042 How to build the biggest arms possible

Welcome back. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Hyper-Truthy Pass and Present. And this week it's my turn to be sick. You were sick a few weeks ago, Chris. Now I've lost my voice. I hopefully don't sound too off and hopefully it holds out. But I'm feeling okay. So, hoping for the best. How are you doing today? I'm doing well thanks, Jake. You're not sick. I'm not sick, no. You're the healthy of the pair today. I am indeed. So today we are doing a requested topic. It's a topic you've had a lot of questions about. And it's a topic that's probably been popular for. Well, close. Yeah, for ever. Yeah. At least, at least a century we'll be talking about how now approaching this, the best part of a century ago. So it's probably not going away any time soon. And that topic is how to develop the bees' arms possible. So there's plenty of us to talk about. I'm excited to do it. I'm excited to be talking about how the silver era lifters thought best to tackle that approach. Well, maybe not silver, but kind of talking golden. Yeah. Lates silver, early golden. We're talking Chuck Sipes. We have talk Chuck Sipes at least once. Maybe twice, once or twice in the past. So Chuck, he's in interesting sort of time in the bodybuilding piece because he was competing in the late 50s. So arguably silver era before anabolic to kind of really widely being used. And then he continued competing into the 60s and he continued sort of riding and teaching and doing things into the 70s. So he sort of occupied that transitional period. And personally, when I look at his routines, I think it's clear that he occupied that transitional period because some of the stuff he talks about makes a lot of sense to me. Somebody makes a lot less sense to me. And, you know, to be fair, he does claim or he did claim that he was naturally did speak out against anabolic spite heavily. Obviously that doesn't necessarily mean anything, but just for a little bit of context for you guys. So this is his arms routine. Now he did split his arms up. So he did split his biceps work from his triceps work. So I'm going to give you guys the biceps portion and then the triceps portion of this work. So obviously this would be added to your standard work out. You'd still be doing all other muscle groups as well. But today we're particularly focused and interested on the arms. So starting with biceps, we have cheat barbell curls which have honestly falling out of favor nowadays, but they were big in the silver era and I guess into the golden era. And they are something I have actually used a little bit in my groups as well. And I'm interested to hear your thoughts of them in a moment. But nonetheless, we're starting with cheat barbell curls. Anyone who doesn't know how to do them, it's kind of exactly what it sounds like. Use a little bit of body English to get the barbell curl up. And you don't do like a super slow eccentric. Sometimes when people do do them today, they're doing like five secondary ascetics. No, it is a relatively standard eccentric. You were just using a heavier load that would have been possible otherwise. Now he did eight sets of these and he would reduce the number of repetitions each time. So he would start with eight and you'd go all the way down to singles. He did a lot of kind of funny repetition schemes. He'd often do like 10, 9, 8, down to 1 sometimes back up to 10 all over the place. So a few fancy things are happening. His next exercise, exercise he did was a preacher bench curl for six sets of four. Then a dumbbell concentration curl for sets of eight. And then biceps chin-ups. So I'm assuming just supernated a schedule planche up four sets of six. And then we have a barbell wrist curl. So in a supernated position, four sets of 25, which I'm assuming honestly is probably just a weight issue again. That's pretty hard exercise to really load up adequately. And then he concluded with a standing barbell reverse curl. And that was for four sets of eight. It's a fair bit of arms work. Fair bit of biceps work. And then our triceps work out began with a barbell bench press or a close grip bench. And he did the same routine. We did the eight sets starting with eight and running down to singles. And then we had a dumbbell triceps press, which I believe would have been done. I assume sitting maybe to stand him or to show up, but it would be like a French press. So dumbbell overhead, extended above head, which is a fairly common exercise in the sort of later silver year. And Ridge Park is this a lot of these arms work as well. And I think even Steve Reeves did a little bit as well. And that was six sets of six. And then we had triceps push downs. So obviously with a cable, four sets of 12. And then weighted dips, which were another very popular triceps exercise. Again, Ridge Park is these Marvin Edo. Obviously, he's a big fan of E. So they're a pretty popular triceps builder. And this was done for four sets of four. Now, I don't know how Chuck did the dips, but generally in the silver year when they were doing dips triceps, they were pretty intentional about their form when they were doing it. And they did usually emphasize having a close grip, keeping the elbows a little bit more tucked to the side of the body. And usually keeping it also more upright and less leaning forward is generally how they would recommend doing it. Yeah, both of these workouts were repeated twice per week. It's a lot of volume. Chris, what do you make of this? Yeah, I mean, this is very clearly a early golden era program, isn't it? I mean, it's it's absolutely not to sell the era program at all. There's quite a lot of the exception of the exercise selection. Sure. So this is kind of like similar to that conversation we had at Connoble, that was last week or week before. And there was a program that had that kind of exercise selection kind of, there was reminiscent of the silver era, but then with golden era style volumes. I think we've got that again here. Yes. But I think there's actually quite a lot of interesting stuff to say. So the cheap barbell curl, I mean, let's just go through things one by one. So cheap barbell curl, obviously is technically an eccentric overload exercise. What we're doing is we're allowing, as you said, a higher level of effort to be used in the lowering phase compared to what we would get normally if we just lifted, you know, with sort of a normal form on the concentric phase. What that means is that you're going to get quite a lot to calcium, I'm going to take from that exercise, you're going to get a lot there for a post workout muscle damage. And it's not there for an exercise that I would typically recommend people do. But even more so, I would absolutely not recommend doing it to the first exercise in a workout. Because any exercise you then do for the same muscle groups is going to suffer from that excessive calcium, which is reducing the kind of potential, which is reducing the stimulation you're going to get. So this is why if you look at the dose response curves for high-perchery to training volume, for normal strength training, they are nonlinear, but they are nonlinear in a way that kind of plateaus may be somewhere between 5 and 8 sets per workout per muscle group. If you look at the eccentric dose response literature, which is much kind of obviously there's a lot less of it, but you start to see kind of plateaus happening at maybe two or three sets per workout per muscle group. And that's because when you get enough calcium eyes into the muscle fibres, they can't experience any tension. And so your additional sets just aren't doing anything. And I think that's the problem that we have. If we start doing something like a a tea curls to first exercise in a workout that we're going to do a whole other elbow flexor work, it really isn't helping our case because we're just going to stop the growth stimulus from happening because we're stopping the tension from being produced or detected. Now beyond that concerns, or beyond the sort of I guess excise order issue that you've highlighted, what particularly is happening in this exercise or what potentially is being accomplished in this exercise compared to just doing a standard barbell curl? So if you were to ignore the eccentric phase, then you would be getting obviously a lot of assistance in the beginning of the exercise. Now, the external moment time is hardest exactly in the middle. So really your momentum, if it just is giving you help in the first part, isn't really doing a lot because it's not actually that difficult in the first part. So you've got to get your momentum to the point where it gets you pass that sticking point in the middle. So really what you're doing is you're making the exercise slightly harder towards the top, which is going to then obviously give you a little bit more brachial radius, this kind of involvement because that is the elbow flex that kind of starts to become more important in the top half or certainly less sort of third or so of the range of motion. It's very very important, relative to the other muscles in the group. So you're kind of getting a little bit of a change in the kind of targeting effect of the exercise. But then obviously each empty phase really depends on where you're going to slow down. So if you kind of just allow it to do its normal thing, it will be most difficult pretty much exactly at the external moment time, being longest, which is at 90 degrees. So it really depends on what you're doing. I mean like if you're treating it as a kind of exercise where you're not really giving a lot of emphasis to the lowering phase, it's not really how it's done most people do. But if you're kind of just allowing yourself to get into that top half or range of motion, then it just changes the focus of the movement. Yeah, okay. So you're shifting it a little bit away from the bike. It's tracking a little bit more towards bracket, right? Now obviously he's gone down into some fairly low repetitions. Yeah. So the the centric load that he's using is going to be a very high eccentric load. So you are actually going to get potentially some benefit out of that compared to just standard normal sets with normal loading, yeah? So it's going to be a different effect. So you're going to be applying that kind of passive tension across the entirety of the muscle. The problem is that the elbow flexors seem to have platoes of the active length and strong low shift on the end of the kind of excise range of motion. So basically with the extended elbow position, you're actually still only in the plato for most of the elbow flexors. So it's actually unclear whether we're going to get any psychomide genesis from those muscle fibers anyway. Now the kind of eccentric overload would be or eccentric only training would be the only way you would ever likely to get that thing. But even then I'm not convinced that you would. And I don't know if you want to go into this or not. Is there potentially anything else that could be happening from a strength perspective, costumely perspective, or is that speculative? So yeah, I mean, you might get a little bit more, well, I mean, obviously you're going to get some eccentric related to the actions, such as maybe Titan, maybe customers, but you're talking more down the strength really rather than down the kind of hypertrophy route. Yeah. Because what I find interesting with this exercise is the way that it's talked about in the silver era was it was a plato buster. And the way that I understand that when I see these guys talking about it is it was a strength plato buster. And it makes me wonder is it perhaps they associate its strength and hypertrophy together, which naturally one would. And maybe they've realized his exercise was making them stronger. Maybe it wasn't actually making them bigger per se beyond what a normal curve would, but there's something happening to a strength perspective. That's my assumption with it. That's why I probably use it intermittently. But I mean, the passive tension, what is an interesting one because yeah, you would assume this probably not could be much benefit to that. So it presumably is something else happening if people are noticing it's getting them stronger. It's very possible. Yep. So the next, what do we have next? We had. So yeah, we've got preacher curls. Now, I think preacher curls are really interesting because what we're getting here is two changes relative to a sort of standing barbell curl or a standing dumbbell curl. So obviously with the preacher curl, what we're getting is a change in the resistance profile at the elbow. So obviously the exercise becomes harder more towards the extended elbow position. And that does the opposite of what we were just saying with the cheat curl. It pushes the kind of activation across to the non, the other muscles that aren't the brachioradiolus. So the brachioralus and the biceps brachy. So eventually those other muscles then start to get targeted instead. So that's the first thing that you would notice about the preacher curl. And then of course, the other thing that happens is you're moving the shoulder into a more flexed position. So essentially we're lifting the shoulder up by elevating the shoulder. And that's going to start to because the biceps brachy are shoulder flexes that start to shorten the biceps brachy. And that's going to change the leverage of the biceps brachy for elbow flexion relative to the brachy are this. So what we've got is two things going on. Now if you kind of want to start tracking down what you think that implication is going to be from a leverage's point of view, you'll find that there's not an enormous amount of interesting or useful data. There are some activation indications. There are some hypertrophy training studies implications that imply that maybe the brachy are this has got better leverage in that preacher curl situation in the biceps brachy. Recently I actually tracked down a very, very interesting muscle damage study where they did preacher curl esentrics. And they showed that the only muscle that swelled in the post workup period was the brachy are this. And it's really massive difference between the brachialis and the other muscles. So that does suggest quite strongly that the preacher curl is kind of targeting more so the brachialis in comparison with the brachy radialis all the biceps brachy. So that's interesting in the context of this workout because now what we've got is exercise one seems to be more brachy radialis. Exercise two seems to be more brachialis. And the next exercise we've got is a dumbbell concentration curl, which depending on how you guys perform it, arguably might have been more biceps Jackie. Yeah I think a lot comes down to the way that you are performing. I mean ultimately what we want for a biceps brachy exercise then by process of deduction is we want to be in a position where the shoulder is extended or at least by the side of the body. I mean which to be honest is many bicecubal esents already in that position or elbow flexor curls are in that position. But what we also want is the exercise to be hardest in the starting point and that's where most curls are going to fall down because gravity just doesn't really let you do that. Gravity is going to make it so the external moment times hardest for the elbow at 90 degrees or you want it is for the elbow to be you know kind of sort of zero degrees or 90 degrees per minute which way you're measuring it. You want to be at the starting point elbow fully extended. So we would do that is by just sitting down in a incline bench situation and using a cable coming from behind us to create the hardest part at the beginning of the exercise with both extended shoulder and extended elbow. And that's probably going to give you the most biceps brachy kind of out of the group. But in terms of this what we've got here I've done my concentration guys just really difficult to know whether what position you is in and where they are. A lot of the time these guys would actually dead stop between repetitions which I quite like because it does I don't know if anyone's ever tried like people listening if you guys have tried this. When I if I ever perform a dumbbell concentration curl I actually do prefer to dead stop and it does allow one to use a heavier load and it does allow that that sort of starting position of the exercise to be more challenging than if you're sort of not dead stopping that exercise. So I find that does yes obviously external moment I'm still going to be longer higher up I get that but it does make it more challenging in a more extended elbow position than it would be otherwise. So that's my preferred way to do it. I don't know if Chuck did it this way but it's I do see a lot of the silver gold near you guys doing it like that. So yeah so you know maybe that has a little bit more focus on the on the biceps brachy or maybe it doesn't I don't know biceps chin I'm going to assume that's a reason it is because it's actually not named correctly. If I'm going to make two assumptions about this I'm going to make the assumption that the grip width is either shoulder width or slightly narrower. Yes. I mean like I would I would even go as far as to suggest that maybe it was even with the hands pressed together because when I did a lot of chin kind of training if I moved my hands close together I would definitely feel that more so in my elbow flexors than in in the lab but that's just kind of my experience. So I'm going to assume it's at least as a tall narrower and I'm going to assume that he's actually getting his chin over the bar. Now that may not be true. In fact neither of those things may be true. I'm just going to make those two assumptions. If those two assumptions are correct then the biceps brachy are probably not a limiting factor because the biceps brachy are shoulder flexors especially in the top part of the range of motion. I assume that probably did go all the way up. A lot of the again a lot of the silver area guys that met a very sort of considered effort to actually get bar to chest so they were fully getting it. Well he's definitely switching the biceps brachy off in that position because of the two joint muscle problem and antagonist inhibition or whatever you want to call it. So ultimately it means that that becomes a much more brachy are this and brachy are the radius exercise in that kind of sticking point. And just kind of for people who are like sitting there going oh this doesn't make any sense to me why is that the case. Just think about a chin up situation because ultimately the external moment time has to be hardest in the middle but there's no way that people get stuck there. They all get stuck trying to get the chin over the bar that last little bit. That should actually really say so the moment I'm so essentially your body, your furthest away when you're that sort of halfway mark. Exactly. So that should naturally be where it's most difficult. Getting started and finishing should be easy in the same way that getting started and finishing should be easy for a biceps curl because the hardest part of the exercise is in the middle. Same thing really to a lesser degree because multi joint allows you to move your body around a little bit so you don't get quite the same degree of difference but it's still going to be hardest in the middle for an external point of view. And also a lot has amazing leverage for and just to be clear to people even if people don't agree with no mechanical matching and we'll have this kind of we'll make some comments on this later but even if people don't agree with no mechanical matching it's not relevant because what I'm saying here is not about selecting muscles it's about simply how much torque you're able to generate at different points in the range of motion. I'm saying that from a lap point of view you're able to generate massive amounts of torque in the top part of the range of motion as you're coming to the end of the exercise with the lat simply because it has such amazing leverage in that position. So you're not going to be limited by the lat in the top part of the range of motion when you're pulling your chin over the bar. So you're not that isn't the sticking point or it's not causing the sticking point. So if you're struggling to get your chin over the bar it's not the lat that's not doing that. It's got to be the elbow flexors that are not doing that. And the elbow flexors obviously aren't necessarily all going to be working because of that two joint inhibition problem. So it basically comes down to getting your chin over the bar as a brachialis and brachioradialis problem. So this is not correctly named to call it a biceps chin although we all call it a biceps all the time so it's not really that big a deal. Well it's not though because it is a big deal. because the alternative-- - Well, it's cause the-- - The confusion to a lot of people, but yeah. - Well, the alternative would be a pronated, like I think about like a wide pronated grip, right? And naturally people are going to, so we're talking about frontal plane. And people I think will naturally look at this and assume yes, close grip, supernated, that's going to be more bicep's drucky. And this is what I was always taught. That's gonna be more bicep's drucky than doing a wide frontal plane. - It's a bracket. - Bracky radialist, I think mainly. - In terms of the chin up, like the close grip. Yes, and my point is what you've just said there around the two joint problem with the bicep's drucky, that argument is going to be a lot less of an issue in a wide grip pull-up. So you could actually argue, you're probably gonna get more bicep's drucky of those two variations in the wide grip pull-up than you would in the quote unquote biceps chin up, the close grip, supernated. - Yeah, I mean, but I also think that with the wide grip, you end up with a lot more lap. I'm not saying you should do it. - I don't want you to do it as a biceps exercise, but out of those two, which one naturally, would you think, like it presumably get a wide grip? - Honestly, I think it's just simply not a good exercise for the biceps brachio. I mean, I think ultimately the narrow grip chin is actually really solid exercise for the brachio radialist. I mean, it's very, very effective at that. I don't think chin's of any kind are particularly amazing for biceps brachio. - Yeah. - If you were to stop where the exal moment is in fact most difficult. - Then it would actually become a lactic exercise again. - Yeah. - Or if you stopped even like maybe sort of with the bar level with your eyes, something like that, I mean, everybody's gonna have a slightly different point to which the elbow flexor of the biceps brachio shoulder flexion leverage appears. 'Cause ultimately this is just kind of a very quick rabbit hole. This is why it's important to state. This is why it's important to reject this idea that two joint muscles stop working in multi joint exercises because they're not changing length. This is why we have to reject this idea. This is why when people say, "Oh, the hamstrings don't work in the squat "because they're not changing length." I stop them and I say, "No, that's not correct." It's absolutely not correct. And I can show you it's not correct in two seconds because we've got studies of isometric squat positions where people are doing an isometric squat, kind of knee extension and hip extension force production and the hamstrings are not working in that scenario. So it's not because no muscles are changing length for an isometric squat, but the hamstrings still get switched off. Why are they getting switched off? They get switched off because they're producing antagonist talks at the knee, which will be knee flexion instead of the knee extension that you're trying to create, even though your hip extension torque will be beneficial to you. So they switch off because it's highly inefficient to have two torches, one that's giving you a positive effect, one gives you a negative effect. So instead, we actually use the knee extensors without the disadvantage of the hamstrings and we switch off the hamstrings and we use just the glutes and the adult to magnus. That's how it works. The same thing happens in the shoulder. So when I'm doing shoulder extension, I'm pulling downwards in the search of a plane, I'm going to use the biceps bracket as elbow flexors to help me do that pulling motion until they start producing a torque at the shoulder. And that's why we look and we say, "Okay, well where do the biceps bracket have torque "producing capacity at the shoulder's shoulder flexion?" Well, only really within 45 degrees do the anatomical position. And so ultimately, what you see is that if I'm pulling from overhead, I get down through 90 in it, the biceps bracket perfectly, happy doing elbow flexion at that point, but as soon as I get down to about 45 degrees, they're gonna have to switch off and they will do that. Now everybody's probably got slightly different points. That would essentially weigh your chin as getting over the bar in case anyone's. - Most people will be able to be able to be. 45 degrees will be approximately getting from where the hand is level with the eyes, to where the hand is level with the chin. That lasts sort of six to 12 inches of distance. That is basically where people are going to be struggling in the chin up, which is exactly what we see. And it's because your elbow flexors suddenly go from having four muscles to two muscles. And it's just like you can't get around that fact. And I think, but I do also think that different people have different. I mean, this is a true statement of any muscle, but everybody's got slightly different leverages. And I think that people have different biceps shoulder flexion leverages. And I think if somebody got really strong biceps shoulder flexion leverage, what they'll find is that they probably get their biceps bracket switched off earlier. And they'll end up relying more on their latin, more on their brachyradialis and brachialis and less on their biceps bracket. Somebody who's the opposite might find that they can get almost all the way down. I believe personally that people who are capable of doing a one-on-lock off without really having to train very much for, you know, kind of way to chin or one-on-chinoes. I think they probably just people who have got virtually no shoulder flexion leverages of the bicep bracket at all. You know, and I've met people like that and I've just been astounded by how easy it is for them. When, you know, I got to the point where I actually doing a one-on-chino my lock off was still terrible. So for those people, they would potentially actually be getting a little bit more bicep bracket as you had this exercise. - I think they would. - Exactly. - So I think you are going to find this going to be a little bit different, though. But I mean, fundamentally it is a shoulder flexion. It's just at what point does it switch off? And I think people are just going to probably find that there's maybe streach or phybit slightly earlier or slightly later. But it's a really fascinating kind of phenomenon. And it actually really changes the way you think about a narrow grip or such to play in kind of pulling exercises. - And either way, you're still going to be getting some brachialis and brachyradialis. So if someone's listening to this and that kind of all this is rubbish because I did chin ups and my arms grew huge. It's like, yeah, well, I did. - My brachyradialis grew like a weed. And for me, there was the thing people commented on when I was doing a lot of one arm chin work. It was like, your brachyradialis is gigantic. You know, literally people have said that to me. - Yep. - So we're not saying that I'm going to go decent arms. - Yes, it's just, it's not. But this comes back to the terminology problem. People refer to an elbow flexor exercise as a bicep exercise and it's just not. It causes a lot of confusion because people don't understand that it's like they think that it's just like one great big muscle that it's like the people who think that a muscle is just one muscle fiber. (laughing) You know, it's one gigantic muscle fiber, like a big snail. And it's nice, obviously like, you know, hundreds of thousands of muscle fibers. And obviously in this case, divided into four main regions, although we'll talk about some subdivisions of that later on. Yeah, so no, there's some really cool stuff going on there, which I think is worth being aware of. So what else have we got? Well, we've got another, oh no, we've got risk curls now. Sorry, I missed that. We've got some risk curls, which, you know, fair enough. I'm not going to comment too much on that because I haven't done much work on different risk exercises. Honestly, I think if anybody's interested in training wrist muscle, they should just look at what the arm wrestlers are doing. I mean, they obviously have that down to a pretty fine art. And then finally, we've got standing Bobbill reverse curls, which obviously is, you know, the reverse grip is going to give you more brachyridialis. Interestingly, I would say this program as a whole is very much heavy on the brachyridialis side. It is. It's, it's definitely the lightest on them. The bias is brachy. It's very light on the most it's brachy side. Yeah. Which arguably is the most challenging in terms of using dumbbells and barbells. Yes. I mean, really, what you would have to do is lie supine on a bench, I think, probably. Do you know there's an exercise that you used to do? Like, it would be like, it would be like a, it would look like kind of a preacher girl situation with that work. Keep talking. I'll think about that. Let me tell you this exercise because it takes a lot of boxes, but when you do it, it feels like garbage. And you're literally lie flat on the floor, not on a bench, just on the floor. You have your arms fully extended, and then you do a curl with your arms flat against the floor. That's what I was thinking. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. More or less. And it makes it to my heart. And you do it and it feels like trash. Wow. But there are some people who did it. I saw a silly real life today. I forget who, but I saw it. I'm like, oh my god, they sold this issue. And then when I did it, I'm like, no, they didn't solve it. If you had a slight, a very, very low bench, and incredibly low bench, just like a couple of blocks on the floor, like those kind of steps that people sometimes use in the gym, just give yourself like 10, 20 degrees of shoulder extension. Would that help? Yeah, probably. That would be really interesting to try that. Yeah, no other middle play. I'm sure that by the following week, when we talk again, somebody will have done something I'll talk about this. But to be honest, you can just sit in a kind of incline bench sort of set up and use a horizontal cable from behind you. I mean, that's probably the-- It's easier than cable, absolutely. In fact, there's even machines I've seen. There's a machine and not the gym that I'm going to at the moment, but the one I was going to last year and the last year. They had it literally just to seat. And there was just two cables. And port-- I do-- it's very, very simple kind of. I said, anyway, triceps. So we've got a standard Bob-O-Binch press, OK, fine, probably, as you said, narrow grip. Perfectly fine for training, media and lateral heads of the triceps. The overhead triceps press, OK, fine, more media and lateral head work. Push down, OK, some long head work, and then dips. OK, so dips are really interesting. So just let me kind of comment on this again from a two-dreamer. might also perspective. So basically the long head is a shorter extensor so we'd expect it not to work in most pressing activities. But again, you've got to look at where it has best leverage for shoulder extension. It's got best leverage for shoulder extension when the arm is overhead. So really kind of doing that sort of top part of the stage to plane kind of shoulder extension range of motions where it's doing most of its work. And as you come down to the anatomical position, the leverage is absolutely sailing towards zero. Like just it's really clear that it's going towards zero. And it comes all the way down to zero at the anatomical position and then of course nobody collects any data past that point. So it's totally possible that if you just extrapolate that line you end up actually pushing the long head into being a shoulder flexor in the opposite position. Now just to be clear, there are shoulder muscles that do do that. You can see them if you go past the range of motion, you can see some parts of the l-toidal peck complex kind of looking like they're crossing over between one side of the line and the other. So that's not unheard of. So I think it's entirely possible that the long head could be a flexor in that behind the back position. In which case, dips would actually toast the long head completely because you'd be asking it to do shoulder flexions at the same time as our extension. And that would be really putting it into a position of requiring to activate very, very extensively. Now I think it's entirely possible that stringing might even be another one of those individual things where some people experience that some people that might explain why some people have just ridiculous dip strength. Like in my case, it's entirely possible that I've got that ability to use the long head as a shoulder flexor in that behind the back position, which is why I can look like a twig and still move monstrous and out of the way. So I think that again, we want those variances, but I think that makes it a very, very interesting exercise for people who can feel it or people who can move a lot of weight on how they get it probably does classify as being a very, very interesting triceps exercise. And people keep asking that question about the long head and the dips. And in the past, they just can't answer, we don't have it. We don't know. There is no data. Nobody's collected that information. So there's a little bit of, obviously, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence. There's a lot of speculation about the end of the day. Yes, it's possible. No, I don't know whether it's actually happening or not. So perhaps the question to us, I mean, do we need a comment on the volume? I don't know if we need to say anything. The volume is just completely off the charts. It's not even worth, you know, kind of analyzing. I mean, it's even a twice a week. Well, how and there's a couple of things working for him. Okay. So the first exercise in both workouts, he's predominantly doing low repetition sets. So you know, there's eight sets. The cheek curl is constantly that. Yeah. More than constantly. And then obviously the wrist curl, I mean, that's not really changed. It's indefensible. This level of volume is it? That's all. There's no scenario in which you can argue that this is sensible. Okay. And then the triceps. Look, honestly, the triceps is the more defensible workout. If we weren't for the pushdowns at sets of 12, I mean, it's still too high. But the dips, four sets of four totally fine. The bench, most of that is sub four repetitions. Those two combined would be fine. But then adding on, and I did six sets of six plus the pushdowns. Yeah, it's just even a twice a week. It's just, it's hectic. Okay. Yep. So the volume, yeah, probably not going to be recoverable for anyone. Now, I don't know where you want to go with this. It would be interesting to talk about what exercise selection we would do differently. You've touched on some of that as you were through this, but is there somewhere else you want to go first before we get to that? There is. Yes. So we've had this conversation before, but I keep seeing the error being made, and I keep seeing people ignoring it. This is like those topics that we've talked about previously, where people say along past the point that I'm making completely failing to address it. And that's why they just keep ending up making the same error again and again and again. So we've talked, we've had a whole episode about voluntary activation deficits. And basically I explained how voluntary activation deficits work, explain why we've got them, explained, you know, all the various features of them. And people kind of just responded by saying, "No, no, no, no, we don't believe that they're happening." And they're okay, well, then live in your own little dream world then because they are happening. But I want to just start out by explaining why voluntary activation deficit is important even when you're dealing with a muscle group like the elbow flexor complex or the elbow extensor complex, which on the face of it don't seem to display very large deficits. Because that's what people are going to say. They're going to say, "Oh, well, we looked at this study and it showed that there was no meaningful voluntary activation deficit, or it's like 2% or 3% or whatever." Okay, fine. So if that's your starting point, listen very carefully to what I'm about to say because it will change your point of view if you're actually prepared to listen. So if I do a voluntary activation test, well, I'm doing is I'm comparing the four-second-generate voluntarily with the four-second-generate voluntarily plus any involuntary force from an actual stipulation. That's what I'm comparing, those two things. So essentially, any additional four-second-generate with the involuntary twitch is telling me that muscle fibers were not activated voluntarily, which are now being activated involuntarily with the stimulation. That's what we're saying. Now, importantly, I'm testing that by reference to the external torque that's being generated in both cases. So if I activate a muscle fiber in the elbow flexor complex that does not have a leverage to produce torque in the direction that I'm testing, or at the joint angle that I'm testing it at, then it will not actually register as a part of the voluntary activation deficit. So let's imagine, and we're going to talk about this again in a few minutes, but let's imagine that I'm testing elbow flexion voluntary activation deficit. And so I've got my elbow at 90 degrees, because that's kind of halfway between where the brachyridialis are going to be most active and bicep brachyimbachialis are going to be most active. So at 90 degrees, and I'm producing a maximum amount of isometric torque that I can produce. And I then test electric stimulation to see how much extra torque I can generate with that electrical kind of involuntary contraction. And let's say I can get two percent or something like that. So you can go, "Okay, well, no, that's no big deal." Okay, what happens though? If I've got a whole bunch of muscle fibers in the medial part of my biceps brachylong head, which are really amazing at supination and have absolutely zero ability to do flexion whatsoever, you actually not, you could activate those with your elbow involuntary stimulation. They could have liked to be a no extra torque regenerator zero. So I've activated all those fibers, and I've used the electric stimulation to activate those fibers, but I've not produced any benefit from doing that whatsoever. So it doesn't register as an increase in torque production and the involuntary side of the equation. And so I don't register it as a problem. At least it just doesn't register as a problem. So what you got then is muscle fibers that are not being activated, so they're technically probably involuntary activation deficits, as far as we're concerned for my hypertrophy point of view. From a biomechanics point of view, it's not relevant because what we're saying is we're not activating fibers that we can't use. Okay, fine, when I activate the fibers that we can't use, with my hypertrophy point of view, it's absolutely relevant because you're trying to do is say, am I training all of the elbow flex complex? Well, no, you're not because you're not activating fibers that are capable of doing supination, but aren't capable of doing flexion. Yeah, yeah. I mean, in the same way, if you were, if they were testing a curl and then suddenly someone starts activating the cords, that's not going to change anything on the test. You're not going to see that increase in body and improvement in the cords. And you're saying, well, it's the same thing if there's muscle fibers that can't actually do that thing, you're testing within that muscle. And we know that there's going to be, I mean, for any muscle we're testing, that's going to be the case. Yeah, I'm just giving an example that I've actually got studies to justify. So I'm literally, there are studies in the 1980s where people looked at the biceps bracket long-haired and they found that some muscle fibers in the lateral part do flexion and some muscle fibers in the medial part do supination. And you literally have it and they, you know, just don't get activated if you're not doing those particular actions. So it's just a perfect example of what we're talking about. Yeah. So if someone says, hey, no, biceps, drachy has, you know, 99% volunteer activation, that does not mean 99% of those muscle fibers or modalities are being recreated or active in that test. No, it doesn't. It's like a second. And just to be clear, again, we covered this when we did the episode on voluntary activation deficit. I was going to repeat it again here. When we test voluntary activation deficits, there are a couple of features, which are very important. Firstly, we test them in unilateral movements. Now, whether or not you think that, I know, the bilateral deficit is caused by muscle mass or whether you think it's caused by something else. It doesn't really matter. The point is that everybody recognizes that bilateral deficit is there and it happens and you end up with a, um, substantially higher level of recruitment in other unilateral movement compared to a bilateral movement. So again, if you're testing unilaterally, you're not going to take that by following track duration deficit that you are going to get in a normal strength training exercise. And then again, we all recognize that stability has an enormous effect on motine equipment. Well, dynamometry is off the top end of stability. Like if you think your your machine exercise is stable, wait till you see a dynamometer, I mean, like it's like you're strapped in, you can't move. So ultimately, there's a very, there's two really big factors there, which mean that when you're trying to go, oh, well, I'm just going to do my normal kind of advice. I'm just going to do my normal kind of biceps curls with dumbbells. And I'm going to be all right, Jack, you're not because you're actually going to see massive difference between that standing to arm dumbbell, girl, with, you know, kind of free weights compared to a stable situation in a dynamometer and a kind of unilateral scenario. So if you couple these three, if you had these, all these three things together, a couple of those two with what we said earlier about the voluntary duration deficit, not including fibers that don't do the torque direction that you're interested in. They actually have three really huge factors that cause that long track deficit to be hugely greater in the free weight normal gym scenario compared to the scenario that you're measuring in the laboratory context. So ultimately, you know, if you're looking at a laboratory derived voluntary duration measuring, you're saying, oh, that's 98%, 99%, 97% or whatever the number is. Therefore, I can ignore it. You're fundamentally not understanding how you go from that laboratory scenario to the gym and taking to account the other factors that we already aware of that change that deficit and make it a lot bigger. I think the part of that that I find most interesting is that if you think about the implication of the leverage parts, the saying that, hey, this motor unit's here that actually can't produce torque and they're not being measured, that tells us it's not just the same motor unit's every single time that you're not able to access, right? So if someone says all the biases Dr. Kee has 98% volunteer activation, then one might think, oh, that's fine. This two percent I'm never going to get. But no, no, no. What you're saying is there's actually some of those motor units you'll get in one exercise and then not in another and you'll get some of those in another. And it actually is an argument for why one must be using different exercises, high variety of exercises, if they want you to maximize hypertrophy. Yeah. And in fact, there's actually no downside really. I mean, there is, I like people go, oh, no, no, no, no, you need to do more sets per exercise to maximize the stimulus. And I'm like, really? Have you looked at the dose response relationships? I mean, like seriously, I mean, like just go back to the Shernfeld metronasis or, you know, look at the Pelland one. I mean, I think the Pelland one is kind of the curve is too steep because I think it includes a lot of the more recent studies that have a lot of muscle swelling in them. But if you go back to the Shernfeld, you just draw a basic kind of natural logarithm through that data. What you find is that, you know, one set, okay, gives you, you know, kind of one arbitrary unit, if you like, worth a high-periodistimist. Your second set is giving you, you know, like, you know, a tiny additional amount. What is it? I can't remember the number now. It's like 30% or something. 39%. So like you just get this, then the third set maybe gives you another kind of 20 something percent on top of that. So, you know, just there's just really small additional benefit from doing an extra set of the same exercise, much better to do an exercise that is training different muscle fibers in that group. And then you're going to get, okay, some overlap, which is going to be in that 39% zone. But you're also going to be getting, you know, maybe 5, 10% of fibers that are not overlapping or even more. I mean, I was really shocked when I looked at the muscle damage study of the, and it showed that pretty much no swelling is happening in the biceps bracket and the brachyridialis in a preacher-coral scenario, which implies that the brachialis is getting absolutely toasted. You know, so I think if anything, I'm underestimating how important neuromaconic ill-matching is. So now that we've covered voluntary activation and that it is an issue for the other flexors and every muscle. Yeah, exactly. So all that means is exactly what you were just leading towards, which is that we have to consider exercise selection as a high priority because that's the way that you ensure that this voluntary activation deficit is not causing you a problem. If you have a voluntary activation deficit in any given exercise, what it means is that muscle fibers that are at least useful to you are the ones that get pushed to the top end of the kind of motunit pool, essentially, they're the ones you can ignore. So you're doing a elbow flexing exercise, the biceps bracket longhead is going to ignore the supination motunits to the last possible moment and probably not actually end up recruiting very many of them. And, you know, just to be clear, when I'm talking about that, example, those studies, these are 1980 studies and they were actually interested about, you know, is there functional differentiation between different heads of the biceps? And that was what they were primarily interested in. People asked me that question all the time. They were, you know, can I target one head of the biceps bracket or the other? I'm probably not, but there are still activation kind of clusters within the biceps bracket longhead. So you will actually get different parts of that muscle being activated, depending on whether you're supinating or all flexing. Okay, so related, but maybe a Jason question. So there is a belief that the best exercises for hypertrophy compound multi joint, multi muscle exercises and that isolation, single joint exercises are the highest in the top of the cake, you know, maybe they're an e-shape or whatever. And hopefully there's not too many people who are listening to this who hold that belief, but I'm surprised by how prevalent this belief still is. If we're talking about maximizing growth, I mean, you kind of answered it just in what you've covered so far, but of those more compound type exercises versus isolation type exercises, which are going to be more suitable to our goal. Yeah. Well, if we're aiming to, you know, kind of maximize arm size, then obviously you want to train the arms. You don't want to be trained in the rest of the kind of body with the exercises that you're using, target arms. I mean, ultimately, you know, there's this push back against the idea that larger amounts of muscle mass being used by, you know, in an exercise mean lower activation per muscle movement. That, I mean, that's just so easily verifiable across a number of different domains in the exercise science literature. I mean, you can see in a particular literature, you can see it in literally like just go and look at the voluntary activation deficits for all the major muscles of the body. Start with the glute, work your way up to the like the biceps back in your notice that you can just literally draw a line straight line through the size of the muscle versus one tractivation deficit, the bigger the muscle, the bigger the deficit. I mean, it's literally that obvious, you know, there's an exception in the case of the hamstrings, but pretty much reliable kind of relationship between muscle size and voluntary activation deficit. Very, very straightforward. And of course, you know, you got bilateral for deficit as well, very clearly giving you an example of larger amounts of muscle mass giving you bigger voluntary activation deficits. So there's a whole load of different kind of sort of sources of data that you can look for. And what it just means is that, and that's before we start talking about limiting factors. So like, you know, ultimately, if somebody says, well, I'm doing this multi joint exercise, and it's I think it's going to train all the muscles that are involved. I'm like, yeah, but which one's limiting factor? Because one of them will be the limiting factor and the one that you experience highest effort in and the others won't be maxed out to the same degree. I mean, that's is highly unlikely that you're going to have an exercise that perfectly matches every single, you know, muscle. I mean, I talk about this all the time. I say that every time I try and do benching or any pressing exercise, my triceps just to the ones that kind of hit limiting factors. So for me, actually, you know, kind of multi joint exercise is due tend to be quite interesting for arm work simply because my triceps have been put in a position of being the limiting factor. But I could probably still get slightly higher accruement in a single joint exercise simply because I haven't got other muscles working at the same time and you've ultimately what we're always trying to do is limit the effort perceptions going to anything other than or being related to anything other than the motine accruement to the target muscle. But I've heard that if you're doing a multi joint exercise, that because there's more muscles being used, that means it's more more sick. I don't even know how to attempt to still know this. No, no, no, no, no, I didn't have to construct the arm. It's literally that more muscles equal more central motor commands somehow and therefore high activation of everything that's being used somehow, somehow, somehow. I mean, that's so to be fair. So many of the arguments I see online just come down to a poverty return somehow. Somehow, it's like, I want this answer to be true. Therefore, I'm going to start from this observation and then insert a somehow and then kind of jump straight to the answer. I mean, honestly, basically muscular failure happens because we hit maximum tolerable perceptions of effort. Anybody arguing that it happens because purely because of peripheral mechanisms actually hasn't looked at what would happen if that were the case. You know, it's actually not possible for that to be the case. We're hitting maximum tolerable perception effort. We even see the, I mean, there's an entire body of literature devoted to looking at how reps and reserve and RPE match so that you hit maximum effort at the end of a set. Maximum effort is literally the definition of you hitting muscular failure. That's what it is. So we hit the maximum tolerable production effort, we stop. And that means that you've basically got a kind of capacity of effort perception. You're devoting that to whatever is required and it could be coordination. It could be burning sensation. The muscle could be cardiovascular sensations. And a big chunk of it is going to be the central motor command coming from the brain. And that central motor command has got to go somewhere. And you've got if you've got more muscles being activated, you've got more central motor commands being generated and you're not going to be able to activate one muscle to the maximum degree. If you're sharing that central motor command across a whole bunch of different places. And there's so many ways that you can see that happening. Like I talk about external focus of attention a lot. When people go, "Oh yeah, external focus attention really motivating because you're setting this external goal there for which you should increase recruitment." And I'm like, "Well, it does increase most likely increased central motor command as a total. But the problem is it doesn't increase recruitment in the muscle that you're interested in training. Because what that does actually is the external focus spreads activation across more places because your body is using more muscles to achieve the desired goal. And because you're using more muscles to achieve desired goal, you end up actually reducing recruitment in the target one of the training. So there's lots of different ways and angles that you can come at this problem, but they all bring you to the same place. Then I've heard that perception of effort is not relevant to strength training. So we just magically reach maximum effort at the end of every single set to failure, just the coincidence. I'm just saying what I've heard, that apparently research is the same the model doesn't apply to. But the model is literally devised in strength training situations. So if you look at where central motor command and sensation of innovation was originally studied. So sensation of innovation is the feeling that we get as a result of recruiting motor units. So it's the thing that contributes to the increasing perception of effort as we go through a strength training session, especially with heavy or moderate loads. We like to those who got other perceptions of effort from our feedback, but that's less relevant. So what we're seeing now is that we increase the sensation of innovation because we're increasing more as the central motor command level. We start to feel that as a perception. That's literally what sensation of innovation means. And when we reach the maximum tolerable limit to that, we can't really increase any further. And that stops us from increasing motinocruin. That stops us from actually being able to continue the exercise that we're doing. The sensation of innovation was literally studied. And you actually sent me a study that's been done by the same lab more recently, whether it's basically tested the same observation and slightly different way. I was literally done in a strength training situation. I was done in Bicense Curls. So when people say, "Oh, no, no, the model doesn't apply to strength training." I'm like, it was literally done initially in a strength training content. Yeah, the studies were so many studies. Art in strength training when the actual sensation of innovation hypothesis was formed in 2012, I think, if I remember correctly, with a Bicense Curls study. And the more recent one that you sent me not so long ago, again repeated, I think, again, elbow flexion exercise. So, yeah, I don't know why people are saying it. Okay, I sidetracked us. Where were we? Staying on track. Staying on track. We were thinking about how are we constructing a kind of arms workout that would be better than the kind of golden era one that you kind of start to dissolve with. And I was kind of just making the point that what we want is a reasonable degree of exercise variety that allows us to hit all of the mass fibers in both the elbow flexors and the elbow extensors. And, you know, I think really I covered a lot of the ground when I was analyzing the workout we brought for us today. So, it's actually quite straightforward. You can say, "Well, okay, you've got the brachyridialis, you've got the brachyialis, and you've got the device, it's brachy." We talked about how the brachyridialis is going to have peak effort in the contract to position of elbow flexion. And also, probably, you know, with a pronated grip if, you know, people want to do it. So, you can't just put it anywhere. Brachyridialis, like we're talking that sort of like elbow gap muscle. You don't like my description? Well, it's not that. It's just, I think, you know, everybody's got very, very slightly different, you know, kind of way things lay out. And sometimes people can look very, very different. I mean, I wouldn't want people to go away. The idea that has to always be exactly like that. You know, I mean, there's case reports of people having all kinds of weird anatomical variations. So, if people's, if they're looking at your arm right now, and it doesn't look like that, then don't worry too much of it. But yeah, so, top part, the exercise range of motion, and, you know, pronating. I mean, I always say to people, you know, elastic resistance is probably the easiest and simplest way to do that. But again, cables, if you're running them horizontally, will generally do the same effect. So, they will generally allow you to get peak effort close to the sort of end range, depending on what your body position is relative to the cable direction. So, yeah, some kind of maybe elastic resistance, loop elastic resistance around an easy bar, and just stand on the elastic resistance, and, you know, pull upwards, and you'll get a pretty strong brachyridialis effect. Obviously, I said before, biceps brachy probably kind of seated curl with the cables behind the back, putting horizontal is going to be really effective for the biceps. Racky would explain why that was, and then brachyolis is going to be a preacher curl. And then really, if people want to go absolutely to the, I mean, obviously we're talking about a bodybuilding kind of sort of situation here. This is not anything remotely related to, you know, casual lifting. I mean, if people just want to do casual kind of strength training, then just do some hammer curls and forget about all this other stuff. But, you know, from a purpose of like somebody who's looking to be competitive, then you would have one of each of these curls probably. And if things still weren't really going in the direction we wanted to, then I would probably look at supinations. Now, I'm guaranteeing that people will go, oh, can I just rotate the dumbbell as I'm lifting it? No, you can't because the supination torque that you can generate is huge. So, you're going to find that that is just the easiest thing in the world to do supination while you're rotating. You're going to need to do a separate supination. Next, I was going to find that you actually get really strong really quickly doing that kind of thing. The grip guys use very light sledge hammers for this because they can literally just put tape, electrical tape of different different distances along the sledgehammer. And then you just, in previous episode, as you move your hand, one electrical tape, kind of notch to the next or sort of strip to the next. And you can count how many sort of electrical tape strips that you've managed to increase over time in your obviously supination and proves accordingly to the increased leverage that that weight has on your wrist. So, very, very straightforward. So, that would kind of be a sort of a complete set of exercises. How would I construct that? Well, I think you might be able to get away with four sets three times a week, but I think if you'd have to keep the weight relatively low and you'd probably have to be one of those people whose muscle fibres probably had quite a lot of difference in terms of the exercises that were training those fibres. If you're one of those people who's perhaps a little bit less kind of specific in terms of which exercises, which thing you might find that you're going to have to do four body AB and train two exercises on one day and two exercises on the other day, otherwise it's not going to work. But, you know, I think either of those two strategies would probably make sense. Now, I don't think you mentioned any unilateral exercises. Well, I guess the supination is going to be unilateral exercises. Yeah, you have to do the supination unilateral, but I mean, you could do all of this unilateral, I mean, there's no reason why not two. Yeah, I mean, if a Dr. Gaudialis, my favorite exercise at the moment is a top partial cable curl, give it like a tronetic cable. Probably the simplest way if you've got a decent setup. Absolutely. Yeah. And then you can air that. So what I'll do is I'll do that obviously single arm, and then I'll pair that with a standing behind the back cable curl single arm. It'll grace myself against the other side of the cable station. So I can do unilateral for both in the same station. I've got most of my groups doing that. I think it's a great pair to bias, Dr. Gaudialis and Biasis. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, the practicalities are going to have to take precedence over everything else. But yeah, ultimately we're aiming for those three different positions and then the fourth big supination if people want to add that in. What did you say for Dr. Gaudialis? You said preacher curl. Preacher curl, yeah. Yeah. And how would that compare to a hammock curl? Basically, from about 70 degrees on, would you probably get into the zone where the brachia radius would be kind of taking over? So we kind of want to stay below that. And obviously, hammock curl is kind of drifting past that point. Yeah. So we kind of want to make sure that the exercise is hardest below 70, ideally more around the kind of 20 or 30 degrees. So I tend to suggest people that preach a curl really want to be as shallow as possible. Yeah. And I'll go, you could actually do that pronated grip. Yeah, if it's comfortable, but I don't generally find that it is too comfortable. Well, not with a machine, no, but you could, I'm just trying to think, because I used to do it that way. I'm trying to recall how you used to do it. You could probably do a hammock curl variation. That wouldn't be too long. That's why I did a thumbnail hammock curl. You You know what I'm saying? You could do that. Yeah, you could do that. Yeah. You could actually do the bottom part or if you wanted. Yeah, that would definitely give you a bit more brecquial. I think. And then we got the TMI. How are we going to change that sort of fairly standard for you? I mean, like that again, it would depend on where you were going with it. So if you were again, thinking about doing this as a as an A, B routine and just having two exercises in each workout, then you could go down the slightly higher rep range. And that would be okay. But if you're going to put all four into one workout and try and do those three times a week, then I think you would probably need to be very careful about your rep ranges. You need to really need to be careful about your reps and reserve as well. Yeah. Honestly, I think this is one of the issues. You finish your thought. I was going to say this is one of those issues you have to be aware of with the elbow flexors and extensors is that of all the muscles in the body. They're actually the most easily damaged. And just to be clear, I know that you've got people out there, even people who are, you know, kind of talking about sports science in this context, who will tell you that they think that the elbow flexors are easily, you know, kind of non-fartee key muscles that they don't because they're smaller or whatever. And your positive design case. And in fact, it's one of those situations where if you have any understanding of the fatigue literature, you would be like, what are these people talking about? Because in fatigue literature, researchers literally use the elbow flexors as the muscle that gets damaged and the quads as the muscle that is resistant to damage. That is literally what they do because after hundreds and hundreds of studies, that is the result that keeps coming out that you train the quads. They recover really quickly. You train the voices back here and they just get destroyed for a week. That is just what we keep seeing time of time of time of time. So when people say, no, no, I don't believe you. I'm like, well, you just haven't done the reading then because it's literally the sort of benchmark kind of comparison that we use for everything. I mean, I'm just amazed. I said to you, I joked with you before we came on the podcast, there are basically three kind of sureities in life, you know, death taxes and hypertrus searches, not understanding the fatigue literature. I mean, it's getting really silly, you know, like just guys just go and do the reading. It's not hard. So anyway, so yeah, elbow flexors and extensors get really kind of damaged by exercise. We have to be extra careful with those compared to a lot of the other muscles that you're going to be training. I mean, it just makes sense to actually look at the characteristics of the elbow flexors anyway. Like even if he didn't look at those days, high fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, small, violent, rectification deficit relative to the other muscles. You can't smash the high threshold motifs because you can't, you know, kind of in the case of the lower body muscles, you can't smash the high threshold motifs and muscle violence because you can't reach them. And there's a pretty even balance of slow and fast. In the case of the elbow flexors and extensors, you've got lots of fast, which fibers and you can access most of them. So you're going to get really severe muscle damaging effect after the workout. So honestly, you know, this is all very, very joined up. There's no kind of gaps in this thought process. People are just not doing the reading. You may have commented about repetitions if you're spleen over up like two days or one. Yes. I think that's an astute comment to make. And I think that's a, I find that a valuable way to be thinking about repetition range where I would say the easiest way to think about draps is to base it off your recovery in a sense that if you're training your muscle and you're doing multiple sets and you're going to be doing it again 48 hours later, you're kind of going to be forced to do lower repetitions. And by lower, you know, I just mean, you know, sub sort of 10 or whatever, right? If you're doing that twice a week or you're doing single sets, you've got an liberty of doing 10, 12, 15 repetitions if you want. So for me, I tend to gravitate towards the higher repetitions if my recovery time line allows for it because I just say so much time warming up. If I'm doing multiple sets, I'll do lower repetitions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it just comes down to practicalities really. But again, you know, there's what it is. So that's elbow flexors. Should we move on to triceps? We should. Cool. So really from a kind of triceps point of view, we've got kind of the medium lateral heads and we've got the long head. Now we talked again in the kind of analysis of the golden era program about how long head might have the ability to get involved in dips. And in that case, you know, you might get a really strong kind of whole triceps stimulus from the dip exercise. If you're one of those people that, you know, has that ability to produce shoulder flexion kind of talk with the long head. And I suspect in my case, I probably was in that cut degree because I did a lot of dips. I got my triceps to a kind of size where they probably weren't going to get a lot bigger. I tried to add in some kind of elbow extension and absolutely zero happened. I mean, it literally did nothing for me whatsoever. So I think chances are there are kind of people that may be fall into that cut degree. Not necessarily everybody, but I think there probably are people who could probably use dips and get quite the long way down the route of training the entirety of the triceps kind of group. If you do want to kind of use single joint stuff to target different parts or you need to for whatever, you know, for the reasons that you're not fully that category, then obviously, you know, kind of what we've got is some interesting information regarding shoulder and elbow leverages. Generally speaking, the long head probably has better relative leverage to the medium and lateral heads when the elbow is flexed and when the shoulder is extended. So that's basically going to be a standing triceps extension, push down rather sorry. And then obviously if you want to train the medium, lateral head, you could do the behind the kind of head kind of overhead triceps extension with a dumbbell. And that would give you kind of two exercises that would do medium and lateral heads versus kind of long head. Would you choose the overhead extension over a close grip bench or are you cheating that because simply you've got stress involvement? Yeah, I'm kind of assuming that somebody wants a single joint exercise for both. You could obviously do the narrow grip kind of bench presence and like that. In the same way that you could do the dip. I mean, either of those two would do that if you were in the category of people who couldn't get the long head to work in those scenarios. So yeah, I mean, there's not really a lot more. I think that that I would throw into the mix. You know, personally, I would just do dips. I don't think that I'd probably do everything that I could possibly get out of triceps training. For somebody who isn't in that cut degree of having that leverage capacity, I would say, you know, yeah, probably something like an overhead bench or and then a standing triceps push down or alternatively, you know, the two different kind of triceps kind of exercises that a single joint. I mean, either of those two strategies would probably do the trick. I don't think there's really anything. I mean, there's some data suggesting that you can get a little bit out of a supernative position in the triceps push down exercises. But generally, you're going to need probably a cuff to make that happen. So the tech, you know, the kind of the requirement for equipment starts to pile up. But, you know, why that's a lot of gyms have calfs nowadays. It is something I often, I do use out with my groups and say, look, if you can't do it, I do it, just do it, but it's supernative. If someone hasn't done it, like he does feel quite nice. If you've got the calf, it feels totally different, doesn't it? I mean, like, this is the thing when I, when I first looked at it and I was like, I'm skeptical, but there was two studies came out both showing that supernative position for the triceps push down increased activation at the long head even further. Well, okay, that's interesting. And I actually went and tried it and, um, okay, my grip strength was just about up to the, up to the challenge of doing a couple of reps before it kind of went, okay, this is not happening. Um, but it felt totally different. I actually, my entire kind of triceps muscle felt like it was doing something really quite different in the same way that when I do supinations, I actually feel my obo flex complex feels different from when I do. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. The same thing I get when I do a supinator version of a push down, I actually feel a completely different contraction in my triceps, like the muscles trying to do something different. Um, so I think the activation locations are going to be different in that scenario. Um, so yeah, um, I think, uh, that would probably be the only kind of tweak that I would potentially consider if somebody was really trying to go to the top tier kind of competitive level of bodybuilding. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about this, this week and I thought, because there's a lot of people talking about, um, what do they call it? Like a minimalist program, you know, minimalist full body training and abbreviated a plan and stuff kind of thing. And I was thinking, you know what, the key difference here between a minimalist and a maximalist, more word talking about its maximalist is a minimalist plan is going to look for the exercise that has as much activation of that whole muscle group as possible, whereas a maximalist plan doesn't really want that. We want to pick exercises that have as much of a particular region as possible. And there's a little of the Arthur regions as possible. Where I think there's a step. I agree with you, but I think there's also a step that comes before the, um, exercise selection, um, kind of decision is made in the context of a minimalist program, because I run a minimalist program most of the time. Um, but that's because I'm an old man. So, you know, if you, if you're coming from an old man perspective, you, you don't just have the point of view of saying, you know, how do I capture the maximum amount of activation for the muscle group, you actually have to decide. what muscle groups are important to you? - Absolutely, absolutely. - No, I agree. I think that's what it's like to end with. - This is starting point where you have to actually go, what's most important to me? And then I kind of, and actually it doesn't always come down to muscle mass because you could say to someone, okay, well, I only wanna have one quad exercise in the program, but is he gonna come down to a leg press or a kind of knee extension? And somebody will go, oh yeah, but the knee extension is the only way to get the right family. And I'm like, yeah, but there's no way I'm gonna drop a leg press out of my program. It's not gonna happen. - Yeah, so what else are you doing in the program as well? Like are you exactly? - Have you got a quad exercise in? - We actually did. We did a whole kind of a discussion where we constructed that that minimalist program out of, I think we came down to one pressing exercise, one pulling exercise, a hamstring's curl. - On social media, we didn't do that on podcast. - Yeah, we did that on social media. - Well, yeah, I think ultimately that's where I start from I start from one pull, one press, a leg press and a hamstring's curl. That's the core of my workout really now at this point. - So in this context, 'cause you've answered the question, if someone wanted to do a minimalist program for arms, you're saying for a lot of people dips for triassips may potentially be that exercise. - Yeah, I would say that's probably the exercise. And I would probably say a hammer curl is getting close to where you'd want to be. - That exercise is more like this. - I'm kind of a bit agnostic really about that. I mean, I don't think it's definitively the guaranteed exercise that I would probably program, but it's pretty close. - I mean, arguably, you know what I like? I like a dumbbell, a supernating, alternating curl because just based on the moment, you are going to get good, dracurity hours. Yes, you do a supernation. I agree we're not challenging supernation, teni's significant extent, but we're still going to be getting decent by a supernating curl. And alternating curl, yes, it's not a unilateral exercise, but do it, have you not? - You're not going to get a little bit more direction. - Yeah, no, to be fair, I do do the hammer curls alternating. So, yeah, no, I think that's right. So again, it's different kind of programs for different purposes. I mean, it depends where people go. I don't like seeing arguments where people are starting from totally different perspectives, where one person is talking about things from a competitive bodybuilding point of view. The other person is talking about it from like a, like maybe closer to my own position, old man kind of just needs a training program kind of point of view. And they're literally arguing with each other about what exercise is the best. And they're not actually understanding that one is asking for one thing and the other is asking for totally different things. - Yeah, what's the function really trying to solve here? - I find those arguments to be pretty, pretty kind of searching for a word that isn't really rude. Disappointing, you know, they're not able to have the empathy to understand that the other person is just fundamentally asking for a different thing. - Yeah. - So, yeah, so just all of this conversation, I hope that I'll see different things as well. That's what I find offensive when coaches assume that the client must only ask who they want to be doing as a coach. And it's like, well, hang on, someone might actually want to maximize playing. You don't need to force a minute with playing or vice versa. On to the other hand. - Yeah, I think goals are personal and definitely are fundamentally, you know, kind of is a necessity for us to respect that. I don't think it's a good idea to go down the route to value judgment thing. People's goals. - Yes. I want to highlight just on that minimalist, maximalist thing 'cause when we just came up with a minimalist plan there, I know that you said dips might fit into a maximalist plan and you gave a caveat there and said not for everyone and you gave the other options if that wasn't the case, yeah? But so obviously dips are a bit of a gray area. Our elbow flaps are excised, we picked an alternating hammock or a supernating nummock or whatever. That was not in our maximalist plan. And that's the point I want to highlight. - It's a bit compromised, really. - Exactly. That's it. A minimalist plan involves a compromise for an excise section and a maximalist plan doesn't. And a basic level. - Yeah, I mean, based on what I'm understanding that, I think that's an important programming. - Oh yeah, I mean, like at the absolute base level, like my starting point for the most minimalist plan that you can get to, which is pretty much exactly the same as yours really, although I think I initially started out with a stiff like deadlift and you kind of said well, no better, to have a, you know, kind of seated hamstring curl. And I think you're probably right. So ultimately, you know, kind of seated hamstring curl, like press kind of some kind of, you know, steeping climb press or kind of wide grip kind of shoulder press. And maybe some kind of wide grip pull down probably would be my personal preferences. Now, you're making huge compromises there because you've not got any direct arm work at all. I mean, it's like, you know, you've got no direct arm work at all in the program. Now, for me, I'm definitely in the category of people who can get away with that because my kind of arms have got better leverage than my torso. So I kind of end up using my arms a lot anyway through anything I've been orangutan really. So I kind of, that is definitely not a huge problem for me. But, you know, obviously for some people, that would be a horrendous issue and they would end up, you know, kind of not really getting a very good arms stimulus tool from that kind of program. So it comes down to limiting factors, you know, you're doing a bench press or you're doing a pull or you're doing whatever movement you're doing. You know, are you limited by your biceps and triceps in that situation? If you are, they're okay. Fine, it probably is giving you a decent arms stimulus. If you're not, then it's not. Well, I say decent, I mean, decent, I don't mean competitive bodybuilding. I mean, it's again with layers here. Like, even if you're the limiting factor, even if your biceps or triceps are the limiting factor in a multi-joint movement, then you're still not getting the activation you would get a single movement. They're still compromised. There's muscle mass excess in there that you don't need. So like there's no way to look at it though because you can't, it doesn't work. What we're saying is start from the baseline is what is the most effective program possible for every single muscle group, every single muscle region. And then we can work backwards from there. And we're not throwing shade in someone who does work backwards from there. It's very few people I would give that maximalist program to, right? I mean, it's my own program. It's the other way. Oh, from that as you can get. Exactly. That's fine. But it's not a moral judgment. It's someone's making compromises. And it doesn't work the other way. You can't start from the minimum and then build up. Like to what point do you build? It's just a. Were you starting without the information that you need to make the kind of. To make the program work? Yeah, I think there's a lot of people out there who just start with how they like to program. They're like, this is how I like to program. Then they start defending why they think that program is the best for everybody. And they come up with all kinds of silly statements. "Oh, you could even train for some sport by doing my strength, really, just doing your sport." They come up with absolutely ridiculous claims like that. This one program that I do is the program for every single guy who's a person. Yeah, that's not a block. And they exercise the tool. No, no, no, it's not. You know, so. But you know, ultimately, the thing we're saying here is that every kind of program is going to start with the goal of the program. And then you make decisions of what you want to include based on what that goal is. And you've got a balance between how many exercises you want to do and how much time you want to spend in the gym and what your kind of budget is for, you know, kind of energy and effort and all that kind of thing. And you'll find that it goes down as you get older. (laughs) You can't go into the gym and do 30 exercises. It's not going to happen at the point when you get to my age. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's where we're at. But the purpose of today's conversation was to try and give people this kind of absolute top tier maximum possible, you know, every single exercise that they could really benefit from. And I think we've probably achieved that. In terms of sets and reps and stuff on the triceps, 'cause we did this for bioseps, just to reinforce again, we've got the same problem with the triceps you have with the biceps. They are easily damaged. They are high, kind of fast-reached proportion. They do have a pretty small deficit to bond together compared to the big lower body muscles, although not quite as bad as the biceps bracket, I don't think. So, ultimately, I would be careful on that front. I wouldn't program lots and lots of sets and reps, but the chances are you probably only gonna need two exercises for triceps anyway. So, it's not so much a big deal as it would be for the elbow flexors to try and capture absolutely everything. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, so potentially two sets of age. - Depending on how much that person. - Other stuff you wanna do. I mean, like if you've got pressing stuff in your routine anyway, then maybe some of that starts to dial back a little bit. - Yeah, this is true. - Yeah. - Okay, I need to ask you one question. Biceps peak, is there anything anyone can do? It's a hot topic I'm sure for ever. And there's all kinds of ideas people throw around how to build the biceps peak. I say the short-hand long-haired and this and the other is there anything to any of that? - What, as I say, I think the important thing to start with is that everybody's kind of sort of, anatomy is gonna be very slightly different. And so what I would do is I would try and establish information. So pick one of these four exercises out to the F4 that we've given for different parts of the elbow flex complex. And put it first in the workout, do a couple of sets of it, and do it unilaterally. do other stuff kind of later on and do that for a couple of months and see what the shape changes look like. And then if it doesn't go in the shape that you're looking for, try one of the others. And so ultimately there's not really anything different that can do than what we just said, because we've just given them the outline. Those are the four options that you've got. Those are the four options that are training fundamentally different parts of the elbow for its complex. So basically those are your four opportunities to make a change. If somebody tries to sell you doing something else, then they're on thin ice really in terms of their justifications for what's happening. Those are the definitive four directions that you can go in for training different parts of the elbow for its complex. So literally pick one and try it and see what shape changes look like after a couple of months. And if it doesn't go in the direction you want to try one of the others. But I'm not going to come out and say no, definitively this is the one of the four that you want to do, because I think that different people are going to respond slightly differently. Now somebody who's got really extensive experience in kind of enough to me and has maybe even gone as far as doing could have a dissection and stuff like that, maybe have a better insight into that than I do. But from a point of view of where I'm sitting, just understanding a literature, I don't think I've got the ability to say it's definitively this one, this one, or this one, I think I would just say to people try one, see what happens. I mean again, if you max out, I mean max, I'm using that word loosely. But if you develop each elbow flexor as much as possible. That would honestly be if somebody's like that determined to to to looks max, then I would say look, just do all four in the way that I've described either like four body three times a week with each exercise being done for one set of lower repetitions, I'm sort of five to seven zone, you know, RIPM reserve, be careful, manage for tea, and then, or if you can't do that, then for body AB and due two and two and see how that goes. But yeah, I think honestly those four exercises are probably going to kind of give you 99.9% of anything you can possibly get from the elbow flexors. Yeah. Great. There we go. Minimumless and maximumless plan for developing arms and the thing you want to finish with, I thought it would be nail it all there. No, I think we're done. I thought we covered everything. Okay. Well, if you guys enjoy this, let us know. Maybe we'll do it for another muscle group. I don't know. But give me some feedback. And if there are obviously topics and questions and stuff, you guys do want us to cover. But in all means, let us know I'm checking my DMs intermittently now so you can send me a message. I say I'm probably going to stop next week, who knows. But otherwise, it could send me a message. Anyway, thank you guys and hopefully you'll join us again next week for another episode.