#1979 Dear Kate Weaver - Harps & Tiff

the group apologies. There was a lady, I can't my thing won't open up, so I can't find you name. But she went, hey, love all the fitness ones, but they seem to be always more directed at beginners, and I went, that is a very good point. That's very observant. And so I even said, noted, I'm going to do something for people who are a little bit more advanced somewhere in the medium too. I'm about to go to the Olympics kind of category and we'll have a chat

about that. So this is really four people who have been training for a while. I've got some experience, some fitness, some strength, anywhere between. You know, three probably six to twelve months of experience where you've really started to change and adapt and you're not a beginner anymore. You don't have your training wheels on anymore, and you've started to get some results, or you could be anyone through to somebody who's at the very point end of a sport.

Remember we're not talking about individual sports. We're talking about training bodies. We're talking about conditioning bodies. And that is conditioning bodies for life, conditioning bodies for health and wellness and function and performance, and also conditioning bodies for sport

if that's where you're at. And of course, a conditioning program for a runner is not going to be the same for a powerlifter, is not going to be the same for somebody who's got a history of lower back injuries and wants to be able to play footy again or whatever it is, or just the average punter who's fifty or sixty or seventy and says, I've been training on and off for quite a while. I've been training for the last year or two pretty consistently. I want

to turn up the volume and the intensity. How do I do that? So this show is about that. Also, I'll shut up in a moment. It is not a personal prescription. So don't say Craig Harper said I should do that, and then when I went and did it and I busted my back. Don't do that. So what I'm doing is I'm talking about how training at a

high level works. I'm talking about intensity and volume and when is probably a good idea to change a program or up the intensity or decrease the recovery, or manipulate the variables to work harder and to get more out of your body. So it is very much just me and Tiffany and Cook thinking out loud, not directing you to do anything in particular. But also, as you will hear through the show, it's like it's a lot of

it makes sense. I'm not probably not going to say anything that blows your head off in terms of wow, I never would have imagined that it. Most of it makes sense, But I think it's good to hear from somebody who's worked with lots and lots of athletes and lots and lots of highly conditioned people and not so conditioned people over a very long time, So that would be me, all right. So I've given Tiff a bunch of prompts or questions which I think are good for this.

But I've also said, ask as many or as few as you want, and we'll just see where we go. So there's there's probably a little bit of planning for this, to be honest, but you know, generally we have a plan and then we fuck the plan off and just go somewhere else. But I think these are good questions to explore because I think they're broadly relevant. So you've got all of I think I sent you through like twenty or fifteen. Where do you want to start?

Then your overall training volume for somebody like that would probably be in terms of just strength stuff, somewhere between three to seven hours a week. Now we're talking someone at the more pointy end of the scale. Then if you're a super duper advanced it might even be more

than that. But also remember that, for example, you're a power lifter, or you're someone who's training for ultimate power and ultimate strength and ultimate muscle gain, there's going to be more recovery, there's going to be longer workouts, but there may even be less volume in a longer time because when we're lifting heavy and we're really trying to move the needle on muscle mass for example, or power or absolute strength, we tend to have more recovery time

between sets. Conversely, somebody could come in who's more interested in still at the point to your end of the scale or the more advanced end of the scale, and say, you know what, I am a triathlete, and so I need to be strong, but I can't carry an extra twenty kilos of muscle because that's not functional for my sport. So I want to build strength, but I also want to build muscular endurance because I tend to do very very high rep activities like writing and running and swimming.

And so for somebody who's an an elite triathlete in this example, we want them to have, yes, some strength, some power, some speed depending on the distances that they run right and swim, but most likely they need to have great muscular endurance, so they would they would probably have a higher volume. They would definitely have a higher volume, more sets and reps and more stuff in the workout, but they would also have less recovery time between sets.

But the overall workout might be forty five to sixty minutes. Whereas the power dude or the power girl who's in the gym just trying to get jacked and big and strong as a fucking house. They're going to do a set. It's going to be pretty heavy, it's going to be pretty hard, it's going to be pretty maximal, and then they may have two, three, even four minutes recovery time between sets. But that's what works for hypertrophy and power.

So the answer is, which is kind of annoying, but it's very true, is training volume depends on what it is you're after. Generally, though, the more progressed you are, the further down the line you are, the more elite you are, the more the volume. But in terms of progression, you know, gains, improvement, adaptation, climbing, the kind of performance ladder. Remember that while training is crucial, recovery is just as crucial as is sleep, as is nutrition. So it's a

multi dimensional thing. Tiffany and Cook, that's great.

like I did. So I had an extensive history of boxing and then doing a lot of hit training, and then I came into doing heavy traditional kind of weight training, and I remember asking you, like, what how where do I sit in the novice, intermediate, elite kind of level of truck? What level of training am I at when it's a different style? So is there some rules around that?

conditioning was probably an eight. But then if we put you in the gym and we went just tire are some functional kind not well, yeah, they're all functional, but here are some traditional lifts, you know, bench press, squads, dead lifts, gins. Just the fundamentals or your level of

conditioning for that was probably a three or four. But because you have such a training background, you adapted very quickly, much more quickly than if Tiffany and Cook had a twin sister who had never worked out, Right, you who've always worked out, versus your sister with the same body and the same genes who'd never worked out, you would

adapt much more quickly. So there's level of conditioning and where we are on the fitness and strength and performance scale relative to an individual thing like say triathletes, or like bodybuilding, or like tennis, versus what we would call just overall conditioning. So yeah, like, for example, my body is very very conditioned to strength training and that kind of old school bodybuilding lifting shits. And when I say bodybuilding, I'm literally talking building your body. I'm not for me

right now. I Am not talking about getting on stage and being stared at and judged and going, oh, how well do his delts balance with his lats? And he's not that. I'm just talking bodybuilding, which is building all round strength. Yeah. So yeah, that's a really good question. So we find people that come from say a running background, who have never done He's a beautiful example. Tammy van Wiss. If you had Tam on your show.

she said, I want to do. It was just when people were starting to diversify their training program because for a very long time, all runners did was run, you know, they of course there was a bit of token other stuff, but it was really token. It wasn't very scientific. All swimmers did were swim. All tennis players did was play tennis.

But I would think it was around the early eighties, mid eighties where people started to get more and obviously in the noughties it's really escalated, but where people started to get methodical and scientific and strategic about conditioning their body and looking at individual sports and saying, okay, let's pick for example, netbal, where you go all right, well, netball, is it important that you can run five k's at a steady state and do a sub twenty sub four

minute kilometer run. No, not at all. Why because we don't do that in netball. What do we do in netball? We sprint stop turn, sprints, stop, turn, move laterally, move forward, move backwards, run jump, run, jump left, right right. So we're doing this interval training, so you need to be good at that. So what can we do. We can do drills that emulate what you would do on the

netball court. Because five k's you're not moving explosively, you're not changing direction, you're moving in a straight line, You're not there's So yes, you're fit, but you're fit for running five k's versus fit for netball. And so back to Tammy. Tammy came in, we had a chat and

I went cool. So she came in the next day and I went, all right, we're just going to do a bunch of stuff that you normally don't do, which is everything other than swimming, right, And so I took her for a run and I said, we're not going to run far or fast. So the girl who never ran, the girl who never had to do weight bearing stuff because of body was always in the water. And this

is a long time ago, but she was while. You know, if her and I got in a pool, I'd fucking die in three minutes, and she'd be zooming up and down the pool like a motor boat. Right. But so we went out the front of the gym and there's around my gym. At that stage there was a block. The block to run around my gym was nine hundred meters. And I said, we're just going to do a nine hundred meter jog. We're not going to sprint, nothing fancy.

We're not going to go hard. And she goes, I've never run, and I go, well, maybe she's done a bit, but she'd never been a runner, right, And let's just say that she nearly fucking cackd at doing a nine hundred. So the girl who swam five k's the morning before or the day that I trained her, I said, what have you done today? And she said five k's right, which sounds extreme, but for an ultra swimmer it's not.

So she ran five k's ate, some breakfast swam five k's ate, some breakfast, came to the gym, could hardly run and not because she was tired or uncoordinated, but because she never did that. So she was very unconditioned for other things, but an absolute elite weapon at that

thing that she did. But what we now know is when you can maintain that level of elite, whatever it is, whether it's tennis or swimming or martial arts or whatever, and then on top of that, you can condition your body specifically to build strength or power or speed or change of direction or coordination or balance or spatial awareness or all of these fitness or physiological variables that we

can manage. Then you take the person who's already real good and add this kind of new capacity with their body and they become crazy. So there's yeah, so good question, though, love it.

are the same. You know, they walk out, they lie on the bench press, or they walk up to the squat bar, or they walk up to the you know, the barbelle on the floor where they're going to do a deadlift, and they will do one lift in competition. I mean they will come back, but they do single So I'll do a single lift and then they might come back five or ten minutes later. But it's literally one repetition at a time. So there's not a lot of value for an elite level power lifter to be

doing ten to twenty reps. Right. There'll be times where they do that because it's just they're going through a phase of their training and everything with most of the lead athletes has periodized, and it might be just in that phase where they're given their joints and ligaments and ten and to a break, but typically they're going to do low reps. Then we think about somebody who is really just about strength, so power I would say somewhere between

one and four or maybe five reps, maybe six. Strength would be somewhere in the kind of five six up to about ten twelve range. This is typically what they would tell you. I argue with these and I'll explain why, and then they would say that hypertrophy is generally somewhere in the ten to fifteen Now hyperch fhe is building muscle mass is in the ten to fifteen rep range, and then anything above fifteen reps they would call that muscular endurance. And in very general terms, that's not the

worst science. But the problem is that when you look at say, cyclists, and some of them do heavy singles or heavy two or three rep maxes, some of them do, not all of them though, But when you think about what they do most of the time, most of the time cyclists men and women are essentially doing high rep, light to moderate resistance. Like you think about when you're pushing a pedal, you are essentially doing a leg press, because what you're doing is you are extending your knee

or ex straightening your knee under load. What do you do when you do a leg press or a squat or a deadlift, you straighten or extend your knee under load. It's the same movement, it's slightly different, but it's done a slightly different way, it's done in a seated position,

and all of those things. So essentially, sprinting around the velodrome for say two minutes, is like doing two minutes of fucking really hard, moderately light but extremely intense leg presses or squats, you know, not the same range of movement. And then you look at these people who do what we would call muscular endurance training and they've got these whopping fucking legs. You go, well, how does that match up?

Because they don't actually train in terms of what traditionally what we would call that's not hypertrophy, you know, that's not power, although they do generate ridiculous power, like just through this kind of lens of this many reps equals muscular endurance, this many reps equals or that it just

doesn't work out. So there are so many times when also another one you think about an elite swimmer, even swimmers who swim longer distances, like even say two to four hundred meters, So I don't know what's two hundred. I guess they're in the water for you know, like one forty five or something, right, but it's like one forty five of extremely intense Let's say butterfly. Look at butterfly. Fuck,

how intense is that? Right? They're coming out of the water and they're doing reps where they're pulling their body through the water, and of course they're kicking and so it's a total body movement. But they're basically doing reps for a minute and forty five or if it's a four hundred meter it's probably like three point thirty or something like that. Sorry, I don't have the times off the top of my head. But they're essentially doing muscular

endurance training. But they get out of the pool and they've got a back like a fucking house.

the ballpark of muscular endurance. I percha fee muscular endurance and and but you know, I still hold onto a lot of muscle even though I don't train in the way that might be recommended for optimal muscle mass. So yeah, good question, Tiff.

marathona with say four percent body fat. Okay, so let's say in this case a male, he is very lean, he is very jacked, he's eighty but it's just way too heavy, you know, which is why we'll see someone my height, which is five ten an elite marathona at my height, and I'm a eighty one kilos and I'm lean, I'm very lean, But a marathona my height would weigh about sixty or somewhere between fifty and sixty kilos fifty five, I should say, and sixty kilos because you need a comment.

You need enough power and speed, but you don't need the weight. And so yeah, you just can't be You will never see an eighty kilogram will not an elite eighty kilogram marathon at the Olympics. And it's not because being eighty kilos is bad. It's just that you're probably carrying twenty kilograms more. Now you think if you take let's say one meter per step, right, well, then you're

doing forty two thousand steps. In fact, forty two two hundred steps in a marathon where you're carrying essentially a twenty kilo weakefest. It just doesn't work. So the body kind of sorts itself out.

your body responds. But if, for example, you came to me, which you wouldn't, But let's say you came to me and you said, I want to run a marathon or you might do that, who knows, But I would say, all right, well you're now. When I say this everyone, I'm speaking as an exercise scientist and from a physical logical point of view, I would go, well, with all the muscle you've got and the weight that you've got, which by the way, is good weight because it's muscle.

First thing I would say is, well, think about this. You training for a marathon. In my opinion, it's not going to make you healthier moving forward. If you don't care about that, that's not going to destroy your health obviously, But you are sixty what are you sixty sixty two kilos yep, and you're lean, like, you're leaner than ninety nine percent of people, right, your lean and so then you go, all right, well, what am I going to

get rid of? Because if you start running ten fifteen, twenty k's and then you're doing that for ten or eight months as you lead up to the event, well you will compromise a lot of muscle. Now, if you're cool with that, then that's fine. But everything comes at a cost. You know, lower running time come at the cost of muscle. You know, building muscle and building absolute power and strength often comes at the cost of flexibility and range of movement, or it can, right, So everything

comes at a cost. So what we're trying to do, like, I think you from a like you to me, you're a hybrid, right because you can run and you can ride, and you can box, and you're coordinated and you've got muscular endurance and you've got strength and speed and balance and coordination. Because you're boxing, like, there's not a lot

of things that you couldn't do pretty competently. That's not say you would be elite, but you'd probably be better than average because you're genetically better than average and athletically better than average. I'm not I'm worse, right, So for me if you and I and again I'm older and all of those things. And by the way, none of this is elevating tiar four and you know, being critical of myself. This is just looking at a body and how body works. It's like, and she didn't deserve her body.

She was just lucky. I didn't deserve my body. I was just lucky. You just get what you're born with. But yeah, I think you know. So whatever it is. If you want to build muscle, a very common thing is I want to build muscle lose fat. Well, let me tell you it's pretty hard to build muscle and lose fat at the same time. It's possible, but it's

pretty hard. So you might want to kind of initially if your focus is on building muscle and changing shape, whether you're a guy or a girl, you might want to just try to hold on to whatever your body fat level is, keep it at that, depending on what it is, or you might want to, you know, like be happy to lose a little bit of muscle, or just hold on to the muscle and drop some body fat. But it's rare that your muscle mass will grow and

your body fat will reduce at the same time. It's a pretty complicated thing, but you know, once you've got that muscle, once you then you can try to or then you can you know, with quite a bit of planning and structure and work, you know, you can reduce your body fat and hold on to most of what you've got. So you know, it's funny because when I'm in a singlet without sounding like a wanka, I'm made a kilos, but I look much bigger, and people regularly

think I'm ninety kilos because I'm lean. But if I'm in a flannel shirt like I am now and people didn't know me, they probably wouldn't even think I worked out. They would just think I'm an old guy that's in not terrible shape, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, because it's you know, so there's that. I don't even know what you asked me, and I'm far away from home, so save me. I don't even know where we start out with that.

but basically what we would call just free weights. And then you use those free weights either just standing or you use them quite often on a bench, whether it's a shoulder press or a bench press, or sometimes a supported row or a prone row where you lie on your tummy and you pull up a bar belt to hit the bench or touch the bench. So there's a

myriad of ways that we can use free weights. I think the more advanced we become, the more we should unless there's a medical or clinical reason not to the more we should use free weight. So I'm speaking to

you who are more advanced. So the difference between saying doing a let's say, a shoulder press on a pin loaded machine is you sit on the or even a plate loaded machine, because that it's pretty much the same when we're talking about a fixed Some things on fixed basically runners where you don't have to balance it, you don't have to be coordinated. You just push it up in the air and it goes, you know, as a

response to your pushing. Versus if I'm sitting on just a bench and I've got a couple of dumb bells up at my shoulders and I'm activating my core, all my muscles, and I'm sitting, I'm not leaning against anything necessarily, and I've got these two dumbbells and I've got to push them up in the air. And not only do I need to push them work against gravity and the resistance that comes with the weight, but I've also got

to balance them. I've also got to control them. I've also got to stabilize those weights through that range of movement. So the main benefit in using free weights versus pin loaded weights is that we're using a bunch more muscles. We're using a lot of stabilizers, stabilizing muscles around your hips and around you know, your midsection, around your shoulders.

We're using a lot of those which we don't tend to when we're doing something which is particularly something which is pinloaded with that comes more risk because it requires more technique. It's less safe, but done the right way, it is you know, quite safe. And then, as I've said a thousand times on here before, you know, pinloaded

machine is fine. So somebody like me who's got a perpetually injured but slowly getting better shoulder, I use what's called an upright a chest press when I'm training my chest. I don't love that exercise. I don't love that machine, but for my shoulder, with my injury, that works for me. So that's why I use it. When I try to do a normal bench press on lying on a bench with a free weight barbell or even dumbbells, I have excruciating pain. So and for whatever reason, when I do

the pinloaded it's easier. But in general terms, we want to use free weights and our body will tell us, and our results will tell us, and our strength will

tell us. And the difference between doing something you know, like for those of you who have done a forty five degree leg press, and let's say you've done a one hundred kilo leg press, if you ever tried then to step out of that and do one hundred kilo squat, you would discover the difference between a machine and a free weight movement, you know, one hundred kilo squat, real squat parallel to the ground us, you know, down to

kind of parallel to your knees. It involves so many more muscles than just sitting in a leg press, and depending on how you do it, more benefits or potentially more problems if you don't do it well.

seconds time under tension and so on. And this is a really good question because people don't factor in time under tension enough because they they're more concerned with how many they do. And this is a very good way to increase Glad you asked this. I didn't think of it. This is a very good way to increase intensity without greatly increasing risk at all. Right, so let me give you an example. So everyone, this is a for you

more advanced ees. I want you to try this. Whatever your If you can do ten push ups, I want you to try this. I want you to do ten push ups in about ten seconds. So down, up, down, up down like that tempo maybe one one a half seconds, so your ten reps take you ten to fifteen seconds. Now I want you to try this, and this is at the end of the scale. I want you to go down. Count five, and I mean right down, so chest down to the ground but not touching the ground.

Hands and feet not hands and knees. Down to the ground. Count to five, don't rush one, two, three, four, five, come back up down right. So we're doing ten reps. So we're holding at the bottom times five seconds, and then we chuck in another one or two seconds for the up and down bit. Let's say two seconds. So we're doing ten reps now, which is going to take somewhere around seventy seconds versus ten to fifteen. So we've just done the exact same exercise with the same weight

your body, the same movement, the same biomechanics. But what we've done is we've made it exponentially harder because the time under tension doing the exact same thing with the same weight and the same body and the same movement has gone from ten to fifteen seconds to give or take seventy seven zero seconds. And that is the really you know, So when you go oh went awhile I didn't have any equipment, There's so many ways that you

can progress. There's so many ways that you can stem your body, stimulate your body to adapt, and time underload is a really clever way and also range of movement. You know, for those of you who for some of you, this won't be a revelation, right, but I want you

to think about doing a regular body weight squat. And so you start at the stop at the top, and you go down bum to about you know, parallel or thigh to about parallel to the ground, so ninety degrees at the knees, and you come up and then you stand up, then you go back down. So when we stand at the top, you'll notice that your quads kind of switch off, right, it's almost your skeleton keeping you up right. So what I want you to do if you want to try this. I want you to do

ten normal squats bodyweight squats again. If this is if you're up to it, if your bodies are right now, all that you know, I say that with an asterisk, right, So do ten, No, in fact, do twenty squats. Do two zero, do twenty squats, and then give yourself a minute or two. Now I want you to come back, and I want you to do the exact same thing. So go down, same body, same weight, exact same movement.

Go down so your thighs are parallel or maybe even a teensy weensy bit lower, But do not straighten up at the top. Come up so your knees are still flexed at the top, So instead of coming all the way back up, you come up about Instead of one hundred percent, not one hundred degrees, but one hundred percent up, you're ninety percent. So your quad's don't switch off, right, So try and do twenty of those where you don't

let your legs relax, you don't straighten up. Now, when you do twenty of option one versus twenty of option two, doing the exact same thing with a little bit of a tweak, you will go oh my god, this is about five times harder. Now, now when you introduce the third variable or the next variable, do that exactly the same way, but slow it down. So instead of taking two seconds per rep, take six. So two seconds per

rep times twenty reps is forty seconds. Six seconds per rep times twenty reps is two minutes, one hundred and twenty seconds. I doubt you will even make the two minutes. You might, but if you do, well done you because that's elite. Yeah. So that's a great question, TIF, And that's a really good way to manipulate intensity and to force adaptation without lifting heavier weights or having to even go to the gym.

Where you are the weakest in terms of strength to do that move is at the very bottom of the movement. You are at a biomechanical disadvantage, You've got the least leverage, and it's the hardest to move the weight. Now, what if you did this. What if you went into the gym and you got old mate who bench presses one hundred kilos for ten top reps and we all know what I'm talking about. One hundred kilos ten reps, but

they're only half, and it's the top half. If you tried to get old mate to do the same weight only doing the bottom half, very unlikely that he would get five. Right, So, whole range of movement, like we want one hundred percent of the movement come down, touch the bar on the chest, or if you want to increase intensity and like tift off in trains without a spotter or a partner. Go down, hold the weight just above your chest, like two milimeters, so it's not resting

on your chest. Count to three or five, and then take a back up again, same movement, same weight, much different effect.

You've got pretty good genetics, but do you train in a way where you force your body to be somewhere near optimal? And that is because you're okay with pain, You're okay with dom's post exercise soreness or delayed onset muscles, horness, whatever, and you are very consistent and your diet is mostly good except for the muffins.

I don't want to be reckless. I don't want to be put myself in harm's way. But what I do want to do is what I want to do is see how strong I could get, or how fast I could run that distance, or how quick I could swim that distance, or how wide I could get into side splits or front splits or whatever it is, like, whatever

the fitness variable is, right. So I think the best way to do that is to be really methodical and to track everything that you do with whatever it is the thing that you're trying to become more elite at. So if it's strength, track your workouts, sets, reps, volume, weight, recovery time, because it's in the tracking, and it's in the paying attention, and it's in the doing the work, and bring it all together in that way that you will figure out what's optimal for you and what's not.

Because even someone who's trained, you know all the people I've trained, if I sat down with you and I looked at you, and even if I did an assessment on you and you told me about your goals and your background, when I write you a program, it's still a very educated guess. I don't know exactly what the outcome will be because I don't know. I don't know your physiology, I don't know your genetics, I don't know your immune system. I don't know your capacity inside out.

But time will telp so by the time. Like for example, when I trained people for years, which I did, I knew exactly how their body would respond to pretty much any stimuli because I just work with them for so long. But yeah, high level trial and error we call it. And you know if you can if I wanted to quantify it a little bit, let's say you can do a movement really well with good form safely, any movement

in the gym. Now we're talking about strength. If you can do fifteen of those with good form, reduce the reps, increase the weight. If that's what you want, if you're in this, I want to get more muscle and stronger and more powerful, then lower the reps, increase the weight. And it's sometimes that workout is not as fulfilling in the moment because you almost feel like you're cheating because you're having more recovery time and you're not doing as

much volume. But all we're trying to do, especially when we talk about strength, all we're trying to do when we exercise is literally just stimulate our body to respond a certain way, and all increased strength is adaptation, increased hyperch free muscle mass, adaptation, better range of movement around the joint, adaptation, lower heart rate, adaptation, being able to improve your VO two max, your lung capacity, your performance

capacity aerobically, adaptation, you know, losing body fat adaptation. What do we do. We increase expenditure, we decrease calories perhaps or both of those, or one of those, and we see our body composition changes. We lose fat, we build muscle. What's that? It's adaptation to a stimulus or stimuli. It's all the same thing, express differently. Let's do Oh wow, we've been. Let's do three more. Unless you want to do more, Let's.

Some Monday's pushing. I do bench press, I do shoulder press, I do dips, I do incline press. I might do some flies in there which are not a pressing movement, a pushing movement, but they're not a pulling movement. All upper body pushing. And then day two I might do all upper body.

the elbow or reducing the angle. All pulling movements are unless we're talking about straight arm pulling a weight from the floor. But as we understand, generally pulling is biceps and bracalis and back, so nearly all back exercises are pulling movements, and we can alternate that. So what we're doing is day one pushing stuff, Day two lower body, so no upper body. Day three back to upper body,

but now we're pulling stuff. Day four we might have a day off, so we would call this three on one off as a split routine, and then day five we come back to pushing stuff with our upper body. Day six we're back to pushing stuff for lifting stuff with our lower body, and then day seven in this routine we would be back to upper body pulling, and then day eight, So it's a four day cycle of three days on one day off. It's a four day rotation. But I mean I just gave you an example. You

could break that up a million ways. So what that means is we're actually training a lot, but we're still allowing For example, my upper body pushing muscles are getting three days rest, my legs are getting three days rest. My legs and lower body, my upper body pulling muscles are getting you know, we could break this up differently. We could go, I'm doing all the muscles on the front of my lower body and the muscles on the

back of my lower body. So day one is you know, squats and leg press and leg extension, which is not only but primarily quads, and day two I could be doing calf raises and hip thrusts and leg curls and all the stuff that's working my ars and hamstrings and calves. So we can break it up really however we want, And there's a way to be pretty consistent with training

where we're not overloading. Failing that, if you go, fuck that, I don't have that time, then I would suggest that you do maybe a full body workout and you do it every second or third day. But if you are to all the more advanced end of the scale, I'll be training hard. I'd be picking five or six multi joint that is, compound movements that pretty much encompass my whole body. Going in on Monday, I'd be smashing myself in a smart way. I'd be having Tuesday, maybe Wednesday

off and then hitting the repeat button. So there's a myriad of ways and then back to your question about periodization over over time. So you asked, I don't know if in this question or earlier, but periodization basically just means that we have phases where we train differently. It might be higher reps, lower weight, lower reps higher weight. It might be working at like a loading phase where I'm just building and building and building, and a tapering phase.

In the loading phase, I'm really going balls to the wall, so to speak. I'm lifting heavy, I'm lifting often, I'm getting myself pretty fatigued, but I'm building overall strength and power and speed, whatever it is. And then I realized, let's, for example, say, for example, a sprinter who's got an event in six weeks, he or she would start to taper it six weeks or four weeks to pen on the program and the coach, and then they would still

be training, but they're winding back the intensity. They're keeping what they've got while they're allowing their body to refresh somewhat. So there's a lot of science and a lot of logic that goes into that as well, and we can also do that as general trainers. And there are days where it's not periodization, but there are days where I go into the gym, I feel great and I smash myself because my body's Remember, biofeedback is your body telling

you what's up, for good or bad. Sometimes I go into the gym, I'm pumped, I'm excited, I'm full of energy. Other days I go in I'm not feeling it. It's not emotionally psychologically, it's just that you know, my body's not ten out of ten today, my body's six or seven. So I'll train accordingly. I'll still train, but I'll pay attention to the data.

and lateral movement and acceleration. One rms are great, but they are the highest risk thing you can do in a gym other than training badly. So I wouldn't do a one RM these days for obvious reasons. But I think if you're fit and strong and relatively injury free, and you warm up and everything's done well, the actual answer is anyone can do one RMS if they're in you know, good nick. But as an athlete who just wants to check where they're at, I would maybe do

one RM, one RM or a more. I'm more likely to do two or three rms than one because it still gives us a real insight into absolute strength. But what it does is it just gives us a baseline. And you know, if I did it today, I would go along the thirtieth of August twenty twenty five, I did this, and then moving forward, I've got I've got something to compare myself to, which is the only person I should compare myself to.

and again it depends on what you're training for. But if you're doing cardio just because you kind of have to do cardio from cardiovascular VO two max absolute fitness perspective, we know that that you can get more aerobic benefit in a way shorter amount of time than going for a thirty minute plot every day of the week. Nothing wrong with thirty minute plods right by the way, I walk for the best part of an hour and a

half a day, which is definitely not intense. But if we're talking about I want the best bang for buck, the best bang for buck is going to be interval training where you are doing Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. This is again just an example. Let me give you a fifteen minute program. So fifteen minutes. I'm figuring this out as I go. All right, so you jump on the bike, you warm up for three minutes, and you're just steady state you're

warming up. This protocol could be used for a stepper, for a grinder, for an air walker, for a ski erg, you know, cross trainer, whatever. This this protocol so for three minutes. Also it could be used on a treadmill, and also it could be used running outdoors. So three minutes is just steady state, getting blood moving, getting your breath, you know, kind of warming into it. So then at the four minute mark, remember this is just an example, and you need to be at a reasonably advanced level.

Let's go with twenty seconds hard hard, not hard ish, not kind of hard hard. And when you finish that twenty seconds, if I offered you fifty bucks to be able to stretch it to thirty, you couldn't. Right, if you could have done another hard ten seconds, it's not hard enough. At the end of the twenty you should be pretty fucked. Again, this is not a personal recommendation,

but I'm talking for people in this space. Then you'd so we go what we do is three minutes warm up, and then we would go from minute three up two minutes thirteen. So that gives us ten minutes. We're going to do twenty on flat knacker, forty off slow, slow pedaling or whatever it is. We're still moving we're not doing nothing, but we've gone from flat out to one hundred percent to twenty or thirty percent. We're just moving. So the works ratio is once two, so twenty seconds working,

forty seconds recovering. Now your time's that by ten minutes, well, ten minutes times twenty seconds flat out as two hundred seconds, so two hundred second is three minutes and twenty seconds. Now, So in a fifteen minute program, by the way, we finished that at thirteen minutes, and the last two minutes it takes us up to fifteen is just a steady state pedal or run or ski or row or whatever

it is that you're doing. But what that means is in a fifteen minute program, you have worked somewhere near max for three minutes and twenty seconds and you have not worked near max for eleven minutes and forty seconds. So of the fifteen minute program, you're working hard for three to twenty. Now, that seems like an easy PSY program until you do it. And if you do that program and you find it easy, you're not doing the

program right. Because I could take an AFL footballer put them through that, or a National League netball player, somebody who is a paid athlete and an elite athlete who is aerobically good. Put them through what I would call the right version of that, and they might have an uncle buck at the end of it.

or professionally, but yeah, I just love that. You know, you're not going to die. But the most I'm going to digress for sixty seconds and tell you a funny story. My ex, one of my business partners, Mike Salisbury, good dude, shout out to Sulzi. He we were talking about running a marathon and it came up in the this is you're going to fucking cack at this. It came up

in the conversation. We're talking about hydration and I don't know if he suggested or I suggest or as a hypothetical might have been me where I said, imagine if all you drank when you were doing your marathon was booze, right, because as you sweat, your blood volume decreases and you're putting all this booze on board. I'm like, I wonder what would happen. And he's like, oh, I'm going to do it. I'm like, no, I don't. I don't think that. He's like, I'm going to do it. So he did it.

So we mapped out a seven k distance along Beach Road, the bike track, and he had a stubby I don't know what that is, three hundred and seventy five mil a beer at the start. Then he had one at seven, one, at fourteen, one, at twenty one, one, at twenty eight, one, at thirty five and one at forty two. So he whatever that is seven stubbies and drank no water. Now, also, everyone do not do this. And you're right, boys are

fucked in the head. And I know all you mums who listen, who are loving mums, you're going, what the fuck is wrong with you? I agree?

the answer is quite quickly. So if you say, you know what, I want to have four weeks off the gym, I would say, great, just don't do nothing like be active, walk more, stretch a bit. Just don't go from high activity to zero activity because that is literally bad for your health. Right, So yeah, but definitely, you know, yeah, if you train, if you've trained for a long time and you go, I just want to give my joints and muscles and ligaments and tendons of break, of course,

or if you've been running for fucking twenty years. In fact, if you've been running for twenty years, the chances of you having a week or two off of minimal because you're a weirdo and like most people who run every day something of an addict, you're not really a wido. But like this is the thing. In fact, for many people tip who have trained for a very long time. Me included, it would probably be good for my body to have two weeks of no lifting weights. Chances of

that happening as zero. What it was, I'm emotional.

areas of my life. Ye, so that was really interesting.

can I not go? Of course I can, and but you know, I would probably do that five days a year, But if I had to do it twenty I would. You know, if something happened in my life and I could only get to the gym every other day, I'd be fine. But I don't need to do that. But if you said you've got to have two weeks of not lifting a weight for a medical reason, I would do that, but I would not enjoy that. I would

not just do it. But that's again I'm not saying be like me, But that's why I mean, Like, this is why I love building habits that, for the most part work for you. Like if one of your habits is that you lift weights most days of your life, well it's not a terrible habits have as long as there's intelligence thrown into the process. Like, there are way worse habits than lifting heavy shit. There are way worse habits than going for a walk every day or a

run or stretching every day, or you know. I think when people go, oh, you're obsessed or you're this, or

you're that, and I'm like well, I'm not. But from where you stand by your you know, your fucking gauge, well, of course, but no disrespect, you know, Like, yeah, I can't say what I want to say, But you know what, some of the people that are critical of that have been critical of me over the years because I don't eat this and I don't do that, like despite the fact that it clearly works, right, you know, in that I'm touchwood, relatively healthy and functional, operational, and I'm in

my sixties and you know, and I but but then when people criticize you for doing the thing that works while living in a body that clearly isn't working optimally, there's so much stuff you go, no, I just I'll just take it, you know. I'm like, I don't know why people feel compelled. Well I do because it makes them feel better about what they're not doing. So if you're the one that's the idiot, then they're not the idiot, and that's more comfortable. Yeah, it's been great.

was great. They were great. But anyway, I spoke. I started speaking at nine and spoke through most of the day, and my left ear blocked, total blockage, like it just blocks, like with air. It's not wax, it's not water, and so I could only hear out of my right ear. But what happens with this blockage is and now your voice starts to echo in your head right. And it's to say it's hard as an understatement, but you just

you know, I can't magically unblock it. And then at about I would say eleven thirty, and I spoke up until three or four. At eleven thirty, both years blocked. So now I've got my voice echoing in my head. I've got a room full of people looking at me. I've got to be interesting. I've got to be fully present. And yeah, that yesterday was while it was great and they enjoyed it and beyond the block DearS, I loved it.

But it was one of the most challenging presentations I've ever done in my life because it's literally like just shoving I don't know, like almost those heavy duty headphones where you wear on an industrial site and it's just you can't hear anything. You know you're talking, but you can't even really hear your own voice in the room. You can hear it reverberating in your head, but you can't hear it in space in front of you. And then when people are asking me questions, I'm just constantly saying,

could you repeat that? And they're literally ten feet away and they're like, how fucking old is this guy? I'm like, I'm so sorry. I told him, I told him what was going on. Yeah, they were great, But so I hope by I think it's Monday too. I hope by Monday three I have at least a solution or a plan. So I'm very excited. I'm very excited. All Right, it's been great. I know you've got a date tonight. Enjoy your date, and you know, I hope you and he just dance up in a storm because I know you

love dancing. And yeah, report back in next time. We chat. We we