What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Mike Isretal. He's a professor of exercise and sports science at Lehman College and the co founder of Renaissance Periodization. If you've ever wondered, is this exercise actually working? Then you are not alone. However, there are now scientifically proven optimal methods for building muscle in the most efficient way possible. And today we get to learn from the best teacher on the planet. Expect to learn the biggest mistakes people make when building muscle, how much stimulation is required to build mass, Mike's top 10 exercises, the best rep ranges, sets, rest periods, and timing between workouts, all backed by science, how much you should lift for your body weight to know if you're strong, how to maintain motivation in the gym, and much more. Mike is nothing short of a legend. His YouTube channel is completely destroying it at the moment, and I'm so happy for him. I love his content. I love his insights. I love the fact that he's evidence-based, and I love the sus jokes and complete overt floating that he does throughout today. So, yes, strap in for this one. Don't forget, you might be listening but not subscribed, and that means you're going to miss episodes when they go up.

So make sure that you've gone to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and hit the follow button Because that way you'll make me happy and you'll support the show and you won't miss episodes when they go up. So go and do it. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Mike Isretel.

Dr.

Mike Izretal, welcome to the show.

Chris, thank you for having me.

Look at your head in all of its high definition glory.

Yes, I believe the folks helping us videotape this had to make 10 adjustments because my head is too shiny, which is a compliment Is there an insult? I can't quite tell. That sums up most of my life.

Dude, I love your YouTube channel. You are absolutely blowing up at the moment. Evidence-based training, hypertrophy, muscle gain, all that stuff. I want to do a one-stop shop today of everything that anybody needs to know to get as jacked as possible from an exercise science standpoint.

Sounds simple.

Let's do it. This is literally what you've been doing your entire life. Yeah, for sure.

Something like that.

You're a doctor or something, doctor of something? What are you- Sport physiology. Yeah, that. I mean, if you don't know, who does?

Oh, yeah. Good God. Tons of way more qualified people, but they don't have this beautiful bald head, and that's why they're not in Hollywood.

All right. Taking it from the top, what are the What are the things that you see when it comes to training for muscle growth? That are the biggest mistakes people make. Where are people going wrong the most when it comes to this?

Thinking all that time in the gym will get you late. And Chris, let me tell you from a personal story, it just doesn't work. Nothing works. Help. Anyone who's listening, help. Send me a letter telling me how this whole thing works. On a serious note, if I had to be scientific about it and explain the biggest source of variance in not growing muscle over, let's say, timeline of about a year, which is a realistic amount of time for people who haven't seen you in a year to be like, holy crap. It has to be consistency, because if you just go to the gym and scream a lot and do crappy technique, crappy volumes and crappy loads and do a lot wrong, but you have a requisite intensity that's anywhere north of reading the newspaper, and you just show up multiple times a week over and over, you're going to get some results. If you have the ultimate evidence-based plan from, jeez, renaissance periodization itself, and you've done one of the hypertrophy app, discount code and bio, I don't know, because that's what influencers say. But you do it intermittently, you do it on and off stuff.

You've ever had conversations with people, you're in the Metro, let's say in London, where you're from, I believe. All English people are from London, yes, of course. And they're asking you tips because they saw that you're jacked. And you start giving them tips, and you eventually get in a conversation of like, Well, so how many times a week do you lift? And they'll be like, Well, it's five. You're like, Mm-hmm, yes, I see where this is going. They're like, But lately, my dog's been real sick, so my wife left me.

An interesting sounding London again.

Yeah, right. So bro talk is actually universal. It's just one accent everywhere. You could be British, English, and then the lifting starts, and you're like, Yeah, man. Bucking Curl's like, Arnold did it. You're like, Arnold, that's it. Drop that meme. So yeah, the consistency is a big deal, but it's not the only deal. If you do something consistently, my thought on that is you might as well do it pretty well. You don't have to go all crazy sciencey like we're going to get into in the next, whatever, half hour, however long it takes you to get pissed and kick me off. But when you are consistent, it multiplies the emphasis that you should be doing whatever it is you're doing quite well because with you is commuting a lot of time to it, a bit of a sunk cost there, might as well optimize on the margins, and then we can talk a lot about all the details.

Okay. One of the first places that people are going to go to, and I'm going to guess one of the most common questions that you get asked, what exercises do I need to be doing?

Yeah, all of them, bro.

Right. Yeah.

That's it. Then I just walk away and they're like, Wow, that guy's supposed to be smart or something like that? But then they see the back of my very shiny head, and it makes them happy. Yes. Okay. Which exercises? So there is a lot to say about it, but you can start with the supposition that it's whatever exercise nominally targets the muscle you want to grow. So if you want bigger biceps, some variation of doing this is probably good. And then, to be honest, that's maybe 80% of the answer. So if a lot of people, here's why I'm saying that, a lot of people will look at, let's say, for quads. They'll look at hack squats, they'll look at leg presses, they'll look at lunges, and they'll look at regular high bar squats. And they'll vex themselves infinitely over the question of which one of these is superior, which is like asking, I need to get to Austin, Texas in a two days, which airline should I take? You ask someone who works at the airport, Which airline is really the one I should be taking? They're like, I don't know. All of them really get you there.

There are subtle differences, but at least make sure the ticket says Austin, Texas. So if the exercise hits that muscle, then you're good to go. Now, there are ways of seeing which exercises hit the target muscle that you want. A couple of what we RP and RP call proxies for stimulus. So this is something like tension. The the perception of a lot of tension generated or exposed in that muscle. So if you're doing chest flies and you feel a crapload of stretch and pulling in the chest, that's probably good. If you're doing what you think is a chest fly, but you misread the machine's instruction thing, and you feel a ton of tension in your biceps or your forearms or your shoulders, but you don't really honestly feel anything in the chest. On a just pure physics perspective, because of the mechanics of the movement, your chest has to be getting some exposure. But maybe you could be doing better by actually doing the exercise in a way or picking an exercise that really you feel some tension off of. Another clue to if you're stimulating the muscle properly is the burn, and that's seen in a medical context when people don't wear proper protection.

I know that resonates with you personally because of the conversation we had right before this. I don't mean to expose you, but Chris, you could just be making better choices is what I'm trying to say. All theoretical, I've never been with a woman, as everyone who watches our YouTube knows. But on a serious note, the burn is in especially higher rep sets when you start feeling the accumulation of metabolic byproducts in the target muscle. So the chest fly analogy. If you're doing high rep pec flies, and at the end of that set, your pecs are burning, hey, that's probably good. You're probably getting a good stimulus there. On the other hand, if it's just your biceps that are burning, but your pecs don't really feel much, are you getting a stimulus in that exercise? Yeah, sure. Is it guaranteed to be a really robust, really good stimulus? Probably not, because you should be feeling some combination of tension and burn. And then also there's pump. Again, none of these are mandatory, but together they're like puzzle pieces that take what could be a C plus exercise for you and make it an A plus exercise if you're getting all the feelings right on this.

So another one is pump. How much after several sets of the workout or of the exercise, how filled with fluid is your target muscle? So if you're doing pack flies, and after a couple of sets, a girl walks by and you're like, What's up? And she's like, Oh, my God. She runs away. I guess that's good, even though she ran away. But she ran away in a way that she obviously respected your peck size, which is the whole point of the gym. But if you do a bunch of sets of something, let's say you're doing pec flies, your shoulders are pumped, your biceps are pumped, even your fore arms look more vainy. But if you can honestly say your chest has changed in an invisible or palpable way, no doubt, still train your pecs, but maybe not that great. Another one is perturbation, which presents itself in two forms. One is, is that target muscle feeling really weak? So let's say you do a few pack exercises and you think they're for the chest, and then you try to push yourself into your car, push off your steering wheel, and you feel a profound weakness in that pack.

You're like, Oh, my God. A really good example is if you're trying to walk downstairs after you hit quads. If you think you hit quads, but you really hit glutes and adductors, you can hop, skip down the stairs, no fucking problem. Are we allowed to swear in here? Or is that not a good idea?

Whereas if you're doing this on the handrail- Yes, desperately clean you for dear life and your legs are shaky.

Another thing with perturbation is crampy. None of this is required. But if your chest cramps hard when you're trying to pose after a few sets of whatever you're doing, then whatever you're doing absolutely hit your chest. The other thing is weakness, too. So if I tell you, Hey, this mega peck workout. What's your best bench? And you're like, Well, it's 200 pounds for a set of 10. And I take you through a mega peck workout. After that, if we put 200 pounds on there, if you bench it for anything close to 10, your pecs never got very fatigued, which almost certainly means they never got very stimulated. So you should see a pretty big repetition strength drop off. If you can barely do a push-up after a chest workout, oh, shit, something happened to your pecs for sure, especially if you feel like your chest is the onus of weakness in that movement. Those are all ways to proxy that. And I would say in another one, again, not a huge deal, not the deal, but a good little additive to the mix, is do you feel any weakness or soreness that persists for hours or days after?

So for example, if you do some new quad machine at your gym, And two days later, your inner thighs are sore, your glutes are physically sore, your quads aren't, either the way you did it, which I'm sure we'll get to technique, or just the exercise itself. It says quads, but it's really not quads. Maybe it is to some extent, but you would expect, if you had a novel stimulus, to feel some soreness. But if you did something that says quads on it, and then the day later, you can barely walk and you're sore to the touch, then you have to have stimulated your quads. There is no alternative. So all those things are in the plus side category. And And any exercise that hits a bunch of those check marks for you, man, that's a good exercise for you. And we're all different. So some people respond better to a Pecfly machine, some people to dumbbells, some people to cables, some people to something in between. Whatever exercise checks those boxes for you really well, that's probably a good exercise for you, at least for the time being.

What about stimulus to fatigue ratio? I hear you talking about this all the time.

Incessantly. To the point where people are just done with it. They're like, Shut up.

Well, this is a new audience. What is it?

Oh, hello. Where are they? We're in an empty room. Oh, there's cameras. That's right. I know how this works from watching many adult films myself. Just kidding. I'm in no FAP for the last several hours. The fatigue part is a big part. So what I just described was the stimulus proxies. Basically indirect ways to know, Hey, did I get a good stimulus? But fatigue is important. So another way to categorize exercise is how much fatigue they cause, which can be split up into a couple of different types of fatigue. One is joint and connective tissue fatigue. If you're doing some skull crusher machine thing or a tricep machine, and every time you're like, Oh, my elbows. Oh, my elbows. Oh, this is hurting a lot more. Is this an elbow exercise or tricep exercise? Maybe your technique is off, or maybe that exercise is just not that great. So you want as little joint connective tissue soreness as possible, as little exposure as possible in that regard. Now, humans are robust, adaptable creatures, so zero tendon and connective tissue, stimulus of any kind, or fatigue, rather. It's not the goal. You just want to get really pumped and really sore and really fucked up in the muscle for any degree of joint connective tissue.

If you have squats beat up your knees a little bit, but they fucking rack your quads, sweet. But if you have some weird hack squad designed by people who don't know how to make machines, which is at least half of all machines in the gym. Then you're like, Oh, this is like a knee exercise, and my quads don't feel shit. That's bad news. Another thing is there's several different kinds of other fatigue. One is called axial fatigue, which is a special fatigue that results from spinal loading. So you'll notice that the amount of fatigue on the system, if you do a lot of dead lifting, bent rowing, and squatting with a barbell on your back, is different and more intense than exercise programs that don't have those. Why? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. More for science to figure out, but it seems like when the muscles that keep the spine erect are active a lot or something to do with the spine, fatigue is letting shit out of you, which almost everyone who's ever deadlifted seriously has reported that The total fatigue tolerance of the deadlift is very low. You can do plenty of leg pressing, and it stimulates a huge muscle mass, gets you really fucked up, really sore, tons of lunges.

But the fatigue is mostly local. When you do deadlifting, something leaves you that you don't quite get back. Systemic. Systemic. And so axial may be a subcategory of systemic fatigue. There are other ways to measure systemic fatigue, your desire to train. One of the reasons that you want to do some exercises you generally like is because your desire to train can stay elevated, and that keeps you coming back more. If you have a low desire to train, it can actually physically result in the promulgation of more overreaching type of escalating fatigue, and then you're just going to be fucking out of the gym because you start hating the shit.

The stimulus fatigue ratio is like bang for your buck.

It's literally and exactly only what that is, cost-benefit, but expressed in muscle terms.

I've asked this question of some of the greatest bodybuilders of this era, Chris Bumstead, Phil Heath, asked Ryan Terry, who recently won the Olympia.

What a look that was.

Yeah.

And I looked at it for a long time.

I know.

He knows, too. I'm in his DMs. What?

If you only had 10 exercises for the rest of your life to hold on to and build as much muscle mass as possible, What would they be?

Yeah, that's the question, huh? So I would say that I'd have to go muscle group by muscle group to make sure I check off all the boxes. I don't know if there's 10 muscle groups. And some of these... So the caveat is these are just my personal spirit exercises, the ones I really like. That doesn't mean they're best for everybody. They can't be, and I can talk about that afterwards of what the stimulus fatigue ratio actually means. But I'd say high bar squats. Why? Because they hit the quadriceps and adductors and glutes very well, the amount of fatigue you get from them is less than you would with other types of squats, like low bar squats. Because until my arms got too big to hold a bar in my back, I fit into the high bar position like a glove, and I love that. I fit into very few things like a glove, mostly condoms There's like 80 cubic centimeters left of room. So high bar squats, I would say. I would say the standing overhead barbell press, just because I'm really good at it and it feels great for me to do, until I guess my arm's not too big.

I can't do that either, so that's fun.

Is there anything in that where the midline bracing is good for just other stuff generally?

Yeah, it's good for like manhood strength. If you can overhead press two plates for reps, you're a serious motherfucker. People shouldn't fuck with you, probably. So that's cool for that, for sure. And then I would have to say skull crushers for triceps, barbell, skull crusher. How many we got? Three. Three. Pull-ups for the back, overhand, chin to bar.

Why overhand, not underhand?

A raw personal preference. I can't rotate my shit in enough to do underhand anymore. I have slowly become more disabled as I became more jacked. Isn't that great? Yeah, there's like an ability curve where you get better at shit and then you get worse at shit. So barbell bent rows from a deficit.

Barbell bent rows from a deficit.

So you stand on a little box and it can go Super deep in the stretch and then touch your tummy and come back.

Any reason for doing that as opposed to a chest supported or a seal?

Manhood. You ever seen a seal in Antarctica? They're fucking pathetic. They always need to be rescued. There's babies and stuff. Fuck that. No. Manhood shit. Like an orangutang would do. You don't see him leaning on a fucking tree branch.

Are we five deep now? I think we're five deep. I haven't been keeping track. I think it's five. I think it's five.

Yeah.

Five more.

Let's see what else. Stiff legged deadlift for the hamstrings.

You wouldn't have hit that enough with your bent over rows?

No, not even close. It's isometric only with bent over rows. You need a dynamic movement for the hamstrings. It also hits a crapload of your spinal directors and glutes and all this other stuff. Okay, six. And then we have, I have the Yeah, I have to say, the cambered bar bench press for chest.

That's the one that does like this. It's like a pale.

So it allows you to press- It's like a middle-aged old and like a young boy carrying milk. Yeah, Or like a torture device or something they put on a bison. So he goes around in a circle and mills wheat or some shit. English people have the last name Miller because that used to be you hundreds of years ago. As well. My word.

Why the camber bar?

The camber bar allows you to go deeper than your own chest level. We have lots of research, especially recently, but lots of good theoretical work before, that shows us that a deep stretch is a pretty big deal for hypertrophy. It enhances the amount of muscle growth you get rep for rep. It also feels fucking amazing and ultra-challenging. If you do bench presses with a regular bar afterwards, you're like, Oh, my God, this shit is easy as hell because it's a huge partial. I would say I'll take an inclined version of camber bar bench as an extra, so that's seven. I'll take dips in addition to that for the lower pecs and just overall manliness. Dips are sweet.

Good amount of triceps as well. We've got long heads. Long head on the overheads? Yes. What have we got?

Two left?

Yeah. What are we missing? If you're bothered about abs, if you're bothered about calves.

No, calves, fuck that. I could say something about calves, but fuck that. Have we done a- Yeah, we haven't done side delts yet. I would say super rum laterals for side delts.

You literally made your own exercise.

A few, yeah. I need more ego shit, so let's just start calling them Dr. Mike laterals. Yeah. Dr. Mike everything. Do you see my new drink I came out with? It's the Dr. Mike drink. In any case, it's where you do dumbbell laterals, but you don't stop here. You just go all the way and touch your palms together at the top.

Can you do that?

I used to be able to. With enough weight, I can get it up there. But then I choked myself at the top. So I'll take those for most of the rest of the belt. And I will say the bent rows and the pull-ups take care of the rear belt quite well. And then I'll say seated, inclined dumbbell curves for biceps. So boom, like that. Again, it's tension at the stretch. Great exercise. The shoulder press, overhead barbell press is there. If I was purely aiming for hypertrophy, I would just take it out altogether because it's insanely high axial fatigue, as you may suspect. And it just really is nothing it trains that other exercises can't train better, but it's there because of, again, for the soul. And if we're doing something as absurd as restricting ourselves 10 exercise the rest of our life, I get soul shit. It's like, what meal are you going to eat in your last meal before they kill you? I'm not choosing macros. Fuck that. I'm just mac and cheese.

But what did you say only 10 minutes ago about it's important to have exercises that motivate you to do them more? Yes. If you enjoy mansuit, standing upright, barbell, shoulder to overhead- Have at it?

Yeah, exactly. Just know the trade-off. Now, I will also say, here's the trade-off. The trade-off is when you go to the club and you're standing there with your and he does more scientifically effective exercises. There's a girl looking at you, too, and she was like, Am I going to go with your friend? Because those doubts are like,. And you're like, God damn it. But spirit energy, she doesn't know about that. You can't over... I guess you could overhead press your friend and throw him away. And she's like, Oh, my God, you're like such a man. Let's go. And by doing it, I mean have sex in the middle of the club. That's what happens. Yes, I've seen Love Island. I've seen you on that show.

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Com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt. Com/modernwisdom. What are the worst stimulus to fatigue ratio exercises? If there were ones where you would say, if you're looking to gain muscle, start sliding these off the edge of the table into the bin. What would be in that I'll say a few things before I answer that question directly.

One is it's hugely individual. Some people get a big kick out of exercises that other people just don't like. Also, any exercise you do for long enough begins to accumulate what we in sports science call staleness. It is a stainless can be put mathematically as the reduction of the stimulus to fatigue ratio. You start with upright rows. You're like, these are fucking sweet, bro. They're rolling at my delts. Five months later, you're like, fuck this. I'm never fucking doing it again. My shoulder's hurt. I don't get a connection with my muscles. I'm tired of it psychologically. So that's the big caveat before splitting exercises generally by their SFRs. So stimulus to fatigue ratios are not a universal concept you can just apply. They're always and everywhere applied in the moment for the athlete themselves. So if someone's like, hey, what should I do for quads? I'm like, What have you been feeling lately and what are you not like lately? And then we choose an exercise and then we go forward.

Good example of that might be moving from walking lunges to box step-ups.

Absolutely. Exactly. You're just forever reason. Your joints hurt more in walking lunges. You've been doing them forever. You're not getting as big of pumps, tension. All those proxies we talked about for stimulus are bound. And all the fatigue proxies are up. You fucking hate the exercise. Your joints hurt, systemic fatigue is higher. So you do what's called exercise deletion and replacement. This is one of the things, there is no one right exercise. Just exactly like there is no one right food for you. You ask someone, what's your favorite food? They're like, Mac and cheese with tuna in it. You're like, okay, that's fine. It's a weird choice, but whatever. It can't possibly be your favorite food for forever, because if you have to eat all the time, you get fucking sick of it. And then whatever was your second is now your first. Same thing works with women, am I right? No, no takers. I'm like a much shorter, less combat-trained version of Andrew Tate. Also, I don't know anything about women. But I've run a few casinos in Bulgaria. People don't know that about me. Isn't that what he does? I'm just going to shut the fuck up.

I do have multiple Lamborghini's.

Yeah, you are spending a lot of your money on Lamborghini's at the moment.

It's not a lot of my money. It's a profoundly small amount. I'm dealing with trillions, Chris. I just want people to understand that. Well, I'll just say it, regular people, there's wealth and then there's me.

The unwashed masses.

Elon Musk, I've heard of him. He's a cool guy. He's got some money. It's It's horrible, really. Putting all that stimulus to fatigue ratio stuff in context, like it's always an individual decision, some exercise on average, just on the mechanics, don't do that great. I can specify what mechanics. One is if an exercise targets a lot of muscle, generally, it can't possibly target one muscle a lot, specifically. And thus, for a specific muscle, it has a poor stimulus to fatigue ratio, deadlifts, for example. What exactly does the conventional deadlift train? You can't answer that question because that question is an answer of like 80 % of the muscles of the body. Glutes, hamstrings, maybe adductors, some quads, technically, tons of lower back, but not exclusively, depending on how you pull, midback, upper back traps. Holy fuck. So if you're really trying to grow, insert any muscle here with conventional deadlifts, there's probably an exercise that gives you as much stimulus for a fraction of fatigue. Another thing is range of motion. If the exercise doesn't expose that target muscle into a deep stretch, you could do better. So for example, floor press. Sure, we'll have a video on the YouTube at some point about this.

The floor press is just you hold dumbbells or a barbell, you go down on to your elbow, so you're lying on the ground like an animal. It's bench is for civilized people. My gym are made of gold. No, it's platinum. I think it's diamonds. It's very uncomfortable, but the wealth alone keeps me comfortable. So you touch down here and you can't possibly physically get a big stretch. So in some context, can be a great exercise, but just on the raw probabilities, probably isn't that great. Those are some of the exercises that I would say, like deadlifts, floor presses, anything you do with a partial range that's not in a length and deep stretch position is probably not ideal for hypertrophy. Rack pulls are another one. What exactly are rack pulls training? Fuck, if I know. I think they train mostly the ego because you load 18 plates on each side. That one girl used to look at, she's like, Oh, my God, you're like a fucking super hero. You're like, Yeah, you want to see me fucking, et cetera. Then you get laid. I think that's how it works.

All right, so that's exercises. You guys I think, have been, at least for me, one of the main reasons why I've reintroduced tempo into my training. Fuck, everything now. Everything is tempo. For a whole life. So given that we've... Yes, slow in, slow out.

That sounds good.

Talk to me about what good technique looks like.

Yeah, that's a great question. So good technique is a huge diversity and variety of expressions. Sometimes. So you can't really look at a person doing an exercise and for sure be like, That's bad technique, because it could be good for them. It could be good for the context. But there are a couple of generalities that apply to almost everyone, to almost all exercises that you can checkbox to saying, If you have these things, probably your technique is pretty good. If you don't have them as a scientifically-minded person, or at least one attempting to be scientifically-minded, at the very least, if you're doing a technique that doesn't check the following boxes I'm about to talk about, I at least want to talk to you and get some reasoning out of you. Because you could have good reasoning. Be like, Yeah, my shoulder's fucking injured. I can't do any more range of motion. Okay, no big deal. But a lot of times, you don't get any reasoning out of people. They're just like, That's fucking what works, brother. And you're like, My man, buck thinking. Sucks. It's painful. It's annoying. Why do it. So one is a good technique should be focused on targeting a specific muscle or muscles.

And by sheer biomechanics, if you're doing this motion, it's not your biceps. So sometimes people will be like, I'm training delts, and they'll do alternating lifts like this with their fist pointed up. And that hits the front delts, but it can't really possibly hit the side delts. And so if you're like, Hey, man, I'm trying to get big side delts, and you do that technique, I'm going to be like, Duh. You can do a stick and rope model of the body where you're like, That's not the muscle that does that. So that automatically means if you want big lats, you're going to do pull-ups or rows because it's the sheer mechanics. And there are more particularities where if you pull out like this, it's probably not as much lats as it is upper back. If you pull down, it's more lats just because how the muscle attach. So that's the king variable of good technique. So for example, if you say you're training your quads and you do a squat that's sumo stance, you're sitting back really far, you're getting a very small degree of knee flexion, there are better ways to train the quads.

That is not the best technique for the quads, almost for anyone, because the better technique would be, well, we target the quads. That means we expose them, that means we give them a high degree of range of motion, which means as you squat mostly down, your knees should go over your toes, rather, and you should go nice and deep, that really biomechanically has to train your quads. So that's number one. Another one is to have a movement that has a considerable degree of stability. So if you're unstable, so for example, if you're doing upright rows and you keep coming up on your toes and you're wiggling around, that's reducing your force production. So good technique means stable.

Because your body will dial down how much force your muscles can deploy if you're stood on a vibrating plate, or if you're on a balanced beam, or if you're on something else.

Bosu ball, 100 %. It happens completely automatically. I've been directly involved in laboratory testing for something like this. This is an insane study we did. We had lots of spotters. We had people max out in the high bar back squat, and then we had them max out on a BOSU ball. Good news, they only squatted about 60 % of the one they're at max. That's still quite a lot. Sixty % is quite a lot, right?

A lot of fucking BOSU?

Totally. But to put it another way, unless you're doing profoundly high repetitions, if you're doing sets of 5 to 10 with 60 % of your true one rep max, what would be instability? You're getting almost no hypertrophy as an intermediate or advanced trainee, which is nothing. You're learning how to squat on a bow suit ball, which is cool at parties. You can show off, maybe get laid, maybe not. But It's no good because you want to be nice and stable. So for example, if you and I are training together and you start doing incline dumbbell press, but I notice your feet are hanging off or dangling, there's two things that can happen. One, you're a short king like me who never grew up to be an adult height, and then I'm just going to be like, That sucks, but good luck. But if you're a tall king like yourself or a medium king, how tall are you?

5'10.

Perfect. The perfect man height. I would say, Hey, Chris, try to put your feet down and really corkscrew them into the ground to get that stability. You'll find you'll get more reps and be able to do more weight with inclined dumbbells, which is a really good thing. So it's stability is a technique universal, generally speaking.

When people talk about grinding or grounding themselves into the floor, there's no qi that's happening here. This is the body responding to us being more stable. Exclusively. The force production comes up.

Yes, I believe qi is entirely a myth also, like all pretend things. If you really want to go down that road, there's a lot of very sad YouTube videos of actual MMA fighters challenging Qi practitioners in China. Fucking him up. I mean, fuck, man. One lady thought she could block a running punch just standing there, but the guy just went right through her. I'd stop watching after. It was very sad. The sad part is that they get physically hurt, but it's more sad to watch their ontological understanding of the world collapse. I think, I must have misaligned my Qi. That's what happened. Only Steven Segal can do shit like that. I want to be on the record saying that.

All right. Controled eccentric.

Control in general, is Especially on the eccentric. Most people can't help but control the concentric because it pushes back. You can only move a concentric so quickly, especially with heavier weights, especially close to failure. So someone can't really spastically do the concentric. They're, they push against it. It's auto-controlled. If you're trying to gun your car up a really high hill and you have anything other than a Tesla, it's going to be seemingly like you're controlling it, but it's just pushing back. That's auto-control. On the Eccentric, however, on the way down, people a lot of times are like, blah, just let it drop, which again, isn't terrible. It does marginally increase your chance of injury. But what it does is it takes a very muscle growth-promoting part of the movement, which is the eccentric. And the eccentric actually requires less nervous system stimulus to do the same amount of physical work, which means its inherent stimulus to fatigue ratio might be higher because it's probably a little bit more stimulative than the concentric as a phase by itself, but requires less nervous system fatigue. So over the weeks of controlling your centric, you may get more out of your muscles with less payment on the nervous system fatigue side.

Well, you've got to lift it back up. It needs to come down. You've lifted it.

It has to come down, and you might as well collect all the coins on the way down. You're like, There's free hypertrophy coins. Just do it. It's like watching someone play Sonet the hedgehog, but they jump over all the coins, at least the Jewish part of I'm like, Oh, but you missed the coins. What are you doing? Reset the level. Oh, yeah, yeah. I just try to pick up. Anyway, in case. This will get us canceled for sure. So control on the centric is a big deal. Control in general is a big deal. And then another checklist we want is, I used to say full range of motion. And I still think that's mostly correct. But we're learning there are different parts of the range of motion which are more or less hypertrophic. So what I can say is mostly full range of motion is good technique. So if I see you a quarter squatting, I'm going to be like, You probably went lower. That's a good thing. But more More importantly, still, from an empirical perspective, is just not robbing yourself of the deep stretch. So if I see you do cable flies and you're stopping here, I'm going to talk to you, and I better hope you have two fucked up shoulders.

Because if they're totally healthy, I'm going to say, go ultra deep for that super big stretch. Don't avoid that.

What's happening in that deep stretch?

Fuck, if I know science and shit. You're the guy. Look, man, we don't know all of the shit. You know what I'm saying? I've put me on the spot like that. There's molecules in there and cells, God knows what else, Chris. We don't actually know exactly exactly why a stretch stimulates hypertrophy. There are several candidate mechanisms being investigated, and I can regale you with the details, but it's a little bit pointless because all the details could be totally wrong. It's a candidate mechanism that fails inspection, right? So in a few months, few years, we'll know exactly why that occurs. But we have something better than a candidate mechanism. We have very good control trials where the only difference between groups or applications is one group goes nice and deep and the other does not. We have studies on, for example, the quadriceps, where the volume and the load is identical between groups. He even got clever studies where people train one leg with a deep stretch only, bottom third, and the other leg, they train only with a top third of leg extension. That's a big deal because autocontrol It's not like genetics doesn't matter.

Nothing matters.

The same body. You've got to split test the left and the right. Amazing.

How great. A lot of those studies are showing that the deep stretch just causes more growth. Now, it's 5 to 10% more growth. You can do top-end partials. You can bench like this and get plenty of muscle growth. Tons of IFB pros and jacked up, juice heads do it and they're still jacked. But from an efficiency and effectiveness perspective, all those guys could have been bigger if they went in for that really deep stretch. To me, that's a big part of really good technique.

It's really interesting to look at all of this as a suite, especially when it comes to the technique for muscle growth, that you have this... If we're looking at stimulus to fatigue ratio, it's something that's important, especially as everybody slowly makes the inevitable journey toward death and getting older.

Jesus Christ, man. What? That's an incredibly macabre way to put it.

I'm an apocalyptic guy. I'm British.

Yes, of course. The Battle of Britain, and never got over that. Death is always imminent, I understand.

Everyone's getting older. Everyone wants to avoid injury by reducing down the amount of weight that you use. This is one of the reliable ways by focusing on a controlled eccentric. That also helps because you're not going to allow it. You're not going to surprise yourself and get into a place or a range that you didn't mean to get into. Totally. By focusing on deep stretch as well. Also going to reduce down further the amount of weight that you need to get the amount. Absolutely. So yeah. Stability.

Unstable exercise is much more injurious than stable exercise. If you have your feet core strewn in and you're just moving exactly how you want, you're probably not going to fuck up. If you have quite a bit of weight on a BOSU ball, I'm sure you've seen YouTube videos of various accidents. Like, yeah, you can fuck your shit up if you get really unstable.

When it comes to tempo, because obviously, we're talking about controlled, eccentric, and concentric that's at least got something behind it. Jeff Nippard did some studies, saw him on TikTok talking about it. How long do I need to take on that eccentric portion?

Yeah, it's a good question. The literature we have so far, as far as I'm aware of it, and because I am science, I'm very aware of it. It didn't impress you. No one's claimed on your show before that they are science itself?

You fused? You are one? I'll be the first.

Yes. It seems to not matter much. Anything between a repetition that in total takes one second, including eccentric and concentric, and all the way up to a total of nine seconds, which is a lot of pain. It seems to be that if you do more quick repetitions, you can get more repetitions. If you seem to do slower repetitions, you get fewer, but each one has a lot more stimulus. It's like filling up a glass of a certain height. If you go really slow, it takes you longer. You fill up the glass. If you go really fast, it doesn't take us long. Fills up the glass. The glass filling is what we want anyway. There's a certain amount of stimulus you can drive to your muscles. You could do it more slowly, you could do it more quickly. It doesn't seem to matter for hypertrophy. However, under control is the big have you. So if you just dump the stuff on you and then crank it up and then dump, yeah, that's not going to be as hypertrophic as some modicum of control. Now, if I go down this fast and come back up, I still 100 % control the centric.

As long as I'm doing I can go ultra slow, I can go a little bit more quickly, and anything in between, at least tentatively for now, we can say one thing almost for sure, it doesn't make a huge difference.

Presumably when it comes to, like practically, functionally doing this in the gym, focusing on a little bit more of a tempo, let's say maybe a two-count or a three-count down, ensures that control is something... Because the difference between half a second down and one second down in terms of control, everyone's thought that they're doing a three-count not tempo, but it's actually been a one-ish. And a lot of it is still like... If you actually hit a 2-3 count, to me, that seems like, All right, I can't escape this. I can't escape the degree of control that I need.

Yes, that's absolutely true. And I'll layer another thing on top of it. One of my last points for what makes good technique is repetition consistency. Most of your reps should look about the same. It doesn't mean identical. There's actually a little bit of an injury preventative benefit from exposing yourself to slightly different bar positions. It makes you more resilient. If you're one machine-like thing all the time and you get out of it in real life, you could find yourself a little bit hurt. But mostly the rep should look the same. The ability to make the reps look mostly the same, and also move in the movement arc in which you want. Because remember, the first principle of good technique is, are you moving in a biomechanical way that targets the muscle? That's a lot easier to ensure if you slowly work into the eccentric, hitting the right positions. If I just squat down, however the fuck my body tells me, I'll do a fine job. I've been squatting a long time, but maybe I'll sit back a little too far. I won't expose my quads as much. If I can take the time to go a little bit slow on the eccentric, I can actually figure out how my quads feel tension-wise while I'm doing it and regulate my exposure as I'm doing it.

I'm sitting back a little too much. I'm like, I sit forward and my quads get fucked up. I can feel the tension right away. Only because I'm controlling the edicentric a little bit longer, am I able to get that feedback right away? It's like during a football play, the coach can't tell you what to do during the play. You got to play beforehand, you fucking figured out, the ball is fucking hiked, and then shit happens. It's too fast. But if you can go a little bit slower, you can auto-regulate your technique and do a better job- During the exercise. During that exercise. And small bonus is your injury probability, at least nomenally on theoretical grounds, will reduce. And I'll take anything that reduces my injury probability by some amount and doesn't reduce the mechanisms of hypertrophy at all. So some people say, tempo doesn't matter. And I say, totally. It's like if you get the same high-quality meal at two restaurants, same fucking meal, it doesn't matter which one you go to. Yeah, but what's the price? If one is 75 % cheaper, my fucking Jewish ass is there ASAP. I'm there early at the door.

No, wait, I could be investing instead of doing that. In any case, I'm there as soon as it opens, blah, blah, blah. So if you get even a theoretical downside of injury risk that's a little bit smaller, I'll fucking take it.

With that in mind, does it make sense for trainers, athletes as they get older to focus more on tempo? As you increase in age, the focusing more on tempo means that you use less weight, reduced injury risk. When you're younger, I saw your video on Sam Sulik, homeboy's very strong, lifting full stack, all the rest of it, but he's made of rubber and magic. He's 22 or something.

Yes, we were all made of rubber and magic back then. In my case, it was a type of rubber that wasn't able to get erect. Oh, I'm on set again. Yes. So what I would say is this, it It matters for everyone because injuries are no fun in any case. There are also injuries that can go with you the rest of your life. You do a major distal pectoral tendon rupture, full avulsion, you're just never going to be the same again. We need another 15 years of medical tech to reattach that thing in a way that doesn't look fucked up or feel fucked up. You don't want to do yourself dirty when you're 22, rip a peck off. You just never the fucking same. You don't look the same, you don't perform the same. Power lifting is done for you. Bodybuilding is fucking weird at that point. So people say, Yeah, when you're young, you can get away with shit when you're young. But statistically, it's still a downside. What I will say is, I'll put it another way, exactly agreeing with your point.

That's my favorite point, one that exactly agrees with me.

Why do you think I'm on the show? I'm just here to feed the ego and be like, Yes, Chris, I'd like to feed with something else. But we signed a couple of papers that said I couldn't physically touch you during the show. When you are young, I fucking get it. I get it. If I can do this, the fucking bitch over there seeing you do it, you're getting late, whatever. Ego, shit. Live your life. When you're older, and this is a particular pet peeve of mine, I see a fucking balding 48-year-old man swing in the fucking dumbbells around him. But come here, dumb motherfucker. What are you What are you doing? How old are you? It's like I've talked to... I've actually talked to a few women in my day. Nothing sexual. When you're 13 years old, 17 years old, and you have what I would describe as very understandable, but a childlike relation to body image and stuff like that. You're unable to go through a muscle gain phase because any amount of extra pudge on you just feels totally wrong. You're 17. Fuck it. I get it. I get it. Fucking, we all had body image issues.

I talked to a 37-year-old woman or 47-year-old woman who knows she needs to gain muscle but is unwilling to gain an extra half centimeter of pudge. I'm like, Look, Linda, how old are you? She's like, I'm 47 years old. What do you do for a living? I'm actually a manager in an accounting firm. So you're intelligent and responsible, and you can see ahead, right? She's like, Well, yes, of course. I'm like, You can't make the trade-off to gain a fucking half centimeter of fat on your ass so you gain more muscle? And she's like, God damn it, you're right. So just the same way, if I see an older, you see a younger guy swinging in weights around, I'm like, Whatever, to be 20 again, my man. I see a 40-year-old doing it, I'm like, Dude, come on. It's like seeing a 45-year-old just after watching Fast and Furious 18 or whatever, like his shit up against a younger guy and the, What the fuck, the fuck? Really? This is what we're doing? So it's always good for everyone. But for older people, just have no fucking excuse. Slow your shit down, control your shit.

We talked about concentric, eccentric. You've mentioned about stretch at the bottom, pause, pausing reps and isometrics. What needs to be said there?

Isometrics just don't seem to be as hypertrophic. Isometrics in a stretch position are plenty hypertrophic. In a contracted one, they're not. So for example, if you're doing cable flies, if you stop at the squeeze, If you stop and squeeze, people will give that cue. It's totally cool for variation. It's fun, it's awesome, it grows muscle. But I wouldn't say it's essential, and it might be a downside. All that energy you're spending stopping at the squeeze, you could put into the eccentric, which probably grows more muscle.

If you were going to do a pause, you're going to be pausing at the stretched position, not at the contracted position.

More often, yeah. Pause at the stretch is cool for a couple of reasons. One, it absolutely reduces the injury probability. That reversal at the stretch is the single, generally, most dangerous time for muscular injury.

Because you've got weight going down and you're about to contract while it's... That's how it ruptured my Achilles.

Yeah, I heard that story. It was terrible. It's the ultimate scary story of warm up for forever if you're coming back to sports. Correct, yeah. The direct force plate measured pulse of force at the bottom of the movement is the highest it will be in its entire movement reversing. It's also technically your chest at its weakest position. So if you want to pause there, again, the absolute risk of injury in the gym is It's way, way less injurious than rugby or tennis or anything like that. It's so funny because rich people, like myself, will be like, Oh, I'm going to ski in a veil. And they'll see a lifter lifting 200 pounds. Isn't that bad for your back, motherfucker? You just hit a tree on your last trip. There's half your brains out of your fucking face. Lifting is super, super safe. So I don't want to be like, you got to fucking pause at the bottom or else you're going to die. But on a small relative injury risk, it is reduced when you're pausing at the bottom. Absolutely. And you get more your time experiencing tension in your muscles at that length and position.

So there's an argument that pausing at the bottom is actually maybe a little bit more hypertrophic, and you need less weight on the bar. So all those things stack up and the good column is at least as good, probably not much better, but the bad column is a little smaller. To me, it seems like at the very least, it's a great option. I'm not going to say it's the only way to train, fuck that, but it's a good option, good idea to try.

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That's drinkag1. Com/modernwisdom. Okay, how do we warm up before we start?

Fuck, final. I just get in there in fucking rage, bro. First thing, when driving to the gym, there are only a few types of music you're allowed to listen to. Chris, let me judge your music soundtrack for warming up. What's in the headphones there for you?

Sleep token at the moment.

That's nonsense. Because I have never heard of it, it must be the wrong thing.

Okay. What do you listen to? Oh, well. Dark thoughts?

Oh, yes, always. My psychiatrist says we have to up a few different kinds of medication to make them maybe go away. Blink 182, really is the correct answer.

Because you reached the age of 13 and never actually aged, psychologically.

Oh, God, I probably never made it to 13. 11, maybe. What music is that? I'm trying to think of what token. Sleep token?

Metal.

Oh, my man. Never mind. I take back.

I thought it was like- It's in the world of bring me the horizon, a loathe, misery signals. Misery Signals.

Misery Signals.

Yeah. All of the bands represent the landscape of my mind. Holy shit. Sleep token. It got dark.

All right. Yes. Okay. Warm up music aside, there is actually a study that was recently conducted by Dr. Brad Schoenfeld, the world's expert on hypertrophy and his laboratory. And they have illustrated something that most lifters of a certain degree of intelligence level and long time participation have realized. And it's that There are two different kinds of warmup. The general warmup, which is when you go in and you do the elliptical for 15 minutes, maybe you foam roll, maybe do some dynamic stretching. That's all fine and good. And then there's the specific warmup, which is whatever lift you have first in your program, you do it for about a set of 12, very lightweight, a set of 12 with maybe your 30 rep max. Then you do a set of eight after a few minutes of rest with maybe your 20 rep max. Then you do a set of four-ish, 2-4 reps, with something like your 10 rep max. Then you rest a little bit, and then you're ready to do whatever load. That specific warmup is a very good idea from a variety of perspectives. It warms up your tissues. It makes them more pliable, less likely to get hurt.

It also activates and wakes up your nervous system. It aligns your actual muscle fibers more into the direction of pull or whatever exercise you're doing. It decreases the sensitivity of what are called Golgi tendon organs, which are detectors in your muscles for how much force is being transduced. And they start out not warmed up by being like, Holy shit, that's a lot of force. And they actually tamper down how much your nervous system can activate. After a few warm-up sets, you literally are stronger.

Which is why you can't cold bar your one rep max.

Exactly. The GTOs need to cool down. After a few reps, a few sets of progressively heavier weight, they're like, Oh, we're safe here.

This is okay. Yeah, it's fine. Okay. Again, I'm thinking functionally, when we get into the gym, what this means. Let's say that we're going in to do a chest day. Or let's say we're going in to do a chest and back day, just a full push-pull day. You're going to start off with inclined And dumbbell press, does that mean that the 12, 8, 4 method for incline press, do you then need to do the same thing again for back?

Yes.

Right. Would you do those two together? Would you maybe alternate from, Okay, I'm going to press a little bit, and then during my couple of minutes rest, I'll go and row a little bit or whatever?

What I like to do is I like to warm up for the exercise I'm doing next. Once I warm up, I do that exercise. And then whatever exercise I have after is one of two options. One, it's the same muscle group, just more exercise. After incline press, I'm on to push-ups or something, same muscle group. Then I only have to do what the great Jay Cutler actually termed as a feel set. It's like you just put some weight on there, maybe not your working weight, maybe your working weight. You just do a couple of reps, maybe 5 to 10, maybe fewer, just to feel out, just to get the technique right. So the first time your heavy dumbbells aren't in your hand, you're like, What the fuck is going on? Just feel it out. That's all you need. So between every single exercise that's not the first, afterwards, you just need maybe one set to feel it out, and then you go. You don't need all three. But if it's a muscle you haven't trained yet, let's say we do chest and then we do back, if I just did a whole bunch of bench press and then I'm doing pull-ups, yeah, that's 12, 8, 4 on the pull-down or assisted pull-up machine.

That last four is maybe four actual pull-ups, rest, put your weight belt on, and then go. But real quick, the general warm-up, the idea that you come in and do elliptical or whatever, if you take a thorough specific warm-up, like a 12, 8, 4 system. That one study by Dr. Badger-hofeld showed that you don't have any benefit, performance-wise, from the general warmup. And unless you really need it, like it's fucking just super cold outside and even a specific warmup isn't good enough, I would say be careful on wasting too much time with a general warmup. One of the things that happens in fitness is there's really good stuff baked into the fitness cake, and every now and again, we add ingredients just on fluff alone. They don't make a whole lot of sense. One of the major sources of fluff is increasing the complexity and duration of your general warmup because of reasons. Some guy will, if he foam rolls his elbows, it's night and day, and then he can do skull crushers. But that's just that guy's fucked up. You see it, and he's an advanced lifter. You're like, Fuck, foam rolling, bro. Everyone's got to do it.

You start doing it. You take your general warmup and you do elliptical. Then you do some box step-ups. Then you do some Pilates stuff. Then you do dynamic stretching. 45 fucking minutes later, you're like, It's time to work out. Motherfucker, your workout's over already. You got to go back to the office. So the general warmup That is just not necessary if you do a specific warmup. So what I do in the gym, I come in, I do some arm circles. I do because I'm rushing, I got to do some side bends and stuff. And then I just go 12, 8, 4, first exercise. After the first exercise, I'm generally warm as fuck. I'm fucking sweating, and then I'm fucking golden. So you can do a general warmup if you want. But I would say for folks listening, you don't have to. But a specific warmup, 12, 8, 4, or something like it, the basic reasoning is just slightly lighter weights, go to heavier weights, the repetition's fall, then you're ready to go train and get the most out of it.

All right. How about rep ranges and how heavy to lift?

Yes. There are recommended target rep ranges for every single human physical quality that we know. So for example, for strength, basic strength building is like sets of three to six repetitions. You do a whole lot fewer than six. Let's use you do singles. You can get stronger doing singles, but you could have gotten stronger because you would have gotten more volume doing still very heavy weight if you did sets of four. It's It's just not an efficient use of your time. Still works not as efficient. Can you get stronger doing a set of eight? Yes, but you get a lot of hypertrophy work from eight. But if you do your eight rep max, it's just not heavy enough like sets of three to six would be, for you to get as much strength out of it as possible. So these are all spectrum ranges. There's not like at some repetition it begins, before it you get nothing, and then you get all the hypertrophy, and then after you get no hypertrophy, it's more of a normal distribution situation. But for hypertrophy, it seems that anything roughly between sets of five repetitions that are challenging, close to failure, and all the way to 30 to 35 repetitions, seems to be on average for the average person, for the average muscle, in medium term, several months of testing to promote almost, I'll say it better, undifferentiable amounts of muscle growth.

So we got a group of people training sets of five to eight, got another group of people training sets of 25 to 28 reps. As long as they go close to failure, and it's the same exercise, they get essentially, on average, the same results. Now, within a different muscle, it could be different. Some people's biceps respond really well to heavy shit, sets of 5 to 10. You do sets of 25 to 30, they just get tired, and they don't have much hypertrophy. It works differently between individuals, too. But the overarching theme is anywhere between sets of five and sets of 30 is unlikely to be a ton of really wrong answers. You can gain muscle doing sets of four, and three, and two, and one. It's just going to take a lot more sets to get that done. And obviously, your joints and connective tissues are taking a fucking hell of a pound because that's a really heavy weight. It's not ultra-efficient. You're not putting your best cards on the table if you're doing that. Can you get really good muscle growth with sets of 30, 40, 50 plus reps? Actually, yes, but you have to do more sets to accomplish that.

And each set is psychologically fucking three minutes long. I was, Fuck that, right? So you do like 10 sets of 52 reps, the playing card workout. Fuck that. It's a shitload of systemic fatigue, crap load of psychological fatigue for the same growth you could have gotten with just doing 10 sets of eight, which is way easier on the whole system. So 5 to 30 reps is really good general advice, but experiment on your own time. Find out what seems to be giving you great proxies. Pump, burn, tension, soreness, whatever rep ranges give you that, it's awesome. And another thing is, try some variety. So if you train back twice a week, have one of the days be slightly heavier, like mostly sets of 5 to 10, some sets of 10 to 15 reps. Try the other day being mostly sets of 15 to 20 reps and even some sets of 20 to 30. Out of a heavier and lighter, that diversity, there are a few studies that show diversity in rep ranges, even within several months of time, can help you grow. So I wouldn't write that off. And also more sustainable from a joint connective tissue perspective and an enjoyment perspective.

It's nice to people have some slightly different days. It's not like, Oh, another day of 28 reps, fuck that. But 28 you get sick of after one day, the next day you come in, it's sets of 5 to 10. Like, Okay, fuck. This is different. It's cool. And it's equally effective on average.

What about weight?

The amount of weight that you choose should fall into two categories or two clearance variables to make sure it goes through. One is, can you lift it with good technique between 5 and 30 times in one set? And two, is that exhibition of your lifting at least within three reps-ish of failure? Because people will say, you give someone 10 pound dumbbells that can lift the 30s, and they do five, and they put it down. They're like, Hypertrophy. I hit five. The caveat there is that you have to challenge the muscle. So the weight you end up using is whatever weight gets you within 5 to 30 reps range, close to failure. And you have to warm up to find that out, and it's different for everyone. But the idea that you got to go ultra-heavy to grow is true, but it's not the only true thing. You can also grow from light high rep shit. You just have to push it close to failure.

Why not to failure?

To failure is a totally fine thing as well. There are downsides of going to failure all the time. It seems that as you get closer to failure, the amount of stimulus per set rises. So if you have a set where you stop at two reps shy of failure, and another person has a set where they stop just at failure, or someone has to drag the barbell off of them, the person who went to failure is going to grow more muscle. That's a good thing, but it's by a small margin, maybe just several % more growth. The downside is training to failure generates a lot more fatigue, probably not a few % more, maybe a few dozen % more, which is a big deal. If you're going to use a program which mostly has you do three or two or one rep shy of failure, you'll get great stimulus, and you'll be able to recover from lots of sets over the course of weeks and months, which means you'll get a great stimulus and a great hypertrophy result. If you insist on going to failure even beyond in your sets, you can get very good results, but you have to reduce the total volume of your training because the amount of fatigue you accumulate is going to be rapid.

It's going to happen fast. So have you ever heard of Hit Training, Mike Menser, High Intensity Training, HIT? Mike Menser and those folks were fans of going to failure and beyond with drop sets and crazy shit like that. They got really good results, but they don't do very many sets. A few sets per muscle for workouts all they do because they realize we can't recover from this. You can recover from more if you stay a little shy of failure. My suspicion is that if you want the best overall muscle growth and you have all the time in the world to train, that somewhere between three and one rep in reserve on average for a program is a really good idea. But you also want to test your shit every now and again. It's difficult to say this as two reps in reserve if it's been months since you've actually gone to failure on that exercise because you can be fucking lying to yourself. Yeah, it's two IR. Someone puts a gun to your head, literally, maybe. And they're like, go to failure, and you get six more reps. Well, shit. It turns out you weren't even in that best growth zone of three to one.

So what I would say is a method that we use at RP, our app does this automatically. It starts you a few reps shy of failure, and then it presents incrementally slightly, slightly heavier loads over the weeks or repetition goals that are slightly higher. So takes you from 10 reps to 11 reps to 12 reps, or takes you from 100 pounds to 105 to 110. Automatically, because your body can't adapt that quickly, you're going to reach failure a few weeks in, four to six weeks in, you'll not only have a whole range of going from three-ish in reserve all the way to zero, which means you checked every box, but you'll now know something about yourself. You'll know exactly how high your best performance is. So for the next mesocycle, next program you construct, you can be like, Okay, I know how strong I am. Let me start a little bit less than that and progress again to see if I can go a little bit higher. So I would say going from some number of reps in reserve all the way to failure in a single mesocycle is probably a good practice for many people.

But not required. You can always go two or three reps and reserve. As long as you do enough sets, you'll get very close to ideal hypertrophy outcomes. And you'll do very well in muscle growth. If you just take everything to failure, you just have to really watch your fatigue management and not do too many sets because then you'll burn out.

What about sets?

Sets are influenced by a few things. One of the big ones is your proximity to failure. So what I'm going to say next about how many sets you should do is if you go close to failure all the time, you do on the lower end of this range, at least start there. If you do Well, two or three reps in reserve, you can be on the higher end of this range. Couple of ways to think about sets. There are sets per week and there are sets per session. I like to think of per muscle group per session. Some people get overly obsessed about, How many sets do I need to do per exercise? There is an answer to that question, but it's much more interesting to talk about per muscle group, because you can train your chest with three exercises and do two sets each, or you can train it with two exercises and do three sets each. The total amount of working sets is by far the biggest determinant of how much muscle you're going to grow per session. So in a session, theoretically, you can do anywhere from one set for your muscle, just one set of curves on the leave.

And as a beginner, especially, you'll get some robust gains. Or as someone who's more advanced, if you train your biceps every single day, just one or two sets of curves ends up being a lot of weekly volume and plenty of stimulus, and that's a totally fine way to grow. On the other end, in the you can do as many as 12 to 15 sets for the biceps or for the chest. The downside there is on the higher ends of that spectrum, you are reaching into what's called junk volume, where, yeah, you're training, but your nervous system is so tired, it's not even recruiting as many of the muscle fibers as you want anymore. It's like it's taking the day off and you're just robotically moving through. That third 30 rep cut off, theoretical, very rough cut off of anything lighter than your 30 rep max, probably won't grow as much muscle. That's always and everywhere, your fresh 30 rep max. So if you're on exercise number five for your pecs, you're doing cable flies with 100 pounds for sets of 15, even if it's a failure. That is to failure as we observe it externally.

With this pre fatigue.

But oh my God. And at that point, your nervous system is fucking checked out. A lot of your faster twitch muscle fibers, the ones that grow the most, they're not even fucking acting anymore. And you look at 100 pounds and someone's like, How many reps did you do? 15. How many could you have done if you were fresh? I don't know, 40? Well, that's 10 away from 30. That already is starting to get junky. It's just the stimulus isn't worth the fatigue anymore. A couple of studies have been done, actually more than a few, and a lot of good meta-analytic data has been synthesized, probably some of the best of which is by a gentleman named James Krieger, who has a lit review, the weightology lit review. I sign up for it. I pay real money My own money, Chris. You know how painful it is to part with my own money? And he has hinted at the fact that close to the best answer, on average, huge caveat, on average, is something like five to eight working sets per muscle per session. So if you're training your biceps and you do three sets per session, totally cool.

You just have to do more sessions per week. If you're doing something like nine sets for biceps, again, totally cool. You just have to train them less frequently so they can recover for a lot of nine sets of work. But if you're doing 15 working sets for just your biceps in one session, the literature would say that's not optimal, and the reasoning would be like your last five sets are just a gigantic fucking waste of your time. You're It's not you're cashed out. It's like frying an egg after it's already fried. It just gets more burnt and nothing good happens to it. On the other hand, if you're doing just one or two sets for biceps per session, you had better be doing a lot of sessions over the week. And if you're only training once or twice for biceps, you say, Look, man, your muscles could take more of a hit. Which brings me to my next point. How do you determine if you're doing the right amount of volume for you? And I would actually keep this relatively simple. However many sessions you have per muscle in a week, which I'm sure we'll get to how many sessions is a good idea.

Let's just say it's two. Let's say you train your chest on Monday, you train chest again on Thursday. If after Monday's workout, let's say you're doing three sets of chest, by Tuesday evening, you're not sore, you're not you're fucking ready to go, your strength is as high as it'll ever be. Someone could ask the theoretical question of, why the fuck are you waiting Wednesday as a whole day to just go Thursday? You could have already hit it again. So if you're well beyond recovered, Next Monday, you can do four sets or five sets for chest to get you close to just barely recovered for next Thursday. If you're just barely recovered, let's say Wednesday, you're still a little tight, a little sore, a little weak feeling, and Thursday morning, you're really good to go, perfect. Perfect.

Is that MRV?

Yeah. So if you go over that value, you might have exceeded your MRV. Well, there's more technical way to diagnose that maximum recoverable volume, but a way to make sure you're not excessively over it, so make sure you're healed on time. But if you're healed too early, then you could be at your minimum effective volume or even maintenance volume. You think you're growing, but you're really doing so few sets that you're not accomplishing a whole lot. So the point is to challenge your body such that it is recovering until, gee, a day or several hours before you hit it If you do eight sets of chest on Monday, by the time Thursday rolls around, you're still a touch, and you're weaker than usual. You're not going to get as robust of a stimulus. And thus, you next time shouldn't do eight sets, maybe you should do six. So by adjusting the number of sets week over week for any given muscle to challenge yourself to recover close to just on time for the next time you hit it, not too far back, definitely not under-recovered, you end up auto-regulating yourself into probably close to your ideal volume for how much muscle you can gain.

How long do you rest in between sets?

Yes. In between actual sets as you go? Yeah. Okay. So I have a unique take on this. You might not hear it in a lot of other places. It's just one minute, and it's the right answer for everyone's next question. No, wait, wait. That's not it. A lot of answers you'll get on the internet from folks that also know what they're talking about is some number of minutes. And I understand that answer because it's very usable. Let's say 2-5 minutes or something like that. The problem is that is not a theoretically-based answer. It's just a notional answer. Here's the number. You're not really sure why. And there are many exceptions. For example, if you train your calves and calf raises, Are you telling me I need to rest five fucking minutes after my calves? Ten seconds after, I don't even feel laxed anymore. I'm fucking totally good to go. So we do it RP, is we have a four-factor checklist model, where if you can checklist four things after your last set over, you can begin your next set as soon as those checklist items are checked. You can wait longer, and there may be some small upsides to it, but someone could say, if you wait much longer, you're just wasting time.

So here are the checklists. Number one, Your cardio can't be a limiting factor. So if you just did a set of squats, and you turned to your training partner, you're like, Should I do another set? No, because then what's going to stop you in your set of squats is you can't breathe. It's not your the local quad musculature that's being brought close to failure. Remember, the local musculature brought close to failure is the way we get the most robust gains. That's the mechanism by which we grow. So that's no good. So wait until you're back to at least normal-ish breathing. That's checklist one. Another one is your neural nervous system strength, which means, do you feel strong? Like in here, not in the pecs, in the heart, which we all know, emotion comes from the heart. No, wait, it's the brain. If you're fucking like, Yeah, let's fucking do this, you're ready. If you still feel curved up in a ball and defeated, how are you going to push it close to failure in the next day? You're not. You're going to suck. So number one, cardiovascular system needs to be mostly recovered. Number two, you need to have your neural strength back.

You need to be like, Yeah, fucking, let's do this. The second to last one is the synergis need to no longer be a limiting factor. For example, in the squat, you can say, Okay, after three minutes, I'm breathing normal. I feel fucking strong again, and my quads feel like we're ready to go, but my lower back is still cramping, still has lactic gas, and it's still weak. If you do another work set, what do you think is going to be the limiting point? It's going to be a lower back, which means your quads are like, Did anything happen? Did we just try? Or what the fuck went on? If your lower back has five good reps in it, but your quads have 10 good reps in them, it doesn't matter if you tell yourself on one rep in reserve, your six reps in reserve for the quads, for the muscle that matters. So the synergy just have to be good to go. Another example is fore arms and the lap pull down. If your fore arms are still throbbing and you can't grip anything, it's not time to do lap pull downs again. You got to fucking rest down, even if your lats feel quite good.

And that last four-factor model checklist is, does the target muscle have enough recovery in it for it to be able to do at least another five repetitions? Because any set less than five reps can be hypertrophic for sure, but not the most efficient use of your time, because you're not sufficiently recovered. So let Let me give you two extreme examples. One is calf raises, just on a seated calf machine. Not the one where your legs are bent, but the one where your legs are straight. Bent leg calf raises actually mostly hit the soleus muscle, which is deep to the gastroc. It's not the cool big diamond-shaped one. It just sucks.

I learned a lot about this while I was trying to regrow the bottom half of my right limb.

Yeah, that sucked. Well, it worked.

Yeah, I actually overshot it. I overshot it and had to regrow the other one more. That's awesome.

Yeah. And the third limb looks quite good as well. So, calf raises. Cardio. Three seconds later, you're breathing normally. You might have been breathing normally the whole time. Check. When do you feel strong again? Could be five or 10 seconds later. Again, my calves feel fine. Synergists. There are no synergists. The machine starts at your hips and goes down. There's no synergist, so that auto-checks itself. And then how long until I'm not feeling like my calves are full of lactic acid? Oh, maybe 5 or 10 seconds. So There is a world in which 10 seconds between sets is the right amount or a correct amount of time to rest for calves. Can you rest longer? Sure. No big deal. But you may be taking incrementally, exponentially more time for linearly better gains, which generally is just like, just do another set. And someone's like, well, if I do five sets where I rest longer, I get just as much growth as if I do seven sets where I rest shorter. Yeah, but the rest longer takes you eight total minutes to train And the rest shorter takes you three total minutes. Why don't you just do two extra sets?

You'll be four versus eight minutes-wise and get the same hypertrophy. So if a muscle is fucking pretty recovered and you're pretty good to go, I say just go again. And if you need more stimulus, just add more sets. So on calf raises, it could be a correct I'm going to answer to say it's 10 seconds rest. Four-factor model, all checked out. On squats for sets of 15, holy fuck. I've rested. I did this one thing once, which is on YouTube somewhere, where I did 405 pounds, four plates in the squat for five sets of 10. And I rested for something like seven to 10 minutes between each set. I also, after set three and four and five, I threw up independently after each one of those sets. So it's going to take some time. And honestly, it was four-factor model-based, even though I didn't know at the time, I came up with that shit later. But it took me four minutes to stop breathing hard. It took me another several minutes for my fucking lower back to be like, Okay, I'm healed enough. So very different answers. But generally, the most simple way I can So condense this whole conversation, if you're ready to go again, if everything's fucking working and you feel strong, go.

If you're not ready, if you're breathing hard, if you still feel weak, if your muscles start cramping, you have to rest. No matter what you saw on the internet, one to two minutes, 2-3 minutes, those are all heuristic ideas. This is a theoretical basis that's a bit more sound.

Outside of the practicality of people just having lives outside of the gym, some people that aren't you- I wouldn't know anything about that. Having lives outside of the gym, is there a upper bound on how long your session length should be? Is there some accumulation of something that's happening in there when you just take time in the gym?

Yes. Assuming you're going pretty hard, generally what we see is after about two hours of consistent hard training in the gym, the amount of systemic fatigue you're going to have, acute systemic fatigue, short term fatigue that last hours, is going to be so high that you You can no longer recruit individual muscle fibers very well for whatever you're training. It's just, yeah, you're doing training, but not much is happening. You're much better off cutting off that session, going and getting some rest, doing more weekly sessions. Some people be like, I train twice a week, but it's three hours each time. Yeah, but that last hour fucking sucks.

Three times a week for two hours.

That are in most cases. Now, some people can train up to two hours and have really good performance, especially if it's an intro workout drink with some protein and carbs.

I was going to say, obviously, you're going to run out of fuel by this stage as well.

Totally, certainly run down on fuel.

There's only so many sleep token songs or Blink 182 that you can listen to as well.

That's right. Yeah, you're going through your playlist to see what fucks. So yeah, generally under 2 hours. For many people, anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour and a half is where their best workouts will occur. And you can have great workouts that last less than 45 minutes. But I would say it's a bit of a technical efficiency question there, especially with people with lives outside of the gym, which is a nominal concept I don't know anything about. Which I've heard of. Allegedly. If you fucking got to the gym, you went to the locker room, you stood at some dicks, you put When your workout close, you came out, it's already such a sunk cost. You might as well go crush out an hour, hour and a half workout.

You're going to maybe have a one-to-one travel to training ratio in time.

Yes. And that's, for some people, not bad. You just don't want it to go much worse than that. So a lot of times People will say, well, aren't 20 minutes workouts effective? Yeah, if you do many of them throughout the week, sure, if you have really low ball fitness goals. But I would say, yeah, get in there in 45 minutes, an hour and a half is a really good answer for many people. If you do much longer than that, the only question I have for you is, do you still have a lot of fucking energy to keep going? And if the answer is like, dude, I fucked my shit up after 2 hours and 15 minutes. Hey, slow clap. These are all averages. Apparently, it works for you. Amazing. But ask yourself, am I really doing the work? It's like you see a guy talking to a girl at a club after five drinks. It's fucking... What is it? What the kids call it? Riz. He's got the Riz. You've got Riz. Oh, fuck off. No, I don't. Whatever that is, I don't have it.

You don't know.

I don't know what it is. You might. I do have it. Oh, God. Okay, is there a test I can take for Riz? The nurse comes out and she just gives you a pamphlet. You are positive for Riz. This isn't a death sentence. I'm like, Oh, fucking God, I knew what I was going to do.

Is it terminal? Doctor, doctor.

I peed blue yesterday.

I knew it was bad. Comes out and tries to tell you that it's terminal, but just gets lost in your eyes.

Oh, my God. What's terminal again? I'm like, I don't know. You tell me. I tried to do it locks in my hair, I'm going to realize I'm fucking bald. See, that's why I don't have Riz. So five drinks in, my man's kicking it. You ever see someone lay down some game, you're in the booth next to him, you're like, Fuck, and hit it. She's like, Oh, my God. That's you in the gym after an hour, right? After two and a half hours, you're like that guy laying down game after 15 drinks, and you're like, I'm big on YouTube. And she's like, Look, man, I'm going to leave with my girlfriends. You're great. And you're like, I see you, Kelsey. She's like, It was Karen. She walks off. You're just watching it from the periphery. You're like, That guy should have stopped fucking drinks ago. That's 2 hours and 30 minutes in the gym guy. Just quit while you're ahead. Come back next time.

How often should people train each week? Sets, muscle groups, training frequency, et cetera, et cetera. Yes.

There are two questions there. One is, how often should you train any given muscle per week? The answer to that is, generally, anything can work between one and six times. You can train the same muscle even seven times a week, if you like. Generally, you can train it once. Neither one is going to give you the ideal, although six is probably a better answer than one. Muscles just don't take that long to recover. So people say, Oh, I just hit my chest once a week. Well, how long were you sore for? They're like, Well, halfway through the week, I was healed. Did you feel strong after? Yeah. So the fuck are you waiting three or four days? Just leaving like, you could be fucking doing it again, but you're not. So I would say anywhere between two and four times a week for the same muscle a good idea. Two is great for a lot of people. Three and four is more for specialization phases and folks that just recover really rapidly. Like, yeah, your chest might not heal three times a week from any normal training, but your forearms might heal just fine. You might be able to train them for five days or maybe 18 days a week like you seem to with your fuck.

Everyone's got something. You know what I mean? Yeah.

I had nothing for a long time, Chris. I had nothing and no one.

That head, though.

I didn't even have the head back in the day.

When did you get that head?

When I started doing drugs. I'm kidding. Actually, I've photographed myself when I was lifetime drug free and my head is almost identically shaped. It's quite sad. As a matter of fact, there was an interaction I had in high school. I was talking to an acquaintance/friend, more acquaintance than friend, and had an interaction with a girl, and I was like, I had an insanely low self-esteem in high school. And I was like, What did she think about that? And he's like, Yeah, she actually thinks you're really cute, other than the way that you act at school. So it's a total introvert, fucking weirdo. She's like, And the shape of your head. And I I was like, What the fuck? I didn't even know my head was shaped weird back then. So I had hair and stuff. I was like, What? And she never made sense of it. And then later, the Internet told me that my head was shaped really funny. So in any case, two to four times a week is a great per muscle session number. The other question is, how many total sessions, how many total times do I go into the gym?

So I'll say this, for folks that just want to be healthy and already have a decent amount of muscularity, two times a week is totally cool. You train with weights Monday and Thursday, whole body, you're going to get a ton of great health, a ton of benefits, ton of physique. It's going to be awesome. For just general recreational fitness, like fit dad, that body. If you're a professional bodybuilder, I'd like to see you training anywhere between five, and that's on the low end, and more like 6-9 sessions per week. So Jared Feather, IFP Pro, my biological son. He's currently in Thailand, I think, lost, found in a sense, but also lost.

Slow colonizing.

Something like that, being colonized. In any case- Colonizing. Oh, lots of that. Yes. That's why he's there. So he trains usually nine times a week, which means some days he does two a days. He's literally a professional bodybuilder. It's his job to do that.

What else is he going to do?

He's got nothing else. He sits in his apartment, stares at a fucking wall, or he's training. No, wait, that's me. Jesus. He sits in his apartment with ladies, I've been told. For a serious effort at changing your body composition, at trying to get more jacked and lean, if you've had enough of adult fitness and you want to be that guy at work that's fucking people are talking about, three to five times in the gym per week, each of them an hour-ish in length hour to an hour and a half. That's what I call a serious effort. So if I'm in the elevator with someone and they make the mistake of talking to me and asking me about workout routines and how they can get more jacked, and they're like, Yeah, I've been seeing gains, blah, blah. I'm going to ask the question of, How many times do you go to the gym per week? If they say two, I'll be like, You could definitely benefit from going three or four. But if they say four or five, any addition of days beyond that, outside of an attempt at professional bodybuilding, just yields very small returns on investment.

What they're doing within the session that you're going to look at is- That's what happens What's next?

If they say, I train five days a week, my next thing is to ask them a series of other questions, which you and I, I think, will get to at the end of this is how to troubleshoot because there's a lot. There's a big can of worms. Some of those questions may not even be training-related. I'll automatically be like, How much are you sleeping? And what's diet like? Then you get the whole like, Well, ever since I started fucking my secretary, I sleep a lot less. And I'm like, Hey, my man. But you could do less of that, grow more muscle.

How should people progress weights over time? That's important.

For secretaries? Oh, just in hypertrophy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Progression over time. Very, very important question. So there are many ways to do it, but some of the ways run into problems. If you just add reps or load when you feel like it, you could be on to something. But also you could just be being a little bitch. When exactly when you're squatting over four plates, do you feel like squatting more than that? Fuck that, never. I feel like not squatting at all. On the other hand, if you go up by very large amounts, you risk some technical decay and some injury probability. Your body is used to squatting four plates. You put a fifth plate on there. Sure, you're still good for a few reps, but it is a very different exercise at that point. Your connective tissues are used to four plates. They're not used to five. Some shit can go zig when it should have zag, and then you're fucked. So what I would say, the safe bet and a good bet, good bet from the perspective of mandating yourself to progress, safe from the perspective of not extreme, is one of two options, maybe a combination of both. Adding just a a bit of weight to the bar every single week while you're in what's called your accumulation phase until you get tired and need to deload, or adding a repetition, maybe two.

So for example, if you're doing pushups at home by yourself, where no one loves you, no one cares if you live or die, the Mailman might say the smell is bad after a while and your cats have started to eat you, that thing. If you're at home working out with pushups, you can do a set of 18 fresh close to failure. Next week, it's 19. The week after, 20. The week after that, try 21. When you can't beat 21 and you get 20 and your pecs are still tired and sore, it's probably time for a few days off or a few days of active rest situation, recovery, until you come back and start hitting it again, and then you slowly climb back up. 19, 20, 21, 22. All-time PR, amazing. So adding reps is an awesome way to progress. The other way is adding load, small loads, right? The only kind I'm blown nowadays. Hey. Anyone? No one. All right. So you go 100 pounds on dumbbell press. Then maybe your gym goes up, we'll I'll talk about dumbbell press was a terrible example. I'll say why in a sec. Barbell, regular barbell bench press, 100 pounds.

Week 10 reps, week one. Week two, try 105, still 10 reps. Then 110, then 115, then so on and so forth. If you can't match or beat your PRs, then you have to take some rest, take it easy, recycle those numbers, and then try again. The trippy thing about lifting and progression and hypertrophy and strength is you progress by these tiny little increments. But tiny incremental progressions over months and months of training lead to big gains. Some people get impatient, and they want to fucking slap the wheels on. They've been leg pressing four plates for a while. Yeah, man, fucking feeling it today. Put five on that motherfucker. And it's like, okay, but you could get hurt.

We do have smaller plates.

We do have smaller plates, and you'll be baffled as to why we have them. It's for that slow, steady progression.

Well, there's another thing that happens as well, which is people who are still using the exact same weight that they were 10 years ago.

It's my weight that I use. I've heard people describe that like, Yeah, I use three plates on the bench. Okay, you've attached yourself to a load. Very interesting.

I imagine that must happen a lot to you. Attach yourself to a load.

Oh, boy, Chris, if you saw our Dungeon/gym, I get attached to all sorts of things through the skin. Do you ever... Do you ever... Total side note, but there's this thing where people put hooks through their back skin and they're hanging. I've seen that. I've seen it a few times on the internet, just browsing. That's not what I finish to, but midway through, yeah. Start. Yeah. Midway through. I start with It's like a Paris session.

It's like a Paris session. It's like an intra-session, pick me up. A little break. Yeah, very nice. Yeah, but people do. I mean, this is... Well, you get on the troubleshooting, but from my side, as someone who's trained for 15 years and seen from the frontline vanguard of the gym floor. Yeah, the fuckery. One of the biggest pieces of fuckery is that no one's progressively overloading because nobody's tracking anything. Totally. And you go in. We have an app for that. And it's like, link below. And it's like 12 reps at 18 kilos on side laterals. On a good day, that's how I feel. And that's what I do. And you've been locked in there for five years at that weight.

Yes. And if you want to just get the same physique at the end of the day, every single time, that's a swell way to do it. But most people in the gym to get the same physique, they want better. One of the really cool things about either increasing your load and/or reps is it forces you to fucking try. Yeah, 100 pounds for 18 was something you could do. This week, you do 105 for 18. It might be really close to your limit or not. Two extreme scenarios there. One is like, you hit your limit real quick. Hey, congratulations. You were training hard this whole time. Good for you. But you tested it, now you know. The other one is, you're 100 for 18 reps, 105, 110, 115, 120. Finally, at 135, you hit 17 reps. Guess what, motherfucker? I got news for you. You've been at 10 reps in reserve your whole fucking life. And all of a sudden, the reason that you haven't been progressing is like, oh, shit, I've never been training remotely hard enough. So that can fix that problem big time. That's why I really like that a forward-looking progression formula.

Yeah, there's feedback in the mix, but you have to challenge yourself in ways that are programmatic that might not be your preferred thing to do. When I have a leg press session, so I use the RP hypertrophy app for my own training, and legit, yes, it's my app, but I actually fucking use it because it's fucking awesome. It doesn't always give me things that I want to do, man. Last week I did XYZ on the leg press. Now it's one rep more and fucking five pounds more. I don't want to see that shit there. I want to go by feel and go light. But the app is like, Hey, science predicts you're going to be able to do this.

Mr.

Algorithm says. Yeah, Mr. Algorithm says, Shut the fuck up and do it. And then you can find a lot of inner strength. If you have a goal that's a little bit outside of your ability, you can find the inner strength to go, You know what? Okay, okay, okay, fuck it. I'll try. Then you win, and then you win again next week, and you win again next week. And you win again next week. And when your body is physically too fucked up to keep progressing, you'll know because you'll be unable to match your old rep PRs from the week before. You did 500 for 19 to leg press last week. This week, you put 505 on, like the thing says. Your goal is supposed to be 19 reps. You get to 14, and you're like, Oh, shit. Help, help. And people fucking press it up for you. You get out, you're like, Huh. Maybe it's just a one-off. Next leg session, you come back, you do the same thing on hack squat. Your legs are fucking done. They need at least half a week, maybe a whole week of easy time to deload. But then you've earned your deload.

You're not just deloading because you're like, Yeah, fuck it. I'm not feeling training. You know for a fact, objectively, you are no longer able to overload your musculature because you're not strong enough anymore. You're not making progress. Then it's time to pull back. So you get this amazing thing of you know exactly what to do each time. And when you're done, you know you're fucking done. It's like, how does the hero stop chasing the bad man in the movie that captured a little girl? When he gets hit by a fucking truck and he can't walk anymore. You know he didn't give up. You want to be that guy. Get hit by that truck of just a little bit more weight or reps than you could do.

How should people periodize the way that they put all of this together?

By downloading the RPI PurchFab, Chris. But if you're a person with too little money, I would never associate you with you in person. My butlers might see you at the store or something like that, but they don't generally look in your direction. So generally, the progression should be roughly linear. You add a similar small amount of load over time or repetition, sometimes both. You keep progressing over time, over some number of sessions, until two sessions in a row, you can't hit that same PR you hit in the last session. You're no longer strong. That means your current level of cumulative fatigue is too high to present the most robust overload. At that point, you continue to progress linearly until you cannot progress anymore. Then it's time to do one of two things. One is a recovery half week, which means for half a week, whatever you are going to do, you take that same session and you divide everything roughly by half. Half the load, half the reps, half the sets. It's all fucking easy. It's a warmup. The whole workout takes 20 minutes. That lets your muscles recuperate a ton, so you have another few weeks of progression later.

If multiple muscles have arrived to that breaking point at the same time, and systemically you feel fucked up, your desire to train is really low, you're sore all over and all the joints, maybe your sleep is thrown off, your appetite is lower, that means you're just overreached total body. Then you probably need more like a week of half of everything. That's called a deload week. You take one of those, and then you restart the progression of starting a few reps away from failure, and next week, add a little bit of load. Add a rep or two, and go up, up, up. So you go up, up, up, up, relax. Drop the fatigue.

How many weeks does this tend to be?

Great question. If you're training pretty fucking hard in the first week, which you should be, three reps, five failure, at least above your minimum effective volume, something to give you a pump and a little bit of soreness. Most people training that hard, if they train four five or six times per week because the systemic fatigue is huge from that much training. Most people can't last longer, am I right? Then about four to eight weeks. If you are a beginner, you can go one year without deloading because you're not strong enough to accumulate enough systemic fatigue. You see a guy squatting 500 over 10, you're like, My motherfucker is going to be feeling. I don't give a shit how good of a shape he is. He's going to need a deload pretty soon. It's so extreme that at the top ends of power lifting, a very fatiguing lift like the deadlift, some of the world's best deadlifts go heavy in the deadlift, really heavy and hard, once every two or three weeks only. For the deadlift, every other week is a deload. Two-thirds of the week through the year is a deload. That's how much one week can fatigue you.

But that's insanely exceptional. So I would say for most hard training people, 4:00 to 8:00, if you really know what you're doing, 4:00 to 6:00, because if you really know what you're doing, you're training super fucking hard, you accumulate fatigue faster. If you're a beginner, if you train twice a week or three times a week, If you're training smaller muscles like arms and stuff, you may be able to go 12 or 16 a week without needing a deload. How do you know that? You keep adding load to the bar or reps, and you keep getting stronger. Then you're good to go. Keep going.

One thing we haven't spoken about is training splits. Is it chest and back? Is it chest and triceps? What is the... From a science perspective when it comes to splits?

Yes, let's go to the test tubes and the measuring devices. Old science. There are a few things I like to consider theoretically before designing a training split. One of them is within the context of the workout itself, when you ask, What am I doing today? Just make sure whatever your training gets high-quality training if you pair it with whatever else you're training. Here's an example of when that does not happen. You do legs first, and then you do chest. For many people who are advanced and training hard, you know this, after legs, motherfucking, you ain't doing shit. You might be peeling yourself off the gym floor, the urine stain below you, maybe even a shit stain if you really squatted heavy. You're not doing anything but going home and eating and drinking and recovering. So legs and then chest just might not make any fucking sense. On the other hand, if you have something like biceps and legs, bicep training doesn't make you that fucked up. It's just not a very big muscle. It doesn't make you systemically tired. You can't do it after legs because you got nothing after legs, but you might be able to do before.

So you're able to do biceps first, legs second. That's a workable split in and of itself. That's part one. So muscles need to gel well together. Here's another example. If you do back first and then legs after, can be done. But generally, your lower back and midback are now so tired, all of your squats in good mornings, you're going to fold over because of your back, not your legs. You have fucked up a limiting factor, and now that's the really big problem. So as long as the exercises play well together and the muscle groups play well together, which is to say you can train everything you want it hard, and the muscle itself is a limiting factor, there's no wrong answer. Someone was like, Is it cool to train chest with back, or is it chest with quads? Or, Hey, as long as you can fucking hit all the muscles hard, no wrong answers. The other construct that we use in program design is if the muscle has been trained already, the next time we train it, is it recovered enough to train again? So for example, if you say, Okay, here's my program. All right.

I'm training three days a week. Okay, great. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. And it's chest, chest, chest. I have to ask you the question of, by Wednesday, what is it that you're doing with your pathetically deflated super weak chest? No. You're going through the motions, your superfuckets are like, Ah, this sucks. If you simply move the routine to Monday, Wednesday, Friday, You can hit chest all three days, and there's enough time to recover between. So one thing that I look, if I'm looking over someone's program, I look for what I just generally heuristically describe as symmetry. I look for each individual muscle group, quads, where they at. Quads Monday, quads Thursday. It seems It makes sense. And hamstrings, Tuesday and Saturday. It seems to make sense. But if you have hamstrings on Tuesday and then hamstrings on a Wednesday, I'm going to be like, Can you at least try to explain that? Does that make sense? There's an amount of time you want For healing, it doesn't have to be exactly symmetrical, but it's generally stimulate, let it recover, stimulate again. Here's another thing. People say, A whole body training doesn't work for me, a whole body every day.

It can if you lower the volumes of everything. So if I'm doing back five days a week, someone could be like, This is bullshit. What if it's three working sets of back? No problem, because the the stimulus is small, the recovery isn't great, and then the next day I'm ready to go. But if you're doing eight or 10 sets of back, you're going to be training back two or three times a week. So with those two constructs is, are the muscles getting their due justice, the way you've arranged them in each session? And also, is each session sufficiently far apart to get good recovery, but also not sufficiently so far that it's just too much recovery and you're sitting around and you're nothing? Those are the two core elements of program design, or splits, as they're called. There are so many right answers within that universe, but also many wrong answers that I can't say X, Y, Z is the optimal split. So good bullshit detector for anyone listening to this. If anyone talks about, this is the best split for legs, we have two options. One, YouTube thumbnail title game, total respect. We play it, too.

I love it. Or categorical fucking bullshit because there are so many right answers to what's the best leg split so individually-based, as long as you do those two check marks. So splits, I'm very agnostic about. There's lots of wrong answers, but so many right answers. I can't say, this is the best split. Whole body every day, push-pull, up or lower, Push, legs, pull, complex splits. Jared and I, Jared, Feather, IFP Pro, we do multi-day splits. We do chest and shoulders in the AM, biceps and foremen in the PM, tons of right answers. As long as within each session, all the muscles I was getting just desserts. I've hung out with people at the gym where after dead lifting and squatting, they're over there doing forearm calls. I'm like, How much are you getting that? They're like, Dude, I'm not even here. It's a ghost crawling. It's 15 reps in reserve. What's a fucking stupid split? Whereas, here's another example. You really want to beef up your back, and you're going to do tons of heavy bent rows because coach said you need a fucking mid and thick lower back. But you do it the day after you've done a crapload of deadlifts and stuff like it does.

What are you doing? That's the wrong answer. You need to do it three or four days later when your back is fresh again. Those two things of exercises are getting checkmarked within the session, and they're spread roughly evenly or in a way that allows for recovery between sessions. Everything that lives in that universe is a correct answer to splits, and everything else is minor.

Why haven't we talked about what MIA reps or rest pause or drop sets? Why hasn't that factored into this? Is this just sprinkles on the top of topping on the top of cake?

Yes. It's a detail that comes from at least two other variables. One, are you training sufficiently close to failure, three reps, two reps, one rep, zero, or even beyond failure? That's the first question. The other question is, are you training in a proper repetition range of 5-30 30 repetitions. If you're doing those two things, there are many different set paradigms to get those two things. I say the third one is, are you doing the four-factor rest model? So for example, if you're doing Myoreps in the curl, you do a set of 12, you put it down. Five seconds later, you pick up and do a set of six, put it down, set of four, so on and so forth. Can we say that you're going close to failure? Yes. Can we say it's the right load selection? We can. What about that four-factor rest model? Well, if after you curl for 12, and you're about to pick up and do your six reps Myoreps, if you're like, Don't do it, then it's an exercise that's not good for Myer reps. You'll notice something you'll see in RP all all of our talk about Myer reps.

We don't often do Myerup barbell back squats. There is no Myer rep in that. When you go close to failure, you're fucking done for minutes. You don't just go back and do it. But for calves, you can Myer rep till you're blue in the face. You can superset, you can do all that stuff. So if you're bringing the muscle really close to failure, the rep range is appropriate. And whenever you're doing your next work set, be it a superset, Myerup, cluster set, occlusion, whatever, the muscle is a limiting factor because all the other things are cool. There are at least eight different kinds of training paradigms, different modalities. You can use straight sets, down sets, drop sets, My reps, what's it called? Super sets. There's tons of other options. No wrong answers. As long as, just to reiterate real quick, you're getting close to failure and everything. The load selection is appropriate, not too light, not too heavy, and you're actually targeting the muscle itself as a limiting factor, which means you've checklisted the four-factor rest model.

What should people do if they're not making progress? They're at a plateau. They're the guy that's been using 18s on laterals for five years. What's the troubleshooting checklist for you're not growing, you might be a bitch, or there might be something up with the training?

Yeah, just quit. I would say that's my best.

Throw yourself out of the window. Fuck it.

When has training ever paid off? Was a number of times stressed that you've physically been laid in the gym? To me, it's zero, and everyone else also zero. I don't even know why the fuck we're doing this anymore. I just, anytime people say, Oh, I'm really having a struggle in lifting weights, my first answer is just, Fuck, just stop. But if they don't accept that, there's a couple other good ideas. The list, technically, of troubleshooting ideas is infinite, but there are a couple of big picture items you really want to think through or talk through if you're struggling with this whole situation, with gaining muscle. One of them sounds very pedantic, but nonetheless, it's worthy of repetition. How do you know you're not gaining muscle? I had a very interesting interaction once on social media where this gentleman asked me, How come he can't gain weight even though he's eating a ton of calories? I looked at his calories, looked at his body, and I was like, Fuck. I was like, Look, man, my number one suspicion is that you're not actually eating this much food consistently. He's like, Dude, I'm telling you I am.

I'm like, Okay, fine. I believe you. I'll rule that out. It ended up being after I thought about it for a bit and asked him a few more questions, he actually was gaining weight, just not as fast as he wanted, but the rate was a pound per week. It was totally fine. So his initial submission of, I'm not gaining weight, was wrong. But some people, when they tell you, I'm really not putting on muscle size, go, How do you know that? There's only really one golden fleece way of figuring it out. Has your repetition strength in the exercises for that muscle group been going up over time, or has it been staying really steady? Let's say we're talking about back. How's your one-arm dumbbell row? How's your bend row? How's your cable row? How's your pull-ups? How's your pull-downs? If they're like, Yeah, man, last year, I've really put on just tons fucking strength onto them. Conversation over, motherfucker.

Where's it coming from?

Of course, it's fucking muscle gain at some level. You can't get neural efficiency for that long. But if you are stalled in your exercises, you're stalled in your body weight, yeah, you might not be growing. So one big one-off that body weight thing is, are you giving yourself enough nutrients to actually gain muscle? I'll quote myself, what a fucking egotistical move that is.

I do it all the time.

My man. Quoting me or quoting yourself? Both. My man. If you weigh 150 pounds, there's no way to gain, tame, or maintain your main gain your way to 180. By the laws of physics, you have to gain weight. And the only way to gain weight is either, strangely, to reduce your physical activity, which most people won't do, or increase the amount of food coming in. So sometimes people will struggle with muscularity. Younger folks, oftentimes males in their 20s, 30s, 40s. But, yeah, man, I'm just not putting on size. I'd be like, How's your eating? And often you get this like, Well, fucking, man.

Any sentence that begins with well.

Yeah, it's already off the cliff. My boss is riding my ass. I have a family. I have a dog.

I asked about your diet.

Right. I didn't give a shit about your boss. You can fucking, while you're getting fired, you can eat a burrito.

It doesn't matter. Mars is in retrograde.

That's a real problematic one. You know what's funny about astronomy is it always says something is in retrograde. You know it's not astronomy, because one thing I like to ask astrologists is, so which planets are in anterograde? And they're like, what's that? That's the opposite of retrograde, dumb motherfuckers. Read an actual astronomy book. Just kidding. People watching this who are into astrology. You know what I'm saying? A lot of fine-ass white bitches love that shit. Am I right, Chris? Is that your jam?

Dude, at one of my live shows that I did in Austin, I did some work in progress shows. And this girl came up after we'd finished, and she was very nice. But I asked her what she did for work, and she said that she uses quantum healing in the fifth dimension to inform her crypto investments.

I've been doing it in the fourth dimension this whole time. No wonder my crypto shit is fucked. Damn you, Sam Bankman-Fried. That's intense, man. What did you say? Did you just assume she was fucking with you?

I asked her to say it again. I said, Hey, can you tell me that again? She did. I said, That's the most Austin job I've ever heard of. She probably danced away on her Bitcoin, Ethereum carpet. I don't know. Dogecoin. Yeah.

Have you ever gotten Sam Bankman-Fried on the show?

No, he's in jail.

Fuck. Can't you do a jail episode where you set this whole thing up in prison?

I wanted to do it with the guy that ran Fire Festival, Billy McFarlon.

Chris, listen. I'm a brown belt in jiu-jitsu and I'm a little jacked. I'm Russian, too. I got the tough guy face. If you have to go to prison to interview him, bro, I'll be one of your security guards free of charge. I want to meet him.

You just want to be around men.

Him, particularly.

He's out of jail now.

What the fuck am I doing? A stupid muscle shit on your show. You got a huge platform. Interview people that matter.

Martin Schrelle.

Cancel this episode.

Yeah, I'm trying.

Oh, he's the guy that did the whole shorting of HIV stock or whatever.

Dexpro, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On the economics of it, it's actually totally valid what he was doing, believe it or not, get Brian Kaplan on here and he'll explain all that.

Oh, no way. Oh, that's right. I watched him on here.

You're amongst illustrious- Get him on here again because he's a fucking man.

He's ignoring my emails as usual. The Martin Schrelle guy, first of all, very unfortunate name. Second of all, the way he phrased everything was like, Do you have a PR firm that's working against you telling you to do this stuff? In any case, fuck did we get on this bullshit? Yeah, 5D, Fifth dimension, quantum-powered, Ethereum.

Crypto trading informs my crypto trading.

This is like- She was great.

I mean, she's going to be richer than all of us.

Or hopeless and alone with no quantum powers.

Yeah. Something else I've been thinking about during this conversation, which we haven't spoken about yet, motivation to train. Is that even a thing that's studied scientifically?

Yeah.

Okay. What's the TL LDR. Motivation is something that's spoken about an awful lot. It's like the God of the gaps of a lot of psychology because people want to make doing things that they want to do but may be difficult to do easier. And that is motivation for them. Yes. For the most part? Yes. What does science have to say about motivation?

If you care, please remind me to come back with no stupid bullshit jokes about the troubleshooting stuff. We can get back to that.

We get that. We do the thing. Yes.

There are a couple of things to say about motivation. One is motivation itself is technically in the construct of adherence is just one of the parts of it. There's inspiration, there's motivation, there's habit, there is interaction between willpower and all that Goggins shit, which is super valid in context. And then there's something called passion, which once you have a passion for something, you no longer ask questions of motivation. People ask me, What motivates you to go to the gym? I'm like, I'm addicted to going to the gym. It's like asking a crackhead, what's motivating you to do that? Light up that rock. What? That's what I want to do. So there is a whole rich psychology around just the one part we call motivation. But that richness actually informs a lot of the things that it's a good idea to employ to increase your motivation. We're really trying to increase this adherence. Try to make you get to the gym, make sure you get in there. How you get in there doesn't much matter. So one is having good sources of inspiration. If you surround your social media, if your feed has a lot of people who look like you want to look a little bit like them, and they've got a lot of positive and encouraging shit to say and a can-do attitude, that's a good start.

It's not going to keep you in the gym, but it might get your ass in there on a fucking rainy day. Another thing is is to set goals. Motivation is in many sense is defined as the pull towards a goal. You get rid of a goal, you're technically not motivated to do shit. Like animals in a lab are motivated goal-based, at least neurochemically. You could have Huberman on here, I'll tell it to you better, is motivation is goal-oriented, even if the goal is equalize this amount of chemical between one brain cell and another. So if you have a goal of like, I want X, Y, Z amount of reps on my lifts that's realistic, or even a motivation, I want to be able to tell myself I'm mad enough to go to the gym four times a week every fucking day this year. That's my goal, a process goal instead of an outcome goal. That's a big deal. If you are goalless, if you're going to the gym For some very general construct, like get fit or have abs or something you haven't really quantified in any way at all or really contextualize, it's easy to be like, eh.

It's like you have to be able to answer the question in your head of if you're sitting, you got home after work, tough day at the job, you sit down on your couch. You have to give yourself a reason to get up. If your reason is nebulous and like, I think fitness is something I told myself I do, you're not getting up. When push comes to shove, you're fucked up. Bier, and you're done. But if you're like, I told myself, contract with myself. I'm going to fucking make it four times a week. Awesome. There is another part of this motivation thing that comes in with, how easy are you making it on yourself? You don't want to have a big barrier to entry. Training partners help a You sit down on the couch and your training partner fucking text you and he's like, Where are you at, pussy? You're fucking probably going to show up. If it's just you, it's going to be tougher. If your gym is 15 minutes away, you'll fucking do this in California traffic for 15 minutes. If it's 45 minutes away, holy fuck, that makes it really tough. Another thing is doing the stuff at the gym you like.

That's where the favorite exercises comes in. If you fucking can't wait to smash some deadlifts, hey, by all means, fuck that optimal shit. Go in there and get you some deadlifts. So there's a lot of stuff coming together. Another thing I will say, this is just my own little bullshit, spin on it. This is a much richer conversation we could have in great depth. I want to put this in a way that's both charitable and sufficiently comedic to be expressive. If you have to ask how to get motivated to go to the gym, you don't need to be going to the gym. You don't want it enough. When you're sick and tired of looking and feeling like shit, you'll show up, motherfucker. I'll see you there because you're going to look in the mirror and you're going to be like, Fuck that. You're going to want to be in the gym. And if you're going to make this a lifestyle, you have to lower the barriers, make the gym cheaper, closer, training partners, exercises you like, and you have to raise the impetus, goals, inspiration, and a fucking goddamn real desire to be there. The people that have no problem showing up to the gym are the people that want to be there.

And no amount of Rocky Balboa fucking movies are going to get you to that place. A lot of that is also built with the experience of having the gym be a place where you get results by pushing yourself, winning little mini challenges, and having fun with it. When I think about what does the gym mean to me, I still remember what it meant to me when I was 15 and first walked in. It was a scary place full of scary people that had scary things going on, and I was bad at them. I didn't want to be there. After 25 years of training, the gym is my spirit home anywhere I go. I could be anywhere in the world. One thing I like to do is I come into a gym, let's say I'm traveling and go to Thailand or some shit like that. After enough lady boys, you got to hit the gym. She's not even strong enough to lift them up. Anyway. I come into the gym, and I've been doing this for a generation. I grab a barbell and I just cinch in like a deadlift grip. It's some fucking spirit connection.

I belong in the gym because to me, the clanking and the groaning and the smells and the machines, they are experiential symbols of progress, of love, of passion, of result.

Positive feedback mechanism.

Yes, of a good time. So one thing is get yourself into the gym however you see fit consistently. Have a good fucking time there doing what you love. Push yourself. Get those little mini victories, RP hypertrophy apps as you're doing a little better over time, and let that fill you up. Let that grow on you. And then after a while, also it feels great, especially after the workout. After a really solid leg workout, someone could punch you in the face. You'd be like, That was pretty sweet. And dolphins. See you next time, buddy. That's it. You don't give a shit. That stress relief, you're driving home after the gym, hard day at work, blah, blah, blah. You're thankful for shit. It's like a post-mushroom trip clarity every single time. And it's good for your health. It's just all these fucking massive green chalk boxes all around. You get into that habit, and that's the big part of habit. You get in the habit of doing the gym, and it's all this hurricane of positive influences and reinforcement. You're not going anywhere. Three days after not being in the gym, your fucking mother-in-law drags the family to like some in a fucking cabin in Northern California.

It's just us having fun as a family, no gym. After three days, you're like, You guys, this is going to turn this mans and shit about. I'm going to get the fuck out of here. You're at the local gym doing this, and then everything is right again. So getting up to the point, don't push yourself so hard that you hate the gym, remember, it's all voluntary. It's all for fun. It's a leisure activity. I have a PhD in a fucking leisure activity. Someone with a PhD in bowling has equally amount of social value, probably more. So it's all good. Start easy. Get to the gym twice a week, maybe three times, 30 minutes workouts, 45 minutes. Get some progress going. Get into the habit. Make it easy on yourself. Once you're in the habit for long enough, you can start to crank up the intensity, and you're going to want to be there. You never have to ask yourself the question again of what motivates you to go to the gym, because the answer is, that's where I want to be?

What else didn't we cover in troubleshooting? What are the other big ones?

Yeah. Have you been to our earlier conversation purposefully progressing in loads of reps? You haven't been pushing yourself? What the fuck is wrong with you? Like one of those guys that you mentioned, he's doing the 18 kilogram dumbbells all the time. Have you tried the 20s? Have you tried doing more reps? So making sure that person has gone to the head treating it as a thing. Another one is, where are you on the balance of recovery versus under-recovery versus over-recovery? If you ask someone like, Oh, man, my legs haven't fucking grown. Okay, how hard are you training your legs? Like, Pretty fucking hard. How long do you get sore for? Like, Well, I just don't get sore anymore. I got sore for the first couple of months of training. Bullshit. Anyone training legs properly? Properly, is this going to be sore from when they finish the leg workout or a few hours later until the day before their next leg workout, unless it's a deload week in perpetuity if you train intelligently?

That's definitely something I think that people get used to, which is this conditioning to training where you only are sore after the Christmas break. You only are sore after the deload week. And then you're back around and it's like, Oh, yeah. Weeks four through eight, I'm fine. I'm just like, I'm just recovered.

Ask yourself to the person who is in that position, ask yourself the philosophical question of is what I'm doing- Are you a bit? I've answered that in the affirmative long ago. I tried the whole mirror thing where I looked in the mirror and I'm like, You're a bitch.

World-renowned power bottom.

Still. Oh, yeah. Well, that I earned. Ask yourself a philosophical question. If you're used to some shit, And it's no longer experientially challenging for you. Are you really so sure you're growing your best? Overload is a principle in training, but it transfers into psychology as well. Your body is pretty fucking good at detecting what's challenging for you. If you're psychologically pushing yourself to the limits quite often, you can rest assured you're probably working hard enough. If you've been used to some shit for months and you're wondering why it's not growing you, why the fuck would it grow you? The body generally likes to resist being changed in many ways because in our evolved ancestral environment, we're very resource constrained. You don't want to piss away tons of resource hypertrophy. You have to continually challenge yourself. So if someone's like, Well, yeah, I'm like, Recovery is not a problem, I'm going to be like, Try training harder, try training more. If they say, Dude, I basically can't recover, I'm going to say, pull back. So it's two different answers based on how you're doing it. It's like if you're helping someone with your area, one of your many areas of expertise, which is, I assume, talking to women for the eventuality of getting them to do fun things with you.

If a guy is basically saying nothing, And he comes up to you, he's like, What did I wrong? You're like, You got to talk, motherfucker. Riz. No riz. You got to riz it up. But if he sits there like me and he's like,. He's like, I'm going to cut you off. Let me keep going. You're like, Come here. You have to talk less. Same with the recovery thing, pluses and minuses. I already mentioned the nutrition, the food thing. Sleep is huge. I'll put it very, very simply for sleep. I could talk a lot more about sleep and all the technicalities. I'll say it this way. If you are chronically underslept, I actually don't need to hear about your program or your diet. I don't give a shit because it's all just downhill. It's telling me about how awesome your new fighter plane is, but I'm like, What fuel are you using? You're like, We're supposed to put fuel in it? I'm like, The fuck out of my face. You have to sleep. It's critical. It's the cornerstone of everything. How do you know you're not getting enough sleep? If you can't stay awake throughout your day without a medical dose of caffeine, you need to sleep more.

Could be nine hours for you consistently, could be six. Roni Coleman, apparently slept five or six hours a night, more or less this whole life. Looks recovered For me, huge genetic differences there in sleep requisite, but you have to be getting enough sleep. So enough sleep, enough food, the training has to be sufficiently hard, and you have to recover. And then everything else is details. It could play with rep ranges, frequencies, so on and so forth. That's a troubleshooting list that's available on our YouTube channel. There's like an hour long bullshit, but those are the big pictures that I want to talk to people about.

Dude, you're a legend. I really appreciate what you guys are doing over at RP. It's genuinely, genuinely a big change I think back to when I first started training, 2006, 2007, scraping the bodybuilding. Com forums, trying to find a meme that might have the insight on how to get bigger. Putting horny goat weed in your custom My protein.

I still do that. Did I not get the memo? Right.

Okay. No, it's really great. I really, really appreciate what's happening with this evidence-based community. I genuinely think that what you guys are doing is making way more people, way more jacked with way less uncertainty. So if that's not moving humanity forward in a good way, I don't know what is.

Chris, thanks so much, man. That really is our shit at RP. All the fucking PR and marketing lingo aside and all my rich guy jokes, we're trying to help intelligent, careful people get the best information and digital tools they need to make their best results. Because Mr. Nick Shaw and I, the CEO, co-founder of RP. We came up in a similar world in which you did, where it was all bro science nonsense. We saw that just normal fucking smart people were not getting answers to their questions. They had the money, they had the intelligence, they had the time. There's just too much goddamn bullshit around. So when we start RP, we're like, You know what? We're not going to do bullshit. Just facts. Sometimes that doesn't sell that well. And some people ask us, Hey, can you put XYZ types of workouts on your app? The answer is no, because they're nowhere near optimal. You want someone to hold your hand and do things that you think are fun? Dope. Tons of other great companies to do that. You want results? You come see us and a few of the other evidence-based folks in this space.

Where should people go? They want to download the app.

Fuck, I know, man. I get that shit for free. My butler is downloaded for. Can we get my butlers on the show? Can you imagine three-hour episode with one of Dr. Mike's butlers You're like, What's your name? He's like, I'm Butler 57. You're like, Oh, God, you don't have names? No, absolutely not.

Sir doesn't like us to look at him in the eyes. Sir doesn't like us to know him by name.

As he answers that, he tilts his eyes away. You're like, That is an abused man. I've seen that before.

Yeah, that's hard.

Honestly, the best place to go is probably just the YouTube. So Renaissance spiritization on YouTube, if you can't spell that, I can't spell that. Rp strength, if you can't spell that, Dr. Mike Muscle, search the channels in black and red. It has RP. Just get in there, watch the videos.

There's great thumbnails, very well optimized.

We had some advice from Mr. Chris Williamson back in the day.

Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you for coming through.

I love being out here. Thanks so much, Chris. Away, get on fence.