034 Voluntary activation deficit: exercise selection, muscle mass, and form

Hello, good morning, good evening, wherever you are. Thank you for joining us for another episode of high perjury, past and present. In 2026, a second episode for the year. So thank you, everyone, for joining us for another year. Well, high perjury, past and present, we are talking about a golden era plan today. So we've for you guys who don't know that we do this, we've started contrasting plans that we saw from the silver era and then plans we saw on the golden era. So before and after Annabellex were being widely used in body building and we're using it as a bit of a way to I guess assess some of the changes we see feed into body building and high perjury training after the influence of Annabellex is introduced. And we're speculating a little bit here. Obviously, this is sort of us looking, you know, applying a lens, looking backwards in time and seeing an asking the question, maybe why did some of these changes occur? But it's certainly been an interesting thought experiment so far. And this is the, I think the third plan, maybe third or fourth plan we've looked at from the post Annabellex era. And today, this is an interesting plan because it's actually the first Mr. Olympia winner. So this plan we're looking at is from the 60s. And we're going to look at a plan that supposedly Larry Scott followed. Now Larry Scott was the first Olympia winner in 1965. And he won at 94, he won again in 1965. So he won the first two years. And obviously he would have been enhanced when he was winning these competitions. And this plan was from about that time. So maybe a little bit before he was winning the Olympia, but he was certainly winning competitions at this point in time. And as the story goes, he was given this plan by Vince Garonda. Now, we've not talked about Vince on this show before. And at some point, we will, I'm sure, cover one of Vince's plans directly, not one that is indirectly given to someone else. But Vince, I don't know if I've told you this Chris, but Vince is one of the people I get asked about the most. I get so many requests for us to cover Vince's plans, Vince and and Dorian. So we will cover both of their plans at some point in the future. I assure you. So this is Larry Scott's plan. Again, this is just, you know, supposedly the plan he was following. I don't know how long he was following it for. But in the early 60s, he was apparently following this plan. Now it was full body. And it was the same workout repeated three times per week. So again, obviously, you know, up until the golden era, it is most common for people to repeat full body programs, AA, you know, three times per week. We did see that start to shift particularly sort of in their more kind of 70s. And so this is, I guess, on that sort of cusp, before we start to see some of these splits emerge. So we have a, what I'll do actually is I'm going to start with the exercise selection. And then I'm going to tell you how does perform because it was performed in a relatively unique way. And that will, I guess, be an interesting conversation in and of itself. So the exercise selection, we start with bench press to neck. So a wide bench press, I guess, what some people call, I think they call it a guillotine press. Is that what you call it, Chris? You're looking at me like, you don't know. Okay, I think some people will call it a guillotine press or just a wide grip bench. And then we move from that into a barbell squat and then go into a calf raise and then behind the neck barbell press. And then a front pull down. I'm sure we'll be happy to see we've got a pull down here. Now this was called front pull down. I don't believe they mean frontal plan. I'm assuming that they mean just in in front of the neck. So probably more, I guess scapular plan would be my guess here, but I'm not entirely sure. And then we go into a lying barbell triceps extension, a preacher bench curl by subsequent, which I don't think we've seen that before. This might be the first time we've seen this exercise. And then we conclude with a bent leg knee raise. So it's a relatively condensed workout in terms of exercise number of exercises. However, it's not short in terms of total number of sets. So each exercise by the bent leg knee raise, which is done for one single set of a hundred repetitions, each other exercise was done for six sets and for six to eight repetitions. There was one or two exercises where the repetitions changed a little bit. Carthrae's is when the lower bit higher. But generally, they were done for six sets of six to eight repetitions. Now this bit's important. And I think this is why people are so interested in growing their work is they were done with short rest periods. So this workout, I couldn't find exactly how long the rest periods were, but the instructions were to use the same weights for all sets and repetitions. And if you can complete all of them, then you add low next workout. So obviously doing six sets of six stage repetitions, where and in doing shorter rest periods as Grunter was known for doing, I would be assuming that we those first few sets would be at least a few repetitions in reserve. So a different plan to what we've looked at so far, Chris, what are your thoughts so far and all of that? Yeah, so there's a couple of interesting things to say here. I mean, obviously, nobody's going to be surprised by what I'm going to say about exercise selection. I mean, there's some pretty big gaps in here as regards to maximizing muscle growth across the whole body. But there's two interesting things that I think we can say that I don't often say. Firstly, I think that it's interesting to see how this golden era kind of plan is doing something to try and essentially limit the potential damage to the tendons that might occur with the combination of using aloebolics and strength training simultaneously. Because that's the issue. When you've got kind of an anabolic sort of state in the system as a result of exogenous pharmaceuticals, what you end up with is the inability to repair the tendon properly after the damage that can be caused by strength training exercise. So if we have got this kind of fatigue being used to manage that problem, essentially, they're using multiple sets and short respirators. Essentially, that means that you're doing fewer repetitions with a lighter load than you would do if you were kind of leaving, you know, long respirators and training to failure. And what have you essentially managing the exposure of the tendon to the potential damage that could occur. Now, I think there are better ways of doing it. You know, I think we can use blood flow restriction and potentially other, you know, kind of ideas around that sort of approach. But ultimately, fatigue is a very simple way of doing it. If you have no equipment to know kind of, you know, sort of knowledge around BFR, which obviously would have been the case back then. So that's first thing that I think is interesting. The second thing is this idea of doing super high repetition sets. So I've got this, I'm not actually sure, a bent leg knee raise is, I think you probably have to describe that too. Look, I'm assuming what that exercise is would be lying on a bench, like an incline bench with your head at the top and then doing like reverse crunch. I'm assuming that that's what they mean by this. So is a hip flex exercise? Yes. So it could be done with a pull up bar. Obviously, that's how people usually do it today hanging from like a dead hanging then pulling their knees up towards their midline a bit higher. But I'm assuming that this is done in the benches. That's what I normally see in the photos of these magazines. Okay. In which case, there are two interesting things to say about this and not just one. So the thing I was going to say was that with really high repetition sets, what a lot of people don't realize if they don't have the basic kind of physiology behind them is that once you go to a rep range higher than around a bout sort of, you know, if we think about percentages of one rep max, approximately 30% of one rep max, you know, and it depends on the exercise and the muscle group. You're training what that corresponds to in terms of rep range, but 100 to 150 is absolutely, you know, kind of off the top end of that. So it's definitely lighter than 30% of one rep max. Once you get past 30% of one rep max, you're not going to stimulate any hypertrophy. Now the reason for that is fascinating. And a lot of people, I'd say the vast majority of people who are kind of influences in the space don't know about this thing. Essentially, in order to accumulate metabolites inside a muscle, you need to actually create vascular occlusion. Now I'll come onto how blood flow occlusion, blood flow restriction works in this context in a minute. But basically, when we have a muscle that is contracting and it's producing whole muscle force higher than around about 30% of one rep max, then essentially the veins get squeezed closed during a muscular contraction. So isometric or concentric contraction, you're closing the muscle, it closes the veins. Now essentially that means that you're essentially trapping the blood inside the muscle. So it starts to create that kind of muscle pump that people talk about to a degree. I mean, there's a bit more involved in muscle pump, but that's the starting point. Now the metabolites then can't leave the muscle. They're trapped inside the muscle because the blood is what takes the metabolites out of the muscle. So if you're like using a heavier load than 30% of one rep max, then you're essentially trapping the blood and muscle trapping the metabolites. You're going to get metabolite-related fatigue mechanisms. If on the other hand, you use a lighter load than that, then even when you do a concentric or isometric contraction, you're actually squeezing the muscle, you're not closing the veins. What's going to happen is you're just going to squirt the blood out of the muscle and it's going to take all the metabolites with it. So you don't get metabolite-related fatigue. So there's these two, there's basically an inflection point. It's It's really, really critical. to understand how the fatigue mechanisms are working. - So just quickly there, I know you've defined this in the past, but when we're talking about fatigue, obviously a lot of people will hear fatigue and that'll have a negative connotation and nothing all fatigue is bad. But ultimately, - That's mostly because of me. I mean, prior to me coming along, everybody thought fatigue was good and it actually stimulated hypertrophy. That's my understanding. - Yeah, it's precisely. - These changed the conversation. - Oh, my God. - Yeah. - But that's, I think the fundamental mistake people are making today is not understanding what fatigue is. Right? And that's why people think it's good. - Yeah, because fatigue is bad. - Yeah, it's just an outcome. It's an observation. It's what happening underneath the surface that tells you whether it's good or bad, yeah, exactly. - So all this happening is fatigue is telling you that there's reduction in performance. Yeah. And so you're saying, "Hey, the thing that's causing the reduction "in performance here in this, "in a normal set of, say, 20 repetitions, "is is build up in metabolites." That's okay. - Mostly. - Mostly, yeah. - Mostly. - Yeah, there's other fatigue mechanisms as well. - Totally. But ultimately metabolites are the bigger player. And ultimately, what that means is that we don't have much of a negative effect on either recruitment or single-fibre tension. And as a result, the presence of them at metabolites is completely innocuous. It doesn't cause any problems. And it facilitates us slowing down the movement speed and ultimately getting to a point where we can produce high levels of recruitment at the same time as high levels of mechanical tension. So you get a high-perch, we stimulate. - So the fatigue is necessary to get to that stimulating part of the set. - If you're not going to use a five-retting max or heavy, yeah, you need some of that metabolite-related to get to the point where you can stimulate high-perch for, yeah, totally true. So the problem with light loads are off the end of that, with tentacle and very light loads, but that's just terminology. So if you go lighter than 30% of warm-up max, you're now not able to squeeze the veins close, you can't create the metabolite-related. The only types of fatigue now that you are going to generate are going to be types of fatigue that either reduce recruitment or that reduce mechanical tension. You're either going to have calcium-imilite to de-mechanisms in the muscle fibers or you're going to have super spinal or spinal CNFT mechanisms in the central nervous system and they're going to produce a reduced level of recruitment. So essentially, once you go off that kind of sort of limit of rep range, and again, it can be any number really depending on the muscle and the exercise, but kind of around about sort of, maybe 30 plus repetition sets, you're going to find that you're not actually stimulating hypertrophy. And that is really interesting that we're seeing that here in the golden era, in a situation where we're expecting that people are using antibiotics, because ultimately, we've divorced this connection between what we're doing and training and what we're getting as an output, because if your antibiotics are automatically creating muscle growth while you're asleep or not even in the gym, then ultimately, you're not necessarily going to know that an exercise is working properly. And that's really, really cool to see that here, just from a historical perspective, really cool to see that here, where we've lost stability to know that what we're doing is working. - Well, I look at this plan. One thing I find interesting is this is kind of, kind of the first integration we see moving away from the traditional way the Silvee Real Plans were done. And so we've still got most of it there. We've still got the full body. We've still got the AAA. We've still got a similar exercise selection. We've got in some way similar repetitions. Yes, we've got this one exercise, which is being done for over 100 repetitions. But everything else is six to eight, they're about. So looking at it, it's like, oh, this is my stuff, what we expect to see. But then we start to see a couple of things introduced themselves. And like you said, you know, the higher set number, the shorter grasp period is that potentially to do with injury prevention, possibly, we don't know. But it's interesting to see how things are starting to shift. And this is only, I mean, what are we talking, maybe five years, it's within the decade of anabolic being used. And so with an only a few years, we're starting to see some of these shifts start to occur. But equally, as you say, it's not a horrible program. I mean, I really like this wide grip bench combined with a wide grip overhead press. I mean, that's a, if you're looking for two pressing variations, that are going to give you some really good coverage across the upper body pressing mosquitoes. That's a really nice combo. Yeah. And again, I like the fact that we've got a pull down, which, you know, probably a scapular plane, so it's not amazing. You know, it's probably a kind of a bit of a mix of some upper and some lower lats, but, you know, okay, not a problem. At least we've got something in there that's training the lats, which is one of my major criticisms about, you know, kind of the silver air routines. You know, and then, okay, so we've got some direct triceps work. We've got some direct biceps work. But again, you know, nothing really on the hamstrings, but then again, that is a feature of silver air programs. We don't tend to see, you know, much hamstrings, kind of work being done in those situations. And of course, you know, obviously squats were getting, you know, kind of carphrases. We're getting, you know, decent coverage for quads, calves, maybe to a certain extent glutes as well. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, you could do a lot worse. I mean, we keep saying this every time we look at the silver air routine and the same thing applies here really, apart from the kind of strangeness regarding sets and wraps, you know, you could do worse than this program. He really could. Yeah, I mean, if you drop the sets down, if you halved those sets, if you did three sets of eight, this would not be a horrible program at all. And then what would we, I mean, I like the bench press index. Obviously, Gronda, my understanding is Gronda basically didn't allow a standard bench pressing in his gym, like his whole thing was, he didn't like benches. I don't think a whole lot at all, but he did do this sort of more guillotine style, which is not a bad variation, is it? I mean, obviously taking that, that wider grip, he's not, I guess it would be better if he was potentially adding in something else. I was going to get maybe a little bit more upper chest and there's not really anything else here that's going to do that. But it's still a fine, I guess it does regeas a little bit more of the triceps. So we can hear a little bit more chest anyway. But I look at a plan like this and I think it's good for, I would say this exercise selection, it's like relatively good for maybe a beginner. Yeah, like someone who's like, "Hey, I just want to kind of hit as much as I can. I don't want to get too sort of bogged down in a whole lot of different exercise variety. I'm not sort of looking at competing. I don't want to maximally develop everything I can." But to see that an Olympia competitor or winner was using this, that's a little bit surprising, don't you think? Yeah, I think that's where the anabolic comes in, isn't it? That's where I say, ultimately, anabolic makes everything grow. And you can kind of. That's one of the things that I think is probably the biggest sort of thing that differentiates competitors who are using anabolic from the natural lifters. I mean, lots of people go, "Oh, well, the anabolic users can they can do loads more volume and they can recover and all that nonsense?" I mean, there probably is a little bit of a difference in recovery, but I don't think it's bigger as people think it is. The real thing is that people using anabolic can literally do any silly exercises they like and leave gaping holes in their routines regarding certain muscle groups. And those muscle groups will still grow. I mean, this is why you kind of got people arguing, "Oh, no, no, no, I don't need to do all these exercises. I can just do, I don't know what sort of silly things they say." But you might have people saying, "Oh, I can just do squat bench deadlift and I'll grow the same as a bodybuilder who would do." You might do. You might do. Really topical what you're saying there, because plans like this, and you said a moment ago, look, it's not a bad plan. And it's not awful. It could be way worse. And you look at this and it's like, well, there's decent chests, decent shoulders, decent quads, you're not getting erect fam unless you can, that bent leg knee raise that he's doing. You know, arms, okay, we've got some arms, direct arms working there, got some lab work, but we're not maximizing what we can achieve by any means, right? And there's a lot of people who are pushing plans like this. And again, not to say that these are bad plans that I use plans like these. Honestly, I could take that loss, to be honest. I mean, this if this was the worst that we were seeing, I'll be actually pretty happy with that. Absolutely. I mean, as an AIA plan, this is great. Again, to someone who doesn't want to maximize every single thing that they can, who just wants to build a decent physique. I think this is phenomenal. Yeah. But where the conversation is headed is this is all that one needs to maxly me develop. Yeah. Because you know, you look at something like a behind the neck press and the argument goes, well, you're going to get anterior delting in middle del to get some trap work. And then this is great. That's all you need. You look at the bench press to neck. You're getting upper chest. You're getting middle chest. A little bit of lower chest. Okay. Great. That's all you need. And you know, we're looking to plan like this and say, yeah, someone's going to build a good physique with this. But can you massively develop every muscle region using just one exercise for that whole muscle group? That's the problem. And I think ultimately that's what I wanted to talk about today under the, you know, kind of, well, through the lens of three errors the time seeing, you know, generally in the in the social media today. I mean, we were chatting about this before podcast and I was saying, look, there's these three things that I keep seeing and you were telling me you've seen them as well. Essentially, there are people arguing about exercise selection, which is kind of what we've just been talking about. They're saying basically that, you know, if you're doing an exercise that involves a muscle group, then it automatically, you know, means that you're, you know, training that muscle group to a maximum extent. Similarly, you got people who don't really understand what happens when you. change the total amount of muscle mass that you're using. So like go from a squat to a knee extension, what's actually different there and why is it different? And then, you know, we've also got situations where people are arguing a lot about exactly how to perform an exercise and whether there's, you know, specific tempo or, you know, kind of form that has to be used. And these three things, what I think most people don't realize is that all of these three arguments, these three discussions that are taking place are actually, you know, subservient to one fundamental observation in sports science that most people are just completely ignoring. And that's something that we've already covered in great detail. And I was actually just looking back to see what episode number it was. It's number 30. So if you haven't come across what a voluntary activation deficit is, then please go back and listen to episode number 30 because we did a really, really good long detailed discussion of exactly what's going on with voluntary activation deficits. But today I just want to show how voluntary activation deficits are explained or at least provide very important context to each of these three separate arguments. And we can, you know, if we want to, we can start with the exercise selection one because that was the one we were just talking about. But very briefly, before we kind of go through each of these three areas, let me just explain what the voluntary activation deficit is in a brief because as I say, we did a full episode on this previously. So when we say voluntary activation deficit, it is a measurement. So again, like for TG as a measurement, strength as a measurement, this is a measurement. So we're taking a measurement and showing that when somebody performs a maximum effort contraction often in a very controlled environment to minimize, you know, the issues associated with stability and muscle mass and that kind of thing. So maybe there's a maximum effort contraction. Then what we can do is we can superimpose electrical stimulation on that to see if there are any muscle fibers that are not being activated. Okay. So essentially, we're going to get an idea of how much more force or in the case of a dynamic to talk, somebody could generate if they were able to fully activate the entirety of their muscle to the, you know, theoretical maximum extent. And generally speaking, when we do these tests again, in the controlled environments in which they're being performed, we get kind of large muscle groups like the quads showing deficits of maybe around 20%. So what we call hitting a voluntary activation level of 80% and their deficit is, you know, essentially 20%. So that's a force production. And essentially, well, that implies is there's a large chunk of muscle fibers that are simply not capable of being activated under maximum voluntary effort conditions, which we could activate further if we're, you know, applying electrical stimulus, which is what's done in these tests. So that's what a voluntary activation deficit test is. Now, it's not the same thing as muscle activation. It's got nothing to do with electromeography. So when people come along and say, oh, well, you know, you're talking about muscle activation and that's electromeography and that's not related type of energy. I'm like, no, we're not talking about that. It sounds similar, similar to analogy, but it's actually completely unrelated. There is no electronic biography involved in the making of a voluntary activation deficit test. So it's literally force comparisons. So it's very, very, very secure in terms of how we are interpreting this information. So essentially, what we're saying is that even when you are producing a maximum effort, now this could be in a test, like in a dynamometer, or you could be in muscular failure, when you're reaching the end of a strength training set, it doesn't really matter. In fact, the muscular failure will actually involve an even bigger voluntary activation deficit for supospinal fatigue reasons. But ultimately, essentially, maximum effort, you're not getting every single muscle fire activated in the muscle. And this is ultimately the key that helps us understand these three separate conversations that are taking place at the moment regarding excise selection, the amount of muscle mass that's involved in excise, which is kind of an excise selection issue, but it's a very specific example of one. And then thirdly, this idea around form and coordination. So essentially, if we start with excise selection, now imagine you've got two exercises that are essentially very similar in terms of, like, for example, the total muscle mass being used, but they're actually involved potentially different either directions. So maybe you're, you know, moving the shoulder in a slightly different direction, maybe you're working a different plane of motion, or alternatively, maybe the resistance profile is different. So you're producing maximum effort at one end of the joint-tangerine distribution, or alternatively, the opposite end of the joint -tangerine distribution. You could imagine, say, for example, a biceps curl, where maybe in one excise variation, you've got maximum effort with the elbow extended, and the other example you have maximum effort with the elbow is flexed. I mean, these are kind of ways that you can manipulate excises to kind of create different effects. Now, if we understand that neuro-mechanical matching essentially tries to get us to send the activation to whichever muscles have the best leverage, then what's going to happen is you're going to, first of all, start sending activation to those muscle, or muscle regions that have the best leverage, and you're going to carry on, you know, working your way up the motine at pool. Now, ultimately, because we have a voluntary activation deficit, you're going to stop before you get to the maximum possible limit that you could get to theoretically. Essentially, you're going to get to a level at which you have to stop early. Now, that happens in the case of, you know, strength training and also in the case of any other type of excise, because we reach out maximum tolerable perceptions of effort. But ultimately, we're going to find that we get to a level of activation. We've activated certain number of muscles, we cannot now activate the remaining however many percent. In the case of big muscle groups, maybe it's like, you know, up to 20 percent, in the case of smaller ones, it's probably more than like 2 to 5 percent. But the point is there are muscle fires that are not being activated. Now, essentially, in one of the excise variations, we've proceeded by sending activation to one, let's say, for example, in the elbow flexors, we've started with a extended elbow position, we're starting out sending most of the activation towards the biceps. You're going to work your way through most of the biceps, brachy muscle fires. And then you're going to move on to other muscle fibers in other parts of the elbow flex complex that can contribute. But you're going to stop before you hit the maximum possible level of activation of those muscle fires. So you're leaving behind some muscle fires in the brachy radiolus, whatever the aren't actually being activated. So there are fires there that are not being activated. Now, that's because the moti units are not being recruited. So don't get distracted by people saying, oh well, you know, muscle fires and moti units, then that's not the same thing. Well, in this context, it is. When we then look at the opposite example, we're producing peak force, say, for example, an flex position, then we start off sending all the activation to the brachy radiolus, we fill that up. And then we move to another muscle like the biceps, brachy in the fibers that can contribute. And again, we stop before we reach the maximum level. So the fibers that are not being used now are not the ones from the brachy radiolus, the ones that are not being used are from biceps, brachy. So essentially, what we can see is that if you choose these two different excisors, you just essentially leave untrained fibers from different parts of the elbow flex complex, depending on which excise variation you use. And that's just a resistance profile example. You can do the same thing with movement direction or plane of motion examples exactly the same idea. So let's move slowly here. Let's leave no stone untrained because this is a topic that gets very confused online. So let's say you are doing the example exercise you've just given you're doing a bicep curl and you're doing one that is harder in that stretch position. You're going to be using more biceps brachy. Now, why does the body not or the brain not use 100% of the available biceps brachy modian? It's before using brachialis brachy radiolus. Like, why would we be in a situation where we're getting say, maybe 85 90% activation, the biceps brachy we're getting still relatively high activation in brachialis, brachy radiolus, why are we not getting why are we not sending all central motor command to that one muscle that has better leverage in that movement? It's entirely possible that does happen, but it probably doesn't because generally speaking, you are going to have some motor units in the brachy radiolus that have better leverage than the motor units in the biceps brachy that have worse leverage. Yeah, so ultimately what we're looking at is, is let's say you can use 100 money. Obviously, this is an arbitrary number. Say you're you're going to use 100 motor units to do that exercise. You're going to use the motor units in order that have the best leverage to do that action, that function. Yeah, I mean, basically you can think of it as a ven diagram. So essentially, there will be regions of the, each of the elbow flexors and the brain kind of thinks in terms of motor units rather than muscle regions and muscles, but ultimately what it will do is it'll go, oh, this area here has amazing leverage for the tusk I'm about to perform and the reason the range of most of them in. And then it'll go there and it'll then work on henamon size principle. So people get really, really upset and confused and angry about how henamon size principle interacts with the principle of neurochemical matching. Principle of neurocannion matching tells you where to go to start with and henamon supply principle then tells you what to do when you get there. So essentially, henamon size principle is going to work once you arrive in the area of the muscle, all the region, all the specific muscle depending on how it's constructed and how uniform it is. It's very uniform then it's just going to treat it as a whole thing. But ultimately, it's going to go to the area that it wants to use for the movement and then it's going to follow henamon size principle once it gets there. So essentially, because some people go, oh, you don't need neurochemical matching, you do just henamon size principle. And I'm like, really? So if I'm like, I want to walk across the room, you're going to start using muscle fibers in my deltoid because they're smaller than the small ones. They're talking nonsense. They're brain hustling. You need a starting point of location first and that has to follow leverage because otherwise, if it doesn't have leverage, this is like the Anyway, I'm going to get onto that with the paper. You have to start with leverage because that's the only thing that guarantees you're going to be able to do the movement that you want to do. And then after that, you follow Hennam and Sajmato. But yes, in answer to your question, theoretically, if every single mochanit and muscle fiber in the biceps bracket had better leverage than every single mochanit and muscle fiber in the bracket radialis, and yeah, what would happen is you would end up with the entirety of the biceps bracket being activated before any of the muscle fibers in the bracket radialis. So that's not going to happen. You are going to have some mix of match. So it's going to kind of use some of the fibers in or some of the motunits in the bracket radialis. And you're just going to move forward. But on balance, you're going to use the muscle fibers in the motunits in the biceps bracket faster. More of them are going to occur earlier. And you're going to end up maxing that out pretty much with the exercise that involves peak forces or peak efforts in the extended elbow stretch position. And then say you're going to move on to the remaining ones that you can activate in the bracket radialis. And then you're just going to have to cap out at certain point because you max them, tolerable perception of efforts not going to allow you to send any more or create any more central motorcans sent to that area of the body. And that's the point when you're going to leave those muscle fibers untrained inside the bracket radialis. So just keep saying this and people just keep denying it with giving zero explanation. I mean, this is kind of where we are at the moment on social media. As I, I explain exactly how this is working. I show them physiologically. And then people just post like a one line comment saying, that's not how it works. Then they walk away. And it's like you're giving no explanation of why you think that you're not giving any details, you're not giving any mechanistic explanation. There's no physiology in what you're saying. You know, if people are following you, that's kind of on them at this point, really. That's not, that doesn't sound like a me problem. That sounds like a them problem. Yeah. Generally people online are just shouting very loudly that you're wrong and then offering very little by way of explanation as to why people believe those people. I think that that's a them problem. Yes. Yes, but if someone shouts loud enough, at a certain point it does become quite compelling to some people. Now one argument on this topic that I've seen several times is that, well, hang on, if you do multiple sets, then each time you do a set, you will be using different mode units. And so just do the same exercise, do multiple sets of it. And in the first set, you might get a little bit more of the biases breaking in next set. You might get a little bit more brachialis. But if you just do enough sets and you're kind of getting everything, has anybody proposed a mechanism for how that should happen? Because that's impossible. That's impossible. So what's going to happen is that if you do exactly the same movement repeated times, then what's going to happen is that you get the same motion as being used. That's what's going to happen. Except as CNN's fatigue, the mechanism is less of the top of the world. You're going to get less total motine that's being recruited. You're going to lose even more of your, in this case, brachialis ones in that stretch position exercise that you're doing. So you're going to make it even more focused on the muscle group that you're originally trying to target, really, in a way, not because it's doing anything positive, but just because you're losing stuff in that top end of the motine pool. Yeah. Ultimately, the only way that argument would make sense would be to, would not even make sense, but the argument is predicated on as one gets more fatigued. They're essentially using more motine. That's absolutely impossible. That's again going back to this old idea that fatigue was somehow involved. I mean, I can go back and I can pick out, I mean, they tried to memory all this stuff, but I can go back and I can get reviews written by hypertrophy researchers that literally say that fatigue increases motine. I'm like, that is a physiologically possibility. I would be ashamed to, I mean, I probably did write something that's silly at some point in my life, but I'd be ashamed if I wrote that these days. I mean, it's just such a absolutely ludicrous idea. The brain is in control of motine and crème, and not the local fatigue mechanisms are happening. Okay. So I guess so far, that explains why we've made the point in the past that would make more sense to do, say, one set of two different exercises, like the two curl variation. Totally. Yeah. As opposed to doing two sets of one. So, that's kind of like the basic idea of changing exercises within the parameters of using the same kind of total amount of muscle mass, like we were describing with a biceps curl with different points of peak effort in the range of motion. You can also kind of look at a different problem, which is what happens if we go from an exercise that has a very small amount of muscle mass, like a single leg knee extension and compare what's happening, say, for example, in a back squat. Like, what's going on in the reverse order? Because this is again, something that's getting a lot of air time at the moment, and I have seen people arguing that a squat is going to be better than a leg extension. No one could build good legs doing a leg extension, but doing squats, you can build great quads. And also, I've seen the same argument with Delts, and in fact, if you're doing an overhead press, it's a waste of time doing a lateral raise. So both of these examples where one is starting with more muscle mass and then saying that using an exercise that has less muscle mass is going to be useless. I think this is people mistaking perceptions of effort for, you know, they're using a perception of effort as a proxy for how effective that exercise is. So ultimately, what we know from, unlike you can start with the bilateral for deficit observation, which is where you do, you know, two exercises, sorry, you do, yeah, you do two exercises. You do one exercise with basically a single limb variation and the same again with a two limb variation. So maybe you're doing biceps curls with two arms, or maybe you're doing biceps curls with just one arm. Now what you'll notice is that you can lift more than 50% of your two arm biceps curl weight with one arm. And the reason for that actually has been studied, and it is because you can achieve a high level of volatiractivation, mochi and acumen when you're using one arm compared to when you're using both arms at the same time. This is because when you have more muscle mass operating simultaneously, the brain is sending multiple central motor commands to different places. And as a result, it can't get to the same level of central motor command that it would be able to, if you're only sending central motor command to a single place. We've got a whole load of tealitature that does exactly the same thing, showing that the more muscle mass you are involving in the next size, the smaller the level of local peripheral fatigue you can reach at muscular failure. So you reach failure, but you haven't got to a very high level of most local muscle fatigue. It's simply because you're not getting to a very high level of mochi and acumen, you're not activating the fast reach fibers that are generally responsible for generating the ton of metabolites. So it all fits together in terms of showing us that the more total muscle mass you're using, the lower the level of acumen is going to be in any one muscle that you are interested in. So it's a physiological impossibility to get to the same level of mochi and acumen in a squat or an overhead press compared to any extension or a lateral raise. It just is never going to happen. It can't do. And literally every time you send me a screenshot, people are arguing about this. They're literally just one line as saying, no, they're the same thing. And like, okay, tell me how that's possible then. Tell me how that's possible. Don't just yell at me, telling me that you think it's not possible. It's 100% not true, whatever you want to use on social media to make yourself look good. Tell me why it's happening or why you think it's happening. Because I'm really, really clear and I look at the literature, it's not happening. I'm trying to play devil's advocate and think to myself, how could one argue that one of these exercises that uses all this extra muscle that you're like a squat will be superior for quad development than an isolated knee extension? And beyond what you said there, that proxy of well, it feels hard, therefore it works. I mean, to be generous, I would say I think some of this is purely anecdotal in the sense that plenty of people in the silver era only did squats because they didn't have leg extensions. And so we can certainly look at and say, well, of course, people built quads gesturing squats and who has access to just a leg extension and not a barbell, no one hardly anyone. So we don't have as many anecdotes of people who have built great quads just using a leg extension as we do using a squat. But that's not a physiological argument or explanation as to why the leg extension would be inferior. And I can't even, I can't even come up with a possible argument as to why one would make that sort of suggestion. No, which is why I think people retreat to anecdotes because they don't have a model, they don't have a physiological explanation for how this is working or might work or could work or is supposed to work. I mean, for me, this is really open and shut. It's like, by lots of our deficit, you've got the fatigue literature as I say and I've done a summary post of all of those studies so people can look at that. And just those two things together, you know, make it really clear that you can't activate and it's logical as well. I mean, you've got centromate command building up doing different things. You're not going to be able to get to the same level of centromate command in a single place as you would do with a small, mass and mass exercise. So really, it comes down to, you know, we've got voluntary activation deficits going on, stopping us getting to maximum levels of accruement. And as a result, that voluntary, or just to be clear, the voluntary activation deficit is happening because we are generating centromate command. When we get to our maximum tolerable perception of effort associated with the maximum level of centromate command, we can't get any further. We're using that centromate command to do multiple things in the case of a large mass and mass exercise. We're only using that centromate command at maximum tolerable perception effort to do one thing in the case of a small mass and mass exercise. So ultimately, a small mass and mass exercise is always going to be better for mass practicing out a specific region of the body. - So let me ask you this, people talk about redundancy a lot, and I'll be honest, there's terms that they just don't sit, well, I don't personally like it when people talk about redundancy in a program. I feel like that's quite reductionistic, but nonetheless, when people talk about redundancy, they're essentially claiming that adding in and other excise is not giving us anything new. - Single best example of redundancy in a training program is doing more than one set for an exercise. (laughing) - So I'm assuming that anybody who wants to argue about redundancy is going to be doing single set protocols. If they're not, then they are basically, what we would say, a hoist by their own petard. - Did you just come up with that then about the redundancy multi sets? - It just occurred to me as you were talking for. - No, just a check. - No, just a check. - Just a check. - As you were saying it. - Okay, it's one of those ones where I hear you said, and I'm like, damn you, damn it, I wish I thought of that. Anyway, the point I wanted to make is, - I used to have a form of podcast co-hosts that used to say that every week. (laughing) - So in the case of a lateral raise and the overhead press, we gave that example before. You could actually make the argument that if, if one is starting with a multi-join exercise or the squat, I guess, and the second exercise that they're talking about adding in is a exercise that's using less muscle, and it's, so in this case, the ladies' tension or the lateral raise, ultimately by default that exercise using less muscle is not, like, can't really be redundant. Like, it's never going to be redundant because it's always, unless there's, you know, insane amounts of fatigue mechanisms that have occurred in that previous set, there's always going to be more motor unit recruitment in that target muscle using that isolated exercise. But if we flipped it and someone started with, say, the lateral raise or the leg extension, you could actually make a better argument for then doing the squat or the overhead press as those exercises being redundant, couldn't you? - For the target muscle that you were describing. - For that muscle, right? That's kind of where it gets weird because, and that's why I like programs that at least start with an understanding of what each exercise is good at and where it's good at in different ranges of motion. So if I was programming a lateral raise, then I would look at my overhead press variation. I'd be like, well, maybe I do my overhead press variation more in the sagittal plane instead of in the frontal plane. I start to focus more on other muscle groups that, you know, - Because the overhead press is not going to give you anything for the middle doubt that you're not getting with the lateral length. - You haven't already got. Or I could just keep my wide grip and use the frontal plane, but I could work in the overhead range of motion above shoulder height. So which I have to find very comfortable. - The target muscle, I think, get my entire top. - Yeah, get much more anterior doubt in that top half of the range of motion. So, yeah, I mean, like for me, as an older lifter, doing like a lateral raise for the middle doubt and then doing my wide grip overhead press in the upper part of the range of motion is just so much kinder on my shoulders than, you know, kind of doing an overhead press, starting much lower down in the frontal plane. So, you know, I think just, but again, what we're doing there is we're saying, well, you know, if I move peak effort around in the range of motion, it's starting to, you know, send activation preferentially to different places. - Yeah, it's an interesting way of thinking about it just in terms of the total amount of muscle mass being used. I mean, I guess ultimately just to consolidate my point, any time and exercise that you're using, like you're using new exercises using less total muscles, fewer total muscles, that exercise is not going to be redundant 'cause it's going to be getting moatier in a recruitment that you didn't have. - Yeah, as you say, unless you get really gasped doing your kind of multi joint variation, then you run across the room to do the single joint one, then sure, I mean, like if you've just done your squat and you're crawling along the floor and then you're trying to nace this and straight up to us, yeah, that's probably not gonna help. But, you know, if you've got full recovery, you know, leave it five minutes or just gonna do something else first and come back, then yeah, at that point, you're gonna get higher recruitment in the quads than you would have done in the squat variation that came prior to it. And the same thing would apply with less to raise after over that pressing. It's, this is just how physiology works. It's like, I don't understand why people are struggling with this. - I mean, it's the same thing you started talking about the bilateral deficit. So it's the same thing ultimately with following up with the unilateral version of that exercise, that unilateral exercise, you are going to get moatier in a recruitment that you didn't get in a bilateral version. - Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, I kind of question whether you would wanna do it though. I mean, like, - Well, it depends on the purpose of that. - If you're gonna do, if you're gonna do single limb variations for an exercise, why would you do a bilateral one as well? I mean, that, - Exactly. - But you're exactly the same exercise, yeah, you would ultimately want to use. - You would have changed it slightly. - Yeah, yeah, peak resistance, yeah. But if you're gonna, I'm just thinking about it, practically in my head now, but if you're gonna drop one of those, someone you would drop would be the bilateral exercise. - Of course. - You could keep the unilateral. - Of course. - And it's ultimately, but then why? So he's the thing, right? If you're doing both of those, you're doing a bilateral curl and a unilateral curl, and someone says, "No, you can't do that, you're done then." Then you say, "Okay, well, which one should I get rid of?" And they say, "Well, get rid of the bilateral because you've got greater moatier unit recruitment in the unilateral." Then the same argument goes so that multi-join exercise or a similar joint exercise. - Correct. - Bit people say they're not that bad. - A motional attachment to a certain doing the same things. Okay, I don't wanna get bogged down on this. So you had another point there. - Yeah, so basically what we've done then is we've talked about how having this limit on the number of or the amount to, it's strictly speaking, the reason we've got a voluntary activation limit deficit is because we have a limit on the amount of central moat to command that we can generate before we hit maximum tolerable section of effort. That applies in the case of exercise selection that we started with. We've also applied it in the case of total muscle mass and exercises. And there's also now an argument, this is taking place regarding using specific form and technique. And I just want to make a couple of comments about this to set the context. Now, I'm not taking sides here. I'm not saying that people should throw weight around with no regard to, you know, - The great form reset. I think that's what people are calling this. - Well, I think people are probably going, I mean, this is one of those pendulum things and people kind of swing from one to two. So I'm just gonna say a couple of things about this and try and set the context and then relate it to what's happening physiologically. So essentially, starting at the beginning, we've got to classify exercises according to how much form and technique concentration they are going to require to perform. So if you're describing an exercise that is very complicated and very difficult to perform without concentrating, you know, greatly on exactly what you're doing and where the weight is going and what the balance is like. You are creating a very large requirement of energy in your brain for that problem. So you're essentially requiring effort perception to be dedicated towards the solving of that coordination problem instead of two motunic crewments. So you're never gonna have the same level of recruitment in an exercise that is difficult and complicated and requires a lot of your focus attention on that movement pattern and comparison with something that has a constrained movement path. So a very big difference between say, you know, a squat on the non-stable surface, which is gonna require an enormous amount of concentration from you to do correctly without hurting yourself in comparison with a leg breast where you kind of stuck in the range of motion and the path of the bar, you know, according to the device that you're sat in. So, and that creates a difference in terms of the number of massifiers in the amount of motunic and crewment you're gonna get in those two exercises. You're gonna get better recruitment level in the more stable constrained path exercise than you are in the less stable, less constrained path exercise. That is again, just how physiology works. If you're dedicating effort perception to coordination, you can't dedicate that effort perception towards motunic crewmen and as a result, we want exercises that are largely constrained rather than exercises that require a lot of concentration on the formal technique. - There's two issues with that as well, though. Yes, so there's also this stability issue in that, yes, it is. - Well, it's a big issue. - It's a decrease of freedom and stability, yeah. Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, you can go down that route as well. I mean, you can argue that any exercise that involves a lot of, you know, kind of stabilization is gonna introduce a whole load of extra muscles that are responsible for stabilization and then you're not training the target muscle as effectively 'cause you've got a muscle mass problem as well. - So we're hitting both of these issues you just talked about then. - We are. - We are, yes. Essentially though, it's just kind of introducing this new idea of if the brain is focusing on coordinating movement, it's not using the same effort perception to drive motunic crewmen. So you're getting this kind of diversion of mental resources away from producing centromatocrands and towards, you know, coordinating the exercise properly. Now, if you kind of go the next step and say, well, I am using a constrained exercise. I'm using a knee extension or a leg press or whatever and I'm not, you know, kind of using complex exercises. But I'm going to focus on doing it in a very specific way. You are actually going to create some of the same problem because if you're focusing on doing the movement in a specific way, then you're ultimately going to be using your mental resources to do that particular movement pattern in that particular way instead of just using your mental resource to produce motunic crew. That is inescapable. [BLANK_AUDIO] can argue, oh no, no, but I, there's basically two arguments. I need to do the form in this particular way, maybe to standardize it, or maybe because I alternatively, because I want to target this particular muscle and I think performing them at exercise in this way targets is not so better. So you've kind of got these two issues. Standardization, yeah, absolutely. We do want to do exercises in the same way every time, but ultimately, you want to standardize things externally rather than internally. So get your external range and motion standardized, you know, by having constraints on the system that you're working with it. So for example, I mean, this is obviously not a machine example, but in the case of like squats, you can put like a elastic resistance band to show what your depth is. And when you touch depth, you know, you touch depth and it's like that's your constraint, your external constraints. So external constraints are much better than internal ones where you're trying to remember where you are and do it at the same time, at the same way every time. And ultimately, you know, that's going to give you a better cue for knowing that you're using the correct range of motion or whatever. Now, tempo, if one of those things, I would just not recommend that people stand up and I just like just, you know, push the bar, you know, and don't think about tempo because if you start standardizing tempo, you're going to end up, you know, changing your, your, your, your sort of number of reps you can do per set. And it's never really, unless you're following a metronome, which is fine. If you want to do that, that's totally fine. But, you know, it's much more difficult to do that voluntarily because you won't necessarily keep track of the exact count. And it'll give you something else to think about as to what you're supposed to be thinking about, which is producing motino current. So ultimately, people are, I think, over standardizing, you know, I think that's, that's going to lead them if they're not careful into territory, where they're not using external method of standardization, which is like, you know, cues, tactile cues for disturbing range of motion or metronomes for determining tempo. If they're using those, that's fine because they're not, they're outsourcing the thinking process to an external agent. That's the issue. I have no problem with people actually using a tempo, but they've got it externally outsource it. Because otherwise their brain is doing the thinking and that's not really a very good idea. And when you're saying temper, I mean, you're many standardized tempo because you can say, okay, well, you know, lower under control, well, that doesn't mean that you need to be counting to, you know, the exact precise, you know, same age. You know, if you give your brain something to do other than pushing the bar, you are pulling resources away from your brain, producing motine, your crewman. So if you want to follow a metronome in the lowering phase, because honestly, you know, anybody who's lifting with heavier, moderately heavy loads probably can't introduce much of a tempo anyway in the concentrate phase. If they can, then they're probably a lot further away from failure than they think they are. Ultimately, it's going to be a lowering phase tempo. Just follow a metronome. If you can't do that, then you need to, you're going to end up with a mental resource issue that is taking you away from your ability to be counting in your head. Yeah. Yeah. So, because I guess the point I want to make is there's a difference between doing like a 201s or a tempo, we're doing a two second eccentric and that's the way I was righted down, but I don't need someone necessarily counting one, two, this is where you're learning to perform the sexes. And you're just thinking, I'm not, I'm just not dropping the load. That's all I need you to think, right? Compared to if someone were to do, I remember back in the day, I would do stupid things like 10 second eccentric, so 8 second eccentric, and then just stuck in your head one to a new county perfect. You need to be using a metronome and in ideally in those situations, it probably needs to be counting for you so that you don't have to count the beeps. Yeah. You know, this is just me illustrating that if you're concentrating on something that isn't pushing the bar, your brain is pulling away the ability to do motine equipment to do other things instead. And that's not helpful for hypertrophy. And this is not, I don't feel like this is contentious. I mean, when I was working in the gym, if we got new clients in the gym, everyone knew good coaching technique was we do not give the client 10 cues to think about at the start of each set, give them one thing at most. You say, okay, this is the only thing I want to worry about. I'm not going to tell you, have you chest up and feet here and this down and whatever. No, no, no, no, I don't need you stuck in your head thinking about a billion different things. We know that that's going to take you away from the exercise. And really, it's the same thing here. You know, perfect you form this way and you need to be counting this number of repetitions or you know, this slow tempo or whatever. It's like, well, there's just more thing. It's the same as cues. It's just more to think about. Exactly. Exactly. So ideally, we want to be pulling away from that. Now, if somebody goes to the extent where they're starting to change their form in order to create an internal focus of attention. So they're like, I'm actually using, I want to change the way I'm doing the exercise in order to focus more on this particular muscle group. Then that internal focus attention is now going to follow the basic rules of internal focus attention. So what's going to happen is that you're going to get activation pulled away from other muscles in order to activate the muscle that you're interested in. Now, in traditional bodybuilding situations, that muscle that you're pulling activation towards is usually the target muscle. So for example, if somebody is doing, you know, a traditional kind of bodybuilding approach, they're going, I'm going to squeeze this muscle while I'm training it. Okay. That internal focus attention, that mind muscle connection, you're pulling activation away from many of the other muscles that would be helping you perform the lift in question. So essentially what happens in those situations is that the number of reps per set generally goes down, your 10 rep max becomes your 8 rep max or 7 rep max or whatever. Now, in that scenario, you end up actually activating that target muscle to a slightly higher degree, which is one of the reasons why people are very excited about using my muscle connection and potentially, you know, you know, could it create more hypertrophy? Well, in the short term, it will do. But what will happen is if you try and use progressive overload from that point, then what will happen is that your brain will start pulling your way from using the internal focus on that muscle route because it will go back to using whatever it can to drive the number of reps up. So you can't really, the internal focus attention and progressive overload are incompatible with each other because what happens if you look at your logbook and go, oh, I got seven reps last time, I need to get 8 reps this time, your brain immediately goes, well, the easiest way to do that is to stop using the internal focus attention and to start using the way I was doing it before. So you gradually just end up diluting your internal focus back to essentially what you're doing before that, which is a goal directed exercise rather than a muscle mass directed exercise. Now, if on the other hand, somebody goes, I need to make sure that I do this exercise in this exact way and that requires me to contract these stabilizing muscles. So they're now driving an exercise, coordination pattern or form or whatever by using certain stabilization muscles, then the internal focus attention happens the same way, but it now pulls activation away from the muscle that you're trying to train. And that's the thing I think a lot of people are not understanding. If you do an exercise and you're having to brace yourself in a particular way to force the bar path to happen in a certain particular way or you're trying to make the exercise happen in a way that is unusual to you or different way. Yeah, the same thing will happen. You'll drop repetitions, you'll drop down from 10 to 7 or whatever, but you won't be then forcing the activation towards the muscle that you're actually trying to train in the first place. And the same thing will happen with progressive overload. When you start with using progressive overload and you try to beat the log book, your brain again will go, well, the easiest way to beat the log book is to just stop doing these silly things with the co-contractions and the, you know, kind of forcing activation away from the target muscle and it'll go back to what it was doing before. Ultimately, new mechanical matching will try and send activation in priority terms to the muscles that help you do the exercise. If you override that by scientific contract and co-contract and do all kinds of weird stuff with internal focus attention, then it'll do that for a short period of time. But as you start to try and push the load up, it'll just delete all of that and go back to what it was doing before. I remember a competitive powerlifter telling me once that when he was benching, he wanted to lift with his ears, that every muscle that could possibly help him out, he wanted to use it. Totally true. Yeah. And what you're saying there, if you're focusing on mind muscle connection, you're certainly not lifting with the ears, you're lifting just with your chest or whatever the muscle is you're focusing on. So the outcome of the performance is going to decline. But what is it is you will actually get more money than recruitment in that particular muscle. Yeah. Temperarily until you go back to the logbook and start trying to push the lift with your ears again, then then you go back to lifting with your ears. And it is literally just, I used to say toes in mentorship program when I was describing this as like you bench pressing with your toes. I mean, that's how you end up moving the way up. So I think a lot of people at the moment are probably getting very excited about the fact that they've changed their form and their number of reps per set has dropped. And they think that that means something. I'm like, well, not really, because what's going to happen is that you're gradually going to move back to where you were three or four weeks ago with the space that you know, kind of next few workouts you're sadgered using. And you just go back to how you were before. And you live just at a bit of an experiment and like you realize it doesn't really do that much. So this is why we talked a while ago, and I think maybe the isometrics podcast perhaps we were talking about ways that one could use internal focus of attention and not be limited by this progressive overload challenge that you've presented there. And using it with something like an isometric which you're kind of limited and tracking progressive overload anyway could be a viable, I guess, situation or circumstance or one could do it. Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, and ultimately that's, you know, kind of going back to the, you know, even pre-silver era bodybuilding at the time. You know, that's that was a big feature of the flexing kind of, yeah, and massage training programs. So yeah, I mean, there's nothing wrong with doing that is just again, I'm just trying to provide context for how physiology is happening in the background because I think there's this human nature's fascinating thing. We tend to think that we get an idea in our heads and we tend to think that physiology will just follow the idea. It's like, we want to do this and we think physiology is going to fall into line with that and it doesn't do that. It's like, physiology is going to carry on doing exactly what it's always been doing and if your strategy doesn't take that into account, it'll end up doing something you don't quite expect. It'll have unintended consequences. I think that when people are focusing on a very, very strict type of form that goes above and beyond just being safe, then what they're going to do is they're going to pull away motidocurban from the muscles that are trying to train and either send it to other muscles or just not create it at all because it's being used to the perception of how it is being used for something else. This whole form debate, and I know that we don't want to go to down into it, but ultimately if we're looking at an exercise and we're looking at what makes quote unquote good or bad form, ultimately the purpose of the exercise is to train whatever that target muscle is. The form should be done in a way in which that muscle is ultimately going to be the main muscle being trained in that particular exercise. For example, if you're doing an overhead press, then. Well, I'm going to stop you because I think that's a little bit potentially misleading if somebody doesn't understand what you're saying there. I don't think you can phrase it as we want to do the form in a way that trains the target muscle because if you do that, then you're going to be using an internal focus of attention all the time. I think we select the exercise and the range of motion and those things on the basis that it automatically targets the muscle that we want to train or the reason we want to train without us having to change the form to make that happen. And then really form is about safety in the context of that exercise. So really when somebody starts talking about form, my reaction is, are you safe? Yes, that would do the second point I was going to make. So talking about form then. Because anything beyond safety is going to pull you away from creating motion. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm going to exercise selection standpoint, I think I know this is a little bit of a semantics argument, but I still think it's an important one. So I think we're looking at it from a different entry point. So what you said there is that exercise is chosen because it achieves that outcome. It's training that muscle. And so in case of let's say an overhead press and you're saying, OK, if I want to train, let's say the middle delt, then I might select a behind the neck overhead press. Right. And so that's your starting point. What exercise class like for this? OK, great. And now how to perform this without getting injured. And I agree completely. Now what you said there is you're going to program in that example a behind the neck overhead press done in the frontal plane. Now I think the people are not being specific enough with exercise selection. And so what we're seeing a lot is people are saying, do an overhead press, do a bench press, do a lap pull down, whatever. And it's like, OK, but unless you give me the specifics there of we're doing behind the neck, we're doing a central plane or we're doing top partial or whatever, unless we're getting very specific, that exercise can feasibly be done in a way that's going to train at the very least bias, different parts of that muscle group and possibly almost neglect some of it completely or heavily emphasized particular parts. And so that's I guess what I meant when I was coming out saying does a train, what we want to train. But if we want to use out the language of just being specific, very specific with the actual exercise selection, I'm happy with that too. But I think we're not seeing that. No, I agree. I think that's the problem. It's like people have been cover layer about describing the exercise that they're programming and then trying to make up for that cover layer behavior by changing the kind of description around the way that the exercise formed under the heading of form. I think there's two interesting human kind of psychology issues here worth pointing out. The first is that in relation to the arguments around form, people are trying to push it into being a binary conversation. They're trying to go, you have to care about form we don't. It's like, no, that's not an acceptable. That's an emotional tribal kind of argument. Let's just stop that right there. That's tribal. You need a box of humans. You need a fit of need to try to. I'm childish. Yeah. So like people, as soon as I say you don't need to, I don't not saying you don't need to, I'm saying is actively unhelpful to over focus on, you know, performing an exercise in a very specific way. They're like, oh, you don't care about safety. I'm like, no, don't be childish. I'm saying you do the form in a way that is, you know, ensuring your safety in the exercise. That is, you know, obviously, you know, kind of goes without saying beyond that any focus on form, you are going to take away a perception from your ability to create a routine. Agreement on this therefore not going to be very helpful. If you're using it to push activation towards muscle groups, you're going to run into internal focus attention problem and you're better off just getting your exercise selection correct, like you've just been pointing out. So ultimately that's kind of where I see the debate really. The other interesting human psychology point is that I think that we're in the performative problem that bodybuilders have been milking for the last few decades where they basically, you know, there's, you know, historically, if you look at competitive bodybuilders, they've been, you know, finding things to convince people of that they do that are different that somehow has created their amazing physique and it's not the pharmaceuticals, you know. Like, you know, bodybuilders basically been kind of saying, oh no, you need to do this, you know, kind of pause in the contract to position and squeeze the muscle and it's like, and that's somehow magically how I've managed to create my amazing physique and it's not all of this kind of gear that I've been taking for the last kind of 10 years. And I think there's this performative aspect where bodybuilders are trying to show people specific things that if they only did this, they could get those results. You actually see this going all the way back to sandal, you know, it's like they're like, oh, you can just, you don't have to lift the weights and you don't have to do this. You can just do these muscle control exercises. Well, that's a bit devatable, but you know, okay. And you see the same thing with bodybuilders. It's like, if you just do the form in this way, you can get those same results as me and it's like not the, you know, in the case of natural bodybuilders, it's not the five years of extremely hard work and dedication and not eating, you know, kind of the things that I want to eat and all of those suffering and kind of difficult times that they've gone through to get the results. And it's like, no, no, no, you can just do the form in the way that I'm doing and you'll get the same results. And the bodybuilders are, you know, competitive and using pharmacy vehicles, they're arguing the same thing, but from a much more comfortable position. I'm not saying it's about, you know, kind of whether it's an abort user or not, not abort users, I'm just pointing out that people are trying to distract from what actually creates results and pointing out that maybe it's the form thing that makes the difference and like, no, it's not. That's performative. That's marketing. That's trying to get you to believe that they have some secret source. There's different from everybody else and it's not. The order just comes down to exercise selection, you know, execution of high levels of motine and crewman and dedication to that over a very long period of time. I mean, there's a big performative aspect here, I think. Yeah, it is sort of that secret knowledge thing, isn't it? You know, it's done this special way and that's what leads to this result. I mean, ultimately, like if form is so bad, if we can use that word, then ultimately one's not even performing that exercise anymore. So like either you are performing that exercise or you're not and if you are, why do we need to get so bogged down in the finer details, really? Yeah, I mean, like people have been posting videos of, for example, there's a rather famous science-based lifter who does their rowing form is quite something to behold. Basically a hip extension exercise with a bit of an elbow movement, tag time. And they're kind of, they're moving backwards and forwards so aggressively that you could argue that it's no longer the exercise in question. Yeah, I mean, that's a great example. Yeah, because someone might then come to you and be like, oh, well, you've just said form doesn't really matter and look at this as this mean that you're going to perform a row like this. And ultimately, you just said, well, you push it far enough and it's not even that exercise anymore and you're not actually going to be getting much out of that muscle. Yeah, I mean, I think my point would be that if the person is not, I mean, I think this particular individual is deliberately doing that to get views. But I think that if the exercise naturally pushes you, let me be really clear about this because I think this is important. If you're doing an exercise like a row and you find yourself being moved out of position, then that's not a good exercise for you. So if you are naturally doing the exercise and you are pulling the row or you're pressing whatever and you find that your body is being moved out position, that is not a good exercise. That is an exercise that is, for whatever reason, the combination of forces is pushing you out of the position that you need to be in to perform the exercise correctly. And I would simply suggest that person find a more comfortable machine exercise that doesn't allow them to do that. For example, in the case that I'm thinking of, the individual is doing a seated chest supported row and their chest is flying back from the chest support every time they do a row because they're doing this huge amount of hip extension. Now in the individual's case, if they were to do an inclination, they would be doing t bar row, they would probably find it a lot more difficult to launch themselves into space. Yeah, then if they were just sitting in that kind of, you know, machine, seat at Jesputter Row. So in the case of that particular individual, if they genuinely want, if like, "Oh, you're telling me I can't concentrate on phone, but look at how I'm moving my body away from the chest support every time I do the row, it's not a good exercise for you. Pick an exercise, you don't have to do that." And I actually, as I say, I think that most people are not going to fly back from the chest support in that situation. I think that most people probably are going to be quite comfortable. I think this person is probably just, you know, playing it up for the camera. But, you know, in the case that that is true, and that person genuinely is struggling to make that exercise work for them because for whatever reason their body dimensions just mean that they push themselves away from the chest support. Just do a different exercise that doesn't require you to think quite so hard. So is there anything else that you think would constitute, again, to use this term "bad phone"? Obviously, you've mentioned that they're doing it in a way that could get one injured. But are there examples like the one you've just given that you think would be a good, maybe, encouragement for someone to then, it's like a different exercise instead? Well, as I say, I don't think there is anything else that I can think of right now, other than just, if for whatever reason your body dimensions don't fit well with a machine or a particular exercise. For example, I mean, I gave it a machine exercise example of the seated row, which I've seen video of people doing this, or on particular person doing, and they tend to get shared quite a lot. Barbell exercises are probably easier examples. Like the standing barbell row, I think, is just a bad exercise because everybody ends up with so much body English and they end up doing massive amounts of hip extension. Now, again, in specific context, you can see people are doing so much hip extension. It's almost a kind of a bent over powerblee. I mean, like, you get those kind of people who are using so much hip extension, there's not a. But that's a bad exercise for that reason because it actually doesn't allow you to control it very well. But equally, you can find people whose body dimensions are not suited to squatting. You know, you can find really tall people, and if they've got, unless they've got ridiculous ankle mobility, you know, they are not going to be able to squat very well without changing the form into something that you would look at and go, "Nnn, not happy with that. That looks like a squat morning to me." I'm like, "To do this 6-7, what do you expect?" I mean, unless he's got ankle mobility like, "Constina." He's not going to get into that position very easily. Now, okay, you can have arguments about whether that needs to be addressed or whether you just do a different exercise or not. From the bodybuilding point of view, I'm going to be like, just do a different exercise because whatever reason your body doesn't fit that particular exercise very well, there are plenty of other good alternatives. You don't need to do an exercise just because somebody on social media told you that you needed to do it. So I think there's two things here. Both, I mean, they're the same thing, but you've looked at from different perspectives. On the one hand, there are some exercises that are just bad because they force almost everybody to use poor form. In the sense that it's not doing what you want to do. The standing bent over barbell row is not designed to train the hip extensors, but most people end up training the hip extensors and the low back. Because the exercise naturally ends up promoting body English to get progressive overload. Yeah, so that's not a form issue then. Like you're saying, that's an exercise, like that exercise is not a. Well, what it does is it falls into this category of like, if you imagine, like very few people probably are going to be in the category of a seated machine row, chest-supported row, being a bad exercise for them because they use too much body English. Most people are going to be okay with that. Next thing, so there's going to, but there are going to be potentially some people for whom it's not a good idea because they just naturally end up using tons of hip extension. But maybe the next thing across is like, well, what about standing biceps curls with a barbell? Some people, again, most people are going to be okay with that or an easy bar, whichever is comfortable. But some people are going to find that inevitably, just because the amount of weight they're using and their center of mass and the, you know, kind of how strong they are rather to the body weight, they're going to find themselves getting moved around. I probably fall into that category. I tend to get moved around if I start doing biceps curls and it's standing biceps curls, two arms. But then there's the third category is like the standing bent over barbell row. Almost everybody gets moved around. So what you can say is that there are just exercises that are going to be more or less likely to be difficult. It's tough, even a barbell curl. Is that even, is that bad form? Is that a bad exercise? Like, if you're doing a standing out of that thing, if, if, if, if the weight is throwing you around because it's kind of, it's just showing you around in the sense that you would be using momentum at the bottom, right? And if we're doing a barbell curl. Well, hang on a minute. If you look at, if you look at the world, kind of, record and championships around standing balbo curl, strict curls, they do actually have a board that people lean against. And the reason for that is because the weight will literally move you around if you don't have that. Yeah, but it'll move you around at the bottom like when you're starting that repetition. Well, it's last to move you around all the way through, especially when you're in the middle when it's the hardest point because you're, you're, you're changing way, your center of mass is in space. Yeah. And look, this might, I'm maybe I'm struggling to conceive this because I weigh like 105 kilos in UA. Sure. So, yeah. And so, but for me, what I've noticed if I'm doing like heavy barbell curls, I'm not getting moved around like mid, mid rep, but at the start, I'm getting moved around at a very good point. And I'm looking at that. I'm thinking, well, hang on. Okay. I might be using a little bit of momentum, a little bit of body English at the very starting point, but that curl ultimately is going to be more of a brachial radii, as focus excise anyway. I'm still going to get to that point in that exercise without compromising that muscle's involvement. Is that even bad form? Guess it looks like a cheating curl a little bit, but is that even bad? It's still doing exactly what I wanted to do. I'm not getting injured. Like, I'm struggling to even conceive what I'm even saying again, again, again. So, like, this is this is where you would then say, well, is the exercise still doing what it's supposed to do, even though there's a little bit about form in there? I would argue that if you're doing, if you're doing seated rows and you're doing them primarily with hip extension, or you're doing bento ribaba rolls, and you're doing them primarily with hip extension, that's not now doing the thing that you were setting up to do. Yep. Yes. So, that's all my distinction there. Is it still doing what you wanted to do? And has it increased injury risk? And if those two. If you're doing a standing barbell curl and you need to just kind of nod you with your hip to get it going, then is that bad form not really? And he's standardizing it. I guess that's the other bit. If you're doing that one way up, and you're not doing the next trip, okay, maybe that's bad form because it's stopping you and him and you from actually standardizing it because it's really overloading. Yeah. Yeah. So, but again, what we're doing is, and just to be clear, a lot of people are going to listen to this and they're going to go, "Oh, well, you're saying it's nuanced and they're saying it's nuanced and you're all agreeing." No. Everything that I'm doing is saying you need to externally constrain what you're doing, not internally constrain. Yes. And the external constraints come from the decisions that you make before you even start about the exercise that you're going to do. And how the exercise is going to be controlled in terms of like, if you're going to use a metronome for tempo, if you're going to use range of motion for, you know, kind of guiding it, whatever, you set those constraints in advance externally or you make decisions about things you don't care about. Internal constraining is where you go, "Oh, I need to focus on making sure the bath path is exactly like this and the tempo is there, it's not going to count." That is pulling stuff away from your ability to create moto, you know, agreement. External constraints is what we're talking about, doesn't do that because it actually outsources all of your thinking and, you know, concentration to decisions that you make before you even start. So for people who are thinking, "Oh well, no, you're arguing about different types of form and weather, different types of form, acceptable, not acceptable, when it's all nuanced and blah, blah, blah, blah." No, I'm not. I'm following a very, very specific trajectory here, which is like, "Is it internally constrained by your brain or is it externally constrained by things that you're deciding before you even start?" If you can get in position to do the exercise and to do that exercise correctly, you then need to be thinking about these specific movements and cues and everything else in your head. Then there's probably better exercises that one can choose. Exactly, which is why I'm saying, "It's a better approach is to make the decisions before you even start." Or watch how you're doing an exercise, and if you think that your exercise is, you know, kind of breaking form and invertechomas, then you probably are better off finding something that's better suited to your body dimensions done the one that you were doing previously. As a coach, it mostly works with people online. I lived by the mantra of I try to prescribe exercises that I guess I could say here, unscrupible, maybe I'll use it from language, but I don't want to give someone exercise that is there's a high chance you're going to stuff it up. I was talking to Declan about this topic and he said to me similar that he uses exercises that have the highest margin of error. He give it to a client and it's so unlikely that he can screw this up. Totally. Totally. That's what I think a lot of this comes back to. Yeah, totally. Again, that's you're literally doing exactly what I'm describing here. You're setting your external constraints in advance. You're making your decisions that make it almost impossible to go wrong. Yeah, exactly. It's like, we're making these decisions because most people most of the time are going to be absolutely fine with these. I mean, honestly, until I saw this particular person doing seated rows with hip extension, I didn't actually believe that was possible to do that. I actually thought it was pretty impossible to screw up a seat to the row, she just supported the row machine. I was like, that is one of my staple exercises. How can you do that wrong? But apparently you can. And again, it may be the case, is I playing up the camera or maybe the case, genuinely has body dimensions, make that exercise about fit for him. It doesn't really matter. I just do something different. I mean, it's like, yeah, yeah, or call it a row and back extension. And then your form is spot on your exercise. Just change the definition of exercise and then your form is correct for whatever it is that you decided to do. Okay, so anything else that needs to be said in the topic or is that hopefully covering most of it, hopefully that is everything. So just repeating a structure that I sat down with, what I was trying to explain here is that the fact that we can't recruit every single motor unit and therefore can't activate every single muscle fiber in a kind of exercise, whatever exercise it is we're doing, that could contribute. So like, you know, we can't activate every single muscle fiber that could contribute means that we are going to end up leaving some muscle fibers untrained and no matter what we do. And it's which muscle fibers we end up not training is the important thing for exercise selection. As regards muscle mass, what we're doing is manipulating the total amount of muscle fibers that we are able to activate, total motor units to work with, obviously using less muscle muscle must can be better. And then regarding exercise form and temper what I'm saying is that if you're focusing really hard and concentrating really hard on the particular way of doing something, then generally speaking of pulling away recruitment and you're making violent tractivation deficit even bigger than it actually has to be. Now, before we start the podcast, I also mentioned that you're asking me if there's any other things that we could incorporate into this matrix. Again, yeah, sure. If somebody's doing like drop sets and finishes and anything that involves high cardiovascular demand, all of that stuff again is going to make the violent tractivation deficit even bigger. So just because you're hitting failure point in an exercise or a set or sort of drop set or whatever doesn't mean you're hitting the same level of recruitment as you were doing previously, you actually mentioned this in the context of volume earlier. And you say doing an extra set somehow recruits more motifs. No, it recruits fewer motor units. And again, the fatigue mechanisms, especially perception related ones are going to produce a further reduction in the number of motifs and therefore number of muscle fibers we're training. So all of this is just explicable by understanding the context that we can't actually recruit every single motor unit and every single muscle fiber that could contribute to a movement despite reaching maximal effort. And we can actually quite easily make it even worse by doing the wrong thing. So all of that, ignoring the form bit because that's not going to work with what I'm about to ask. And this is my last question. If we then go back to our Larry Scott workout at the start of this podcast and we evaluate that program against this framework you've just proposed. What do we see? What are the shore coming? Is that because ultimately all these exercises are using quite a lot of muscle mass. I mean, we've got single joint arm exercises, but everything else is multi joint. We've got many sets with short rest periods. Causing yes, we did talk about some metabolite fatigue, but ultimately there's going to be higher perception of effort here. There's going to be more supospinal CNS fatigue here. We've got fewer total exercises with the multi sets. So given what we're talking about in today's topic of maximizing activation, you would look at this program and think it probably missed the mark a bit. Yeah, so there's ways to take a step from this, but ultimately this is a program that is getting good coverage, not perfect coverage, but good coverage of the muscle groups. It is doing that three times a week full body format. And as a result, it is going to be a lot better than some of the nonsense that we see circulating today on social media. So it's kind of like a as you point as you kind of point to that, it could be a really good beginner program to get someone started, as long as we cut the sets in half and did three sets instead of six. But yeah, I mean, honestly, I would much rather introduce an extra exercise for each kind of broad category of muscle groups that they're training and cut the sets down to a single set. And just do one one kind of two different pressing variations, or three different pressing variations or whatever and start to expand the variety a little bit at the expense of losing some of the sets. I think we're still in this kind of process of getting away from the kind of five years ago territory where people were just spamming sets on four or five exercises. And they were doing like eight to ten sets of each exercise. And it's like we're now getting to this moving away from that. We're now going, hang on a minute, much better to just do a couple of exercises instead of doing, you know, spamming sets for every single exercise that you do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes no sense. Yeah. Yeah. There's no scenario. I mean, you've made this case really well in the past. There is no scenario in which doing two sets of one exercise is going to be better than doing two exercises for one stage for the same kind of broad kind of area of the body that you're trying to treat. There's no scenario in which you can argue by doing two sets of, you know, bench press is better than doing, you know, sort of, you know, one particular grip with bench press is better than doing high to the whole line. I think, I'm close grip versus a flat bench wide grip. I mean, there's no scenario in which that is ever possibly going to be true. And someone wants to make the case, then make the case. The interesting thing is nobody ever sends this stuff to me and says, this is what I think, why do you disagree with me? What they do is they just like sort of slander me behind the scenes and say, rude things about me. And then I hear about it from other people who say, well, this person is insulting you and saying this and the next. I'm like, well, they're not actually communicating to me what they think and they're not actually trying to persuade me that they are correct and I'm wrong. They're not taking, they're not taking me seriously in that respect. They're not actually saying, oh, hey, my idea and here's your idea. And this is why we're different. They don't want to be compared in that way. They just want to, you know, throw kind of mud at me from, from, from a safe place. So, but anyway, that's beside the point. The thing I'm pointing out here is that if somebody believes that there is a mechanism, a physiological mechanism by which two sets of one exercise is going to be better than single sets of two separate exercises that train broadly the same area, but with slight differences, they're welcome to make that case and we'll listen to it. But I cannot see any possible way that they can win the argument. Yeah, I mean, look, that's a good challenge. Like if someone does have a mechanism as to how that's possible, then, you know, that's our challenge. You like, let us know, send, Chris message send me a message, send, talk about it online. I'm sure it'll end up back to us at some point anyway. And then we can talk about it on podcasts. Yeah, I mean, that left to approach doesn't really work because there's just what I think most people don't realize. I mean, there's a, there's an absolute army of tiny creators on, especially TikTok, who are all just kind of positioning themselves against this model that I've presented and saying, you know, Chris is an idiot because he doesn't believe this or he disagrees with me on these, these issues. What they don't realize is that there are a billion of you guys. There's only one of me. So, you know, ultimately, it's doing what you're doing may get you, you know, another 573 followers, if that's important to you. But it's not going to get you any further than that. You're not going to go anywhere with this. But, you know, if that's what you want, if that's the size that you've set for yourself, then fine. But ultimately, it isn't really going to do anything interesting in this universe that we're living in. And I hope that you would play for slightly higher stakes than that. But that's it's your decision. I mean, it's not my life to lead. Well, I look forward to seeing what physiological explanations come up for why multi-sets would be single sets of multi-exercises. And if it's compelling enough, then by all means, I'm going to start programming that way, but I am not going to hold my breath. Okay, thank you, everyone for joining us for another episode in 2026. I hope you've all had a wonderful start to the the year and I hope you'll join us again next week for another episode.