050 Are circuits for hypertrophy the next big thing?

And so it was encouraging for me when we put it up in our stories that people like, Yeah, let's do it'cause I was like finally vindicated, yes, let's cover this. So there's I think there's one big accessibility issue or practicality issue to this topic, which is what I was concerned about. We'll cover that. So today we're talking about circuits. Now there's obviously different ways that circuits look and and obviously we're talking in the context of hypertrophy. And circuits and hypertrophy

maybe don't really go together all that often. People don't normally talk about them in the context of hypertrophy. Maybe in like group fitness stuff, people might talk about circuits. And I've got some clients who program circuits because they work in small group kind of sessions. But an individual doing a circuit for the purpose of hypertrophy, it's not really something people would think about all that often.

So we're gonna see where this conversation goes. I think there's some interesting potential application that might come out of it. It's something I've played with for a few years now. In fact, I don't know if you know this. When we first started talking, whenever that was, four years ago, maybe something like that. The first workout that I wrote inspired by our conversations and the mentorship was actually a circuit. And I did that for months.

And I'll maybe I'll talk a little bit about my experience on it when we get into this episode. But that was inspired by your model and I think it makes a lot of sense with a lot of the physiology and and the model and that'll come out in this conversation. But my part of the episode is did they do this in the Sylvia era? Did they do this before anabolics? Now, Uh we've talked about some routines which

You could kind of say could be circuits, depending on how one performed them. So a lot of the Bob Hoffman stuff, the York barbell type routines, we've talked about several of these in past episodes. And the way they tended to work was you would do a single set, you would do your ten to twelve exercises.

And then after you've done all that, it was your choice. Do you want to add another set? Do you want to go again? Do you want to add another 10 or 12 exercises onto it? And so you've kind of got this. you know, two biceps exercises, two triceps exercises, and and have like a slight variant. And so there was a component to that which was kind of like circuit-esque.

And again, we've covered this before. I kind of wanted to go down a different path and talk about other ways that circuits were being done. But I would just comment on that style, the Hoffman York barbell style. routine where a single set's potentially being repeated is a lot of that was done, I guess, kind of out of necessity.

you know, the what's is it Plato, Aristotle, one of them, the you're looking at me with wide eyes. I think it's Plato, the the father of invention is necessity, something along those lines. And I think that's why these guys tended to go more towards this sort of circuit style is cause a lot of these routines would be done with a single barbell. You'd have multiple people doing them together. You know, that were being done like i in military training that were being done.

And so they were the exercises are grouped in a way where you could have, you know, a few people, you perform the exercises, use one barbell, then you could increase the weight on the barbell for the next few exercises. And it just kind of worked out that way. So While I think they're really good examples of silver era circuits, I look at them as

Well, did they do this because it was most effective or just because it worked for their their time period? So I wanted to look at an example of a circuit, which wasn't just done out of accessibility and necessity and and convenience.

And this was actually this was actually written in a book by John McCallum in the 60s. Now John McCallum not like a bodybuilder, didn't compete, but he wrote a lot about bodybuilding. Um and mostly in the sixties, you know, contributed a lot to magazines. He wrote um Uh Keys to To Progress, I think was the the name of his sort of main book he also wrote, uh like the a book on the 20 rep squats. And this

workout is contained in his book, but bodybuilders had been doing it in the fifties as well. So this workout as written It was published after Anabolics had started to be introduced. They weren't really widespread yet, but it is a harkback to a routine or style of routine that had been used in the decade prior. And this type of training, I don't know if you've heard about this, Chris, they called it uh PHA, which was uh

Peripheral heart action. Now, supposedly they'd actually borrowed this from gymnasts or some other field. It wasn't a bodybuilding thing to begin with, but they sort of sort of uh co-opted it and used it in bodybuilding. And essentially it's just circuit. So the way that this circuit worked and this was for bodybuilders, this was for for hypertrophy.

This consisted of groupings of exercises. And so it is obviously as was the norm, it is full body and it was repeated three times a week. And the first grouping of exercises was a front squat. And this was actually done for twelve repetitions, which is pretty pretty high for front squad. And then it went to a what they call a cuddle sit up, a variation of a sit up for twenty five repetitions.

And then barbell curls for 10 repetitions. And then seated twists. So you know, seated down with like a broomstick or a barbell and doing that sort of twisting oblique exercise for 25 repetitions. And then a wrestler's bridge, which I've you ever seen anyone actually do a wrestler's bridge? I've I've only seen photos of it in these old books. I've never seen anyone do it. For anyone who's not familiar with it, it's basically imagine like a a glute bridge position.

But now imagine you're actually lifting yourself off your shoulders as well onto your head. So you it's they talked about it as like a neck strengthening exercise. Anyway, that it was big in the bronze era, it kinda got carried over into silver era. So that was the last of the exercises in that particular grouping. Then he would go on to the next grouping, which was incline dumbbell press for 10 repetitions. Sit ups for twenty five reps, a sagittal plane barbell row for twelve repetitions.

And then a bent forward twist. So again, this kind of like oblique type exercise for 25 repetitions. And then concluded with a standing calf raise for 15. And then he had one more grouping and he would do a prone hyper extension for twelve repetitions, a leg raise for twenty-five reps.

Again, obviously no machines at this point, yeah? So you know, we've got some recfem work in here. Then a one arm military press with a dumbbell for ten repetitions, a side bend for twenty five repetitions, and a close grip bench for ten repetitions. Now the way these little phase groupings were done is he would work through the the the group of exercises, the five exercises, he would do a warm-up set.

So about fifty percent ish of his working weight. This is very similar to what Reg Park used to do. He would then work through them again with a heavier load, but still a a sort of a warming up type load. And then he would do his work sets. And he would do three work sets. So he would work through all these exercises in in the peri the group one kind of exercises or five exercises. He would do them for the workload or work set. He'd repeat them again, twice more.

And then he would move on to the next grouping. Do those five exercises, repeat them twice more, and then move to the last grouping. So it's a big workout. There's quite a lot of volume. It's there's obviously a intentional pattern here and how he structured some of these exercises. So generally there would be a we've can see a multi joint exercise and then he adds in kind of like a

core exercise, abs, obliques, something like that. Uh, and then he tended to go into a single joint exercise after that first multi joint, and then added in more core obliques, something like that, and then Another, I mean, restless bridge calf rays, trolley strip bands. It kinda varied for that last exercise.

I think there's quite a lot to unpack here. Obviously there's the exercise selection which we can talk about and we talk about that a lot anyway. And you know, this is a fairly robust exercise selection program. There's no hamstring work always with the the hyper extensions.

That's not too bad. There's no, you're not gonna like the no frontal plane pull down or pull up. But apart from that, the exercise selection is pretty robust. But let's talk a little bit about the format. What stands out to you here?

and side bends. So in each in each kind of group we've got two exercises that probably wouldn't fit into a modern day bodybuilding programme, at least as written. A lot of people do kind of at work, they just kind of write it as ab work at the end of whatever workout they're doing.

And just to be clear, we've been over this before. Uh I think it was one of the recent episodes we did. Um The amount of session volume that you do, if it's spread out across enough places, isn't necessarily a problem. Um a lot of people go, Oh well if you do enough kind of sort of sets of anything, then you're gonna have a a large amount of post workout, you know, recovery time before you can do another session. And it doesn't work like that because

What you're thinking is like, oh, because I've worked really hard, therefore it's gonna take a lot of time to recover. It's like, well, no. What you're what you're actually what actually determines your recovery time is per muscle basis. um how much damage you create. Um and so you can do a lot of work, um, but if you're staying away from failure, you're not using stretch position excises and you spread it across enough places

then actually no, you can do a lot of work and it's not problematic. I mean you're basically describing a manual job at this point. I mean it's not it's not d it's not possible. It's not difficult to get around that problem.

But here we have got a lot of session volume and I think a lot of people today would probably find that quite uncomfortable. Um and Okay, so and and also the repetitions are quite high. So I'd be kind of interested in just how close to failure he was going um with each of those work sets. My guess is he's probably stopping with a rep or two in reserve.

You know, I think there's there's probably a lot of um kind of weirdness in here that isn't gonna really work out that well.

you know, often when people are programming them for the purpose of whatever they're trying to achieve, they're using they're doing, you know, a hundred repetitions plus, right? So if we're talking twenty five seater twists, I d I don't think this is going to be a max effort exercise. I assume it is some kind of

pace setter within this group of exercises. Now the question for me would be looking at these you you know, observe fifteen exercises minus give or take five exercises that are, you know, a little bit fluffy. Are we getting anything novel? Or is he getting anything uh you know, special by doing these as a circuit? Compared to just working through and doing one set of each of these exercises, or compared to working through these as

uh as straight sets and doing his, you know, multi-sets of of the squats and then doing his multi-sets of the sit-ups and then of the curls. How would those different formats change what results someone's getting?

And because of the inherently cardiovascularly demanding nature of that big multi joint exercise, um it's going to be hit quite hard by any previous uh kind of cardiovascular sensations that you've got floating around the system. So unless you're prepared to literally kinda sit for five minutes and do nothing or just walk slowly backwards and forwards like I used to do.

That was just brutal. Um, and I think that's that's just one of the things that you have to kind of take into account with with with squat. Um so yeah, I mean if you tried to do three sets of front squats with tall reps per set, I think you would be sitting around quite a lot between sets waiting for the next uh kind of um set. Uh if you wanted to avoid the cardiovascular problem. Amém.

If you kinda said, Well, okay, I'm gonna do front squats and then I'm gonna give myself three minutes and then I'm gonna do some uh kind of biceps curls. Even single arm biceps curls you could do. Um, I mean that would be an interesting idea because you'd you'd feel very little affected by the cardiovascular uh kind of sensations at that point, even though they're even though they were still there.

You could do single arm biceps curls, you could just do that. And y you could actually do both arms separated by kind of ninety seconds or whatever. Um And then by the time you'd kind of uh done that, you might be ready to do another set of front squats. Or you could then go onto something like a an incline bench or, you know, something like that. And I think that's

That's where it gets interesting with exercise selection. It's really the same conversation that we've had before regarding exercise selection. You know, can we order our sorry not exercise selection, exercise order. Can we order exercises in a way that basically means that the sequence of exercises allows us to recover cardiovascular sensations because the what we do is we have a cardiovascularly demanding exercise and then we drop in something that's the opposite end of the spectrum.

You know. So going from a front squat all the way down to a single arm biceps curl, you can get away with doing that single arm biceps curl with a little bit of cardiovascular sensation still present and it really isn't going to limit the number of reps you can do very much at all.

It's like, Oh wow, it's you know, it's such a a prominent muscle. But the reality is it's only prominent because it sticks out. It doesn't actually have that much size to it. Volume wise, it's very small. Um You know, one of the most fascinating things from a biomechanical point of view is just how the triceps and the biceps produce very similar elbow flexion and extension talks in each direction, but the triceps does it with with size and minimal moment arm.

and the uh biceps group um does it with momentum and actually a fairly minimal size. So getting similar talks in opposing directions, but in very, very different ways. So so yeah, I think it's probably the best uh kind of choice. I mean, having said that, if people wanted to kind of say, Oh, well, I want to do this but I don't want to do kind of whole you know, all all all of my

kind of upper and lower parts of the body in the same kind of part of the workout or in the same workout or whatever. So, okay, we could do calf raises then. I mean, I think that would probably be the lower body equivalent. Yeah.

I mean that would that would kind of be the same as what we've seen in a lot of these Celero plans. Yeah. Single sets, obviously we've talked about the value of single sets being the most stimulating in that first set. There's probably not a lot we need to say about that. But if we compared that to then doing it As multi sets, straight sets, or as groupings, circuit style like this.

Um, and we're happy with our exercise selection. We're just going we've got capacity to do maybe two, maybe some people have got capacity to do three, that would be thirty six sets or thirty thirty six sets for a workout. That's a lot, but okay, maybe if people wanna do that, they can make it happen.

What's different then between doing that as all the way through Um, you know, one set, uh, then all the way through another set, then all the way through a third set, or just stop at two, it doesn't matter. uh or conversely doing all of your sets uh for each excise sequentially before you get further on. Well the first thing that jumps out to me if you do that. is that you are creating a smaller exercise order effect that is negative on your later sets of later exercises.

So if you go through all the way from um, you know, say you do your kind of um sequence all the way through once. Um then By the time you get to the end of that first round, if you like. then obviously you've got some degree of exercise order effect, but it's smaller than it would be if you'd done every single set for every single exercise before you got to the end. So if you're doing calf raises last, like a lot of people tend to do.

then if you do everything else first, you've done like thirty three sets before you get to that point of doing calf raises. That's a pretty chunky exercise order effect. Now, again, we've talked about this in the past. It doesn't have to be you know, kind of monumental. If you're training correctly, you're leaving rest periods, you're training with uh relatively low reps, got a lot of um

you know, kind of thought goes into avoiding the exercise order effect, or not avoiding, but limiting the exercise order effect. You know. And again, you can test the magnitude of this if you want to by just doing the exercise at the beginning or the end and seeing how you do. Um but yeah, you can have a smaller exercise order effect on your first set of car phrases if you just have eleven sets rather than thirty three sets in this example.

So I think straight away we're getting an interesting kind of benefit in the sense that you do get um kind of a more even distribution of I'm not saying it is even'cause you can't get an even one.

Not helping you. The excise order effect is worse if you do your normal straight set protocol and ignore the circuits. If you do circuits, the excise order effect is going to be smaller. Going the other way and saying, well, okay Does that mean then that let's say I'm doing close grip bench as my first exercise, okay? So I do my bench press first, and if I do it as a circuit, I do one set of bench, and then I do all my other exercises, then I come back and do a second set of bench.

What happens to that second set of bench? Is it better or is it worse? Is it is it a better stimulus or is it a smaller stimulus than if I did three sets of bench all in a row before I continued? And I think that actually is a harder question to answer. Now if you go back ten years, fifteen years

then most people would say, uh, well, clearly doing three sets of bench, you know, one set after the other is going to be more stimulating than doing one set, then doing a whole bunch of other exercises, then coming back and doing a second set. But that's because they thought that fatigue was stimulating.

And it's not. Um and that's the problem. What we have to do is we have to drill down into the fatigue mechanisms and go, what is happening here that is going to be negative for me? Now Let's break it down. Basically to to to to kind of um to kind of look at this uh categorically, you can say there's gonna be two major categories of fatigue mechanism. There's gonna be central nervous system and there's gonna be peripheral.

And then within those you can then break it down uh one step further and you can say there'll be superspinal and spinal in the CNS and there's gonna be uh calciumine related and metabolite related inside the muscle. Okay. So if I do uh if I look at the CNS side, um on the CNS side, spinal CNS fatigue

probably can be ignored in the context of strength training if we're leaving a couple of minutes rest. Um i it that's not a hundred percent true and it does have a long tail to it, but ultimately for these purposes let's let's kind of just park it. Super spot of T.

weren't successful. I'm not gonna say they didn't do a very good job,'cause that's rude. They did do obviously a very good job. They just didn't understand that they were missing something. Researchers have done a lot of work in the last kind of decade or so on um capturing the magnitude of CNSD at that point because

the decay is so quick upon stopping that we tend to underestimate just how much C N S T is present. So if you look back kind of fifteen, twenty years, the general pref prevailing opinion was that CNST maybe was about kind of sort of forty, fifty percent, maybe a bit less in the context of um kind of

quite fatiguing strength training situations and maybe more like seventy eight percent in the context of cardiovascular situations. And those numbers have gone up really since then and CNS fatigue is now generally regarded as being a lot more important even than that. simply because we've got the ability to now measure CN fatigue at the moment of the exercise cessation. Literally by doing the exercise in the apparatus that you're going to test in.

So you kind of sit in a dynamometer and the instant that you get to task failure, the electrodes start stimulating the muscle to do the volunteer activation measurement and you get an instantaneous CNS fatigue uh kind of assessment. And that's really, really important because if you

do the say a cycling exercise and then you ask the subject to get off the bike and walk across the room and sit on the volunteer Yeah, exactly. Sit on the dynamometer and set up all the electrodes and five minutes later you start Exactly. You w we it was literally recording like a massive, massive kind of uh underestimation of what the actual true CNST was at Taspale.

So they've done an amazing job of fixing that problem. And now when you look at the more modern studies, they're like horrified by just how massive the CNS fatigues uh kind of effects are. Um You know, it's way higher than we uh used to kind of uh believe it was. So ultimately, um Yeah. Basically, uh CNH fatigue I think in the context of strength training, spinal CNH fatigue is probably gonna have mostly dissipated. I mean it does have a long tail out to about ten, fifteen minutes.

But honestly, you can probably kind of d sort of dismiss it most of the time um for what we're talking about. So superspinal really is gonna be quite similar. Um for okay. Not similar in the sense yeah. It so it really depends on your other exercises. If y if you were do let's say you were doing um only say five or six exercises and they're all multi joint

then basically you'll probably find that your supraspinal CNST uh being primarily influenced by cardiovascular and and inflammation kind of signalling, is probably gonna be pretty similar per set. So In that con in that scenario, in that context.

you would have say, okay, I'm gonna do one set of bench followed by a second set of bench. Okay, yeah, CNS fatigue, as long as you've less left similar rest periods, is probably gonna be less uh in the multi set protocol compared to the uh circuit protocol because she maybe done five or six other exercises uh instead of just the one. If you were doing the twelve, but your twelve consisted of a lot of single joint stuff.

then that would start to change because you'd like you'd have some recovery space, like literally what we were talking about in the constant front squat versus the b followed by the bicep skill. So if you had some intelligent exercise order and you were doing some multi f joint followed by some single joint And you were allowing yourself to um, you know, kind of almost recover a little bit as you went through, you might find that.

say with three o three minutes rest or m sort of maybe four minutes rest, you actually weren't in a such a bad state by the time you'd done eleven uh other exercises before you came back and did the bench again. I mean I I think genuinely it probably would be worse from a superspinal C N S D point of view, uh but I don't think it would be necessarily as much worse as you might predict. Um, simply if you had left those kind of uh single joint uh exercises along the way.

So I think it really depends. I mean like if you were kinda as I say, if you were doing like a five or a six exercise protocol where you were doing s sort of something like a, you know, bench followed by a pull up followed by a leg press follow you know, stiff leg deadlift or something like that, then yeah, I think you probably would be in a worse shape.

And if you have a load of muscle fibers that are lactate producing and then they're gonna go looking around the body for other fibers that are lactate consuming, which is any muscle that you're not working, if you then start working those other muscles and make them lactate yeah, you get the idea.

Is that a good idea? No, not really. Certainly not from a CNS fatigue point of view. But yeah, we're trying to do the opposite of that really. So yeah, I think again, context wise, if you're doing your circuits as like a bunch of multi joint exercises, like five or six multi joint exercises to cover the whole body like we talked about in the past. Um

I think that, you know, it would be very challenging to to argue that that was doing a better job than just doing multiple sets, straight sets, and then proceeding on to the next uh kind of exercise. I think that would be not not helpful. But If you're doing more like sort of ten to twelve and you've got some single joint stuff in there And actually I don't think it's quite so clear cut whether

that second set of benches much, much better being done in a c traditional straight set protocol compared to being done in a in a normal kind of situation. So yeah.

And so if we are talking something like a squat, maybe even a bench or a pull up, then I reckon a lot of people are going to be underdoing that rest period wise and so doing multi sets back to back.

that probably going to be having more negative impact in those later sets than if someone were to program a circuit and have some of these biceps exercises, even the way the example we started with, where you had, you know, core exercise, bicep exercise, twists, whatever, go back to the squat, I think that's gonna have less of an impact on

The exercise gives you a much kind of more even distribution of stimulus across all of your working muscles instead of um you know, kind of just applying it much more to the ones at the beginning of your workout and much less to the ones at the end. Um so this this swings and roundabout.

But this sort of circuit idea is probably a a nice middle ground because you've got consistency in doing the same exercises in that order each time, but you're less impacted by that exercise order. When I've done this in the past, what I've done is two sets per exercise. So I'll I'll work through the circuit twice, but what I do is I I work through, say, ten exercises, so one to ten, and then I work backwards again.

So my tenth exercise gets done twice in a row. I take a a few minutes off and I start again going backwards because obviously that tenth exercise is still going to be the most impacted by that exercise order. Then the first exercise So I figure I'll give it sets ten and eleven instead of sets ten and twenty.

Actually that that allows me to kind of um finish the analysis that I was doing earlier because I was saying basically you've got these two major categories of fatigue mechanisms, central and peripheral, and you can subdivide each of them into two, which is uh superspinal and spinal, which we've talked about, and then uh calciumine related and and metabolite related.

Now, generally speaking, we don't need to worry too much about metabolite related fatigue. It doesn't really create any problems for bodybuilding, um, unless it gets to the level where it triggers superspinal, which is obviously superspinal. Um but calcium mumbled fatigue, uh the way that I modelled it is that it basically reduces mechanical tension and um it isn't really possible to uh dissipate it that much between sets. Well, if you look at the recovery rates of um

calcium relativity mechanisms as a whole. So I've talked about this um quite a few times before, but very quickly. Um the standard way of measuring all calcium ion related fatigue mechanisms together is a measurement called low frequency fatigue. It picks up pretty much all of the calcium related fatigue.

uh mechanisms that happen. So some people kind of label it as one or the other. They'll label it as excitation, injection, coupling failure, for example. Not really true. It kind of picks up uh all of them uh as a group. If you look at the recovery profiles of that T mechanism, it does have a little bit of a um kind of initial recovery.

And then it flatlines. So it's probably not fair to model it exactly the way that I model it. Um, but ultimately I don't have a good model for what's happening in that first kind of couple of minutes. But it does look like we do get some degree of recovery there. I'm just not sure really what's going on. It might be an interaction. A number of people have done some work on the interactions between metabolite related fatigues and um calcium related fatigues.

So it could just be that you're what you're seeing there is the interaction between the two with I mean, some people have proposed that even phosphates can create a calcium ion essentially a calcium relative T mechanism. Um, so it could be physiology is messy. So you could see a bit of interaction there and it might be that we are getting some mechanical tension recovery from that uh dissipation of calcium day fatigue in the first couple of minutes. In that scenario

you would basically say, well, okay, that is what we would benefit from avoiding by doing circuits versus doing straight sets. Because if I do my bench and I've got a little bit of calcium aminated T that is recoverable And the vast majority is not But if I'd have some of that that is recoverable, then I do my circuit and then come back and do a second set of bench, then obviously I've then recovered

from that and I'm able to get a little bit more attention than I would have done the first time. So uh in that regard I think that's where things get interesting because what you're now saying is potentially I can win a little bit back

um that I wouldn't necessarily have got. Honestly, um a lot of people are gonna stop there and they're gonna go, Oh right, okay, so you know, there's a benefit. But honestly If you're thinking long term about your training and I would urge people to do this, if you're thinking about long term about your training, don't think too much about mechanical tension at the fibre level uh as long as

As long as it's happening. Um, don't think too much about the magnitude of that because really what matters is have you trained the muscle fibres or not. If you if you have to choose between superspinal fatigue and calcium amyloid fatigue, always choose the calcium amyloid fatigue because superspinal fatigue stops you actually touching the motor unit.

You can't if you can't uh uh recruit the motor unit, you can't train those fibers and it doesn't matter. If you trained fewer fibers with more tension, that is not a good outcome. Because long okay, you might see a little bit more hypertry in the short term, but your long term ceiling is now lower. Because if you can't train the motor, if you can't train the fibers, you're never going to grow those muscle fibers.

You know, I mean we've been hearing people kind of talking about you mentioned people have been talking about lateral force transmission recently. I I find that funny'cause I'm literally the person who kind of got the fitness industry interested in lateral force transmission about kind of seven or eight years ago. But fundamentally, you know

that is not a hypertrophy mechanism. You know, hypertrophy is created by the fibre themselves itself producing its own mechanical tension. Yes, you can stretch a fibre externally without it being activated and that will create sarcomerogenesis. But the only way to stimulate um myofibrillar addition inside a muscle fibre is for it to produce its own cross bridges and uh for those cross bridges to hit a sufficient level of mechanical tension that stimulates fibre to grow.

Um, so ultimately uh the superspinal fatigue is the bigger factor, or the CNS fatigue in general is a bigger factor, uh, because it's what determines um, you know, how many motor units we can actually recruit.

Um, this there's a few studies in rest period uh duration analysis where Uh researchers have compared like kind of thirty seconds, um, you know, one minute, two minutes and like five minutes in animal models to try and see how that affects post workout fatigue.

Um so you would kind of expect uh some differences there. The the problem is that all all these different fatigue mechanisms are moving in different directions. If you if you have a large amount of CNS fatigue Then what's going to happen is that your latest set are simply not going to recruit the motor units at the top end of the motor unit pool. And that actually protects you.

That now protects you from getting more post workout C N F T. So if you do a kind of a very short rest period workout, you actually find that you can start to suppress post workout C N F T galit sorry, post workout pet a little bit because you've got some

superspinal series fatigue towards the end of that workout. Obviously animal models don't always take that into account'cause these electrical stimulation it's kind of uh becomes messy working out what's going on. Um So if you had long rest periods and you could actually maintain your motor recruitment high, you might find that with sufficiently high rest uh sufficiently long rest periods and maintaining recruitment sufficiently high, you actually end up with more post workout

uh kind of fatigue because you are not protecting the muscle during the workout in the same way. Um but equally you've got the calcium i relativity kind of potentially moving in different directions where you've got some dissipation and then um again it it it becomes very, very difficult to model.

Um, so I think, yeah, potentially if you're able to recover a little bit of calcium ion accumulation, um and get rid of a little bit of calcium accumulation, sorry, or uh sort of remove a little bit of calcium related T mechanism between sets. you might end up with a little bit less post workout. But I wouldn't want to definitively say that is happening because of potentially other things that are moving around in opposite directions and allowing recruitment to be higher.

'Cause if recruitment is higher, you are going to get more damage just because that's how muscle fibres work. You have more glycolytic fibers at the top end of the motionit pool.

And I do have a suspicion that those later sets, they are probably having a bit of a s a a superspinal CNS protective mechanism on them. And that's why they can get away with this high volume without it maybe causing as much post workout fatigue.

where they could do a couple of reps per set. So let's say you were doing, you know, I mean, let's say you were doing a five rep max and you did one or two reps per set. You know, I think that could be a really interesting model for using a circuit because you're staying a long way from failure, you're avoiding calcium later fatigue completely, you're uh kind of mi minimizing your supraspinal and spinal CNS fatigue.

Um, I think you could probably make something like that work very, very well. And when we were talking about it, you mentioned that you've actually got a protocol that you were using uh recently or or in the past that works pretty much like that.

And essentially what's going to happen over that, let's say you do 10 sets, 10 doubles without weight, is you're going to get this slow accumulation of both metabolite fatigue and also you're going to get some increasing superspinal CNS fatigue over those those 10 sets.

And for me if I was to do say, you know, ten doubles with a a front squad or something like that, those sort of sets seven, eight, nine, that's where I'm gonna start to notice with those, you know, forty seconds off, I'm my breathing's gonna stay elevated, my heart rate's gonna stay elevated. Now, essentially what we can do is take that cluster idea and merge it with a circuit.

And so if you're doing five rep max lows, you're doing doubles, and you're just going from one exercise to the next, you're taking that thirty seconds just to get to that next exercise, get yourself set up and go. And it's the same thing. You just repeat this circuit.

over time there's gonna be not so much metabolite related fatigue that's building up, but there's gonna be the superspinal CNS fatigue, which will build up after maybe four rounds of it, five rounds of it, whatever, you're ultimately ending in that same position as you would do with clusters.

Take a protocol that somebody's doing which is already fairly minimalist. Um, you know, and we've done a minimalist episode before on this podcast, but I think we we said it was gonna be some kind of press, incline uh press or or kind of overhead press.

uh and then a wide grip pull down probably was my choice as always. And then maybe kind of a leg press and a a stiff leg deadlift or a leg press and a leg go. Um and saying you're doing those four exercises And you could you could do two reps of each exercise and then you could do it again and do another two reps of each exercise and then you could do it one more time and do another two reps of each exercise.

And that would be really, really interesting because you would probably have to leave slightly longer rest periods than would be normal for um a circuit type protocol because you're doing multi-joint for everything. But you would basically start to make sure that your exercise order effect was almost non existent.

You know, and that's one of the things that people really do I think struggle with. And that comes back to your point earlier, which is like people are always asking, can I do like uh you know, exercise in my if I'm doing three workouts a week, can I literally just reorder the exercises on each uh kind of day and do an A A dash, A dash or whatever. A one, A two, A three type workout where

Um, you're basically you're doing exactly the same exercises on all three days, but you're moving the order around. So it doesn't look like exactly the same workout, but it is exactly the same workout except for the exercise order effect. And the I think the thing that people forget about this is that

Again, the only thing that exercise order really manages is superspinal CNSPT. So if you get to a point where you're changing let's say for example you do exercises in exactly the opposite order, um then your first exercise obviously becomes laugh.

Well, there are gonna be some fibers in that exercise when it's done first that are gonna be activated and other fibers and and then not gonna be activated when it's done last. That basically means that those fibers are being trained once a week if you do that, like that. Um I mean what you could do is an A B A, B A B format with exercises in the opposite order.

And that would work because obviously you would then be uh able to get from yeah uh you know, kind of one workout to the next. So if you do want to do exercises in a different order, you have to do it as full body A B A, B A B. Oh A one, A two.

And then you try to hit a new PB that once a week. And at the very least, we can use that starting starting with that exercise as uh using it more for more you get recruitment games.

But yeah, you could do the opposite order and as I say do A B A B A B. That would work. Um again, A it's not A B A, it's A one, A two, A one, A two, A one, A two. But okay, fine. Um You know, so so that but coming back to this circuit format, if you did uh two reps of each uh exercise and then did the whole thing again, your exercise order effect would be pretty minimal.

Um, so you could use uh circuits to kind of maximize your development across all the muscle groups that you're training without needing to mess around with this. I'm not saying that it's gonna be better'cause I think it requires a lot of management and I can see a way of making it work with say four or five exercises. I think that

But when you start to get up to ten and you've got like a working gym and other people are around you, it's gonna start to get very, very messy. Very messy, very quickly.

And it might be four or five different exercises, usually most of the upper body exercises. one or two exercises to conclude at the end. So you can still do some variation of circuits in a busy gym. You could do it in a squat cage as well and you'll be able to do three or four different exercises there potentially, but you might have to be like unloading weights, maybe need two different bar setup.

My favorite way to program circuits is to alternate. So I do full body A B and I'll have uh one of those work out. So let's say full body A and it'll be essentially a Reg Park style, essentially like this five by five.

But I'll turn that into a circuit. So it'll be these big multi-joint exercises, usually about five of those five to six multi-joint exercises. And then exactly what we've just said, I'll take that five rep max load, I'll do it as doubles, and then just rotate through those five or six.

And then on my other full body day, I'll just do the a single set and I'll have the, you know, 12, 15, 17 different exercises. And I won't do that as a circuit. Or if I do do it as a circuit, then I'll do the all the way down and then all the way back up again.

it will be it will be people who are probably doing kind of that minimalist type routine. They've got you know, they've got they've got a uh squat rack, they're doing a squat, you know, they're they're doing maybe a stiff leg deadlift, they're doing you know, a pull up, um and then maybe doing some kind of uh press. Um the the issue is if they're just working out of one power rack, then they are going to be moving the bar around quite a lot, which is a miserable experience.

I mean, you're probably better at kind of constructing these kind of um sequences than I am, but if you were doing, say, Anderson front squats, so you were doing uh s front squats from pins then you obviously you would have the barbell at a a height that would be kind of more usable. Um If you then Yeah. I mean if you then had blocks you could stand on, you could probably then do s sort of stiff legs from that same position. Um, I don't know. I mean that I'm just

And often in that forty five minute session, we'd get towards the end and the last exercise we wouldn't have time to complete together. Or there might be one or two exercises. And I'd have to leave the client to finish out one or two exercises by themselves and I'd go to my next client.

And I think and I see this. This is actually what motivated my thought. I was sitting in a gym and I was watching a PT do exactly this thing. And the exercises the PT did with their client, the client performed really well. High sort of effort. And the PT had to be moving them through these exercises really quickly. And you could see this client huffing it, puffing as moving to the next exercise, because they obviously had such a limited amount of time.

And I thought as a more intelligent way to do this as a PT would be to do a circuit.

and uh kind of uh encouragement and get them to understand what m muscular failure actually is like on each of those kind of scenarios. They know what their weights are, they know how many reps they're doing. And then basically at the end of that you say, Okay, now just go and do it yourself one more time, well I can't do and Yeah, and I think that's fantastic. I think that's that that is deserving of being an industry standard. I genuinely do.

Kind of value for money if you like, thing to do. I think it's brilliant. You know. So much better than, you know, kind of either rushing or leaving them to do a couple of exercises on their own at the end that you haven't got time to work with them on. I think that's that's very cool.

And I think maybe a lot of people maybe entered this conversation thinking there probably wasn't really any utility to them and hopefully that sort of changed their mind a little bit there. Now, at the same time, I think where we've landed is There's some interesting things that maybe could be little bonuses or perks or, you know, maybe if you manage it in a certain way, could have some specific unique or novel benefits to it.

But there's maybe a little bit of a trade off in some things and it's it's hard in some gyms and it may not necessarily replace your standard straight sets or single set whatever.

Well not obviously, but I did. Um,'cause I had it bolted to the wall. Um, and I had uh a separate bar on the floor. So I'd got a squat rack with a with a uh bar but inside it. I'd got the uh uh kind of uh deadlift platform uh on the floor and then I'd got a pull up bar and a and a dip station separate. So I could have done four exercises there. Uh pull up, uh, dip, uh, deadlift, stiff leg off the floor, b off off off probably block.

And then um and then squ f squat in the rack, a front squat in the rack. And that that would have been brilliant. That would have worked really, really well. I tended not to do that. I tended to do supersets'cause that just kind of what felt better for me at the time. But if you wanted to do that kind of cluster routine where you're doing two reps of a five rep max and four and you could work around those four

I think that would be really, really interesting just as something to try and see how it felt. And capturing that exotic. That's pretty cool.

Um, I think that that would be interestingly usable in the context of a taper for an athlete. So if you've got a strength athlete that's working around those kind of exercises or something similar, And you've got the ability to um set them all up uh uh to to function like that, uh independently without having to move equipment around, then I think as a tapering strategy that could be really cool for two reasons.

Firstly, because by doing kind of two reps of a fire rep max, you are absolutely getting nowhere near something that's gonna create post workout fatigue. So from a strength athlete point of view, that's very, very cool. You're getting your um required intensity.

get your adaptions and keep your adaptions without really getting uh very much post workout fatigue. So you could actually make that work really, really well. So from a tapering strategy, that's very, very cool. Also, and I think this is underappreciated

If you put yourself in a scenario where you are doing uh, you know, four separate exercises or five separate exercises in a circuit, say two or three times, say three times, you are going to get out of your head for forty five minutes to an hour. And if you're tapering and you've got an important competition coming up, that's not un you know, that's not to be underestimated. I think that's pretty pretty important. Um people are under a lot of uh competition related stress.

to have a workout where they don't have to I mean two rips to the five rip max, whatever, is should be keeping people well within, you know, the realms of uh, you know, comfort, for want of a better word. Um but the constant activity is going to be keeping them from kind of ruminating on the competition that they're gonna do. So I think that's I think that's potentially quite positive from a, you know, sports psychology point of view.

as well as from a uh kind of tapering point of view and post workout fatigue management So, you know, no, it's not the next best you know, not s the next great thing for everybody to start doing, absolutely not. Um, but I do think there are some really interesting little applications here and there of this of this idea.

And you could absolutely intersperse your multi joint exercises with single sets of some of these, you know, single joint exercises that are less fatiguing. And so there'd be ways you could you could not do a classic circuit, but merge some of the benefits in with a standard workout.

You don't really want to be doing all your multi joints together and all your single joints together. If you find yourself doing like four single joint exercises in a row, unless your entire workout is single joint exercises then you've probably done something wrong with your exercise order uh kind of sequencing. Much better off is to have, you know, multi joint, couple of single joints, multi joint, couple of single joints and like kind of uh fa pa pace yourself in that way.

Um, you know, uh and I think that's that's an important uh kind of lesson above and beyond just this conversation about circuits, which is kind of what you're drawing attention to.

uh ask whether people wanted to uh hear about this particular topic. But yeah, if people have suggestions for um other topics that they would like us to cover, then please let us know and we'll do the same thing again. We'll put it out to the audience and say Is this something that everybody or at least a a a number of people are interested in hearing about and will be happy to to do that? Um I mean I think that's been a worthwhile exercise.