016 Powerlifting part 2

Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mouseri. I'm going to talk about powerlifting accessory exercises today. So last time we talked about powerlifting in more general terms. So this is a follow up episode to that. So if you haven't already listened to our previous episode on powerlifting, then obviously please go and do that. And then this one will make a lot more sense. So as I said, we're going to talk about accessory exercises today and the justification for why we might want to program those. Essentially, there is a group or a school of thought, if you like, that states that ultimately the principle of specificity is going to mean that focusing on the main lifts is going to be potentially either all that's necessary even to actually achieve maximum powerlifting performance. And I think that ultimately misunderstands. What the principle of specificity is resting on. So when we talk about principles in strength and conditioning, principles are essentially observations that have led to a general guideline that we can follow without necessarily needing to delve into the reasons or the physiology behind it. If you actually go looking into the physiology that supports the principle of specificity, there are a lot of really interesting exceptions. And ultimately, it just arises because physiology is messy and isn't always doing exactly what you think it's doing. So principle of specificity is a really good principle. I actually wrote a book about it once. But ultimately, it is underpinned by specific physiological adaptions. And so it's far more kind of accurate to go back to those individual adaptions and look at what's happening if we want to figure out what our programming should look like. So with that being said, essentially, when we talk about the justification for accessory exercises, what we are going to start with is neuromechanical matchmaking. Now, essentially, neuromechanical matching tells us that motor units or to be kind of, you know, move into practical terms, regions of muscles or muscles within a group are always going to be activated preferentially if they have better leverage for a movement or an exercise that we're doing. So essentially, the central nervous system prefers to send activation to places that are going to produce high joint torques for low muscle activation inputs. And, you know, a separate occasion, we can talk about the justifications for that. And we can answer, you know, criticisms about that. I've done that before, but that isn't the purpose of today's podcast. So basically, what happens with the principle of neuromechanical matching is that when we use an exercise, and that could be one of the main lifts, so let's say we're doing a bench press or a squat or a deadlift, when we do those exercises, the brain or the central nervous system are going to send activation to the muscles and muscle regions that have best leverage to contribute to those joint torques that are necessary. to complete the exercise. Now, the important thing that is driving our justification for accessory exercises is that as we perform those exercises, we're going to produce the most hypertrophy in the regions that have the best leverage. And since leverage is actually partly determined by the size of the muscle, the next time we then come to use the exact same exercise, that leverage of those specific regions has now increased relative to the other regions, which will have grown to a lesser extent. So what happens over time is that the relative leverages of the regions that were originally kind of better is going to get better and better and better relative to the other areas. And we're going to find that we display a much greater stimulus in those areas and much greater reliance on those areas as we continue on with our training program. So essentially, we end up with an exercise that is much, much more focused on those specific regions or reliant on those specific regions than it was at the beginning of the training program that we started. And that's really something that actually can cause a bottleneck. Because essentially, and I'm a great example of this, whenever I do any kind of pressing exercise, my central nervous system goes, hey, this is what your triceps were born for, we're just going to use those. And you know, everything else is just completely unimportant. So it actually is quite comic all the way that I look like when I'm pressing, it looks like I'm trying to shoot a cannon out of a canoe. It's literally just 100% triceps. So you can end up in a situation where the central nervous system really starts to rely very heavily on this. In the case of, you know, a macro level, you could be saying, well, is it in a bench press? Is it, you know, kind of delts, pecs, triceps, or you can go even kind of even within each of the individual muscles as well, if you want to get really granular with it. But, you know, fundamentally, it's happening at multiple levels. And the CNS essentially is just going to keep pushing activation to wherever has the best leverages. Now, if we want to, start to avoid that bottleneck, because ultimately, those individual muscles and muscle regions have a maximum limit to the size that they can get to. If we want to get to a point where our bench press or our squat or our deadlift is reliant on much more muscle regions, and then gradually increase the sizes of all of those regions, so that the ultimate end one rep max that we're able to form is essentially governed by the sizes of all of those areas, not just one area or very heavily reliant on one area, then what we're going to need is accessory exercise, which is going to allow our bench press and our delt exercises to essentially come in and fill the gaps in our training program. Because in my case, if I do bench press, my triceps are going to get an amazing stimulus, nothing else is really going to grow. And ultimately, my bench press one rep max will always be limited by my triceps ability. If I focus much more on doing accessories for the delts and the pecs, I'm going to allow my bench press to rely much more on a sort of distribution of muscles. And that then ultimately increases the maximum strength that I will be able to achieve at the end of a long term set of training programs that has accomplished that goal. So that's the justification for having accessory exercises in a training program. So with that all being said, what we're going to do, I'm going to ask Rob to explain and describe some of the accessory exercises that he uses or programs in the training programs that he's got at the moment with powerlifters. And we're going to talk a little bit about how those accessory exercises might differ depending on the person's ages. I'm just giving you an example of my case, but talk about other people, but also in cases where maybe there are sticking points in different parts of the lift. So Rob, let's start out talking about squat. Can you just describe to us a couple of the accessory exercises you're programming for the squat and when you might be programming? Yeah, for sure, Chris. So when I'm looking at improving someone's squat, you know, obviously, besides just squatting frequently enough, you know, you typically would address that first. I'm going into accessory exercises for the program. I just want the main muscles involved to be getting bigger. So I'm looking at very, very direct exercises for glutes, adductor magnus, and, you know, some of the other adductors and the quads. Mainly those are the big ones I'm worried about. And, you know, the classic line of thought, a lot of people would go about programming things that were very much like the main lift. You know, they do a squat and then a pause squat or squat and then a hack squat, something like that. And not really go about programming things that are very specific movements. So I prefer these days to opt for, you know, if I want quads, I've already squatted, I'm going to go for something like a leg extension. So a leg extension, you know, versus another squat pattern is going to get all parts of the quads, whereas the squat will not. And it's going to be more isolated, you know, short position focus as well, which is a bit less damaging and maybe would impact recovery less and still get, you know, everything in the quads that I need to work to keep building the squat. Increasing recruitment, all those good things for adductors, like adductor magnus. I'm usually going to be, I mean, you're getting it out of the bottom of the squat for sure. If you want to target it more, I'll use just something like an adductor machine or maybe a cable adduction, something like that. And depending where, you know, peak effort is in the movement as well, you can target the adductor magnus a bit better there. So really like those, if you don't have an adductor machine, there's a few good straight leg cable options. A few bent leg cable options you can use. I've even used like an incline back extension where you place the inside of your leg against the pad and you bend sideways out over the thigh pad. Nice one for the adductors. Most people have an incline back extension at their gym. So super easy to load, you know, once you're strong enough, you can do body weight and then just hold a dumbbell. If anyone is struggling to see what that looks like, you can probably post a video of one on my Instagram later on. But definitely a good one most people would have access to. And then for glutes, usually something like a hip thrust, something that's more isolated and sticking more towards the top range of the thrust as well. You know, if I'm getting adductors and quads and all that stuff from other exercises, I'm really trying to split up my accessories to each be as specific as possible. So I kind of avoid the ranges where other muscles might be kicking in. So yeah, just keeping the hip thrust at the top range. Glute bridge, things like that. If you don't have those, like a good hip thrust, you know, with a barbell, of course, just as good. You could do something like a horizontal back extension where peak effort is in the contracted position. Also very nice for glutes or even like a reverse hyper where you're just a bit more strict with it. A lot of people would kind of tend to use the swinging motion with a reverse hyper, but if you're nice and strict, focus on actually just using glutes and getting a good bit out of that. That can be a really nice accessory for that as well. Cool. Awesome. Let's pick up on a couple of things that you mentioned there. So as I was having the intro and the justification for accessories i focused on the regional nature of hypertrophy i didn't mention something that we've talked about many times before which is that if you're using smaller muscle mass exercises you're going to hit a high level of recruitment in those muscles and that is a better stimulus for gains in recruitment as a long-term adaption so that's one of the really cool things about accessories is you can actually start training recruitment as an adaption to a greater extent than you can in the main lifts i think that's really really interesting one i think it kind of falls down a little bit because we tend to program the accessories after the main lifts when we're unlikely to be able to hit high levels of recruitment but you know we can maybe do variations like isometric contractions for three to five seconds maybe before as part of our warm-up and then kind of come back and do more hypertrophy work on the same thing later on so i think there's maybe an interesting way of bracketing that a little bit to try and capture those two adaptions a really really good point in terms of the kind of accessories that you mentioned um really i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good awesome to see basically you know like a knee extension some kind of a doctor exercise and maybe then obviously the hip thrust a lot of it focusing on contracted position again really cool because we're trying to avoid adding extra fatigue in for something that isn't as important as the main lift i mean i gave a big sort of pitch for the value of accessory exercises but let's not forget that you know powerlifting still does have a huge coordination element we do want to focus on the main lifts as the priority so contract position really cool because obviously we are going to end up getting a lot less damage from that particular uh exercise variation um looking at the adductors this is an interesting one because um the leverage data we've got for the adductors and the various different adductors isn't amazing and it's not amazing in the seated position certainly there's some nice data in a standing um position um the data that i've got suggests the adductor magnus starts to uh reduce its ability to do adduction when we are in a flexed hip position so we're in the seated hip adduction machine i think the adductor magnus is probably going to do a little bit less of adduction because it's mainly doing actually hip extension in that particular position as we know because that's what it was doing in the squat so i think that variation described the straight leg would actually be really interesting and i think that uh also working in slightly different ranges of motion of that obviously we can use elastic resistance we can use you know as you say other ways of adding resistance maybe just change the ranges of motion and uh target the adductor magnus to a greater extent so i think there's some really interesting stuff going on there with um the adductor side of things i mean the knee extension and the and the hip thrust obviously self-explanatory and very very straightforward the adductor one i think is worthy of further investigation i think there's some cool stuff that could be done there for supporting uh the adductor magnus in um in uh those um kind of powerlifting contexts and actually it's got me thinking about whether there could be a really interesting isometric that we could create because if i want to increase adductor magnus motor unit recruitment i think that would have to be done in some kind of straight leg adduction exercise i don't know if you've put any thought into that before yeah i haven't used any isometrics with it um i mean the only adductor isometric i've used generally is like copenhagen planks things like that sure they get a bit limited pretty quick you know loading them heavy enough would be awkward so that you're not just holding it for kind of a very long period of time and i mean you can't do it but i'm sure there's sure there's some better ways yeah i'm just um i'm just wondering what is um what is the range of motion that i'm trying to remember where it sits in the in the standing position um yeah to be honest i think most of the standing um most of the range of motion we're likely to use is going to be adductor magnus from i'm just looking at the graph now i think most of the range of motion that we're likely to see uh going from the midpoint the standing position to out uh to the side 30 40 degrees of adduct of abduction sorry that's likely to be uh all the adductor magnus uh with grass grassless along the side of it as well so honestly i think um any any of that range of motion would be fine um but yeah i think there's definitely scope for an isometric to uh create um a interesting effect from increasing motion agreement as i say that's a separate thing we're talking about more about the hypertrophy so i think but these are totally valid ways of approaching the problem i think it just means you end up doing a little bit of a kind of a warm-up with those things um the cool thing about recruitment increases is that they are totally non uh kind of um they're not likely to go away once you've created them so you kind of get months and months and months of them sitting around so if you kind of just dedicate a couple of years here and there to that type of thing i think it could be a really really interesting um kind of long-term benefit cool so that was the squat talk to us about the uh bench press then so how would you go about selecting uh or no to start with what would be your go-to uh kind of accessory exercises for the bench press and then we'll talk about why you might select them in certain circumstances afterwards yeah so for a bench i mean obviously you're just looking at pecs delts triceps um a not to have big lats but the idea that they're doing something in a bench is is you know very silly so for pecs i mean i'm mainly looking at like machine pec fly pec tech cable flies things like that staying generally away from you know kind of like a more old school thing of going from bench press to dumbbell press or something like that or someone might you know in the past i've heard the argument that you're training like a neglected range of motion because you get further down the dumbbell press and then you're like oh my god i'm not going to be able to do that you're still just training your pecs in a less stable variation so if you do like a machine fly machine pec tech something like that again you're going to get better recruitment better hypertrophy out of it and all the regions of the pec are very active in just that horizontal adduction so you don't have to worry about adding in really much for you know shoulder flexion for upper pecs or anything like that um and if you're just trying to boost the bench press i don't really think you need to target specific upper pec anyway i would not really see a good rationale for that for um triceps exercises um you know people tend to think you get a lot out of benching and depending on the person you know you get more than some people i certainly get a bit more triceps out of it but you still don't get um really much longhand at all you know not really any so if you really want to grow all the portions of your triceps you're gonna need some kind of elbow extension just with a fixed shoulder position i really like just a standard push down um you can do it over head extension if you like uh you know a little bit more stretch position maybe a little bit more damaging so i really do tend to opt for just push down variations um double arm single arm or uh the old like polycomb push down where you lie on an incline bench and just do a push down on that incline bench there like 45 or 55 degrees the angle doesn't really matter too much unless you you know you just got to set the cable up appropriately but any of those are going to be really nice just make sure that you really want to grow all three heads of the tricep shoulders not moving around while you're doing the exercise um you could use something like a jm press or a close grip for the the lateral medial heads but again you're going to get a lot out of just an elbow extension like by the side or overhead i don't really see a reason to add much onto that because it could potentially take away from your bench press performance through the week if recovery is taxed so yeah sure yeah i'd stick with those and then for delts um any kind of overhead press where peak effort is towards the top end of the range of motion um something like that i still do like you know a machine variant there more stable um you know higher recruitment a little bit more hypertrophy easy to you know keep it in the muscles you want if you're doing something like a dumbbell press or something like that you know i don't have a huge problem with it but if your elbows start flaring out wide as opposed to staying like you know reasonably narrow more sagittal plane you'll wind up getting less of the front delts and things that would contribute to the bench and you know especially if you're going like very frontal plane probably a bit more middle don't things like that that might not help as much um if you want to grow your shoulders a ton still throwing a lateral raise something like that but specific to the bench i'd prefer just some kind of sagittal plane um usually machine press yeah and i mean i guess um either keeping the range of motion in that top uh kind of range or using elastic resistance to make the exercise more difficult um so yeah awesome and in terms of you know sort of choosing which of those you're going to prioritize for different people are you kind of working through any kind of process to uh sort of identify people who might be better off with one or other of those exercises in their in their programs yeah and i mean mainly for me it's just visually looking at someone i'm seeing their program of course what they may have or have not done in the past in terms of hypertrophy accessories a lot of people have haven't done all that many different ones and they probably haven't done them very well you know maybe they're hitting something like a three sets of 12 for just like chest and triceps you know once or twice a week on top of their benching so at that point if i look at a person they have you know say very very large triceps um and not a lot of pec i'll immediately default to using more accessories for the chest um usually like twice a week to make sure recovery is okay if i have someone say benching like a monday wednesday friday something like that usually throw in a pecked fly on day one and I'm day three which is currently what I when I'm running myself from Declan as well he's a very similar style for accessories um so I really like that if someone has very very large pecs and not a lot of arm size obviously go the opposite you know they probably seem like they're going to get a lot out of just benching so I'll tend to default to a bunch of tricep work maybe some front delt work still for triceps you know keep it to like twice a week I don't really see a reason if you're doing a ton ton of bench to try to go more than that I mean maybe you could but you know if you're growing on twice a week training with just a couple sets just keep growing consistently don't get to a point where maybe elbows are getting beat up maybe you have to like taper back you know if you have something you can just run for a very long time just run it out so yeah but basically it's just looking at how built someone already is in an area and then training whatever is lagging I guess you would also look at where their sticking point is in the range of motion because um generally speaking triceps are going to be mostly working in that end range of motion um so if somebody's struggling with lockout then it's most likely going to be a triceps problem if they really can't get the bar off the chest then it's highly likely to be a pec problem um those kind of things is that kind of a similar process yeah yeah but whereas like I guess more of an old school thought would be like oh you can't get the bar off your chest do more paused benching after your bench like long pauses things like that or you can't lock out do you know a very top range heavy close grip pin press or something like that nothing wrong with those exercises by themselves but you know to me if you're already benching and you're looking to get just the hypertrophy out of those without fatiguing yourself just go for the more targeted accessories hitting whatever you know is going to be involved in the sticking point yeah exactly I that's that's fair so yeah essentially just looking at the kind of um build that somebody has and noticing whether they're kind of uh generally sort of clearly um displaying large amounts of muscle mass relatively speaking in one or other of the muscle roots and less in another and then similarly following that up by looking at the sticking points in the range of motion and hopefully those two pieces of information should be kind of giving you the same data yeah hopefully sort of telling you the same thing this is the same thing for the squat as well you have someone who's got a very hip dominant folded over squat a good chance that they're not getting a ton of quads out of that so probably better off using quad accessories like a leg extension if they squat pretty wide you know maybe you could throw in a narrow or stance squatting exercise like a hack or something like that to get you know more quads and adductor but still opt usually for the leg extension and then if you have someone who's very upright maybe using a high bar um position something like that you know make sure you get a little bit more glutes things like that out of it with your accessory work so yeah and then same sticking point analysis wherever they tend to fail look a little below that yeah i mean i think the squat is one of those exercises which isn't quite so informative about where the sticking point is when it when you see a sticking point it's like well it's always going to be around the same place because the squat has such a huge resistance profile change that once you're going to get past that kind of uh beginning part it's just plain sailing really and they're really massively fatigued from what's yeah the only people i see stick towards the top are and i actually kind of used to do this myself people that dive bomb really fast and use a ton of rebound out of the bottom yeah so it's not right it's not really a competition lift is it so yeah um yeah i mean ultimately whereas in the bench i think you can it can find that the sticking point does move around a little bit depending on where people's uh difficulty uh you know points are so yeah i mean obviously in my case if i can get it off my chest then it's just going to kind of i'm going to lock out because there's nothing really stopping me from doing that but um yeah so so yeah really cool um i would just add in another observation which really only is something that um is possible if you've got a decent uh kind of database of multiple exercises uh and the and the lifts of uh people in those exercises uh the one mcmaxes or training weights people in those exercises i've noticed that if you can kind of um relate say for example you look at somebody's um dip performance um if somebody's got a monstrous dip relative to their bench then the chances are that's telling you again that they're going to be a tricep dominant bencher and i'll mention this because um i don't actually have huge triceps i just have ridiculous dip strength that is largely moment arm related so i'm basically just kind of constructed in a strange way that means that my um leverages of my triceps are just insane um but they're not really noticeable so again if that's going to do exactly the same thing in a bench press they're still just going to get involved and do everything because it's not really about how big the muscle is it's about how like how good the leverage is so um this is ultimately i think something else you can do is if somebody has if you know what somebody somebody's lifts are say uh like you know that they're sort of uh they look at their training weights and you can see that they're not really that their pec fly is you know kind of relatively modest and their overhead pressing numbers are relatively modest and their dip numbers are horrible which you know just horrible in the sense that they're just off the charts which is describing me perfectly so you know you look at my sort of pec fly numbers and you're like that's relatively kind of modest you know the uh you know overhead pressing doesn't really look like anything special and who is this specimen doing dips it's like then you would immediately know that i'm just going to use my tricep to do everything in a bench press so i think you can kind of get the same information from but that's harder because you don't always have that data i mean you can always just look at somebody and kind of get an appreciation for what they look like you can always look at them doing the lift and you get an appreciation where the sticking point is i think that's really cool that you identified those are the two sources of data that's going to be most common and easiest to access but adding on top of that i think if you have got the information about some of these other lifts you can kind of draw pretty much the same conclusions because you can just see that they're clearly really strong in the pec or the delt or the triceps or whatever and you get the same answer yeah cool so deadlift um essentially um same question again um what's your go-to accessories for the deadlift and then second follow-up from that you know when are you going to program them yeah so for deadlifts i mean obviously we're looking at glutes big one hamstrings a doctor a dr magnus mainly um i think a lot of people still tend to think you get a lot of hamstring out of a conventional deadlift uh you know with the knee extension happening in that not the case at all and i've heard people argue that you're getting a ton of hamstring because they've seen hamstring injuries in a deadlift um still yeah i would absolutely not agree with that completely is that a thing i haven't seen people have argued that with me um when i say it's more have you seen like people reporting on it i mean have people like i mean because sometimes with like for example with the whole biceps um muscle strain injury people post videos of that all over the internet there's these horrible videos of people's kind of biceps muscles getting kind of you know sort of changing shape doing a curl exercise usually a preacher girl uh you know and it just looks horrible but i mean have you seen anybody posting anything about hamstring strains in a deadlift situation i have seen a few and i've actually seen them in person at meets and that but not super often um and really i you know i think at that point i will say the people that it happened to were not natural so maybe uh something happening there with the gear that i know you and jake have talked about yeah i i the thing is because a strain strictly speaking requires an eccentric contraction i mean that's what strain means so you you can't really strain a muscle in a um in a concentric only exercise like a deadlift it shouldn't really be possible and i think the same thing applies to some of those biceps videos i was just mentioning a moment ago where people kind of rip their biceps off doing preacher curls and i think it's more likely that it's a tendon injury or a muscle tendon junction injury that's my gut feel is that we're actually seeing is a rupture of the um kind of junction between the two structures so i would kind of classify it more as a tendon failure i mean i don't know i mean i'm not qualified to say but it just in the context of my understanding of the mechanism of a strain injury to a muscle and my understanding of uh damage to tendons i just can't see how it could be a a genuine muscle strain injury in this sense of the word that we use it in case you know sort of cases like you know sprinting and and and that kind of thing so yeah yeah no i would i would agree definitely a tendon thing so um okay anyway i got sidetracked back to the back to the accessories yeah so for targeting hamstrings um if i'm looking at like hip extension focused exercises i do really like just a straight leg um 45 degree back extension usually that'll match nicely where the hamstrings have a good leopard leverage kind of the mid-range of hip extension as long as you're using a free weight if you want to make that more glutes you could do a banded back extension 45 degrees works nice um and then just like girls seated or a line you know whatever you have access to i'm not really a big stickler for one or the other get a little bit more near the knee with the the line get a little bit more overall hams and hams near the hip seated so either can work really well there um if i have someone doing you know maybe like stiff weight deadlifts on one day or just stiff weight deadlifts in general i might I feel like curling on, you know, some of their other sessions, so it's not quite as fatiguing maybe as a seated, but, you know, kind of dependent on the person there. For glutes, again, just back to the hip thrust, really, really like the hip thrust, short position focused, gets you increases in recruitment, gets you increases in hypertrophy, all those good things, and then it's not going to be as taxing as some other things you might do. You know, in the past, I've definitely known people when even I've used, you know, something like split squat, lunge, variations like that, that'll hit glutes in like a stretch position, but I don't really, you know, see any reason to focus on those at this point. Definitely like the thrust or glute bridge, things like that more. And then adductors, I mean, you're going to get them out of a stiff leg would be great. I'm going to get them out of an RDL. I'm going to get them out of a lot of your squatting, or you can use any of the same accessories for the squat, same kind of variations, and they'll do the same thing. So I'm not usually programming separate variations. For adductors and adductor magnus, just the one that covers the squat, covers the deadlift. I was just thinking that as you were describing those exercise choices, so there's a really big crossover here then for your accessory choice for squat and the deadlift. So let me just try and sort of group that then. So we've kind of got the adductor accessory is going to cross over for the two, and the glute accessory is going to cross over for the two. So you're not obviously doubling up on that. It's just, you know, it's the same thing. It's working as it's working. Yeah. So really, is it just the hamstrings that we're adding in there? So, um, kind of a leg curl variation and maybe a 45 degree back extension, depending on what's, you know, kind of easiest to program. Yeah. Yeah. And of course people still try to argue, you'll get some hams out of a squat when you will not at all. So I still get that a lot. Honestly, it's crazy. I mean, I think, I think when you're looking at deadlift variations, you know, whether there's sort of, um, I mean, from the, from obviously from, you can kind of look at them in a. Uh, a range, can't you? There's, there's like the stiff leg, there's the RDL, and then there's like the, the traditional deadlift variation. Um, and basically there's going to be sections, um, you know, obviously less, almost, almost minimally, if not minimally in a stiff leg, but there's going to be sections of the lift, um, in the RDL and the classic deadlift where the knee is extending. And if the hip is extending and the knee is extending, the hamstrings aren't going to be working because they're going to be producing antagonist talks at the knee if they, if they try and work. But that doesn't mean that they won't. You know, work at all. There'll be sections. Yeah, certainly ranges where they are going to work. There'll be ranges where they're able to do something. And I think that's the interesting part. And that's why I think, uh, you know, the hamstrings are going to get involved in deadlift variations, just nowhere near as much as people tend to think they do get involved. Um, you know, it really is kind of a Dr. Magnus has been a kind of a driver and that's, yeah, but that's, but that's also interesting because, you know, in terms of crossover between squats and deadlifts, you know, I think there's, there's a lot less crossover. And many people, um, um, I mean, I guess some people see a lot to cross over. Some people don't. Yeah. Cool. Okay. Um, so is there anything else that you would have a program in terms of accessory exercises other than the, what we've already gone through? I mean, I still do like some, some heavy core work, uh, not using things like, you know, pile off presses and kind of more like dinky little exercises, but some like heavy, obviously heavy flexion. Um, you know, you just want to train flexion. People still like to think of the core is just like a stabilizer or like anti-rotation, things like that. But I like heavy flexion exercises, heavy trunk rotation, um, all that kind of stuff for the erectors. You know, I kind of tend to assume I'm getting as much as I really want or need out of the deadlift variations. Uh, I don't usually see a need to program anything else, but I know people that like some like spinal flexion, um, maybe like Jefferson curl exercises. I don't use them. But no, no problem with them at all. I do like them. I think that, um, some kind of targeted sort of spine extension exercise. So essentially resisting what the deadlift is trying to do, do to you, which is pull you into flexion. I think ultimately, um, what I think is interesting there is that some people don't like programming high and, uh, high volume is obviously a relative term, but some people tend to program lower volumes for the deadlift than they do for the other two lifts simply because they don't tolerate deadlifting very well. And I definitely drop into that category. So I think that's the kind of scenario where an accessory, uh, to kind of pull the spine kind of upwards and resist the deadlift kind of bending you over. Uh, I think that's a really interesting idea to have that in a program. Um, have you ever kind of programmed anything like that? I haven't done it consistently, honestly, with many people. I have a ton of friends that love those exercises. Do they tend to be a lot taller than you? Yeah, you know, they actually coincidentally do. Yeah, that's probably why. Yeah. And they, I have some friends who are ridiculously strong on like Jefferson curls and things like that. And so, you know, as much as I like them, I've just never played around with them too much. I think I did one with like messing around with like 275 or something like that. I think it's probably because it's just not a limiting factor for you. Yeah. I'm very short. My torso is very short. So I don't really, you know, like. I don't really struggle too much. My back is a little bit rounded, you know, when I deadlift because I keep it down on purpose, but it doesn't tend to like round through the lift and lose position and anything like that. It just kind of is where it is. It's locked in and I just rolled it. So yeah, not something I tend to work on, but certainly, like you said, could include it for people that struggle with that. Yeah. I think we had mentioned good mornings. But it's just the kind of the just follows naturally from the explanation that you provided. So you're kind of, you're assuming. You're getting that anti kind of spinal flexion training from the deadlift. All I'm pointing out is that in certain people who tend, maybe especially the taller people, you're going to find that they can't maybe. And if those people aren't tolerating enough volume on the deadlift to be able to get that training effect, they're going to end up needing to do that accessory that fills that gap. And I definitely fell into that category. So that was, that was always my kind of issue when I was deadlifting, which is I just got kind of bent over at the top. Yeah. And that was just because. Because my torso is quite long in that, in that regard. So, okay, cool. I think you've already mentioned, I mean, we tend to finish these episodes just by mentioning a couple of things that we see that are definitely not great ideas. The theme that you've been kind of giving us all the way through is that you're seeing people programming accessories, which are basically just kind of variations of the main lift. Yeah. And that's the thing that you're seeing, which is the most egregious sin in this regard. Are you seeing anything else that you think is. Um, silly or is that really the overriding problem? I mean, that's definitely the overriding problem, but I think that the biggest one for accessories besides that is just kind of using volumes and that, that are just not well thought out. You know, you'll do, you'll see people doing their bench press work and then like four sets of 12 on a dumbbell press, um, four sets of 12 on a pull down, four sets of 12 on an extension, like three or four sets, things like that. High rep. Not really training. Like a lot of times a close enough proximity to failure to be super useful. So you're just kind of like stacking up volume in those muscles. It's going to be, you know, quite fatiguing for not really a huge hypertrophy benefit. Um, especially if it's something like, you know, you use those less targeted exercises. So you're like a bench press and then three sets of 12 on a dumbbell press and then three sets of 12 on something. It's like, you know, you're using very redundant exercises and then fatiguing yourself excessively. For not a big benefit, whereas if you just did a good exercise, one to two sets, you know, maybe a little more if you need to a couple of times a week with, you know, maybe a rep and reserve, maybe two reps in reserve for moderate reps, low to moderate reps. Um, you know, I still really like like five to eight for accessories provided, you know, people always like to complain about that. So provided people can execute a lift well with that kind of weight. Um, yeah, if you just go that approach, much more recoverable. I'm going to grow you better than, you know, say three sets of 12 to like an RPE seven, RPE eight, something like that, which I see a lot. If you do 12 reps with a few in the tank, you really likely haven't gotten very many useful reps out of that. So yeah, you do set of six, one rep and reserve. Um, first of all, easier to gauge the proximity to failure, especially on a very targeted exercise. And then you've gotten quite a few good reps, minimal sets, and you don't, I mean, save time. You don't fatigue yourself. Definitely much, much more useful. Do you say, I mean, you've mentioned dumbbell bench pressing a couple of times in your, in your counter examples. Would you say that there is a tendency for powerlifters to, uh, kind of naturally inclined towards free weight stuff simply because their competition lifts are free weight things. And that really doesn't make a lot of sense for what they're trying to use those other exercises for. Some of it might also come from the fact that like not all powerlifting gyms are going to be as well equipped when machines and stuff like that. Some of them are pretty bare bones. Sure. I mean, they've got to spend the money on things that are most important, which is the squat racks and everything else that they need to, you know, do the main lifts safely. And, and, and obviously with the right kind of, um, calibration of all the weights. I mean, you don't want to be using the wrong weight plates and find that your openers aren't right because the number of times I've actually weighed stuff and found like, oh, that was like, you know, kind of, I thought it was a 20 kilo plate. And it was like, you know, 18.7 or something. It's really, really. really kind of they're not what you think they are generally speaking so that's there's a lot of investment in that to get that that that right and so you maybe don't have the ability to go and i totally get that um so but i i just wondered if you'd seen that i do think that there's a lot of this inclination i do see that inclination of people go well you know powerlifting has that kind of sort of mentality of reaching for the the free weights instead of the machines when actually they could cut down their warm-up sets and cut you know increase the stability increase recruitment get all these benefits and you know get through their accessory stuff a lot more easily if they just use the machines instead yeah i mean so many so many lifters i've coached before i coached them and even you know friends i have who still compete they may be in the gym you know two and a half three hours and i mean when you're very very strong like inevitably you'll be there a bit longer you have to train the main lifts but i mean if you're up to even like you know kind of the point where i've been at my strongest and that maybe you know squatting around 220 kgs deadlift about 275 stuff like that you know i can get through a session um a full body session with multiple main lifts in an hour and a half and that's like with good rest between not really taking you know not really rushing anything taking my time on accessories because i'm only doing one or two sets of moderate reps and like you said i'm picking exercises where maybe i need a warm-up rep to feel it out and then i just go i'm so glad i used that expression a while i changed people's mentality from talking about warm-up sets and i said let's just talk about warm-up reps from now on because it's not trying to create a warming effect so we can kind of do away with the whole set idea and then instead of doing you know set of 10 and then you gotta wait a minute and a half two minutes before you do your set yeah it adds up it does it adds up so um cool um i think that's probably been a really solid continuation from last week's episode on powerlifting part one and this is powerlifting part two where we talked about accessory exercises whether we do a powerlifting part three will depend on whether we get questions um and whether there's interest in talking about other stuff like maybe tapers splits that kind of thing but we have talked about all that stuff before in other contexts so uh let's do that and i'll see you in the next episode let's see what happens uh but uh whatever happens we will be back next week with another episode talking about something uh different