007 Do all training programs maximise hypertrophy eventually?

and welcome back to another episode of Hyper HP Pass and Present. Thank you guys for joining us once again. Today we have, today we have the first time in our podcast where we've got a second workout from the same person. So I'm interested or I'm excited to share this with you guys. You can actually see how things have progressed along sort of like experience level when someone goes from beginner to a little bit more intermediate to a bit more advanced, how that's sort of changed over times. I'm not going to get ahead of myself. I'm going to introduce this in a moment before I do Chris. Welcome. How are you today? Yeah, I'm doing well thanks, Jake. Yeah, not too bad at all. Katie here. You're you're getting ready for some traveling soon. So I'm just always a little bit stressful, but yeah, I'll get through it. I can see suitcases in the background. Anyway, so this the plan we're talking about today is another one of red parks. So obviously red she guys I'm sure familiar with him, Missy Universe winner, multi Missy Universe winner in the 50s. Basically all the 50s is winning Missy Universe's first man or first bodybuild at the bench 500 pounds. So very strong guy as well. And obviously one of the most recognizable silver earlifters. Now a few weeks ago, I think two weeks ago actually we did a podcast where we looked at one of his bolking routines. So obviously you're just well known for this sort of five by five routine, which isn't sort of a classic five by five. I could sound a little bit differently, but we talked about that. And we looked at what you would kind of call an abbreviated workout plan. So it had fewer exercises, had more sets, heavy loads, and the exercise variation was relatively limited. And that was a fairly common thing for some of these silver earlifters to do at certain periods where they would focus more on I guess more compound lifts, more on weight gaining, more on strength gaining. And then they would talk about changing that routine to stuff that was going to develop a little bit more shape. And that would include more isolation exercises. So today what I wanted to showcase is if your goal is to maximize, if you're not talking early beginner, we're not talking just trying to get a bit of weight on, we're talking like really trying to develop the entirety of the body. That's going to look very, very differently. And so the plan I've got today from Gredge, this was a fairly advanced plan. He had a more advanced plan than this, but this was like the, I guess he had like a progression than he wanted people to go through. And this was like the last stage of that progression. It was the fourth of that progression. And then he had more like advanced specialization stuff like that. So this is a fairly full on phase. Like I just want to be up for him to be like, hey, there's a lot here. Okay. And he suggested people follow just for a short period of time. Again, this is a finite thing. You're not going to do this indefinitely. And then you're going to, I think he did suggest like a D-Lo like a week off when you finish this before moving on to a new phase. So again, just reminder, go back, check out our episode and just see how things actually change from that sort of earlier beginner weight gaining stage to what he's suggesting here. So without further do today's workout. So this was what he called his Misty Universe courses. So this is published in early 50s. And like I said, this is the last phase of that sort of four phase kind of training block. So we start with one of my favorite Silvia or lifts that behind the neck barbell overhead press. Three sets of eight. Basically, everything here was three sets of eight, except for carphrase, which we'll get to that in a moment. So behind the neck, then we moved into standing overhead dumbbell press. Now he did this in a more sagittal plane. So the behind the neck, obviously quite a wide frontal plane position. And now he's going to sagittal plane for dumbbell over. Then he's going to squat. And he in this plane, he recommended a front squat. He typically would alternate, like plans, one phase, front squat, one phase, back squat. And he did this with heels elevated. And he would superset the squat with the bent arm pull over, which they loved doing the Silvia area. They didn't go to failure with the pull over. They saw it more as a way of expanding the chest. It wasn't like a, yeah, wasn't a particular, I guess, fatigue exercise that they just sort of did it between after the squat. It was more to kind of get you breathing deeply and heavily. Then he went into a standing car phrase. Now with this, in this is the only phase I've seen him do this, but he normally he would do eight to 10 here. He did five sets of 30 repetitions. I mean, Chris, what do you, what do you think when I say that? So I think really everything that I could say about this car phrase is going to be applicable to the rest of the program because as we're going to see as we get through this, there's a lot of volume here. I mean, these workouts, am I correct in thinking that these workouts are done exactly the same three times a week? Yes. Yeah. So, you know, there's a lot here because obviously each exercise is three sets of a moderate load, wraps. So it's not, you know, I mean, on face value, that would be like perfect, perfectly in line with everything else that we've seen. But as you're probably going to point out, as we go through these exercises, that there's many cases where a muscle has been trained multiple times. So you end up with six sets. And, you know, I think with the with the gas stroke here in the standing car phrase, I don't think a gas stroke is going to get trained anywhere else because, you know, the soleus will be the prime and couple and top flexor in the squad. So I don't think we're going to see anything else training gas stroke. So actually, I don't think he's doing more sets here with the calves, with the gas stroke than he is with anything else, but at least not many things. The the strangeness is the rep range. So, you know, obviously, you know, historically a lot of people have said, you know, our train calves with high rep ranges and simultaneously they've complained that their calves don't grow. But I think that's probably just what we're seeing here, maybe, is a little bit of history about where some of that mythology maybe came from. You know, maybe, as I always say, when we go through these routines together, I always say, it'll be fascinating to be still doing this in six months time or a year's time with a totally different level of knowledge and understanding, because we'll have seen so many of these programs and described them and analysed them, that maybe we'll get to a point where we can say, oh yes, actually, we're starting to see this trend happening or, you know, maybe you'll have some reading that you've done elsewhere that you can bring light to some of these these tendencies. But, you know, at the moment, I don't really have anything insightful to say other than the, yeah, it's high reps and I wouldn't have expected that. As you were speaking, one thing you were talking about like the history of it and maybe stuff will evolve and will work out and maybe why they're doing some of this stuff. And one thing that they come to mind here and you've mentioned this in previous episodes is obviously the limitation with equipment and this is an example where either it was different ways that he did the carphrase and one way was with a partner literally having someone on your back, right? And he was actually playing around with different car facetises yesterday and I was doing donkey carphrases and one thing that I noticed is I was doing it unloaded. I didn't have someone on my back, I had a machine and I was doing it unloaded and I did it and I was like, oh, this is actually fairly challenging just purely with nothing on me, right? And then I put on 80 kilos and it's like, oh, this doesn't feel any different and I think I end up going 100 kilos or whatever and it was just by like the position I was in, the stretch I was in like that was the most challenging part and the low didn't make a whole heap of difference there and I wonder like and again, like I said, I put it in put on 100 kilos or whatever and I was still doing 12 reps or whatever it was with it and if he's literally using someone's body weight for the resistance here, okay, I can see why you'd be doing 25, 30 repetitions. Like, maybe it's literally just coming back to the limitation here with load. So it is a interesting, I guess, a question to ponder. Anyway, so then we had, so standing carphrase, then we did incline dumbbell bench and then from the incline dumbbell bench, you went to a flat bench. Now in this program, he used dumbbells, often he used a wide grip barbell, but he was using dumbbells as well. So we've got it incline into a flat, then he'd overhead tricep extension into either he gave the option of dips or what they called the line tricep's curl, which was basically scar crushes. So he was using an easy bar here. Then a vertical shrug, which they didn't, he did with eights again, you know, previously we'd seen him use a high repetitions in the in the bulking phase. He's gone back to eights and then an up right row, a barbell curl. Now this is an odd exercise seated dumbbell curl and what he did is he actually had the dumbbells touching. So they were like held together and he did a dumbbell curl that way. I haven't seen, I'm not familiar seeing any other silver earlifters do that. Maybe it was done. I'm not sure, but it certainly didn't seem to be a popular exercise, not one of your cold ridges doing elsewhere either. So I'd know if it was just for a little bit of novelty or what, but that's what he suggested here. And then he went into hanging leg raises, which we've seen in a couple of our other programs as well. So there's a lot there. What's not there? There's a couple of things that aren't there. That's a good point. So I'm trying to, I can't remember what Red Sparks last program was like, but I seem to spend my life on these podcasts complaining about the lack of good back exercises. I'm not seeing any back exercises on here apart from the shrug. I'm not seeing any wide grip pulldowns. I'm not seeing any rows. There's literally just a pullover, which as you pointed out probably wasn't a exercise that this is really interesting. This for me is like extremely strange to see a lack of pulling exercises in a program like this. Yeah, the pullover after I grow. Yeah, this not a lot is there. A lot of pressing, but very little pulling. And as we always say on these analyses, there's no there's no deadlift variations. There's very little hamstrings work here. Well, the interesting thing you may not remember in the last program we had from him, he did have both a bent over row and he had the deadlift from blocks. Yes, yes, it's possible that what we're seeing here is just what he perceived his own weaknesses to be. Yeah, you know, I mean, that's that's always the interesting aspect of it because on the one hand, there's a lot of exercise variety that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. As you pointed out with the pressing variations, he's moving between frontal and sagittal planes. We've got different inclines going on. um, you know, obviously the vertical and horizontal presses, there's definitely some interesting stuff here. Um, he's going between a seated curl, which I'm not sure how that looks, but maybe there's some differences there with the shoulder angle from the barbell curl. I don't know, um, and the triceps exercises are obviously different because they're using different muscle lengths for the, because of the shoulder angles, at least for the long head. So you can see that there's definitely some good attempts here to vary exercises in a way that causes the exact thing that you are setting up this program with, which is that it was intended to provide better shape, which, you know, really means training muscle fibres that you weren't training previously. Yeah. On the one hand, it's very interesting that we've got this exercise variation that clearly is going to do a good job. On the other hand, it's interesting that we've got these clearly huge gaps, which we would regard as monumentally, you know, kind of deficient in a, in a good training program. Um, and then, of course, the only other thing I would mention is, you know, what's going on with this volume? I mean, it's absolutely crazy, you know, got 14 exercises I've counted while you've been describing it. And that's 14 exercises with three sets per exercise. That's not going to work for many people, I don't think. Yeah, it's interesting. The first point you were making about the exercise selection, if you work through most of the upper body stuff, it seems like you nailed it pretty well. Like from a shoulder perspective behind the neck, frontal plane, that's pretty sweet. And then going into a schedule plane overhead. So we've got good sideduck, we've got frontduck, if we look at chest to do a flat bench going into an incline bench, we've got, you know, more sternal, we've got more clavicular. He's kind of done fairly well at varying the exercises efficiently to get different regions from most of the upper body, the triceps, he's done it well as well. But then lower body, I would say that there's probably a bit too much overlap on two bench press variations unless they use different grip widths. And I can see ways of targeting certain parts of the muscle groups more efficiently. But I think I would largely agree with what you're saying there, that the majority of what's here is actually really good. What becomes strange is the things that are missing. And a little bit unsure about how the upright row fits, you know, because I feel that that's overlapping with the curl variations that he's got and the and the and the delta exercises that he's already got. So really, for me, if that upright row was swapped out for a migrate bound or even a narrow row, I think that would that would be transformational for the program as it's written. Well, it's odd even the placement of that because he's placed it vertical shrug next to the curls because he sees it as a biceps exercise. Yeah. Or or back, but clearly not as delts. And he did, I don't know, you know, the way they did the upright row back then, they did row very high up. It was kind of like a high pull up to the sort of chin hides. So, you know, it was a little bit different how he do it nowadays, but still so exercise selection. A few things missing the mark here, some things he kind of did pretty well. And then volume. Now, I always find this very interesting, maybe look at volume when we look at splitting volume across different exercises. And it's interesting to wonder because do we have, would you say we've got good information on the effect of volume as far as muscle damage if you had to put those six sets in one exercise compared to those six sets in two different exercises? No, I wouldn't say that we've got good data about that at all. So it's possible that the way he's splitting stuff up maybe would have potentially less of impact as possible than if he put it all in one exercise. So from a physiological point of view, you can start from the ground and work upwards and say what's happening? So if you have, say for example, you did a squat variation and then you followed up with a knee extension. Really nice, clean example of how we might see something like this happening. So you do the squat, you're only going to get damage in the single joint quadriceps. You can't use the rec fan. You then add some knee extension sets on the end. You are going to immediately access fewer mot units in the single joint quadriceps because the activation is going to move towards the rec fan which has better leverage and you're going to use that preferentially. So you're not given that damage is exponentially worse in the highest threshold mot units with the fastest muscle fibers. Moving from the squat to the knee extension dramatically reduces how much extra damage you're going to create on the muscle fibers that you've just been damaging in the squat. So but it creates obviously completely fresh damage in an area that you previously weren't training. So if I were asked to kind of characterize why I think is going on here physiologically, I would say you're probably going to see similar total. This is this is very very very difficult to characterize I think accurately but I think you're going to see I don't think you're going to see a huge increase in damage in the single joint quadriceps when you add the knee extension on the end is kind of where I'm starting from. I don't think you're going to see a huge change because you're not you've already kind of gone after the most vulnerable fibers now you're kind of you know not going after those anymore. So your damage isn't going to be as bad on those but you're now starting completely fresh on an entirely new muscle and obviously they're going to start from the top and work your way downwards. So in the same way we always say hypertrophy is muscle fiber specific well damage years muscle fiber specific and so those exercises that where those fibers are not actually active but obviously we're not getting more damage in those fibers. We've actually got better data on regional damage after exercise than we have on regional hypertrophy. So this four or five really nice studies that have actually identified extremely specific locations of fiber damage inside muscles after various different types of exercise ranging from aerobic exercise through to strength training and even strength training of different exercises and the squat on the knee extension is a perfect example of this one. We've actually got a study examining exactly this particular problem where people have said okay well you know is the damage located in very different areas absolutely is located in extremely different areas as result to the selection of those exercises which is what we'd expect because activation and calcium on accumulation from that activation is what drives damage. So if you activate a fiber as much or at all you can't create damage in that fiber. So I think what we would expect is that if you were to say okay let's try and characterize what's going on. I think the addition of the knee extension after the squat wouldn't cause more damage in the same areas that the squat has caused damage and I think it will be relatively limited in those areas. It will be some but you're not going after the highest social motions in those areas to the same degree but it would create completely new damage in a totally separate location. So if you would say well okay let's just try and say well how many damaged fibers have we got and you know are they more damaged or less damaged. Well I would say you've definitely got more damaged fibers as a result of doing that extra exercise. So you've you've kind of started using a different exercise you've trained some knee fibers from the top down you know you're going to create damage from the top down so you're going to get more total fibers damaged and probably as a result overall you're going to get some more damage on a total whole body level. So then you would expect to have a bit more CNS fatigue as a result of that inflammation from those damaged fibers getting into a bus stream and this is really where I think people are starting to think so very brief interlude. So one of the things that I actually enjoy seeing and people probably think I get frustrated about this but I don't. One of the things I enjoy seeing is when people take the model that I've explained and start drawing conclusions from it and then arguing about it and so well you know and so one of the things that people think I must find frustrating is when people argue against whole body saying yeah but if you train the whole body then you must create damage in all of these places therefore you must have more postwork out CNS fatigue than you would do if your training is below a split and you're limiting the number of kind of muscle fibers into a totality across whole body. I'm not frustrated by that I'm pleased that people are actually thinking about physiology and making predictions on what they think a training program is going to do. Fantastic keep doing that and you know maybe in you know a few months or a year's time you'll get to a sort of place that actually explains something that I haven't explained. That's why I've done this not because I'm trying to you know do anything else I'm trying to get people to use physiology to explain how training programs work. So yeah I think that we have got this risk of training a large number of muscle fibers as a result of using extra exercises and creating more total body damage which then potentially would lead to a bigger postwork out central nervous system fatigue effect. So yeah everything else is interesting an interesting problem to address. Which effectively would increase the what the impact of that postwork as CNS fatigue in a session where it was still present but it wouldn't be increasing the timeline of duration for which it was present for would it. This is the interesting thing because if you have multiple muscles at different ends of the body so if you've like you know done biceps curls and then calf raises you know potentially there's some total of that information from both of those sources is going to lead you to have quite a big CNFT impact following day but as you correctly point out those two muscles are on opposite sides of the body they aren't going to be impacting on each other in terms of their recovery rates. So what you should find exactly as you just described is that again you get more CNFT but it dissipates in the same period of time. So really what it indicates is that training full body and then going back and trying to train full body the following day is likely to be extremely unsuccessful for that reason but you should still find that you're you know kind of every other day or your three days a week works okay for that you know for that for that for that explanation. So again you know I'm I think it's really cool when you know people actually walk through this physiological framework and say, well, okay, if this is true, then that implies that that should then be true, and then that implies that that should be true. Because ultimately, what we've been struggling with for probably 30 or 40 years in hypertrophy science is hypertrophy research is thinking that they can do hypertrophy research without paying any attention whatsoever to how physiology works. And so they start talking about training muscles, which is impossible, you know, training muscle fibers. They start talking about, stretch me to that hypertrophy when it's impossible, you've only got circumrogences. They start talking about creating hypertrophy with that, you know, with fatigue being present, even though you're literally switching muscle fibers off and stopping them being, you know, exposed to mechanical tension. And they kind of just come up with, you know, magical thinking of reasons why these things can be ignored. And it's fantastic to see people starting to push back on that, you know, and you've got people who've sort of been exposed to how the physiology works and they've learned about it. And they're now implementing that saying, actually, no, that hypothesis that you're presenting can't possibly be true, because, you know, size principle, because mechanical tension, because how fatigue works, because, and it's great that we can be in this situation where all we're arguing about now is how the physiology actually works in the context of a training, training, training program. You know, literally just a couple of years ago, you know, people would be saying, well, we believe in metabolic stress, we believe that muscle damage causes, I personally, I'm like, I can't talk to you, you know, you literally, you literally making stuff up, I can't talk to you. You know. Well, the arguments are what I would regard as interesting, they're based on reality as it is, rather than how hypertrus searches have been pretending it is, you know, which is, it's just so exciting for me to see that change. It's fantastic. So I don't get frustrated at all about these various different arguments, because I see them as necessary for us to figure out what's actually going on. But yeah. So when I look at a full body program like this one, which I've been talking about, and I see this huge amount of volume across lots of different parts of the body, yeah, it has this interesting challenge whereby we're going to see potentially a huge amount of CNFT the following day. And you know, he's not going to want to do very much, you know, maybe walk along the beach or whatever. But you know, potentially it could still more or less kind of work for a short period of time, three days a week, you know, but again, I think he is probably going to be doing a deal later after four or five weeks and doing something different. This is, this is, I think, the plan for me when, you know, we started talking a lot about some of the, the silvery guys and, and you know, obviously we've been talking about physiology for a long time. And this was the plan for me when I read it. I was like, this breaks what I believe this doesn't make sense to me. And that was maybe, maybe two years ago. And I remember going back to it a year ago, so I was like, oh, this might be how he's getting away with some of this. Like the, the fact that we've got, you know, the frontal plane versus the frontal, the sagittal plane for us, I'm like, oh, it might actually just be that we're getting different muscle fiber damage here. And yes, it's still high volume. And yes, it's going to exceed at least what a lot of people can, can sufficiently do within a single session, potentially exceeding their vocabulary in, you know, successive sessions as well. But it was that point for me, I was like, oh, that's how this could make sense. Yeah. And I think with, with what we know now, we could do an even better job of really compartmental izing stuff so that you could absolutely do, you know, your three sets and really push the activation away from certain muscles. You could change the resistance profile to make sure that you're, you know, you literally just do a lateral raise instead of an overhead press in the frontal plane, but you could do the overhead press in the frontal plane with a resistance profile, so the hardest part is definitively below shoulder height. I mean, really push the activation across to the middle delt, you know, similarly you could do your surgical plane so that the is a partial range of motion, so you're working much more overhead. And again, really targeting the anterior delt. And those little changes, I think, just have come with the development of the moment on research where you can actually see what's happening. So I think, you know, this is one of those areas where you can take a program that's been written, you know, sort of 70 years ago and actually make it better because of the day to that we now have available to us, but fundamentally it's still more or less the same. Yeah. Is anything else I wanted to comment on there, so any other questions I had, is anything else you thought was worth mentioning? No, I think definitely people are going to exclaim how much work it is when they put the numbers together. I mean, I think 14 exercises, 3 sets per exercise is absolutely crazy for most situations. But, you know, coming back to the beginning, this was designed to be a short period of time, four or five weeks, whatever, so, you know, maybe that's how it worked. Yeah. So, like I said at the start, I wanted to contrast this to previous plans where there were more abbreviated, where there wasn't as much work for different muscle regions and stuff like that. And the goal, obviously, of a plan like this is, well, you'd think to try to provide a similar size of the body as possible, even though there's some obvious shortcomings that you've pointed out. And I guess the question is, okay, he didn't quite get there, but what might it look to get there? Well, you know, is it even worse trying to pursue that? You know, what does it even mean to maximize growth? What does it mean to try to plan that's actually going to, people tell me, gains, maxing nowadays? Does it even matter? Do you need to do this? Could you, he's doing six sets per muscle, like you said, across to the next size, could you just have done one set and got to the same place in the end? Yeah, this is a really interesting question. So, what I'd like to do, and, you know, stop me if I start rambling, but what I'd like to do is just try and sort of define the question that has been raised in this area. And explain the key training variables that would contribute to essentially arriving in the same place, but more slowly, or producing a qualitatively different result. Essentially, I think what is being argued is that you can kind of do almost any sensible strength training program for hypertrophy. But after a couple of years, you'll kind of arrive in more or less the same place. Now, that's totally accepting the fact that you might get there quicker with some programs and more slowly with others, but you'll end up in the same place because, you know, as natural bodybuilders, you've kind of got a hard limit on what you can get. So, you know, you just have to accept that and, you know, it'd be done with it. Now, I'm surprisingly sympathetic to this point of view, people would go, you know, undermining your whole kind of, you know, philosophy. Well, I'm not really, I'll explain why, but I'm sympathetic this view because I do think that, you know, the natural limit is a lot lower than most people in today's day and age believe it is. And the reason for that is because they're looking at what people are telling them today. And as we've just spent an hour or so before this conversation talking about my faith in humanity is relatively low. And so I don't actually take anybody's word for anything. But if you look back to the photographs pre-1950, you know, you start to see people look much more reasonable in terms of what is achievable. And again, remembering though that those people were still genetically extremely gifted in the purposes of building muscle. So I think that there are going to be some training variables that do basically just mean that you get a place more quickly or more slowly. So for example, if you were to do a strength training program of the type that you construct or I would, I would write, you know, generally speaking, you could do one set for each muscle and you could do that couple of times a week and you would take certain number of years and getting to a certain level of muscle mass and you're going to probably struggle to get much past that point. You could get there a lot faster if you did two or three sets. So volume for all of the fuss that people make about it is literally doing nothing other than getting you to the same place slightly more quickly. And I think that is the truism that I'm seeing in this debate at the moment, which is that, you know, yeah, you can do, you know, this or that or the next and you're going to end up in the same place eventually, you know, and similarly, then reason and I'm like explaining the reason why this is not always true in the moment, but then reason you could argue the same thing for frequency. You could do an exercise twice a week or you could do it three times a week or you could do it every other day. You're going to end up in the same place, more or less, after a couple of years of training in that way, you're not going to change the outcome, particularly, it's just going to be slower or quicker. So in these examples, you have the same plan, effectively you've got the same plan and you're saying, okay, you can do an exercise, you can do an exercise, you can do it twice a week, you can do it a third time a week, okay, but it's basically the same effectively program and you're just changing the volume of frequency. Essentially, if you are getting that hypertrophy across the week, then frequency is not going to matter in the long term for what you're doing, it's just going to get you there faster. Doing three workouts a week will get you there faster than two. Volume is the same. Interested. So obviously, we're talking about do these training variables get you to the same outcome or a different outcome. Now, I'm prepared to concede at the very, very top end. You're going to see some differences there and I'll explain why that isn't on, but let me, before I go and argue the tiny, tiny, tiny details, let me argue the opposite side of the equation first. So what I've just argued is where I think the argument is correct in so far as if you modify work out volume or frequency within certain parameters, you're going to more or less end up in the same place after a couple of years. Alternatively, the opposite end of the spectrum, you've got things that absolutely 100% do matter and the red part program we just talked about is a really nice illustration of this. If you do only a small number of exercises, so pick powerlifting, for example, you're just doing your squat bench dead, maybe a couple of other bits and pieces around the edges. You are never going to be training certain muscle fibers and indeed certain muscle groups are just not going to get switched on. You're not going to get much gastroc at all, you're not going to get any long head of the triceps. You're going to get very limited brec fan and maybe even some hamstrings do what I'm just going to lack. And then that's ignoring all of the little areas. areas within muscles where pneumocannica matching means that you're just not switching on those particular areas of the muscle because you don't need them. If you contrast that with a program that has a much larger exercise variety, like the program we've just been talking about, and now suddenly you're getting much more complete development, that is qualitatively different. You could do the powerlifting program forever, and you would never get the hyperty in those muscle fibers that you're training with the wider exercise variety issue. So straight away, when I'm trying to illustrate here now, to juxtapose with what we've just been talking about, this is a exercise selection as a training variable that 100% matters, and if you don't get it right, you will not get to your maximum muscular potential. There is no possible way of doing that. It is physiologically impossible to grow muscle fibers that are not being used in an exercise. Can't do it. Now adding on to that, or we've now got to look at, is the training frequency problem for the specific exercises. So for example, the example that we've used in conversation before now is where people are programming leg extent, that maybe they're doing an upper lower split, I'm not backing on upper lower splits for the moment, I'm just using as an illustration. If you're doing upper lower split and you're doing two lower body workouts a week, and you do leg extension in one of those, in one of those workouts, and in the other workout, you do a squat or a leg press or something like that. Okay, great. What's going on? That you're basically doing one times a week frequency for the unique muscle fibers that are being trained in each of those exercises. So in the case of knee extension, rec fem, literally is getting trained once a week. So you need to be doing maintenance volumes at three or four sets to even keep it static. Not many people are doing that really who are listening to this podcast, you know, not many people are training with that kind of volume, maybe the knitting five sets if they're doing upper lower split, but that's again, literally just over maintenance. That's toppy. One problem actually happens with the sock merogenesis, the stretch meditis hypertrophy from the leg press or the squat, which you're not getting really from the knee extension because it's much more contractive position exercise. So you've basically got these two chunks of muscle mass, which are going to grow for a couple of days after each workout and then disappear by the time you get to the next one. Again, the frequency interacting with the exercise selection creates an issue for you. So we're not just saying here that, you know, you've got to pick the right exercises. That's absolutely true. You need a list of exercises that covers the whole body and make sure that you're not leaving anything out. Yes, point number one. Point number two, you actually have to train those twice a week. You can't, you can't train one exercise once a week and expect to get all the benefits of that exercise. It doesn't work like that. You know, there is a limit on how much centralmost command you can send to the muscle and that means you're going to end up with a deficit. What deficit you're going to see? A deficit is going to be the fibers you don't need to use because they're not doing anything useful for that movement. So frequency interacts with exercise selection very dramatically in those particular scenarios. Finally, we've then got the post workout fatigue problem. So, or actually, you've been before you jumped into that. I just make a comment on the exercise selection piece because this is a conversation online all the time. Someone will be like, oh, well, if that's the case, if you're going to train the exercise more than once a week, then how did someone get to grow any muscle doing this thing once a week? Because they were doing more than four sets a week. Or, usually, so I had this conversation just before we jumped on our call today with some semi-message, like, oh, but you know, this program only does where each exercise once a week. I was like, OK, show me. I'd like to see it. And they show me. And there was, like, say one day had an incline, one day had an overhead. And I'm like, OK, all this, all this happening here is a vent diagram. Like, simply the muscle fibers that actually in both of those exercises, they have the ones that are going to get bigger, right? And that is the difference between the rate of hypertrophy and the end result. So, if you're basically doing two exercises that are overlapping, like incline press and overhead press, then what's going to happen? You get a fast rate of hypertrophy in the fibers you're training. That's going to look great from a beginner's perspective. It's going to look OK from an intermediate perspective. When you hit the advanced level, what you're going to find is that the fibers that you're trying to grow just aren't actually, well, are they going to get a little bit of growth after each workout? And then they're going to just go back to normal by the time you get to the following week. Which in that case, exercise variation, like, it just makes no sense. Because you would actually be better off just doing the same exercise twice a week instead of one exercise once and now the other exercise once, because anything that's unique to that exercise, like you've just pointed out, you've done it and you've lost again, actually. Exercise selection is a plateau, plateau is the wrong word, is a maximum muscular potential modifier. Volume is not. So, what we're saying here is that when you're talking about this problem, which is, you know, do all programs more or less end up in the same place after a couple of years of hard training? No, they don't. Why don't they? They don't, because ultimately there are certain training variables that don't matter for that and there are certain training variables that do volume and within certain parameters frequency is not going to change where you end up. But exercise selection absolutely is going to change where you end up and frequency of that exercise selection is also going to change where you end up. Now, the third thing that's going to change where you end up is whether you're training with large amounts of CNS fatigue or not. So, if you're doing a workout and you're hitting high levels of, you're experiencing high levels of CNS fatigue either because you're doing that as a matter of course, maybe, maybe you just got in a habit of taking short rest periods. I mean, it doesn't have to be something about accumulated postwork up to you, just training with short rest periods. So, you don't hit the highest levels of recruitment, you can't train those fiber. Same thing happens if you are training in a state of constant accumulative fatigue. This is an interesting one because this is kind of where you say, "Well, will a bro split get me to the same place as one of your full body routines as long as I do the same exercise selection?" But, loads of volume, no, it won't because you hit the exact same problem for a different reason. Yes, you've got your exercise selection. Yes, you're doing enough sets per workout to make sure you carry over from one workout to next, but you are missing the top level of recruitment because you're constantly in a state of muscle damage, therefore you've got postwork out CNS fatigue, therefore you're not actually training the top level of the muscle in those situations. So, ultimately, there are variables that matter and there are variables that don't matter. And I think we just got to divide those out. So, that last point you just made with the CNS fatigue, so am I correct and saying this is going to be so controversial, so that any split where you have two consecutive days is likely going to be inferior in total ceiling of muscle mass to a split that has at least a rest day between sessions. Well, I think generally that's going to be true, but you have to bear in mind that if somebody is doing an upper lower split and training on consecutive days, but they are training in a way that minimises the amount of postwork out there, almost no one would be. That would be the exception. Well, I don't know that's necessarily true. I think there are people out there who have been looking at the physiology, they've been looking at the fatigue, they understand the fatigue is a problem, and they've started to do maybe one or two sets. Yes, but that would be the only exception to what I've just said then, is if you're doing one or two sets. I think a lot of people are starting to train like that. They're doing a couple of sets per muscle group and upper lower split, and they're doing very little in the gym, they're going in, they're doing maybe they're doing a back exercise and some sort of press, and then they might do a biceps curl, maybe a tricextension, they do a couple of sets of each of those, and okay, maybe you could argue that triceps are not being avoiding the problem, but we're not really interested in localising muscle damage issues at this point, we're more interested in, is this going to create a problem for my lower body workout the following day? The following day. I don't think it would do, you know, I think that would have to be an upper lower six times per week, probably to be feasible, wouldn't you say? You could still do that twice a week, absolutely, because you think about it, you need to do one set, you need to do, yeah, if you're repeating, if you're doing a, if you're only doing the same upper body and same lower body workouts every time, you could do that, I mean, you could absolutely do it. I mean, imagine, imagine just taking, take a really, really solid four body programme of, say, 12 or so exercises, which covers the whole body, which you might do, split it, split it, split it into two halves of six exercises each, and then do them on, you know, only four days a week, you're absolutely going to make progress, and this is a really, really nice example, because a lot of people will look at that six exercises of one set each, twice a week, and go, why would I do something that basic? Well, actually, that will get you, that will get you to your maximum, not to give the potential. It will get you there slower, but it will get, it will get you further than the, get you further there, down a roast bit, well, and it will get you further than a lot of other programmes, well, the change, I mean, so many people will go, oh, I need to do a complicated upper lower split, and I need to do different exercises on, you know, my first upper body workout, my second upper body workout, like you won't get as far about doing that, you know, there is an inferior way of programming it, inferior way of programming, if you want to maximize where you're going, where you get to, the maximum level of hypertrophy you can get to is determined by the breadth of exercises that you're doing that still have net hypertrophy across all of those regions every single week, that's it, that's the answer, that is, like, say that again, because that's everything summed up in a sentence. Where you're going to get to, your ultimate hypertrophy destination is dependent on the number of exercises or different exercises, the exercise variety that you're doing, and whether or not those exercises are each getting net hypertrophy across the week, which means basically you're going to need to train them twice a week, at least. So, one without the other does not matter, there's no point, like you said, no point having you this extensive list of exercises, but half of them have been trained once a week or two sets, you absolutely have to have the frequency and the exercise selection thing nailed down together. If you get that, then your destination will be the same. So again, people are going to think, oh no, he's undermining everything he's saying because he used to say that full body three times a week is perfect or every other day, but no, I literally just tell you what the model says. So the physiological model will tell you that your hypertrophy rate will be faster. If you do full body every other day I was dragged kicking and screaming into that admission not too long ago I prefer three days a week, but you know, it doesn't matter the point is that the physiology tells us where we're going If you do three three days a week full body or if you do two days a week full body with exactly the same Let's say we just pick a single workout and do it three times a week or we do or every other day or we do it twice a week You will get to the same place eventually. You will just get that faster if you do the three day or the every other day So there's some really cool validity in this argument, and I think hopefully some people have to now Re-adjust how they think about hypertrophy in general because I think most of the time hypertrophy researchers are extremely guilty of this most of the time people just think of hypertrophy as being like Better or worse, more or less. That's that's it. There's no kind of like you know difference between how fast you're going and how far you can go You know now what we're saying here is that this argument that's being you know kind of engaged in online at the moment Is a brilliant insight into the fact that there is a difference between how fast you and where you get to so how far you can go I have asked you and Excise selection with appropriate frequency will get you to the maximum possible place you can go things like volume Are going to do absolutely nothing for you. They're not going to get you. Sorry in terms of where you want to go They're not going to get you there, you know to a different location. Just going to get you wherever you're going faster So it's fascinating again that my hypertrophy researchers do tend to focus on volume And it's like well actually, you know in the long term It's not going to be that interesting as a training variable as excise selection Yeah, it comes back to that excise selection I think I said on the previous podcast the way I programs I always start by writing at the list of what exercises do I need and then I decide and volume and frequency and everything else But if you don't start with that like that is that's the variable. That's what you said here That is the variable that's going to determine where you end up Those are your boundary conditions. They are absolutely your boundary conditions your boundary conditions are the excise selection that covers the whole body as far as you want to Then secondarily you've got to go I need to make sure these exercises are all being trained twice a week after that once you've nailed those two things down Your options now open out and you can go these two things being true, you know, those are my conditions of continuing Now I can say well, you know, I can look up a body. Sorry up a lower. I can look at full body. I can you know choose how I want to structure But what's really interesting is that this is how the programs that you've been presenting to us actually worked So for example the Clancy Ross whereas I started out with a full body program But then as it got too big it got spooked out across two days and it's like well the excise selection was the driver Yes, the frequency and volume are kind of just like Once you've got that nailed down you would then move on to those questions secondarily so many questions I get are about what split should I use or those Those questions are going away now that I've got Now I said the weekly next thing as model has been the most amazing thing for avoiding questions about If I did it literally for no other reason it would have been for that But so yeah, it wants us about training splits and about volume or how many sets should I do them like you've had you haven't answered the first question Which is which exercises should I do and how do I do those twice a week now because if somebody has Personal requirements or schedule based requirements that mean they can only go to the gym twice a week They don't have any options. They have no options. It's like you want to go to the gym twice a week Then you are doing a full body program Identical workout every single time you're in the gym no discussion no argument There's nothing you can do because anything else you do is going to be massively inferior to that But any two-way split is the same again upper lower four times a week is the exact same thing those upper and Those are exactly the same you have to do the same session every single time you could literally push the upper lower split Four days a week to the absolute limit where you're doing five sets per exercise And you could literally just about make that work as a it would like function like a bro split in a way because yes You would end up with literally just getting to the next workout in a positive state and you'd be at a constant state of CNS T go all the time and because of your massive amounts of most of them is that you're creating so you wouldn't get to your maximum potential You would just about make it work from an exercise selection and a frequency point of view You would be suffering from the top end of the motif point of view And it's not even just up below it that suffers from this I see this with full body programming There needs to be a word for a full body or upload program which is programmed like your bro split where they have a full-body plan ABC and ABC can't work Exactly and they put a leg extension on on B and a hack squad and a barbell squad on ANC and it's like well This is a bro split. Yes, it is again full body a B repeating as in a B a B a B is brilliant and it I think is a really really enjoyable Split that worked long term because it's most flexible split you can do For me, it has one of the most enjoyable aspects to it because you're not grinding away every single time you go They do you may not try and hit the same exercise for the same numbers So from a psychological point of view, I mean training several years and you get an old like I am It's really nice to go in the gym and not to do exactly the same thing every single time you have an alternating split Yeah, ABC cannot work because you're limited to three sets and that isn't going to get you from one week to the next Now in an interesting debate to do to move this onwards a little bit will be to say well What if somebody's doing two different squad variations, you know, I mean Hmm can we can we just alternate between front squad and back squad for example? I mean with that that I think that's getting very close to being able to say well, that's basically the same exercise more or less Yeah, effectively, I think we said this in part so all we're talking about is an exercise which is which has effectively the same Moating on well, I guess muscle fibers are active and if that happens to be two exercises that have a different name But they're effectively the same exercise. Well, that's all going to be sufficient I'm like a lateral raise and I over had pressed in the front of playing with peak forces below shoulder I mean essentially it's going to give you for the muscle you're training the same thing So I think there's there's this kind of and I guess really if you want to take it to the absolute extreme level It's like having a couple of different gyms that you go to and they're all different branded machines And you know, you're basically doing the same movement pattern every single machine You can kind of take things to an extreme level But I think we probably sort of encapsulated that problem rather to develop this point and hopefully that's Given some clarity around this argument that we're seeing at the moment, which is that you know Just do a good training program and you'll end up in the same place eventually. Well, no, you won't you might but you don't Sterily you might not necessarily end up there. It really depends on what category of training program your particular program falls into No, does it suffer from a lack of exercise variety? Is it doing exercises too infrequently or does it have too much volume? So you're getting too much CNSD or any other thing that might give you too much CNSD like you know sort of excessive advanced training techniques or You know dropsets and that kind of thing or maybe you're doing Sure, I suppose as I say whatever it might be you end up with a lack of a tunic room and you don't train all the muscle flies If you're falling into any of those traps Then you won't get to the same place as somebody else who's doing the program that you know kind of allows them to maximize their Muscular potential But if you're listening to this podcast and you're doing kind of some sort of full-body program that repeats an exercise twice a week For you're doing an upload split that's doing the same workout same upper low workouts same upper workouts same lower workouts Then chances are then you will end up offend essentially in the same way. So yeah, so you can also stop asking me about how many sets you should do Well, you know, you made an interesting point actually on that and the conversation has shifted because the question was always What's the best split should I do this split of this split and then the question evolved to how many sets do I just And do one set should do to how many sets can I get a couple from and the question that you said and and I'm seeing this all the time now Is is exercise enough and there's two variants of that question is leg extension enough for my quotes or the other Variant of that question is is leg extension enough to maximize growth in my quotes and those are two different questions And it's kind of this whole topic question of will it get me to the same place or will it get me moving forwards at the same pace And it all comes back to exercise selection. So is our leg extensions enough? Yeah, sure if you're doing them with more than five sets once a week You're doing them twice a week. Yes. Is it enough to maximize growth? No as you've just pointed out before So this is really this conversation in a nutshell. It's like well, will all programs get me to the same point Will a leg extension get me to the same point? Will a leg extension and a leg risk getting the same point? It depends on exercise selection. That is that is a foundational piece in this entire conversation And it's so interesting that we do see a huge amount of exercise variety in many of these silver era programs You know, there's a lot of variety in most of them, you know And very very large amount of exercise variety generally very small number of sets As you pointed out when we started out on this little project And when we looked at some of the oldest programs, they didn't even have a set system Yes, exactly. I didn't know the word best The selection is the thing. It's like you just had this list of exercises that you did And you just did a single set for every single one Because the point is exercise selection. It's not about And yet now we've got people that you know kind of just doing a couple of exercises in our session Or they're trying to do multiple sets I think maybe as the set you know obsession the volume obsession has grown The exercise selection is necessarily shrunk Because people have you know kind of lost exercise variety in order to add volume And it's quite clear that if you want to maximize your ultimate muscular potential Then you can't do that without a wide average exercise you know in your program And ultimately that may mean that you see slightly slower progress especially as you're seeking that specific goal. simply because you have to spread out your energy across a wider number of places. I think it's, I think it's a really interesting question, a really interesting debate. I think it's hopefully changed the way that people see things. But I do fear now that my entire kind of feed is going to be full of people asking me exactly which exercises to do. Which should be fair, I think is, is people asking better questions. Like, that's kind of what we said is, hey, if you want to program well, I would always say to my mentoring clients, the most important thing for you to understand in all this. Once you understand fatigue and limitations to volume, although, arguably, that probably comes second anyway. But the most important thing for you to actually learn here is simply whether that's near mechanical matching or exercise selection, whatever you want to call it. It's just understanding what exercises are actually going to train, what I want to train. Once you've learned that, like your ability to program well, like that's the most important skill for you. Yeah, I think that's probably right. You know, I think, and then really once people have a foundation of, you know, what we know about various different movement patterns and how they use different muscles, that's when you can start see a little bit of experimentation coming in, people trying different things. And just as a kind of observation on this, it's very easy because of the huge amount of equipment available to us in today's day and age to, as you, I think you posted a video recently on Instagram, actually, of you messing around with a new exercise and inventing it as a kind of a new influence project. That's such a great example because you can go to a gym and you can kind of turn around in a different direction, give a cable over your head and suddenly you've got a new exercise. And I'm not criticizing people for doing this by the way, I'm just, you know, kind of, you can, you can, you can go to a gym and you can play around with equipment and you can find something. Now, I'm not going to discourage that. I'm absolutely not going to discourage that, that's a, that's a thing that we see going back to, you know, we literally had one today where he's doing that weird biceps curl with his hands together. I mean, fine, you know, experiment, have fun, play around with stuff, see if he can make me work. That's cool. The two things I would say is if you want to actually make a breakthrough and find something that works, then look at the physiological date that we've got. Look at the moment, Tom's, look at what's going on, look at how you can reduce muscle mass in the exercise, try and focus on another specific area of the body. Look at ways of doing that and work with physiology rather than working against it. Secondly, tie it onto this, bear in mind that almost every creative or inventive way of training a muscle is probably going to have a low degree of stability, unless you work really hard to fix that problem. So what I'm saying there is that because of the way cables work and because of the way the equipment setups work, it's easier to get a weird cable angle or, you know, different way of doing something. If you reduce stability, because you can just move in a different direction, stand somewhere else, you know, have the cable and you're going to massively reduce stability. As a result, you're not going to really be doing anything for that muscle. Even if you find a way to, you know, target a particular area of the body, which is perhaps previously not been targeted very effectively, you're not going to get the maximum effect from the muscle that you're training in that way. So it's a two-step process. Yes, find the thing based on physiology that you're interested in training. Fantastic. Now, figure out a way to make that stable. Use people. I just want to bank when they get to the first thing. They go, "Oh, I've found this new thing that trains this and I can feel it's different." And I'm really excited about it and I share this with the world and I'm going to name it after myself, you know, because everybody names it after me. I haven't even named anything after myself. And I find that really funny because, you know, I've kind of created a time model of how I virtually work, you know, and I haven't named anything after myself. But these people, you know, play around with the cables and suddenly they've named it after themselves. Cool. Go to the next level and stabilize it. You know, get the bench in the right place, get the cable pointing in the right direction, get your physically set up so that you maximize it. You get those two things right. You can actually start to get to an interesting excise selection, you know, and again, get to that point fantastic, you know, do a victory lap, brilliant, well done. You know, you've added something. But I think those two steps are important because as I say, it's really easy to create an excise that is different if you just mess around with cables and have no stability. Yeah. Pair that with stability. And now I'm paying attention to what you're doing because you've actually done something that is fundamentally interesting at that point is adding rather than just being a distraction. Hopefully. I hope nobody, I'm being a little bit flippant here, but hopefully people understand that I'm not being critical and I'm not discouraging this practice. I really think experimentation. No, I mean, I've done this quite a dozen times and brought it to you and asked you what you thought about it. The way I would go about excise tweets and, you know, ultimately, that's the way I view these things. Most things are not new. Yeah. Like most excises are not new. All you've done generally, or when I've tried to play around with the next size is I've looked at how do I take an excise and knock off the bit of that excise, which is not actually training the part of the muscle when it came. Which is the end. I don't know how to make it. Yeah. It's ultimately the whole car phrase that came from where people went from doing normal standing car phrases or toe presses and leg presses, suddenly just cut the top half of the range of motion off and it's transformational. Exactly. That was fantastic. And that was actually really simple when you think about it. No cables required. Precisely. Fantastic. Adjustment. And then the second bit that I would normally look at is how do I just make this more stable? That's it. It's a two step process. Yeah. And I think a lot of people, as I say, rush to share with the world their new discovery and they don't take the necessary time to get these stability nailed down. And I think ultimately where we see, you know, like, you know, just pick the hip thrust, you know, I mean, okay, you could argue that there are sort of glute bridge type exercises going back into the, you know, sort of maybe hundreds of years ago. But obviously Brett can try to popularize the hip thrust and like it or not, he's now associated with that. And I think you've done an amazing job in popularizing a really, really valuable exercise that solves a very clear problem, which is that, you know, glute training was focused almost exclusively on stretch position, instead of contract position, where the muscle has best leverage. If you want, like the perfect example of somebody who created the next size using physiological principles, and actually I would say Neurochemical matching before it was cool, before it even had a name, in fact, creating an exercise, which is also very, very stable. As you can see by the monstrous amounts of weight that people can lift with that exercise, even on a bench, even before you get to the machines that have been made, you can lift monstrous amounts of weight on those machines on the bench with a barbell. That is a perfect example of a really like the perhaps most creative exercise invention creation that we've seen in the modern era, really. When I compare that with, you know, the cable exercises done standing is different. Have you seen, I forget what the name is for these exercise, but it was meant to be like the perfect curl, and it was like a cable curl, where you kind of change and swing your body position as you're performing the curls, you kind of start from like back facing. That's a perfect example of what I would be trying to avoid happening, so that stabilization requirement from the full body is the disadvantage that we're seeing. So, you know, what we're trying to do in these situations is find a way to, yes, physiologically identify the muscle that we're trying to target, and then build on that by, you know, sort of stabilizing things as much as we possibly can. And I think the, you know, yes, the amount of weight you're going to lift is going to vary between muscle groups, obviously, but it's a really good litmus test, you know, if somebody by Brett invents an exercise, and you've got people hip-thusting 700 pounds, that's a pretty good indicator, really, that it's a very stable exercise, you're not going to move that kind of way to the exercises and not stable. So if, on the other hand, if you've got a cable and you're struggling to control a small amount of weight to get the exercise movement pattern you want, that's the opposite problem. Now, I'm not, I'm not bagging on cables, they just suffer from this problem more than any other implement. Yes, you can have cable exercises that work brilliantly, you have to put the work in to get the stability. And there are people doing that, I've seen a couple of examples where people have set benches up, they've set the equipment up, they've got the angles right, and they've worked hard to get an exercise that works, I'm not criticising them at all, you know, I'm illustrating the point that, you know, we need that stability, to maximise motoring equipment. So, hopefully people now have a road map that when they're messing around with the gym and they want to play around with this stuff, they do take that to step process and produce something that we can use. Yeah. So guys, hopefully we've enjoyed this conversation and it's given you a bit to think about as to how to get to your final destination and will all programmes get you there and potentially the answers no, but there's some specific variables here that matter more than others. To conclude, can you repeat, I've got you repeated twice before, but if this can be the one take away, I would be so happy because this is like the crux of how to programme well. So, the destination you get to, so your muscular destination, if we want to terminate your muscular destination, your ultimate muscular destination is going to depend on the exercise selection you have in your programme and the frequency of those exercises. So, you're not going to get to your maximum muscular potential by doing a small variety of exercises and doing those exercises that's frequent that you need and the combination of the exercise variety and doing those exercises individually at least twice a week. Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining in and we hope you'll join us for another episode next week.