031 How steroids and TRT increase injury risk (and how modifying your training might help)

And welcome back everyone to a new episode of High Perch View Past and Present. Chris, how are you doing today? I'm doing very well. Thank you, Jake. I'm doing fairly well, but I was telling you before we hit record that I spent 24 hours and last 72 hours sitting in a car. So I'm doing okay, but I don't know where I am or I feel like the world's moving, but apart from that, I'm doing quite well also. So this is, I mentioned the other week I made a joke that we're doing High Perch View, present and present, because we were talking on an anabolic plan or a golden era plan. And today I have another golden era plan to talk about. And then we're going to dive into anabolic specifically. Now we are going to go down one specific sort of route there and talk about, you know, one implication of anabolic and perhaps why maybe we saw some of these plans change over time. Now it's going to be maybe a slightly different conversation fast and we're going to talk a little bit a little bit about what we've observed or what we see kind of in trends that have changed over time and you're going to hit us up with some interesting, I guess, data on some of the impact of anabolic said, maybe it gets talked about a little bit, but maybe not as much as it should be. And we're going to see what we can see. So I'm looking forward to this conversation, but the plan that I'm going to talk about today is a plan, well, is a bodybuilder, I guess, that gets a lot of air time. And on social media and YouTube and TikTok, I would, has it a guess, he may well be one of the most talked about bodybuilders. And I'm one of people trying to guess who it is at this point. Now this is a golden era bodybuilder. And it's not a modern bodybuilder because there's a few modern guys that we get talked about a lot, but this is, if you haven't guessed yet, Mike Mensa. Now there's a lot of Mike Mensa. Anytime anyone comes at me and talks about Mike Mensa, my first question is which Mike Mensa you're talking about, because if we look at the way Mike's training changed over time, it did change very significantly. So I'm not going to sort of go into too much detail, but how he sort of evolved in his training methods over time and towards, I guess, his post-competitive career, because obviously there were some significant changes. And some of the stuff you see online, people will talk about training in muscle 1 to be 10 days and stuff like that. That was certainly related developments for Mike. But Mike is very interesting character, not just some of the, I guess, the ways he tried to understand what was happening and some of the stuff that he got right, and there's some stuff that perhaps he didn't get right, and he sort of does introduce us to a lot of interesting ideas. But what I find very interesting about Mike is he was one of the influential characters, or perhaps the most influential after Arthur Jones. And Arthur Jones is still doing full body at this time. So Mike had taken this idea of doing lower volumes. It's sort of in a high intensity strategy or method. And then he talked out and he obviously reduced frequency. And so if we track sort of what a change between the silver era and the golden era, and then you sort of see this, I guess, initial change in the 60s that we've talked about a little bit so far, where we see people still usually doing higher frequency. They're still doing each body part, each muscle group two or three times a week. Maybe there's a slight step back. So maybe two times a week and we start to see some splits being used. And then we see this sort of next evolution kind of in the 80s and even late 70s, where now people start to take even a further step back as far as frequency goes. And instead of doing things two or three times a week, now we're seeing sort of one to two times a week. And so Mike, I believe, is one of the key guys sort of pushed us a little bit down that sort of realm, I guess. So this plan I think is quite significant, almost as a bit of a turning point. And there's a few other comments. In fact, I will just talk a little bit more about Mike before I jump into this plan. So something that's interesting about Mike is he got on gear very young. I think 15 to 16 years old, he talks about being on antibiotics. And he got injured really early on. So he got injured when he was I think still a teenager, like teenager, early 20s there about he injured shoulder quite badly. And this is when he was already competing, obviously at a low level. And that injury set him back really significantly. And obviously, he then I guess was influenced heavily by Arthur Jones and went into this, you know, high like HIT sort of style of training. But one thing that's interesting if you observe the way Mike talked is obviously he was a huge advocate for this high intensity lower frequencies type stuff. But one kind of comment that comes up is how how important it is to him that the lifters that he trains don't get injured. And he talked about the obviously the importance of recovery and how he thinks that that's I guess satisfied by doing these high these lower frequency workouts. But also the fact that these these competitors he's working with and not getting injured as opposed to other people of that time. So I think that's an interesting comment. Now let's look at this plan. So this is what he calls his most productive routine, you know, his most productive workout. Now this was, he says he followed this when he was, you know, competing and he was winning misuniverses and he placed or he won the heavyweight Mr. Olympia. So late late 70s, he was winning these competitions. And this is a plan that he says he was following around that time. And he was he was seeing very good results with. Now the format for this plan is a two way split. And he was having he was taking one rest day between each workout. So it'll be workout one rest day workout two rest day back to workout one. And so essentially it'll be each workout would be repeated a twice in like an eight day cycle. So the workout days would change. Now workout one, just so you've got a bit of an idea in your mind, this is kind of like imagine an upper lower split if the lower day also had chest and a tiny bit of shoulders in it. So that's kind of the split he's following here. So workout one, we've got leg extension, a single set about six out most. In fact, I think every exercise he did for six day repetitions. So I won't keep repeating that. So everything was done for six day repetitions. So we've got leg extension, six day repetitions. Now he did do some partial sense of negatives occasionally after that. So he would normally do negatives once a week. And he would sometimes do forced repetitions and extended set stuff like that. So we got the leg extension. And then he would superset that with a leg press. He then would take a bit of time between those two exercises and then go into squats. And he did a single set of squats. Everything is taken to failure. And like I said, some things were taken be gone failure with these additional force repetitions, negatives, etc. But everything is normally taken just to to failure. Then we've got two sets of leg curls, two sets of standing carferies, one set of toe press, one to two sets. He changed it up a bit of peck deck or dumbbell fly. And this is where he would superset it with an incline press as well. And then he would do dips. Again, one to two sets changing up a little bit. And he would add some force repetitions here as well. He would do triceps push down a single set. And he would superset that again with dips. And then he would finish with line triceps extensions. So that was workout one. And those two sets for the line triceps extensions. So everything is done for one to two sets, six to eight repetitions and generally to failure. Now workout two, we had the Nordless pullover two sets. And he would superset that with a close grip pull down. Then we have a bent over bi-bell row two sets, a machine like a vertical machine shrug two sets. And it would superset that with upright rows. And then a machine lateral raise for two sets, superset it with a machine overhead press. And then reverse peck deck two sets, standing barbell curl for one set. And then dumbbell concentration curls for two sets as well. So if you cast in my back to some of the other golden euro plans we've looked at, we were doing what 30, 40 sets in a workout. And here we're looking at what less than half of that about 16, 18 sets. So definitely a step down in volume compared to some of the other golden euro plans we've seen so far. What are your initial thoughts on the most effective routine of my mentor? So this is actually really interesting. So what I'm going to do here is pick out the things that I think are, hesitate to use the word good. I think I'll commensurate with the physiology. And then kind of look at the things that I think are not so commensurate with the physiology. So let's just assume, I know this is not correct to say this, but it's broadly speaking training muscles twice a week. I know it's more like twice a week days, but it's kind of a key place, yeah. It's pretty close, isn't it? So for somebody who's saying, well, how does this relate to what normal mortals are going to be doing? It's kind of a two times a week training program. Okay, that's not horrible. And when I look at the sort of volume per muscle group, it's kind of around the sort of maybe four or five sets per muscle group per workout. So if you look at the recovery date, so that's pretty much bang on. So when we talk about recovery, we're sort of looking at three sets. You can do that three times a week, five sets, you can do that twice a week. So broadly speaking, I think he's pretty much bang on when it comes to, you know, the, they're having done that calculation for every single muscle. I've just kind of looked down on broadly speaking, I'm seeing maybe four to six sets per muscle group per workout. So, I think that's about right. There's some even that are slightly less than that three or four sets, but it gets generally in that realm. Yeah. It's this like kind of ballpark picture. So again, in terms of recoverability, I think that's of post workout fatigue. I think that's pretty much bang on. The other thing I think is really important is that instead of adding extra sets for a single exercise, he adds another exercise instead. And I think that's really, really important because that is still commensurate with what we would expect people to do logically. If you're trying to increase total hypertrophy of a muscle group, don't add another set of the same exercise you're already doing. Add another exercise instead because you're going to get, you know, some good carryover of almost like doing an extra set of theories and exercise, but you'll get a different coverage at the top end of the matinee pool. So, I think that's really, really important. In terms of rep ranges, obviously six to eights, I think is a fantastic rep range to work in. So, I think that's really, really good. And, you know, training to failure isn't a bad option either. I mean, like is one rep in reserve slightly better than maybe. But, you know, rather than do that and have four reps in reserve, like some people and considering half of this is done with single sets, it's, yeah, you will. It's pretty cool. So, honestly, honestly, you know, if somebody said that, I mean, I'm, you know, at this point, I think I'm kind of like, or if you're not doing full body three times a week, what are you even talking about? But, honestly, if somebody were to do upper lowest bit and they were to come back with a routine broadly structured like that, like I've just described, modeled on this kind of routine here, I wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. And then probably be one of the best upper lower splits or twice a week splits that you can kind of come up with. You know, just on that, actually, it's interesting because I believe he talks about he used to do this as workout one workout two day off. And then he talks about how he wasn't recovering. And he went to work out one day off, workout two day off. And that's a criticism we've made of upper lower splits or these two way splits before in another podcast where in those stuff, you know, I guess splits, you've always got one workout where you've had a workout the day before. And so there's going to be some CNS fatigue from that previous workout. So it's interesting that he's chosen to have a day off or buffer between every workout, potentially mitigating some of that CNS fatigue as well. Yeah, again, so I mean, I kind of ignored that because I was trying to kind of shoehorn this routine into the kind of standard mortal routine of ties we'd be absolutely right. The way he's started to do it with that extra day off definitely makes it more attractive than the standard upper split or the standard, you know, kind of split of training each muscle twice a week, but with four separate workouts. So yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of good things to be said about this. And of course, really, my main criticism is the kind of use of intensifiers. Yeah, they say the sets and the negatives. So it's the four strips negatives, all of that stuff is not going to have any positive effect. So, you know, at the moment, I think there's being a little bit of a resurgence around the metabolic stress nonsense. People are starting to send me down at messages saying, "Oh, this person is claiming that metabolic stress is a stillest, a stimulus five-perch feet. It never was. It never will be. It's nonsense." You know, and also people are kind of claiming that you can, you know, create soccer plasmic hypertrophy by training in a particular way. Again, that is absolutely nonsense. All of these ideas just keep coming back as somebody goes and reads a study from a couple of years ago and goes, "Oh, look, this is maybe a thing I can talk about on social media." Honestly, you know, none of this stuff is ever going to go anywhere. So that would be my main criticism of this routine. I think the kind of the chasing after the pump, chasing after the kind of the fatigue locally in the context of, you know, those specific sets that he's doing it in. But other than that, actually, I was surprised to find I used to quite like this for what it does. Again, I'm not, wouldn't be on my radar to a program like this, but, you know, if somebody really does want to train, you know, kind of by splitting out. We were actually talking about this before the podcast. And I was, we were trying to come up with an explanation of why there is still so much resistance to people training for body, you know, but whatever the reason for that is when we can talk about that on a separate podcast. Whatever the reason is, people still do like to split up their routines and train different body parts in different days. This is probably one of the best ways of doing, I think. Yeah, it is interesting looking and being like, you know, what, there's actually quite a lot here that is done very well. And, you know, like you said, single sets, a double set to cross the board. Obviously that buffer workout, oh, buffer recovery day between each of these workouts, even excite selection. You didn't really touch on any of that, but it's a fairly good excite selection. I'm just looking now. I mean, what do we, what are we missing? Is anything obvious with missing? Like, back is good. Shoulders is, you know, I mean, chess, I mean, just go. I mean, from to plan pulling. No, so it's got the pullover. So that's interesting, having the pullover, the machine pullover, not a barbell or dumbbell pullover, because in other plans you've told about so far, it's been barbells, which are going to be quite different. And then he's got a sagittal pull. And then I'm guessing the bent over row would be transverse. And then shot. I mean, so selection, you know, there are things that you could do to make it better, but the essence of it is that higher variety. He is generally leaning towards machines. There are, yeah, there are a few areas that I would probably tweak, but, you know, I've made those comments a hundred times before. Interesting seeing the pack deck in there. I don't know if we've seen that yet. Perhaps maybe once. Obviously, I think we've seen fly a couple of times, but that's an interesting, I think, combination. They're starting with the pack deck. The order doesn't really matter. I guess with a pack deck and an incline press. How do you believe a good combination here as fast chest goes? Yeah, no, there's there's some really good stuff in here. I mean, like, as I say, you know, you could treat these and you could go, okay, well, can I do both a cedar than a like leg belt in there? You know, can I tweak it in a way to, you know, increase, you know, the variety a little bit more. As I say, back is something I always look at quite carefully. And I don't see a frontal plane pulling exercise, which is definitely a negative here. But, you know, generally speaking, I think this is this is pretty good. You know, there's nothing really left out. The curls, I mean, a barbell curl and a concentration curl. I believe they're kind of doing the same thing as well. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, yeah, I mean, you could, again, you could treat that and do that better. It's just like the, the essence of it is, is relatively kind of directed towards the ideas that we've been talking about. So even though it is a golden era program, it's actually not horrible. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a, it's a good example of a split that he's making that split work in a relatively intelligent manner or way that does is, you know, coincide with how the physiology would predict this would be a better way of doing that split. And I love what I really like is that he didn't get dogmatic in doing everything has to be two sets or everything has to be one set. I often, when you look at plans a lot of the time, I think people want plans to look a certain way. And so, you know, I see people, you know, maybe using certain rep schemes or sets or, you know, tempos or whatever it might be and they apply that to every single exercise. And I'd be like, well, why do you do two sets with that exercise? Oh, because I'm doing two sets of everything. Okay, but that exercise or that muscle has two exercise doing it. Why do you need two sets for that? So I like here seeing that, you know, he wasn't sort of constrained to, oh, everything is two sets of this. It's like, well, actually, nice. Some of these exercise when he had one set because I've had two exercises for that muscle or whatever. I think there's a few things that he, the human, the human brain's obsession with symmetry is definitely a, yeah, definitely. So, boys, where do we go? I think, yeah, what do we want to, where do you start? So, basically, I just wanted to introduce the idea that, there is some reasonably good data showing that anabolic steroids have a negative effect on tendons. Now, that isn't going to come as a shock to anybody who's read around this area, you know, even superficially. But I want to just go a little bit deeper into that statement and explain why I think it's happening and how it relates to, you know, what we've said before about steroids. Now, this is not my specialist area. I'm just commenting on a very, very sort of specific thing. Then, what we can do is bridge that into your specialist area and talk a little bit about whether there is a reason or whether this observation or these observations are a reason why some of the golden aeroprograms look different from the silver aeroprogram. So, I think it's one of those kind of exploratory conversations really to see whether there's anything that kind of comes out of it. So, basically, starting at the beginning, if we look at the injury risk data, then what we can see is that anabolic steroid usage increases the risk of all tendon ruptures and also ligament ruptures as well. So, it's a collagen problem, if you like. It's affecting negatively all collagen tissues and interestingly, those, some of those numbers, those risk ratios are quite high. I mean, like, it really does kind of jump off the page at you and go, hang on a minute, this is something I need to worry about. This is not like a very small risk increase. This is like, you know, pretty pronounced problem. And it even happens at relatively low dosages. So, some of the data that's been collected, obviously, have been collected in recreational steroid users. Other data has been collected in people have been prescribed testosterone, for example, in the context of testosterone replacement therapy, TRT. So, the risk exists across the entire spectrum, not just in recreational users, but also in people have been prescribed it at relatively low dosages, which is, again, something that probably is going to be interesting from a kind of perspective of a wider audience. So, basically, we've got that starting point. We've got a risk, okay, so why does that risk exist? Well, essentially, if we look at what happens in interestingly, there are actually some human studies on this as well as animal studies. Human studies generally done in people who are recreationally using who kind of say, self-report that they're recreationally using. And then the researchers go and kind of measure what's happening with their tendons or what have you. And then say, okay, this is how they differ from other people who are perhaps also doing strength training, but don't have that anabolic usage history. So, across the board, what we see is that anabolic increase collagen synthesis rates in the same way that they increase muscle proteins synthesis rates and muscles. And they decrease collagen breakdown rates in the same way that they probably suppress muscle protein breakdown rates and muscles. Now, that kind of sounds like you should end up with a stronger, bigger tendon in anabolic users as well as you end up with a stronger, bigger muscle in anabolic users. So, it's like, well, why is this different? You see? Now, the interesting thing here, though, is that tendons or tendons stiffness relies almost exclusively on its structure and not on its size. So, muscle relies very heavily on its size for its kind of strength, whereas a tendon does not. It almost exclusively relies on changes in its structure. So, when you look at what happens to a person doing strength training, when you look at the way that tendons change over time, they restructure themselves to become stiffer because of fundamental architectural alterations. They're not changing because, you know, you're kind of adding more collagen. People think that's what it's happening, but it's not. So, ultimately, the tendon has to restructure itself. And I think the restructuring process is largely determined by the collagen breakdown. So, what happens is you do a sort of workout or exercise training session that stimulates the change in the structure of the tendon. And what happens is the tendon kind of goes through and issues a whole load of breakdown signals that pull away the structures that you didn't want because they're slightly weaker, and it restructures it then using the collagen synthesis into a new pattern, new format. What we see with anabolic usage is that collagen breakdown process is interrupted and prevented. And as a result, when you then go and look at the collagen tissues of anabolic users inside the tendon, you see that the patterns are disorganized. So, what you've not been able to do is restructure the tendon because you can't go through the breakdown process. This is the really, really important thing, I think, is that the process of collagen breakdown is what enables you to restructure the tendon into a stiffer format. And the anabolic uses is preventing you doing that. And so, ultimately, what you end up with is a bigger tendon with a lot of grosses on the surface and not actually a stronger tendon. So, the tendon responds by getting bigger, but it doesn't actually respond by restructuring itself to get stronger. So, fundamentally, you know, very simply, what we can say is that anabolic are probably doing the same thing, more or less philosophically, in muscles and tendons, increasing synthesis rates, decreasing breakdown rates, but the tendons suffers as a result of that, whereas the muscle benefits. I mean, broadly speaking, in a nutshell, that's really what I think is going on. And as a result, you end up with this fibrotic, larger, less effective tendon than you would get with, you know, a, you know, sort of in comparison with what you would get with just normal exercise training without the anabolic being used. So, ultimately, that then kind of begs the question of, well, okay, so how do we respond to that information? Well, broadly speaking, for an exercise point of view, we know that heavy loads are necessary to create the increase in tendons stiffness. So, if you're using a heavy load, you're going to get an increase in tendons stiffness, and that's obviously going to be beneficial, because it stops the tendon getting yanked around and potentially ruptured in sort of situations where, you know, you might be at risk. Now, if the anabolic is stopping that adoption happening, then the benefit of the heavier load starts to kind of fade away. But equally, if you kind of go down the route saying, well, okay, so I can use light loads and no problem. Well, yes and no, because ultimately, the damage that tendons experience comes from the stretch and recoil of the tendon, not from the force that they transmit. This is kind of thing that I think I'll be banging my head against a brick wall forever about, but people think that, you know, oh, I can use a light load, and the tendon's not going to be at risk. Well, not in the immediate sense that if you use a light load, the tendon isn't going to be at risk from that light load. But if you carry on doing a ton of light load work, then yeah, you're going to end up with problems because that tendon damage is going to just build up and build up and build up because of the stretch and recoil. It's the lighter the load you use, the more the tendon strains. So ultimately, from a perspective of saying, well, okay, you know, is heavy and light load the right, you know, kind of conversation here? I mean, do I choose the heavy loads or light loads? Well, I'm not sure there's a right answer in the context of anabolic uses because ultimately, you know, the heavy load, you know, isn't going to give you any benefits because you can't repair the damage that all the, sorry, you can't, you can't process the stimulus that they provide. Conversely, the light loads, you can't really, well, maybe you can repair the damage that they provided, I don't really know. But it doesn't really kind of make a lot of sense because all you're doing is accumulating a ton of damage. So ultimately, I think where we are is that it's very, very difficult to try and figure out what the right answer would be in the context of those types of training. And then you can kind of go, well, okay, well, does that then start to, you know, mean that we can do specific types of training, does something like blood flow restriction makes sense where you kind of get the best of both worlds, you kind of get a very small number of repetitions, but you also get a very light load. Or, you know, was that really what these guys were trying to do with the intensification techniques? Was it kind of like, you know, create a ton of local muscular fatigue? So you end up with very little load tenderness experience. I mean, these are the kind of questions I think that we can start to ask at this point. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting you talk about like load, right? Because if we look at what are some of the key changes we see that happen over time? And obviously not everyone is doing the same thing. Yeah, but if we look at general patterns, and I mentioned a few of these patterns early on, is we do see obviously frequency start to drop, we see volume within the session go up and we see frequency go down to about twice a week initially. Now, I guess even before we have that conversation with how the training is changing, it's worth noting that yes, 1954, 1955, we start to see anabolic use occur in bodybuilding. It's probably not until sort of 1960 give a take that it's more widespread, you know, being used. And then that's we're talking like really, we're talking only one or two compounds that are really going to be used at that point in time. Once we get into the 70s suddenly, we've got 19 nores, we've got DH teacher videos, we've got a whole stack of extra things being used. And then when we get into their age, it expands even further, trend below in the 80s being used, growth hormone, 82 onwards being used. And then we see AIs, rheumatized inhibitors being used in the 70s and 80s as well. So if I were to take a step back and look at what, where do we see some of these changes in training occur? And how do we overlay the changes in anabolic use onto that timeline? I would say that we see this big shift sort of 1960 onwards, where we start seeing these insane volumes that we've looked at not today, but in some of the previous podcasts. So within session volumes, we don't see this massive change really in infrequency. And then kind of what we saw this journey point here today with Mensa, I'd say in the 80s, we start to see this frequency start to decline again. And now we start to see sort of one time per week splits being used, where a muscle group is really just trained once a week. Now in the lead up to this podcast, Chris, I didn't tell you when I was spending 25 hours in the car, I was listening to a number of other podcasts and I was just checking, you know, what's out there as far as people talking about anabolic and bodybuilding and goal in here and all this stuff. And I'll admit I was pretty disappointed with some of the content that was out there. I should say most of it. But I listened to maybe half a dozen different shows. And look, there was some stuff that was quite interesting, but I did listen to quite a lot. And one theme that came out, I think across maybe three or four different episodes with different people I listened to. And these are like professional bodybuilders is they had each independently made a comment about how one of the best things I'd ever seen for their results in the gym was actually going to training a muscle more than once a week. And actually training, they usually said twice a week, one person actually said a third time. But interesting to see that obviously they're the norm for the last few decades has been training a muscle once a week and people are now identifying, you know what, actually that doesn't seem to work as well. So I think it's interesting to just track when did these frequency changes occur? When did these drugs, I guess, escalate? And is there potentially a bit of a commonality there, a bit of a, I guess, a correlation? Now to go back to the load piece that you were talking about, if we look at how load change, I mean a lot of the silvery guys are doing load repetitions, you know, they're doing five repetitions. Obviously, Retapark, you know, did a lot of these load reps and you know, even Severees talked about doing five to ten repetitions, you know, Hoffman obviously a lot of his stuff was five to ten repetitions with your guys. So there's a lot of stuff being done in this, you know, single digit repetitions. And then when we get to the golden era, we do see that a lot of this change, like we got up to eight, 12, 15, 20 repetitions. And you know, to your point, I wonder if part of that, and I don't know how much these guys, you know, we made this comment last week, I think that maybe these guys found what was working, they're not even knowing why it was working. And you think maybe there's some other things going on as a performative aspect and maybe some psychology into it as well. But I wonder if they identified that, you know, what, if we're doing these high repetitions or higher repetitions, these shorter rest periods, a lot of the time these guys are talking about, you know, 45 second type, you know, rest between sets with these moderate repetitions, is that potentially limiting the load that they can use to high enough extent that it's reducing some of these injury risk from a connective tissue standpoint. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, let me respond to the performative point first, as I just wanted to clear what I'm saying here. Basically, I think it's, and I think there's, we're not arguing whether this exists or not, we're arguing how big the phenomenon is. I mean, there is a, there is a performative aspect of bodybuilding. The question is, how big is it? I mean, does it really drive programming decisions to a very large extent, or does it drive programming decisions relatively small extent? And when I say it performative, what I mean is that when you've got a really gigantic bodybuilder who is, you know, presenting their routines and arguing that this is the, you know, their personality that should be followed and listened to and that people should do their routines and, you know, whatever else. I mean, it's obviously, it's kind of a business in that respect. Then they want to kind of present the image that, you know, they have something special and that something special doesn't come out of a bottle. You know, they want to make it clear that it's something that they're doing, you know, that is inherent and ideally that it's hard work that they've put in. They want to demonstrate that they're doing hard work. You know, and so they want to be seen to be working hard. Now, one of the ways that you can be seen to be working hard without, you know, kind of sort of creating problems for yourself is to stress the cardiovascular system. So you do a series of four or five sets with higher repetitions and you leave short rest periods. You are going to be looking like you're working really, really hard for the camera. So the camera can show you and you're absolutely blowing like a train, as we would say in the UK. And ultimately, he isn't really doing anything to the hyperspace he's doing this at all, but at least it looks like you're working hard for the camera. And so people can see that and be like, oh, wow, no, he's worked really hard to get where he is. I'm like, my friend, that cardiovascular activity that they're experiencing right now is doing nothing for hypertrophy, but I'm glad that you think that your idol is working hard. I mean, that's the important thing, isn't it, really? So from the performative aspect, I think we've got to identify that it does exist. It's just how big is this effect, you know, and does it really drive decisions or is it just something that has been added on top as a little bit of an icing on the cake? I don't know, but it definitely exists. So moving on from that, it's like, well, okay, so leaving that aside, what are we, what are we really seeing in terms of the, you know, kind of load question? Well, ultimately, I think the first thing is just to say, well, if antibiotics are removing the ability of heavy loads to stimulate and increase intense stiffness, then you do kind of lose one of the major benefits of using heavier loads. So if you can't get the adaption that heavy load is creating, then you kind of have to start asking the question of whether it even makes sense to use heavy loads, because if you can get the muscle to a really strong state and your tendon hasn't adapted in, you know, kind of correspondence with that, then you can kind of end up in this place where a lot of hypertrophy research is all, which is that the reason that antibiotics cause tendon problems is because the muscle gets too strong and it's rips the tendon off. You kind of can end up in that state, I think. But tendon stiffness is, you know, you need to have your load to stimulate the adaption. So if you can't get the adaption, then, you know, what's the point in using heavy loads in the first place? I can't wait there. It's worth noting that if you were to ask the average person who knows anything about this, why people use antibiotics and more like that experience injuries, I think that's the one piece they would say. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And that does come out on the hypertrophy research is do state that. But I think they're underestimating how much disorganization is created in the collagen fibral structures of the tendon by the antibiotics anyway. But as I say, that's because the repair process is not happening, you know, kind of correctly, or the restructuring process is not happening correctly. A question is, I'm not clear whether there is a difference between the repair process of an existing tendon and the restructuring process of a tendon that's adapting. So do antibiotics, I mean, what would be really interesting actually would be to see what happens when long distance runners take antibiotics. I'd be really, really interested to see what happens there because you're getting a lot of tendon damage and repair, but you're not getting very much tendon restructuring at all. So is the tendon, does the antibiotic steroid prevent or interfere with the repair process? Because if it doesn't, if antibiotics in distance runners really doesn't create any problems in the tendon, then in that scenario, you could argue that it makes a lot of sense for bodybuilders to you'd like to load because the repair process isn't being interfered with. Does this make sense? Yeah, yeah. So can we simply replace the existing tendons collagen that's been damaged with new tendon collagen in the context of a, you know, kind of antibiotics steroid environment? Or do we actually still need that collagen breakdown to get rid of the damaged collagen fibrils and replace them with nuance? I don't know. I know that in the context of strength training situations, you do see very much disorganized collagen as a result of using the antibiotics in the combination with strength training. But is that because the tendon is trying to restructure itself and is being unable to do so? Because it can't get the breakdown rate high enough. If that were the case, obviously, this is speculative. If it were the case, then what repetition range do you think someone might be using for that? Yeah, you could see that going right up to the light end of the spectrum again. If the tendon is being damaged, but the repair process is not being prevented by the antibiotics because the breakdown rates don't need to be that high to just replace existing collagen fibrils, then you could go to town on it. I mean, you could be using light loads all the time and it would actually probably make a lot of sense. You know, maybe blood flow restriction would give you a little bit of an advantage there because you would create less damage because fewer repetitions. But ultimately, again, you see that this would fit really well with the kind of superset type, you know, kind of extra local fatigue type drop set programs that you see, where people are trying to create stimulus for the muscle with minimum amount of repetitions. Yeah, that would make a lot of sense in that context because you would get less tendon damage for the same or for some of the muscle stimulus. Now, another change that we see and this is mentioned, actually, this isn't talked about specifically in men's plans today, but men's does talk about it a lot, is a new emphasis on tempo and slowing down tempo is an eccentric lifting. And what impact would that have on connected tissue? So I think, you know, the intentionally being careful about your lifting, I think is probably going to be a beneficial effect acutely. So obviously, you know, tendons and muscles both kind of rupture for more or less the same reason. You create long-term damage over time, material-based damage over time, and then eventually you do something that just kind of snaps it. A lot of people kind of fall into the same trap with muscle strains and tendon injuries and they're like, and they're like biomechanically analysing exactly what the person was doing in particular positions. Like, oh, it was going into this position that created the problem in light nonsense. The issue was that they were doing something for a long period of time prior to that that was creating damage that wasn't being fully repaired and you eventually got to a point where it tore. And yes, the moment when you tear it usually involves a heavier load, a less well-controlled eccentric, all of those kind of things. And you put yourself in a situation where you suddenly experience a large force in a stretched position either of the tendon or the muscle on, you know, snap. But you have no mind is that that wasn't that thing that actually created the problem. It was the thing that you were doing for weeks or months prior to that particular moment in time. People don't like to think about those sort of thinking about things in those ways, but that's more or less how it works. So I think really is difficult to say. But I think ultimately, yes, being careful about a tempo, especially in the eccentric phase, of the repetitions is definitely going to reduce the risk that some particular moment in time creates a large force in stretched position that creates a rupture. But again, as I say, repeating myself, the issue is not really that moment in time is everything the way forward. So it's more about, you know, what are we doing in terms of the the program? And that's probably where that reduced frequency comes in, because you kind of at least giving a little bit more time for the tendons to kind of restrict themselves. I think it's also worth mentioning, and this is outside of my warehouse again, but it's also worth mentioning that. I think potentially if you go back, you know, there's probably going to be differences in the durations of time for which lifters were using antibiotics. Well, that's a good point because early on in the 60s, they were generally cycling. And you know, it usually, if you give yourself a period of time away from the antibiotic, then the tendon at least has a period of time in which you can then, you know, kind of restructure and adapt without that constant state of collagen breakdown being inhibited. If you give your tendons the ability to achieve high levels of collagen breakdown, they will fix, I imagine, a lot of the issues that you've created prior to that point, whereas if you're on all the time, then I think that changes things and you're basically never giving your tendons a chance to do what they need to do. And again, you know, we do see a lot of these changes occur in the 80s. When we do see gear escalate, we start to see cycles become these permanent sort of, you know, there might be sort of blasting and freezing cycles where people are staying on permanently. And, you know, we see the introduction of growth hormone, which is working a little bit definitely than the other other antibiotics are as far as connected tissue goes, isn't it? Like, it's not preventing the breakdown as much as, say, testosterone is, but it's further increasing synthesis. And if there's already sort of this enhanced or increased synthesis anyway, and this inability to break down every model properly, then adding more synthesis on top of that is just going to potentially exacerbate that issue, won't it? Very possibly. I mean, again, I mean, just to kind of set all of this in context, this is an exploratory conversation. I think either of us are presenting a view that says, you know, this is how we think things are. You know, we've got some interesting data in the animal models and a little bit in humans, showing that tendon damage or sorry, tendon, you know, kind of structures are disorganized in anabolic users. And there's a higher risk of rupture in all kind of collagen tissues. You know, and it's just trying to, how can we connect this with the way that people have changed training programs every time? I don't really know. I mean, I think it's really difficult to say what is what is going on at the moment. But there's definitely something there. And I think that's that's why the conversation is so interesting. Now, one other change that we see occur, and obviously there's a few things that could lead to this. I don't want to I don't want to overstate this, but we do see much more of an emphasis on machines. And we would see this develop even further. And, you know, obviously, what we get to the 80s and 90s, then, you know, how you believe majority of work is being done on machines. In a similar way to the eccentric of the slower tempos being used, just to add a little bit of control and potentially reduce that, you know, that I guess actual catalyst, which could lead to the rupture, is it possible the machines could add a little bit of protection there? So, I mean, I think ultimately the machine allows you to kind of bail a little bit, more safely in the situations that you're not comfortable with. You know, it probably allows you to do ranges of motion that you may be more comfortable in. I mean, it would be interesting just to kind of do a little bit of analysis and see whether there is a shift towards using more partial ranges of motion, especially in the top part of the ranging motion. Yeah, I was thinking that I wasn't able to identify anything like that, but you would think it would logically make sense to him. You would. So, there's kind of some questions around that. But, you know, ultimately, I don't think the training lines up perfectly with what I would expect, but equally, I don't think the physiology gives you an obvious answer. So, like, you know, if you said to me, okay, you know, accepting that antibiotics make it very difficult for tendons to increase in stiffness, because they can't restructure themselves. How would you program a strengthening routine for bodybuilders? I'm like, I actually don't know at this point. I actually don't know at this point how I would change the training program for somebody who's using antibiotics, because I certainly would say that if they are coming off the antibiotics, then I would very much recommend that they do pursue, you know, ways to un-pick the damage that they have created. So, you know, I think it would be helpful to try and get to a point where the tendon was stiffer, you know, in those periods of time when they're not using antibiotics, but whether people are really doing that at all, as you say at the moment. And don't forget, you said that these changes are occurring even with TRT. Even with TRT. So, if people are kind of going, as you say, blast and cruise, and they're kind of going up to silly levels, and then coming back down to a TRT level, I don't think they're really going to get much benefit from saying, oh, well, I'll get all my tendons stiffness increases during my TRT phase. We need probably not. You're probably not. So, again, it's kind of a very, very difficult problem to solve. But equally, you know, would you say, well, okay, we'll just go crazy on the light load stuff. Well, I'm really not sure whether that's going to work because, you know, you go under a lot of light load work, you are going to be creating a lot of damage in the tendon. Does the antibiotic allow you to repair that damage? I don't know. That's a question that I've not managed to answer yet. Now, maybe the data is out there. I haven't done a lot of work to, you know, make sure I've found every single paper that exists. But if somebody does know of a paper in which they've got distance runners or endurance athletes using antibiotics, I would be fascinated to see what their tendons look like. Because if their tendons have, you know, relatively minimal indication of a pathological changes, that would be fantastic to observe, because that would give us confidence that the tendons are capable of repairing themselves, at least, in the context of anabolic usage. You mentioned a few studies early on. And, you know, some even just in TRT, showing this increase injury risk. Well, any of those studies you mentioned, were any of those done in people who weren't actually lifting and people who just in sort of day-to-day life? If there's injuries that are occurring outside the context of lifting, would that potentially suggest that, I mean, obviously, people can be participating in a higher. Well, I'll say, you don't know why activities they're engaged in. This is why I think it's important to have some sort of, you know, kind of a control group. So having a group of distance runners, you know, ones using anabolic one is not, you know, be fascinated to see whether their risk of injuries is higher or at least just not so much the risk of injury. But like, can we see whether the pathological changes exist there as a result of the steroid usage or not? And is it, you know, as pronounced as we see? The question, what it comes down to is, you know, is it just a restructuring block or is it a repair block as well? I don't know. If it were a repair block, would that be on any, a key time? The worst, I'd be worst of all worlds because then you kind of, there's nothing you can really do. You can't really, at that point, my performative argument comes into play because at that point, you're going, literally, all we're doing here is playing around the gym and pretending to do stuff to keep people believing that strength training has anything to do with bodybuilding. And I don't think where, I don't think we're at that point. I mean, I keep kind of coming back to the numbers. We chat about this before the podcast and we're like, no, if you were to kind of estimate the amount of muscle mass you can add from strength training versus the amount of muscle mass that some of these guys are adding from, from anabolic, you know, is it the same number? Is it, you know, third of the number? Is it a quarter of the number? I don't know. Those kind of, those kind of numbers are pretty interesting to play around with. But, you know, if you're kind of saying that, you know, there's no repair, if there's a block on repair and there's a block on, on restructuring, then really, what all we're doing in the gym is playing around pretending to lift weights because at that point, you kind of don't really want to create issues for the tendon. Otherwise, it's just going to rip off. And I'm not, I'm not sure where they are. I've wondered why, because obviously we see the, the width and session volume go up so drastically. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Which is a really good indicator that it's probably not a repair block. Yeah. And I've wondered, is that better than doing single sets more often? Like what is, which would have a lower chance of injury? And what I was trying to find information on and I was unable to is do more of these injuries happen in the first set or the last set. Like these things are typically happening in that first max effort set where someone's using the highest load that they can, they're using, you know, doing the most amount of repetitions as they can and more than un-fatigue state or the more likely to happen when performance is reduced due to fatigue and coordination, I guess is reduced. Well, that's the issue, isn't it? I mean, that's maybe coming back to your comment about machines. I think what we tend to see in general with both muscle strain and tendon rupture is that as I say, someone will engage in a period of heightened exercise activity for, you know, a period of time and then they will go and do something, you know, explosive, they'll do a short sprint, they'll, you know, lift a heavy weight, they'll do something slightly out of the norm and the tendon just tears off and they, everyone blames the thing that they did out of the norm and it's not just the amount of volume that they've been doing previously, that's the issue, but it exposes the weakness in that particular context. And there's, you know, as I was saying, there's a lot of scenarios where people will go from say, doing a lot of calisthenics and then they suddenly test their strength and a bench press and thing, you know, they rip their, rip their peg tendon off. I mean, that's the kind of thing that we tend to see happening. So yeah, if you kind of would say, well, okay, you know, someone was doing a lot of bench presses and the bar path was really solid for all of that period of time. But then they got slightly out of the bar path that they've been doing previously in ping, something rips off. Everyone's going to be like, oh, no, it was a technique issue in the coordination drawing. Yes and no. They went outside of the kind of, and it put a strain in a slightly different direction or a slightly different, but the issue was that you hadn't got 10 in the correct state because either, you know, your antibiotics was preventing the restructuring or you created a lot of damage that hadn't been repaired. And they just exposed the injury or sorry, the weakness, not created the injury from nothing, if you like. So we were very hampered in the industry because biomechanists love to kind of pounce on these scenarios and try and explain why somebody was doing something in a particular way that caused the injury. And it's like, no, the problem was the exercise training program they were doing prior to that point. All the antibiotics that they were taking really. So yeah, the machine kind of bar path being fixed is a really interesting way of starting to reduce that risk of happening. I mean, you would think logically if someone's in training a muscle, you know, every other day or three times a week and they go down to just once a week, but presumably there's fewer opportunities for an injury to occur. They just, even if it weren't impacting, you know, any sort of actual structural changes as far as tendons go, there's still a third as many opportunities throughout the year for an injury to occur. Yeah. And of course, you know, the local metabolite of t-builds up massively, if best, if you're using those short rest periods and you've got some cardiovascular stuff going on as well. And, you know, you kind of bring the weight down massively over the course of the work. Overall, kind of problem that the tendon has got to handle is going to be smaller. But again, it's like, what does the post-workout recovery process look like for the tendon and not just from a, you know, an unassisted point of view, but from a assisted point of view. I mean, I really don't know. This is kind of where we're at. And I'm like, if people were approaching this podcast thinking that we were going to provide a whole lot of answers to this question, I'm sure they're going to be disappointed because I don't think there are, you know, any obvious answers at this point in time. What I'm just hoping that we can do with this particular episode is raise this awareness and get some other people who have much higher knowledge bases about animalics, although given your comment earlier, that may be a thin, a thin group of people. But, you know, maybe there are people out there. I'm sure there are people out there who've got very high understanding of how animalics work and they can start to listen to this, but there's no actually, I know these things and these things relate to what you're saying. And then they can come up with an answer or a model that actually fits the data better than we can. You know, I just don't know enough about animalics to be able to pull all this together. But I, you know, I think it's just important to raise awareness of this and trying to get people talking about it. And from your perspective, obviously, you know, it's a key event in the progression of bodybuilding history. And it obviously fits very well into that. And hopefully in the future, we can figure out exactly how those trends relate to this particular observation. When I was listening to all these podcasts in two of them, two separate podcasts, two different people, both professional bodybuilders, one, I think at an Olympia level, they independently made the comment that it was just like a, you know, off the cuff, everyone knows it. It was like everyone knows that if you take gear and you don't do anything, you're going to grow muscle, right? And I was like, they know that. I was like, can you repeat that? Because the amount of people online who seem not to know that. I think, honestly, that's where the performative thing really starts to get going. You're like, you know, you kind of, when you listen to people online who confidently state that you can't grow muscle with gear just by sitting up and saying, so you kind of realize that their brains have been completely hijacked by that performative aspect of bodybuilding. Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. So, okay. So volume and load. I mean, obviously, those are two things that we can, we can't sort of reduce both of those easily. We can normally reduce one or the other. And you've mentioned a few times now BFR, being a potential tool that one could use, I would actually reduce both of those. Now, obviously, we don't see a lot of BFR in the golden era, but you wanted to briefly touch on why that's something you've mentioned a couple of times. So basically, BFR accelerates metabolite related fatigue because it keeps the blood inside muscle and it stops metabolites from leaving the muscle. So you keep all of your metabolites there, which is obviously something that doesn't happen in, especially light load strength training, because as soon as you kind of do an eccentric phase, the blood leaves the muscle and you don't get that metabolite, you know, accumulation remaining. So you basically reduce the number of reps in total for each set. And that basically allows you to do similar, if not the same number of stimulating reps with a light load, but obviously a few are total number of repetitions. So it's a really interesting way, I think of, you know, allowing bodybuilders to expose the tendon to fewer repetitions while simultaneously getting the same muscular stimulus. Whether there would be other health issues associated with BFR for that particular population, I don't know. I'm not anyway, you know, qualified or even capable of assessing that risk profile. So, you know, that's a separate question, but I do think that potentially that is something worth investigating in that context. Now, there's obviously other ways one could reduce load and volume, and that would be creating, say, CNS fatigue, which then reduces one's ability to actually, you know, lift as much load as they were able to previously be, to see seeing a lot of CNS fatigue. But that's where the cardiovascular bit comes in, isn't it? And that's where you kind of, but you're obviously losing out there in terms of the stimulus that workouts providing to the most precisely. So what you said there to BFR is you're saying, hey, this will achieve exercise that go while preserving the stimulus. And potentially, what we're seeing in some of these workout methods with the supersets and the short dress periods and the higher repetitions and whatever else is still achieving the reduced load and volume, but they're losing stimulus by doing that. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I am seeing more and more people going back to talking about fatigue as a thing rather than fatigue mechanisms. And that's got to stop because fatigue is just a measurement. It doesn't tell you anything. You know, it's like what is the mechanism of fatigue that's acting in this scenario? You can't just say, oh, this is worse because fatigue. I'm like, how? You can't, you've got to carry on and tell me physiologically why you think that these fatigue mechanisms are occurring in that context. You can't just say fatigue is here, therefore it's bad. No, what type of fatigue is there? Why is it bad? I mean, like a post-workout fatigue is still present. You can pretty much say it's still bad because all post-workout fatigue mechanisms are bad for stimulating hypertrophy. But in true workout, you can't just say, oh, fatigue is present, therefore stimulus is lower. No, which type of fatigue mechanism is present because if it's just metabolite related fatigue, it's not a problem, which is important because I don't know if you seen this, but online there's actually a bit of a narrative now that metabolite fatigue is bad. That actually somehow causes a CNS fatigue, something I'm not sure. Well, it does eventually. If you get enough metabolite accumulation, you'll get a burning sensation, but it's not metabolized there. The problem is the feeling of, so if you're like, oh, have I got metabolite related fatigue presence causing CNS fatigue, well, can you feel something? Because if you can't feel something, it's not there. You know, ultimately CNS fatigue is about sensations. So if you're worrying about metabolite related creating CNS fatigue, just ask yourself, can I feel some discomforting sensation in the muscle? If you can't, it's not there. So metabolites on their own don't create a problem. It's when they get to a point where they stimulate the sensation of burning. That's when they create CNS fatigue. So this might be a controversial question. So if we see like a lot of these programs, these golden era stuff, they're using, you know, say 60-second rest periods, 45, 60 seconds they're about. And obviously this soup is set and stuff as well. I'm not taking away from that. But if we were to use say, you know, single joint exercise, something that doesn't have a high cardiovascular demand at all, and performs, say, you know, moderate repetitions with that and then take these 45, 60 seconds rest, do it again, do it again. Well, that's arguably enough time for a good amount of both spinal and supospinal CNS fatigue. Hopefully. Hopefully. So if you're not experienced, if you're doing that and you're not experiencing any cardiovascular sensations worth writing home about, and you're not experiencing any burning in the muscle, then you're literally just creating mostly metabolite-related fatigue, a little bit of calcium-elite fatigue, but that's, you know, by the by. So yeah, and honestly, my rest periods literally, when I'm training on my own, my rest periods just moderate according to my sensation levels. So if I'm doing a large multi-joint pulling exercise, then I'll take longer than most people would expect before I do it. Yeah, another set or another exercise. If I'm doing a press a little bit less, if I'm doing a knee extension or a leg curl a little bit less, if I'm doing a single joint exercise, which you rarely see me doing on the upper body, if I am doing a curl or a triceps tension, I'd barely take any rest at all, because there isn't any sensation there, you know. So you can't absolutely do those like that. And I think this is the thing where rest periods, again, the evidence-based crowd have kind of tried to drive their narrative, which is where they want to come up with a number of minutes that everybody should rest. And this nonsense, it's like, what's the physiology that determines the reason for the rest period in the first place? Yeah. Well, this is why I think that's controversial, because obviously we had a shift a couple of years ago, because people don't want to learn physiology. But we had this big shift, right? And like, you know, in the evidence-based world, we was like, okay, we now know longer rest period is a better. And so to now come back and say, yeah, you know, in most ACEs, longer rest periods are going to be better, but here's times where you don't need to do that. That's a pretty controversial take. Yeah, I'm laughing because I think the word no is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What do you mean when you say no? Yeah, that'll come soon. And there's an outcome in a very specific context. Ultimately, on that, that's really important point, because almost all of those studies with a looking at your experience, look at the exercises they're doing. They're all standardized programs. So, yeah, they're kind of using the traditional kind of selection of exercises that point them. It's all multi-joint, leg press, squat, leg bench. Yeah. Absolutely. You'll probably want a longer rest period. Yeah. So, but the thing is, like, physiologically, why does that happen? It happens because of the very thing that hypertrophy research is refused to admit, which is that fatigue is actually a negative in many situations, hypertrophy, if it's the right fatigue mechanism. So, you look at the fatigue mechanism, you go, what is potentially problematic here? Well, super spinal and spinal sinus fatigue is a problem here. If you wait for those to dissipate, and you know that they dissipate because, for example, heart rate has come back down to a sensible level, or you can't feel any burning sensation in the muscle, then have at it. Go to your next set. It's absolutely no reason why not to. But they're refusing to engage with physiology, because it requires a ton of reading. That's my hypothesis. Okay. This leads us to your favorite part of our podcast episode, Chris, where it's my invitation to you to speculate. So, if you were to speculate on what you think might be the, how do I word this in a way that you're going to participate with me? Maybe the most intelligent way to program four and enhance lifter to maybe mitigate some of this increased risk of tendon rupture. You've talked about load and volume, so you've talked about BFR potentially, maybe, being a tool that one could look at. You've mentioned those rest periods, maybe, or arguably keeping them as short as one is able to to the point that super spinal sinus fatigue is not negatively impacting them, would you say? So, I think there are a couple of quick wins that you can get, which, you know, unsurprisingly are already present in the program that we looked at at the beginning of this podcast. You know, I think you can go to machine exercises. I think you can take advantage of the observation that you just made, which is that you can go to single joint and even single limb stuff and take relatively short rests between sets and not have too much CNST being present and therefore that's going to work. You know, I think you can be careful about your, you know, lifting mechanics, you can be careful about your lowering phases and you can be careful about not, you know, jerking too hard at the start of a, kind of a concentric phase as well. You know, you can just keep things very sort of smooth as much as possible and just baby it a little bit, I guess as well. So, you know, could that be why pauses became so big, man? Maybe so. I mean, there's some really interesting stuff here. This is what I think this conversation has been so valuable before. I mean, I know that this has been a little bit disjointed and not very kind of satisfying in terms of presenting a model that is kind of explaining everything, but we're at the beginning of a concept here. We're trying to figure out what's going on. You know, this is like me, you know, sort of like whatever how many years ago it was now, ten years ago, sort of coming out and saying mechanical tension is the force for lost relationship and everyone looking at me and going, you're mad. I'm like, I'm not sure I am. I'm pretty sure I'm right here. And I think, you know, this is one of those moments where you just have to kind of put this stuff out there and go, give me feedback, tell me what you think. You know, if somebody comes along and says, well, actually, no, you've got this bit wrong because I'm a steroid expert and this is what is happening in this situation. Fantastic. Let's kind of take that on board and see whether we can move this in a useful direction, but answering your question, you know, I think, yeah, the machines, the single joint stuff, even the single limb stuff, you know, takes advantage of that ability to push metabolically to be. I certainly think BFR is worth investigating. I want to just look at it and make sure that there wasn't any interaction effect between, you know, the cardiovascular risks that bodybuilders face as result of using steroids and what BFR does. I mean, that's definitely worth checking before you jump in with both feet. Yeah. I'm using it. It's been in some exercises as well. I mean, I don't know if you've seen the data on what happens to intracranial pressure in like a leg crest. So, yeah, no, I have, yeah. Yeah. So probably not an exercise I'd be doing. I'd be combining BFR with. No, but this is not really the one that would logically make sense anyway. So, you know, you could argue me still do it though. I'm sure that I'm sure I've done it in a past. I'm sure there's that some that would make more sense. But, you know, if if someone's listening to this and like, I'm just going to do BFR, maybe some exercise, you know, maybe that's maybe not the approach to. I definitely would do some investigations first before you use that. I don't want, you know, people to, you know, explode because of some kind of interact. And that's the thing is like, yeah, that's the issue with an under researched population, you know, being sort of faced with these challenges. It's really difficult to know what the responses are going to be to those kind of scenarios. But yeah, so that would be something that I'll be interested in. But ultimately, as I say, until we move any further forwards with our understanding of what the repair block, but it looks like versus what the restructuring block looks like for tendons in the context of antibiotic usage, I'm really, really struggling to answer these questions. So this is probably, it's been really useful for me, just trying to get my head around exactly where the blocks, not blocks as I've just used to a block in that a different context, but where the limitations are in my knowledge in my understanding of how this process works. If I want to move my understanding further forward and create a model that actually makes sense, I've got to try and find an explanation of whether it's just the restructuring that tendons are, the restructuring of tendons that antibiotics are interfering with, or whether it's the repair processes that they're interfering with as well. And if so, is it the same extent or is it different? That's really, I think, the key question to answer. Yeah. And potentially, I mean, you've told about coming off cycle and that potentially, I don't want to say reversing some of that damage, but it just allows a window of opportunity, doesn't it? A window of opportunity in which you're telling us now we're going to start behaving in a way that is not inhibited by the antibiotic. So you could then rely on the heavy strength training to do what it's supposed to do and create them as different increases that you want. How that then changes as you go into the next steroid cycle. Well, absolutely no idea. I've spent a very long time trying to identify any supplements that could potentially aid with some of these issues. And it's been incredibly difficult, more difficult than I expected it to be. There's a very, very small hand for some potential supplements and peptides that could help, but the issue is, this is a pretty unique problem in that the issue is that it's increasing synthesis and it's stopping right down. All right. And most of the things that I could pay for, it's like really exciting about it. And it's like no exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Most of the supplements are good for joints, they're good because they're kind of doing that, but to a much less extent. So, you know, arguably you'd say the general joint supplements, probably not going to be good in this instance, like arguably you're going to have a negative. Yeah, they're going to just make a problem slightly worse. Yeah. Is there anything else you would consider? They're the key things. We'll be dancing around the frequency thing a few times. Do you think I don't see, I don't see how you can answer it to the bone. I don't see how you can question the bone. But you could suggest that if my protein breakdown is reduced, then the negative impact of a lower frequency is less, right? So, like what Mense did here with this twice over eight days, that could be this middle ground where it's like, hey, you're still getting a good, you know, regular stimulus. You're not pummeling conductive tissue every 48 hours, maybe that was an intelligent. Because at the end of the day, if somebody would say to me, how do I decrease injury risk while, you know, using these compounds that increase injury risk, I would be like, train less. Full stop, train less. I've talked before that you can literally do two sessions a week of one set with the report to reserve and you're going to make progress, very slow progress. So, train less. And especially if you're kind of anabolic, steroid is creating massive growth compared to your strength training stimulus, which it will be. And this is just important observation. In the human studies that we've got where you've got a bunch of untrained people start doing strength training and they, you know, kind of divide them into three groups. One group, just a strength training. One group does anabolic and strength training. One group does anabolic without strength training. And basically, you kind of end up with a similar muscle growth in the exercise only and anabolic only groups and double the muscle group in the exercise plus anabolic group, you know, and so people go, oh, okay, so anabolic creates similar muscle growth to, you know, exercise training. Well, no, because if you did the same thing in strength training people, you get tiny amounts of muscle growth in the exercise group and probably the same amount of muscle growth in the anabolic group. So, you probably see 10 times the difference. So, it really depends on your starting point. And most people aren't just kind of going from sitting on the couch to jumping into an exercise and anabolic program. They'll probably do two or three years of strength training before they, you know, go to the dark side. So, ultimately, when you're kind of saying, you know, what is the, what is the contribution of strength training and anabolic in a bodybuilding program for a bodybuilder who's already got several years of strength training behind them? I would say the strength training stimulus is pretty minimally in comparison with what the anabolic is doing. So, that would be my start to always say somebody, if you're, you know, a combustible bodybuilder who's using anabolic, and you want to minimize injury risk, just train a lot less. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's biological, yeah. So, again, this kind of pushes me towards the performative answer. You know, I keep coming back to this thing, is it? Well, I have to read myself in because I'm so cynical about human nature that I just kind of assume the worst at all times. So, I have to kind of say, no, I'm being realistic about this. I've not noticed that about you. That's, that's used to me. Okay, I'm going to end it with this final question. It's commonplace now amongst, maybe the science-based lifting world. And I've said this myself, that someone who's enhanced is best of training the same way as someone who's not enhanced as a natural lifter. Now, I've set back from saying that because I'm not so convinced that's entirely true, but do you have a, I know there's been a lot of speculation today, so I don't know if you have a definitive sort of standpoint on that, but where would you land at this point in time? I think the only honest way to answer that question for me right now is to say, if I were to start using TRT, how would I train my, change my training program? That's the only honest way I can answer that question because honestly, I don't really have another way of approaching that, that would be reasonably kind of interesting. Your question you pose yourself was, how would I, not would I? It sounds like you would. There'd be some changes of it, maybe minor, that you would make. I, right now, based on what I know from what we talked about today, I would drop back from training three times a week, training two times a week. I would simply reduce the number of exposures that I experienced. That's all I would do. I reduced the number of exposures and I would be a little bit more mindful in, I mean, I already am pretty mindful at my age of what I do. I don't do anything that I think is going to cause anything to get ripped off. You know, I tend to stick with, I tend to stick with exercises that are fairly confident won't cause too much of an issue. So I don't think I would need to change my exercise selection too much. I think I'm pretty sort of as safe as I can get on that front already. So I literally, I would just switch from doing three times a week to two times a week and I would pretty much keep everything else the same. So honestly, that would be the only thing I did I would reduce my exposures. Yeah, it's interesting. And one thing I've noticed since we've been having this conversation, not just today, but in over the last few months or whatever, is a lot of the people that I see who are huge advocates of twice a week training and sort of, you know, have maybe you said, hey, you know, I've tried three times a week, my joints felt bad and like it, etc. They tend to be people who are on TRT or on gear. And I do wonder if even if they don't cognitively know that maybe that's potentially why they're having some of these issues. I do wonder if that's why that narrative is pushed a little bit more heavily is, yeah, you know, you're probably actually going to respond slightly better or feel a little bit better with that slightly reduced frequency. Yeah, the word response is difficult in that context, isn't it? It's like, yeah, that's holistic response rather than like it must, because most clearly, it's going to still follow the same rules. Until you get into it. And then that's, that's like where you're going to go. Of course, that's the worst thing. But yeah, that's the issue, isn't it? It's like a holistically response is kind of correctly described there. But from a muscle point of view, it's still going to follow the same rules in three times a week. It's still better than two times a week. But yeah, my answer would be, I would reduce my exposure, but I wouldn't change volumes. I wouldn't change anything else really like that. I would probably try and be a little bit more careful. But again, that's the only honest way I can answer that question. I don't think it's something I'm capable of really saying I would deliberately go about programming because I don't think I have enough knowledge to make those as somebody else or on a generic basis. Okay. There we go. That was our first anabolic podcast. I don't know if we'll revisit this if there's more information out there. If people give us some feedback and maybe they'll point us in direction to answer some of the questions that we've posed today. But if there is anything I like that, then please let us know, message us, message, comment in my question box or something like that. And yeah, like you said, apologies. I'll be giving you guys a working model, but hopefully it was an interesting conversation and got you guys thinking, if anyone who is in hands to work with enhanced athletes, maybe just a conversation started to think about how some of these things do affect your athletes. Hopefully you join us again next week and thank you as always for listening and sharing and subscribing and spreading the podcast.