039 How to instantly increase your strength (through motivational techniques)

Welcome back. Thank you for joining us for another episode. And in today's episode, we're going to discuss how you can actually make yourself stronger immediately. So we're going to talk all about motivation and the effects that has in the lift. Now, before we get there, I have an exciting program to talk about. I'm actually really pumped to talk about this. So for you guys who joined us last week, I covered Clancy Ross's favorite work at routine from 1952. Now, ironically, the next day, I actually found this workout, which was Clancy Ross's 1949/1950 workout. And looking at it, I thought this looks really familiar. And then I contrasted it to the 1952-favoured workout we discussed a day prior. And realized it's actually almost identical. But there's a few tweaks he's made. And I was really interested to see what integrations he'd made over a few years to fine tune his full body plan. So I'm going to invite you to visualize this with me today. As I try to discuss with you, the changes we see in these few years in Clancy's workout routine. Okay, we're good. Ready? Chris, you ready? Yes, I'm ready. Go for it. So with our older, our earlier routine from 1949/1950, Clancy was starting off with squats. Now, he did do some lighter sets and then he worked into one hard set and then one back-off set. So we did four sets in total. Now, in our newer routine from 1952, we did keep the squat, but we reduced it down to two to three sets. So he dropped off one to two sets there, but the exercise stayed the same. In the earlier routine, he was using lead presses, two sets of 20. Now, you guys who listened last week will know that he swapped the lead press for leg extensions against same sets, same repetitions, but different exercise. And we'll talk about why maybe some of these changes were made at the end. So I'll just run through it now. The next exercise was the car exercise. So he did use a leg press, car press, or a toe press previously. Now, he did four sets and he worked up to a hundred repetitions. If you did more repetitions, he did fewer sets, so he either did four by 30 or one by 100, which you guys who listened to two episodes a few weeks ago where we talked about higher repetitions, we'll understand why that single set probably didn't do a whole lot. And then the newer routine, he actually swapped his toe press exercise for a seated calf raise. In the older routine, he did a flat barbell bench with a wider grip and he kept that exercise the same in the new routine. And then the next exercise he did was an incline barbell press, which he actually swapped out later on and he used a barbell pullover instead. Now, he also had pushups in the first routine, which he dropped out entirely in the next one. Then for shoulders, he had upright row, which he kept. He had lateral raises, which he kept. But he also had behind the neck barbell press, which he dropped out entirely. He didn't even swap it, Finnecy. Then for arms, we have a barbell curl, which he kept and a one arm bent over dumbbell row, not row, a curl, which he dropped out. And he didn't have any direct triceps work. So he essentially, I guess he dropped out the additional bioseps exercise and he swapped that for a flat barbell triceps extension in the newer plan. Now, as far as back is concerned, he had behind the neck chins or plups in the first plan and in the later plan, he swapped that for wide grip lap pulldown. And then we had a bit of, I guess, what I would kind of call fluff. So in the first plan, we had 100 sit-ups, 50 side bends and then 50 leg raises. Now, I find this interesting because what we do, you see in this chain going from the early silver area to the later silver area is a lot of these type of exercises end up getting dropped out. And he did drop all of these and the only sort of variation of these that he kept in in the later plan was the reverse crunch for two sets. So all your hundred reps sit-ups, the side bends, etc. were gone. And that's it. So fairly similar, but a few interesting modifications. What do you think of that? So I would say that there's some really interesting trends here that fit with what we would predict if people were paying attention to what their routines were doing and what the various elements of their routine would do. So just picking up the last thing that you mentioned, which is really, really screamingly obvious, all the high rep stuff has gone. So within a couple of years of doing hundreds of reps of sit-up side bends, leg raises, and even no calf raise stuff with super high reps. That's disappeared. Now as you pointed out, we've covered this in detail before, but very, very briefly, if people are using a load that is lighter than sort of around 30% to 100 max and obviously hundreds of reps are going to fall into that category, then what will happen is that there won't be any vascular occlusion. So if there's no vascular occlusion, there can't be any metabolite accumulation, then you can't use a metabolite-related fatigue mechanism to create local musketeague. And that is going to mean that when you reach musketeague failure, you're going to have predominant the calcium-invasive fatigue mechanisms, which reduce tension, and that means you're not going to get a hypertrus stimulus. So it's really cool to see that they've noticed that those things just don't do anything. Now obviously, there are still people running around today thinking they do do things, but that's not obviously our problem, and it's not their problem either. So when I say their problem, I mean silver-era bodybuilders. So that's the first thing. So high-rept stuff doesn't make the cut. It disappears. Secondly, we've got a reduction in volumes. So that 1949-1950 workout has started to drift up towards high numbers of squats sets. There's quite a few sets of cough raises in there. And I would say in general, there's a few supplementary exercises like the behind-the-neck press that are adding to like del volume that's probably starting to get topy. So again, second thing I noticed is just muscle group volume has dropped a little bit there, and so it's cool to see that again is starting to reflect the kind of classic three sets, three times a week type models that we see a lot happening in the silver era that are justified by physiological observations. So first things will be rep-range stuff has gone. The high-rept range stuff has gone. Second thing will be the volume has dropped per muscle group. And I would say the third thing is that we're seeing some better exercise selection choices in the most part. There's one example that you've already pointed out is probably going the opposite direction. But I would say moving from squats plus leg presses down to squats plus knee extensions is a really big step in the right direction. So again, things like squats and leg presses don't work the right firm. And just to kind of make a point on this because I'm seeing this idea coming back, if you go back like 10, 15 years, you'll see that the standard explanation for why the right firm is not operating in a squat or a leg press is because it's not changing length. And I'm seeing people starting to repeat that again as they're going back and reading all the stuff and they're repeating it because without understanding. We have got studies showing that the right firm drops out even if you're doing an isometric contraction of combined hip extension and knee extension. So you're sitting in a squat type position like a wall sit and you're producing both hip extension torque and knee extension torque. The right firm drops out. It switches off in that scenario. There's no length change of any muscle in that scenario. So anybody who says that the right firm stops working in a leg press or a squat because it's not changing length has not done the read it. They're just repeating what they've heard or they've seen in a kind of a manual or kind of introductory textbook. They haven't actually gone through the literature and said, why do we think this? Why do we think the right firm switches off in those situations? It's because of studies that have measured isometric hip extension and knee extension directions showing the right firm and hamstring switch off in those scenarios. And it's not because is the length change that matters is because of the antagonist torque being produced at one joint while the agonist torque is being produced at the other joint. So really cool to see them understanding that biotic yellow muscle switch off in more joint activities when they're required to produce antagonist and agonist torques simultaneously. So that's cool change to see there. I mean, on that point actually, so you've mentioned this reduction in muscle group volume. And I think that's an interesting point because as we can see most exercises, he didn't reduce the volume. What he did is he actually dropped out additional exercises when he was exceeding usually two exercises per muscle. Now one thing that's sticking out to me here is the behind a neck press. He didn't have that with his shoulder work. And most of the time in this workout, he's he's grouped the exercises by the muscle where he had the behind a neck press was after his barbell curl exercises and his dumbbell curl. So I wonder if he was using that partially for his triceps. And that seems to actually been replaced by the triceps extension in the new workout. So you can understand the two bioticular muscle problems. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I mean, I think those really are the main things. It's the understanding that, you know, multi joint exercises just aren't working those muscles very effectively. if at all. Because really that is probably the instance of exercise selection moving in a positive direction that is most obvious. Yeah. So the one example that probably didn't make as much sense would be the car exercise. But again, if we're looking at the fact that he was doing the toe press with a hundred repetitions, he was presumably just so loaded by a load. Yeah. And it probably wasn't really doing anything anyway. So I could least chose a worse exercise, but it's probably doing it a little bit more. Like at least it's getting some soliast growth, I would imagine. Because he was just I'm assuming to limited in that first exercise. Yeah. Yeah. Who knows. But yeah, most likely to be practical reasons rather than you know, kind of observing a physiological trend underpitting what was happening. Okay. I thought this was a really interesting experiment to assess these two very quick shift. People changing there in the context of a scenario where there's nothing else confusing the gains. I mean, that's exactly the issue that we face today. People are like, oh, well, I did this and you know, this didn't work for me and then I did this and it did work for me and I'm like, yeah, what else were you doing? Yeah. By what else? I think everybody knows what I mean when I said, well, okay. So moving on, you're going to tell us how we can all get stronger immediately. Well, the context for this, the context for this is because, um, and we've been talking obviously about how people get excited about various different topics at different times. And so we try and provide information that's helpful for them at the times when they're interested in it because obviously that's the best motivation for learning something is to see something that you're interested in. So at the moment, people are very interested in how we actually reach muscular failure. So the moment in that context, people are saying, well, is it because I'm building up a lot of peripheral fatigue or is it, you know, something else that's happening? Essentially, one of the things that you can look at, one of the areas of the literature that you can look at to help you understand that argument is to look at the motivational section of the literature because motivation has an immediate effect on how many reps we can achieve to failure or how much strength we have, how much force we can generate and then give a moment in time. And that fits perfectly into my core is psychological model of T. Now, I know that at the moment, people are arguing whether or not my core is model applies to strength training. You know, I think it does. I think it fits very, very well. I think we've got some really good strength training studies showing that perception of effort, you know, actually reflects the sensation of innovation in strength training situations. So there's a really good study actually that Mark Orer was an author of showing that when you're doing biceps curls with different loads or different states of fatigue, then RPE is very closely related to the central mode to command. So ultimately, you know, there's some really nice data showing that part, the model, this part, the model, the motivational side. Again, we're going to talk about today. So basically, going to talk about how motivation can be changed with a variety of different things. And that comes back to your introduction, Jake, where you said that we're going to show people how to get stronger instantaneously. And this is totally true. So if you just want to ignore the whole kind of muskia-failure argument and say, how can I get stronger immediately? Then all of this stuff that we're going to talk about today is going to apply. So you don't have to treat this as like, okay, this is an inside-to-tile muskia-failure works. It could literally just be how can I get stronger? Well, here's a whole bunch of things you can do. So essentially, we're going to walk through, I think, eight or also different things that relate to improving motivation and motivation increases strength by increasing motunit recruitment. And there's actually some really nice studies demonstrating that that exactly what happens by the children increase in voluntary activation. So, you know, I'm not just kind of saying, oh, we'll get stronger now. I'm in thirring the tit is by way of an increase in motunit recruitment, although I don't actually think there is any other possible explanation. But ultimately, that we do have the voluntary activation data showing that. So why is that important? Well, basically, the only existing model for connecting motivation with motunit recruitment is Mark Orers' Psychobiological Model of Teague, which shows that the sensation of innovation is increasing motunit recruitment. Sorry, all the way around. The central motocamand is creating an increase in motunit recruitment, but simultaneously the central motocamand is creating the sensation of innovation, which then produces a perception of effort. And when we reach our maximum tolerable perception of effort, we then have to stop increasing motunit recruitment, because to do so we'll be trying to go past the maximum tolerable perception of effort. So, ultimately, there's just a feedback loop going on there. So basically, we have a clear model that says that if I have reached my maximum RPE, because sensation of innovation has been, you know, contributing to that RPE, I can't go past that point. And then how do I actually use motivation to influence how much motunit recruitment I can generate? Well, very simply, if I am more motivated, I am prepared to tolerate a more disagreeable sensation. That's it. So essentially, I'm in a scenario where I'm experiencing a very high level of effort perception. That's extremely discomforting. And I decide, emotionally, that I am not prepared to go past that point. And therefore, I'm not prepared to then increase the sensation of innovation any further. If I weren't decreased sensation of innovation any further, then I wouldn't decrease motunit recruitment any further. And I essentially stop exercising at that point. I could carry on if I were able to access more motunits, but I don't, because I'm not prepared to experience a more disagreeable perception of effort. Then circumstances change and I become instantaneously more motivated. And at that point, I'm then able to increase my level of effort tolerance. And I do that because I am motivated to do so. And that then brings me a higher level of recruitment. And I can then continue exercising or achieve a higher level of force output or whatever it is that I'm trying to do. So we've got a really, really clear model here of how motivation is linked to motunit recruitment increases in specific scenarios. Is that all making sense? It does. Is any of that conscious? So is anyone making conscious decision? Because you've used the word there, I think at some point, like I think we'd be decide or there was some implication of a decision. Are we actually aware that we are almost stopping ourselves from tolerating more effort? Do you think that people make decisions cognitively or emotionally? I would say both. I think 99.9% to people 99.9% time make decisions emotionally and then rationalize those decisions cognitively if you asked them why they've done it. Yeah, that's probably fair. So I think that decisions are mostly, if not almost exclusively, emotional for most people most of the time. I think that most people also will deny that if you ask them and tell you that it's cognitive. But I think most people are making emotional decisions most of the time. I think I hear what you're saying. I wonder if you could make a preemptive decision that would be cognitive as opposed to almost like a reactive decision, which is emotional. I think that the more emotion that you and actually I saw you post about this recently. Yeah. I think that the more emotions you are feeling, the harder it is to be cognitive. Yeah. So this is starting to get into areas of sport which are more how can I put this? They're more susceptible to the emotional side of things. So in the zone that we're going to be talking about, strength training, the room from a newver in terms of this kind of emotional side of things is relatively small and it happens very quickly. If you look at the more endurance style event, you can see this happening over much longer periods of time. So if you look at like, especially even ultra endurance type events, then people can actually be battling this emotional state that they're in for hours and hours and hours and hours of a run. And it literally just comes down to can you manage your emotional state to stay in the zone where you're focused on the goal that you're trying to achieve and not on how unhappy you are? Because that's really what it comes down to in those scenarios. It's can you get your mind focused on the thing that you're trying to achieve and not focused on the attraction of stopping doing what you're doing because it's more comfortable to stop. Ultimately, that goal switching, which is I think what you post about, is the attention switching is the issue because people think that we have like a will power kind of quantity. It's like the depletion of will power happens over the day. It's not actually what's happening. We don't experience a depletion of our will power because that would imply that when we finish the task and we'd run out of will power to continue doing the task that we were doing, that you wouldn't be able to then do something different. That's not how it happens. What happens is simply that you switch your focus of attention from the thing and not to amount focus of attention in a external internal focus of attention type thing. I'm talking about your emotional focus of attention. If you're emotionally focused on what you're trying to achieve, then you can carry on doing the thing that you're doing. But what happens is as you start to feel disagreeable sensations, building up and the comfort of stopping starts to kind of twist your gaze across to the idea of just kind of collapsing at the side of the track and sitting down and enjoying the fact that you're not making yourself miserable anymore. That focus of attention starts to get diverted away from what you're trying to achieve and more towards the attraction of just stopping doing the miserable thing that you're doing. And the more you get pulled away from what you're trying to achieve and towards the comfort of not doing what it is that you're currently doing and more likely it is that you're going to end up kind of being defeated by your opponent who is more focused on the goal that they're trying to achieve. And that's when you're looking at all this kind of super endurance, ultra endurance type activity that's really the mindset of the people that are super successful successful in those scenarios. They're able to just stop their focus switching because they've got this kind of sort of drive inside them which they've managed to build or create or condition which allows them to continually latch onto the thing they're trying to achieve as being so much more important than all the other stuff that they're being attracted to in the moment that allows them to stop feeling those disagreeable sensations. So those kind of scenarios are so much easier to visualize and understand than the strength training side of things but the exact same rules apply just happening over a much shorter period of time. Yeah, in the post that I shared about it, I use an example of and I guess this is relevant actually to a topic we'll talk about in a moment but deciding at the start of your set that this is the point I'm going to get to, I'm going to do this when you repetition. So I'm not going to question because it's so easy to get to 15 repetitions in if you're doing a higher upset not that many people who are listening probably are but then question was that my last trip to do I can I do anymore can I do one more can I do one more should I stop now and by actually making that decision the start of the set hey I'm not going to even question this until I hit 15 repetitions or whatever that goal is it takes away that decision crisis point where your question is at the point I stop is this the point and that's what I mean is there potentially some cognitive decision making we can make when it's premeditated before we do this. I'm remotely cognitive oh okay so you can you can make okay so the more emotional the great to the emotional state that somebody is in the less likely it is that they'll make a cognitive decision. Yes yes and making the cognitive decision you're doing is you're making the cone state before you go into the emotional state is that going to give you a higher probability of coming through the experience in the way that you want to agree yeah anyway I forget when you were headed before I do reality with that. Just kind of talking in general terms about decision making being emotionally kind of driven in most cases most of the time and especially in states of you know kind of discomfort as we're going to find in most exercise scenarios so the point is though that we have a very clear model for how motivation is increasing performance and it's doing it by increasing motina accruement and ultimately that ties into the whole muscular failure argument that people are having at the moment by showing that we can instantaneously increase recruitment and if that is possible if I can instantaneously increase recruitment that means that the level of recruitment that you were using 10 seconds ago was not maximal and a lot of these studies that we're going to talk about are done in strength-trained people and even athletic populations many of these studies are done in athletic populations especially the stuff we'll talk about towards the end so that's not my really important point that's essential because I know what the answer is going to be when I when people kind of start quoting this podcast all the people who are determined to disagree with everything that I say and we know who those people are but all the people are determined to disagree with everything that I say is going to turn around and go oh well no no no all that stuff only applies to untrained people you know and trained people they can achieve maximum levels of recruitment without being motivated yeah garbage we've got really good studies showing that a lot of this stuff actually works in strength-trained people and actually it has been actually studied more some of this stuff as we'll get to it in strength-trained people because it's being used in the athletic context you know a lot of this stuff with bar speed is actually done in athletes because they're actually interested in testing it in athletic context because all the velocity-based training stuff was done in athletes because that's what they want to test it in because that's the only people who are using if people using velocity-based training or just going to the gym to you know kind of look a bit better it's just irrelevant to them so all the velocity-based stuff is being done in athletes anyway let's get stuck into these these things because a lot to get through so I've got a list here so I'm just going to go through them verbal encouragement has been something that sports scientists have used in maximum voluntary symmetric contraction testing since day one I mean basically they shout encouragement while somebody is doing a strength test because they know that improves performance in the strength test if you don't shout encouragement when somebody's doing the test even if you've told them to do maximal effort they still won't produce as much force in a nice symmetric contraction than if you're standing next to them shouting encouragement people respond positively to other people standing next to them shouting encouragement it's because we are social creatures and we appreciate and value and respond to emotionally this surrounding people who especially in this context are giving us positive input to what we are doing so there you go increases in motivation instantaneously created by other people standing next to us I think anyone who's ever been a personal trainer can easily attest to this if you've got a client who's doing a max effort lift obviously you're going to verbally encourage them obviously you're going to see better performance when you do so exactly and there's actually a kind of carry on from that which is my second point on my list which is that the phenomenon of social work or social facilitation is wider than just somebody standing there shouting encouragement you can literally notice a observer effect so if you've got if you're in the gym on your own generally speaking you will be less motivated than if you've got just other people also working in the same gym as you at the same time so if you got three or four other people in the same area you will naturally work harder than if those people are not there that is again just a social facilitation phenomenon we respond positively to the presence of other people well most of us respond positively to other people you know there's troglodytes like me who prefer not to be around the people but that's you know I'm like not a not a not a normal case so that is that is a kind of wider phenomenon and again just the simple presence of other people tends to be very positive yes you can find exceptions to that as I say I'm a really good example but there are other scenarios as well a slight competitive environment you can take that thing a step further and this this again is a situation where we tend to I'm just going to try and make sure that as I go through this list I do sort of mention examples of where there are a you know kind of sort of definite data in strength train people this competitive environment is a strength train scenario kind of that has it has been tested in a strength train scenario so we know that when you put strength train people in a competitive environment they tend to perform better than when they're not in a competitive environment so you know not just have an encouragement not just the presence of other people but actually saying I'm going to try and do my best because the other guy you know the other person is going to be also doing their best and there's a kind of rivalry there and I want to kind of win this particular competition so put people in a competitive environment most of the time not all the time there are exceptions to that again but you know put people in competitive environment and they generally will try harder and put more effort in there's variance is there in terms of coordination and stuff but if the coordination is relatively minimal then generally speaking the effort tends to be the overriding factor because when people feel self-conscious coordination tends to go down but if it's not coordination limiting factor then effort tends to be the primary most important driver of the performance and competitive scenarios will tend to allow you to produce more effort because you are literally prepared to experience a more painful scenario in order to be competitive in that scenario because it is worth more to you to do so in that situation I mean that's literally that simple it's like you know if you're on your own there's nobody around there's nobody encouraging you there's nobody to compete against what literally what is your motivation what do you work as hard as if you've got a scenario where you've got more to win I mean this is what it comes down to it's like you know what is the kind of cost-benefit analysis that's being done emotionally inside of you in this scenario I think we've allowed a narrative about how exercise works that is completely wrong to pervade the industry whereby you know we somehow think that you know we are this kind of god-like creature that can just tell ourselves to produce maximum levels of motion equipment without having any kind of you know limitation on that and that's just not true we've got a massive emotional limitation on how much effort we're prepared to just you know sort of withstand in any given scenario and all of these factors are going to modify that in the moment and you're going to end that were differing levels of recruitment according to. So clearly showing us that we're is limited by the maximum tolerable possession of effort and clearly showing us how we might go about pushing that level up in a given scenario. So again, for people who are listening to this from a practical point of view, if you want to increase your strength and to maintain this, to give yourself a reason, give yourself multiple reasons, go to the gym with a gym partner, get them to give you encouragement, have some kind of gentle rivalry with them on different sizes. Even if you've got different levels of strength, try and have your own kind of way of adjusting for that. You're going to find you get stronger, produce more effort and get better results because your recruitment levels are higher. I mean, both of those points so far, basically, if you have a training partner, you can achieve both of those. Like it's fairly easy to actually implement. Yeah, but there's levels of success that can be achieved within that. So just going to the gym with somebody and chatting with them and doing a set of things. No, you need no potential about it. If you're intentional about how you, and you're intelligent about how you can stroke them. I mean, if I go to the gym with someone who weighs 300 pounds, then it's not going to be a very fun experience, unless we're doing pull ups, which gives me a very funny experience. There's not going to be a very kind of, you know, when they're basically almost twice my body weight, it's not really going to be very fair competition. I mean, how often do you hear bodybuilders in the past say that they would go to gyms where there were people who would be given them? You know, that motivation of other bodybuilders, other people who are stronger or bigger or whatever, that gave them the motivation to perform better. You know, it's ultimately the same thing. Perhaps. I think there might be something else going on there. Better access to. So are they important important factors. But anyway, let's try to do it too. It's distracted. So yeah, so straight away, you know, hopefully people are listening to this are seeing the really huge importance of motivation in performance and the ways in which we can manipulate that. Let's move on to another one. And this is one that is very kind of emotionally attractive to me is the idea of autonomy. So one of the really interesting things that's come out of motor learning is that if you give people a little bit of autonomy in a motor learning task, they actually learn more quickly. So that's something that started in there and it's come across into strength training. And we've discovered that not only does it assist in motor learning and the improvement coordination and the successful performance of actions in an accurate way, it also increases the motivation. And therefore, when the answer is motune at recruitment through the exact same method that we've talked about previously. So it has autonomy and autonomy just means that they have some control over their environment. So this is one of those things I think is relatively straightforward for those of us who are, you know, going to Jim on our own, especially when the gym is quiet. We've got all the autonomy that we can kind of really dream of largely kind of self determined. And that's not real. I think the autonomy issue really is something that personal trainers need to avoid squashing. So if you've got a client and your tendency is to just and I see this a lot actually in the mainstream kind of fitness industry. I see a lot of scenarios where the client is literally just has no clue what's going to happen next. And the personal trainer just says, do this. Yes. No explanation. There's no context. There's no guidance. There's no expectation. It's all just like, do this. And the person just does that. And I can see immediately that the motivation is not there from the start of that. They need to kind of build their own motivation them from being dropped into that scenario. And it clearly is not allowing them to reserve maximum levels of effort in that particular situation. So a lack of autonomy is definitely going to create a problem. And I think it does create a really big problem in a lot of situations for a lot of people working with personal trainers. So I think giving people a little bit of freedom within the context of the sort of training program or the workout that they're doing is really good way to allow them to achieve higher levels of effort. And there's a whole bunch of ways that you can do that. You can start at the very beginning. So when somebody is coming into the gym and they're starting their session, I think it's really cool to give them a lot of freedom about the exact type of warm up that they do. Do they want to use this machine to do up to five minute, 10 minute warm up under the one who use that machine. Do they want to do something else over there? Because it honestly doesn't matter really. They're just kind of getting that kind of muscle temperature increase as long as they're using a, you know, if they're doing a leg workout or whatever or doing full body workout, whatever. And you start them on treadmill or across train or a bike, but it's their choice. Then you've introduced some autonomy because they have made the self determined choice to do something that they want to do. It's easy to go, but they've chosen to do it. And that then elevates that motivation because we like to do things that we want to do. We're choosing machines in many ways. Whether we understand those choices and why we made them is a separate question. I'm not going to go to philosophical today. So I've probably gone way too philosophical already with the whole kind of making most decisions all the time. That should be all, but let's just stick with that as being a thing that I think is unlikely to affect most lifters are going to the gym on their own. But it's absolutely going to affect personal trains working with clients. Well, actually, you think an interesting aspect of that is people will approach a personal trainer because they think it's good for their results. I think they're going to get a better outcome doing that than doing the own thing. And sometimes, and we talked about this actually, I think in the first episode of this year, we were talking about mistakes. The personal trainers are making with new clients and you'll work out mistakes people are making. Sometimes the limitation of a PT session actually means that you're more limited than you would be if you were just doing that session by yourself. And obviously, there's going to be context today if you don't know what you should be doing or what's going to work in the gym. Obviously, having a PT will be beneficial, but beyond the fact that you're limited to whatever that time slot is, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever it is, there's what you pointed out here where you're actually giving up your autonomy in most cases. So one thing that I do in my online groups, which is obviously a little bit different to on the gym floor, but I try to identify what are the things here that you sort of mentioned. What are the things that don't particularly matter that I can offer some flexibility in. So what I allow people to do is I'll use a wider repetition range. And instead of saying you need to do six to eight repetitions, you need to do five or whatever. Usually I'll give them it might be say five to 12 or five to 10 or whatever it might be. And I say, hey, if you if you just always want to go between five to seven, do that. If you always want to go between eight to 10, do that. I don't mind. And then I'll also give you a few different excise substitutions. And I say if this excise doesn't do a few, these other excises all achieve the exact same thing. You pick the one you want. I don't care. Stick with it. I don't want you to swap each week. You stick with that excise to next eight weeks, 12 weeks, how long it is. But do the one that you want to do. And at least you've got some choice there and that's going to motivate you. So I think as coaches, if you're working online, if you're working in person, trying to find ways that you can offer a little bit of that autonomy to your client is ultimately going to get them the better results, it's going to make you look better. And it's it shouldn't be that hard to do as long as you can identify what are the things that's not going to take away from the efficacy that actually going to enhance it. Yeah, totally. I think that's really, really valuable point there. So essentially any time somebody's doing a training program and they feel like they are doing something they don't want to do. That's going to drop the motivation that's going to drop the recruitment. It's going to drop you effectiveness of the excise. So all that, you know, kind of rep range or whatever. So always better to kind of pick a rep range or an excise that's slightly less kind of optimal from a biomechanical point of view in the eyes of your coach. And in pick one that you like better, I mean, as long as it's doing the same thing. I mean, it kind of you can take this to an extreme and it doesn't work. I mean, yes, no, it's going to grow their calves doing, you know, kind of, you know, pretty jappishish in that. Yeah, you've got to kind of do something that actually does do the thing that you want it to do. But within that, you know, zone is within the within the kind of range of things that you're doing. What a simple condition is then you can learn effectively. I would always I would always go for the one that you'd like doing better. But people take it to an extreme and they kind of go, oh, I can do this excise and it's going to give me better results. I like doing this excise more. I like doing this way of training more. Well, no, not really because you can outside the boundary conditions. So can I go to stay within the boundary conditions of things that do that thing. But within that, I think, yeah, motivation is a big deal. So motoring equipment is always going to be something to chase. Cool. So autonomy, honestly, most people are listening to this, putting them going, not sure, autonomy really applies to me. And it probably doesn't. Well, a lot of coaches will listen to the coaches, so they can implement that. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to pick one next that is, you know, not going to be a surprised anybody, which is that listening to music can increase your motivation. And that's going to increase your performance. And it does that by increasing motoring equipment. I find this one enormously ironic because some of the people who are arguing that there's no limitation on motoring equipment are some of the same people who post repeatedly about the music that they enjoy listening to when they're doing excise. Because it motivates them. And I just found out this is all these playlists of people. Yeah, this playlist really motivating fires me up to train. I'm like, OK, aren't you the same guy who says that there's no things a budget for motoring equipment that you can just maximize, maximize recruit all the motifs. want in any exercise that you're doing even if it's got all the muscles working in the body at the same time. It's like, okay, so you can't actually see how these things connect. You're not actually thinking about any of this stuff. You're just kind of posting stuff that you've kind of fed into a AI engine and it's spatter and answer for you. So music, if it is loud enough to kind of get you going, obviously, don't listen to any music, there's too loud, but if it's loud enough to get you going and it's, I'll be exciting and you'd like it, in order those characteristics. Well, that's key that you actually like it. I'm pretty sure they've wasn't there to study where it's not easy to get you. Yeah, you can have music that's loud enough, but it's and also as a high fast tempo, but you don't like it, then it won't do the job. You actually have to it has to fit all three of those criteria. So if the music's too quiet, you can't hear it, or if it just doesn't really register for you, they won't do anything. If it's slow tempo, it won't do anything for you. And if you obviously don't like it, it won't do anything for you. It has to fit those three criteria, simultaneously, really, to make a difference. So again, just increasing your motivation, firing it up, putting it in a better mood, increasing the level of effort that you are prepared to tolerate. This is all just, you know, adding to this basic model, which is that we're trying to increase the maximum level of effort that we are prepared to tolerate and motivational increases a really good way of doing that. Moving on to some of the stuff that is simultaneously most interesting from a physiological point of view and also getting back into that territory of working with athletes and strength-trained people, visual feedback is a really cool one. And this is one that has been tested with voluntary activation measurements. So as all the other stuff we talked about so far, really the only data we've got is just showing improvements in performance as a result of the increase in motivation. So there's kind of like a very tiny window where you could kind of, people can argue the point against you because they can go, well, you know, you haven't got data showing that voluntary activation increases. Therefore, I'm going to pretend that that means that, you know, it could happen for another reason. I'm like, okay, what mechanism could that be? And then they sort of ignore you and go and talk about it to me else because there isn't anything. I mean recruitment experiments, the only thing that can really change in those scenarios and contribute to increase performance. Visual feedback, we actually do have voluntary activation measurements showing that, if you're doing a maximal effort voluntary isometric contraction, if you do that with and without visual feedback, you'll get higher motine equipment levels as measured by voluntary activation in the scenario where you've got a visual feedback representation of your performance. So if you've literally got, you know, literally just two lines on a screen and you can see the line going up as you increase more force, that is visual feedback of your performance and you will tend to find that with that visual feedback, you get a higher level of effort that you are able to tolerate and therefore a high level of motine equipment and a high level of performance in that strength test. So just to repeat myself, this is a maximum voluntary isometric contraction lasting three to five seconds. We are not talking about things that take, you know, four hours to do. Yeah, we are literally talking about seconds worth of contraction. This is as, this is as, you know, kind of maximal effort thing that people are currently claiming is determined entirely by peripheral factors. I am showing you without any shadow of any doubt that this is being governed by the brain and not by the muscle. This is not a debate. This is literally the easiest thing in the world to demonstrate just by looking at the data that we have available. So three to five seconds of us, of max my isometric contraction is being altered by your perception of effort tolerance. So that's visual feedback and you can actually kind of push that another step further and go, okay, let's come, I'm actually, you mentioned it earlier coming back to this idea of performance targets. So you can do something. Well, actually just before you go to performance, go back to visual. So like you just said there, you've actually blended visual with performance. Now I wonder, can you get any stimulus from the visual, some visual stimulus by itself without performance? So why I'm wondering that when we're talking about audible stimulus moment ago, there's, I talked to you earlier today about a study where they had people doing a max hand grip, they're using done moment as well and only a five second isometric with a hand grip device. And they actually had visual, they didn't have visual feedback, they had a visual stimulus. So they had like a light that went off and I think it said goes lit up as they go. And I think that alone was actually enough to increase peak force. But then when they paired that with very loud noise, it was like a half a second loud noise almost like a gunshot, then it went up even more. So by actually combining both the visual and the audio. Okay, so okay, let's rewind because this is actually not closer to visual feedback, it's actually close to music. So when we've got that music playing, I said it's loud, it's fast tempo, it's enjoyable. That's increasing our motivation primarily by changing our mood state. And that changing mood state then allows us to achieve high level of effort tolerance and therefore a high level of motivation. So the motivation is happening by changing our mood state. And I think really what you're describing there is close to that is not so much visual feedback. So it's actually before feedback is actually changing your mood state for you in getting involved. In fact, this actually also reminds me of another, so I mean, honestly, this fielded gigantic much stuff. There's also, I mean, we talked actually about this recently. There's this a famous study of rugby players. So again, athletes, I mean, I guarantee you, I'm just going to say this again, I guarantee you that as soon as people start talking about the stuff on this podcast, all the usual suspects will fold their arms and say all of that only applies to untrained people. I'm just going to repeat it again. This stuff is being measured in athletes. This stuff has been measured in strength train people. This is already been tested in all those populations and it all works, it works exactly the same way as it works in untrained people, it works in strength train people as well. So when you've got all this nonsense where people go, oh well, the bilateral force deficit doesn't apply in trained people. Yes, it does. All the studies being used to argue for bilateral facilitation and nonsense. They're literally changing stability and that's why the apparent facilitation effect is happening. Same thing's happening here. They're just going to go, oh well, you know, motivational stuff only works in untrained people. No, I got it. Tested in strength train people and even athletes. So rugby players, rugby players doing three rep maxes, rugby players doing three rep maxes, you play them a training montage. So you can imagine your favorite kind of rocky training montage being played before you do a three rep max squat and they're getting higher three rep max squat performances. So again, like I said before, this is really, really heavy kind of end of the spectrum. Like we talked about the maximum voluntary isometric contraction of three to five rep, three to five seconds. Again, three rep maxes. It's pretty close to maximum levels of strength that we're talking about here and rugby players doing those three rep maxes are having their performances increased by watching some kind of exciting training montage before they start. So mood change, mood change improvement increases your level of effort that you're now prepared to tolerate because you're in a better emotional state that allows you to achieve high levels of recruitment, achieve high levels of performance. Same thing with your example of the, you know, flashing lights and loud noises. Same thing with the exciting music. All of this is the same stuff. It's all working the same way and it's all applying by, and it's all applying to scenarios of, you know, extremely high force application, high f application every very short period of time. So all the arguments that people are going to come out with, oh, this doesn't apply in strength training context. Oh, this doesn't apply in untrained people already answered that and I'm already showing you that it does apply in those scenarios. So the people who are arguing against it haven't done the reading or they're being disingenuous and just denying that these studies exist. That was me getting a little bit surety. So yeah, we went back a step there because we went back to the music stuff, but we also then went through the visual feedback, which is feedback related to your performance in the moment. So whether that's a line on the screen showing the level of force you're producing, whether that's a number, we got some really nice data and athletes where they just do, like I was mentioning velocity based training earlier, they do repetitions where they do max effort repetition and they get a bar speed number. If you don't show them what that number is, they produce one level of force, even though you're saying, or you to lift the bar as fast as you possibly can, they do it like a squat rep with, I don't know, 50, 60% of one rep max and they move as fast as they can. You turn the screen around and you show them the number and now they get a better number because they can see the number and they're like, now I want to push that number up, they're motivated to do so, more effort means more recruitment through the sensation of innovation, they get a higher level of performance and it's literally just because they're achieving access to more motunits and therefore improving the number of fibers that are activated and achieving a higher level of force out, put as a result. So for individuals or coaches who want to use these techniques, so the music, I mean that's an easy one and if you're a coach, when I used to work in the gym floor, I would always ask everyone my clients, hey, what do you want to listen to? I put on music today, I want to listen to you even if it is stuff that I absolutely did tested because I knew it would be motivated for them. Given your taste of music, I'm not sure that's difficult because you have pretty strange taste of music from my perspective. From your perspective, okay. Yes, perspective is. but definitely it looks strange to me. - What music do you like? - That is not going to be disclosed on this book, I'm wondering, when I asked, is this two personal? Okay, there we go, it is. So music isn't an easy one, you can implement. - Don't struggle with boundaries. (laughing) - It's not something I struggle with at all. So yeah, you're not gonna find that out. - And then performance-related feedback. I mean, that one, you can be creative with that. Now, that will be easier as a coach, if you're a coach and a gym floor with a client, then you can set them a target, or you can, depending on what it is, what exercise you're doing, it might be. - Well, the cool thing is that targets actually seem even more effective than simply just giving performance-related feedback. So there's a difference between saying somebody, or just telling people what their numbers were last time and then telling them the numbers all this time. There's a difference between doing that and actually saying, last time you achieved seven reps with this weight, let's try and hit eight reps today. You've now changed that thing slightly, and you've actually not just given them feedback, but you've given them a target to try and hit. And you can do that with, I mean, it's been done in the context of bar speeds. I mean, you literally say to somebody, this was your number of bar speed. Last time we're gonna try and hit a round number of this and it's a higher number this time. You will actually find that they start to push those numbers up even further than they would have done just being given the feedback information. So targets are really interesting because I think they push people even further along in terms of their motivation. It's not just a, it's not just that you're trying to exceed something you've done previously. You're now trying to move towards something that you might have only achieved tomorrow or the day after if you'd not been given that target today. So that, I mean, that's a really interesting situation 'cause you're actually maybe getting more benefits. - Yeah, and that's easy enough to do. Like if you have a logbook, so you know what weight you have been using in the past and then if you have a progression model, you're following, then that essentially allows you to have a target you're aiming for. So that's something I would have with each of my groups. And I actually try to give people a target based on the experience level. So I'd say, look, if you're a beginner, this is your target. I want you to add one repetition in this workout on top of what you did last workout. And then to media, I'll change a target. I say, look, what I want to do is pick one worker this week and I want to add one repetition to each exercise once this week, not three times, just once this week. And then the advanced I'll reduce. I'll say, look, over the two week period, I want you to add one repetition. So actually adjusting that target, so it's actually, I guess achievable for that individual based on the experience level. In terms of feedback, is an easy way to include feedback for either for yourself or for a client? - Not beyond simply just counting the number of reps that you're doing. I mean, obviously, if you're working lastly, it's in your measuring bar speeds, then that's easy. It's super useful feedback mechanism. But if you're just in a bodybuilding context, then no, you're just going to be counting reps. - But I mentioned to you at the start of, actually before we started recording, that there was some new equipment I'd use from TechnoGym, and they actually had, you would perform the first repetition and it would monitor your range of motion and your speed. And then it would show you on the little screen for each additional repetition you were doing, how you were stacking up against your first repetition speed and range of motion. And that was really interesting even for me doing that. I was just doing a lap pull down, but I could see as I was getting towards the last couple of repetitions, the range of motion was just reducing every so slightly, maybe five percent or so, and it was motivating for me to actually try to hit that. So that was, I guess, almost instantaneous feedback within that set itself. But you're not many people going to access to equipment like that. - Sure, sure. I think the simple counting of repetitions and tracking with a logbook is worth 80 to 90% of anything that we can do here, especially in a hypertrophy contact. We just keep a record and keep just kind of pushing forward to be the logbook. I mean, it really just comes back to that in terms of this performance feedback side of things. And if that, that should be motivating to us. And there's all these other stuff we can do as well with the motivational side of things. We're not limited. - We're not limited just one of these. Yeah, it's loads of things we can do. So I think to finish up the list, I is worth mentioning that there are things that you can do that are demotivating. And I already mentioned one of these, which is like if you're working with a personal trainer and they kind of just pulling you from one part of the gym to another without telling you what's happening and you've got no choice in what you're doing and they just say, do this, do this, do this. That is demotivating because you're losing autonomy. - So, or giving the exercises that they actively don't like. I saw this so often when I work in the gym, it's someone to be like, we know what exercises don't you like, a hate squatting, oh, well, you need a squat. I'm gonna make you squat. It's like they actively just hold you. That is a one exercise they did test doing and you're giving it to them. - Yeah, I know, I know. So, but again, there's fascinating kind of exploration that can be done in interpersonal dynamics, though. I'm not going to comment. In terms of like a more kind of formulaic way of thinking about this, anything that is going to require cognitive effort from us can create effort perceptions that then chew up RPE that we would otherwise want to devote to Motu Unit recruitment or the Sensation of Innovation. So, essentially, if you think you're out, you know, the Psychobiological Model of T, you've got your Sensation of Effort, sorry, your Sensation of Innovation being created by the Motu Unit recruitment signal on one side and on the other side, you've got the RPE and if all of your RPE is taken up with Sensation of Innovation, fantastic. That gives you the highest possible chance of hitting a really high level of recruitment. Now, you can increase that by any of the motivational stuff we talked about, because you simply increase the capacity of our PEDO preparatory. But if you've got RPE being chewed up by other things and obviously I normally talk about cardiovascular sensations and burning sensations in the muscle and, you know, interleukins and all that kind of stuff and that's the most kind of important thing when you're constructing a training program. But if you have cognitive load because you are thinking about other things, if you go into the gym and your brain is full of work related stress and thoughts and, you know, kind of plans and, you know, whatever else that you've been doing today is chewing up space in your brain, you're probably going to find that you don't hit as higher level of kind of Sensation of Innovation because you've got RPE associated with these other things. But in the literature, we've got some really nice data related things like doing a cognitively demanding task, immediately, I mean, the Strup test is the famous one. You do it like a Strup test or another cognitively demanding task immediately before a strength training worker. You're going to get fewer reps to failure in your exercises because you simply basically got a brain full of, kind of, effort that it's dedicated to other things. And that mimics work related activity really. But you can also do social media scrolling. I mean, just give somebody a, you know, kind of a phone to kind of scroll for 10 minutes before they do a strength training exercise and they're going to get fewer reps to failure on the exercise simply because, again, the brain is experiencing effort perception related to other things. In this case, I'm not going to comment too much in detail about what I think about social media, but, you know, you get the idea. It's a negative thing that people, an emotion that people are experiencing. Yeah, which is interesting, given how prevalent social media is now and, you know, everyone filming all their exercises and their workouts. And I struggle with that tension. And I'm like, it's not good for me to have the phone on the gym floor. And I actually don't like it. Just because something's popular doesn't mean it's good. No, no, no. And, you know what? Actually, when I do, we talked about periodization last week. And we made the comment that if you were going to periodize, one way you could periodize would be to have phases where you're focusing on modian at recruitment. When I do program phases where I'm focusing on modian at recruitment, what I tell my clients is, I'm, it's so important in this phase that you are using some of these motivational techniques. And one of them is to avoid this demotivation that comes with social media. So I actually tell clients in that phase, I need you to put your phone away. Use it for music. Like, set your music, put it away, and that's it. I do not want you on your phone between sets, because it's actually going to take away from the adaption but chasing in this phase. Totally, totally, totally. So, yeah, I mean, you could have, but again, I mean, some of this stuff is interactive, isn't it? So if you've got a gym partner that you're going with and you're hyping each other up, it's highly unlikely that you're going to start scrolling on your phones, because you, in that dynamic, that's different. You're in the zone, you're with the, you know, the other person. You're not, hopefully not like reaching for your phone every 10 seconds. And that motivation is probably negated some of that negative or demotivation that's occurred when you were, if you were scrolling beforehand. Which actually leads me to a question, do these stack, can you stack different motivational techniques? I mean, I think you probably can, but I don't think it's linear. So I think that ultimately it is probably quite non-linear in the sense that any of these things will get you a step forward. And then the next step forward that you take from anything else is going to be half as big. So if you go from having no motivation whatsoever and you employ one of these techniques, it gives you a decent boost of motivation. That's going to be the biggest effect you're going to get. And then if you're able to add a little bit more motivation on top of that, then there'll be a bit of additional benefit. But I mean, as I say, there are studies that have shown that you can get incremental effects from some of this stuff. So like, comparing porn, it's targets, which just performs feedback is a really great one because obviously that does show a incremental benefit. So there's this kind of situation where you can see that, but as I say, I think it is definitely a non-linear phenomenon. So you look a bit more in than a bit less and then you probably start to cap out from a reasonable point of view. Again, I think really then it's like it's more of a log scale than a linear process. Yes, that makes sense. The level of motivational input that you would need to jump up another notch will be so huge that you wouldn't want to be experiencing it on a daily basis. You'll probably get quite a serious disturbance of your stress hormones if you try to create that level of. And I actually, Paul, I've just talked about that. So this is Paul, you know, kind of achieved really amazing performances in the, I probably only have another one or two of those left in me in my life. It's just that kind of level of motivation that you reach and you're like, that was a once this year phenomenon. I'll, you know, think about maybe try it that again next year, but there's no way I'm cycling myself up to that level to do that again anytime soon. And I think that's kind of the territory that you're now starting, I'm starting to speculate a little bit obviously, but, you know, I think that's the nonlinear relationship that we're describing here. Smelling salts, do they do anything for motivational stuff? I have no idea. I saw a little bit about that once and I didn't really look to it. I don't know. I mean, again, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, it'd have been one thousand two if it did, I don't be like, yeah, I mean, I think some of this stuff is going to be individual. Some of this stuff is going to be individual. I mean, the thing about Smelling salts is that it's an a, it's an aversive stimulus. So you're, you're triggering more of a fight or flight type. But the loud noise would be like that as well. Sure. So, but again, context is contextual sort of queues are important. So if your loud noise is accompanied by a sort of a light and a flashing go sign, then that starts to change the sort of nature of that kind of stimulus and the context of it. You know, one thing that I had known is actually I didn't mention this. It also measured startle. So they measured that they were testing stimulation of a neck muscle that apparently correlates with someone's startled or not. And it didn't, the performance increase was not correlated. Some of the startled or not, which I think is quite interesting as well. Well, again, it'll come back to what people's instinctive responses are to specific threatening scenarios. I think that probably is quite individual. But I'm not just saying that to sound cool, actually. I actually have a quiet distinctive model about hearting that word. But ultimately, I think when you've got stimuli that people are responding to that's okay. Let me try and create a useful guideline here. A lot of the stuff that we've talked about is designed to change people's mood in a positive direction. So where changing people's mood in a positive direction, or we are giving them a feeling of great reward for achieving the goal that they are currently attempting to achieve. That's very similar. They're crossing over because obviously we got a big boost positive emotion in this seeking of a meaningful goal. So we're doing positive stuff. When we start to, all of that is elucidated by all of these examples that we've talked about. There's a lot to go at. When you start bringing in stuff that is kind of just changing, um, fight or flight response stuff. So it's not necessarily a positive mood driver, but it does increase sympathetic nervousness to activity. Then okay fine, you're probably going to see a positive output in certain variables. But I don't think it's fitting in exactly the same paradigm as what we've been talking about mostly today. I think what we've been talking about most of the day has a more wholesome time. I can't prove to it in this. Do you see where I'm going with this? It's like, I think there's there's there's highly unlikely that you're going to see many downsides of the other engagement. But I guess caffeine probably fits a little bit in that other category you're talking about. So from what I've seen, and I'm not a nutritionist and I don't pretend to be one on the internet. So what I'm from what I've seen, caffeine does seem to increase performance by increasing voluntary activation. Okay. So that implies that it would fall into a similar category from this stuff. How it does that? I'm not going to speculate, you know, I'm not, I don't do that stuff. It's not my not my bag. But yeah, I mean, broadly, it does probably fall into a similar category of this stuff. Is it doing that by giving you a positive mood related benefit? I don't know. Is it doing it by just making you jittery and increasing sympathetic nodes of directivity? I don't know. I mean, that's for the nutritionist way in on that one if they can. Ultimately, what I'm point I'm making here is that I think if I were choosing between things to implement, I would choose the ones that clearly have a positive mood enhancing kind of flavor to them, like the music and the verbal encouragement and the avoiding negative social media scrolling and all the kind of stuff that is, you know, visual feedback and things that motivate people from a attractive point of view, rather than saying, oh, let's do something that's really miserable and horrible, like smelling something that smells absolutely disgusting. I mean, just to be sensible is what I'm saying. And pick stuff that's wholesome and attractive and positive and moves people in a good direction. I don't think we want to given that we've got like eight or ten things that are going to do so many other options. You've got it. Yeah, it's highly without being miserable about it. Why not do those things instead? I mean, I understand that some people want to do the kind of stuff that is, you know, kind of more unpleasant because it kind of fits with their self image of doing things that are difficult. And I'm not saying that doing difficult things isn't good. I'm just saying that in this particular context, we don't need to go down that route to get to the same place. So why not save that, you know, kind of mental energy that you would have to devote to those aversive stimuli to another scenario where you can better, where you're better able to spend that currency in a way that's more productive because there's no other way of doing the thing that you need to do. You're making a point before. A lot of stuff I got today. I just, you made the point, well, I'm good. I'm glad it's hard to pull this out of you sometimes. I always try to bait you into philosophy. So you made the point before that some of this will be individually variable. And I think that that's worth people assessing their own response to some of these. You know, it doesn't mean competition is a really great example. We've got nice data showing that some people, you put them in a slightly competitive environment and it really pushes them in the opposite direction. So absolutely don't, you know, I'm probably in that cut degree. I always did my best performances in the last practice before a meet. I would always always be substantially better, meaningfully better. My coach was always pulling his hair out about that. But, you know, that's just some people are like that. You know, they don't perform as well when they've got other people, you know, kind of competing against them in the moment. But again, I think that in the context of strength training, I think that's more likely to be a coordination way to think because you get a spotlight to fit. You think people are watching you start to tense up and you perform work because your coordination is worse. In a strength lead context when you're literally just producing force and trying to get effort levels of coaching and coo, and I think it's much less relevant. So ultimately, if if we're limited by effort and recruitment rather than coordination, I think you're going to find that irrespective of whether you feel slightly less, you know, kind of comfortable, you probably still will be able to produce a high-emotion and coo, even if your performance is slightly lower simply because it's the coordination that's causing your performance to drop off not the recruitment level, if that makes sense. Yeah. I used to train with someone who he would always, who would ask me to spot him and he would want me in position to spot. And when I was in position to spot, he would always perform better. For me, if he was then spotting me in that, and they're like, not hands on the bar, but right next to the bar, they'd go, I would perform worse. It would always demotivate me having a spot that really close me and it was motivating for him. So you get this. Your brain is focusing on more things than it needs to focus on. So if you've got somebody too close to you, your brain is for an awareness of other things. Yeah, true. I think that's what it was. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's helpful for people to reflect on how do I implement these, each of these topics, there'll be a way that that individual can use that, but it might look a little bit differently for them. Now, that last point you've brought up before about negative things, like these unmotivating, demotivating situations, and you talked about the strupters. And you know, there's one study, another macros study, whether had people do the strupters compared to watching a neutral documentary, I think it was. And those who done this, what would you say mentally for Heating Struptest is computer assessment. They performed worse in squats, done to failure. Now, obviously people are not generally doing this Struptest in day-to-day life, but they are doing mentally fatiguing work. And a few weeks ago on a podcast I mentioned, I would check with my clients, you know, depending on the type of work that they're involved in, do you actually feel more motivated at the end of a workday, at the start of a workday to go to the gym? And depending on what work people are doing, they might find that their workday was so mentally fatiguing that when they do get in the gym, they perform as tanks. And other people maybe you're doing maybe more mindless work and maybe they're students, maybe they're not, they're working part-time, or whatever, they might perform better at the end of the day. So I think individuals have to assess themselves as to how does this stuff actually play out in their own lives, and how can they modify it when they go to the gym? Or who do they go to the gym with? Whatever that context is for them, there's different ways to implement all of this. - Yeah, totally. I mean, that's something everybody's going to have to look at. You know, it's gonna vary between people, what programs and time of days and various approaches and exercise selections work. There's always gonna be boundary conditions, but within those boundary conditions there's gonna be a reasonable amount of wiggle room. What I like about this area though, is there's just so much to go out. So if you like, well, I don't have a gym pod. Okay, well, there's a whole bunch of other stuff you can do instead of. - Yeah. - There's just so much you can go out. And it all just comes down to the same thing, which is that, you know, just find a way to motivate yourself and hopefully some of the stuff we talked about today is going to give you some ideas of how you can do that. And hopefully there'll be at least one or two things in there that you can use. I mean, everybody can use a log book and, you know, beating the log book. So I mean, if that's the only thing you can do, if you can do nothing else. I mean, that's a big thing. - Yeah, if that's the other way. - Instead of like, making that music on there somewhere, you know, and they're training on their own. They've got autonomy. You know, see, you're moving in the right direction straight to way. There's lots of things. - I've won more for you and then I'll let this wrap up. So Sylvia or Rich Park, he used to talk about going into the gym, laying on the floor for five minutes, letting whatever you'd done during the day, just wash away and then visualizing what he was about to do. Visualization. Where does that fit into? - That is not something that you would start talking about at the end of a podcast. - That doesn't neatly fit into anything you've covered? - It is just, you're opening a lot of extra doors by bringing that in. A lot of visualization and imagery is going to be coordination influencing. So there's basically what it comes down to is the brain doesn't differentiate perfectly between imagined and fake scenarios. So fake scenarios, imagined and real scenarios. So basically you have a real experience and you have an imagined experience. And the brain doesn't necessarily differentiate between those two in the way that you think it might. You can instinctively think like, okay, so this happened and this did not happen. And the brain can tell that it's between those two things. One, yes and no. So there's like a very much a kind of a vague sort of boundary between those two things. And so it's rehearsal. So essentially it's coordination improvements based on your rehearsal. - So you can imagine a workout happening and you're actually going to start getting a data set from that imagined scenario that is going to feed into your kind of lived experience, if you like. So it's like a additional certain information your brain is now going to refer to. That makes things complicated. - I thought this is going to be a mood thing. I didn't think this was going to get. - This is messy. This is really really messy. - I would rather treat this as a totally separate topic. And in fact, it's not something that I'm hugely well-readed and it's something that I know enough to kind of comment on it and be aware of it. But it's not something that I've ever even done in FAQ about. Okay, okay, well, there you go. There's a little bonus tip. - Well, I actually think the reason for that is because it would be too big an issue for me to really tackle. I mean, motel learning is something I go into and I pick very specific things out of and I come out of it and I go, I'm happy I understand that. I'm not going to implement that, but motel learning is a massive area and it's really complicated and it's complicated not just because the human brain is complicated, but obviously it is. But it's complicated because that measurement methods are pretty limited in terms of what we can actually calculate. So you end up with measurement methods that are not great at testing the thing that you really want to test. So like the fundamental question of how do I measure coordination is just like impossible to answer. I mean, like measuring coordination, like there are certain very specific ways of measuring coordination which I have latched onto because they are really clean, like proximal to this to sequence. If somebody is doing a movement that involves proximal to this to sequence, then you can watch the extent to which that proximal to this sequence either happens or doesn't happen and therefore you know where the coordination is good or bad. So if somebody is doing a throwing motion and you measure the proximal to this to sequence, so you can see the peak in proximal joint angular velocities happening earlier and at a lower level than the more distal sort of joints hitting higher level, higher angular velocities later, then you've got a very clear proximal to this sequence. If you fatigue them and then get them to the same motion again and suddenly your proximal to this sequence disappears and you get similar peaks in joint angular velocity for all of the joints and they're all happening simultaneously, you've just latched your proximal to this to a sequence, you've latched your coordination, you've seen a reduction in performance as a result of your loss of coordination. But if I said to you, "Oh, we haven't got a proximal to this sequence," or you don't have, you're not measuring that, in like just measuring random joint angles and sequences of muscle activation and performance and stuff like that. Like, well, and you see those changing over time and I'm like, is the coordination getting better or worse? Or without the performance data, you're not going to know. You're just looking at random numbers on a screen. So the actual measurement of coordination is incredibly difficult to do. And so you now start, the point I'm making is that when you go and look at the motorway and say, "You have to know what you're looking for." And you have to know why you're looking for it, what you want to achieve and what that measurement method that you're looking at is telling you. And a lot of the motorway and literature is really struggling with that fundamental problem, which is that coordination is really tough to measure. Okay, well, I apologize, I imagine a heart, some when you heard my final question and you thought it was madly, it's like, really, it's a real problem. (laughing) Anyway, there's plenty of motivational techniques we've covered ignore the visualization one, but there's about eight or so other motivational things we've looked at. So I hope that there's at least one or two there for you guys to implement, give it a go in your own training. Let us know, how did you find it? Did you find your performance went up? Did you find your numbers went up? Did you find your progress went up? Increased. So let us know, we'd love to hear. That'll be performance feedback for us and I'll be motivating for us in our podcasting. (laughing) Anyway, I hope you'll all join us again next week for another topic.