015 Powerlifting part 1

Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mauseri and we're going to talk about powerlifting today and this may end up being the first in a series of conversations about powerlifting. We're going to focus on the main lifts today and on building maximum strength in those exercises. So really my section is going to be fairly short today because we've already covered the mechanisms of maximum strength in a previous podcast. So I think it was one of the very first ones we did. So if you haven't heard that, please do go back and review it very simply or in summary. There are probably about six or so mechanisms of maximum strength as in adaptions that contribute to increases in maximum strength caused by strength training programs and we can kind of divide those into the adaptions that happen in the central nervous system and then the adaptions that happen in the periphery. In terms of the central nervous system, our first adaption is obviously going to be an improvement in coordination. The second is an increase in the ability to recruit mot units. The third is a reduction in the level of antagonist characterization which tends to go hand in hand with improvements in coordination most of the time. In terms of periphery we've obviously got a hypertrophy and accompanying sarcomarogenesis. Both do pretty much the same thing as long as you've got the customers to attach the new sarcomers to the end of the museum and then we've got increases in tendance stiffness and increases in lateral force to the machine. So just summarizing how we might go about triggering those adaptions. In terms of improvements in coordination, we basically just need to show the brain a better option than the one it's already got stored and that really means kind of getting a better movement pattern out of a exercise that we've done previously. So we actually need to not only hit our very best coordination pattern, we actually need to either deliberately push ourselves to do a better one by some coaching technique or by using an external folks' attention. We actually need to go above and beyond the level that we've gone previously. So essentially it's a replacement of a motor program or an update to a motor program. So coaching and external folks' attention are great ways to do that and of course any fatigue that's present is going to stop us doing that. So fatigue tends to prevent motor programs from being improved ultimately because it causes a reduction or a breakdown in our coordination as we're doing the exercise. So in terms of increasing motor unit recruitment, we need to hit high levels of recruitment to make that happen. Again, that is problematic if we're in a state of fatigue or we've got any discomforting or unpleasant painful sensations going on. So you need to try and avoid those when we're targeting that particular adaption. As I say, antagonist characterization can kind of link to improvements in coordination. As far as the peripheral stuff is concerned, I'm not going to deliver a lecture on how hypertrophy works. It'll be relieved to hear. Similarly, I'm not going to talk about how soccer engines works, but I'm going to assume that most people listening to this have a understanding of that or if they don't then there's plenty of material on my FAQ or in the other broadcast that I do a check. As regards tenders stiffness, really that's going to happen as a result of training with heavy loads. Most power lift is going to do that, so not really necessary to think too much about that. And lateral force transmission, we don't really have a clear understanding of what is going to be or what is the primary stimulus for that adaption. Again, I think it probably does happen relatively often with heavy loads. There might be an argument for saying that we need supermax-money-centric to really max that adaption out. That might be something that people could think about in extreme scenarios where everything else has been tried, but I wouldn't jump to that as something I would look at first of all, because there isn't really a lot of data to support that particular idea. So that basically is the mechanisms of maximum strength. Obviously, just to reiterate, fatigue is going to create problems for many of those mechanisms. And what I mean by that is presence of fatigue while we're doing a workout has the potential to reduce our ability to stimulate those adaptions, especially coordination and mochi net recruitment. So that's enough for me. What we're going to do is we're going to talk about the programs that Rob is currently writing, putting together for his power lifting clients, and the kind of things that he's doing, and hopefully connect that with the physiological mechanisms that are underpaying the strength gains that I've just described. So, Rob, kick us off. Tell us about some of the programs you're writing. Give us a quick overview of focusing on the main lifts. We'll kind of leave the accessories stuff for another time. For sure. Yeah. Well, like Chris said, we'll cover all the accessories via hypertrophy in another episode likely, but when it comes to main lifts, I think, so only Chris is saying, the big focus has to be on identifying the mechanisms of strength that you're going to target, and then avoiding just being too fatigued through the training week. So when I'm programming the main lifts, squat bench and deadlift throughout either a three or a four-day split or cut of the most common, usually I'm looking to avoid excessively high volumes of training, avoiding excessively high reps. Most of the time in the main lifts, I'm going six and below a few reps in reserve, not a ton of sets. I think kind of the old-school programming style with parallel lifting, people do other, you know, volume blocks or volume days, and you'd have something like, you know, five sets of seven, five sets of eight, and that would probably be with the same load. So if you're working with a, maybe a couple reps in reserve, that might be something like a 10 or a 12 or a max, and things like that. And I don't really think that those kind of big volume days with those lighter loads are really super useful for strength. That overall volume is going to be very fatiguing. It's not really going to give you, you know, specific improvements in coordination, relative to like the loads that you're going to be needing and things like that. In terms of hitting high levels of recruitment, you're not going to hit as high as you will with a heavy load, a little bit chav failure. So you're not going to get the same adaptations there. And then, you know, typically, if you do a volume day early in the week, a lot of people might do the heavier day at the end of the week, or even vice versa, a heavy day early in the week, volume day later in the week. But then your next heavy day is still saying the following Monday or Tuesday. You're still out of the time getting a lot of fatigue, caring over from those big volume days into your heavy, you know, some people call them primary sessions. And in that case, I definitely have people in the past that have come to me, you know, I've coached and they'll have issues on the heavy days where they feel off the movement pattern feels strange. I'm sure we've all like walked a heavy squad out and it just feels odd. And that's, you know, that's a product of fatigue, caring over the movement pattern does not feel as good. Obviously, you're not going to be quite as strong. And then, you know, you might think, oh, it's just an off day. And I've heard that a lot. Yeah, I had an off day and my technique didn't feel crisp, you know, things like that. And really, you know, I look at that and I go, no, you didn't just have an off day, something throughout the week, you know, whether it's something I did or could be something outside the gym, but has left you fatigue going into that session so that you can't actually execute the way that I need you to. And then like Chris just saying, you won't get the improvements in that pattern going forward in the strengthings as a result of coordination in that. So there's something you mentioned there that was really important that I didn't kind of cover in detail in my little intro. And that's that the coordination pattern is load specific. So especially in the kind of multi joint exercise, the way I'm describing here is definitely very low specific. So ultimately, we see that there's a different ratio of joint talks, for example, in muscle activations in squads with different loads. So the closer we can get to our kind of open a weight, really, the better we're going to be in terms of making those improvements in coordination happen in a load and task specific way. So really, when we were kind of chatting before the podcast today, and I was like, you know, the thing that I keep coming back to when I think about powerlifting is how many times can we basically practice the kind of the competition lifts in a state of low fatigue and as close to the weight that they're going to open with as possible. That's kind of, if I were to write a single set statement of what I want to try and achieve with a training program that would kind of be it. And that sounds crazy because you're like, well, actually then there's a lot of ways that you could do that. I mean, I can imagine, you know, someone with a fondness for clusters like Jake, probably putting a routine around clusters together that would do that, you know, or as you were saying, Ripson Reserve would again get us pretty close to that as well. But ultimately, sort of going straight in and hitting sets to failure probably isn't going to be the best scenario in most cases. Yeah. And particularly with programming for the denlift actually in the past, I've used cluster sets and configurations like that because you get that practice off the floor as well. So sometimes if people are rushing doing reps back to back, they're not really taking as much time as they can or should for the set up off the floor. Obviously it's not specific is it because if you kind of really bouncing the bar off the ground, I mean, like there's no longer specific to the actual kind of competition effort that you're going to do. It's kind of more of an ego thing, you know, and even if you do like a quick reset, you know, a lot of the times you're trying to bang out rep after rep, you wind up out of position, you wind up, you know, rep one, maybe it's good, rep two and three or a rep four is back to good. You're not taking your time for that set up or is he giving yourself a little bit of time between just doing signals or maybe a double some of them. like that tends to work really nice, especially on conventional demos I've found. I keep the tend to keep volumes even lower on those and the frequency lower because they just tend to impact people on more than like Sumo, much shorter range and not really usually as fatiguing. You're not taking anything through a really large range of motion and that, so Sumo, I tend to find you can program a little bit more frequently and maybe with a little bit more sets and reps, conventional, I'm definitely going like very low volume options and lower frequency for the most part. So I think there's obviously a couple of things that people will find difficult to kind of grasp when it comes to low volume powerlifting training. I think obviously on the one hand people tend to want to do a lot of practice, which is a good instinct, I think, the problem is of course that when fatigue occurs, then the practice isn't doing what people think it's doing. So we're kind of just tempering that urge to do more practice by saying yes, your urge is probably valid, but you just need temper and say let's try and figure out a way to meet that requirement without essentially losing the adaption that we're seeking in the first place. So that's kind of the, that's kind of the place I always start because I think people massively underestimate just how important coordination is for improving strength gains across the board, but obviously multi joint exercises more so than single joint stuff. And I think people think coordination like stops, you know, relative, I've had people talking about that and it goes on, you know, for the first say, like few workouts, few weeks, and then you're not getting improvements after that. But you know, obviously we know you absolutely are for a very, very long time, it's always contributing. And I think the other side of this kind of instinct for doing more work, more volume, more reps is just I think a misunderstanding about what's necessary to stimulate hypertrophy. Yeah, you're using the main lifts and the main lift volume to stimulate the hypertrophy you need to keep driving them and thinking that just drawing the same lift over and over is going to give you growth in all the necessary muscles. So there's that side of it, which we're kind of kind of trying to avoid doing there today, but also just a simple volume dose response. So like you were describing at the beginning where people are doing sets and reps much, much higher than what you're programming. So kind of aiming in that sort of, you know, I think you said five by seven or something like that for about five by eight, but that kind of territory, and then they're trying to come back a couple of days later and do the same thing again or do something different. Whereas you're getting, and they think that that volume is necessary to kind of stimulate meaning meaning for hypertrophy. To be honest, I have noticed that it's less common now for somebody to say to me that they think that a more advanced lift or, you know, even an immediate lift needs to do more volume to stimulate growth because, you know, that volume is forcing the growth in that. It's getting better. I'm not seeing that claim quite so much now. I think the whole kind of, really detailed analysis we've done on things like the Weakness, Domino's model and other demonstrations of how hypertrophy can occur with quite small volumes like one set to failure twice a week. I think that's starting to get through to people that that's not really a thing. But yeah, so ultimately, even though you're programming low numbers of sets and reps and even a couple of reps in reserve here and there, you know, your multiple times per week exposure to those lifts is still going to produce hypertrophy and, you know, majority of the relevant muscles for those exercises even though the programs are low volume. I think that's probably something that a lot of people would look at your programs and initially go, "Where's the hypertrophy part?" And that will, it's baked in. I mean, it's there. It's there. And then there's the specific accessories we'll get into next time. You can come back to that and I keep pulling you away from it. And I think the other thing, and we can talk about this a little more in the next time, but it's very relevant to the main lifts, is the idea that you should do a main lift and then something that very closely resembles it. Some people would say for hypertrophy, some people would say to like practice, you know, technique and those things. And I don't have like necessarily a massive problem with it, but the idea of doing say a bench press and then a dumbbell bench press or a squat. And then a safety bar squat and things like that in succession, in a session, ones of getting pretty redundant. And it was the old ideas. I think that's very similar to kind of those ideas, like some of the periodization stuff that we talked about recently where people are doing it because it kind of looks like it should work. And it's like, no, you've not started from the ground up and worked your way up from the basic principles. You just kind of sort of tried to figure out something that looks cool instead. And if it does work, you're very likely, you know, isn't working for the reasons people think because like, like say you take a low bar squat and then you add a safety bar squat to full depth or something, yeah, sure, maybe the safety bar squat to full depth gets you a little bit of work and some muscles that might not get hit quite as well in the low bar. But, you know, in the same end of that, you could use something isolated and not fatigue the hell out of yourself with a bunch of sets of squat. That will toast you for the next sessions or later in the week. Absolutely. Show up so much time and energy because they require so much warm up for and, you know, all the rest of it. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's definitely true. So in terms of, I mean, one of the things I noticed that people really get wrapped up in about powerlifting is the kind of the sets and reps schemes. So that's kind of why you look at a lot of articles, most of the article is really just taken up with tables with kind of like this many sets of this many reps and with this percentage of warm right back. I'm glad we're actually a long way away from that. Like, I remember looking at the internet like, you know, 10 years ago and every single power lifting article you looked at, I was just littered with references to the percentage of warm right back. Yeah. People are using that one, honestly. Things like that. Massive differences between people in terms of how many reps you're going to get for any given percentage of warm right back. If you even know what your warm right back is, I mean, which is real, but which one makes do you want to use? Yeah. So, but in terms of, you know, kind of that, nevertheless, that still is something that people keep going back to. It's like this, you know, what, how many sets of how many reps do I do, you know, and how many times a week, and I'm like, am I doing that? So just kind of preface it before I ask you the question, let me just preface this with like, when we're looking at a powerlifting training program, what we're trying to do, like I said at the beginning, is hit these mechanisms of maximum strength. We're not really worried too much about most of the peripheral stuff, because that's either going to happen automatically, like the tendons stiffness and the natural photon machine. All the hypertrophy side of things is either going to take care of itself through the main lifts, reps, sets, but also with the accessory work that we'll talk about on another occasion. Really we're thinking mostly about the neural side of things and neural side of things really is just going to be about fatigue management, avoiding hitting, you know, situations where we're doing a rep and it's not triggering either an improvement in coordination or an increase in motor unit recruitment. So it's about trying to get a lot of un-fatigue reps in, is a short way of saying it. So like I said before, probably loads of ways of doing this, people could do clusters, they could just do straight sets. I mean, there's a whole load of different ways, but in terms of the straight set options, let me ask two questions, and you can kind of pick which one you go with the start with. So do you have a, like a guiding principle, like the total number of reps that you want to do, or separately, do you have a number of kind of set rep schemes that you keep going back to, and do they have different kind of reps in reserve, and how does all of that fit together? Usually, I mean, I think so mainly probably the one that I use the most often is going to be like a simple, like patient lift or model, you know, like Helper and S. So you just take whatever your fiber at max is, and I might have someone initially test around the fiber six or a max to find that, and then get back to a few sets of doubles with that way, adding a rep or so session until we get to triples, sometimes push it up to four or even, and then just increase weight, yeah, bring them back down to the doubles of an appropriate weight, and then repeat, I really like that a lot. It's super simple, super easy to track, you know, generally it keeps progress moving forward very slowly, so that sometimes, you know, if you get too fast, or people use too high volume things like that, you get all these kinds of like overused things, tendons things start to hurt a little bit. So if you just manage it very, very slowly like that, you give time for muscular adaptations and tendon adaptations, I just noticed people tend to get less pain and stuff that way, like you can just train and run a block out from much longer, you know, that way I don't have to start back, again, maybe a lighter, a little bit lighter weight, maybe more reps and reserve or anything like that, I can just run it out for a very long time, so that's that, if I just use straight sets, maybe like a three by five or three by six, I guess total number of reps is going to be anywhere from, you know, if it's three by two, it's going to be six, if you work that up to a three by three or three by four, it's going to be nine to 12, you know, I don't worry so much about the total reps and the total sets, as I do you just week to week, I'm checking, you know, how everything's moving, how the bar speeds are, things like that. and just monitoring like, you know, the athletes feedback. If it seems like it's going well, I won't change anything. If it seems like for some reason they're not responding, you know, that point, I'll assess like what the reason for the plateau might be. And if it seems like it's not enough stimulus, maybe do something with hitting a few more reps, if it's, it's not usually that. And then if it seems like it's fatigue or, you know, knocking in a room and then go and address those things. So you mentioned Hepburn. So the classic Hepburn routine is eight sets of two rising to three with around about a five or eight max. Now, people who've followed me for a while know that I did that for about 18 months. So I did everyone I like it actually. I was only able to do it twice a week. I couldn't do it three times a week at the time, but I was probably a bit older than most people when I started doing it. So I've never been something to do with that. So do you ever go, do you have a program as high as eight sets of two rising to three? So it does depend. I mean, most people I have currently are training three times a week. If I have someone who's training four, maybe I'll do a little bit more sets each time, you know, they can just recover from a little bit more. So when you say, you mean that there's a split routine? Yeah, yeah, someone just usually it's for the sake of time, per session. I'll split it up in the four days a week these days and then do upper lower, upper lower, some more like that. In that case, since it's more recoverable, recoverable between the upper days and the lower days, I might do a higher number of sets. And again, if it seems like someone's not responding to some reason on the lower end of the volume, you know, I might increase the sets, but still keep in the reps low since it's another thing people use to think, you know, high reps more recoverable when that is. Well, yeah, it's actually a really important point about the workout, sort of split, being a kind of time, per session because ultimately, if we're trying to get coordination improvements and we're always going in and doing, say, ask what first and then a bench afterwards, that bench is really kind of playing a second fiddle. Yeah, there's a coordination adaptions. So there is actually an argument to say, well, if you have the ability to do an upper lower split, then you could say, well, a bench is getting a first position on this second workout and the squatters get in the first position on the other workout, and then you've actually now advanced the ability to improve coordination in both of those lives. I think that's an interesting point there. Yeah, with the power of doing upper lower splits, I do tend to find work really well, you know, no, if you're, I mean, even hypertrophy, obviously, but power of doing because you just have to fit so many exposures to the lifts in a week. Yeah, sometimes it will just help someone with getting enough, whereas if, you know, and try to three times a week, like I try to three times a week, I can get enough in, but I also work in a gym, I've kind of unlimited time, other, you know, in the middle or after my day, but someone else might have maybe an hour tops, and they get quite a bit in, you know, maybe sometimes we've five minutes, so you gotta figure out ways to split it up and still make it work. Now it's like you said, if you place different priorities on different days, then you can absolutely maximize that lift for that day, in a way, it's nice. Yeah, and I think that's something I've not really thought about in detail before we talked it through. I think it makes lots of sense. So yeah, so basically just for people who are definitely, you know, so definitely listening out for the information of sets, reps, that kind of thing, you know, starting from a kind of a Hepburn type routine, when I say, when we say to Hepburn type, it means that you don't necessarily need to do eight sets of two rising to three with a vibrant max, you know, it can mean, because I mean, I have vivid memories of doing that, some of those vivid memories are not very pleasant, but definitely, I think I would probably start with five sets of two rising to three, even if it was only two times a week, I think five would probably my starting point most of the time. I've said before that five sets of three is probably a really solid strength type routine, just in general. Yeah, I'm not necessarily having to be powerlifting, but I do really like the progression model of two rising to three, because as you say, you can kind of just put your sort of brain on autopilot and know that, you know, you've done, you know, five sets of two this time, then next time you're going to do a one set of three plus four sets of two, and then you just keep doing that and doing that until you've got five sets of three, and then you start again. The interesting that you mentioned going up as high as four, so you're going between two and four, I would guess that was when you're starting with a six rep max. Yeah, yeah, if someone's, if someone's starting, I have them do a test day, trying to find a five or six RM, and, you know, maybe, maybe they know it, maybe they don't, I might run the progression out a little longer, you know, it's not like sets of three versus sets of four. The recovery and fatigue and that is going to be vastly different, and if it's going really, really well, and I feel good, I just might run it, you know, set of four, you're still getting very good work in versus set of three, I don't find a massive difference. Totally. I think there's an interesting observation there, which is that, if I, I guess if I thought that coordination was a really important factor for somebody to be working on, then keeping fatigue even further away would be an interesting way of doing that, obviously. So that would be like, well, you know, can we, can we get that extra set of repetitions in with a little bit less fatigue and really practice the lifts? On the recruitment side, I think it really depends on the execution of the lifts. If, if, so some people are going to be quite happy doing explosive efforts on every single repetition of every single set, other people are going to be like, can't be bothered with that. That's too much like hardware. So you only really get the kind of max efforts on the end of the sets. So I think this is a really interesting point. I think it really comes down to the fine tuning of this really depends on the person. Yeah. Because if you've got somebody who really needs the coordination practice, then you want to keep them away from that kind of really fatiguing rep, the grinders, or as for somebody who's perhaps the coordination is okay, but you're struggling to get them to do really high effort repetitions to really push the mochi new recruitment thing forward. Then you actually want to let them get a little bit close to pay for that. Yeah, that's the only rep that they really, really push it really hard. Definitely avoiding like, you know, the classic like a power for will tell you they have like an R.P. seven or eight. And it's a quarter, nine or ten, and they have nothing to do today. Sure. He's definitely caricatures here, but yeah. So there's kind of the different groups. And yeah, just to be clear, the reason we're kind of sort of dis, we would be discouraging people from going that close to failure too regularly is just, is the intersection fatigue is going to make the stimuli from the later sets in that work out less effective. And it's also going to make problems for the next workout because we're going to arrive in the next workout in a fatigue state, which means that lots of these neural adaptions just aren't going to happen. And there's going to be a little bit of reduction in the peripheral ones as well. So I think ultimately this kind of fatigue management is going to be really, really important. And I've made this point before, but you know, we know that fatigue is a problem for hypertrophy and local muscular adaptions, but the difference between central adaptions or central nervous system adaptions and local muscular adaptions is that central nervous system adaptions tend to be quite binary. They either happen or they don't. And so if we just have a little bit of fatigue, then we just kind of immediately the rest of the workouts not going to create the adaptions that were interested in from a neural perspective. So arriving in a fresh state, I think you made a really good point earlier when you were like, no, off days aren't just off days, their information. Yeah, they're happening for a reason. The really important information. So like, I mean, interestingly, just on that, do you just go off progressive overload and how people feel? Or are you doing any kind of testing to see whether people are experiencing any kind of accumulative fatigue? So for example, are you doing like a jump test before you do the squat session? Yeah, and especially like, I do like kind of the PIP type stuff precession in the warm-up, same as I would with athletes. Are you automatically doing a jump anywhere? That's pretty cool. Yeah, I sell you that a lot, just a vertical jump, some of like that. And then if all of a sudden, you know, one day said they trained Monday and then Friday, it's down three inches. Oh my god, something has gone terribly wrong here. It's an extreme example, but yeah, if that's now looking good, then I'll, you know, I'll know that something, I got to just something maybe the following week and that. It's a very reactive programming style, but it works super easy. Yeah, I mean, that's probably kind of the main test I use that and just, you know, monitoring. Some people really like the apps to monitor bar speeds and things like that. And if I'm going from, you know, a previous session, say they're ramping up and it's moving a bit slower, I know also that something's gone probably wrong in the week there. Yeah, I've had some piloting coaches go through the mentorship program who've been, who've used the the bar speed monitors a lot. And they've got some really cool data and they've done some really cool monitoring. I think it's really, maybe even I would say it's definitely underrated as a thing to do, but it does chew up some serious processing. Yeah, we've got to do it all right. Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff that he's done with, you know, I'm going to go ahead and lift his, and he, he pilots a great pilot for himself. But he does. tons of that with his guys, the VBT and that, and there's a lot of really cool things and he has, you know, plenty of world-level guys, very high-ranking lifters that have a lot of success with it. I think there's a lot there to be to be learned. I think it's really cool. But I also think that they're just doing a counter-moving jump and getting a number on that is a super cool way of taking a big step in that direction without doing an absolute ton of analysis. So that's pretty cool. So with that counter-moving jump, this is just me asking you a question because I'm interested more than anything else. With that counter-moving jump, have you noticed that because, okay, so this will depend on somebody's athletic background. So if somebody's coming into powerlifting from a previous sport, probably this isn't going to be applicable. But if people are coming into power lifting from not having done kind of maybe a lot of team sports before or any kind of track and field, do you find that initially the kind of vertical jumps are kind of just kind of going out quite quickly? Yeah, yeah, huge amounts. Because the problem I always used to face was that you want to use counter-moving jump height as a monitoring metric. But you kind of throw them at your client, you haven't done a lot of them before and the coordination just goes through the roof. So everyone's kind of jump height just goes skyrocketing. It's certainly more useful once it's kind of plateaued. That was down, yeah. And then, yeah, and then like once it's leveled off for a little while, I know it's kind of hanging there. Yeah, initially like someone's squat strength goes from say, you know, like three, 15 to four, 40, something, something like that. Their jump height goes so far up so fast. Yes. And yeah, like at that point, obviously, every session it's going up, it's not so useful. But once it just levels off there, then you can use it a lot more effectively. I think that's an important observation because I think there's there's occasions when people are looking at the vertical jump height and they're going, oh, it's not going down. So everything's all right. I'm like, well, yeah, I'm just looking at history. Has it been kind of skyrocketing up for the last kind of couple of weeks or months? Because I definitely noticed that when you kind of introduce high velocity work, like a throw or a jump with people who are, you know, maybe kind of intermediate low power lifters or kind of moving towards, you know, being very competitive, you can just be really misleading because it's just yeah, moving too fast. Yeah, for me, it's just the same object answer. Okay, yeah, we're your background slide. Yeah, I guess, I was going to add a jumping. But I think that's, um, but that's that's just a useful point as well. It's like to notice that the high velocity stuff probably, um, will create an increase in recruitment. Um, but um, other than that probably doesn't transfer very much to the, um, exercises into the main lift. So I think there's this kind of ideas that, um, maybe power just need to do high velocity work. I think, um, it will increase motina recruitment, but so will the main lift, so I'm not going to argue by the way for that. But, um, if we're doing it any way for the kind of monitoring purpose, and we don't need a lot of repetitions to do that, um, we certainly don't need to be using a barbell to do it. I mean, just do it. Yeah. Just do it unloaded. Just do it unloaded jump as part of the warm up or unloaded, um, you know, or perhaps doing a medicine ball throw for the before the bench or whatever. Um, then obviously it's going to be really included in the warm-up. It's going to give us a monitoring, um, kind of a capacity and it doesn't chew up sessions by having a kind of a whole day dedicated to, you know, fast lifting. I mean, that's, I don't think that's necessary. So awesome. Cool. I think, uh, uh, I think for the, like the PIP kind of end of things, I think a lot of people still do opt for another thing they wrong without working up to like a, a top kind of over warm-up single, um, for the potentiation effect when they could probably just do a jump and it just, another round the single and it'll give you like the, the load-specific coordination and all those things. But just choose up a lot of time, like if you're already pressed for time, ramping up to a heavy single before you back off the report, um, you know, just very likely an additional 5, 10, 15 minutes maybe depending how heavy you're going. So again, like the, the jump end of things is just easy walking there. You do a few and then you do your work. It's very good. And on the, on the jumps, I guess one more thing we can add is that, um, if we are moving towards a sort of slightly higher number of reps, like in the Hepburn kind of routine, if we're moving towards doing three and fours instead of, um, twos, then something that can happen, um, is that the rest periods need to get longer. Yeah. And, um, one of the unfortunate things about the PAP effect is that it only lasts, uh, probably, uh, sort of four or five minutes. So if we are kind of starting to push that rest period up to the top end of that five minutes, um, because of the higher number of reps and the large number of sets, then I would imagine that would be one of the few scenarios where I would actually have a PAP effect, uh, jump before I did another, uh, sets of the same exercise. So normally, yeah, you do a jump and then you do your sets and the previous set gives you the PAP effect for the next set is just like it just happens baked in. And it's certainly baked in in a hypertrophy world where you're not needing that much time to recover between sets, but if somebody's doing sets of squats and they may be doing sets four, and they've done, and they're, they're, they're kind of doing, uh, five sets of four, and towards the end of that batch of sets, I would imagine that the rest periods are going to need to probably start creeping up. Um, so, yeah, definitely, you guys have to be aware in my case, uh, just as an interesting point. So I, I did the whole headburn thing eight by two rows into three, um, and, um, I was probably flat on my back between the sets, uh, yeah, very, very. I was gassed and I was needing, I was, look, I was literally watching the clock and I got to the point where I was like, I'm going to increase my wrist periods from like up to seven minutes by the time I was going to, and people would just say, oh, no, no, no, you were cardiovascular, you know, you know, kind of, you weren't fit enough. I'm like, I was cycling a hundred miles ago a weekend while I'm doing it. There's nothing wrong with my cardio. That's all. Um, so it's, it's just some people, I think, just have that metabolic response to, I think it comes down to the ratio between the muscle mass and the cardiovascular system. So it's not about how good your cardiovascular system is. It's how much muscle mass you have relative to what your cardiovascular system is capable of doing. Yeah. Uh, I think that's the, that's the issue. I mean, I, I've even heard people say, like, you know, sprinters who get out of breath are out of shape. And it's like, no, they're just creating an enormous, enormous metabolic response. Yeah. So when there's a squat when 800 pounds for five reps, they're not out of shape because I have to rest. And they did a squat who made 100 pounds for five. Yeah. Yeah. It's the, it's the lactate production is just gigantic. And that is, that is a trigger for the cardiovascular system to then deal with that, um, kind of by upregulating, um, breathing rate and all the rest of it. So ultimately, I think it's, um, yeah. Coming back to what point I was making, I was just saying that as the rest periods get longer because of those scenarios, you might find that a pop effect vertical jump prior to doing another set is an interesting thing to do. Because it just kind of refreshes that, um, pop process, uh, which you wouldn't have needed to do, uh, normally because you'd be doing sets, uh, sufficiently close together. But when you're not doing that, you might want to drop one of those, uh, in, I think it's an interesting, but the only occasion I would ever see that happening. Yeah, definitely, definitely a good idea. Cool. Okay. So, um, we've been running on a while, but can you give us, and we've got plenty more episodes to talk about powerlifting, so we don't need to do all of these today. But can you give us some really silly sort of, examples of powerlifting, um, kind of practice that you've seen regarding maybe sets and reps and things like that? Yeah, I mean, um, the, um, very high volume cases that I mentioned at the beginning with high reps, because, you know, like you said, if you do like six, eight sets, some more that with very low reps, can probably be totally vomit. You do like five or six sets. I've even seen his eyes like, you know, six sets of 10 and things like that. And that's just not going to be very useful. Um, that's going to crush you for the weeks. So I definitely don't recommend that. Seems very wonky protocols where people will do, uh, ascending reps as well, like they start low and they go high, um, for powerlifting, I've seen ascending weights within a set, um, which is, doesn't make any sense. I mean, ascending one of those. Wow. But essentially you have people on other side of the bar, and you're doing singles, but you're just throwing a plate on each time, until you get to a very, very heavy rep. And I just, I don't see the point in that at all. You know, you start at three, 15 and you add a plate each time up to, you know, six or seven hundred, just, just do a normal set. Um, one, it's not going to require wasting two people's time. What I was going to say is like, how much, how much time and energy can we chew up by just doing something? Yeah, I've seen that. It's just crazy. Um, still, you know, not as much like you said, but I still do see like the very specific percentage based stuff. And you cycle that through, you know, week to week or every few weeks, very specific increases. And those things just are going to make sense. Everyone's going to progress at a different rate. You know, someone might be adapting very quickly to a program versus someone adapting slow. And if you have a built in rate of progression, it's just a very easy way to have someone run out and just hit a wall very fast. And then you're, you're kind of stuck with this specific model. And I go, whoa, what do I do now? just start a little lighter and recycle it again. And if it didn't work for the first time, it's probably not gonna work for the second time. So yeah, I would probably stay away from those. You really need a very reactive programming style for good part of the programming. It just can't be cookie cutter, it can't be, this session needs to be this, the next session needs to be that. 'Cause then when that doesn't happen, due to fatigue and the gym outside of the gym, you're just like, you know, you're like, all right, where do I go from here? The plan was this cookie cutter plan I had. And then now I don't have anywhere to go. - Yeah, absolutely, it's tricky. So cool. I think that's been a really good intro to the powerlifting problem. Obviously we can come back and we can talk about accessories. I think that's pretty much, it's gonna fit well now. I think I have to talk about today. So let's come back next week and talk about accessories for powerlifting. And then we'll see where it goes. Maybe there's a third episode in there somewhere. Fantastic, okay, so thanks everyone for joining us. We will be back next week with another episode about powerlifting.