048 How to do more exercises in a workout without fatigue holding you back

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of HyperdVPass and present. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you to everyone who's going to be joining us later this week in our first webinar for our Transcend Coaching Certification. Now before we jump in to the podcast episode, we have, or I have an announcement I'm going to make. And in all the years I've done podcasts and content and all this kind of stuff, this is the first time that I've got to do a competition announcement, winner announcement. So this is a first for me, this is kind of exciting, but we have our winner for our Transcend Coaching Certification scholarship to announce. So this was basically everyone who shared the image we were circulating around the certification and they had to talk about or mention what their reason was for wanting to do the certification. And everyone submitted that and tagged us and today I'm announcing who the winner is, who wins the 12 month scholarship for the certification and it is, I just want to pull up, Philip Nova. So F, so this is Instagram handle. So F, I, L, I, P, N, O, V, A, I will also be tagging you on Instagram. So you'll be joining us for the next 12 months alongside a whole bunch of other coaches and other athletes as we dive into 12 exciting different topics on how to program advanced programming for what we're calling the modern clients or people who are dealing with all kinds of, you know, life events, stresses, dieting injuries, gut health issues and you know whether they're athletes, whether they're powerlifters, whether they're hypertrophy, focus clients, all kinds of things that people are going to be dealing with today. So we're super pumped to be starting with you guys in just a few days time. Chris, is anything you want to say today before I jump into a plan? No, I'm, I think yeah, I'm just excited to get started. I mean, been working towards making the material as accessible, usable and practical as possible. We've been sending a few slides back, we're in forwards to capture these ideas. First session is going to be very exciting, very, very fast. Actually, we're going to be working through a huge amount of material together, everybody up to speed. So those of you, obviously, have been following my work for the last kind of a couple of years, will be getting a very, very good refresher and hopefully a good system. I mean, ultimately, what we're going to be focusing on in this course is giving people practical tools to use all the information that we've been sharing over the years. So yeah, that first session is going to be very exciting for everybody, not just for people who have been following, but also people who may be catching up a little bit. They'll have that opportunity to get up to speed in that first session. So very, very exciting first kind of module, if you like, in the course. And then building on that going forward is obviously going to be pretty cool as well. And if you haven't signed up to join us, you can still sign up to join us for the year. So we're still running a discounted certification until we start our first webinar. So that'll be on Thursday. So I think that's the 23rd. Yes. 23rd. When's it? When's it 23rd? I think 23rd. So you've got a couple more days or a few more days. If you haven't signed up, you can jump on, sign up and saw a secure discounted rate. Okay. That's all the housekeeping admin stuff for today. Let's jump into a kind of silver era plan. This is a 1960s plan. So in case you forgot, that means that antibiotics were kind of being used. They've been introduced into bodybuilding, but only just. So what we have here is a plan from someone named Joe Abender. Now I suspect most of you listening probably don't know who Joe Abender was. He was not, he's not one of the most well-known silver era lifters. He's again, very tailed and silver era, start of golden era. But I would sort of put him in the silver era category. He didn't win any big competitions, so he sort of didn't get, hasn't been remembered as well as some of the other lifters we've talked about so far. But he does have an amazing physique. He's certainly a bodybuilder worth looking into what he did and learning from his training methods. Now what we've got today is a training program that he wrote for beginner lifters. So this was not his own plan. This was a plan that he suggested people start on. And I think it's a very interesting, well put together plan, not just for beginners, but for honestly most people. And last week obviously we talked about different types of programs, different goals one might have, maximalist, minimalist and just kind of training for general health purposes. And we talked, we gave some examples of what some of these well-rounded plans might look like. And I think this plan actually fits some of those categories. Like it's a very well thought out plan. So we'll cover that in more detail. But let me tell you what it is. So it was, it consisted of single sets. Okay, remembering that obviously single sets were kind of the more dominant system up until late 50s or early 60s. And he started with a leg raise. So obviously this is a bit more of a rack famed style exercise, but he did it as a warm upset. So he didn't take this set to failure. One set, 15 to 20 repetitions, leg raise. And then he went into his squat. Now this was done for a set of 15 to 20 repetitions. And then he did his straight arm pullover. So again, very silver ear up, hearing this squat with the pullover. And that was a set of 15 as well. And then he does a calf raise. So what he calls a toe raise here, but it's a standing calf raise. And it was done at uni, literally. So one leg at a time. And this is the only exercise he actually did two sets. He did two sets of 20 repetitions in each leg. And then went into a overhead press. I believe he did this with a barbell, suggested doing this with a barbell, a single set of 10 to 15 repetitions into a bench press. And this was done actually like a sort of closer grip, a shoulder width. So it wasn't very wide like people like Reg Park were doing at the time. And he did this for a set of 10 to 15. And then I bent over row. And this was more transverse plane, a set of 10 to 15. Now we don't have any plops, but Chris, you will be happy. We do a stiff leg daily. So we do some hamstring work and we did a set of 10 to 15 here. And then a barbell curl, a set of 10 to 15. And then what do you call the line triceps curl, which I guess is more like a skull crusher, a set of 10 to 15. And they can include with some abs, we did sit ups, one set of 15 to 20 repetitions. So we've got, what have you got? Two, four, six, eight, ten, eleven, eleven exercises I believe. And one thing that sticks out to me here, which is fairly common for the silver areas, having this larger repetition range. So most of these exercises were 15 to 20. Obviously now and age we see a lot of eight to 10, a 10 to 12. And a lot of these guys, Steve Reeves did this as well, having these larger ranges where it might be eight to 12 or 10 to 15. I think it was just an accessibility thing. If equipment is limited, load is limited. It allows one a much easier opportunity to progressively overload over time with repetitions or with load. So as an overall plan, what do you think of this? So I guess they're doing this three times a week, like most other programs. Cool. So yeah, I mean, it's got some interesting, I mean, obviously it's very clearly a silver era style program. Yeah. Full body three times a week, same workout three times a week. So full body A repeated. And the exercise selection, I mean, it looks like a barbell program, doesn't it? I mean, it looks like a program. Yeah, essentially. You would literally have a barbell and that would be it and you could do this program. So, but equally like you pointed out, why were there are signs of silver era exercise selection select with the pullover pair with the squat. You do also see signs of kind of more golden era type exercise as well. So obviously the deadlift, a stitlaid deadlift in there is kind of the obvious kind of example. It kind of feels like it's yeah, very late silver era in that respect. Yeah. In terms of what it does, I think it's very, very good except for lats. I mean, I don't see any lat work in there at all, which is mad. So the pullover is not a lat exercise. It's a lower chest exercise with triceps long head. The transverse plane bent over row is most definitely not either. So it's really lacking kind of that work. I mean, if you literally just had a frontal plane pull down or pull up in there, it would be a lot better. But fundamentally there's nothing wrong with the pro. It does everything very well that it does. It just misses that work. I think that's the plane that I would have. But that's the complain I always have with silver era programs. It is. And I just don't understand why they didn't use a pullup arm often. Yeah, it's very strange. It's very, very strange because they're not fundamentally that difficult to kind of, you know, set up. So that's where we are. I mean, that's just kind of what happened really. I look at planes like this and I wonder is there anything like the fact that they all are prioritising all the most prioritising and bent over row. Is there anything to that? Am I missing something in that exercise? Is there something this is doing? I think it's literally because they're trying to create an exercise program that can done only with a barbell. I think that was the thing that sort of, if you like, shifted the exercise selection, it's like, can I do the exercises that I want to with a barbell? Okay, then the exercises I'm gonna do. And everything else just falls away. And this is a program that really screams that, I think, is like, you can literally do everything on this list with a barbell. Yeah, you don't even need dumbbells. Yeah, that's the issue. And I think to be honest, is either a cultural thing or it's a marketing thing or it's just a fundamental equipment availability thing? But that's the vibe I'm getting from this program. It's like, if you can't do it with a barbell, it's not getting in. And that's why I think you end up with a substandard exercises like bent over rows, which is just horrible. Really. Which to be fair is really the only exercise here. I mean, obviously the polo that we can argue about what that's doing. But be aware of that. If it's context to this program, because the bench press variation is very narrow grip, then it should. Well, it makes sense because he's basically just splitting chest workout to exercises. If you've done a wide grip bench, then I'd be like, just take the polo over out, it's pointless. Yeah. Yeah, unless perhaps, you know, if you were doing a wide grip bench and you had someone who was naturally more tricist dominant any way, then arguably you might be getting something more out of that polo over, potentially. But this is definitely the best way to pair that. It is interesting when you see people modify it. And I think we've told about this in an episode in the past, where you can modify the multi-joint like the pressing exercise and you can push it really far down one way or the other to then pair that with an exercise, which is achieving the opposite. So this is a good example of that. Were you doing the closest grip bench, perfect pairing with the polo over? I like looking at this. And obviously, like you've mentioned, he's done this probably because it's a barbell focused plan. But these are really bang for back exercises. And especially, I guess, for beginners or someone who, you know, doesn't want to be doing 400 different exercises. And 11 exercises, a lot of people today would say, "Oh, that's too many." But, you know, he's got an overhead press in there. Obviously, getting middle delts, getting front delts. He's got the bench press in there. You know, these are very bang for back. You know, get some triceps, get some chairs, get some delts. And you look at this and there's so many, so many ideologies today that this would challenge. You know, the idea that, you know, you're doing more than 10 different exercises. Already people are going to say, "You can't do that." You know, the idea that he's doing an overhead press with a bench press. You know, there's going to be people saying, "You can't do that." And it's like, "Well, actually, this is a really efficient plan, especially for someone who's only got access to a barbell." You know, I would look at plan like this and think, "Well, if I had someone who, you know, they didn't want to get on stage, they just wanted to build kind of as much mass as they can with his little work as possible, bar the lat exercise. This is pretty much it. Yeah, I mean, and, you know, you can make use of modern equipment and you can be in them now and of the gym even more quickly. I mean, you replace your squats with, I mean, you replace your squats with a leg press or a machine act squat or, you know, pendant a squat or whatever. And you're loading time and your warm up time is going to decrease massively. Massively. Do the same thing with your bench press and your overhead press and your machines. Take out the pullover and the bent over row and place them with lap pull down and narrow up machine row. And you're going to be out of the gym in 45 minutes. Yes. I mean, it's not going to take you forever to do that and you're going to cover, you know, as you said, somebody who's not going to get on stage is going to cover all their bases and have a very, very usable routine. I think this is what we just keep saying that these silver era programs are the template, which if you just add a little bit of modern technology, such as technology, a little bit of modern engineering. And suddenly, you've got an amazing program that's best to the 99.9% of anything you're going to find online. Yeah. It's really, really kind of a very, very good template with, as I say, the only reason why I think it lacks is because it was being forced to fit with a while back then. That's my view when I look at that. That's what that tells me. Yeah. Yeah. And I've almost objected this being called a beginner plan because it's like it's not necessarily great. Yeah. And like I said a moment ago, it's a plan for anyone basically who doesn't want to get on stage. You know, that you don't need to progress off this. This could well and truly achieve the goal that many people would have and you could stay on this plan. You know, it doesn't, this is not a plan you can only do for six months or for one year or whatever. This is a perfectly adequate plan to do a long time. And just stop for a moment. I'm thinking about what you just said and compare it with what we get bombarded with on social media. And with ideas that we need to be doing like drop sets and other advanced techniques and pre-exhautions and this, that and the next and everyone's wanting to do something super complicated. They're wanting to like pair exercises up and oh, and now I need to do a priming exercise and I need to do and like all of that is rubbish. You know, when they're not doing something fundamentally correct like this type of program where they're doing a solid training frequency with some really good exercise selection that covers all their bases. And ultimately is going to allow them to make progress for a very long period of time and build on a solid foundation and just keep going. And yet we're being told that oh yeah, you know, you need to do sort of these complicated things that are like physiologically nonsensical. But that's where the industry's gone. It's absolutely mad. When you compare this simplistic routine, which is going to get a lot of people, as you say, pretty much all the way to their to their goals as long as they're not being ambitious enough to get on stage, they're going to get very long way with this. And yet it's very, very startly contrasting with what we see on social media all the time. I think it's very, very important to create sort of make people aware of that juxtaposition. It's very, very start contrast. Yeah, it's it's not at all like a plan you would see today. You know, anyone who's writing a plan like this is writing it because I mean, they want those to be to us or yeah, or you know, they've seen sort of how silver area people have listed and they've been inspired by that. Yeah. You know, like I, I, I, I, I, I, I figured out the anabolic so completely. Yes. You know, kind of skewed everybody's perception of how strength training actually works. And maybe they figured that out themselves just by observation. But they've extracted themselves from the group thing of well, you need 52 sets, you know, per muscle per week, whatever to be able to write a plan like this. Yeah. So where are we going with this episode? Where are we going to talk about next? It's a little bit relevant to what we've just said there. Yeah. So what I'd like to talk about today is something that I've mentioned a number of times before. And ultimately it comes back to a misunderstanding of how fatigue actually works. Now obviously I've talked through the various mechanisms of fatigue. I've talked through the definitions of fatigue. And a lot of this flies over people's heads, I think, a lot of time. So very, very kind of briefly, let me just encapsulate what I'm talking about when I say fatigue. Fatigue is an actual outcome that we can measure. It's an observable reduction in exercise performance. So you can have a scenario where you do a strength training set and maybe because of the way that you do it or the rest period that you take afterwards when you actually then test to see if you are fatigued, you don't actually notice any changes in performance. So for example, a very, very simple example might be I do sort of five reps of a chest press. Maybe I leave a rep and reserve. And then I rest for a couple of minutes and then I test my strength again. And maybe I get the exact same number of reps out again with the same number of reps in reserve. And so technically at that point I am not fatigued. Now you could say to me, oh yeah, but do you feel fatigued? Do you feel tired? Yeah, I can feel the fact that I exercise, but it's not fatigued because I am displaying the exact same exercise performance as I did a couple of minutes ago. Now you can get the same thing with short to rest periods. You get the same thing. It doesn't really matter. The point is that if I don't objectively measure a change in performance, then exercise definition of fatigue tells me the time not fatigued. So however I feel whatever mechanisms are happening under the surface. So that's an important observation. I could have fatigued mechanisms present, but I could also have differentiation mechanisms present. I could equal those out. And technically on paper, I am not fatigued because fatigue requires me to display an objective reduction exercise performance. So that's really, really the important starting point. That's an important point. Let's just say that once we're in case someone missed it. So you're saying they can actually be fatigued mechanisms that have taken place. And so in the absence of anything else, you would be fatigued. But because there's also a potentiation effect, which could be taken place, it's basically a performance boosting effect. It's balanced itself out. And so now your performance hasn't gone down. And so technically speaking, you're not fatigued because fatigue in this sense is based on performance going down. Correct. So we've always got to be aware that these two totally separate, but obviously interacting concepts. There is the fatigue objective external measurement, which is how my performance changed. And then under the surface there's an fatigue mechanisms. So just coming a little bit more detail on these. If I have a potentiation effect, then almost all potentiation effects are located inside muscle fibers. You can have potential. Potentiation mechanisms that exist in the central nervous system, but they're relatively minimal in most kind of situations that we find ourselves in. So most of the time, if you're doing a gym, sort of, strength training set, and you experience a potentiation mechanism, it's going to be peripheral. It's not going to be central. So we can talk about this. We can talk about this. The definition of fatigue is a temporary and reversible reduction in exercise performance as a result of a previous bout of exercise. So that's the full definition. Now, a lot of the time you see truncated versions of this definition. So people forget it's sort of change excise points to be strength. Now, most of the time those truncations or changes aren't fundamentally problematic, but if you really want to get to the absolute depth of what we mean by fatigue, you have to have the full definition. Now, when you flip that over and say, "potentiation is literally just the opposite of fatigue," and you have a temporary and reversible increase in exercise performance as a result of a previous bout of exercise. Now, you can see that if I'm motivated by somebody shouting encouraging words at me, that isn't a potentiating effect because it wasn't caused by previous bout of exercise. So this is why definitions are important. We actually have to know exactly what it is that we mean when we're saying these different things. So potentiation actually excludes the possibility of a motivation or so any other psychological impact. So if I'm using a focus of attention or somebody motivates me or if there's music playing in the background and I get excited, whatever, it doesn't apply as a potentiation mechanism. It will change whether or not I can record a definition of fatigue present or not because, like, if I do my chest press bout of sort of five repetitions or whatever, and then I come back a couple of minutes later and I do it again. But this time I've got somebody standing next to me being encouraging and I get my repetitions I got previously, but in the presence of motivation, then yeah, again, I'm not fatigued, but it's because I've had a small amount of fatigue mechanism present, but combined with the motivating effect, I've then brought myself back up to zero. And so I've ended up in a zero fatigue situation. The issue is that if I went above that and despite an improvement performance, I couldn't call that potentiation in this particular instance because I've inserted the motivational technique, which is created the positive effect without actually using a potentiation effect. The potentiation effect has to come exclusively from an exercise bow in order to be defined as potentiation. So again, you've got these different things moving in different directions, but if I insert a genuinely new non-excited intervention, then I can't call that potentiation. I'm obviously going to see a like improvement in performance, but then in that situation, it's not actually potentiation. In the same way, much less commonly, you could have somebody demotivate you. So you could see your reduction in performance and you would look at that and go technically, am I fatigued or have I just been demotivated? Now, again, in the research, you will see confusion over this and some people will not notice that that is actually not a fatigue instance, even though I've reduced exercise performance. Technically, I'm not doing it because of fatiguing, therefore it's not actually technically fatigued. But we generally do include that fatigue. So, for example, trying to think of a suitable kind of incidence where this would happen. But yeah, I mean, if you are a good one, if you remove somebody's autonomy, so if you have a situation where somebody's doing a strength training workout and they, and they, their autonomy is taken away from them. So instead of there, then being able to do the way that the work out of the way that they want to do it or in the order or the time that they want to do it in, you take away autonomy, you will see a demotivating fact. So a very usable experimental design for this. So I get lots of requests incidentally. I get a lot of requests regarding people wanted to do like set up their master's thesis and they asking me for study designs. Or even sometimes the A's D thesis, they'll say to me, how can I construct a PhD thesis around the ideas that you're talking about. Well, here's a really interesting one. You could do an standard autonomy removal design that now in motor learning, they do this all the time. So you can just look at the motor learning study design. If you want a better version than one I'm giving you now. But basically with autonomy removal on the one hand, you have one group of people who are basically told to go in the gym and follow its specific workout plan. Now it could be the workout plan that you just talk through. It could be something as simple as that or it could be use more use more user friendly. You would have a machine based program where you can do like, you know, simple warm upsets and then do the main set without any difficulty. You would have one group group A, which is the control group and they would be told to go in the gym and do the exercise with the warm upsets. They would be told to do say to warm upsets follow both your answers followed by their works and they would know what those weights were before they went in. Everybody would know what their actual work weight was before they went into the worker. So they'd be told pick whatever warm upsets you want and then do your your work set, which is the number of the weight you've been told to failure. And we will basically record the number of reps to failure that you get and you know, you could tell them to take three minutes, respire or whatever or you could let them rest as long as they want it doesn't really matter. Group B would basically be what we call tied to a number of group A. So essentially every group A member would have a group B member and they would follow them around and group B would literally do whatever group A did except when they got to work set they would have to train to failure. So that whenever group A member did their warm upsets and they did say three reps with whatever group B would literally have to just mimic whatever they did. And what you find is that group B would display a reduction in exercise performance in terms of the number of reps to failure that they were getting because of the removal of that autonomy that they were experiencing in the context of that worker. And technically you could say that that was fatigue and it's not actually true because it's not a reduction in exercise performance created by previous bout of exercise is created by demotivation effect from amoeu or tonnami. So this is getting really, really deep into the definitions of what we're actually working with concepts behind what we're talking about because really what we're trying to get at when we say unlike experiencing fatigue is have I experienced a reduction exercise points because of an exercise phenomenon is presented. If I experienced an exercise if I experienced a reduction in performance because I'm stressed unhappy demotivated cognitively kind of sort of focused on something different like when we get people a stupe test and then ask them to do a strength training set they generally experience reduction in performance we call that a kind of mental fatigue because we're trying to get it the exercise performance reduction that's been created by something that's not actually exercise we shouldn't really call it fatigue. I mean it is functioning as a super spinal CNS fatigue mechanism but the actual output isn't technically fatigue it's relaxed next to which is looks like fatigue but it's not actually technically fatigue but we tend to wrap it up as fatigue because we just kind of you know want to you know incorporate this additional CNS T mechanism into that kind of scenario and the terminology isn't perfect but ultimately what we're dealing with here is fatigue and potential which are excise induced and then other stuff around. The edges which can create fatigue mechanisms which technically isn't really a fatigue or a potential. In fact we tend to often describe them as such so these are all kind of kind of related concepts but problems in in in terms of the terminology simply because of the way that the field has developed time and we tried to tie up definitions but by doing so we've excluded certain physiological concepts which are related to those phenomena does that will make sense it does only I I had a feeling. I'm just feeling anticipating where this conversation is going to go I think that that distinction you've drawn there over motivation and fatigue is going to be really important and just hearing you talk about that has made me come to the realization that I actually think majority of the time online when people are talking about fatigue at least in the context of within a single session fatigue I actually think majority of the time not all but but probably 50% or a bit more. They're referring to motivation I don't think the referent of fatigue and they don't know it. Yes but there is that connection because like we talked about in the past a lot of the time motivation reduces when people stop looking at the stop focusing their attention on a goal that they're trying to achieve and stop focusing their attention on the fact that they feel uncomfortable and that as a result because those uncomfortable sensations are coming from exercise. themselves that technically does to all into the supospinal CNS T category as an exercise related to the mechanism so if I if I create discomforting sensations as a result of several bouts of intense exercise that switches my focus away from thinking I'm in the gym trying to achieve my body composition goal or my strength or whatever and I start thinking about the fact that I be much more comfortable sat on the sofa with a cup of tea. So if you had two people I know we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves here but let's see a two people in that situation online there where they both experience the same discomforting sensations in that workout. And one of them is thinking to themselves, basically, I hate this sort of, this workout, hate this long workout, I hate doing this many exercises. - Exactly, exactly, exactly. - Exactly, exactly. - For the other person's not. The other person's thinking, okay, I'm feeling this discomfort, that's fine, but I know how valuable what I'm doing here is and then not letting that demotivate them. - Exactly. - That first person is out for tea or not? - Well, what you're describing is, what you're describing is a set of thought processors, which is either amplifying or minimally, the negative effect that those fatigue-induced sensations can have or exiles and do sensations. So the exercise creates those sensations and then the brain interprets that and decides, I mean, ultimately what you're describing here is the psychology of a leap performance because it all comes down to attentional switching. Am I focusing all the time on what I'm trying to do or am I allowing my attention to get pulled away towards being more comfortable? Ultimately, a lot of life is literally about deciding whether to be focused on what you wanna do and being uncomfortable in doing that or allowing yourself to get distracted and saying, well, actually, I'd be more comfortable if I just had a couple of things to do. I mean, a lot of life comes right to that. But especially in excise situations, because the excise itself is creating those uncomfortable sensations. If they weren't there, then you wouldn't have the task which switching or the focus switching problem. So all the brain is doing is either amplifying or minimizing the impact those sensations have. So yeah, I mean, you are introducing an extra element but it's part of the way your body is processing that information. So, the information is still coming from the excise itself. So I was still arguing that still is a fatigue related phenomenon, but you're absolutely right. The motivational kind of processing or the circuits related to motivation, or the way to it. - Oh, absolutely. - It's made me more less fatiguing. - I've been making more less fatiguing, totally. 100%. - I mean, if someone's listening to this and they're like, oh, you know, I don't know if I sort of believe that around, like, you know, the motivation side of things. I mean, I can certainly say that I know first have for me personally, where I've seen the biggest reductions in my performance in the gym have not been for me doing like higher volumes in a session. You know, maybe doing a few extra sets or whatever. It's been for me getting a message on my phone about some, you know, work related issue I need to go deal with. Or, you know, some, you know, interpersonal issue I've had with a friend or whatever. You know, they're the times where my session has become a bad session, and suddenly I'm hitting, I'm weak on it. Every single one of my lifts, I'm hitting ways that I would, you know, always easily be able to hear now to max effort. It's not because I'm done an extra set. - And that's because that's why we've got really nice data showing that as soon as you let people use their smartphones in the context of experimental workout, you just ask people, one group of people to leave their smartphones, you know, outside in the locker and the other group people take them with them and scroll. And immediately you see the difference. People are scrolling, getting way worse, kind of excited point says, it's because your brain is processing information and not devoting that processing power to the actual exercise that you're doing. So you're withdrawing resources that you can use in the context of producing motino equipment. And as a result, you just, you experience that reduction in performance. So what I'm not saying is that the definitions of fatigue and potentiation and the rest of it are perfect. They're not. There's definitely little array areas here and there where you kind of have to say, you know, is this genuinely coming from exercise or is this me processing the information and the way that I'm processing it? Or is it actually information coming from elsewhere, like with smartphone? And is that really fatigue? I mean, yeah, it worked more effectively through the super spinal-sciente mechanism because I'm literally just reducing either my motivation directly and that reduces my maximum tolerable possession of it. Or I'm chewing up resources and therefore creating discomfort that is contributing to my effort perception and therefore bringing me closer to my maximum tolerable perception of it. So you can do it in two ways. And it works perfectly through the super spinal-sciente mechanism that we already know about. But technically, it's not coming from a source that is exercise related in active instance. So I guess what I'm saying is you have to be a little bit tolerant of the problems associated with exercise terminology, but be aware of them. So you can't know what concepts you're talking about. This goes back to what we've been saying before, which is that if you allow the definitions of words to drive your understanding of how the physiology works, you are going to get into trouble and going to end up doing what a lot of the evidence space guys do and getting lost in what words really mean and what concepts really mean. What we're trying to do from a size-based perspective is say, what is actually happening and then be aware that that may not map perfectly to the words that we're using. I mean, obviously we're trying to be precise about definitions, but being aware that sometimes there's going to be little gray areas where your definitions get like messed around with a bit. But where I want to go with this today is to talk about what we mean when we talk about fatigue during a workout, what we mean when we talk about fatigue after a workout, and what that actually means in terms of practicalities for programming strength training workouts, specifically in the context of doing larger numbers of exercises per workout. So that's where I want to go. So all of that preamble was me just kind of hopefully not confusing people too much, but just making them aware of the fact that we do have a relatively good terminology I would say, but there are weaknesses in terms of being very precise about the specifics of interactions between things like mental kind of concentration, tasks switching or focus switching, and the results of that in terms of measuring fatigue or potential in context of a strength training workout. So if we kind of take a single strength training workout, it's okay, we're going to do a number of exercises in that workout. Then as you pointed out, as soon as we start listing large numbers of exercises, like more than say 12, 13, 14, 15 exercises, a lot of people immediately have two objections. And this is where I want to kind of focus the rest of today's conversation. Firstly, one group of people will say, oh, well, you can't do that number of exercises in a single workout. By the time you get to the end, the exercises doing at the end, they'll be pointless. Okay, that's one group of people. So what they're saying is that the accumulation of fatigue, as you go through the session, will create a problem for you. And by the time you get to the end, you'll be experiencing so much. You know, again, I'm trying to kind of capture the essence in their object without, but I don't like one of my personal kind of dislikes about where people kind of talk to each other online is that a lot of people will go straight in at the beginning and create a strong man or a pejorative version of what their opponent is saying, because they want to win the argument really quickly and move on. And I think straight away, that just completely turns the argument into an emotional one rather than a cognitive one. So I'm trying to keep this coming to. So yeah, basically, their argument is that your, whatever is happening in the earlier parts of the workout, I just create to the negative effect so that you end up with a reduced stimulus from the exercises at the end of the workout. Okay, cool. So that's one complaint that we see. Incidentally, there are actually other people who say the excited order effect doesn't exist. So it's not like I'm kind of taking an extreme position here. The other group people then will say, well, if you're doing all those exercises in a single session, then you're not going to recover in time for your next workout. And that's a separate set of complaints. So I just want to look at those two kind of complaints and just go through them. And I think some people even combine them. And those are the people I kind of lose respect for because we'll get into it. The mechanisms are different. But fundamentally, we've got these two sets of complaints. We're going to talk about, you know, doing a lot of exercises. How does that create a problem for intro workout fatigue? And then doing a lot of exercises. Is that going to create a problem for post workout fatigue? Is that kind of making sense? Absolutely. And, you know, we've talked about so many plans on this podcast of Silvia Elyfters before antibiotics. And they were doing 10, 12, 15, 20. We've talked about some of the going up to 30, even 40 exercises in a single session. Yeah. And you know, this week I posted on my social media about this idea that what you've just said there that you can't do more than 10 exercises in a session and like, well, really every single person before antibiotics was doing just that. And lo and behold, obviously I had people in my comments section saying either, no, no, no, you can't possibly do that because as you said there, you get to the end. You're not getting any stimulus in those last six exercises or the other one is now you're seeing S will be fried if you do that for a couple of sessions. So there's it is funny that there's these objections and people know that you can't do it, but they don't agree on why. Yeah, absolutely. And so with Jorge Jumpin, I just want to clarify that that does not mean that I'm telling people that they have to do or must do or are, you know, kind of going to be best placed doing lots of exercises in every session. I personally don't do that many exercises in every single session. If I want to include more exercises variety, I simply use a B a B before that. So I split my kind of number of exercises across two sessions and then I do a three day a week protocol. And that kind of moves me forward across multiple exercises. That's how I get my exercise variety. I'm an old man. Your mileage may vary. So that's just kind of how I go from things. I'm not suggesting that this is the only way of training. I'm just we're just just arguing about or explaining how the fatigue actually works. So when people are making statements about how they think these programming decisions are affecting and the resulting hypertrophy whatever, we're explaining why those positions are not necessarily accurate. So basically, if we're doing a full body workout and we're aiming to cover substantially different parts of the body with every single exercise. So let's start with that assumption. We're starting with the assumption we're not overlapping that much between exercises. So we're picking exercises that are perhaps slightly lower in total muscle mass in order to get a large number of exercises, say 15 without covering multiple muscles, sorry, same muscle multiple times. So similar to our maximalist plan last week, but perhaps a little bit on the lighter end of it. So maybe the one or two exercises per muscle there. Yeah, so that kind of trajectory. So basically in that scenario, you're not really going to be having overlapping peripheral fatigue mechanisms that much. You're really only going to be having overlapping central nervous system fatigue mechanisms. And it's basically going to happen because of what the cardiovascular system is doing. So ultimately, when you do a exercise, whenever you do a set of muscular contractions, you're going to have a couple of things happening. You're going to have basically a cardiovascular response. So you're going to have a sympathetic nervous system activity increase, your heart rate's going to go up, your breathing rate's going to go up. And those are going to come with discomforting sensations. And those discomforting sensations are going to contribute to an increase in your upper perception, which is going to bring you closer to the maximum tolerable perception effort. So if you do another strength training set, while those things are still in place, critical statement, then you will find that you can't do as many reps on the next exercise, even if it's a completely different muscle group. So if you literally do like an overhead press, and then immediately try and do biceps curls, you will not get your maximum number of biceps curls out if you do it too close after finishing your overhead press set. So that's literally just because of the discomforting sensations bringing you closer to the maximum tolerable perception of effort. We also have inflammation that gets produced, myocardines that get produced in the muscles, they leak into the bloodstream, every time we do muscular contractions, they leak into the bloodstream, they will uncirculate, and they will create again, fatiguing feelings in the brain, not using fatigue in a technical sense, they're just preferring to the kind of discomforting sensations, discomforting sensations in the brain, which again bring you closer to your maximum tolerable perception of effort. As we talked about earlier, you've also got this kind of motivational factor where as you go through the workout, and your brain is starting to focus more and more and more on that cup of tea that you can have on your sofa when you get back home, instead of what you're doing in the gym right there, then you can start to magnify these negative effects, push them in the direction which it takes them, and even more supospinal CNST causing effect, rather than kind of being more able to achieve high levels of centromatic amount. So all of that stuff, it really is the sort of fatigue mechanisms that are happening as we progress through the strength train workout. So is all of that making sense? Yes. Cool. So what that means then is that our exercise selection, our rest period selection, our choices around training variables like repetition range and proximity to failure, all of that is going to modify how that, those things are happening. So if, for example, I choose large muscle mass exercises straight away, I'm going to have huge dumps of lactate into my bloodstream. I'm going to have a very large cardiovascular sensation effect. I'm going to have a lot, large inflammation effect. I'm going to be experiencing a lot of negative sensations relatively quickly. And especially, now this is interesting, especially if I now pair that with more multi-joint exercises later on in the workout. If you do a couple of multi-joint exercises and then your brain can tell you, like your subconscious knows, you've got more of those coming up straight away. Now your attention focus is going to get pulled more and more more towards the sofa and the cup of tea and further and further away from the exercises that you're about to do. So it's not just about the kind of exercise that you've done. It's also about what you've got left. So this is kind of like-- or I've mentioned this before, where we've talked about-- if you normally do three sets of seated leg curls, and then I ask you to just, for one week, go in and know and do a single set, I guarantee you will absolutely beat your first set of armors with that set protocol. Because you know that you haven't got the other two to come straight after it. And the same thing is going to happen here. Your brain is going to start getting pulled away from the actual focus of what you're trying to achieve and more and more towards sitting on the sofa. And as a result, it starts to dial back the amount of effort you're prepared to tolerate in those later sets of work out. So it's more subtle than just saying, OK, I've done some-- I know I generally just describe it as like whatever you've done previously is going to affect what I've become as next. But it's more subtle than that because your brain does know what you've actually got to do as a whole session. So that entire compute is taking place in the background while you're doing any given exercise in that series. So starting point, the exercise selection. If you're doing large muscle mass exercises, we're going to experience a bigger problem because you can have more lactate in the system. If you're taking short to rest periods straight away, we're going to start accumulating a problem that's getting bigger and bigger and bigger. As you go through a workout, you're going to experience more and more accumulation of lactate in the background. And that is going to create a more and more negative effect on the later sets of the workout. Same question. The point you made there with these multiple multi-join exercises. So that's something that I think a lot about when I program. And I think that there's some really interesting ways to look at that because-- so I actually had an experiment where I went back and looked at all the silvery of plans I could find. And I tried to look at where they were programming squats. And about two stars of the time that I'm programming them in the last couple of exercises. And then sometimes they're programming them at the start. And I actually think that when it comes to programming multi-joints, if you have it either at the start, you get it out of the way. And then you go rest of the workout and you can focus. Or you have it right at the end. And you know, I do that once at a squats. And I'm out of here. I do that all the time. Exactly. I think they're the most moving places to have those exercises. Like logically important locations. Yeah. Yeah. So I think there's a lot actually to be said. And it doesn't mean one is better than the other. I personally, the way I do it, is if I'm doing squats or programming squats, that are fewer than, say, six repetitions up with the other star. Because then that cardiovascular burden is not going to subtract as much. If I'm doing more 8, 10, 12 repetitions, I'll put at the end because I'm not just concerned about that motivational piece you talked about. I'm now concerned about that cardiovascular component as well. Exactly. Yeah. And so things like proximity to failure and rep ranges are also going to play a role. So again, picking large muscle mass exercises. And we're combining that with short-risk periods and high reps and training to failure. Straight away, you are magnifying that excise order effect. In contrast, if you're sticking with slightly less muscle mass exercises, I'm even slightly I mean, just going from squat to leg presses going to make a difference. If you kind of bring the amount of muscle mass down and not, and then use slightly heavier rep range, leave a rep reserved, give a slightly longer respite. And suddenly, that excise order effect, as we would say, that negative impact of what you've done previously is going to get smaller and smaller and smaller very, very quickly. And so ultimately, I think a lot of the people who are saying, oh, no, no, you can't possibly do 50 excises in a session. I think a lot of those people are training predominantly with multi-joint exercises. They're using higher repetition ranges, like sort of 10 to 12. They're training to failure with every single set. They're leaving short-risk periods. And they're ending up, yeah, you're going to be in a mess by the time you get halfway through. Absolutely. And then you're going to be miserable. And your brain is going to be dragged towards the sofa from the cup of tea. You're not going to want to actually continue with the workout you're doing. Whereas in contrast, stick with machines and do the exact opposite. You kind of keep the muscle mass a bit low, leave a longer respite, rep reserved, kind of sensible, heavy loading. And straight away, something we call that capacity to do a little bit more. I think that's the important thing when we're talking about intra-workout fatigue, is that a lot of people's lived experience of doing lots of excises is that it is a miserable experience if you train in that way. Whereas you start to move the dial in direction of more tolerable excise choices and training variables choices, then it becomes much more workable. I mean, you simply need to do compare two different exercises. And if you want to look at the extremes, do you do two different muscles, but you can't even do it for the same muscle. But if you were to compare, say, set of 10 or 12 repetitions of a squat done to failure, or zero reps of reserve, compared to you could do either a leg extension or even if you want an extreme example, do something like a biceps curl, you might do a set of five. Just note for yourself, how long does it take you to get back to your baseline after that? In terms of feeling, literally work of feeling in this regard of time. And just see when do you feel like you're back to normal? And for me, with a set of 12 squats, and I'm kind of basically I'm pretty fit. If I were to do a set of 12 squats to failure, it's probably going to be about 10 minutes before I'm not able to see. Really took a really good time. When they do that, because they've been conditioned to believe that three or four minutes, I mean, the idea that three minutes rest is like the gold standard, everybody just repeats that. And if you look at fitness influence, it's even in like every much based on science based communities, they'll just go three minutes, because that's the number that you keep seeing. But the reality is, years physiologically that makes no sense because if you still feel horrible then you've got a super fun and you get fatigued. And yeah, when you came out with 10 I was like okay, yeah, okay, you're a big guy but like for me it's about seven and like for that kind of situation. I mean that's what solid seven minutes I would need really to get myself ready to do it another certain however, you know, I would lose reps but you know sort of getting approaching egg occurs on level of performance. I literally tested it this week. I did I think I did maybe a set of it was a little bit higher reps, I did a set of 16 to failure on the hax score. Yeah. 10 minutes later I was literally seeing there doing nothing for 10 minutes later. My breath rate and my heart rate was still elevated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really mad. And this is and I'm just kind of out on top of all of the things we've already said because since we're talking about squats, I think it's important that there are also exercise selection choices which require a lot more warmups than others. Yes. Squats are classic example. You can't just walk up to the bar and start doing squats. So you just it's not possible. You're going to need to spend probably 10 plus minutes getting to the point where you're happy with your squat to the degree that you're going to do that string to any set. This is why powerlifting actually follows completely didn't rules when we're talking about kind of the way workouts are laid out. Yes, you know, like 20 minutes to get to the point where you're going to do your Salisquats. But in context of bodybuilding, even then you still are a bigger warmup lead time. So again, you start taking those exercises out to the program and suddenly it starts being manageable. And I think again, people who are kind of having this knee-jerk reaction of saying, oh no, you can't do 15 exercises in a session. If you look at what they're doing, they're probably doing free weight squats in the garage. I mean, I'm not going to do that because I lived that. So, you know, I'm that is my experience as well. If you told me when I was doing free weight back squats in my garage, I had to do 15 exercises. I would have actually laughed. I mean, this is not physical. Yeah, I mean, because using that example again, if you say you wanted to do 15 different exercises and you want to program squats, I'm just working through my head. How would I do it? Well, would I be doing a single set of 12? So then I need to do only maybe one or two warmup sets? Well, that's probably the most efficient way of doing it. But then, like I said, I'm going to be stuck waiting for eight minutes or something else. So you're going to have to do it at the end of your session. So I finished up first. Yeah. Exactly. But then how many other exercises like that kind of? What if I want to do a stiff leg or want to do a rack pull or want to do pull-ups? Chain pull-ups, okay, maybe don't need to do as many warmup sets, but it's a stiff leg rack pull or something like that. Absolutely. You're going to need to do just as many warm-ups as you squat. And what am I going to do? 15 repetitions. I'm going to be stuck waiting eight minutes again. So you need to decide, do I do lower repetitions? But then I'm going to do four or five warm-up sets to get there. It really becomes a juggling act, doesn't it? It does. But again, the exercise selection, I think, is the thing that takes precedence because if you've got a well-equipped machine-based gym, then it really even with that, even with heavier loads, you can get away with a very, very small number of warm-up sets. Yes. So I mean, I can work in five to seven ranges and literally do two warm-up wraps. Yeah. I mean, even on a haxquad, I love haxquads because I can go heavy on a haxquad, you know, sets of five. And I'll normally do like two warm-up sets to get there. Yeah. So again, the machines don't want to make the difference. Now, I think ultimately you can kind of, you have to kind of sort of see different limitations on. But again, just before I kind of express that point, again, it comes back to what your personal circumstances are and what capacity you've got to do the kind of what time you've got to do the workout and the other things you've got to do. Like, if you can behave like an old-school lifter and like, you know, literally, you know, sit down in a deck chair and have a drink of orange juice for 10 minutes between lifts, then actually you can probably do a lot more than somebody who's like on the clock and they've got to be out in, you know, sort of 50 minutes because they've got somewhere else to be. I think ultimately, those time constraints are probably what drive the number of excisors more than anything. But if you can get to a machine kind of, well, look at machine-based gym and you can make that work for you, then I think you can push the number of excisors up to a quite a high level, you probably get to 20 and still be out of the gym within, you know, kind of a reasonable amount of time. You're not spending hours and hours and hours in there. But again, people who can spend hours and hours and hours in there because their students or they've got, you know, kind of a business that runs itself, whatever, then sure, I mean, like, they can probably have a number of other options open to them. Like, they can probably do the freeway back squat if they want to do that and then just spend 10 minutes looking out the window and then carrying with their stuff, okay? I mean, it's important that we identify where limitations are being created because they're practical or life-related. And it's like, because when somebody says, no, you can't do that. I'm like, yeah, but are you saying that it's impossible? Or are you saying physiologically? Or are you saying that just in the context of modern life, that is highly impractical and improbable? Okay, there are different things. Yeah, you know. So because if you were to do 15 exercises, wait eight minutes between each exercise, do a set of eight, then there should be basically none of that cardiovascular respiratory rate sort of increases and end, you know, the affron feedback, which would be affecting how your perception of air fit in the next exercise. Ultimately, what is going to be affecting you there is going to be the information that my clients are talking about before. So then the question is how fatiguing really is that going to be? And do we have a wave? Well, it seems to be related to exercise duration and density and muscle mass are used. So if you kind of, yeah, I mean, if you kind of go in and start hammering out sets of 10, 12, you know, to failure on the back squat, then you're just going to catch up with you pretty quickly. You know, whereas if you're doing like more of a machine-based muscle by muscle approach, then I think it's probably going to be a lot less of an effect because this less muscle is your being used. Less muscle is being used ultimately. So you're going to get a much smaller kind kind of dump of those myocines into the bloodstream. Same way they like take works really. So I think really again, it's just all related to the same underlying phenomenon, which is affected by the same exercise selection variables and the same, you know, kind of training variables as well. So ultimately it's all just about managing that cardiovascular those cardiovascular processes. As you said, we can, and we talked about we can manipulate those training variables in various different ways. But the exact number of exercises is therefore going to depend hugely on people's practical circumstances and their cardiovascular fitness and the time available they've got. So I don't think it's appropriate to say, oh, I know what you can do more than 12 exercises or nobody can do more than 50. It's like, well, it depends on your fitness and who you are in your age and your practical circumstances, how long you've got for the worker, what machinery you've got available to train with or is it all freeways. All of those things are going to come into lay and some people are going to be able to push it to an extreme and do 40 exercises in a session. Because they've got two hours because they're a student and they're a high level of cardiovascular fitness and they've got amazing machines available to them and they're a bit creative. Fine, okay, yeah, that's going to work. Somebody else got literally just to garage gym with a few dumbbells and a barbell. They're going to be very, very, very limited and find it very difficult to get to much past 10 exercises, especially if their cardio isn't amazing. So I think it really is going to come down to individual zones. And so having a blanket statement like nobody can do more than 12 exercises, absolutely. Just so unhelpful. One of the most common questions I get is what is the most amount of sets someone can do in a workout? And I'm like, I'll let you know that I've programmed up to 80 sets in a workout. If I'm doing clusters, I'm doing sets, you know, 5-3-up max load, doing set to 2 and my whole workout is consisting of clusters, I've done, you know, 80 plus sets in a single workout. And then there's other workouts that might get someone which is six to eight sets. And it's such an unhelpful metric to say, what's the top end of sets one can do? Well, it totally depends on exercise selection, on repetitions, on proximity for all of this matters. So, you know, it's exactly what you're saying here. How many exercises? Well, I'll be talking, you know, unilateral, single joint, low repetit, like how could you possibly answer that with all of these variables? A masterly reductionist kind of approach which ignores the fact like just thinking a set as a set as a set. And it's like it's not. It's like all of these variables go into determining the effects of that set in terms of intro workout fatigue. So, ultimately, how many sets you can do, and how many exercises you can do, is absolutely variable. But there are going to be decisions that push you in one direction that's going to be decisions that push you in a different direction. So, everybody's just going to have to start with whatever they can do, and then modify it. If they want to do more, they're going to have to modify it in directions that are kind of helpful to them. They're going to have to start, you know, if they've got more time totally. Like, if you're going to do, you're doing a workout in 40 minutes and you're like, I feel like that's the maximum I'm doing the maximum number of exercises in that 40 minutes. I'm like, okay, but have you got 50 minutes? Okay, well then start leaving slightly longer rest periods and see if you can now do an exercise. It's that simple. Or if they're like, I'm doing these exercises, I feel absolutely gassed. at the end, I'm like, okay, well, let's look at the exercise selection that you've got. Are you doing a squat in there? What multi-joint exercises are you doing there that we can kind of make either more stable or actually convert into single joint exercises? What rep ranges are you using? Do you have any ability to drop that rep range slightly for some of your exercises? Yeah, I do for every single one, but can you do it for some of them? Yeah. Things are going on. That's such a good point there, because you might have some exercises where doing a set of six might cause the same sort of, I guess, rest-period demand than another exercise where you're doing a set of 20 or 15. And so to say, well, every exercise needs to be six repetitions or can't be this many or whatever. It's like, well, again, that's why when I'm programming squats, more often than not, I'm programming sub-five repetitions in a full-body plan where I'm doing 12-ply exercises, because again, a set of 10 or 15 squats is going to be too long to recover from, but single limb stuff, biceps curl, stuff like that, more from the not-entrogramming 10 to 15, because it's not worth that extra time to then warm that up and do a set of five. So repetition, honestly, I think repetition really should be exercise-specific. I know that that's sort of unsensitling. From a practical point of view in terms of the impact of our exercise, how's it going? Well, on the rest of the workout, from a time point of view, from a cardiovascular sensations point of view, absolutely. So that's what I'm saying. I think when people are asking for blanket recommendations, it's totally not the wrong starting point. What I need to start with is what are you currently doing? Okay, fine. And do you want to do more exercises? Or would you like to do more exercises in that workout? Okay, fine. Well, then look down the list of things that you're doing in the rep ranges and the rest periods and everything like that and see if there's anything that you can change that or push it in the positive direction for reducing cardiovascular sensations. And then you probably find that if you make a couple of those adjustments and a space will open up at the end of your workout or motivational capacity or your feel, you'll feel able to just add one more exercise on. You'll be getting to the end of your workout and you go, "Actually, no, I don't feel too bad. I could do something else." That's what you'll feel. And that's the data point that you're looking for. You may have those adjustments. You get to the end of the workout and you actually, "I feel like I could do something extra." Great. Then you can include it. Yeah. So, about making those small adjustments in positive directions until you get to that sensation, which is like allowing you then to do something new. So that's one category of ensure people have. That's the inch workout for tea problem. So when people say, "Oh, no, you can't do that many exercises in a single session because your end of the workout will be worthless." That's what we're talking about. So the other group people say, "You can't do 15 exercises in a session because you won't then recover for the next training session." Yeah. You're laughing already because this just ignores what the post-work-after-party model looks like. I mean, post-work-after-party model is probably one of the strongest elements in the entirety of all of my work online. So basically, post-work-after-party model is really obvious. It's very, very easy to establish. Literally, you have got a. In the workout itself, you are creating calcium and accumulation due to muscle activation or stretch, or both. So those things will cause calcium ions to accumulate in the virus. That will then trigger calcium and molotovd mechanisms. Basically, you've got excitation, contraction, coupling failure. You've got cell membrane damage, and you've got myophibralid damage itself. Now, basically, those are literally just direct consequences of calcium and accumulation, causing calpane or phospholipase production inside the fiber. After that, you've then got a supospinal central nervous system of fatigue effect, which is linked to the inflammation, which is clearing away the muscle damage, the myophibralid damage. So whatever myophibralid damage you create will be related to the amount of CNST that you create. If you want another actual technical fatigue mechanism, it's the coordination disruption from the fact that your brain now will not produce the same force with the same activation. So the way your brain thinks in terms of movements is these activations produce this force output. And when you have fatigue present, your brain now has a mismatch between the actual force outputs and the activation inputs. And so you actually end up creating a less coordinated movement because your brain only thinks in terms of activations. So that would technically be another fatigue mechanism. Does it make a difference in terms of stimulus? No, but it does make an difference in terms of the kind of right number of reps to failure that you can do. So if that is a post-workup fatigue model, then ultimately the amount of damage you create is going to be the factor that determines how many days recovery you need or how much actual fatigue the experience. Broadly post-workup fatigue broadly scales with volume linearly. So if I do, say for example, literally just biceps curls, then more sets that I do, the more post-workup fatigue I create and the more recovery time I need before I can train those biceps again. But if I create like a substantial amount of muscle damage and I get a large inflammatory response, I'm going to create super spinalcy and it's to you effect, then starts to create problems for other muscles as well. So I've got these two kind of issues happening. I've got the actual local fatigue effect and I've also got a super spinal fatigue effect. If I now add in triceps as well, then I'm going to have like, or actually let me do a different example. Let me start by saying, let's imagine I'm sort of doing these biceps curls in the context of an upper lower split like a lot of people program say two workouts a week, four four total workouts, two workouts per week, up a lot. So imagine I'm doing that. So I'm doing say four or five sets of biceps curls. We could consider two alternative scenarios here. Either I could add on five sets of triceps extensions. So now doing five sets of biceps curls, five sets of triceps extensions, total of ten sets. Like now I'm going to have like the same low-chorusca fatigue muscle damage wise inside the biceps. I'm going to have pretty much an equivalent amount of that in the triceps. I'm going to have double the amount of super spinal cn's teapest of now double the amount of muscle damage. Very straightforward. So basically broadly speaking, if I have 15 exercises, let's say they're all single joint exercises, if I do 15 single joint exercises, I'm going to have 15 sets worth of super spinal fatigue and I'll have one set each worth of muscle damage. If I did three different exercises for five sets each and have the same amount of super spinal cn's teapest, but I'd have five times as much low-chorusca muscle damages I'd have in each of those individual kind of situations. The issue though is that, oh sorry, can I just check? Does that sound right? Does that make sense? Yes, it does. I'm curious what your next sentence is going to be because I do have a question, but you may answer it. I think I'm about to answer it. The next issue is that because the actual inflammation response duration depends on the muscle damage time to repair, you get a totally different time to recovery of the super spinal fatigue if muscle damage is more limited in individual muscle. So if I have 15 sets of single muscle groups being trained, I have the same total amount of super spinal fatigue on probably day one, but it's pretty much all gone by day two. Because the length of time for each of the information sticks around depends on ultimately how long the muscle damage takes to repair. But if I do, I do, I have 15 tiny holes and each one of those holes is very quick to backfill and say to one or three massive holes. Exactly. Exactly. So the issue is that yes, you will get like 15 sets worth of super spinal fatigue on day one, but by day two it's pretty much all gone. If on the other hand, I have five sets worth of muscle damage, but not going to be recovered for two or three days, that super spinal fatigue is going to take two or three days to recover. So reality is that super spinal fatigue people go, "Oh, well, you're trashing your central nervous system by doing 15, 20 different exercises for body whatever." Yeah, you might feel a little bit rough the following day as the same way that you would feel a little bit rough if you did five, six sets of bench, five, six sets of over, press five, six sets of triceps, six tensions. You're going to feel rough either way, but you're going to feel rough longer with the body parts split approach because the muscle damage just takes longer to repair. Every single data point that we've got in post-workoutive literature shows that if you create more muscle damage in the workout by doing more sets for the same muscle group or more stretch position exercises or whatever, then what you will find is that your information response is lengthened and delayed. So ultimately, it takes longer for the calpain process to finish. It takes longer for your initial processes with the information to finish. Your secondary muscle damage effect gets punted much further along. In animal models where we go crazy with the muscle damage, you can get four days before the inflammation really gets going and you actually start to see losses of myfibular protein. Obviously in humans we don't see that. We tend to see most of the secondary muscle damage effect is day two or back end of day one, but basically you're only really starting to get that information happening on day two. Again, we're talking about muscle damage in workouts, ten sets of something silly. But ultimately, what we're talking about, the processes are much earlier than that. Yeah, basically the full body approach of doing lots of sets, but separates the cross-lice parts of the body. Yes, you will get a very similar immediate CNS fatigue and the following day, but it really clears very, very quickly in a person with the body parts of that approach. So, based on what you just said there about that delayed response, so theoretically, is it possible that actually the next day full body might be having a causing more super-spanacine acid tea? I wouldn't say it'd be called more unless you were genuinely, I mean, like if muscle mass is equated, such a cross-muscle mass is equated, then I think it would be the same. But, you know, if it's not, then I mean, if you get, I mean, I can't honestly see that happening, but yeah, I mean, if you're doing more so-- So you don't think, say someone's doing it up a lower, you don't think that they could delay that inflammation damage response. Maybe. I mean, like if you were doing-- let's say you were doing, yeah, I mean, let's say you were doing five sets of two exercises for each muscle group, your upper lower split, which is not unreasonable. I mean, like, do you train like that? They'll do like five, maybe five, six exercises, and they'll do four or five sets of each, that's a big workout, but you know, I mean, that is done. In that scenario, yeah, I think you could create enough damage in a single muscle that it would pump the inflammation in two day two. So this is not really exactly to what we're talking about, but that would make me think, if someone were training, say, up a lower or two-way split with high enough volumes, that you may fact potentially be better off training on those two consecutive days and then taking the rest day rather than-- no? I don't know. I mean, it's going to be very individual exercise specific and all the other variables. I mean, yeah, maybe, but honestly, I mean, I don't think it's good idea to train like that anyway. No, no, we're kind of coming up with the best case for a bad sort of-- I'm not interested in my brain power to kind of-- with exercise routines, I wouldn't have been medigate some of the stilliners. But, you know, that's, yeah, so is that clear enough so far? Is that okay? Because I've got one more thing I want to-- Yeah, yeah. So the final thing I want to add is people go-- people who go, well, we don't-- not really interested in your post-workout, but you model, I don't agree with it or whatever. You know, I want to focus more on like the autonomic nervous system and the cardiovascular response. So they basically are going back to like aerobic exercise kind of models and they're saying, you do a string to work out this full body. You can have a big autonomic nervous system shift. It's going to take you a long time to recover from that. No, it doesn't. So all the autonomic data suggests that no matter what exercise about you do, you recover within 48 hours. Don't care what you do. They literally got studies in marathon running showing that it takes 48 hours to clear. It doesn't matter what you do. It's one of the most frustrating things that I have seen in exercise science that we can't figure out why it should be modifies the duration if anything ever does of the autonomic nervous system coming back to baseline because no matter what kind of exercise we seem to throw at subjects, they always seem to get back to baseline within about 48 hours. Maybe a little bit longer than that, but not really meaningful. So ultimately when somebody goes, I don't agree with your post-workout team model. I think it's more about cardiovascular recovery. I'm like, well, okay, then you're recovered in 48 hours no matter what you do. So you can just literally train every other day or every all three times a week and you can do anything. The idea that doing lots and lots of exercise would cause a problem for that in their model, which I don't really think is relevant, but because ultimately the only reason you're autonomic nervous system recovery would be a problem as if you are actually out of breath going into subsequent sets of your next workout because that's what the autonomic system is doing. But anyway, in this scenario that you want to use that model, then fine. You can be recovered in 48 hours when I'm out of it if you want. It doesn't matter. So really, even if people just reject the basic post-workout team model, that I've detailed in one-to-use cardiovascular models instead, which I think is mad, but okay fine. Even then, you're still recovered in 48 hours no matter what you do. Yeah, so either way the post-workout fatigue issue doesn't persist beyond 48 hours. It does. Unless you were doing like five sets per muscle in your full body workout that had your dozen different exercises. Again, that is not nobody's going to do that. I mean, like the people are doing high exercise, you're doing single sets, mostly. They're doing, I know exactly my point. And you know, we could, you know, someone might say, oh well, they're doing multiple exercises per muscle, but obviously the intention behind that program would be that they're biasing different regions of the very little muscle. So yeah, you're most damaged fibres at the top aren't going to be doubled up. Yeah. I mean, oh, this is one of those areas where if you actually really dig into the physiology, all the arguments against it just fall away because there isn't really a scenario in which this is an issue. The only people who think this is an issue, people who haven't actually gone and done all the reading. Well, yeah, I mean, you would only think it's an issue if you don't know what's causing post-workout fatigue. As soon as you do realize it, any other split. Yeah, the, yeah. So where does it land us? Where it lands us is that we can make use of the physiology to be flexible about the precise number of exercises that we have in a workout and still have a successful final couple of exercises of that workout. We can manipulate running variables very intelligently to avoid creating the exercise order effect or at least minimizing it as much as you possibly can. And that's what a lot of people are, I mean, we've talked before like some of the really interesting creativity that's going on in the science-based lifting community is around this precise issue. Yeah. It's about finding ways to do more exercises involving individually less muscle mass in order to like get out to silly numbers of exercises, but we're okay. And that's cool. I mean, that's inventive. That's creative. I respect that. I think it's really interesting. I'm not going to put a program like that, but that's just because I'm old. But, you know, I think it's really interesting what they do. And so they get up to really, really crazy numbers. If people look at them go, no, no, no, you can't do that because they prefer back to their norms. They're like, no, no, no, no, you've got to do 12 or that's the maximum number. It's like, yeah, but you're not understanding that context is fundamentally different from yours because they've taken on board the physiology behind each of the kind of training variables, next-size selections, and they've started to push those numbers of exercises higher. Cool. Awesome. That doesn't mean that you can do that in a free way, it's a situation in your garage. No. So let me ask you this. So you've made it fairly clear repeatedly that you are not a personal fan like for yourself of training this way and training with many different exercises. So how many exercises do you think you could in fact do if you wanted to train full body three times a week? Yeah, from one to two though, because if I were to change my personally preferred exercise selections because I prefer to do pooled and presses, you know, and using squat patterns and things like that, I just prefer to train like that. I'm old, I'm not going to, you know, kind of do anything, so I don't want to do. So obviously in this mental experiment, you are still the same age you are now, okay? But let's say you are trying to train in a way where you are swapping some of those exercises. Yeah. So you try to help me do it now at the moment, you're doing well half a dozen or so? Yeah, probably no more than six. So I could probably double up and do 12 if I was to pick my exercises better. I'm confident I could do that. Yeah. And that's without any detriment at the end of the workout. Yeah, it's just not what I, that's not just, I'm training for health, for, you know, kind of just basic body composition. I'm, oh, I'm like, people don't realize this, you know, is. So we could probably, if you think you could do 12, then we could probably take what you think you could do and then add 20% onto it and then that's probably going to land. It's pretty accurately to where you actually would be able to do as opposed to your worst case scenario estimate. You know, but yeah, it's like I've got other stuff that I want to do. I mean, I, this is not my sole focus in life, you know, it's not even my sole physical activity focus. But then that's going to be my motivation piece. And, you know, the tricky thing here is it's almost circular because if someone says I don't want to do it, it's like, okay, well, we could actually program in all these, you know, intelligent ways to make it possible for one to do it. But again, if they fundamentally believe that they don't want to be doing it, it's kind of not going to work anyway because they're going to be demotivating themselves out of it. Yeah, I think that's why you do see these kind of small communities of people who start to, you know, push the boundaries of what other people think is, is durable because they're motivated to find interesting and creative solutions to, you know, based on physiological reality, to bodybuilding programming. And that's kind of where you see those people emerging. Which is cool. You know, what I'm kind of explaining is that the physiological reality is that the possibilities are larger than most people think they are. Yeah. And you can give basic kind of recommendations for people who know nothing about the gym, you know, and you can say, look, you know, you probably need to limit yourself to 10 to 12 exercises and, you know, steer in these directions and most people are going to get like digitally just like the program we started with today. I mean, you can throw some of that at the end, so you just do that three times a week or twice a week if you're, you know, not really dying just getting over the gym. And you know, most people will do well. We've got to get this understanding that there is a difference between not like, okay, so we're all aware that there are, there's this thing that, you know, kind of gets bandied around occasionally, which is like a public health recommendation. So people like it told, you know, this is kind of a recommendation for your health, that organizations who set themselves up and, you know, deemed themselves to have their wisdom to impart this information, you know, and then they say this is what a public health money. I mean, ultimately when fitness influencers are arguing about what people should do when they go to the gym, it's kind of like a mini version of a public health recommendation. You know, people who don't really know what they're doing when it comes to gym, here are some guidelines that you can follow. So like, you know, two or three times a week, you know, train full body, do the same work every time, do 10 to 12 exercises. And you know, you can start to get towards a recommendation or a suggestion, which is going to be good for most people who just don't know what they're doing. But ultimately what we're also aware of is that you can bend those recommendations quite a lot. Yes. So what you're doing. Yeah. And I think this is the important thing. Like a lot of people when they are arguing emotionally about exercise numbers in each given session, they are blurring the lines between what is a suggestion for people who don't know what they're doing. And what is a possibility of people who do know what they're doing. And you've got to get your head into two different places to be able to understand why some people will literally talk past each other for an hour. Yeah. Yeah. Because one group of people are saying, no, no, no, people can't do that if people can't do that if people are going to do what people who don't know what they're doing. Yeah, fine. Exactly. That's what the sort of basic guidelines exist for. But then you've got these other group people. Yeah, but we do know what we're doing. So we can bend the rules. We can bend the guidelines. We can go in a different direction. We can do this. We can do that. We can do this in this way. We can start to create more capacity here. There somewhere else. And suddenly you've got to work out that looks absolutely impossible. At least on paper to people who don't know what they do. Yeah. Yeah. That first category is basically how far can we go while keeping it as hard as possible to stuff up for anyone. And you might get you a percent the way there and then you go any further and now it's going to become easy and easy to stuff up if you don't realize how you shoot or need to program these other little niche variables. Exactly. And the problem is that you've got people out people who are confusing those two categories. And they what they'll do is they'll then invent quasi physiological reasons for why those guidelines must always be followed and can never be violated. And that's when that's where you get the like the autonomic nervous system people. They were on and if you do more than 15 exercises in a workout, you're a cody or a cover for the next workout. I'm not sure it's calling a causing 40 to tell them about what you do. Well, it's retrospectively looking for justification for why exactly they can't do it. Yeah, they decide we're not just that they can't do it. Nobody can do it. Yeah. So this is like this is very similar to the people who they feel as simple as you decide that they want to program like this for themselves. And therefore that must also be the best possible way to program. We see these people with giga to Geo. So we go no, no, no. But only must my program be the best for me. It must also be the best for everybody. Everyone all the time forever. Yeah, I mean like, where's only the exact opposite. I'm like, no, I train in a very suboptimal way because it's just what I'm going to do. But yeah, you've got these kind of yeah, but it's the same reason it start with like they say, no, I'm going to defend this guideline to the death. And then like they're starting inventing reasons why it has to be like that. And like, well, no, you start with the guideline because it's a good starting place for most people most of the time. And then you accept that if somebody starts to make these adjustments, then if they make enough of those adjustments, they can get some weather. It's almost implausible for most people to see you. But you've got their step by step by virtue of doing a series of very specific adjustments in line with how for the other works. There's allowed you to make those kind of to make that program work. I think that's that's why we're seeing a lot of confusion online because people are literally having two totally different starting points and assuming another same thing. And I know. There's a totally different situation. If you're making a blanket recommendation for like most people most of the time, then you're going to end up with, you know, kind of the basic silver airtight program. If you want to start to say, well, actually, I'm interested in seeing how far I can go with this. Then actually you've got a lot more flexibility. And that's where I think a lot of criticism against the science based lifting community in the moment is directed at is directed because people are blending those two things. And they're looking at somebody doing 40 sets in a workout, totally different exercises. And they go in that's impossible. And the guy is clearly doing it. He's posting it on it. Well, clearly it's not because he's doing it. So then you kind of go, OK, well, so where do you go from that? But what I'm trying to explain is that there these two totally different like mental frameworks. One is a recommendation framework. One is a possibility framework. I mean, what they're doing that situation as well is looking at one variable in isolation. They're saying, oh, well, you know, I think you can do 10 sets or 10 exercises and this person saying they can do 40. And just saying, I'm going to keep all the variables exactly the same and only change in the moment of exercises. Yeah. And it's a different mindset. And so I think, yeah, all of the arguments are literally just coming down to a blending of those two frameworks. One framework is like a recommendation framework and the other framework is we have all its practical limitations in place. And the other framework is a possibility framework. So what can we do if I'm prepared to break out of those like basic recommendations and just start saying, well, physiology and pinning this work like this. Therefore, I'm going to do this. Interestingly, this ties back to evidence versus science and like the approaches that people take the evidence guys will go, well, the evidence says you do these number of sets and these number of exercises and these unlike this. And being trapped inside that guidance framework, whereas the science goes, well, this is how underpinning variables are working. And that's how, so if I change them so that they don't have the so negative effect, then I'll end up being able to do more, you know, or, you know, I'll be able to change what I'm doing elsewhere. And I mean, it's what we said with the respirators before, right? Like an evidence base would say you do your two to three minute respirator. And you're saying, well, actually, maybe science, if you are, yeah, we say you might be spending six minutes between one exercise and maybe a minute between another. Totally. And that's because you've understood what's actually creating the problem. Yeah. I think that's a hopefully as a helpful framework for people to come back to and realize that, you know, we're not saying these general recommendations, people are giving a bad or wrong, you know, they're helpful for the vast majority of people. Yeah, hopefully, absolutely. We're just hopefully, hopefully encouraging people not to speak in absolute and say that there's no way one can move outside of these guidelines and these are, in fact, set boundary conditions for every single person all the time. And we're saying, well, no, actually, if you do push deep enough into the physiology, you can start to push those edges out. And ultimately end up with something quite interesting and creative and that looks very different to what most people maybe are doing. And if you want to stick with your six exercises and do that three times a week or whatever that's fine. I'm sorry, you do that. Yeah, we're all working to do that. But if you want to experiment and you want to do 12 or 15 or 20, well, hopefully, now you've got the tools to do so. So I think that's that as dumb. Do you have anything you want to finish with? No, I'm good. I'm, I'll just say the beginning looking forward to the first webinar in the course that we're starting on Thursday. I think it'd be very exciting. So yes, as you said, if people still want to sign up, they can still do that discount is still live. So obviously, it'll be linked from both of our Instagram bios. Please do check out if you're interested. Perfect. Thank you guys for joining us and I hope you'll join us again next week for another episode.