's a a lot of anecdotal evidence, there's a lot of uh speculation about at the end of the day, yes, it's possible. No, I don't know what whether it's actually happening or not. So perhaps the question to ask I mean uh uh do we need a comment on the volume? I don't know if we need to say anything.

The volume is just completely off the charts. It's not even worth, you know, kind of analysing. I mean it clearly Twice a week. Well, uh Howund, there's a couple things working for him. Okay. So the the first exercise in both workouts. He he is predominantly doing low repetition sets. So even though there's eight sets. The the cheek curl is cancelling that effect out. And cancelling it out. So And then obviously the wrist curl, I mean, that's not really taking the elbow.

It's indefensible, this level of volume is indefensible. There's no scenario in which you can argue that this is sensible. Okay. Look, honestly, the triceps is the more defensible workout. If it weren't for the pushdowns at sets of twelve, Yeah, I mean it's still it's still too high, but it is the dips, four sets of four, totally fine. The bench, most of that is sub four repetitions.

Those two combined would be fine. But then adding on another six sets of six plus the pushdowns, yeah, it's just even a twice a week, it's just it's hectic. Okay. Yep. So volume. Yeah. Probably not gonna be recoverable for anyone. Um Now, I don't know where you want to go with this. It'd be interesting to talk about what exercise selection we would do differently. You touched on some of that as you went through this, but is there somewhere else you want to go first before we get to that?

There is, yes. So we've had this conversation before, but I keep seeing the error being made and I keep seeing people ignoring it. This is like those topics that we've talked about previously where people sail on past the point that I'm making, completely failing to address it. And that's why they just keep ending up making the same error again and again and again. So we've talked we had did a whole episode about voluntary activation deficit.

And basically I explained how voluntary duration deficits work, I explained why we've got them, I explained, you know, all the various features of them.

Um, and uh people kind of just responded by saying, No, no, no, no, we don't believe that they're happening and they Okay, well then live in your own little dream world then because you know, they are happening. But I want to just start out by explaining why The voluntary activation deficit is important even when you're dealing with a muscle group like the elbow flexor complex or the elbow extensor complex, which

on the face of it, don't seem to display very large deficits. Okay?'Cause that's what people are gonna say. They're gonna say, Oh well, you know, we looked at the um this study and w it showed that there was no meaningful voluntary activation deficit, or it's like two percent or three percent or whatever. Okay, fine. So

Um, if that's your starting point, listen very carefully to what I'm about to say because it will change your point of view if you're actually prepared to listen. So If I do a voluntary activation test, what I'm doing is I'm comparing the force I can generate voluntarily with the force I can generate voluntarily plus any involuntary force from an actual stimulation. That's what I'm comparing, those two things. So essentially

Any additional force I can generate with the involuntary twitch is telling me that muscle fibers were not activated voluntarily, which are now being activated involuntarily with the stimulation. That's what we're saying. Now, importantly I'm testing that by reference to the external torque that's being generated in both cases. So if I activate a muscle fiber in the elbow flexor complex that does not have a leverage to produce torque in the direction I'm testing.

So let's imagine, and we're going to talk about this again in a few minutes, but let's imagine that I'm testing elbow flexion voluntary activation deficit. And so I've got my elbow at ninety degrees Um because that's kind of halfway between where the brachy radialis are gonna be most active and biceps brachi and brachialis are gonna be most active. So I'm at ninety degrees and I'm producing a maximum amount of isometric uh torque that I can produce.

And I then test electrical stimulation to see how much extra um torque I can generate with that electrical uh kind of uh involuntary contraction. And let's say I kind of get two percent or something like that. So you can go, okay, well no, that's no big deal. Okay. What happens though if I've got a whole bunch of muscle fibers in the medial part of my biceps brachi long head?

Which are really amazing at supernation and have absolutely zero ability to do flexion whatsoever. You actually not you could activate those with your involuntary stimulation, they could all activate, and no extra torque will be generated. Zero.

So I I've activated all those fibers and I've used the electrical stimulation to activate those fibers, but I've not produced any benefit from doing that whatsoever. So it doesn't register as an increase in torque production in the involuntary side of the equation, and so I don't register it as a problem.

It literally just doesn't register as a problem. So what you've got then is muscle fibers that are not being activated, so they're technically part of your voluntary activation deficit as far as we're concerned from a hypertrophy point of view.

From a biomechanics point of view it's not relevant because what we're saying is we're not activating fibres that we can't use. Okay, fine, we're not activating fibers that we can't use. But from a hypertrophy point of view, it's absolutely relevant because you're what you're trying to do is say Am I training all of the elbow flexor complex? Well, no, you're not, because you're not activating fibres that are capable of doing supination but aren't capable of doing flexion.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean in the same way, you know, if you were if they were testing A curl, and then suddenly someone starts activating the quads, that's not going to change anything on the test. You're not going to see that increase in mode and improvement in the quads.

And you're saying, well, it's the same thing if there's muscle fibers that can't actually do that thing you're testing within that muscle. And we know that there's going to be for I mean, for any muscle we're testing, that's gonna be the case. Yeah, I'm just giving an example that I've actually got studies to to justify. So I'm I'm I've literally there are studies in the nineteen eighties where people looked at the biceps crackie long head and they found that some muscle fibers

uh in the lateral part do flexion and some muscle fibers in the medial part do supination. And you literally have that and th it you know, this don't get activated if you're not doing those particular actions. So um it's there's a perfect example of what we're talking about here.

Yeah. So if if someone says, hey, no, Bicess Drachi has, you know, ninety-nine percent voluntary activation, that does not mean ninety-nine percent of those muscle fibers or motor units are being recruited or active in that test.

No it doesn't. And and and just to be clear, again, we'd covered this when we did the episode on voluntary activation deficit, but I'm just gonna repeat it again here. When we test voluntary activation deficits, there are a couple of features. Which are very important. Firstly we test them in unilateral movement.

Now, whether or not you think that, you know, the bilateral deficit is caused by muscle mass or whether you think it's caused by something else, doesn't really matter. The point is that everybody recognizes that bilateral deficit is is there and it happens and you end up with a um Substantially higher level of recruitment in a unilateral movement compared to a bilateral movement. So again, if you're testing unilaterally

you're not going to take the b uh voluntary activation deficit that you are going to get in a normal strength training exercise. Um and then again, we all recognise that stability has an enormous effect on rotent recruitment. Well, dynamometry

is off the top end of stability. Like if you think your your machine exercise is stable, wait till you see a dynamometer. I mean, like it's like you're strapped and you can't move. So ultimately there's a very there's two really big factors there which mean that when you're trying to go, oh well, I'm just gonna do my normal kind of biceps curls with dumbbells and I'm gonna be all right, Jack.

You're not because you're actually going to see massive difference between that standing two armed dumbbell curl with, you know, kind of free weights compared to a stable situation in a uh dynamometer and a um kind of unilateral scenario. So if you couple these three if you add these all these three things together, couple those two with what we said earlier about um the voluntary activation deficit not

including fibers that don't do the torque direction that you're interested in. Then you actually have three really huge factors that cause that monstruct deficit to be hugely greater in the free weight

normal gym scenario compared to the scenario that you're measuring in the laboratory context. So Um ultimately, you know, if you're looking at um a laboratory derived volunteer activation measure and you're saying, Oh, that's ninety eight percent, ninety nine percent, ninety seven percent or whatever the number is, therefore I can ignore it, you're fundamentally not understanding how you go

from that laboratory scenario to the gym and take into account the other factors that we're already aware of that change that deficit and make it a lot bigger. I think the part of that that I find most interesting is that If you think about the implication of the leverage part, so saying that, hey, there's motor units here that that actually can't produce torque and they're not being measured.

That tells us it's not just the same motor units every single time that you're not able to access, right? So if someone says, oh, the biases drag has, you know, 98% voluntary activation, then some might think, oh, that's fine. There's two percent I'm never gonna get.

But no no no, what you're saying is there's actually some of those mode units you'll get in one exercise and then not in another, and you'll get some of those in another, and it actually is an a an argument for why one must be using different exercises, high variety of exercises, if they're wanting to maximize hyper Yeah, and in fact there's actually no downside really. I mean there is a

I mean, like people go, Oh no, no, no, you need to do max in more sets per per exercise to maximize the stimulus. And I'm like, Really? Have you looked at the dose response relationships? I mean, like, seriously? I mean like just go back to the Schoenfeldt metro analysis or, you know, look at the Pelland one. I mean

Um I think the Pelin one is um kind of the uh the curve is too steep because I think it includes a lot of the more recent studies that have a lot of muscle swelling in them. Um but if you go back to the Schermfeld and you just draw a basic kind of uh natural logarithm through that data, what you find is that, you know, one set, okay, gives you, you know, kind of one arbitrary unit if you like, worth of hypertrophy stimulus. Your second set is giving you, you know, like

you know, a tiny uh additional amount. What is it? I can't remember the number now. It's like thirty percent or something. Thirty nine. Thirty nine percent is it. So like you just get this and then the third set it maybe gives you another kind of twenty something percent on top of that. So, you know, it just there's there's just really small additional benefit from doing uh an extra set of the same exercise. Much better to do an exercise that is training um different muscle fibers.

in that group and then you're gonna get okay, some overlap, which is gonna be in that uh thirty nine percent zone, but you're also gonna be getting, you know, maybe five, ten percent of fibers that are not overlapping or even more. I mean I was really shocked when I looked at the the the the um muscle damage study um of the and and it showed that pretty much no swelling is happening.

um in the biceps brachi and brachiradialis in a prechocur scenario, which implies that the brachialis is getting absolutely toasted. You know, so I think if anything, I'm underestimating how important neuromechanical matching is. So now that we've covered voluntary activation and that it is an issue for the elbow flexes and every muscle. Yeah, exactly.

So what that means is exactly what you were just leading us towards, which is that um we have to consider exercise selection as a high priority because that's the way that you ensure that this voluntary activation deficit is not causing you a problem. If you have a voluntary activation deficit in in in any given exercise, what it means is that the muscle fibers that are least

useful to you are the ones that get pushed to the top end of the um kind of uh mo tune it pool essentially. They're the ones you can ignore. So you're doing a elbow flexion exercise and the biceps bracky longhead is going to ignore the supernation motor units to the last possible moment and probably not actually end up recruiting very many of them.

And, you know, just to be clear, when I'm talking about that example, those studies, um, these are nineteen eighties studies and they were actually interested um about, you know, is there functional differentiation between different

um heads of the biceps. And that was what they were primarily interested in. And people ask me that question all the time. They go, you know, can I target one head of the biceps brachy or the other? I'm like, probably not, but there are still activation um kind of clusters within and the biceps brachi long head. So you will actually get different parts of that muscle being activated depending on whether you're supinating or or flexing.

Okay, so related but maybe adjacent question. So there is a belief that the best exercises for hypertrophy are compound, multi joint, multi muscle exercises. and that isolation, single joint exercises of the ice top of the cake, you know, maybe they're at E shape or or whatever. And hopefully it's not too many people who are listening to this who hold that belief, but I'm surprised by how prevalent this belief still is.

If we're talking about maximizing growth, I mean you kind of answered it just in what you've covered so far, but of those more compound type exercises versus isolation type exercises Which are gonna be more suitable to our goalia? Well, if we're aiming to, you know, kind of maximize arm size, then obviously you want to train the arms. You don't want to be training the rest of the uh kind of body with the exercises that you're using to target arms. I mean ultimately, you know, there's um

uh there's this push back against the idea that larger amounts of muscle mass being used by um you know in an exercise mean lower activation per muscle group. And that i I mean that's just so easily verifiable across a number of different domains. in the exercise science literature. I mean you can see it in the fatigue literature, you know, you can see it in literally like

you just go and look at the ventre activation deficits for all the major muscles of the body. Start with the glute, work your way up to like the bicep brach, and you'll notice that you can just literally draw a line, a straight line, through the size of the muscle versus venture activation deficit. The bigger the muscle, the bigger the deficit. I mean it's literally that obvious. You know, there's a exception in the case of the hamstrings, but pretty much

reliable kind of uh relationship between muscle size and voluntary activation deficit. Very, very straightforward. And of course, you know, you've got bilateral force deficit as well, very clearly giving you an example of larger amounts of muscle mass giving you bigger voluntary activation deficits. So there's a whole load of different kind of um sort of d sources of data that you can look for. Um and what it just means is that a and that's before we start talking about limiting factors.

So like, you know, ultimately if somebody says, Well, I'm doing this multi joint exercise and it's I think it's gonna train all the muscles that are involved, I'm like, Yeah, but which one's the limiting factor? Um, because one of them will be the limiting factor and they'll be the one that you experience highest effort in and the others won't be maxed out to the same degree. I mean that

is highly unlikely that you're gonna have an exercise that perfectly matches every single, you know, muscle. I mean, I talk about this all the time. I say that every time I try and do benching or any pressing exercise, my triceps just are the ones that kinda hit the limiting factor. So for me, actually

you know, kind of multi joint exercises do tend to be uh quite interesting for for for for arm work simply because my triceps are being put in a position of being the limiting factor. But I could probably still get slightly higher recruitment in a single joint exercise simply because

Um I haven't got other muscles working at the same time. And you've ultimately what we're always trying to do is limit the effort perceptions going to anything other than um or being related to anything other than the motion accrument to the target muscle. But I've heard that if you're doing a multi-joint exercise, that because there's more muscles being used. That means there's more Both I don't even know how to attempt to steal man this argument. No I didn't know how to construct.

The argument is literally that more muscles equal more central motor command somehow and therefore higher activation of everything that's being used. Return somehow. Yeah. I mean that's so to be fair, so many of the arguments I see online just come down to, you know, a palpatine return somehow.

you know, somehow it's like, you know, I want this answer to be true, therefore I'm gonna start from this observation and then insert a somehow and then and then kind of jump straight to the answer. I mean, honestly Basically, muscular failure happens because we hit maximum tolerable perceptions of effort. You know, anybody arguing that it happens because of purely because of peripheral mechanisms actually hasn't looked at what would happen if that were the case.

You know, it's actually not possible for that to be the case. We're hitting maximum tolerable perception of effort. We even see the I mean, there's an entire body of literature devoted to looking at how reps in reserve and RPE match so that you hit maximum effort at the end of a set. Maximum effort is literally the definition of you hitting muscular failure. That's what it is. So we hit the maximum tolerable production effort and we stop. And that means that you've basically got a

kind of capacity of effort perception. You're devoting that to whatever is required and it could be coordination, it could be um burning sensation of the muscle, it could be cardiovascular sensations, and a big chunk of it is going to be the central motor command coming from the brain.

And that centromotic command has got to go somewhere and you've got to if you've got more muscles being activated, you've got more centromotid commands being generated and you're not going to be able to um activate one muscle to the maximum degree if you're sharing that centromotid command across a whole bunch of different places. And there's so many ways that you can see that happening. Like I talk about external focus of attention a lot.

And people go, Oh yeah, external focus tension really motivating'cause you're setting this external goal, therefore it should increase recruitment. I'm like, Well, it does increase most likely increase central motocromand as a total, but the problem is it doesn't increase recruitment in the muscle that you're interested in training because what that does

actually is uh the external focus spreads activation across more places because your body is using more muscles to achieve the desired goal. And because you're using more muscles to achieve the di desired goal, you end up actually reducing recruitment in the target one that you're training. So um there's lots of different um kind of uh ways and angles that you can come at this problem, but they all kind of bring you to the same place.

But I've heard that perception of effort is not relevant to strength training. So we just magically reach maximum effort at the end of every single set to failure. It's just a coincidence is Uh uh I'm just saying, I'm just saying what I've heard that apparently apparently researchers are saying the model doesn't apply to

But the model is literally devised in strength training um situations. So if you look at where Central Motor Command and Sensation of Innovation was originally studied, so sensation of innovation is the uh kind of feeling that we get as a result of um recruiting motor units. So it's the thing that contributes to the increasing perception of effort.

as we go through a strength training set, especially with, you know, kind of heavy or moderate loads. With lighter loads, you've got other perceptions of effort from afferent feedback, but that's less relevant. Um so what we're seeing then is that as we increase the sensation of innovation because we're increasing more as the central motor command level, we start to feel that as a perception. That's literally what sensation of innovation means.

And when we reach the maximum tolerable limit of that, we can't really increase it any further and that stops us from increasing motinic recruitment. That stops us from actually being able to, you know, kind of

continue the exercise that we're doing. The sensation of innovation was literally studied and you actually sent me a study that's been done by the same lab more recently where they've basically test of the same observation and uh slightly different way. And it was literally done in a strength training situation, it was done in biceps curls.

You know, so when people say, Oh no, no, the model doesn't apply to strength training, I'm like It was literally done initially in the strength training concept. We have the studies, we're still getting new studies. Yeah. Not done in strength training when the actual sensation of animation hypothesis was formed in twenty twelve.

you know, uh I think, uh, if I remember correctly, um, with a bicep skill study and the more recent one that you uh sent me uh not so long ago, again, repeated, I think, again an elbow flexion exercise. So um I yeah, I don't I don't know why people are saying that.

Yeah. Okay. I sidetracked us. Where were we? We're staying on track. Staying on track. We were thinking about how are we constructing um a a kind of arms workout that would be better than the uh kind of golden era one that you kind of started us off with. Um and I was kind of just making the point that what we want is a reasonable degree of exercise variety

that allows us to hit all of the muscle fibers in both the elbow flexors and the elbow extensors. Um and, you know, I think really I covered a lot of the ground uh when I was analysing the uh workout Yeah. for us today. So it's actually quite straightforward. You can say, well, okay, you've got the brachirobialis, you've got the brachialis, and you've got the biceps brachy.

Um, we talked about how the brachioridialis is going to have um peak effort in the contractor position of elbow flexion and also probably, you know, with a uh pronated grip if, you know, people want to do that. So you're not going to be able to do In case anyone's not aware, Bracuratialis, like we're talking that sort of like elbow gap muscle. You don't like my description?

Well, it's not that. It's just I think, you know, um everybody's got very, very slightly different um, you know, kind of way that things l uh lay out and sometimes people can look very, very different. I mean, I wouldn't want people to go over the idea that it has to always be exactly like that.

Um, you know, I mean there's there's case reports of people having all kinds of weird anatomical variations. So if people's uh look if they're look if you're looking at your arm right now and it doesn't look like that, then don't worry too much about Um, but yeah, so um top part the exercise range of motion.

um and you know pronating them. I mean I always say to people, you know, elastic resistance is probably um the easiest and simplest way to do that. But again, cables, uh if you're running them horizontally, will generally do the same effect. So um they will generally allow you to get uh peak effort close to the uh sort of end range depending on what your body position is relative to the cable direction.

Um, so yeah, some kind of maybe elastic resistance. Um loop elastic resistance around an easy bar and just stand on the elastic resistance and, you know, pull upwards and you'll get a pretty strong brachioradialis effect. Um obviously I said before, biceps brachi probably um kind of seated curl with the cables behind the back, uh pulling horizontally is gonna be really effective for the biceps brachi, we explained why that was.

And then brachialis is gonna be a preacher cool. And then really if people want to go absolutely to the I mean w obviously we're talking about a bodybuilding kind of uh sort of situation yeah. This is not anything remotely related to, you know, casual lifting. I mean if people just want to do casual kind of strength training then just do some hammer curls and forget about all this other stuff.

Um, but you know, from a purpose of like somebody who's looking to be competitive, then you would have one of each of these curls probably. And if things still weren't really going in the direction we wanted to, then I would probably look at super nations. Now

I'm guaranteeing that people will go, Oh well can I just rotate the dumbbell as I'm lifting it? No, you can't because the supination torque that you can generate is huge. So you're gonna find that that is just the easiest thing in the world to do supination while you're rotating. You're gonna need to do a separate supernation exercise and you're gonna find that you actually get really strong really quickly doing that kind of thing. Um the grip guys use very light sledgehammers for this.

Because they can literally just uh put tape, electrical tape of different uh different distances along the um so you know. And then you just i progressive overload is you move uh your hand uh uh one electrical tape uh kind of notch to the next or s sort of strip to the next, and you can count how many s sort of electrical tape strips that you've managed to increase. uh over time and your obviously supination improves accordingly to the increased leverage that that weight has on your wrist.

So um very, very straightforward. So um that would kind of be a sort of uh complete set of exercises. How would I construct that? Well I think you might be able to get away with uh four sets three times a week, but I think if you'd have to keep the weight relatively low, um and you'd probably have to be one of those people who's

uh muscle fibers probably had quite a lot of um difference in terms of the exercises that were training those fibers. If you're one of those people who's perhaps a little bit less uh kind of specific in terms of which exercise does which thing, you might find that you're gonna have to do full body A B and train two exercises on one day and two exercises on the other day, otherwise it's not gonna work. But, you know, I think uh either of those two strategies would probably make sense.

Now, I don't think you mentioned any unilateral exercises. Oh well I guess the supernation's gonna be unilateral exercises. You have to yeah, you have to do the supernation unilaterally. But I mean you you could do all of this unilaterally. I mean there's no reason why not to. Yeah. I mean for Dracuratialis, my favourite exercise at the moment is a top partial cable curl. If you have it like a trying editor.

Absolutely. Probably the probably the simplest way if you've got a decent setup. Absolutely. Yeah. And then you can pair that. Like I so what I'll do is I'll do that obviously single arm and then I'll pair that with a standing behind the back cable curl single arm and I'll brace myself against the other side of the cable station. So I can do unilateral for both in the same station. I've got most of my groups doing that. I think it's a it's a great pair, Tobias, Bracky Radias, Tobias' Dracky.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean ultimately uh practicalities are going to have to take precedence over everything else. But um yeah, ultimately we're aiming for those three different positions and then the fourth big supernation if people want to add that in. What did he say for Brachialis? You said Preacher Curl? Yeah. And how would that compare to a a Hamakel?

You basically from about seventy degrees onwards you're probably getting to the zone where the brachiradialis um would be uh kind of taking over. So we kind of want to stay below that. Um And obviously Hammer curl is kind of drifting past that point. Yeah. So we kinda wanna make sure that the exercise is hardest below seventy, ideally more around the kind of twenty or thirty degrees. So I tend to suggest to people at preacher really want to be as shallow as possible.

And arguably you can actually do that. Cronated grip. Yeah, if it's comfortable, but I don't generally find that it is too comfortable, but yeah. Well, not with a machine, no, but you could I'm just trying to think'cause I used to do it that way, I'm trying to recall how I used to do it. Probably you could probably do a hammer co variation. That wouldn't be too That's what I did. I did a dumbbell hammocker, like a single arm. And you could do the the bottom partial if you wanted.

Yeah, yeah. That would definitely give you a bit more brachiolis, I think. And then repetition why who would just kind of keep that sort of fairly standard, four or eight, something like that? Again, it would depend on where you were going with it. So if you were again thinking about doing this as a as an A B routine and just having two exercises in each workout, then you could go down the slightly higher re rep range.

And that would be okay. But if you're gonna put all four into one workout and try and do those three times a week, then I think you would probably need to be very careful about your rep ranges, you need to probably need to be careful about your reps in reserve as well. Honestly, I think that's the best way it is. You finished your thought?

I was just gonna say this is one of those issues you have to be aware of with the elbow flexors and extensors is that of all the muscles in the body, they're actually the um most easily damaged. And just to be clear, I know that you've got people um out there, even people who are, you know, kind of um talking about sports science in this context.

who will tell you that they think that the elbow flexors um are easily uh you know, kind of non uh non fatiguing muscles that they don't exp because they're smaller or whatever. and the opposite is actually the case. And i in fact, it's one of those situations where if you have any understanding of the fatigue literature, you will be like, What are these people talking about? Because in the fatigue literature

researchers literally use the elbow flexors as the muscle that gets damaged and the quads as the muscle that is resistant to damage. That is literally what they do because after hundreds and hundreds of studies, that is the result that keeps coming out, that you train the quads and they recover really quickly. You train the biceps bracky and they just get destroyed for a week.

That is just what we keep seeing time after time after time of time. So when people say, No, no, no, I don't believe you, I'm like, Well, you just haven't done the reading then because it's literally the sort of benchmark kind of comparison that we use for everything.

I mean, I I'm just amazed. I said to you, I joked with you before we came on the podcast, there are basically three kind of sureties in life. You know, death taxes and hypertrophy research is not understanding the fatigue literature. I mean, it's getting really silly, you know, like just guys just go and do the reading, it's not hard.

So anyway, um so yeah, um elbow flexors and extensors get really um kinda damaged by exercise that we have to be extra careful with those compared to a lot of the other muscles that you're gonna be training. It just makes sense if you actually look at the characteristics of the elbow flexors anyway. Like even if even if you didn't look at those studies. proportions, high fast pitch proportions, small volunteer activation deficit relative to the other muscles.

You can't smash the high threshold motivates because you can't, you know, can't uh in the case of the lower body muscles, you can't smash the high threshold motigen at muscle fibers because you can't reach them. And there's a pretty even balance of slow and fast. In the case of the um elbow flexors and extensors, you've got lots of fast reach fibres and you can access most of them, so you're gonna get uh really severe muscle damaging effect after the workout. So

Honestly, um, you know, this is all very, very joined up. There's no kind of gaps in this uh thought process. People are just not doing the reading. You made a comment about repetitions if you're splitting up over up a l uh like two days or Yeah.

Yes. I think that's an astute comment to make and I think that's a I find that a valuable way to be thinking about repetition range where I would say the easiest way to think about dreps is to base it off your recoverability in the sense that if you're training a muscle and you're doing multiple sets and you're gonna be doing it again forty eight hours later.

you're kind of going to be forced to do lower repetition sets. And by lower, you know, I just mean, you know, sub sort of 10 or or whatever, right? If you're doing that twice a week. or you're doing single sets, you've got the liberty of doing ten, twelve, fifteen repetitions if you want. So for me, I tend to gravitate towards the higher repetitions if my recoverability timeline allows for it, because I just save so much time warming up. If I'm doing multi-sets, I'll do lower repetitions. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think uh it just comes down to practicalities really. But again, you know, um it is what it is.

So that's elbow flexors. Um, shall we move on to triceps? We should. Cool. So um really from a uh kind of triceps point of view, we've got um kind of the medium lateral heads and we've got the long head. Um now Um we talked uh again in the uh kind of um analysis of the Golden Era program about how the longhead might have the ability to get involved in dips.

And in that case, you know, you might get a really strong kind of whole triceps stimulus from the dip exercise if you're one of those people that, you know, has that ability to produce shoulder flexion kind of talk with the long head. Um and I suspect

in my case I probably was in that category because I did a lot of dips. I got my triceps to a kind of size where they probably weren't gonna get a lot bigger. I tried to add in some um kind of over extension and absolutely zero happened. I mean it literally did nothing for me whatsoever. So I think

Chances are there are kind of people that maybe fall into that category. Um, not necessarily everybody, but uh I think there probably are people who could probably use dips and get quite a long way down the route of training the entirety of the triceps uh kind of group.

If you do want to kind of use uh single joint stuff to target different parts or you need to for whatever re you know, for the reasons uh that you're not falling into that category, um, then obviously, you know, kind of what we've got is um uh some interesting uh information regarding shoulder and elbow uh leverages.

Um, generally speaking, the long head probably has better relative leverage to the medial and lateral heads when the elbow is uh flexed and when the shoulder is extended. So that's basically gonna be a standing triceps extension, um push down rather than

Uh and then obviously if you want to train the medial and lateral heads you could do the uh behind the uh kind of uh head uh kind of overhead triceps extension with a dumbbell. And that would give you kind of two exercises that would do medial and lateral heads versus uh kind of uh long heads. Uh would you yeah choose the overhead extension over a close grip bench or are you choosing that because simply you've got st chest involvement?

Yeah, I'm yeah, I'm kind of assuming that somebody wants a single joint exercise for both. Um you could obviously do the the narrow grip uh kind of bench press or something like that. Um in the same way that you could do the dip. I mean either of those two would do that if you were in the category of people who couldn't get the long head to work in those scenarios. Um, so yeah, I mean, um

there's not really a lot more I think that um that I would I would throw into the mix. Um, you know, personally I would just do dips. Um I I think that'd probably do everything that I could possibly get out of triceps training. Uh for somebody who isn't in that category of having that leverage capacity, I would say

you know, yeah, probably something like an arrogate bench or and then a standing triceps pushdown, or alternatively, you know, the two different um kind of triceps uh kind of exercises at a single joint. I mean, either of those two strategies would probably do the trick. I don't think there's really anything I mean, there's some data suggesting that

you can get a little bit out of a supernative position in the triceps pushdown exercises, but generally you're gonna need probably a cuff to make that happen. So the tech uh you know, the kind of the the requirement for equipment starts to pile up, um But, you know, why that's up?

I mean a lot of gyms have cuffs nowadays. It it is something I often I do use out with my groups and and say, Look, if you can't do it, don't do it. Just do it pronated butt Super native if someone hasn't done it, like it does feel quite nice if you've got the castle volume.

Different, doesn't it? I mean, like this is the thing. When I when when I first looked at it, and I was like I'm skeptical, but there were two studies came out both showing that supernative position for the triceps push down.

uh increased activation of the long head even further. I'm like, okay, that's interesting. And I actually went and tried it and um okay, my grip strength was just about up to the st up to the challenge of doing a couple of reps before it kind of went, Okay, this is not happening.

Um, but it felt totally different. I actually my my entire kind of triceps muscle felt like it was doing something really quite different. In the same way that when I do supinations, I actually feel uh my elbow flexor complex feels different from when I do. Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok

Yeah. Um the same thing I get when I do a supernatant version of a pushdown. I actually feel a completely different contraction in my triceps brachulite. The muscle is trying to do something different. Um so I think the activation loc locations are are gonna be uh different in that scenario. Um So yeah, um I think uh that would probably be the only kind of tweak that I would potentially consider if somebody was really trying to go to the top tier kind of competitive level of bodybuilding.

Yeah, I was thinking about this this week and I thought'cause there's a lot of people talking about um what do they call it? Like a a minimalist programme, you know, minimalist full body training and and abbreviated plans, that kind of thing.

And I was thinking, you know what, the key difference here between a minimalist and a maximalist, more we're talking about it's maximalist, is a minimalist plan is gonna look for the exercise that has as much activation of that whole muscle group as possible. Whereas a maximalist plan doesn't really want that. We want to pick exercises that have as much of a particular region as possible and as little of the other regions as possible.

I I think there's there's a step I agree with you, but I think there's also a step that comes before the um exercise selection um kind of decision is made in the context of a minimalist programme. Because I run a minimalist programme most of the time. Um, but that's'cause I'm an old man. So, you know, if you if you're coming at it from an old man perspective, you you don't just have the point of view of saying

you know, how do I capture the maximum amount of activation for the muscle group? You actually have to decide what muscle groups are important to you. Absolutely, absolutely. No, I agree. I think that's a start. Yeah. There's a starting point where you have to actually go, what what's most important to me? And then I kinda and actually it doesn't always come down to muscle mass because you could say to someone, Okay, well, um, I only want to have one quad exercise in the program

But is is it gonna come down to a leg press or a or a uh kind of a knee extension? And somebody will go, Oh yeah, but the knee extension's the only way they get the wreck feminine I'm like, Yeah, but there's no way I'm gonna drop a leg press out of my program. It's not gonna happen. You know And what else are you doing in the programme as well? Like are you Yeah. Exactly.

We actually did we did a we did a whole kind of um a discussion where we we constructed that um that minimalist program out of I think we came down to it w one one pressing exercise, one pulling exercise, a hamstrings. On social media, we didn't do that on a podcast.

Yeah, we did that on social media. And like, yeah, I think ultimately that's where I start from. I start from one one pull, one press, a leg press and a and a hamstrings curl. That's that's the core of my my workout really. Um, now at this point. Uh in this context. It because you've answered the question. If someone wanted to do a a minimalist program for arms, you're saying for a lot of people dip. For triceps. May potentially be that exercise.

But I'm I'm I'm I'm kind of uh a bit agnostic really about that. I mean I don't I don't think it's definitively the the the d the guaranteed uh exercise that I would probably programme, but it's pretty close. And arguably, you know what I like? I like a a dumbbell um a supernating, alternating curl. Because just based on the moment arm, you are going to get good Draculatialis.

Yes, you do have Supernation. I agree we're not challenging Super Nation to any significant extent, but we're still gonna be getting, you know, decent by Bracky Ars, Drake Ratty R. Um and the alternating curl, yes, it's not a unilateral exercise, but do it a heavy knife. You're gonna get a little bit more. Yeah. No, I I I to be fair I do do the Hammercur's um alternating. Um so yeah. No, I think that's right. Um so again it it it's different um kind of

programmes for different purposes. I mean it depends where people are going. I d I don't like seeing arguments where people are starting from totally different perspectives where one person's talking about things from a competitive bodybuilding point of view, the other person's talking about it from like a like maybe closer to my own position. Old man kind of just needs a training programme kind of point of view.

And they're they're literally arguing with each other about what exercises are best and they're not actually understanding that one is asking for one thing and the other is asking for total Yeah, what's the function really trying to solve? Yeah, I find those arguments to be pretty pretty um kind of um try I'm searching for a word that isn't really rude.

um disappointing. Um, you know, that they're not able to have the empathy to understand that the other person is just fundamentally asking for a different thing. Yeah. Um so yeah, so just all of this conversation. So it's okay for someone to ask for a different thing as well. That's that's what I find offensive when coaches assume that the that the client must only ask what they want to be doing as a coach.

It's like, well hang on. Someone might actually want a maximalist plan. You don't need to just force a minimalist plan or vice versa onto everything. Yeah, I I think uh goals goals are personal and um definitely are uh fundamentally, you know, kind of it's a necessity for us to respect that. Um I don't um think it's uh a good idea to go down the route of value judgmenting people's uh goals.

Yes. I wanna highlight just on that minimalist maximumist thing because when when we just came up with that minimalist plan there, I know that you said dips might fit into a maximum plan and you gave a caveat there and said not for everyone and you gave the other options if that wasn't the case, yeah.

But so obviously dips are a bit of a gray area. But our elbow flexor exercise we picked, an alternating hammer curl, a supinating, dumbbell curl, whatever, that was not in our maximum plan. And that's a point I want to highlight. Yeah. Exactly. That's it. A minimalist plan involves a compromise for an exercise selection, and a maximalist plan doesn't. Well, yeah, I mean...

Oh yeah, I mean like at the absolute base level, like my starting point for the most minimalist plan that you can get get to which pretty much exactly the same as yours really, although I think I initially started out with a stiff leg deadlift and you kind of said, Well, no, better to have a s you know, kind of seated hamstring curl and I think you're probably right.

So ultimately, you know, kind of she's a damaging curl, leg press, um, kind of some kind of um you know, steep incline press or or kind of wide grip, um kind of shoulder press and maybe some kind of wide grip uh pull down probably would be my personal preferences. Um now You're making huge compromises there because you've not got any direct armwork at all. I mean, it's like you know, you've just got no direct armwork at all in the program now.

For me, I I'm definitely in the category of people who can get away with that because my kind of arms have got better leverage than my torso. So I I kind of end up using my arms a lot anyway to do anything. I've been an orangutan, really. Um so I kind of that is definitely not a huge problem for me. Um But, you know, obviously for some people that would be a horrendous issue and they would end up, you know, kind of not really getting a very good uh arms stimulus at all.

from that kind of program. So it comes down to limiting factors. You know, you're doing a bench press or you're doing a pull or you're doing whatever movement you're doing. You know, are you limited by your biceps and triceps in that situation? If you are, then okay, fine. It probably is giving you a decent arms diminished. If you're not, then it's not. When I say decent, I mean decent, I don't mean competitive bodybuilding.

I mean again with layers here, like even if you're the limiting fact even if your biceps are tracks are the limiting factor in a in a multi joint movement, then you're still not getting the activation that you would get in a single movement. There's muscle mass uh excess in there that you don't need. Because you can't it doesn't work.

What we're saying is start from the the baseline is what is the most effective program possible for every single muscle group, every single muscle region. And then we can work backwards from there. And we're not throwing shade on someone who does work backwards from there. It's very few people I would give that maximalist program to, right? I mean, it's just hard. As far from that as you can get. Exactly, that's fine. It's not a moral judgment if someone's making compromises. Gracias.

Work through it the other way. You can't start from minimum and then build up. Like at to what point are you built? Like it's it's just a Well you're starting without the information that you need to make the kind of uh to to make the program work. You know, I think there's a lot of people out there who just start with what they like how they like to program. They're like, This is how I like to program then they start defending why they think that programme is the best for everybody.

And they come up with all kinds of silly statements like, Oh, you could even train for some sport by doing my strength training program and just doing your sport and they come out with absolutely ridiculous statements like that. This one program that I do is the program for every single girl, anyone.

Uh yeah, that's not a marketing exercise at all. No, no, no, it's not. You know, so uh but you know, ultimately The thing we're saying here is that, you know, every uh kind of program is gonna start with the goal of the program and then you make the decisions of what you want to include based on what that goal is and you got a balance between how many exercises you want to do and how much time you want to spend in the gym and what your kind of budget is for

you know, kind of energy and effort and all that kind of thing and you'll find that it goes down as you get older. You can't go in the gym and do thirty exercises. It's not gonna happen at uh uh at the point when you get to my age. So Yeah, I mean I think that's that's that's where we're at. But the purpose of today's conversation was to try and give people this kind of absolute top tier maximum possible

you know, every single exercise that they could uh really benefit from. And I think we've probably achieved that. In terms of um sets and reps and stuff on the triceps,'cause we did this for biceps, just to reinforce again

We've got the same problem with the triceps you have with the biceps. They are easily damaged. They are high um uh kind of fast reach proportion. They do have a a pretty small deficit of venture activation compared to the big lower body muscles, although not quite as bad as the biceps brachia, I don't think. Um

So ultimately I would be careful on that front. I wouldn't program, you know, lots and lots of sets and reps, but the chances are you're probably only gonna need two exercises um for triceps anyway. So it's not so much a big deal as it would be for the elbow flexors to try and capture absolutely everything. Yeah. Yeah, so potentially two sets of each. Yeah.

Other stuff you wanna do. I mean, like if you've got pressing stuff in your routine anyway, then maybe some of that starts to dial back a little bit. Yeah, this is true.

Okay, I need to ask you one question. Biceps peak. Is it anything anyone can do? It's a hot topic, I'm sure, for ever. And there's all kinds of ideas people throw around, how to build the biases peak, isolate the l shorthead and long head and this and the other. Is there anything to any of that? Um well as I say I think the the important thing to start with is that everybody's um kind of sort of

Anatomy is going to be very slightly different. Um and so what I would do is I would try and establish um information. So pick one of these four exercises, uh, out of the four that we've given for different parts of the OFFX complex. and put it first in the workout, do a couple of sets of it, um do it unilaterally. Um do other stuff kind of later on and do that for a couple of months and see what the shape changes look like.

And then if it doesn't go in the shape of the that you're looking for, try one of the others. And so Ultimately though, there's not really anything different they can do than what we've just said because we've just given them an outline. Those are the four options that you've got. Those are the four options that are training fundamentally different parts of the elbow flex complex. So

basically those are your four opportunities to make a change. If if somebody tries to sell you doing something else, then they're on thin ice really in terms of their justifications for what's happening. Those are the definitive four directions that you can go in for training different parts of the Alberfax complex. So literally pick one and try it and see what shape changes look like after a couple of months and if it doesn't go in the direction you want it to, try one of the others.

Um, but I'm not going to come out and say, no, definitively this is the one of the four that you wanna do because I think that different people are gonna respond slightly differently. Now, somebody who's got, you know, really um like extensive experience in, you know, kind of anatomy and has maybe even gone as far as doing cadaver dissections and stuff like that, maybe have a better insight into that than I do. But from a point of view of where I'm sitting, just understanding, you know,

The literature, I don't think I've got the ability to say it's definitively this one, this one, or this one. I think I would just say to people, try one and see what happens. I mean again, if you max out I mean max, I'm using that word loosely, but if if you develop each elbow flexor as much as possible, then

Yeah, that would honestly be if somebody's like that determined to to to Lux Max, then I would say, Look, just do all four in the way that I've described. Either like full body ev uh three times a week with each exercise being done for one set of Um lower repetitions around the sort of five to seven zone, you know, rep in reserve and be careful, manage fatigue.

And then or if you can't do that, then full body A B and do two and two and see how that goes. But yeah, I think honestly, um those four exercises are probably going to kind of give you ninety nine point nine percent of anything you can possibly get from the elbow flexes. Yeah. Great, there we go. Minimalist and maximalist plan for developing arms. Anything you want to finish with, or did we nail it all there? No, I think we're done. I think we've covered everything.

If you guys enjoy this, let us know. Maybe we'll do it for another muscle group. I don't know. Um, but give you some feedback. And if there are obviously topics and questions and stuff you guys do want us to cover, by all means let us know. I'm checking my DMs intermittently now so you can send me a message. I said I'm probably gonna stop next week, who knows? Um but otherwise send Chris a message. Anyway, thank you guys and hopefully you'll join us again next week for another episode.