045 Training a muscle 2x per week - Full Body vs Upper/Lower

Welcome back. Thank you for joining us for another episode of "High Perch of Feet Past" and "Present." Today, we're both in different locations. Sort of, you're back home, you're a temporary home. More or less. And I'm not more or less yet. More or less yet. And I'm sitting in a hotel lobby, but we're making this work. So, thank you for joining us. Now, we have announced a few weeks ago that we have some very exciting to pipeline. And that is a year-long certification course. Now, hopefully you guys all know about this by now because we have talked about it a fair bit on our last two episodes and on social media. But if you don't know about it, I'm just basically going to say you should be signing up to our early bird offer interest link, which is in both Chris's and my bio on social media because we are going to be sending out an actually insane early bird offer. Actually this week, and then definitely within the next two weeks, okay? So you'll absolutely get an email into your inbox with an absolutely insane early bird offer, which like from a business perspective, I think my clients would know I'm pretty generous with business. Like I don't take advantage cost-wise. And you presented me with an offer that I was like, "Oh my God, that is like next level. I don't even, I pushed back on it." And you're like, "Now we're doing this." So this is absolutely not an offer. Thank you, so much. I'm making it clear that it's all my fault. In case anyone wasn't aware, yeah, it's all Chris as well. So make sure you sign up to that email list. Is anything you want to say about it? No, not really. I'm just super excited to finally get this project going. I think it's going to be a lot to fun. I think the webinars are going to be really, really cool. I've got loads of cool stuff to go through. Lots of new physiology, lots of relevant physiology for helping people take that next step, get from being a really good person trainer with the average person to being able to handle much more complicated circumstances, older people, people using antibiotics, people in severe caloric deficits, those kind of things. So I think it's really going to take people to the next level. It'll be a very, very exciting project to work on. I think we've got a really good combination of tools, if you like, within the course, because we've got the presentations every month, we've also got these case studies. So that's going to be very cool. So actually walk through how to implement the stuff in real life situations and make it work. Even when the case maybe doesn't fit perfectly with what you're expecting to see or what you've been prepared to work with, you say, well, how can I modify this? I think that's one of the areas where people can most grow is the stability to go, what are my fundamental principles? Rather than saying, you know, this is what I always do. You know, it's like, this is how I always program and I'm going to fit the round kind of pegging to the square hole, the square pegging to the round hole. And it's like, well, how can I make this person fit into the way that I already do things? So we'll hang on a minute, go back to first principles, go back to physiology and go, this is the problem this person is having or this is this sort of situation this person is in. How can I use physiology as I understand it to make sure that I write the best program and support this person in the best possible way? And if you can do that, then basically anybody who arrives, you can instantly, you know, kind of fit the program that you want to write to the person's scenarios or situations and you're not kind of missing anything. And it's because you fundamentally understand the first principles and you've gone kind of all the way through from kind of physiology through to practice without any kind of obstacles in your way. I think that's where people can most grow because most people are just kind of going, here's my method and I apply this method to people. I'm like, yeah, but what happens if this person's situation don't allow, doesn't allow you to kind of use their method, then you start on you because you don't have a flexibility. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, that's what trips coaches up all the time. You know, like so many of my mentoring clients, their coaches who have done, they've done certification after certification, they've done all this extra education work and they've got a lot of, they've got a lot of knowledge that they present me with a case and like this person doesn't fit the, the standard, I guess formula of what I've been, what I've been taught to do. What do I do? Exactly. Exactly. Often what I see people do is I kind of try to throw everything at it. Look at the case that they're giving me and it's like, okay, you're, you don't know what to do. So you're using every single tool in your toolbox and putting all of them there and hoping that something will stick. And so what we've done is identify who are these complex clients who are going to get, who are the clients you're actually going to have to work with, right? You're going to be working with people who've done it all before and it's still hard again is an art senior result. I want to see you can be working with older clients. You can be working with clients who get injured. You're going to be working with clients with gastrointestinal issues, working with clients of high stress in the life who have poor sleep. All these issues that you're going to be facing and the tools that you might have maybe the way you've been taught to use them aren't going to work on a particular order aren't going to work. And so we're actually going to talk through, well, how do you modify this? How do you adjust the program to actually work for that client or for that client or for that client at this point in time? And then when this context changes, now you can modify it like this. So it's going to be really heavy application and theory, which I think is going to be the beauty of actually marrying those two together. Absolutely. It's going to be a very cool product. So yes, if that sounds exciting or interesting, then please do sign up to the email list and we will get you the offer for the early bird discount probably sometime next week. Very soon. Just a couple of common questions I've had on that just say it was on the same page. So some people have asked, well, what if I'm in a different time zone where it doesn't work well? So all the webinars, both because we've got webinars and also tutorials which will be webinars well, but it's going to be case studies based on the last topic. So all that's going to be recorded. So if you sign up, you will get access to recordings. If you can't attend live, if you're doing the tutorials and the certification option, you'll be able to send in case studies and will be picking through case studies ahead of time for the tutorials. Even if you're not there alive, you can still submit case studies that we might cover in those tutorials. So that's not an issue if you're concerned that you're on a weird time zone or your works, get all changes or whatever. I think that's the main question I'm getting at this point. And lastly on it, we have posted the different topics this week. So if you have been wondering, so I was getting a lot of questions, what kind of topics you guys are going to cover. We both have a post if you jump in our social media. It's called Transcend Coaching Certification or Crypion. And then you can scroll over and you can see what the 12 topics are for the certification course. Okay. Now, let's jump into today's topic. So we are covering a element or component of training splits. Now we're going to do this from a slightly different angle. We've talked in the past about different splits. We've talked about upper lower versus full body. We've talked about how to turn full body into upper lower. If it's too much for you in a single workout, hey, you can split it up and train it over six workouts in the week. And we've talked about silver, hero lifters, like Clancy Gross who did salon methods to that. And today we're actually going to talk about upper lower versus full body, but in the context of doing each two days per week. Now, I've actually got a training group for people who want to train twice a week. And we do full body twice a week. And my experience with that group has been that I actually think full body twice a week is one of the most underrated splits. And it's interesting as a coach, I came from a background where like, I'm almost ashamed to admit this, where we would basically say if you can't train four times a week, like maybe if you could do three times a week, we can make it work. Okay. We're going to have to do full body, but you know, and and full body was kind of like the worst of all the options. It's only for beginners, but hey, if that's all we can do, we can kind of do full body through times a week and whatever. And maybe you'll get something out of it. But if you can't do that, it was kind of like, don't even talk to me. I can't do anything for you. If you're doing twice a week, my hands are tired, it's not going to work. And that was very much what we were taught. You know, this was sort of the old school. I don't want to name names of different sort of, you know, patty godgy that we'd sort of inherited, but that was very much belief that twice a week simply will not work. And seeing the people in my group who are doing twice a week, I mean, physiologically, it may sense, right? I mean, after all our conversations, I was like, of course, it's going to work. Of course, we can program twice a week and get amazing results. But people who are seeing like incredible results, I'm talking people who have been, you know, training for years, they had been doing maybe three or four times a week and they've dropped down because we may be playing a sport or maybe they've just gotten busier, whatever, maybe they're a new parent and seeing incredible progress in twice a week. So if you can only train twice a week or train a muscle twice a week, absolutely. It is a split. You can see amazing results on, but we're going to talk about what are the pros and cons to doing it as an upper lowest split or doing it as a full body split? Who it might work better for doing one of the other or at least some of the pitfalls or some of the programming variables you might need to be concerned about if you want to make it work the best possible way for you. Now, I've got a silver golden, I don't know what you're going to call it. This is kind of that space in between. We have talked about this a little bit before. This is a guy named Chuck Sipes. And Chuck was, he was competing like the early 60s, right? So at this point, Annabolics did exist. Supposedly Chuck Sipes didn't take Annabolics. He was sort of quite opposite. to them, but this program was a late 1960s program. Okay, so certainly anabolic did exist. We're being used quite widely at this point. So I don't know if we could call this a prehistory plan or a historic plan. It is a historic era plan from someone who supposedly was not using steroids, but that is sort of irrelevant more or less, because I just want to talk about this overall structure of this plan. So Chuck talked about this as a beginning phase, so not for a beginner, but he would use it as a beginning phase for someone who is going down like a competing, say they were going to work towards a bodybuilding show. This was kind of where someone would start. Okay, so they've got a few years of training under the belt. And okay, now we're going to dial it in. We're going to work towards a show and this is where we start. Now, I'm just going to say the plan. It's an interesting plan. So we've got a upper lower, kind of upper lower. It's a two way split and it was repeated four times per week. So each worker was done twice per week. So work at A is, it starts with squats. And we've got four sets of six squats. Now the squats were done using, it was like breathing squats. Okay, so this was a fairly common silver ear a method. Peri-rater talks about it a lot as well. Where you would, for example, take in this case two deep breaths between each repetition. So generally, it would allow one to use a slightly heavier load. Obviously in the context of squats, you've got a heavy bar on your back. So there's some fatigue from that as well. But generally, you would be able, because it's a bit of a rest pause, you would be able to use slightly heavier loads. So we've got four sets of six repetitions with this slight grass or, I guess, rest pause between each of those repetitions. Then we do the same thing for dead lifts. We have four sets of four this time. But again, two breaths between each repetition. Now with deadlift, obviously the weight is on the floor. So it's a little bit easier to do this rest pause style. And then we've got shrunks and a barbell row. Now these were both done for four sets of six. Obviously these are upper body exercises. So it's on a true upper lower. And that was it for workout A. Work out B, we start with a barbell bench. And we've got six sets. And we do six, six, four, four, two, two. So as the reps of descending, the weight is going up. And then we've got a barbell behind the neck press, which, honestly, is probably, I would say my favorite lift, and it is certainly a favorite of silver errors for silver airlifters. And that's done for four sets of six. And then we've got cheating barbell curls, which we've talked about a little bit before. Reg part was a fan of these. And so for the way these are done, basically, you're just using a little bit of body English, a little bit of momentum to get it up. And so again, it's going to allow you to be heavier loads and one would otherwise use. So that's four sets of six. And he didn't specify the ab exercise, but presumably some kind of crown sure, maybe a hanging leg raise or something like that. And that would be done for two sets of 20. So that day is an upper day. But obviously, we don't really have back work days, put the back work onto the lower body day. Four days per week, fairly low reps, moderate volumes. What do you make of that? Yeah. So just picking up straight to where and what you said there with the volumes. This is well within recoverable kind of volumes. So broadly speaking, you know, I often say three sets, three times a week or three and a half times a week. Sort of maybe five sets if you're training a muscle twice a week. That falls inside the recoverable kind of volumes with moderate loads to failure. And I would say probably what he's doing here with his six reps with some breaths between probably ends up in about the same kind of territory. So I would say he's probably a set kind of short of hitting the top end of his recoverable sort of capacity. So I think this is unlike the previous Chuck Sipes program that we looked at, which was well outside recoverable volumes. Definitely a golden era of none. This is actually pretty much what I would explain. I think I've actually done a split like this some point in the past, maybe sort of 15, 20 years ago, I think I probably did something very much like this. This would have been kind of what I did before I went on to full body and stayed there. I kind of realized this sort of up, although it just didn't shoot near tall. But this was probably something that I would have played with. I actually like it a lot looking at it. I mean, I know that if I did it, I would just hate it after a couple of weeks. But I actually like looking at it. It kind of I can look at it and I go, yeah, I can do that. It doesn't trouble me. It doesn't feel like I would be beating myself into the ground. I feel like it worked reasonably hard, but I actually got some quality work done. I like the exercise selection, you know, as a work out based around free weights, which obviously it is. So presumably that was the context. I like it. I mean, obviously squat, you know, kind of deadlift shrugs and a row, presumably when he says, "Lat row" he means it's a narrow grip. That's nice. I mean, it's a solid set of exercises. It works well. There's nothing kind of overlapping too much there. He's definitely training different stuff. And then the other day bench press. I like that. Obviously behind the neck press, very solid choice. I wouldn't probably do cheating curls, but okay, curls. That's fine. In terms of what's missing, I would say probably, you know, the pull up. If you had a pull up in that, I mean, the fact that Chuck's life doesn't have a pull up in there is a bit crazy. But yeah, I mean, a pull up would have been a good addition somewhere. But I guess with deadlift shrugs and rows, he's probably feeling like he's probably hit back quite kind of hard. Yeah. I mean, you probably want to split the volume then between the row and the pull up. Yeah. I mean, that would be the obvious thing to do. Or if you have time on an issue, you could program very low reps on the pull up. This would be something I would do where I might say then do straight force sets of two on the pull up. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And then I mean, again, the fact that he's not got dips in there again is a bit mad being being jokes types. So I probably have dips in on the other days, the Tuesday Friday sessions, which I like to cover the long head, which is my work. I want to make with the exercise selection, the point in turning, saying, hey, you know, we're missing like a frontal plane pull, we're missing a long head triceps exercise, we're missing even calves or gastric neomyasic leg ears. That was my next comment coming up. And then also, you know, mostly missing hamstrings and certainly the two joint hamstring muscles there. But one thing that I think is interesting looking at plans like this, and I don't, I don't want to undersell how important this is for lifters, is you may not need to actually train every single muscle region depending what your goal is. And it's easy to look at a plan, or it's easy to ride a plan and think I need a rack of exercise in. And I need a two joint hamstring exercise in and I need a long triceps long head exercise. I need this and I need that. But is your goal to be a bodybuilder? And sometimes like I might talk to someone and they might say, oh, my goal is I just want to build a bit of muscle. I just want to look like I go to the gym. So okay, well, you probably don't need three different hamstring exercises. You know, look at a lot of these silvery real lifteds who were doing nothing but deadly. It's like one exercise that doesn't even hit the hamstrings very well and they looked freaking amazing. So I think it's easy to look at a plan like this and put, oh man, it's so much missing. And yeah, if you want to get on stage, there is a fair bit missing. But if you just want to be stronger, if you want to be stronger than 99% people in your gym and still look like you lift. Very good. This program would work. This is a really good program already, even without the modifications I've made. Yeah. This is a really good program. No, it's it is. I mean, it genuinely is. If it's inside recoverable volumes, he's using pretty heavy loads. I mean, for me, the six is a fantastic number of reps. It really is. It kind of my my rep range from the beginning has been five to seven. I've always been saying. I think it's a fantastic place to work in that range. If you can, and obviously these exercises are pretty much all good choices for that rep range. You know, and it's a good selection of exercises. As I say, it's not there's nothing redundant here. There's not overlapping massively. So he's I mean, like, but as you say, I mean, I personally would split some of these four sets out into two's and do probably two rows and two. You know, kind of probably that would be my preference. But even as it stands, it's a really, really solid program because if you're training the same exercises twice a week. And this is something that really needs highlighting before we move on. He's doing these workouts twice per week each. So it's the same workout done twice per week. So he's doing the squat down the shrug row twice per week. He's doing the bench press behind the neck press and cheating girls and abs stuff twice a week. He's not changing the exercises and doing, you know, from workouts. And I think that's really important to highlight here. Even though it is into the golden era, he's still following that silver era mentality of going, "Well, I need to do the same exercise twice a week," or "as no point in doing it really." I mean, with four sets per exercise, if you were to change these exercises up and do different exercises, it'd be just about spinning his wheels because he'd basically be on maintenance. The maintenance literature is super, super clear. There's at least four solid studies in different populations. We've got a couple in previously untrained people before they did a training program. And then obviously they do a kind of maintenance period after that. We've got one in endurance. Cyclists, obviously, pretty big exercise history behind them. And then there's one in older people, older men, I think. All four shows exactly the same thing. Do three or four sets once per week for a muscle group for an exercise. And you end up basically spinning your wheels. So any fibers that are uniquely trained by the exercise once per week are just going to be how it'll maintenance. Yeah, they're overlapping ones, you're going to grow, but the ones that aren't overlapping are not. They're just going to stay static. I think that's really, really important. And that's one of the things I really like about this. I mean, so many things. It's like the volume works. The exercise selection is good, not amazing, but it's good. And as I say, the frequency is nailed down, at least within that twice a week. Yeah. And it's about a framework. Really good. Yeah. And that's 6, 6, 4, 4, 2, 2 for the bench. I really like that. That is a rep set scheme that I still use with clients today. And I almost exclusively use it in a two way split like this. Because one thing you will notice if you're doing many sets, you're doing four six sets, even if it's recoverable volume, it does take a long time. And that is one of the limitations I would say with doing full body is you're kind of generally limited with the set and rep schemes you can do. Maybe for one exercise or workout, you can do something like this. Generally, you're kind of limited to one or two at most, maybe three sets. You're not going to want to do a whole stack of warming up. You're not going to want to work down to doubles or triples. So that's the one thing I think I like about something like an upper lower push puller, any of these two way splits, is it does allow a little bit more creativity with the set and rep scheme like this. Yeah, totally. And obviously when you're doing exercises like squats, deadness and bench presses, then again, having that ability to warm up and take your time on those exercises and not have the other two, you know, kind of coming up after them is definitely a lot. So, you know, that's why when the other podcast I do with Rob, Marceri, we talked about powerlifting, potentially working very, very well with upper lower splits because you don't want to have to go through the entire warm up process to get up to your squat working weight and then do the same thing with your bench press, then do the same thing with your deadlift and then crawl out of the gym on your hand and knees, three and a half hours later. You know, it just isn't an enjoyable experience. So kind of splitting that into two separate workouts can work really well. It's not a, you know, physiological limitation in the strictest sense of the word, but it kind of definitely feels like one. Yeah, but no, I got a lot. Interestingly, because when we talked about this podcast topic, before we jumped on the call today, you said, "Oh, let's just do this workout plan today, because I don't think there's another scenario where I'm likely to present it." I was expecting a really kind of, you know, sort of boring, potentially, you know, not very exciting or usable, usable plan, but you've given us something that's actually pretty cool. I really like this. Yeah, if one, you know, you're working out of a home gym, you've got plenty of weight, but you know, I don't have machines. That's why it resonates with me, actually. Yeah. And look, it would be a fun plan. I like plans like this. I like these more, like sort of, I guess, strength focused plan. Yeah. This is a power building plan, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. You know, if you include a couple of those exercise selection things that you mentioned, you can really well round this out to be a decent high-period of your plan as well. Yeah, I mean, there's kind of little tweaks that you could make that would, that would kind of make it quicker and easier to do. So like the deadlift, I would probably, I would probably end up doing as something more like a block pull. Yes. Just take, take the first kind of, you know, three to six inches off the ground, just to kind of stop it from feeling like death. And probably maybe even stiff like it. Yes. So it starts to become a much more interesting kind of hamstrings, a look to Magnus exercise there. It gives you a little bit more coverage, a little bit less, a little bit faster to recover from, a little bit more enjoyable, to be honest. So I think there's some small things there that can work. But yeah, just I've been surprised by this, I think it's actually really good. So where do we want to go with this? We want to talk about comparing now an upper lower, which is done twice per week, like this, to a full body done twice per week. Where do we start? Yeah. So the context for this is that I've had a couple of questions on my, when I do my Instagram questions once a week. I had a couple of people saying, okay, fine, you know, I get the idea that three times a week is probably, or three times a week for body is probably better than, you know, upper lower kind of standard of, you know, two workouts of each type per week. So four times a week, total workouts. Get the idea that three times frequency per muscle is better than two times frequency per muscle. But what happens if we compare four body twice per week with upper lower in the standard format of two workouts of each type per week, so four total workouts? So you get to basically go into the gym twice a week for your four body, where you go into the gym four times a week for your upper lower, but obviously you're still learning up in the same muscle training frequency in both programs, which are the two is better. And there's actually quite a lot to say about this. It sounds like it could be a short conversation, but actually there's quite a lot to say. What I suggest is that we kind of hammer out the physiological bits first, because personally, I actually think the more interesting conversation is in the practical side and the application side, because I think we're going to end up not to jump too much air, but we're going to end up as that. It really depends on who you are, which are these two are going to be better. But anyway, let me kind of sort of jump into physiology first. So physiologically, it looks like you're doing the same thing, but there are differences. So if I do, if we say, okay, we're going to start out by just comparing literally exactly the same sets, reps, exercises, everything, and just literally portion it differently. Then what you're going to get then is what looks like a fairly long four body kind of workout twice a week. And you're going to get sort of comparatively shorter individual workouts in your upper lower split. So straight to where you can see, you're going to end up with a longer four body workout that means that your back end of that workout is going to experience the exercise order effect, where you can have a reduced level of moat unit crewman, because the builder of the sort of inflammation and the cardiovascular sensations. And you're going to end up kind of hitting lower levels of accruement and essentially experiencing supra spinal CNSD. So you're back into the workout is going to suffer because of that kind of longer workout that you're doing in each session. And the upper lower split, you're not going to have that problem, you're going to be able to hammer out the entire kind of workout each time and probably still be fresh enough to get a solid kind of level of recruitment out at the end of your kind of set of exercises. So straight to where I mean, and that's something I think most people on in the kind of social media space at the moment they were arguing about this, I think most people get that, they can see that, they can experience that for themselves. They know that they crawl across to the kind of sort of seated lego at the end of their four body workout and the elastic size they're doing. They don't put their heart and soul into it because they've kind of done seven or eight exercises already and they're just kind of done with it. And we've talked their ways to test that out if you're doing full body. Totally. And how about the effect yourself? Just move an exercise from one end of the workout to the other. Yeah, especially if that's the first exercise for that muscle in that workout. And you put it at the start. Yeah. And you know what you'll see is some people will be vastly different. You know, some people will find anything beyond eight, ten sets, they're going to see a huge detriment and then other people like, you know, I can do 20 sets, I can do 25 sets and I'm losing one repetition at the end. So it is going to be a significant and you know, obviously there's going to be some physiological stuff going on, but even some of that's just going to be motivation and some people hate the idea of doing long workouts and some people like really driven, they love being in the gym and they feel great. Absolutely. So yeah, so that's kind of something I think that most people are going to recognize just intuitively. They're going to see it happening. They're going to relate to it. What's harder to see is the problem that we get with the upper lower split. So if you're doing four workouts per week, you are absolutely going to have sun butter backed back. That means that you're going to the gym the following day and you've got all of your muscle damage created by the previous day workout. That's going to create an inflammatory response. That's going to then produce super spinal since T and you're just going in from the first exercise in your workout. You're already now in that super spinal CNST state. You're not going to hit a high recruitment in that first or any of the exercises in that workout because of what you did the previous day. So just to be absolutely 100% clear what I'm saying is if you do a bench press workout one day like we have the. program from Chuck Sipes. When you go in the following day and you're doing squats, your squats are not going to be hitting max recruitment because of the bench press we're okay to the previous day because the damage you created in the pecs and the delts, triceps is going to produce an inflammatory response that is going to then tell your brain that you are fatigue tired and it's going to reduce the amount of recruitment you can achieve at maximum tolerable perception of effort. So just to be again, 100% clear, you are going to feel like you are exerting maximum efforts. This is the really important thing that people I think miss. And they go, oh no, I can still exert maximum effort when I did bench press yesterday. Yes, you can. Absolutely. Your maximum tolerable perception of effort is being hit. It's just no longer corresponding to your maximum central mode command because you are feeling other stuff that is contributing to your effort perception. And therefore you're hitting max effort perception before you now hit maximum no tune at a crew. This is the psycho biological model of fatigue. So you don't know there's any difference. You still feel like you're exerting max effort. You're not actually now hitting max recruitment. So really big important point there that there is a difference between max effort and max recruitment if we are carrying any kind of sensations from other stuff. And obviously the day before having a workout in that kind of day before is going to create that problem. So that's basically what it comes down to is either the problem of the back end of the workout being kind of low recruitment because of the previous exercises and sets we've done on the day, which is the for body problem. Or we're ending up doing kind of a sort of entire workout in a suppressed state because of the previous days workout, creating damage and inflammation and therefore super spinal CnsD. So on balance, it looks like the upper lower is going to be slightly worse because it hitting your entire workout from a negative perspective. Whereas the full body actually only is the back end of the workout. It suffers and you can kind of then start to strategically decide how you want to kind of address that. Obviously though that upper lower it's only going to be two of those four sessions. So are you going to have that issue? Sure. Potentially. Yeah. If you're comparing like with like, like volumes, yeah. Exactly. And if we're sticking, if we're sticking with relatively kind of sense of all use, I may be sort of two or three sets per muscle group, then you're probably going to be okay. If you start to push the upper lower split and start to say, well, actually, I want to take advantage of the fact that I'm doing. And this is where it gets interesting and this is where people are arguing now online because they're saying, ah, yes, but because I am going to put four times, now I can do four or five sets per muscle group per workout, whereas you can't do that with your full body twice a week because you'd just be there all day and you'd be miserable by the time you get to the end of it. It's just not going to happen. Nobody's going to do that. I agree. Nobody is going to do that. But that doesn't mean that it's worse because if you do do four or five sets per muscle on your upper lower split, you are going to absolutely have a problem in your next workout. Absolutely. It's going to be pretty bad. So you are going to have a quite a severe super spot on the CNS tip for the next workout. Let's walk people through that. So obviously, in the context of full body and normally we're talking about full body diet three times a week, I'm just going to use as an example here. We would normally say that if we're using normal repetition ranges to say above five or six repetitions or even eight or twelve, whatever, that the recoverable volume per muscle is usually going to be your three sets if you're doing it three times a week. Yes, obviously, if you're doing doubles, triples, you can do more sets. We're not talking about that. So the argument being made would be, you're limited probably to about three sets three times per week if you're doing full body. But if you're doing upper lower and the thing is being trained, or each muscle being trained twice a week, you can do five sets and you're a cover. And so people are looking at it saying, well, how much volume can I recover from if I'm doing this split? Oh cool, I can do five. Maybe I can do six sets, whatever it is. And you're saying, well, that's your wrong question, because when you do that and you just maximize how much volume you can take in a single session, all you're doing is increasing the amount of super-spinig and SVT for the next workout. Yeah, which is not ideal at all. I mean, as we said, with the joke-size workout, he's doing that, he's doing four sets, he's working. I'm like, I'm still thinking it's a good plan. I mean, can it be better? Yes, absolutely. But don't forget, a lot of those, not all, but some of those sets are this kind of cluster thing that he's doing. He is on the heavy end of the spectrum and he's absolutely kind of trying to, you know, kind of make it work, but he's still suffering the issue where he's going to come back the following day and he's not going to be- He's still going to be some damage in all of the core, yeah, totally. And even at the app, so he was pushing reps up, he was only doing two sets. So there was, I think, some consideration here in the amount. Right, you can mission of it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, recognition of it. So in terms of the debate that's going on at the moment, people are going, you know, if I do four times a week, I can go to the gym four times and, you know, I can end up doing loads more volume per session and then I'm going to end up with more hypertrophy across the week. And I'm like, well, you might see a faster rate of progress, but you're going to plateau earlier because you aren't going to be able to- you're going to be constantly in a state of supospinal synapse team, especially on, as you say, two of the workouts per week, which means that, you know, whichever way you cut to, whichever way whichever set to workout, you put second, you're never going to reach your max, muscular potential on those muscle routes, the training on that second workout, which is not going to happen. So I think it's a little bit of a shortcut that isn't worth taking. It's like, it's going to move you quick more quickly in the short term because yeah, you're going to potentially make a little bit more growth on the fibres that you are training. But when you start to kind of plateau, you can't really go any further than that. You're just going to get stuck. So, so yeah, so that's, I think that's really what it comes down to is this playoff between the within session fatigue, the post workout tea. And when people are saying, oh yeah, but I can do more volume on the upper last bit. I'm like, yeah, but it doesn't help you the way you think it's helping you. And you may the point that it's, this is difficult because you can't measure this easily. You can't measure the post workout supospinal synapse fatigue the next day. Now, you can measure within session volume. Exactly. You can't get this acute feedback where you're just testing your next size. You have to try one for while see what the progress is like, change it up, give yourself a rest day. See if you're going to be like, that's, that's a bit of a pain. Even for me, a wearable with this stuff, it's still hard for me to track those my new changes really. And it's something like to be honest, it's something I've actually significantly changed my opinion on. And I was telling you before we hit record that I'm now quite reluctant to program two workouts back to back for most people, most clients and for myself as well, because I do underlate between doing full body and doing upper lower, just based on my schedule. And for me now, if I'm going to do upper lower, I'm going to do upper day off, lower day off, upper day off, lower day off, I'm not going to do two sessions consecutively. And this again, it's very hard to quantify, but how I feel about at the moment, I actually think that this supospinal synapse fatigue on that second workout, the consecutive workout, I think I've really underestimated that in the past. And I think this is something that I agree with. I agree. I agree. And I think the easiest, and this is this is a separate kind of framework now, but the easiest way that I found to show people how big they post workout, synapse fatigue problem is, or the post workout fatigue problem is, is to, is, is to just take your existing program. So for example, maybe you're doing full body three times a week and you're doing three sets per muscle group and that could be three sets of one exercise, it could be three set predictors, one set each, it doesn't really matter. So whether you do max, muscle, minimalist or anywhere in between it, it really has no, it doesn't, it's not important. And then literally just add an extra set for one of the muscle groups and just watch what happens. And I guarantee, maybe it won't happen with one exercise, but it obviously will happen with two. So if you go from one, say you're doing three sets per muscle group three times a week, you can go to four, you're probably going to notice your progress are the slows down or stops, try five and absolutely will stop. That's the easiest way I found to demonstrate so on to prove to someone that this high volume stuff is not a good idea because they're making really great strength gains with their three times a week, three sets per muscle group. And then you just add one more set or two more sets per, don't do this for every muscle group obviously. You don't want to be progressed to complete this topic across the board, but just to test it and demonstrate it to yourself so that you know that this actually works in practice rather than just kind of is you know, hotel or the internet literally just pick an exercise and do I've done this. I absolutely was flying through a set of strength gains on particular machine exercise that I've been working at. I was doing three sets per day and we and I put it up to four and I absolutely immediately hit the break wall. It just stopped. Now it's that was me. Now I'm kind of the definite kind of sort of susceptible to muscle damage under the spectrum, for certain muscle groups. So that's not surprising, but I think most people will find that they hit a brick wall with either four or five sets if they do that. So that's for me in the simplest way because what we're talking about at the moment, like you were saying, is so complicated to kind of see the results. But I'm like, if you don't want to see how big a problem excess post-work-up to is, just pick an exercise that you're already doing close to maximum recoverable volumes on or muscle group, you're already doing close to maximum recoverable volumes on at least according to the averages. And then just add Once that per worker, I just watch how you don't make any progress. Yeah. So I think an issue that that holds people back. And I don't know where this fits into it. Obviously this isn't a sort of practical programming piece, but you don't need to stick to a seven day schedule. And so you can theoretically do some of us do. So I think we'll need to be physiologically, you're not obligated. No, physiologically, and obligated to. And this is something for me, what really clicked is when I saw both, I don't know, you're going to feel about this, but when I saw both Mike Mensen during Yates and and priest during Yates, we've talked about both of these plans on, on this podcast before when they both highlighted that they were getting worse results when they were doing back to back sessions. And that when they ended up separating them and taking a day in between, that for me made me think, you know what, as an advanced lift, and maybe there's something to this. And I do think that potentially as a less advanced lift, I wouldn't be as concerned, giving someone up a lower on consecutive days. Like you said, rate of progress is probably going to be quicker initially, but I do think the ceiling is going to drop. And so I do think if you get someone who's an advanced lift, wanting to do a two-way split, don't think that you are certainly obligated to just doing up a lower day off, up a lower day off day off. You can do upper day off, lower day off, upper day off, and repeat that, right? If it works with your schedule. Even, I mean, Dorian talked about doing, like, work out day off, work out day off, and then he'd still had the two days off. So you just got this trade off then with frequency. Yeah. As a question, what's going to be more important? Having that slightly higher frequency or having that recovery period there? So is anything else physiologically dimension, or do we want to talk about how one might know, kind of, if they might, I think he better suited to one or the other? The big physiological issue is really when you're comparing two times a week for body versus upper lower done muscle training frequency of two times a week, but for total workouts. So you basically got the same kind of plan, but divide differently, or maybe, as I say, the upper lower guys start chasing more volume with that comes with its own issues. And that's kind of all the physiology really. After that, I think it comes down to practical side of things. And I think really just to kind of start with the full body side of things, doing full body twice a week, you can absolutely, and we've got literature showing this, make really good gains, doing single sets of the same exercise twice a week. So you literally just pick a whole bunch of exercises you want to do. Do a single set of each and do that twice a week, and you'll absolutely make great long-term progress. And you'll probably eat your max, more or less, maximum, muscular kind of potential with that program, because it might take a little bit longer than doing a three to a whole day, you're doing it three times a week, but you know, you will get there because you're not getting any of that carryover of the CNST. You're just kind of, you're losing a little bit per week on that. But it's relatively small in that two times a week kind of scenario. So I think it is a really solid plan. Maybe the last exercises of your workout might not quite get there in terms of maximum, muscular potential, but that's a problem that you can kind of work around with motivational stuff and that kind of thing. So I think two times a week is amazing for a body. Obviously for a body the same workout every time, because you start changing exercises, it doesn't work. For that to work, because what I do like about full body twice a week is you can't stuff up, because like you said, you do single sets. Yes, no, it's amazing. It's amazing. There's the only way you can stuff it up, because I have had people ask about this, is if the only workout to not even be spaced. So if you're like, how do you do single workouts that I can work out in the side of the in that seat? Yeah, that's totally okay. Then single sets probably aren't going to quite cut it. Yeah, that was quite so great. Yeah, no, I know I agreed. So there can be scenarios when it doesn't work. For somebody who's got the ability to carve out an hour twice a week, you know, I mean it's incredible. It really is. So I mean, anybody who is randomly listening to this podcast, I don't know why you would be randomly listening to this. You stumble across this podcast. It's your first episode and you're like, what are these people talking about? And you're kind of just interested in a plan that kind of fits into your lifestyle that already is quite busy. And you just want to kind of look pretty good, like a gym. And you know, even very good actually, then you don't want to make your lifestyle. It's just just do four or twice a week and it's incredible. It will absolutely take all of your waxes. Going from two to three times a week in four body terms, you'll get where you're going faster. I mean, really that's all it is. So I'm a huge fan of four body, two times a week as well as four body, three times a week. For me, the upper lower kind of variation has many downsides. First of all, the busy person isn't going to benefit from going to the gym. Obviously four times a week, especially if they will have travel there. You know, I mean, it's all right for me. You can say, oh, I could literally walk three minutes down the road and be at my gym. And I'm unlike, I can get it done and come back again and carry on with my day. Most people are going to be traveling a distance and that's going to chew up, you know, three hours of that day, potentially to drive there, get changed, go through the gym, get changed shower, whatever come back or go wherever they're going to go next. So it's a lot of time out of your week to say you're going from four body, twice a week to, you know, kind of up a lot of four times a week. You're losing a lot of your week when that is, those extra two workouts are being put in there. So I think really, like we saw with Chuck's types program, if you're a kind of someone who's got their own garage gym downstairs and you want to train in that particular way, actually, it starts to become a lot more interesting to do the upper office because you can roll out your people. Yeah, you can roll out your house into your garage and sort of do the workout. And actually now it starts to fit into your lifestyle a lot more easily. So I think that probably is a major practical consideration. That's why I said at the beginning, I think that if you're comparing four body twice a week with upper lower, kind of four times a week, you've got to start with practicality or at least address the practicalities of saying, no, how easy is it for you to kind of take this time out of your week and is that something that you want to do? Because straight away, you've now got quite a big difference really. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, for me, working with clients is far more clients I'll have, who'll say, hey, I kind of need to do two or three times a week. I suppose it's clients will say, I can do every day, but I can only do 25 minutes. You know, I'll get one from blue moon. I'll get a client like that. It'll be 10 to 1 the other way. Yeah, exactly. So I think really practicalities have a major role to play there in terms of what people kind of, what they want to do and what they what they can do and how each of these two splits is going to work for them. But fundamentally, they're both, again, this comes back to one of the frustrations that we have as kind of educators in this space is that people want to make things kind of black and white. They want to just kind of go, does it work or is it useless? You know, I'm like, I'm going to minute strength training works. You know, there are scenarios where you're going to kind of push a program to the point where it absolutely doesn't work. I mean, somebody showed me a program a couple of weeks back where basically they were doing exercises kind of once the body parts were there and they were doing literally not only exercises once per week for say three or four sets, they're actually doing muscle groups once per week for three or four sets. And I was like, and are you seeing any growth on this? I'm like, well, I'm getting stronger. I'm like, yeah, by you, you know, no, no, no, not really. I'm like, well, there you go. Because maintenance, you can't avoid it is, it is like that is just how it is. So if you're training one, one kind of muscle region or an entire group like say, right, and once per week for three or four sets, nothing is going to happen in terms of long term growth. It just it will not grow. So, um, you know, I think there's certain situations where strength training is going to not really work as far as muscle work. But yeah, if you unfold between because as soon as you kind of like do two, I mean, even if you take take a program that I criticize a lot, like a sort of a full body, sorry, not a full body, I almost never criticize a full body. And I put a lower split four times a week, okay, so you're doing two workouts, retype, but you now stop varying the exercises across session. So you're doing different A, you're doing an A, B kind of split with both kind of upper and lower or however you split it. So they're doing different leg exercises on your first lower day from the other exercise you doing a second low day. Now, even if you do that, if there's some overlap, you are still going to see growth, you're going to see growth in the overlapping regions or muscle fibers. So even in the scenario where, you know, my most criticized program, which is the upper lower with different workouts on every day, even if you do that, you are still going to see some growth. It's just not going to be as good as if you stuck to the same exercises on both of your upper sessions and both of your lower sessions. So like even the program that I criticize most is still going to work in inverted commas. It's just not going to work as well as a program where it's done better. I think maybe that's why there's a lot of confusion online where people would be like, oh no, there's no difference if you do, you know, twice a week versus three times a week. You do one exercise per muscle versus multiple because we see that this what's being talked about as a worst version still works. And exactly. from this, like it doesn't work or it does work, it's like this can be things in the middle where it kind of works and it's just that there are better options. So there's this really big reductionist tendency for people to go, it either has to work perfectly or it has to not work at all. I'm like, are you listening to yourself? It's just like crow up a bit. I mean, I know that I'm probably one of the oldest people operating in this space right now. But like seriously, come on guys, you're behaving like T&As. Like, so it got to kind of understand that there can be programs that give you a result, it might not be the best result. And just to be clear, it might be not the best result for two possible ways. Either it might give you a slower rate to growth or it might just not let you get to your maximum Moscow potential. There's two different things. So a lot of the time, you know, it might give you reasonably similar rate of growth to start with, it'll just plateau you a lot earlier. And that's the thing that people I think really struggle with because they just think that first to rate of hypertrophy means you end up in a better end point. It's like, no, you could look at physiologically how this works. This ties back into what we started with when we're kind of introducing the certification we're going to do. People have to understand how the physiology is actually working if they want to actually manipulate programs to get certain outcomes. If you're under some of the physiology, you're just going to make silly kind of conclusions like, oh, well, if a straight to growth means I'm going to get to longer term retiree virtual, no, that's just not how the physiology is working. So I think this is really important. We always start from the absolute kind of baseline and kind of fundamentals to make these kind of kind of draw conclusions about what's going on. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's an interesting point around the rate of growth versus the ceiling of growth because you do see a lot of people online talking about things like like multi sets versus single sets or they consolidated plans where people are doing one exercise per muscle compared to more maximalist plan where people are doing multiple exercises per muscle. And those could be two different outcomes. Like someone could grow quicker doing a consolidated plan. They're doing one exercise per muscle and they're doing multiple sets. Yeah, exactly how that can happen. I mean, literally, like if I gave two people or even imagine the same person in two different kind of universes, one person does exactly the same exercise a couple of times a week, multiple sets. The other person does three exercises per kind of muscle region and exactly the same frequency, exactly the same total number of sets to fail it all the rest of it. So what you'll find probably if you start with untrained people is a person doing the one exercise might see first or eight to growth because they don't have three exercises to learn. Well, especially if they're doing more like multi joint style exercises as well. Sure, so they're going to end up with that kind of more rapid progress to begin with, but the person who's doing more exercises is laying the foundation for greater ceiling of long term growth because they are actually going to end up training a wider number of fibers. The growth is going to be across a larger number of places and you're going to end up with more total body muscle mass. There isn't a scenario in which you can get a higher ceiling of growth with not fewer exercises. It's actually physiologically impossible. Anyone who thinks about this is is got to realize that conclusion. The only way you can argue against is to say something completely unphysiological, like the idea that, you know, if I'm training a muscle with an exercise, every single fiber in that muscle is accurate to them. Like, well, here's like 17 studies showing that you're wrong. Every single volunteer activation study will show you that you're wrong. And those are done in highly stable low muscle mass conditions where you are going to get, you know, kind of as much activation as you possibly can get. And even then, you're like 10, 15% short of total. Even if that were true, though, it's still doesn't give any advantage to doing a consolidated plan where you're doing a few exercises. It's saying in this alternative universe where a single exercise able to activate the entire idea of the muscle, it's just going to produce the same result of doing. Yeah. It's worse. Yeah. From a multi-exx point of view, the worst scenario is that you're wasting a little bit of time moving from one exercise to the other. And a lot of people actually report they get motivated by doing a max effort. Absolutely. There's no doubt about it. There's no doubt. I mean, I said to people 100 times, like I tell the story all the time, if I am doing like a multi-separatical, especially on something like a seated lego, which I don't particularly like, I'm guaranteed to find that I'm pushing my max efforts and I'll get maybe some like, you know, I don't know, three sevens or three fives or whatever on it. Three sevens probably more likely on the seated lego. And then if I then say to myself, okay, I'm going to have a week where I just kind of do single sets because I'm cooked, I load a stuff on, I'm traveling whatever. And so I go and do single sets and suddenly I'm hitting 10. And my single set. Absolutely. Yep. Yep. Almost everyone your boards are. And the scenario you just gave there, I think is perfect because what I would always say is something, if you could a day where you're your stressed out, you didn't sleep well, you're just not feeling it, rather than go in and do your multi-set approach where each set of those multi-sets, you're performing worse than normal. And then you feel even more demotivated. Exactly. So you take this sort of as an opportunity to do a single set and you'll actually hear a PV, turn your future bad workout into really best workouts. And then you'll be second guessing whether you shouldn't be doing single sets. It's wild. So yeah, but basically, worst case scenario, you end up kind of in the same kind of ballpark, but best case scenario, not even best case, moderate case scenario. Most likely scenario, you get more motor rate and start hitting PV. Best case scenario, you get this bit greater ceiling effect, if you're long term muscle growth. So there isn't really any kind of place where doing a single exercise multiple sets is going to be better than doing multiple exercises, the same muscle root for single sets. I mean, these kind of comparisons are not really kind of places that you can kind of argue. I don't get why people are making the case in the opposite direction, is what I'm saying. Well, you do because you kind of get the answer at the start of this little segway was because people might be seeing faster growth initially. Okay, sure. They might see because they're making great strength games because they're focusing so much on that one exercise. Well, and to my point, that if they are doing, let's say they're doing three chest slash shoulder exercises and they're doing a flat bench and they're doing a, well, in their guess in this case, you're doing in solivated. So they're doing just bench for chest. Compared to doing a bench, but then maybe they're doing a peck deck and then maybe they're doing a crossover. Right. Obviously in that scenario, if you're doing just bench, you're going to get some triceps growth, you're going to get some interior del growth. You're not going to get that with some of those other chest exercises. Sure. So you're going to see faster pace initially if you're selecting and this is why people think it consolidated for body plan is so if you can do it, they're like, "Look, I just did a remaining deadlift and I did a bench and I did a lap pull down and I grew like a weight." Yeah, you did initially, but give it two years and then see how much you're going to grow. You're not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's that's yeah. So yeah, I think that's just kind of one of those situations where fundamentals are going to get you to a better answer than kind of sort of just sort of following methods that people are proposed. Really, this is the same kind of thing as the whole two times a week versus three times a week kind of debate, which I've definitely got to run brewing about that because people have been on that recently. And then I say to me, "Oh, no, no, no, no, two times is the same as three times." And they just go straight to the outcome data and they go like, "Oh, you know, we can't show any studies that are statistically significant differences between hypertrophy from training two times a week versus three times a week." And then they don't tell you the hide the fact that there's also no differences between one and two. Exactly. But there are differences between one and three. So I mean, anybody with a brain can see that it's just low levels of power preventing you from seeing differences between two and three and one and two. But fundamentally we're seeing kind of three is better than one. Well, if three is better than one, and not many people are going to disagree with that because there are outcomes studies showing that that is true, then okay, why is three better than one? So I will three is better than one because multiple reasons. Firstly, you've got a nonlinear dose response of hypertrophy. So if you try and do nine sets in a single workout and compare that with three sets three times a week, you are going to have a useless kind of response of hypertrophy from your last couple of sets of that nine set workout. But you're other to kind of, you're the program where you're doing three times a week, you're going to get pretty solid result from all of your three sets three times a week. So straight away, we can see that the nonlinear dose response means that you've always going to get a better response from higher numbers of sets per workouts per week with three being better than one, but probably also three being better than two, just because of nonlinear hypertrophy response to volume. So straight to way, the same logic that applies to one time versus three times is going to apply to two times versus three times. So it makes sense. And then you say, okay, what about the after-effect question? If I'm training once a week, then I've got probably four or five days worth of time when I'm not growing and I'm actually shrinking. Okay, well, that same logic applies to two times a week because it does to one time a week, three times a week or really, three and a half times a week is the only kind of protocol that doesn't apply to. So again, you've got exactly the same logic. So when we're talking about three being better than one, all of the same things apply to three being better than one does apply to three being better than two. So, you know, it fundamentally follows exactly the same rules. What you'll find is that what people try and do is argue two things. Firstly, they'll try and argue that if you're training twice a week, then you can do a high enough volume in those sessions, such that your post-workout stimulus period pushes out to 72 hours, and therefore you don't have, like, significant atrophy time when you're training twice a week. So therefore, that problem goes away. The problem with that is that there isn't a single study showing that strength training post-workout stimulus periods do last 72 hours. We haven't even got a muscle protein synthesis study that shows that. Every time we ask them for that day, today, show us an aerobic exercise kicking study that lasted up to two hours. That's muscle damage. That's kicking. That's not strength training. So, at least you're an hour of kicking. I mean, it's nothing to do with strength training. So that's the only day they've got. They're leaning their entire kind of hyper-truist stimulus period on one study, which is not even in strength training. I mean, it's just horrific. So that's the after-fee side of things. Then they will try and go the other way. We think that if you're doing four-body three-times a week or training a muscle three times a week, then you're going to have overlapping stimulus periods. So the same idea, they come back with this kind of 72 hour idea, which again, as I said, they've got no data for. They'll go, "Hey, look, we think that you're doing a strength training workout. You're always going to be over the 48 hours." That means that when you come back and do your second workout later in the week or third workout later in the week, you're still going to be in a stimulus period. You're still going to be growing from the previous workout. Therefore, you're not going to maximize your stimulus in those subsequent workouts, which is actually the reason that we talk about not training every single day. Other than other small muscle groups, you don't want to do that. You don't want to be in the stimulus period. The issue is, though, if you look at the actual curve of muscle proteins incis, which is the kind of best proxy we've got for the stimulus period, in terms of what's going on, all of the spike in muscle proteins incis happens in the first kind of maybe 12 to 18 hours. So ultimately, there isn't going to be any meaningful kind of carryover or kind of elevation in muscle proteins incis. At the time when you're doing that, kind of a second or third workout in your week, you're not going to have a problem with that because you're going to be down at like, maybe 10%, 20% of a baseline. The spike was up 160%. So you still have a massive distance that you can increase muscle proteins incis in your second or third workout of the week. It's not going to interfere with the stimulus you're getting. This is assuming that you do even have an elevation at 72 hours or whatever the number may be. You know, because you haven't got any strength training studies showing that that's it. That's all. They all kind of go as far as maybe 48. There isn't a measurement point that goes past that. So when somebody is saying, oh no, no, we think that the kind of stimulus period lasts more than 48 hours. Show me a strength training study that has muscle proteins incis elevated after 48 hours. Okay, and then we can talk. I'm still right, even if you find one, but you haven't got one. So yeah, I mean, you sell these other problems. I love the other questions. You simply will. It doesn't go away. Yeah, there's still going to be, there's still going to be other variables that are still going to less than the efficacy. It's just going to be one of those problems. You still got the dose response being nonlinear, which is always going to make three times better than two times. And you still got the attribute problem, you know, even if it's smaller. And you don't have an overlap problem really because as I say, even if it does, even if it is still elevated, it's elevated by such a tiny amount, even at 48, it's elevated by 10, 20%. So really not compared with the massive spike we get in the first 12 hours. Pretty much all the hyperducing stimulus is something in the first day after your workout. So anything like when you leave that and go into the second day, there's no overlap really that's have any meaningful nature. It's not going to cause a problem. In fact, in my opinion, almost all of the elevation after 24, 36 hours, if not, you know, 24, I think. It's just most of them to prepare anyway. So if you're not doing enough sets to create damage, you're not going to have enough of a kind of overlapping stimulus or an overlapping MPS elevation. So physiologically, there isn't a way to argue that two is even the same as three. As you're logically doing, none of that really matters. Even like the atrophy doesn't matter, the MPS doesn't matter as long as your first point stands, which is that this diminution tends to volume. Exactly. I just don't know how anyone, like no one's going to get up there and say, yeah, I think that the 12 set of an exercise is giving me as much growth as a first set. I mean, maybe some people will, but like, how are you going to make that argument? And so if you accept that we know that some people were arguing that they were claiming that you can kind of get increasing recruitment over a series of sets. They cannot like misunderstand the impact. So the second or third set is in fact more effective than the first set of maybe the confusing path. Literally every, yeah, path is not post activation potentiation is not a central nervous system phenomenon. It's a peripheral phenomenon. You cannot increase mochino crew and over a series. We've even got one of my favorite post activation studies. I believe it was even done by David Ben, showed that you can have a post activation of a potentiation effect, not as in performance increases. And voluntary activation is going down. So your peripheral effect actually overcomes your reduction in mochino crew. Is Apple? You said something really interesting. You wanted to cut you an A's this week. And do you call what it was? Because you'd said I would hope that you look my QNs. That's what you call the interesting thing you said. Now you made a point about fatigue and you said, if this answer doesn't make sense, you go and revise the definitions of fatigue. Do you remember what was that? I do remember writing that. I think I was drawing attention to the fact that fatigue strictly is an outcome. Yes. But was it in the context of path? I can't quite remember what the question was in the context of because it applies. Yes, it was in the context of path. So yeah, so if, yes, exactly, I remember now. So basically, I was thinking about this exact same study because it just been, it's been kind of swimming around in my head quite a lot in the last couple of days. Basically, if you see a performance goes down, then you are fatigued. Now you may not feel fatigued. You know, you may not think there's any fatigue present, but if there is a reduction in performance, that is the definition of fatigue. Similarly, if I see an increase in performance, then I am patentiated. Now, I may not feel patentiated. I may feel fatigued. It doesn't matter. But I've increased performance. Therefore, I'm patentiated. I'm not fatigued. So if I do multiple sets or multiple efforts, and I see either maintenance of performance or an increase in performance, then I'm not fatigued. But I can still experience fatigue mechanisms that are being equidized or actually overcome by patentiation mechanisms. So this is the problem that we have in exercise science. Fatigue and patentiation are literally just telling you what the outcome is. Is it increase in performance or is it a decrease in performance? You can have reductions in motine recruitment, which is a super spinal sin of fatigue, even though you have an increase in performance from patentiation. And this is one of those things where I say you have to revise your terminology and understand what you say. This is not contradictory. This is actually just following the terminology. You may go, "Oh no, I don't think that's what fatigue is. I'm like, I don't care." Because this is how it works in the entirety of the fatigue literature. And that's more important than your opinion. So basically, the entirety of the fatigue literature treats fatigue as an outcome, which is a temporary, reversible reduction exercise performance. If you have a temporary and reversible exercise performance reduction, and yet there is a potentiation mechanism happening, you're not patentiated, but there is a path effect. It's just it's a mechanism. It's not a natural observation and outcome change. Conversed, you can have an increased performance from patentiation, but actually a reduction in motine recruitment because you've got this super spinal fatigue present. And that's what we actually see quite a lot, as I say in the kind of pap literature, is if you actually go looking for it, you will find that recruitment always just goes down and down and down and down, down over a sequence of efforts, whatever they may be. So super spinal fatigue is always happening, and it's always kind of present. You may not see a reduction in performance, but it is still happening. So translation there for anyone who got lost is if you did multiple sets, downhand assignment, my ability to explain something. I mean, some people may not even know what pap stands for. Right? So what we're saying there is if you're doing multiple sets, in that second set, you could perform better, but there could be less hyperdepartial stimulus. Correct. Because your potentiation is happening as a increase in the kind of retention of individual muscle fibers, but your recruitment is determining how many responsibilities are activated. I actually got this question again recently, which shows that there are actually new people coming to my Instagram page and think, I can't imagine what that must be like. You kind of navigate to some kind of random Instagram page and you realize there's two and a half thousand infographics and reading one of them makes your headache. And it's like, okay, this guy is a little bit out there. So like the difference between mechanic retention and motine recruitment, the kind of tension first to single fiber force. So a fiber needs to experience that force in order to be stimulated to grow. Recruitment just tells you how many fibers are activated. And this actually goes hand in hand with a whole bunch of other criticisms that people give me about EMG and, I'm not sure how many are going to come at you. So they'll go, oh, EMG is irrelevant because it can't predict hyperdepartial. And I know straight away what paper they're referring to because I was a co-author on that paper. I'm like, okay, you know, kind of throwing papers that I was part of, I mean, like whatever. And they go, like, you know, EMG is irrelevant. And I'm like, well, no, it's not because EMG is giving you an idea of just how many fibers are activated in that particular contraction. And you can't create a stimulus fiber to be in a fiber unless it's activated. Are these, you know, kind of, that's how I think things work. So ultimately EMG is telling you again more about your kind of long term kind of capacity for what your ceiling is going to be. Because if you can't I activate fiber in a particular exercise, it's never going to grow, no matter what you do. But you could get this, like with a pepper fat, you could get high kind of mechanical tension stimulus on single fibers. Okay, fine, yeah, they're going to grow faster, but again, you're not going to grow any other fibers. So you're going to see that kind of trade off between what's the diminished fiber and fiber and fibers have got max kind of limit on them in terms of how much they'll grow according to the size pins that it's tried to muscle. So you're better off trying to hit more fibers and grow more, each fiber more slowly than you are trying to hit, you know, single fibers harder and then hit a ceiling and not get anywhere. And I would actually say that one of the biggest kind of complaints, if you like, of the community of people who are lifting is that they get stuck. Yeah, I can't grow. Why is that? Why am I plateauing? And I'm like, well, I can think of 17 different things that you could be doing. We're doing two full modules in that, aren't we, in the webinar series? Well, exactly. And this is the single thing that people complain about, they're called some hard gainers or they just say they're hit a plateau or they're really struggling to make progress. And I'm like, well, I'm pretty confident that you're probably making a mistake around your exercise selection, not being broad enough. So you're not covering enough fibers or you're doing too much for digging stuff and you're ending up either within session, like two short rest periods or post session, you know, kind of damaged and must have damaged when you arrive at the next worker. You're doing something wrong, most likely with the way that you're programming and it's causing you to end up not being able to push into your kind of last chunk of moat units. And it's very, very obviously obvious how the physiology works here. And it is, as I say, the biggest complaint people have, but they all want to push back and they all want to go, no, no, no, no, no, I just want to do, you know, a bunch of sets for one exercise a couple of times a week and like, well, okay, problem then. You know, you call that they to plan or whatever it's called, you know, you lower frequency, both of those errors you are making, which have absolutely no physiological justification behind them as we just explained today. There is no scenario in which doing one exercise for multiple sets, you know, kind of, and then changing your exercises across the weekends that are within the session. There's no scenario in which those things are going to work well for you as a long term strategy from not so great. And there's no physiological way to argue that they're better either. People are arguing against them, just kind of, you know, pick a couple of outcome studies and then use rhetoric. There's no analysis of how the physiology is happening. So this entire conversation, if we're talking about upper lower compared to full body twice a week or, you know, what you've just talked about there, I think really there's, if we look at lifto in their lifting journey, some of these issues are going to become more significant as they get more advanced in the lifting journey. And I think there's going to be trade-offs to both. Like if we're talking about, and obviously this podcast has been about two times a week frequency, but if we include three times a week frequency in there as well, and we're talking about, you know, high variety of exercises and multi sets versus single sets, if you're an advanced lifter, the things that are going to stop you or hinder you continue to progress are not going to be the things that are impacting the speed or the rate of progress. The things that are going to stop you. And the feeling of problem is the ceiling exactly and that's important because it means that you've got a shift to focus as you become more advanced lifto. You've got to stop thinking about chasing quick fixes and trying to grow things quickly. And you've got to stop thinking, what's my capacity limitation here? What? What libraries am I not training? And, you know, how am I allowing fatigue to interfere with my motina at a crew? And that was everything. Everything as an advanced lifter is going to come down to how can I increase recruitment levels? I'm just a number of fibers that I'm training. And that's why for my advanced lifters, I'm now saying we're just not going to do consecutive days. We're going to have this day. Totally. And again, this is a problem that I don't think is as big or as important for a beginning lifter or even an intermediate lifter. Sure. Doing up or lower the consecutive days or doing your consolidated plan with multi sets for a single exercise. So I think one needs to, and that doesn't mean that those other options are better for an inexperienced lifter, right? But I do think one needs to be honest about where are they at in their lifting journey? And can you get away with this? Yeah. And if you enjoy it and you can get away with it, go for gold. Yeah. And I think people can be knocking down. So I'm just going to be able to do that. You had a fundamental shift your mindset from how can I grow as fast as I can to how can I actually find a way to expand the number of fibers that are growing and expand, you know, the level of recruitment that I can reach on any given effort that I put in. And that means avoiding back to back sessions. It means, you know, kind of avoiding all the other kind of stupid, fatiguing stuff that people do like, you know, drop sets and high reps and short rest period and things like that. But, you know, fundamentally means also a better exercise selection. Things that actually fit together and doing those exercises multiple times per week. Just doing more exercise selection and saying, I'm going to do, oh, this exercise on Monday and another exercise on Wednesday. And that's my two, my two times a week. And I'm trying not to knock it. You can't, you can't make these kind of mistakes at this point. You cannot make those mistakes when you're at the point when you're trying to push through plateau as you've got to have. You know, your exercise selection is going to be dialed in the frequency of the exercise selection is going to be dialed in and avoiding fatigue has got to be dialed in. And then you've got to nail those things down. And then, you know, if you're still not making progress at that point, then, you know, there's potentially a consultancy worth having. But, yeah, ultimately you can't be making these mistakes at this point. Well, what I think is so interesting about this part of this conversation is that not just you shifting your focus, but you're actually probably going to sacrifice great of progress. And that's a really significant shift to make. And that's like, this is the first time I'm actually verbalizing this shift that I've made because I used to always try to be like, OK, how much volume can I do? How often can I be in the gym? I do as much volume as often as possible in the gym. And I want to go to failure. I do remember. Yes. And so I've sort of subconsciously come to this realization that actually, no, I'm doing things that I know me, there could be some atrophy occurring. You know, if I'm doing up a day off, lower day off, upper day off, I know that there's going to be some atrophy occurring between those workers. I know that it's not best for speed or progress. But in the long run, I think I'm at a point where I need to do that. And so I think that conversation is really interesting to realize, hey, there's a sacrifice here. And there doesn't need to be right. Someone could do full body Emmy on the day. You can still make this work. But depending on what your context is, they're building. They would probably, because they've gone from doing three sets of bench to doing bench, you know, kind of maybe something in the client and something else. You know, they're starting to, that was a bad example. A better example would be kind of, you know, maybe going from seated leg coat to doing seated leg coat plus line leg coat plus, you know, for the back extension. You're from seated leg coat, which is kind of my, the staple hamstring exercise for anybody who's not an advanced lift. Then basically you're going from that three sets three times a week or whatever. Now you're going to do that one set, one time or three times a week. And you're going to do a line leg coat one set, two times a week, and a four to five to the back extension one set, three times a week. So yeah, you can find that whatever five is you were specifically targeting with your seat to let go. And now going to gross more slowly, and they were previous because you're doing a lot less point. But you're now expanding the number of five is your training with that hamstrings part of your workout. You are going to hit a higher plateau limit than you would have done in terms of muscle mass. And you would have done just it in the same exercise. And then you might get to a point where actually doing all that in a single workout is causing too much within session fatigue. And so now maybe you go to an A B full body where maybe you do a line leg girl one day and you do a seated and you do the back extension. And so again, you are sacrificing rate of growth in those times. But you needed to do that because your recruitment levels were starting to drop because of the within session fatigue, the experiencing. Yeah, this is going to be the natural progression that you end up having to take is that your rate of progress is going to slow as you sacrifice volume per session. And potentially even a little bit of frequency if you have to. So yeah, you can end up much more slowly, progressing much more slowly, but your ultimate ceiling is going to be high. And that's the mindset. And I think that's why I think physiology matters in this context because you have to understand that the nature of the quest is changing as you hit those by toes more and more frequently. Because literally you can look at those two plans and someone could be like which one which one will I grow fast on and you'd be like, not that one. This advanced pain I've just written for you is not the one someone's going to grow quick is on. But it's going to be best at this point in time. So yeah, and unless you know why unless you know the physiological principles as to why that's the case, which planning I go with you're going to go to plan that's going to yield the quickest results. Yeah, yeah, which is obviously why people promote them. You know, that's just kind of they know that. We'll get a fast kind of rate to progress initially. I mean, then they don't have to make up a piece and they're planning them and then they're going to come over to a plan like mine and two years later. Exactly. I think we've gone down all kinds of adjacent paths with this episode, but is there anything else to conclude with when it comes to comparing up or lower twice a week with full body twice a week? No, I'm good with that. I think, yeah, as I say, just repeating what I said earlier, if the exercises in both workouts or both lower body workouts, in the case of the uppelose, but if they're the same, then both programs will probably work reasonably well for most people almost at the time. So as long as you're not doing separate exercises on different upper body sessions or different lower body sessions or different four body sessions, then both options are for lower and full body twice a week. They're both going to work well. And we had an example in the one that you presented us with some truck types. And I actually quite like it. They're just not ideal. You're going to get better results long term if you can train four body three times a week, especially if you get to the advanced level where you're going to do four body ABA, BAB, because then you load more kind of exercise variety. You really can't be able to push kind of all of your exercises really well in every single workout, because you're not trying to cram a million things into a single session. But fundamentally, they are going to work. So when people say to me, you said upper lower kind of four times a week doesn't work. No, I didn't say that. It does work. It's just not as good as doing something like, four body three times a week or even as you say, with more advanced people four weeks, three times a week ABA, BAB. So is that important thing? I really want to kind of say at the end is that there is a difference. What we've got to do is understand there's a range of options and some are better than others. It's not that there are two categories. And one is the category of things that don't work. And the other is the category of things that do work. Everything really with a few exceptions like body parts splits with low muscle training volumes and frequencies per week. That doesn't work, but pretty much everything else will work. But certain things will stop working out of the other. Yeah. And we didn't touch on it, but even in the case of someone who's an enhanced lifter, because you ran through those different variables before. Okay, maybe the after-feet might be lower in some of these and who's enhanced. But they're still going to have the issue of the diminishing returns of volume. They're still going to be the same. Even if the magnitude is lower, they're still going to be a benefit to this high frequency, more exercise variety. Like all these things are the same. Everything we've talked about, it's simply maybe the magnitude to be slightly less in that case. So regardless if you're enhanced, you're natural. All these variables still apply. Yeah, I mean, I keep going back to that. Animal model study that you actually were the first to identify, which had an animal, I think it was a rabbit. They were in rabbits with exogenous testosterone. And they immobilized one of the limbs of the rabbit. And basically they then tested immobilized and non-immobilized limbs in terms of muscle size. Obviously, well not obviously maybe two, some people, but the exogenous testosterone actually caused both limbs to grow. So this is in the mobilized limb where you expect massive atrophy to be happening. And I actually called both limbs to grow both female blood done the non-immobilized. But the non-immobilized limb actually grew more than the immobilized limb. What that shows you is that the exercise stimulus, the unbolic stimulus, are actually separate fundamentally. You're adding them together in the case of the non-immobilized limb. And the immobilized limb, you're basically one is negating the other ones. You still end up net positive because the unobotic. So I think really that's kind of then, it means that we're in a slightly confusing situation with users because what it means is that they're always going to be growing. It's just that their muscle fibers that they're training at a grow faster. That's all. Yeah. So the variables we talked about still matter. The variables are still evolving. Yeah, still applies. There will be a point arguably when exercises aren't really doing anything. I mean, depending on my point of maximum, the exercise is usually an additional stimulus, yeah, totally. Probably getting to a point where you look at some of the highest level kind of professional bodybuilders. It's quite likely that exercises aren't actually doing anything. Well, but it's still necessary to maintain one exercise. You've got to know first agreed, agreed, agreed. Absolutely. It's just the any changes of probably an additional growth. He's not going to be able to do that. I'm just kind of trying to figure out my own had really. This is kind of part of my journey to understand a little bit more about the unobolished side. I don't really have a reliable model at the moment. And that's not entirely my fault. It's just the like, you're really, but there we go. So yeah, this is a topic we get a lot of questions on as well. And we've actually talked about getting some guests on the podcast to talk more about. Yeah, we should do that. It should do that. It's just as I say, you know, at the end of the day, my skill set is parsing the literature and to the extent that the literature doesn't exist, I can't parse it. Okay, I think that's it for today. Thank you guys for joining us. Don't forget to jump on and submit your email to our pre-launch offer link. And we'll be back next week with and your topic and your episode.