046 How fast can you grow?

And it's gonna tell you exactly how to sign up. You don't wanna miss it. So if you're listening to this and it's still like Hmm, maybe before Wednesday, then jump on and put your email in the link in my bio or in Chris's bio. If you're listening to this and it's after Wednesday, then you may have missed out. Give it a go anyway. Jump on, chuck email in our bio, and maybe you'll be lucky, but probably not. Um, how are you doing today, Chris?

And, yeah, also information on social media. And, of course, we'll be talking about it a lot on social media in the next kind of 48 hours as well. So I think we'll probably leave it there.

Almost said silver era. I'm gonna start with the Golden Era plan. Now I actually really like this plan. I think there's a lot to talk about this. So this is it's technically a Frank Zane plan, but it is not a plan that he personally followed.

So it was a plan that he put out as a uh a beginner plan. And he did talk about sort of ways you can progress it and you can add a bit of volume to it and whatever else. Um and he did sort of make the point that While this is an amazing plan for beginner, or for someone who maybe has had a little bit of time away from the gym and they're getting back into it, he did point out that, hey, if this is all you've got time to do, or

you know, you don't wanna add more work to your your workout like plenty for you or you're busy or whatever, this is fine. This is certainly gonna be um, you know, an acceptable, intermediate, onwards type plan as well. But once you've had some time doing this plan, there are ways you could progress it further. And I'll mention kind of what he said about how to do that in a moment. But for now, let's just cover the plan. So

Bearing in mind, Zane, we're talking late 70s. We're like full-on golden era now. We're about two decades after people have started using anabolic. Um, Zayn was, you know, he was obviously known for very sort of symmetrical, aesthetic sort of look, not just like, you know, mass on mass, but really quite pleasing aesthetic. Uh and the the plan that we've got here, it was a full body Done three times per week and starting with single sets. So very sort of silver era type outline.

Now we start with a lying leg raise. And he did sort of mention this ab work was kinda a little bit like a warm up as well. Okay. So he had a lying leg raise, crunches, And then he I think he called it seated twist. It was basically sitting down with a broomstick over your your back like in a s sort of like a if you had a a s a bar for a squat sort of position. And then you're literally just twisting side to side.

That was your ab work and he was doing sort of twenty-ish repetitions of each of those, except for the seated twist. He said start with twenty, work up to a hundred. Obviously that's not going to be uh a significant hypertrophy exercise. He wasn't even insinuating you were going to take that to failure. It was largely, I guess he was looking at it as some ab work and then some warm-up type work.

Now, the bulk of the work started with the next exercise, which was a front squat. So we had one set of ten front squat. Now, after each exercise, This is interesting. He did a stretch. So he did the front squat and then he did a quad stretch for ten or fifteen seconds in each leg. Then he went to a single set of a I'm calling it a front foot elevated split squat. He called it a lunge.

But if you look at how he performed it, it was front foot highly elevated, like significantly elevated, one side at a time, ten lunges, ten split squats, and then swapping to the other side. and then doing a quad stretch for ten seconds in each leg after doing that as well. He then went into a standing calf raise once set of fifteen, and then after that, again, a fifteen second uh calf stretch.

And then a frontal plane lat pull down, a single set of twelve, and then doing a fifteen second lat stretch after that. And then an incline dumbbell and neutral grip press. And that was a single set of twelve. And then a fifteen second peck stretch, like a doorway stretch after that. And then a single set of twelve dumbbell pullover. Again with the chest stretch after that. And then a bent over barbell row, a mid-grip, once set of 12, and then a lat stretch for 15 seconds.

And then a seated dumbbell overhead press, a single set of twelve, and then he did a rear delt stretch after that. And then standing barbell curl for single set of twelve, and then a I guess a biceps stretch. He had his arms sort of uh outstretched behind his back for fifteen second stretch. And then a dumbbell triceps overhead extension for single set of twelve with a tricep stretch after that.

And he concluded with a single set of gripper. They call it he called it a gripper. It is literally like a a gripping um apparatus that he had. He did a set of twelve with that and then he also finished with a set of uh outstretched behind his back um uh stretch, but this time with his hands pronated. Now a couple of additional points I want to make. So single set for all of these. Okay. Now he did say you can, after you've gotten used to this, you can work up to two sets.

So I think we've got I should have counted. I think there's fourteen exercises here, fourteen or fifteen thereabouts, including the ab exercises. So by the time you work up to two sets, we're we're talking, you know, high twenty sets per workout.

And he did say uh when you get to that point, he said, Yes, you could add more stuff. Okay, you could add more exercises. But at that point, eventually you're gonna run out of time to be able to do everything. And he made some really astute observations here.

So he said, not only are you gonna run out of the time that you need to to add more work, add more exercises, but he said what you're gonna notice is at the end of the workout, the exercises you do, he said they're gonna become neglected. Essentially, you're not gonna perform them as well.

And so he he did suggest basically at that point, if you're on advanced lift and you need to be adding more exercises, you may be better off going to a two way split'cause you simply may not be able to fit everything you need in.

He also said, if you're doing cardio, don't do the cardio before the workout. Do the cardio after the workout, 10, 15 minutes of cardio. I think you said 12 minutes. But he said, if you're doing it before, it's going to subtract from the your performance in the workout itself. Interesting observation. And then lastly, I thought this was quite cool and then especially given our conversation actually before we started recording, he he was asked how long to rest between exercises.

And he said, rest as long as you need for your breathing to return back to normal. So I think some interesting observations as to how to apply this workout. What's standing out to you about all this?

And then um what else are we missing? Um I mean, again, depending on what people want, you know, they could have a hip thrust in there and that would add add some glutework, but Other than that, really, my only complaints then come'cause we've got the frontal plane pull down and he's got something which is close to a

I'm not a fan of uh bent over barbell rose. I think they basically kind of the barbell is too heavy and it moves you around and you end up just uh kind of it becoming a a low back and momentum based exercise. Um so I don't think it's uh a great thing for most people most of the time. But you know, it's settled to plane, so okay it fits the more or less seduct to plane.

And you're getting more uh kind of stability. So again, you're getting total levels of equipment being higher. So, you know, I think Um, yeah, my only other complaints would be related to stuff that he had no real control over, which is again not really fair to criticize him for. So honestly, this is probably the best Golden Era programme I've ever seen.

with the exception of the calf exercise, you know, he's got the frontal plane lat pull down with a bent over row. So he's got two lad exercises. He's got the incline chest press and he's got a pullover. So he's got two chest exercises. Like he's he's largely working off kind of two exercises per muscle group.

And given that he didn't have the availability there potentially to do a loaded direct fem exercise, if he wanted to stick with two sets of stimulus, he's actually made a fairly good choice because the second cord exercise he's used is a unilateral exercise.

So i in in terms of what you're describing, yeah, he is pretty much doing what you're kind of suggesting, which is trying to turn his second exercise into a more focused quad exercise than the first one. Um, but again, my question would be really is that good use of uh kind of energy and resources when he's missing a couple of muscles that

So he's I think he's alluding to the fact that you're probably gonna be stronger in that second set because you're not I'm assuming you're not doing any any warm up set for these exercises. So you should actually be able to use a heavier load.

Um, and I'll comment on that in a moment. But um most of the time I suggest people they do it straight after the workout because largely speaking, your kind of mobility and aesthetic stretch isn't as affected by your strength training workout as the other way around. you do your stretching before your workout, you've got a chance of creating some um fatigue mechanisms, m probably mostly local in terms of calcium amulated, but potentially also

in the sort of the CNS. And that's then gonna uh blunt the adaptions that we're trying to get in the workout. So we wanna kinda do our static stretching after the workout. He's kind of doing it after the workout in the sense that he's doing it after each exercise. He's avoiding the local uh kind of interference effect of static stretches, but he's not avoiding the C and S effect. So he's kind of halfway house really.

You know, for the purposes of uh what we're doing, you know, it's not it's not horrible. It's just I wouldn't choose to do it like that.

This is a really interesting question and probably something that I'll end up writing uh a more kind of nuanced uh kind of uh article or FAQ entry about at some point. But um the kind of the the starting point is that um The duration matters in so far as it's like stimulating reps. So if you're kind of uh stretching a muscle to the point where it's now on the descending limb of the length tension relationship and you're creating a passive tension mechanical tension stimulus.

then basically it that is then now equivalent to a stimulating rep zone. So you're now doing stimulating reps but on the kind of passive tension side for psychomorogenesis. So yeah, if you stretch for a little bit longer, you're going to get a larger effect. Um two important things to observe though. Um, largely speaking, and this is the bit that I need to kind of uh spend some time working through the nuance on, but largely speaking, breaking that up isn't really going to matter.

So if you do like a ten, fifteen second stretch and then wait and then another ten, fifteen second stretch, um, it really is gonna be the same thing as doing a thirty second stretch if the actual range of motion is the same.

Fine. If you're the kind of person that just needs to take five, ten seconds every kind of fifteen seconds, again, that's totally fine. It really doesn't matter. So I kind of like answer the question in that way is to say, you know, largely speaking, it's the total amount of time to a particular range of motion that's the key factor for driving psychomogenesis from static stretch. The other thing to note is that like

strength training, there is a very strong dose response, uh nonlinear dose response of um uh sarcomogenesis two static stretching duration. So basically if you look at the animal models, it really does um

look way, way more pronounced than the strength training stuff. So if you get a strength training study that uh or metro analysis that shows a nonlinear dose response, it kind of got this nice sort of uh curve going up to a plateau, um, wherever you know that may be, sort of anywhere between, you know, six and eight sets per workout, whatever the number is.

Um, if you look at the static stretching stuff, they've basically just got number of minutes of stretching per day in animal models and it literally just kind of jumps upwards and then plateaus. So they've kind of got the crazy numbers, like they'll go up to like twenty four hours of uh stretch position mobilization in some animal models and say, you know, does twenty four hours, you know, give me appreciably more sarcomerogenesis than twelve hours? Not really.

Um and like the basically it jumps up from kind of um really, really high levels within about thirty minutes and you're getting kind of most of your gains within an hour uh across the whole day. So you're getting enormous amounts uh very, very quickly from your static stretching.

Uh of course people are going to focus on these numbers and go, oh, I'm not going to do thirty minutes of stretching a day. That's not the point. I'm saying that it's a nonlinear dose response. It's like a little bit is going to go a very long way and when you start adding a lot more, it's not going to get you that much further on the route to where you're trying to go with that.

The key thing is just getting exposure to that particular range of motion, um, you know, and therefore triggering the psychomogenesis in the first place. And of course remembering that you have to ki keep on increasing that uh range of motion if you actually want to kind of continue making progress. So it's not like you can just go, oh, I'm stretching to this range of motion every day for a week. And I'm like, yeah, okay, that's going to stop working after like the first three days.

So the range of motion has to improve and that's basically the equivalent to progressive overload in static stretching.

uh kind of situation in which you're gonna have passive tension producing uh sarcomygenesis. So you still have the ability to then access the top half of that muscle with the static stretch. But even then some muscles um, you know, probably aren't gonna respond very well to a static stretch situation no matter what y sorry, to a passive tension stuff situation no matter what you do, whether it's a stretch position exercise or a static stretch. I mean ultimately I think um

That probably only really applies to things like the triceps. Um, maybe the biceps, I don't know. I mean Um, again, the the problem is that uh we kind of run into a bit of a sort of uh limitation on the data'cause not many people are out studying what happens when you static stretch biceps brachy in humans.

um each to failure. Um, you know, switch out the sort of split squat for a a seated leg co and honestly or or a stiff leg deadlift if you want to keep it with the free weight kind of theme. Honestly that's brilliant. It really is.

continuing to do that. And you've answered that just now for sarcomerogenesis and you made the point that, hey, if you're wanting to continue adding sarcomerogenesis genesis, you actually need to continue that stretch increasing over time. So that's one adaptation that we can look at. But What else do we need to consider?

When when we're making progress, obviously we're we're aiming to see strength gains. So that's our kind of metric in the gym if we're kind of'cause most people are not going to be working on the basis of how they look on a day to day basis. What they're going on the basis of mostly is

They go to the gym and they uh kind of do their strength training program and hopefully it has enough consistency in it to be able to see you making progress over time. And that progress, by definition, is going to be in the training weights that you're using, so or reps that you're doing for a particular weight. So what we're looking for then is that improvement in uh strength or uh repetition strength or, you know, gym related numbers um over a period of time.

And, you know, the first thing that we're seeing at the moment is that people are still arguing about this relationship between strength gains and muscle size. So they're like there's no relationship between strength gains and muscle size, therefore what you're doing in the gym, improving your uh kind of numbers has nothing to do with, you know, kind of the muscle mass that you're gaining. Let's just kind of walk through this because

I've done it before, but we're still seeing that problem kind of, you know, being uh kind of encountered in the industry today. So the reason why people are saying that strength gains and size gains are unrelated. is because you can achieve adaptions that contribute to improvements in strength that do not involve improvements in size. So I can do a strength training program that is explicitly trying to avoid improvements in muscle size.

I can use very low reps. I can do uh singles. I can do um a lot of focus on my coordination with the lift. I can aim to do uh isometrics with limited muscle mass and improved motino equipment. I can deliberately structure my program so it doesn't have um, you know, the the capacity to continue gaining muscle mass over the week by doing less frequent kind of um workouts or limiting the number of stimulating reps in each workout.

But in fact if you'cause let's say you had a a an athlete, a fight or whatever where they can't actually gain any weight. I've not thought about doing it that way, where you say, Well, we're gonna let ourselves use a strategy here that is going to gain some muscle, but we're just gonna do it so infrequently that we've lost that muscle again.

Because we don't really know how lateral force transmission works. Oh we don't know how it works, but we don't know how it stimul Again, we know it works and we know broadly how it's stimulated. We don't really know what's going on like in detail uh in either of those two things. So you could end up potentially with a bunch more lateral force transmission, which would be really interesting'cause that would then mean that

you would have that adaption but potentially uh it would uh be retained and your hypertrie would not be retained. So there's some really interesting stuff around that that you can do. And obviously, you know, kind of continued exposure to the heavy load gets your tendons to be stiffer and

And there's a whole bunch of things that are going on uh that people are missing. But fundamentally, yeah, you can gain strength because there are a whole load of other mechanisms that contribute to strength gains that are not increases in you know, my fabric kind of number.

So, you know, there's that uh opportunity. So for that reason, people are focusing on this and going, look, because you can gain strength without size, therefore there's no relationship between size and strength I'm like, Cool, yeah, agreed. You can kind of Definitely gain a lot of strength without gaining size. The question is can you gain size without gaining strength?

Do I have the capacity to really see big changes in my strength because of improvements in coordination on an exercise that I've been doing for the last kind of eighteen months? Not really. So um I'm sort of removing that from the equation. Am I likely to see increases in recruitment if I'm staying in a certain rep range with a that I've been doing for a while on a uh piece of equipment? Again, that I'm not really

uh changing. Not really again, I'm not going to see some changes there because I would need to expose my brain to high levels of motune equipment for that particular muscle. The only way I'm going to do that is by using a small amount of muscle mass or more stability. I'm not doing those things because I'm sick. So again, I'm not going to see changes in recruitment, particularly in the context of the program that I'm doing.

Um and you start to go, okay, and am I going to see tendance difference changes? Well again, not really, because I'm not changing the load parameters, so I'm not going to see much movement there. So the only thing I'm really going to see in the context of a bodybuilding program is increases in size.

So you're going the opposite way from what you were just talking about with the idea of just doing a bunch of trials on the front squat once a week. It's like you're kind of moving in a direction where you haven't got that other stuff and really all you've got is the muscle size increase.

And then it's like, well, okay, so muscle size is increasing. Can I have an increase in muscle size without an increase in strength? Well, no, you can't. Because when you add myofibrils, those new myofibrils then have cross bridges. And those cross bridges are now going to make the muscle fibre increase in force production. That's then going to actually then transfer to the tendon. How do I know that? I know that because

ultimately that muscle fibre that you're activating um was activated during the exercise that you were training and it contributed to the exercise that you were doing. So it's going to contribute next time and it's going to contribute next time with a larger number of bifibrils.

So you're gonna have an increase in force production. So ultimately you can't really have an increase in the crossbreed number and uh because of the myovibular number and therefore multiply with diameter and not have a strength gain. So this is what people are doing. They're they're misunderstanding that um there is a context.

Their misunderstanding is that yes, there is a context in which strength and size gains are going to be uh you know, div diverge from one another, and that's when other mechanisms contribute to strength gain. And that's bec and that ha that they basically means you can have strength gains without size gains. You cannot have the opposite.

You cannot have a size gain without a strength gain. And that's why when we're doing a bodybuilding program which largely eliminates the other mechanisms of strength gain,

you are going to have a close relationship between the muscle size gains and the increases in strength that you are seeing in the gym in the exercises that you're doing. Which is why I always say we've got to look at the exercise a specific strength gains and that is your metric for figuring out whether or not the muscle that you're trying to target is actually growing.

and I actually see some changes where I'm able to get stronger on the side of my body that I'm not training, therefore I've gained muscle or I've maintained muscle. And so people are actually taking Are there like these, you know, neural adaptions and thinking that that's actually somehow producing mechanical tension, producing a hypertrophy similar?

No no no no. The words are describing reality. You have to go beneath the words, understand the concepts, and then apply the concepts as your map for reality and it should pretty much fits. Now, okay, the map is not the territory, but it's very, very close in most of the sort sort of circumstances we're talking about. But if you just use the words, you're gonna get into trouble very, very quickly because you n may not fully understand what it is that those words are describing. So

Here what we're saying is that, you know, uh yes, strength and size gains are related, but why are they related? What's the concept that makes that happen? And you say, Okay, well it's because you cannot add my vibrals across bridges

without then, you know, producing a strength gain. Okay, fine, but can I make a strength gain in another way? Yes, you absolutely can. And the example you gave is great because it's like, yeah, I can do a cross education effect of uh coordination and recruitment and I can end up actually getting uh a maintenance of strength on my uh untrained side or an even increase in strength on my untrained side depending on the context.

And that's going to be oh okay, I've gained strength, oh therefore I must have gained muscle size. No, that's not what happens because it's other mechanisms of strength that have caused that. But that's contextual. So you've got to understand the concepts that sit below the words. And I think

And again I've I've got examples of this that we've we've talked about. But there's lots of situations where people just take a bunch of words and go, Okay, well that's the reality. I'm like, No, the concepts are the reality, the words are the description. You have to understand the concepts below the re actual words. Otherwise you are going to be mapping stuff that is absolutely meaningless. And unfortunately there's a lot of people who are just grabbing words.

'Cause they're excited about it, uh in in interested in it, but they don't want to actually take the time to just go one step below and go, Okay, what's this mean? You know, there's people who are focusing on words, people are focusing on concepts. And I think that's the difference.

So like conceptually what is actually happening. What is actually happening here is that when you increase the muscle fiber size, you're doing that by adding myofibrils. Myofibrils are like eighty plus percent, eighty five percent of the actual myofibril uh the muscle fibre content.

You know people are saying, Oh, you know, you can add sarcoplasm. Well, mm, minimally and it's very contentious how that happens, why it happens, how long it happens for and all the rest of it. So if you want to go down that route, you're instantaneously on a very, very, very thin uh limb of the tree. You know, you are way out, uh, kind of over, you know, um very, very kind of long drop. It's not really kind of uh sort of very stable place to stand.

But fundamentally, you know, what we understand is that most of the muscle fiber increases in size, if not all of it, is caused by adding myofibrils and therefore you must be adding cross produces, therefore you must be increasing in strength.

And ultimately that muscle fibre wouldn't be used if it wasn't being if it wasn't contributing. So you can't really say, Oh no, no, no, you're increasing size of muscle fibers that aren't contributing to strength. No, no, no, you're not. That's not happening.

The second thing which is separate but related is is the definition of progressive overload. And unfortunately this is or fortunately or unfortunately,'cause I guess people probably feel that they're being attacked at the moment. So let's let's kind of move the kind of focus of attention somewhere else. Um, this is not actually an error that is caused by the current uh kind of um

social media community. This is actually an error that goes back into exercise science. So uh nobody is safe. It's like is this is exercise uh kind of science problem. Uh the idea of progressive overload in exercise is uh has got uh problems with it because uh there are a large number of people who think that progressive overload means throwing more uh kind of stimulus at the muscle to force it to do something. Okay. Now the other way of viewing progressive overload.

is that you are simply proving that the adaptation has happened has happened by displaying a higher level of strength. So these are the two kind of models that uh you see in the context of progressive overload. And sadly the former is more common in the S and C uh more cap Casual is the wrong word, more practical or applied part of strength training uh uh kind of exercise science.

in the more practical or applied part of exercise science relating to strength training, people definitely see progressive overload or often definitely is not the right word, often see progressive overload as being something that is more

you know, kind of something that you're trying to force to occur. So the idea would be that you would uh potentially increase volume over time. So y they're they're sort of thinking in terms of like adding more and more stimulus to force the muscle fibers to do something. Now, reality is that isn't the way that this works. What we're doing when we uh talking about progressive overload is literally just demonstrating

that an adaptation has happened. So if I do, you know, kind of three sets of five um with a waited pull up on a Monday, and then I come back on, you know, kind of uh Wednesday or uh Thursday or whatever and do the same workout again. Then if I do exactly the same workout, then

away from muscular failure than the original uh workout on the Monday. Now it doesn't mean that I've gone to failure on either of the workouts. I may not have done. I may have been uh like a reporter in reserve or whatever. I may been, you know, planning to do that, not reaching failure in either case.

And if you just keep doing the same kind of workout again and again and again, what's gonna happen is you're gonna get further and further away from muscular failure until you're not actually getting enough stimulus to really keep you in a place other than maintenance, at which point, you know, you just kinda stay exactly where you are.

if you kind of gradually start to look for opportunities to add that extra rep, what you're doing then is you're displaying the fact or proving to yourself that you've actually made progress and now that three sets of

you know, kind of five is turned into one set of six and two sets of five, or even, you know, two sets of six and a set of five, or whatever it may be. Um, and you start to actually demonstrate that you have made progress because you are now capable of performing the sort of the the workout with more repetitions or heavier load with the same level of effort that you put into the original workout with three sets of five.

So that's what we're seeing really with the two different ideas behind what progressive overload actually is. It's like one group of people are thinking, Oh, I need to try and force something to happen by just applying more and more volume or more and more something, whatever it may be

to the uh kind of muscle that I'm trying to train. And the other group of people are going, no, no, no. We're just literally displaying the fact that we've made the adaption by demonstrating the strength. And this is related to what we just talking about, because if you understand that fundamentally you can't actually increase uh, you know, muscle size without producing a strength gain.

Then you kinda then look at your kind of bodybuilding program in terms of progressive outload and you can see immediately that Therefore, if I am demonstrating strength gains, then there is a good chance that I am achieving a muscle size increase. Now, does it guarantee that I'm increasing a muscle size increase? Um

that I'm attaining that. No, it doesn't guarantee because yes, I could achieve an improvement in strength through a different mechanism. Especially if I'm unfamiliar with the exercise or if there's a big coordination capacity improv for improvement or if I've got a motivating equipment uh improvement happening.

that is then enabling me to do more repetitions. So it's not guaranteeing that I'm getting a size gain. But if you look at it the other way around, If I can't display a progressive overload improvement, if I can't actually add any reps or anyway, that is absolutely guaranteeing that I'm not increasing muscle size. Because you can't get an increase in muscle size without producing a strength gain.

You've got to do just something different if you want to carry on progressing. And it's actually an error of thinking because um basically what they're doing is they're saying, Oh look, you know, I've been doing these exercises for eighteen months or a year, whatever I can't make any progress on them.

Therefore I'm gonna switch to a whole bunch of new excises and yeah, suddenly you're gonna see massive strength gains in those exercises because you're just improving your coordination. You've gone literally from a bunch of exercises you're incredibly familiar with and you had no capacity for improving coordination. And now you're doing a whole bunch of a different ones. Now, okay, if you switched from very, very multi joint uh kind of uh sort of uh large muscle mass stuff

and you moved in the direction of smaller muscle mass stuff with single joint stuff, you would see some incru recruitment increases. Maybe if you switch from bilateral to unilateral again, you'd see some recruitment increases.

So there are ways of actually making it work for you positively. But most of the time what that's not what people are doing. They're just switching up the exercise and they're going, Hey, wow, now I'm progressing again. No, you're not. You are learning a new exercise. That's not the same thing. Actually, because you're now in that learning of the new exercise, you are losing some of the muscle size that you were uh you'd achieved before because you're no longer at the same level of recruitment.

And now you would be chasing at the same thing but in a slightly different set of muscle fibers. So you'd be just repeating the same problem that you've gone through before.

f more focused on that particular muscle, maybe using less muscle, using it a unilateral, whatever, it's a more stable version. They're the only times you're gonna continue to actually progress. Like if you're just saying, Oh, I'm doing uh you know, this overhead press and now I'm gonna swap it for a different v variation of an overhead press.

Why why why would you not be progressing on the first exercise you're doing and suddenly progressing the next one? It's not gonna work like that. It it's just such a Such an odd mentality that people think I stall out on an exercise, it's no longer providing a growth stimulus. Of course it is. What what's it doing? If it's not doing it, it's because you you need to access more motor units.

then you've got to find a way to add it in. Now you can either do that by battling with your existing structure and keeping with a full body uh AAA format, or you're gonna have to switch to a full body A B A, B A B. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Like if you're not changing the exercise because you found a new version which is more stable of the current exercise you're doing, you're just changing the exercise to another equivalent exercise. Really it's marketing. That's why people are doing it.

So yeah, and that that's that's a spectrum. There's gonna be things that are functionally almost identically equivalent because you know, literally all you're doing is changing the implement that you're using, but you're fundamentally quite mechanically doing the same thing. And there's gonna be exercises that have a little bit of kind of mm grey area and it's like, Are they exactly the same? Mm, not really, but in this context they're pretty much the same.

You know. Um, and you can kind of just draw a spectrum of from one end to the uh uh to the other where you've got things that are literally identical or they just look different and things that are, you know, okay, there's a little bit of difference there, but we can kind of look through that because it's not so so big a deal. in the context of the client population that we're working with. And it's just cosmetic.

Yeah, but that's done for an enjoyment purposes, which is not cosmetic because enjoyment genuinely does contribute to motivation, which contributes to an increase in recruitment. It's not something we can just ignore and say to our clients, No, you just forget about that, you know. We actually have to say, Well we accept the fact that this is motivating you to see that variety. Okay, fine. Well we'll try and work with you to make that happen.

Because they're seeing how much better they're responding to it. So, you know, my encouragement to people is, hey, let's see how you feel in this. Let's try it. Track your progress, like we're talking about today, and then see if you still find it just as demotivating as you thought that you.

I think this is one of those things that changes over time. I mean, um one of the kind of uh reasons for doing this topic on the podcast was because um we've been noticing that there is a tendency for many influencers to ond ond ond ond ond ond ond ond ond ond ond ond ond ond You know, and what we're s sort of seeing is that there's kind of um a bit of a distortion about what is

uh normal and what is possible once people have been training for a couple of years, they aren't going to see very, very uh rapid strength gains on the vast majority of their exercises. You know, they they're if you're doing multi joint stuff and if the multi joint stuff has a skill component, um, you know, like a free weight

uh kind of back squat or deadlift or bench press, yeah, you can kind of sort of continue to see those improvements because you've got so many more mechanisms of strength gains working with you. If you're kind of very much down the stable route and you're kind of working with a sort of seated overhead press in a very similar machine, very stable setup that you're very friendly with, your ability to make gains on that is going to be extremely limited once you've done a couple of years of training.

So when people are kind of like sitting there going, Oh, like you know, I added, you know, kind of ten pounds on my kind of overhead my seated machine overhead press in the last kind of, you know, two months or whatever. Like and I've been training fifteen, twenty years. I'm like okay, but like

He also posted that he's tested his strength. So while he doesn't train, he I he's done like a a single overhead press, I think it was, either bench or overhead, I forget. And then he's tested it again a few weeks later. And that was it. No exercise between those two time points. And he's increased his strength by it was like fifty pounds or something, I forget how much, but a huge increase without doing anything.

And yes, if you are blasting gear, this can and will happen. And I mean it's a bit of a It's a it's a bit of an adjacent point, I guess, to make. But the point I wanna make is if you are following influencers who are giving the impression that as an advanced lifter, you can or should be adding

you know, five, ten kilos, pounds, whatever to any lift every single session. Either they are changing their exercises so regularly that they're just seeing a coordination improvement and it probably doesn't really matter for them because the gear is kind of covering over those mistakes. Or they are in fact building that amount of muscle because of the gear that they're using.

um they probably fall into two categories. There's stuff that I that is on my sort of talented side, which is generally kind of vertical pulling. And then there's probably stuff that is on my less talented side, which is pretty much any kind of pressing really, apart from dip.

Um and so on the on the kind of talented side I can probably probably make a rep happen, an improvement in a rep happen um maybe once a week, maybe once every other On the kind of least talented side, I'm probably adding a rep a month, maybe two reps a month at best. So there's a bit of a difference there. So like with pulling I can generally get to rep uh rep a week, whereas generally on pressing I'm getting a rep a month. Um that's where kinda where I'm at, really.

not territory that I could repeat in a machine situation. It's just not gonna happen. You're not gonna have that ability to do that. You know, and the same thing for powerlifters. Powerlifters can carry on making, you know, kind of squat their bench press gains for a long period of time. And again, it's because you're dealing with a lot more complicated adaptations than you're dealing with in a seated overhead press or whatever. You know.

It's not possible. It's literally impossible. You can expose it to a higher volume of stuff, which is why the people are going down the progressive volume nonsense at the moment.'Cause that's really they've kind of been pushed into a corner. That's the only thing they can really do. You just kinda but that then you just in the same territory the Excise Science goes when they start paradigming

you know, kind of aerobic exercise and applying it to strength training, which is nonsense. You can't do that. But again, it's like y you can't make the fibre produce more force than it wants to. It's gonna give you exactly the same amount of force every single time unless it's fatigue and it's gonna be less.

We should not be expecting massive increases in progressive overload. And I think this is very liberating when you understand this because it means You don't a session where you didn't progress is not a wasted session. I think there's a tendency for people to think that, oh, I didn't progress. I didn't progress this week. Therefore, I didn't grow. Therefore, I didn't do anything productive.

No, you're still doing the productive work. You're still in like that, you're still exposing muscle fibers to mechanical tension. You're still giving them a hypertory stimulus. Maybe that adaption is just happening so slow that you're not actually going to see that show up for a few weeks.

The that that's I think asking a a pr a question prematurely. I think the question you need to ask in the first place is that, you know, have you got any scope to add meaningful amounts of muscle size that would be supported by that caloric excess?

uh calculations, you've got Martin Birken's calculations. I mean like there's a whole bunch of different uh ways of doing it. But it th the thing that's consistent across those is that if you look at them And I've made this point to you just with some examples. You know, most people are walking around at body weights that are substantially above what their stage weight would be. Substantially above what that stage we have.

covering all the muscle groups, um, making gains, got to a point where they're adding a rep or so every month, maybe on their main exercises, really kind of um pushing the limits. At that point their ability to add much muscle mass is very, very tiny. Um and at that point you can look at these calculators and go, Okay, so if I were to step on stage, what would my kind of stage weight be?

uh you'll find it's substantially below what you're walking around at. And people are saying, Well, no, no, I need to be in a caloric surplus to kind of continue growing muscle mass. I'm like on the one hand, you're not going to gain that much anyway On the other hand, you're just taking yourself further away from what your stage rate would be. Um, you know, th i comp is probably your friend right now.

I get one or two reactions from people. Some people will say, Man, they look great. What do they do? Tell me about how they're trained, et cetera. And then I get other people who say, Why do we care what these guys do? They barely look like they live.

In that extreme uh end of the spectrum, massively catabolic, huge stress response for the body, you're getting a huge glucocorticoid uh kind of response that is absolutely yw'n ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud

Um, fix that. They completely uh negate and we've got studies showing this, they negate that glucocorticoid uh kind of effect and stop you atrophying in that chloric restricted state. So even though like on the one hand we're kind of saying, Oh, you know Uh we're criticizing influencers for uh you know using anabolic

Um and simultaneously then pointing to their enormous strength gains. But you can do the same thing again. You can say the same influencers will then uh kind of point to their extreme success on a diet and how lean they can get with no difficulty. And I'm like again.

Generally speaking, there's somewhat consensus, I guess, that below twenty-five is probably going to be that limit there for natural limit. Now That is so heavily influenced by someone's level of body fat. So if someone's got higher body fat and then they plug the the information into that calculator, it'll come out with a significantly higher fat-free mass index. But as soon as someone is lean and they plug their data into it, then obviously their fat-free mass index drops.

So, you know, that's something we need to acknowledge as well is that

If you've gone to the point where you're standing on stage in a natural bodybuilding competition, your body fat's down at like six, seven, eight percent, or even, you know, kind of depending on what the competitive level is in your area, then yeah, you're gonna have a totally different picture. Your fat free mass index can be absolutely way, way lower than that.

So it literally heavily depends on your body fat that you're carrying around. So yeah, you've got to kind of expect that if you are walking around like five, ten kilos above your stay each ready weight according to one of these calculators. But except you are going to lose some of your factory mass get where you are to where that stage ready position is.

uh, you know, were at the body fat that they were at. Don't try and go, Oh well no, no, I want that body I want that look, but I also want to be body fat. No, you can't do that. That's not gonna happen.

you can end up looking like a natural bodybuilder of today. You know, and it's a completely different look. It's it's much smaller and it's much more defined. And it's like that there's a reason for that. It's because of the stress process that you go through and the the atrophy that you experience.

And you lose that kind of muscle mass going from this position to that position. You know, it's like, well, okay, well look at those guys and go, Okay, that's feasible. But that body fat, that's what's feasible.

tools to get to looking like someone on stage if you don't want to look that way. If you want to if you aspire to look like the silver air lifters did, then obviously that's what you should be working towards. Like I think that's

You know, so look at what those guys are doing. They're all pretty much the same kind of uh kind of fat-free mass and the same kind of you know, sort of look. Uh you know, and it's if you like that look, great, then just do what they're doing and, you know, kind of look at those numbers.

Same thing if you like the look the silver era, which I think it actually is aesthetically far more uh kind of attractive. I think it looked way better. But, you know, do what they're doing and look at what their kind of uh sort of numbers are. You know, and they're different. They are definitely very different. So it's a body fat specific problem.

But as soon as you throw pharmaceuticals in, you transform both of those problems completely. You transform the total amount of fat free mass and you transform the deep body fat that you can hold at that fat free mass. And you just push the both of them into orbit and they're just completely irrelevant to everything that we're talking about.

And this is the problem that we're always facing because people just scroll online and they look at what the you know is uh presented to them and they start to adjust their brain to what they think is, you know, kind of a uh standard. And the standards are just like, you know, a million miles away from what is achievable in a a natural uh context, whether it's silver air look with slightly high body fat, or whether it's a modern day natural bodybuilding but much lower body fat.

it really they're they're just two separate uh goals, but those both of those goals are just miles away from what uh kind of pharmaceutically assisted bodybuilding is do.

something that people say a lot of is, you know, don't don't compare yourself to someone else or don't, you know, there's anatomical differences and there's differences in muscle fiber makeup and and this, that and the other. But While all that is true. it I would feel that probably the best we can do is to actually find a natural if you're if you're natural yourself, to find a natural lifter who has

you know, similar proportions, similar height than you and see, well, what was their body weight at a you know, as a natural lifter when they were at a aesthetic that you were happy with. And That maybe as a sort of ballpark figure, a number that you might aspire to. Do you think that that's reasonable or not?

You know, and I think that's a really great starting point, you know. Um, and I think if you want to then extrapolate that to a silver era without doing tons and tons of calculations and, you know, difficult kind of math, then literally just add ten percent. So if you've got somebody who's kind of one eighty and you say, Okay, well then got stage way to eighty, then I would say silver era look is gonna be about eighty eight.

have done that. I think he did a really good job on that. So, you know, credit to him.

any sort of continuity between p two people of a similar height or is it just wildly different?

Well it's interesting. You know, but yeah, there are genuine outliers who'll find that just there's nothing happening. I mean, like you get enough slow twitch fibres and you're not going anywhere. I mean that's just how it is. It is just how it is. I mean It's like but y what you find is that, um, with some exceptions, most people who are exposed I mean, maybe it's different in this kind of current scenario, but like in a society situation like I grew up in

Uh, when you're younger, you had the opportunity to participate in a bunch of different sporting activities. Um, and you you naturally migrated to what you were good at and you were encouraged to do more of that and you ended up

kind of following that on in your kind of hobby activities later on. So, you know, people who are really good at the endurance stuff, they were encouraged to do more kind of, you know, long distance running. Maybe they started doing some cycling. Maybe they ended up doing triathlon and they

do triathlons as they get older and that's their kind of physical activity kind of hobby. You know, people who are more on the kind of sort of track and field, more kind of uh speed and power end of the spectrum.

maybe they gravitate more into the kind of uh sort of bodybuilding or strength sports related side. So I think maybe today that's not the case and people just kind of pick on stuff that they see online and go, Oh yeah, I wanna do that and they had no experience of knowing whether or not they're in good at that. So I think maybe what we're seeing now is people trying to do stuff that they're not suited to genetically.

Um, I don't know. I mean it's an interesting sociological phenomenon. But, you know, I think um yeah, I mean definitely are seeing people saying, Oh no, I just I do this and nothing happens I'm like It might be that you're doing it wrong, or it might be that you're an outlet and you genuinely do have a ton of uh stow twitch fibres and you're just not going to go anywhere no matter what you do.

mentioned, discussed that progressive overload is showing one that their training is working. That's basically all it's doing, right? And it's keeping one within the realms of maintaining a stimulus. Obviously if you drift too far away from max effort, then you're no longer achieving a stimulus. But in v the vast majority of cases, why would our training program not work? If I'm running a program, I'm honestly I would be shocked for my program not to work, okay? For almost all my clients.

And so I'm assuming there will be progressive overload, but why would there not be? How am I writing such a bad program that there's not going to be progressive overload?

And so they use excess exercise variety to disguise the fact that their programs are not really working very well. Yeah. So they'll throw these exercises in and go, Hey, no, you're making progress on this new exercise and the strength gains are all there and it's fantastic and it's like That is why sticking with a bunch of exercises for a long period of time and demonstrating that progressive overload is happening is a really cool way of establishing that your trainer knows what he's doing.

And I think you're way past that point now. You know that that's gonna happen, so you're very comfortable in the fact that, you know, you don't need to rely on that metric to um kind of be comfortable and be confident that what you're doing is working. But I think that that journey that you've gone on is something that other people still need to go on.

intrinsic to the way that they do things, that they've stepped beyond needing it and now they can operate in a more fluid and flexible way without it, but recognizing that everywhere that it was previously guiding them and preventing them from making a mistake, they're already now operating within that framework without needing that guideline.

Essentially it's like a guardrail, really. Yes. It's a guardrail that stops you from going outside of your kind of uh recoverable volumes and doing silly things that you shouldn't really do. Now that you don't do those things ever, because that's just instinctive, you don't need the guardrail anymore. But n ninety nine percent of people are gonna need a guard rail.

an exercise or an outcome or whatever to progressive overload, knowing that it might in fact be so slow, it might be fooling me. Right. And so I just want to have confidence that I know what I'm doing in the gym is in fact providing that stimulus. It's based on the program, there's no way that it's not. And so I don't want to get too bogged down in what the number is or isn't showing. And sure, if over time then I don't see a change, okay, great, let's talk about it.

and increasing that volume over time, creating massive amounts of accumulated fatigue, swelling, and thinking that that is hypertrophy. And ignoring the necessity for progressive overload. If you said, Look, guys, you're gonna need to demonstrate progressive overload for us over this six month period of time, they would stop programming the way that they were programming because it wouldn't work.

how do I now kind of free myself from that constraint? And it's like, well you just do because you can.

program that doesn't rely on progressive overload, they could take a step like that and that would be a fantastic way to introduce the concept. But honestly, most people most of the time I think they're much better off focusing on the progressive overload, even if it is slow. Um, you know, because fundamentally the guardrail exists for a reason. It's telling you that something is working.

uh kind of uh formula. He said it applies to, you know, stage weight, natural bodybuilding situations. And I think people have interpreted that as kind of, you know, five, six, seven percent that kind of territory. And again, just check what, you know, kind of Martin said about it. Um, but I think, you know, very, very approximately you add ten percent to that and you're gonna find that you're in the kind of ballpark territory of of a silver era lifter, more or less.

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Yeah, there's no kind of scenario where you can be adding pounds and pounds and pounds to your lifts, you know, every week or even every session, as you've said, some people are claiming, which I find absurd, but you know, there you go. Um, you know, so it's just kind of recognizing that that is is the is the territory for the, you know, um the sport or the activity that we're talking about.

Mm. You know, but then also there's a whole bunch of errors that people are making that are peripheral to that around what progressive overload actually is. um what it's doing, how strength gains relate to hypertrophy. And you've got to kind of just be aware of all of that and recognize that, you know, when people are talking to you about this stuff, they may be making those errors. And you've just got to kind of um

take them on board and parse the information you're receiving appropriately. But I think the single biggest issue really is that we've been being bombarded every day by images and information which is firmly entrenched in the territory of professional bodybuilding supported by pharmaceuticals. So everything you look at is flavored by that baseline. And people are just being kind of inadvertently conditioned to think of that as the norm. It's like you'd be a lot better just kind of going back and

sort of cleansing your brain by just looking at silver era stuff. Yeah. You know, and resetting uh your sort of expectations to what is normal. And if you're finding that you're looking at those going, These guys don't look like they lift, then you are in desperate need of a Brain.

They often will say, Oh, I would lift I would do a behind the neck press and I would do that with, you know, m hundred and eighty pounds for eight repetitions and I would do this for this many pounds for this And while they do obviously at times talk about, you know, trying to progress load and trying to add repetitions, and Steve Reeves has talked about that a lot.

They do often default back to this is the weight I did. I use these weights. And they're not talking about it like I I was able to lift this weight for one repetition. Sometimes they'll do that as well. They'll talk about their PBs. But often they're saying, This is what I did in my training. I did this many for this this many repetitions.

And that to me suggests that hey, there was really frickin' slow progressive overload if they have a normative weight that they were doing and they just know this is the way they did for that exercise.

Obviously you can read something into what you're seeing there. So if you're looking at people doing specific lifts like bench press or overhead press or whatever, you can read something into it. Because obviously somebody who is approximately your height, who is achieving a certain

No, seated overhead press or even standing overhead press if that's what they were doing. Or squat or whatever. If you can get to those numbers for their kind of repetitions, uh broadly speaking, you're probably going to be in the same kind of territory as they are in terms of muscle mass, broadly speaking. But just be aware that there will be occasions when somebody has had an obsession with a lift and they have pushed the numbers up to absurd levels that you're not going to get close to.

And there are people who are obsessive about it and they do get to and they've gone beyond what I've got to. And that's cool. But the point I'm making is that you've just got to try and when you're looking at numbers that somebody's got, if they've got one or two lifts that are just off the charts compared to everything else

be aware that that's not necessarily going to be reflective of what their body physique looks like. It's just that they had an obsession with it and they pushed recruitment and and coordination, what have you, to levels that you're probably not going to get to unless you share that obsession. You know. So Again, it's like um just be aware that there's definitely those two different categories of number that you're looking at. Um and so yeah.

full picture is required, I think, when we pause that kind of information.

And there's some exercises, let's say a leg extension, it's a really good example here, where you do a leg extension for years. There's no good alternative to a leg extension if you want direct fem growth. And so I've got clients who might have done a leg extension literally for ten years. And if I have a client who does a leg extension for ten years and they don't progress weight on that leg extension anymore, I don't care. I keep it in.

I'll use another quad exercise maybe as an indicator lift in that is situation. But even if you're not progressing to go back to my point before Progressive overload is is helping us know the program works and we can look at why the leg extension is in that program and we know that it is achieving a goal.

So if you're if you've got an exercise which is an important, a central exercise to your program and you've done it for a very long time and you're not progressing or progress is extremely slow on it, it doesn't mean you need to get rid of that exercise.

I uh y I think you just have to have something kind of in your head that makes you wanna go after that particular thing. But if you were capable of controlling that and you were able to go after it sequentially different kind of exercises. I think you maybe actually would get further than you could without that level of obsession, even on the muscle size front. Because I think the recruitment gains you get when you enter that territory are quite are are definitely higher.

Um, you know, and so I think maybe there's there's something psychological there that's worth kind of poking at. Um, you know, if you could kind of rotate obsessions and get I mean I just

uh kind of like pull down machines pretty quickly. Um, you know, and and yet even then I can still kind of make progress on them. It just it's turned the muscle group into turned the latter into something that is just so much more kind of capable of making progress. Um or was that just, you know, kind of levers and genetic or whatever, I don't know. But it just feels like there's more scope there.