Speaker 1Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Hypertrophy Past and Present. Chris, this is the second time I'm seeing you this week. I saw you just the other day. I don't even know how long ago it was now. It was like midnight for me, so it's all a bit of a blur. But we started our first or had our first webinar for the Transcend Coaching Certification, and we were joined by like 32-ish people, which was amazing because obviously time zones are very difficult to coordinate all over the globe. But it was an awesome first call. Anyway, how are you doing today?
Speaker 2Yeah, doing well, thank you. Yeah, it's, as you say, strange to be doing two of these in a week, but I'm sure I shall get into the screen as we go.
Speaker 1On our call on the webinar, someone was commenting that they wanted Rob to be there, and Rob was in fact on the call, and he messaged in the chat and said hello, and that person, I think, lost their mind. But I thought maybe in, not memory, Rob's not dead. What's the word I'm looking for? Inspired by Rob, I would give us a strength-based, power-lifting style silver arrow plan today. So, Rob, if you're listening, this is for you. So, this is a plan from Paul Anderson. Now, people may recognize Anderson because he has an exercise named after him, the Anderson Squat. Now, to be. To be fair, it's not an exercise that many people would really do, but essentially, it's a variation of a squat where you're beginning in the bottom position from pins. Not super relevant, not something we're going to talk about today, but I think it's always interesting when there's people who have exercises named after them and have, I guess, started entire sort of trends and exercise patterns. So, Anderson was an incredibly strong man. So, he was one of the strongest people. So, before steroids, okay? We're talking 1950s, and this plan was actually from 1954. So, well before steroids were being used, he was one of the strongest men on the planet. So, he won gold in the, actually, I think it was the Australian Olympics, and that was, what was that, 56? So, and that was weightlifting, and he's predominantly known for his squat strength, but, you know, all around, obviously, strong man. And, like I said, pre-steroids. And this plan is an overall weightlifting plan, so it is a little bit different to kind of the hypertrophy-focused plans we normally talk about, but if you were to look up Anderson, obviously, he's a strength athlete, okay? So, he's not, you know, intending to get on a bodybuilding stage, but there's no doubting that this guy had slabs of muscle. Like, his legs look like flipping tree trunks. Like, they're just huge. So, I thought, hey, let's see. Let's see what this guy does to build legs that size. And this is what he does. I really like this plan, actually. I've actually borrowed, I've taken part of this plan and introduced into my own programming over the last few months, because I actually really like one element of it, but I'll get to that in a moment. So, this was actually a six days per week plan in the 50s, you know, and that's relatively unheard of-ish. So, it's not like a standard split. Like, it's... You pointed out, actually, before we started recording, that it's almost an upper-lower split in a sense. But the main workout day, which was done three times per week, which was, let's call it upper body day, consisted of an overhead press, and he did two sets of two reps. Now, he didn't talk about warm-up sets, but I imagine he did do a number of warm-up sets to get to this, because he was overhead pressing over 140 kilos. So, I'm imagining there was a couple of at least warm-up repetitions. So, two sets of two, and then he went into dumbbell press, so flat dumbbell press, and this was done with 60-kilo dumbbells, and he did two sets of three repetitions, which I can only imagine would have been so difficult to get into position. Anyone who's ever benched very heavy dumbbells before will no doubt be able to attest to that. And then he did the Olympic weightlifting lifts, yeah. So, he did a snatch and a clean, and he just did multiple repetitions with that, multiple sets. And then he did his... Deadlift, and he did two sets of triples. Now, you pointed out that for some lifters, it might look a little bit more like a back exercise and a leg exercise, depending on how they're lifting, which is why I'm kind of calling this his upper body day, but obviously, he's got the deadlift here. And then he concluded with a clean pull to waist height, and that was done with 225 kilos, or 226.8 kilos, to be precise, and he did four sets of three repetitions with that. Now, he... I don't know how long. I don't know how long these workouts took, but he would rest over 10 minutes between sets, which, considering he was only doing doubles and triples, I think is a pretty insane amount of time, these workouts must have been quite lengthy, which probably helps explain why his next workout, he actually performed squats only. So, he took his squats out, obviously, from that, you know, sort of full body one workout day, and he performed the squats three times per week by himself, and he did... He would... He would sometimes just do a single set, and sometimes he would do two or three sets, and he would do two repetitions. So, that entire workout was just one to three sets just of squats. Now, he was squatting over 300 kilos, so, again, I'm sure there would have been a whole number of warm-up sets to get to that point, but he would just do one to three working sets, two repetitions, 10 to 15 minutes between those sets, and that was it for his squatting. Now, that's the bit, actually, I really like. So, I often, if, you know, we've talked, I think even last episode, we talked about the demand of some of these big multi-joint exercises, if you're doing them within a workout that has a whole lot of other exercises, and for me, I actually sometimes take my squat out of my full body day, and inspired by Anderson, I'll put my squat by itself on a separate day, and just do two or three sets of two or three repetitions with it, in a manner that's not going to impact recovery the next day. And I really enjoy that. So, thank you, Anderson, for giving me that bit of inspiration. Chris, what do you think of this plan?
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, it's so striking that the plan is, you know, perfectly in line with what Soviet-era bodybuilders were doing. It's just, he's doing, he's focusing, obviously, on the important lifts for his competition. And just to be clear, put this in context, until 1970... Until 1976, the overhead press was part of the Olympic weightlifting competition. So, we tend to think about the Olympic weightlifting competition as being the snatch and the clean and jerk. But until 76, it was actually included a third lift, which was the overhead press. They withdrew it for the 76 competitions because people were leaning back too much, and it was turning into a standing bench press.
Speaker 1Which, if people don't know, yeah, if people haven't heard that before, Google it, because
Speaker 2it looks hilarious. It's insane. It's insane. So, you've got... Like... It's difficult to get exact numbers for what, you know, people were lifting. Obviously, you can see here that Anderson's lifting like 150-odd kilos, you know, in his training overhead press, which is insane. I mean, allegedly, people were kind of putting 190, 200 kilos overhead, which is just, you know, ridiculous. I mean, I just can't get my head around that. But, yeah, so basically, you have to bear in mind that when Anderson won gold in the, I think it was the... I think it was 50, 56 in Melbourne, Australia. Yeah. He was, yeah, I mean, he set a world record at that time with 500 kilo total for three lifts, all overhead. It's just mad. So, yeah, I mean, ultimately, he's focusing on those lifts, and overhead press obviously is a critical part of that three lift competition. So, he's necessarily, you know, focusing on coordination. And he's doing, you know, a couple of sets of a couple of repetitions to maximize his coordination, recruitment, and also get his muscle growth. You know, when people say, you know, you can't build muscle with low reps, you can't build muscle with small numbers of sets and reps, you just show them this. It's like, you know, literally, this guy was the, you know, one of the biggest, strongest men on the planet. He's competing in the super heavyweight category, you know. So, you know, it's obvious that... It's totally doable to build. I mean, we haven't talked about Hepburn much on this podcast. It's the same, literally, same kind of category, really. I mean, a little bit more volume, but basically the same kind of thing.
Speaker 1Yes, yeah. And interestingly, Hepburn also makes a comment in, I don't know, have you seen the letters that Hepburn and Reg Park wrote to each other? No, not at all. So, Reg, when he was working up towards his 500-pound bench, so Reg being the first bodybuilder to bench 500 pounds, Hepburn being the first weightlifter to do it. But Reg was actually getting instruction from Hepburn on how to get his bench up. And one of the points, I believe it's in one of these letters that Hepburn makes, is that he recommends separating his squat from his pressing and that having them both on the same day, like, yes, you know, he has done in the past, but it can be detrimental. And so, it's interesting to me seeing that we're seeing the same thing here, where the squat is taken away from everything else.
Speaker 2Yeah. I mean... Exactly. that's i think that's why powerlifting routines do tend to diverge a little bit from bodybuilding ones because you need that um kind of uh lack of fatigue around each lift that you're competing in to be able to maximize the coordination you can't you can't just kind of go oh well i'm just going to do everything three times a week all in the same workout and you're kind of there for an hour and a half or whatever you know battling your way through all three lifts and by the time you get to the end you're just kind of in bits and you just don't really want to kind of focus on that thing whereas if you separate out and you start having a day when you can go in and tackle squat first day another day you can tackle bench first then you start to actually get those coordination improvements occurring you know and they are technical lifts so yeah i mean i think that that's a separate conversation but ultimately i think that's why why coordination you know kind of is king in those in those situations yeah but no just as a bodybuilding which is what we're we're really kind of focused on it's really striking that this you know this routine although it is a uh you know designed to uh help him succeed in this sport of olympic weightlifting although olympic weightlifting as it was then not as it is now you know with the overhead press in place um you know clearly just fits very very well with the volume and frequency kind of parameters that we're seeing in the silver era which is you know training three times a week um you know doing a couple of sets uh of you know uh in this case lower reps because he's training for strength um but the yeah volume and frequency
Speaker 1is bang on it's really remarkable yeah and it's so interesting to me that on that squat day sometimes he's just doing a single set right like he was theoretically doing a single set of two repetitions and no one can argue that he wasn't able to build tremendous amounts of muscle in his
Speaker 2legs from and as you keep saying this is pre-steroids this is literally like there's no other way of doing it and i think this is the problem when people say oh you know well you know the best bodybuilders today are doing you know kind of um uh you know a billion sets of of kind of chest work every monday and that's how that that's how they're getting that's how they're getting huge i'm like no it's not they're getting huge by using enormous amounts of pharmaceuticals it's got absolutely zero to do with training so i think this is the problem you've i think we've still got people who believe that it's relevant to comment on what the biggest people on the planet are doing right now it is not relevant you talk to a pharmacist if you want to understand what the biggest people on the planet are doing right now you do not talk to because it's irrelevant it is literally irrelevant yeah i mean i i told everybody disingenuous incredibly disingenuous for people to go around saying oh look at this bodybuilder right now they're really big and they're doing this silly training routine i don't care i literally don't care you might as well be telling me what they ate for breakfast it's absolutely irrelevant it is not even i'm not interested it has nothing to do with how big they are at all it's not even i'm not interested it has nothing to do with how big they are at all i can't get my mind around when people kind of seem to think that it's a relevant data point it's not i mean if somebody believes otherwise then please make the case and i'm happy to kind of engage with that but right now i just look at everything pre-steroid is is following the same pattern people are training three times a week with low volumes i mean it's
Speaker 1multiple steps removed anyway like if you think about obviously what i love about some of this pre-steroid era stuff is that there was such a small pool of people who were lifting it that point right like people were coming to weightlifting and they didn't even know what weights were and so you know what we see is when there was a small group of people doing this thing what worked for this you know group of people nowadays we have every single person has tried weightlifting at some point in their life and has had a gym membership and to now say well let's look at these genetic elites let's look you know the best bodybuilding in the world now and try to draw conclusions from what they're doing it's like well okay we are now looking at such a genetic funny and then on top of that we've got the drug issue it's like there's like none of that well
Speaker 2actually you've got you've got you've got a third thing which is the interaction effect so you could have somebody who's got amazing genetics for strength training but absolutely horrific genetics for responsiveness to anabolic you could have somebody who's got relatively kind of moderate or poor kind of responsiveness to strength training but grows like a weed when they start taking anabolics or any other pharmaceutical i mean we've been talking offline about all the other crazy stuff that people are doing at the moment i mean it is it becomes a science experiment in in in the worst sense of the word and i think ultimately what we need to get away from if we want to move forward is the understanding that um you literally cannot use uh anecdotes of people who are currently training as relevant as relevant you can use your own anecdotes to inform your own training of course i mean you should do that but when you when you say oh so and so is is doing this and they're huge i'm like okay and why are you telling me that it's totally irrelevant it doesn't mean anything yeah so i forget what led us down that
Speaker 1that little rant um anderson his plan looks the same as the bodybuilders yeah it does see
Speaker 2it does it does it's it's a high it's a high high frequency um and actually it's really cool that he's doing that upper lower not perfectly upper lower but he's splitting out his lifts uh you know six days a week so that he can minimize intercession fatigue and maximize his coordination improvements and those exercises that he's trying to excel in so really he's he's absolutely nailing it from a um from a kind of um you know sort of uh fatigue management point of view for the purposes
Speaker 1of what he's trying to achieve yeah i think there's some cool things happening as well like if you look at the exercise order you know we've got the on that monday with the multiple exercises obviously the squat day there's only a squat so i think it's really cool that he's doing that and i think it's really cool that he's doing that but on the other day we've got the upper body exercises first and then going into these sort of more full body lower body type exercises which are going to be more cardiovascularly demanding
Speaker 2so i think there's some yeah but i think also also you wouldn't you wouldn't want to do you wouldn't want to do your your kind of uh dead lifting stuff before you did your um overhead because your back wouldn't be able to give you the support that you needed yeah but even the snatch
Speaker 1and the clean and you know all these multiple singles that he's got in there you know these are coming after like i think there's a quite a few cool things happening in this one thing i wanted to mention i forgot um he so obviously this squat you know i've made the comment a couple times now that he was just doing you know a couple sets of two repetitions and obviously drew like a weed if you look at his legs now you made the comment that a lot of this mirror is exactly what we would expect to see from silver era bodybuilders just with different exercise selection one thing that i don't know if i've talked about this on this podcast or not before and perhaps i have but reg park obviously reg was known for you know largely doing these sets of five and and you know people would kind of mistakenly say five sets of five but the first two sets were kind of warm-up sets and so three sets of five but in one of reg's advanced um mr universe plans he actually did doubles for his bench and that's something i always found very interesting and i suspect it because obviously he's got a propensity there for heavy benching because he obviously worked up to doing a 500 pound bench um but interesting that such an advanced bodybuilder like reg was actually potentially doing just doubles for his bodybuilding work and you know this idea that you need you know as you said multiple sets higher reps like you can in fact grow a lot of muscle doing a couple sets of
Speaker 2two repetitions can't you yeah i mean we actually did an entire podcast on um a recent study where they compared doing heavier loading protocols um and achieved the same growth as moderate load protocols uh when the same number of sets were done um in each session um i'm just looking to see if i can find which episode it was when we did that full study breakdown um can't find it now without doing sets of was it three to five yeah it was three to five um it was three to five reps it was a three to five rep max or five rep max ish kind of uh loading um ah episode number 27 we called it r4 reps optimal new study so episode 27 we did a whole episode talking about um how you can train using heavier loads and basically get pretty much the same muscle and i think i mean i've deferred to what i said in that episode but i suspect that um from memory it will come back and i think it's going to come back and i think it's going to come down to you getting approximately the same number of stimulating reps maybe one one less or so here and there but ultimately you're getting higher recruitment gains as a result of training with those heavier loads so you kind of end up uh getting uh probably a better end result in the long term because you get access to more muscle fibers and even if it takes you slightly longer to get there you'll get to a better place better place a more advanced level um so yeah uh really it's it's really it's really important to see that heavier loading um you know as you say being being used in bodybuilding situations even back then um we expect to see it with anderson because obviously he's competing uh in in the ability to lift those uh those numbers but um it's cool to see it in the bodybuilding space as well because it does confirm again you know that we're we're matching physiology and strength science now with what the silver era we're doing and that's really the essence of this podcast is just to say you know um the arrival of the bodybuilding space is the survival of anabolics just means that all data regarding what people are doing in strength from like 1955 to 60 onwards i mean everything that people did after that you can just ignore um you have to go back and look at what people were doing prior to that to understand how things actually could work in practice and it just matches with what physiologically i see happening
Speaker 1in literature so yeah so online at the moment there's been a resurgence i don't know if i can even say resurgence because i don't know if it ever disappeared but this whole topic of volume and frequency and how much volume do you need is volume king oh god that used to be that used to be my freaking mantra that was what was nailed into us when i was a pt learning from some of these older sources volume is king you just drive up volume over time constantly i remember learning that was the the difference between like when you have an advanced lifter the only thing that you need to do differently is to just drive up volume and you just plot it over years and just every year you just make sure they're doing more volume and this seems to you know as much as we've talked about it and tried to clear some of this up it seems to be a continual topic of how many sets does one need is volume the main driver is frequency even important is it just about
Speaker 2spreading out your volume i think we should start asking people um when they start asking these questions about volume we should say to them are you planning on being bigger and stronger than paul anderson because because because if you're not if you're not if your goal is less lofty than paul anderson then maybe you could do his program or slightly less and you would get to your goals or any of this you'll figure out you know i'm just i'm just picking him because we've talked about it today but you know honestly it's like um you know do you have loftier goals for your strength in size than you know paul anderson because if you if you do then maybe yeah you could consider doing a bit more volume but if you're happy you're happy with his levels of strength and muscle mass then maybe you could just do what he did or something you know more bodybuilding specific uh which would be along the same lines um you know and you get to you get to that level um maybe not because obviously he's genetically very talented and a dedicated man but um you know ultimately the point stands which is that you know clearly that was achievable with an incredibly low volume
Speaker 1um program um you made a point a moment ago you talked about the stimulating reps like matching stimulating reps i think when you were talking about that study that we discussed yeah 27. just to quickly lean into that for a moment people look at plants because a lot of people i don't know if you get questions like this i get questions like this a lot you know what if i want to get stronger and i want to build muscle or what if i want to get good at the power lift but i wanted a hypertrophy plan you know there's more power building type stuff sure and you look at this plan for manderson he was resting you know 10 minutes between these sets like these workouts would have been monstrous work assets in terms of duration yeah but you made this point that hey it's really from a hypertrophy perspective it's about stimulating repetitions and if you're doing two sets of of two repetitions you know that's really going to equal what you're going to get out of a standard set it is more or less it's going to be
Speaker 2the same well with the recruitment benefits i mean if you compare a 10 rep max um which is kind of what we send tend to see a lot of the uh silver era doing because they want to do too much warmer you know a 10 rep max is probably going to give you the same stimulating effect as two doubles i think yeah um just because of the recruitment being higher in the in the in the heavier load rep ranges more or less i mean okay maybe it's slightly less but yeah i mean exactly that's literally the same thing as doing a silver era bodybuilding routine where you're doing a single set of a bunch of exercises three times a week that's the whole point they're literally pretty much physiologically identical so you can just grab one of those exercises choose two different
Speaker 1exercises one or two exercises per workout that you know that you want to be working on getting that load up higher working on lower repetition um stuff and then you can just do multiple sets with it like that's that's something i love programming that way for a lot of people where each workout we might have you know maybe uh i might do an overhead press is that sort of lift for you know work at a and then maybe we'll do a back exercise or a low body exercise workout b and we'll start with often i'll do clusters yeah it might be five sets of one to two repetitions and then we just move into single sets and there's no reason that you can't merge and blend these two things of doing multi-sets of low repetitions matching the the stimulus that we've just talked about with a single set and then doing single sets everything
Speaker 2else just to keep it more efficient yeah totally um and what's amazing is that if you took this out of context like completely out of context and you went you know out into the kind of fitness industry social media space um and without referencing you know silvia bodybuilding without referencing science you literally just said you know hey everyone i'm doing a routine where i do two doubles on these exercises and it might be you know kind of uh overhead press uh you know kind of a bench kind of some kind of stiff leg deadlift or something like that you know kind of a garage gym type scenario where you've got a bunch of uh freeway exercises that you're doing and you're just doing doubles in those exercises with like a full body routine you know kind of three times a week not actually that far away from the way that i used to train when i was doing weight to pull-ups and dips and a few other bits and pieces around the edges and pretty much just training with kind of you know a couple of reps a couple of sets uh three times a week and you could do that and people would be like oh you're never going to build muscle doing that yeah yeah they would literally they would queue up they would queue up to tell you that you and they would be extremely confident that they were right and you were wrong and you had to do you know kind of dozens of sets of moderate loads otherwise you'd be impossible for you to build muscle and you could literally then turn around and go you know the strongest man on the planet in 1956 who won a gold medal in weightlifting at the olympics and set a world record at a time he was doing pretty much exactly the same routine and you are telling me because of your enormous confidence in what you've seen online you brainwashed yourself by watching bodybuilders you've used anabolic steroids and you brainwashed yourself into believing that that type of training that paul anderson did is impossible to build muscle using that's where we are people do not realize just how screwed up the fitness industry is because of steroids they do not understand another nod to rob he actually sent me a post today
Speaker 1a fairly large account of someone who's enhanced and being very obviously enhanced and the post had said that you can't you can you can maybe maintain but you can't build muscle with less than five to six sets a week and then it said to build muscle you need i think it was 10 9 to 20 sets i think it's
Speaker 2it and i mean rob rob has an inbuilt nonsense seeking engine he sends me all kinds of it does
Speaker 1he's like a bloody heat seeking missile for nonsense isn't he but yeah it's again people
Speaker 2just don't understand how frequency is working in this in this situation or how stimulating reps are working in this situation so they're kind of like they just think about total volume across the week
Speaker 1as if as if the body knows what a week is i mean come on so let's let's dive into that and i think something that's helpful to understand or think about or change your way of looking at things is that a set a set of stimulus is basically five stimulating repetitions and i think that's really helpful when you're looking at sets maybe a lower than five repetitions um or even i guess if you're looking at higher repsets as well ultimately when we're talking about diminishing returns of sets we're kind of talking about these bundles of about five stimulating repetitions aren't we so you know if we're talking about one set of two sets or whatever and we've just talked about doing singles or double repetitions okay that's like two reps is just under half of a single set yeah so for me that that was a really helpful basic shift i made a couple years ago when i realized okay sets stimulus in a set we're just talking basically about five stimulating repetitions regardless of how you slice and dice it
Speaker 2pretty much i mean i think you can you can do that i mean but ultimately um you know where we where we need to go um and we've done we've done these kind of analyses before so i think what we're going to do today um is just run through a couple of really important concepts that we've covered before on this podcast i was going to bring them all together and just line them up and talk about why the physiology is as we understand it fits perfectly with silver era body body pro built bodybuilding programming and obviously therefore also with what you know anderson was doing in his weightlifting programming as well um now after we've done this podcast if people want us to go back over any of the individual elements and do a bigger expansion of those concepts we're happy to do that but we have done them before so we're just going to kind of run through them today so what i'm going to do is start with the fundamentals of what is happening in a workout as regards dosing and weight loss so we're going to start with um the fundamentals of what is happening in a workout as regards dose response so when we say dose response what we mean is as you add on more sets or stimulating reps you can do it either way as you add on more stimulus across a workout for a particular muscle group what you're going to find is you have a non-linear relationship so you cannot and this basically comes from two key sources you've got uh brad schoenfeld's meta-analysis from i forget the date 2017 2018 and then you've got the the pellin meta-analysis from last year 25. so both of those are non-linear responses what that means is that each additional set does not give you the same stimulus as the earlier sets that you've just done so what we can do is for ease of numbers what you can do is you can say that i'm going to define my first set as 100 of a first set stimulus that's just axiomatic i'm just saying that one sec my first set is 100 of my first set which is very straightforward what you can then do is look at the stimulus of your second third fourth fifth sets relative to that original set and what you'll find is that each extra set gives you a smaller percentage as in less than 100 now this is literally just reading numbers off those two uh kind of meta-analyses now you have to do an adjustment for the Schoenfeld one because he did a linear two linear lines instead of creating a kind of a curve but you can impose a curve on top of those and basically get to an answer so essentially um i think you've got the numbers in front of you so correct me where i go wrong but basically um when we look at uh if we start with with brad's numbers then essentially your your your first set obviously is 100 your second set is going to be 39 of your first set which is obviously an enormous step down straight away enormous step down from your first set to your second set your third set is then going to give you i'm trying to read off the chart here um can you help me out 22 22 22 and then where do we go from 22 percent and then force it yeah so four set is then 16 percent and then is it 13 and then 13 for the fifth set so basically based on the uh meta-analysis uh that brad did you can plot a line that will tell you that you are have absolutely no business doing four or five sets at all in in your workout is literally you might as well just go home and and do something else so really three sets turns out to be something probably where you're going to want to stop but the reality is first set to second set you're dropping from 100 down to 40 or 39 it's literally that second set is really kind of like an optional extra the third set is like okay really if you've got capacity um it's kind of why we always go you're much better off choosing different exercises rather than kind of focusing on the same exercise all the time because you're you're dropping down dramatically yeah if you're using uh the schoenfeld meta-analysis if we look at the pellin meta-analysis the number is a lot less uh dramatic i think we go from first set we go for the second set is 80 is 82 percent yeah second set is sorry third set is then 68 is it 68 68 and then 57 percent okay cool so again we're dropping down not as dramatically but you still are dropping down so what's common between these two meta-analyses is that you are definitively not able to get as much stimulus in your second and third and fourth and fifth sets as you are in your first set first set basically is the thing that makes all the difference so that is that's and just to be clear these are the only data that we've got so when somebody is and let me just go down to the first set and i'm going to go down to the second set and i'm going to go down a very very quick rabbit hole because what we're seeing at the moment is people influencers who are actually very good at what they do and this is kind of why we're talking about this today because most of the time when we see stuff online like when rob sends us stuff and it's complete nonsense i just kind of laugh and ignore it because i'm like i don't care what these people are saying they don't they don't have any you know kind of meaningful influence over the the intelligent part of the industry but when you see somebody who actually knows what they're doing saying things like the data say and then they don't specify what data now just to be clear i think we've got a referencing problem in general on social media because there's no space to say anything we don't it's not like when i used to write long articles you could hyperlink you know kind of problem that stuff all the way through and you get a really nice analysis that people go through and kind of pick apart and it's great but nobody reads those things so everybody's including me have stopped doing them and so what's happened is we've kind of gone to social media and you end up in a situation where sometimes you get a citation and even then it's like you can't click on it because it's not clicking you can't click through and it's it's just messy it's really difficult to do now i try and give actual citations written on the infographics that i do everything that i do and obviously when i do faqs i have a bit of text and then i have an infographic which has the citation so i'm trying to do my best to give people ways of checking everything that i say and when i say you know physiologically this is what happening you can just go to the faq and see why i think that i mean it's like everything is cross-referenced so but when people say there's a data don't show that or you know i don't think that's what's happening and then they don't give you any way of going down like their chain of reasoning to find out why they think that i think that's unhelpful so i think what we've got to do is be specific about what data it is that we're referring to so in this context when i say the dose response is clearly non-linear so it's that the first set of every workout is substantially better i mean in schoenfeld's kind of data you've obviously got one uh 100 going down to 39 for your second set that's enormous pellin obviously is 82 percent so you know not anywhere near severe but still very very clearly worse those are the only data that exist so when somebody says oh no there isn't a non-linear dose response it's linear i'm like based on what data there's no data that show that literally doesn't exist there is literally nothing i mean often in exercise science you can say well this data i'm using or i think this data is relevant and we can argue about whether the data is relevant this is cut and dry there's literally no other data so those responses are non-linear you can't get so all the data is
Speaker 1there's really that first sets is is definitely the most effective stimulus in the workout
Speaker 2yeah and and when people want and again if people want to argue whether it's pellin or schoenfeld i think that it's important to look at you know why those two studies show different results um i believe very firmly that the reason that the pellin data shows a skewed benefit in favor of higher volumes is because of the studies because every analysis is literally only as good as the studies it includes and the problem with the pellin one is not anything to do with the way the study was done it's a great study that you know they did a great job um the problem is that the studies that included since the schoenfeld was published most people who have been studying volume have been doing really really excessive volume studies so they've just been going up to crazy numbers and when you go up to crazy numbers of volume you end up with crazy amounts of muscle swelling and you start to distort the top end of the volume curve so it looks like you're getting super amounts of muscle growth and actually just getting super amounts of swelling i know that the swelling argument is uh kind of ongoing people still denying it i just keep coming back to the fact that we've only got one good long-term training study which actually measured muscle growth separately from swelling now you know people are running around posting studies online saying oh this study shows there's no swelling i'm like no it doesn't what you have to do is go and look at cody horn's study in extreme volume and see that when he ducts intracellular and extracellular water from the lean mass changes you get a substantial reduction in the amount of muscle growth that is appearing in those scenarios that's the only long-term study that exists that has deducted muscle swelling and it actually didn't deduct all of it it only deducted the extracellular it didn't duct the intracellular so that is the only study that exists and it shows that when you do high volume training you have a seriously enormous muscle swelling effect that skews the data in favor of that uh protocol makes it look a lot better than it actually is so when you look at the pellin data and you go okay so the pellin is showing way less reduction in muscle growth as you go from set to set to set and it's because the top end of the curve is getting pulled upwards by these silly volume studies that have used extremely high volumes that have created muscle swelling proving or not proving sorry uh displaying or making it seem like muscle growth is happening at super high volumes when it's actually not and that skews the data in favor of that and that's the only study that does that and that's the only study that does that and that's the only study that does that that skews the entire curve upwards and makes it look steeper than it actually should be so i am definitely biased in favor of the schoenfeld numbers i think they're much more likely to be real even looking at them surprises me that they're so low as you go to higher and high volumes but that's literally what the data say and that's the best data i think we've got if you want to make a case for why muscle swelling is not happening in the schoenfeld sorry not happening in the pellin i think you're going to be struggling because there is no other data other than the cody horn study but um you know honestly um either study show that the the dose response is definitely non-linear therefore the first set is always going to be better than every other set that's kind of where we start from
Speaker 1yeah so if you were going to go off the schoenfeld data then in a very sort of simplistic way you could look at that and say that that second set is going to give you roughly half as much half the stimulus of the first set and that third set roughly half of that second set and then anything beyond that is relatively meaningless pretty much
Speaker 2i mean i think anybody's doing more than three sets on an exercise and a workout is absolutely wasting their time i mean i think there's there's just no point in doing that unless they are doing like a strength protocol where they're doing you know kind of singles or doubles or even triples and then okay then then you can do double i mean you can go to five and six and i mean i kind of i mean people know that i did the hepburn routine of eight sets of two rising to three in retrospect i feel that i was probably two or three sets too many per workout i think a protocol of five sets of doubles rising rising to triples is probably going to be a lot better
Speaker 1over the long term yeah that's how i feel as well i think that eight sets you know those first two three sets warm-up sets and then those five working sets that's what i would normally program as well for some of those goals so again if we're looking at this saying you know one set two sets three sets we're talking like that that sort of let's say the the two sets being like maybe their greatest return on investment we're talking about 10 stimulating repetitions there there give or take like obviously you know fatigue is going to play a bit of a role and okay are we losing one rep and that second set whatever yeah but if we're again going to try to look at how do we use low rep protocols to match this we're going to look at getting about 10 stimulating repetitions yeah exactly so
Speaker 2the next step then is to say well okay if if we've got a dose response which is happening at the workout level and it's happening at the workout level because of the mechanisms that are driving it so it's happening because your muscle fibers are growing in the kind of 48 hours post workout and ultimately um that that that process can only really go up to a certain limit so we make new proteins by elevating the rate of muscle protein synthesis and you can only really elevate them transiently up to a certain point the the machinery that makes new proteins can have only go up to a certain point and then you can only really elevate them transiently up to a certain rate of making so you can't just kind of dial the kind of the the knob up to 11 it doesn't go that far you get up to 10 and it stops it's like there's a limit to how far you can actually go when you're making those new proteins so essentially uh what's happening as you kind of uh stimulate that hypertrophy you telling the fibers to grow telling them to grow again in that same kind of 48 hour window is only going to have a progressively smaller smaller effect as you kind of do additional kind of stimulating reps also you've got the fatigue happening so as you create some fatigue you're going to then inhibit the fiber from experiencing as much stimulus either on the recruitment side by cns fatigues or on the peripheral side by calcium unrelated fatigues so ultimately there's a limit to how much we can actually drive uh muscle growth in each workout both on the stimulus side and also on the fatigue side so what we're going to aim for then is doing multiple workouts per week so if you train every uh kind of other day you're going to be able to do multiple workouts per day or three times a week you're going to get more of your first sets um you're going to process that stimulus and you're going to come back and you're going to do it again um it is mathematically impossible for somebody to beat three times a week frequency with two times or one time it just isn't possible i mean this literally the dose response relationship is what defeats pretty much any argument against a higher frequency protocol of three times or every other day um so but what do we see people actually saying what we see people saying on the one hand they say um you know oh look here is some uh kind of long-term training data and we're going to argue that that long-term training data supports the fact that frequency doesn't matter or they say oh look at this um and they say meta-analysis but they don't mean meta-analysis what they mean is network analysis so um let's just look at those two things um you know kind of and see where people's arguments are coming from so firstly they look at the long-term training data and they say oh look at this um and they say oh look at this data and what they'll do is they'll post up some selective interpretation or what they'll say is uh oh well um there's no study that shows uh that there are significant differences between two times a week and three times a week frequency that's what they'll do and that's selective so essentially what they're doing is they're trying to get you to focus on you know one fact rather than taking the entire picture of the literature as a whole so what i did when this original argument came around because we've done an entire podcast on this exact question um what i did was i literally just said look here are all of the uh trained subject uh kind of actually i think i maybe did bigger analysis i think i maybe covered the untrained ones as well but i don't remember basically i just kind of did a table and i said look here are all the relevant studies um of all the frequency and uh comparisons between one and uh two between two and three and between one and three i think i ignored the ones that were doing like five four times a week five times a week six times a week that kind of thing so basically um when you look at that data and you look at the data and you look at the data and you look at the data what you find is that there are significant differences between one and three but there aren't significant differences between one and two and two and three so essentially uh when people say look there are no significant differences between two and three times a week well they're not telling you that there also aren't differences between one and two so every time somebody stands in front of the camera as they are often want to do and they say oh well no i don't accept the people arguing that frequency makes a difference because i looked at the data and it shows that there's no significant differences between two and three that's incredibly uh disingenuous because you could literally film the same video and say there's no difference between one and two so therefore i'm going to do one time a week if you're going to stand there and claim that you're doing two times a week because there's no differences between two and three then i can literally ask you to do the same video of you telling me why you're going to train one time a week because it's the same as two and yet we know that one is not as good as three because they literally have got data showing that one is not as good as three so i'm going to do one time a week and i'm going to do two times a week and i'm going to do two times a week so i don't understand where people's kind of thought processes are going with this other than to assume that they're they're acting in bad faith because you literally can't make a case for two being better than anything it's clearly not you know because there's no significant significant differences between one and two so how how are you making the claim that it's worth you know kind of that it's as good as three it's it's very strange it's like it's it's literally just selective selectively showing a set of data and not taking in context that's the problem that's what we're seeing um so the way i read it is that you know the just there aren't big enough differences apparent in the literature between uh one and two and between two and three but you just scale from one through to three i mean that's that would be the most obvious interpretation for me and i think the reason that's happening is because muscle swelling is creating a problem in those data sets so if we look at um if we look at why muscle swelling is creating a problem if you look at volume generally speaking you're always going to find a bigger muscle growth effect of doing higher volume training now that's not just because you're getting more muscle growth it's also because you're getting more swelling if i have three groups and i give them a low medium and high volume uh kind of uh kind of workouts then what i'll see is like a progressive increase in volume in hypertrophy sorry muscle growth muscle size increases sorry across the three volume tiers and a chunk of that will be swelling and a chunk of that will be hypertrophy okay so when we're looking at the volume literature muscle swelling effects are magnifying the differences between groups yeah so we've always got a problem that the swelling is making the group bit group differences bigger so every time you go looking for differences between groups when you've got different volume tiers you are more likely to find them when it's swelling is present rather than less likely to find them when swelling is present in contrast if you volume match three frequency groups and you do one time a week two times a week and three times a week but you have all of them doing the same weekly volumes now you're going to get the same uh swelling across the three groups but you're going to get differences in terms of the um you know kind of overall muscle growth so your frequencies that are higher will get more muscle growth but they'll get the same kind of amount of swelling approximately across the week maybe a little bit less that's assuming that the volumes are under coverable i mean yeah i mean obviously when you look at the frequency comparisons where volumes are recoverable what you tend to find is that you get um a lot less uh you actually get differences between groups i mean um if you look at the frequency studies that have shown differences between frequencies generally speaking the volumes are recoverable when you start to push into frequency studies where the volumes are not recoverable then you're going to get a lot less volume and you end up in a situation where you've got muscle swelling in the groups and actually to be fair i could make a case even stronger and i could say you'll get more muscle swelling depending on where the measurements are taken you'll get more muscle swelling in the groups that are doing a lower frequency because you'll test the muscle size if you test the muscle size the same number of days after each workout if i do like if i do nine sets on one day and then i test my muscle size three days later or two days later i'm going to have a muscle swelling effect from doing that nine sets um if i'm doing three sets of uh three sets three times a week then i'm much less likely to get a swelling effect after my three set protocol than i would after my nine set protocol so the reality is that the higher frequencies will have more muscle swelling and therefore you'll actually i could make the case even stronger and i could say look you know if you're doing higher volume per workout lower frequency you can have a bigger muscle swelling effect it's going to counterbalance the uh the greater hypertrophy you're getting with the higher frequency so the reality is that you know frequency is working the opposite direction for um sorry muscle swelling is working the opposite direction for frequency it masks differences between groups muscle swelling is working for the differences between groups on the volume side so you end up with greater belief that your volumes matter and a smaller belief that your frequencies matter and that's where we are at the moment the industry basically believes that frequency doesn't matter which is insane when you think about it like okay fine yeah go and do 400 sets in one workout and get back to me like tell me that you can do that and then like like not train for the rest of the month i mean like people aren't thinking properly frequency clearly doesn't matter it's just when it matters is what we're arguing about you know so what we're saying is that we think that the stimulus period is about 48 hours long which is what you know we can go into that in a minute but um ultimately um what i'm saying here is that muscle swelling is making volume tears look bigger more look like they are more different from each other than they really are and it's making frequency
Speaker 1tears look less different than they really are now one of the arguments i hear from people online when they usually hear you say that is oh no we have no no evidence that higher volumes cause more swelling than low
Speaker 2do well we do the cody horn study showed that because it's the only study that's actually assessed volume because they measured increases in volume across a five or six week i forget how many weeks i think it's six weeks i think it was two three six yeah yeah so there's two three week blocks and they increased volume progressively over the course of that three uh those two three week blocks so and volume and swelling continues to increase across all six weeks so they're increasing volume and they're literally getting more and more swelling as they go through that six week period that's the only study that you've got that actually compare that actually measured simultaneously um whole muscle size and the contribution of muscle swelling to whole muscle size there isn't another study so you've got studies that people have done um where they've you know tested temporary increases in muscle size after a workout at different time points and some of those show i mean like the data i've collected across the i think i don't know maybe eight studies show that basically every single study that's ever been done in trained people where they've done a bunch of different uh kind of bunch of sets and then tested post-workout muscle swelling um it always comes out as between kind of one or two percent and eight percent around about the two or the three day mark which is usually when you're measuring muscle size after a after a uh the end of a strength training program so and when you consider that um differences between groups in you know kind of most hypertrophy studies aren't much more than that you you kind of basically saying you could you could find that if you're comparing one damaging protocol with one less damaging protocol then most of the differences could be swelling you know even in your trained people you know because as i say all the studies that i've put together um were in trained people so so yeah i mean i think again um when when this is the problem that we've got i feel like not the problem i've got because i'm not really trying to kind of uh you know answer all the questions but the problem that you will you will come into contact with on social media if you want to use social media as a source of information which is i think um dubious at best but if you want to use social media as a source of information like people say to me all the time oh i learned this and i learned that and i learned this from this person like really is that what you call it learning is that is that what you think you're doing um okay interesting so you're absorbing information from them or opinions from them is probably a more accurate way of describing it so you're absorbing opinions from them with rationalizations behind them and those opinions and rationalizations that you're absorbing um have come from selective information provision so like i said a minute ago when somebody says stands in front of the camera and go i've not seen any differences between you know kind of any study showing there's a difference between two and three times a week and you've absorbed that information you've internalized that and you've gone oh that means there's no difference between two and three times a week what you haven't seen is the data they haven't shown you the problem is that human beings have this thing which is called um what you see is all there is so basically your brain assumes that all the information that's in front of you right now is all the information that's necessary to answer the question now without doing you know i do this on the podcast with rob and i sometimes start having a conversation with him in the middle of a podcast but without doing that again before we jumped on the podcast today i was kind of chatting with you um just uh you know kind of casually about the problem that i see with large language models and artificial intelligence and the problem basically that i see or that obviously there's hundreds of problems and they're all working on solving them but the problem that i see that's interesting is that a lot often the large language model will focus on only the information that's right in front of it uh to answer the question that you asked it to answer and it won't actually reference information that is peripheral or next door to it uh that is actually very very relevant and it's and and i was proposed the reason for that is not because the ai is flawed it's because the ai is actually trained on human data so it's literally just replicating what we do or what people do so i think what's happening is that um when when somebody is sitting in front of their you know kind of mobile phone and absorbing opinions from influencers on on tick tock or instagram or wherever what they're doing is they're taking the information in front of them their brain is going this is the only information that matters this thing that this person is telling me right now is the only thing that matters and they don't take a moment and go what other information could be relevant here because this person is telling me that there's no significant differences in any study between two and three times a week therefore i can do two times a week and it's just me just as good as someone doing three times a week i'm like okay what other information matters have they told you about the significant differences between one time a week and two times a week or one time a week three times a week have they told you about how those data are collected and how meta-analyses are done um you know kind of uh on those areas have they told you about you know how the physiology works in the background they've not told you about any of that because it's a 30 second clip on instagram or on tick tock or wherever and so they're just making a point to get people to engage with them so if we want to actually arrive at an answer we have to do a lot more work than just absorbing someone's opinion on tick tock i think yeah which is obviously very difficult um if people don't want to be going straight to the data themselves exactly exactly and so you know this brings me back to the point that we mentioned about um you know when when people are referencing data so um there's this tendency for people to or influencers to say okay fine um you know all the data i've seen mean that this happens but they don't tell you what data they've actually looked at and again your brain kind of goes what you see is all there is um they've looked at everything therefore you know there isn't anything else to to argue about and it's like well hang on a minute you know let's do a let's do a kind of a check and see what data is relevant so one one of the same a linked kind of problem that i see is when people will share a graph and they won't reference where the graphs come from and they won't tell you how it's been made they'll just show you like there's a very famous graph with orange and uh yellow bars on it not one of mine because i do i do actually um this is actually relevant um when i first started doing infographics i've never told this story i've never told this story anywhere i've told individual people this story but i think i'm going to tell people i'm going to tell everybody now so when i first started doing infographics i actually decided to color code my studies never told anybody this so basically i decided i was going to color code the studies and i've actually moved away from doing this a little bit but you can still see the tendency in my infographics today i decided that i would make every single long-term study in humans uh color coded with red orange and yellow so if you look at my instagram and you want to pick out the studies that are strength training studies in humans just go and look for orange red and yellow and you'll see them if you want an animal study it'll be purple and pink
Speaker 1so generally speaking i'm trying to guess the colors as you're saying the categories
Speaker 2and i thought it was purple and blue guys off with that one but well okay so okay so a an acute study an acute study in humans so if it's a like a fatigue study if uh if you look at the fatigue study if you're looking for a fatigue study in humans it'll be blue with a little bit sometimes there'll be a purple line to differentiate between the groups so it'll be but it will be blue feel the overall kind of template will be blue so like if you go all the way back to the beginning very very blue dominated uh graphics will be acute studies in humans like uh number of reps uh with different kind of rep ranges or um you know post-workout fatigue or whatever all of those are going to be blue dominated uh kind of color palettes with a little bit of purple there maybe some light pink but uh the animal models are all very purple dominated with uh you know kind of a little bit pink very rarely i'll do cross-sectional analyses so like for example there's some tendon stuff where you've got uh athletes who um uh compete in long distance running uh those are all green so if you're any cross-sectional analyses like comparisons between two groups just like you know do athletes who compete in long distance running have bigger tendons achilles tendons than athletes who don't and you'll get a green color palette in that scenario very rarely do those but that's so i decided to actually color code but i actually realized that nobody could see what i was doing so nobody realized that that's what i was doing so i kind of started to slip away from it and a lot of the more recent studies i've i've i've tended to kind of go into sort of different directions with color palettes but generally speaking i kind of have stuck with my orange red and yellow palette for long-term strength training studies in humans so if you are looking on my instagram for a long-term study of uh sort of humans in strength training then it will be it will be red yellow and orange and nothing else will be there so i've never told anybody that so that's a brand new story so you can have fun uh wading through my instagram and looking at uh you know kind of the work that i've done on that but that's that was a decision i made right at the beginning and um i stuck with it for a very long time and nobody noticed so um kind of gave up but anyway uh where where are we going with that um you're talking about the um the carrier image yeah so there's a very famous a very famous um uh sort of uh graph that people throw around based on the courier network analysis now we did an entire podcast on this last summer where we basically explained what that network meta-analysis is doing and why you probably need to be a bit more cautious than um is you know the norm when interpreting the results a meta-analysis what it does it takes a group of studies which have all assessed the same question they've all assessed you know what is the difference in say for example training frequency between you know kind of low frequencies high frequencies so you take a couple of groups that are doing different training frequencies and you say you know okay what is the muscle growth that happens in each of those two groups and then you group all of those studies together and you do an effect size calculation for each study and then what you'll generally do depending on the kind of characteristics of the studies you might weight all of the studies equally or you might weight some of the studies and to a greater extent depending on your confidence in their results so you can kind of do statistical kind of different what are called effects models you can kind of pick and choose which of those models you think best your data best fit and then you can use those and you'll end up with an overall effect size for you know training with different frequencies that's a meta-analysis now the courier network analysis was not a meta-analysis so when people say it's a meta-analysis that's not correct it's not it's a it's a i mean you depending on your terminology but it's not but it's not a meta-analysis in the sense that the industry thinks of as meta-analysis it's a network analysis which is a different thing what they did was basically you you don't necessarily take studies that have compared um different frequencies uh you basically just have a load of studies which have to use different frequencies and they all get included so you end up with loads more studies which is why when influencers look at it they'll go oh this this analysis included a hundred studies i'm like yeah but none of them actually compared training any frequencies and in fact for reasons that are unknown to me when we did the analysis on the podcast well i actually went through every single study that went into the metro into the network analysis they actually missed out a bunch of important frequency studies that should have been in there now i don't know why whether it was data cut off or whether it was you know kind of the the you know the the search criteria or whatever but they actually missed some of the important frequency studies that we have in the meta-analyses so you know even though it included a load of studies i actually included a load of irrelevant studies which compared you know kind of um a control group with a a higher frequency um not actually two different frequencies at all so it's a network network analysis and i don't actually agree with people who say that that is a valid way of um you know kind of ascertaining effects in strength training context i just don't agree with them i don't think it's appropriate um but anyway it's not a meta-analysis it did include different studies but it's not a meta-analysis it did include different studies but it's not a meta-analysis it did include different studies but it's not a meta-analysis it did include different studies yet when people what people will do is they'll show this um kind of graph which has no citation on it it's not like one of mine where i have a citation at the bottom where you can trace it back literally it's just a graph of bars which shows that you know two times a week is either the same as three times or better and it's like that is incredibly disingenuous way of presenting information because it's not telling anybody about how the data is collected it's not telling them that network analysis actually excluded some important frequency studies it's not telling them that it includes studies that probably aren't relevant and it's just basically throwing big numbers at people and going this this study included loads and loads of studies therefore it's really valuable and important and we should just trust what it says and that is incredibly disingenuous you know that is not really appropriate behavior i don't think so what we need to do is recognize where these data come from be clear about where they're coming from and what their assumptions are behind them because that graph is absolutely not i get a load of abuse online from the way that i present data you know i do what i think presents the data in the in the best possible way but i always make it clear where the data has come from and people can go back and check the original data because the citation is there and i also make notes as what my graphics infographics do i make notes about what like in the meta-analysis i'll say this meta-analysis included this many studies and you know these are the criteria and you know so even if you don't want to go and check the original document you can just read off the infographic i present where the data have come from and broadly speaking how the data were kind of compiled you know i think that's really important so you know the reason we started this podcast episode today was because um you mentioned uh something that happened recently online and uh two of the kind of protagonists in the conflict as it were uh one of them basically said um that they didn't agree because the data didn't agree with something and they didn't specify where the data would come from and the other person basically did more or less the same thing with a little bit more information but more or less just saying long-term studies don't support that view and i think you know that's what i i think i was trying to get out with this conversation today which is that you know when we are stating opinions about uh what we think is happening i think we need to be clearer about where we are deriving our information from and i'm like this entire podcast is all about you know kind of being clear where the information comes from and um why we think certain things you know i mean that's ultimately what we're doing today was talking about how dose responses work our frequency uh builds on those responses i mean and the only really uh missing piece now we want to do is just talk about stimulus periods but um i've been talking probably non-stop for the last 15 minutes so i should probably um ask you uh what you think is uh going on at the moment
Speaker 1it's it's a very difficult topic i think like obviously the the first sets bit is relatively straightforward when you understand the physiology and we've done multiple episodes on it i think what's really difficult and what i'm finding hard to get my head around is to what even suggestions to make to people is how can you discern when you are being presented or when you do have the full picture in front of you and you do have the full data in front of you and it you're not going to get it online and i don't know i just don't have good advice really give to people because you've even said that okay well you know look for citations okay that's all well and good but the amount of content creators i see who put out citations who flash an image of a paper with a name and then the study doesn't say anything that they've said it said and and like so often i'll just see people come back and these are people with huge accounts and they'll just say things like oh i used wrong study okay that's all well and good but now these you know 10 000 people who've seen that post who aren't seeing your comments say that you used wrong study they now believe that thing and in fact even if they don't even if they do see your comment now but you've retracted that statement it's still embedded in their mind and they they still part of them unconsciously you're still going to believe that thing that they saw the first time
Speaker 2so which is why i said that the the issue is not so much education when people say to me oh i've learned this from this content creator and i've learned this from that content creator and i'm like probably not you've probably just absorbed opinions from yeah that's not the same thing as learning um you know you want to learn way way through the faq but i also acknowledge it not
Speaker 1necessarily everyone wants to learn right like some people don't some people just want to learn just want to know what to do and what's going to work and so it's a really difficult thing to kind of give advice on there because it's like okay if you want actually that's that's that's not a
Speaker 2problem barbell strategy is not a problem so the barbell strategy you take either end of the spectrum either you just want a program that's going to work okay fine well then just go and do a silver area bodybuilding program before steroids destroyed every kind of um like uh
Speaker 1knowledge base that we've got in the industry i mean that's a bit of confidence in what we're like i guess you could argue that there's not any variables there to how many people are going to
Speaker 2stand up and argue that stories haven't i mean like literally i i've done this i've done this thought experiment before uh i keep saying to people look if you think that magically in the 1970s everybody suddenly discovered the best way to achieve muscle growth was to train with high volumes infrequently and you know kind of higher repetitions short rest periods and all of that and it was just totally and utterly random and coincidental that that was precisely when they all started hopping onto it and you you want to make that case to me i mean like honestly make that case with a straight face and we can like have a conversation which will mostly involve me laughing at you but ultimately we can have that conversation but nobody is going to do that nobody is going to go do you know what yeah it was totally coincidental that you know everybody trained in exactly the same way right up until like the sort of 60s and 70s and then they all started training randomly in a different way but that was better but also and this is a bit
Speaker 1that's even more ludicrous is also some of them did it some of them did the exact opposite and
Speaker 2they also got just as good yeah carry on yeah it just doesn't matter at that point so yeah i think the issue is that you know the barbell strategy which is like the opposite extremes actually are okay on the one extreme if you just want to have a good program that works then great just go and do a silver era bodybuilding program and just forget all of this nonsense yeah um if you actually want to understand what's going on you've got a lifetime of you know kind of reading to do yes yeah and i think the faq is a really good starting place for that and even if you just go through and take out the citations that i've listed and just read them and ignore what i'm saying about them you'll get to pretty much the same place i'm sure but you know if you want to do it without my kind of commentary around the edges then fine do that um but in the middle is the problem the middle is the problem where people kind of want to like oh i'm trying to find the best way and i'm learning this from this person no you're not you're absorbing their opinions yeah and i think that's and the middle bit which is where everybody is because that's what normal distribution work how normal distribution works um basically the middle is the problem because everybody thinks that they know better than everybody else you know and they don't um you know basically the person who's at one end of the extreme um you know who's just literally following a silver era program and the person who's gone completely mad and spent 15 years of you know working through all the data or who's just picked up my faq and run with it because they're basically just outsourced their thinking to me you know fine either of those two extremes is going to work but the middle bit where that's where it's not going to work because people are assuming that they have some kind of miraculous ability to like honestly you know this is this is what is crazy okay so somebody will discover like i actually have followers who followed me um for a very long time um and they will have absorbed pretty much everything that i've i've kind of put out there they've been through the faq they've they literally i see them liking every single post and every single patreon article that i write and i see them often commenting and making intelligent thought uh kind of contributions to those and then suddenly out of the blue they'll say oh i agree with 99% of what you say but this one percent i agree with this other person i'm like are you insane are you actually insane you think that even after internalizing every single thing about my model you now think you know my model better than i do to the point where you can find the problems with it and now incorporate some nonsense from another creator who i've literally explained why their position is wrong multiple times and you think that somehow they're right on that point and i'm not and you can discern that really okay that takes a pretty huge ego you know i mean honestly i i human nature is fascinating it's like the ability to kind of work through somebody else's model except that it is you know pretty much the best explanation or something but then suddenly kind of say oh no no actually i somehow have now achieved the like ability to know more than you do even though everything i know has come from you like honestly where do you where do you get
Speaker 1those are very funny situations where that happens often i will get less so now but sometimes i would get caught up in in conversations let's say online and you know people will be sometimes i'll have it where people are arguing with something that i've like content i've literally put out or i'll have people who are arguing with me who don't know you know i do a podcast with you or whatever and they'll be like you don't understand this at all you know this is like go look at what chris says about chris beasley said this isn't this and they're trying to disprove what i'm saying based on your content i'm like okay thank you for explaining to me what chris believes because i had no idea really but i imagine what's happening in the situations you're pointing out is it's an emotional attachment where they've they've got this sort of one part of their existing emotional sort of belief is is influencing or informing part of their identity and your models challenge that and because i'll get these comments too where somebody'll be like oh i agree with you and i'll be like oh i agree with you and i'll be like oh with everything you say but man you really missed it with this one it's like ah so what you're telling me is that this one particular topic that's actually violating some kind of identity
Speaker 2thing for you right it doesn't mean the only way somebody is going to overturn my model is to go through all the literature that i've already gone through and figure out where my interpretation has erred relative to the underlying data nobody's going to do that it took me 10 years nobody's going to do that there will be a point in the future where i'm having this argument with ai it's not there yet but there will be a point in the next two or three years where i'm having this argument with ai and at some point ai will will win but we're nowhere near that point yet and we're nowhere near with anybody else so you know i think it is it is basically somebody will have and that emotional response will hijack their brain's ability to just sense check what they're doing you know i literally cannot understand how somebody could you know kind of literally get all of their model from from what i've written and then turn around and go i actually know you're wrong here i'm like are you serious really and it's not because i won't like accept uh changes of opinion you've literally you've literally done this on air where you've disagreed with me and i've been actually yes you're right and you don't we've done it multiple times in person you know where you pointed out that there's something that i've not connected in the model i'm working with i'm going yeah absolutely right so anyway um sorry i hijacked you again you were you were telling me what you thought
Speaker 1well i i don't even know where i was going but i think just to finish off what you said there if someone does have that response if someone if you're listening to this and and there's you know whether that's you know chris's model or whether that's you know other content that you're engaging with and you're like yeah this is this all makes sense i agree with all of this and then suddenly you have that experience we're like ah but this one thing that's not going to work and then you're like that for me like that's a no-go i think that's probably a valuable invitation for you to actually examine well what is it there that you've got this emotional attachment to because it's probably unlikely that that's the one thing that in fact is incorrect it's more likely it's probably you could use that as a mirror for yourself and see what's this thing i'm not willing to actually um go deeper with i guess very philosophical
Speaker 2so what what will happen yeah just following on from that what i think happened often in those scenarios i mean we had a very famous very public uh example of exactly what you just described there but what sometimes what people will do when they're faced with those kind of like oh no no no this this part of the model doesn't work i don't agree with that as you say it's because emotionally they want to program in a certain way or emotionally they want to do something uh that that then disagrees with um and so they start looking for reasons why the model doesn't work and so essentially um when we're talking about frequency we're explaining that you've got this dose response of uh kind of um hypertrophy to volume which is non-linear which means that you need more first sets per week and immediately what you'll get is people going oh no that's wrong because reasons and as i say mostly they'll start off with long-term training data and i've already debunked that basically they're just selectively picking either the uh kind of fact that yeah sure there's no significant difference between two and three but that is masking the fact that there's no significant difference between two and three and that's the fact that there's no significant difference between one and two and the fact that there are between one and three and muscle swelling is clearly causing a problem in those situations so again they'll selectively pick a few studies in there or they'll reference the courier meta sorry network analysis again which is irrelevant um you know so again um they're they're just basically just cherry picking the bits of data they want to show you and your whizzy wizzy rt what you see is all there is will fill in the gaps and they'll basically be hijacking your brain's normal pattern recognition processes to win the argument um what they'll then do when you say to them okay yeah but what about atrophy and they go no no atrophy is not a big deal and like okay well how does the maintenance literature kind of exist then because if maintenance literature you know kind of shows that you can do three or four sets once per week and end up with you know kind of no hypertrophy across the week then you must be getting atrophy inside a training week and they'll go oh no no that's not relevant because um and reasons i mean it's seen multiple reasons but sometimes they'll go oh no atrophy occurs very slowly initially and then uh quicker later on exact opposite got absolutely tons of data i mean i've literally done faq after faq on this i've got another faq coming up uh again i've collected the data again because i've got even more studies every bed rest study shows exponential uh decay in muscle growth uh with the fastest rate of loss happening initially uh every immobilization study shows the same thing um every animal study where they do um like a protocol for creating massive muscle growth whether it's stretch whether it's um stimulation whatever it is always as soon as you stop the protocol the muscle growth collapses initially and then settles down um literally every single data source that we've got shows the same thing a bunch of infographics on instagram um faq coming uh soon so um ultimately that isn't true muscle growth definitely does dissipate very quickly initially so that that kind of counteracts that and so what they've ended up they've had to kind of move away from that they've gone okay well no the stimulus period lasts you know forever whatever you know it's like you know it's like 72 hours or 96 hours whatever and um and and ultimately that that was a really fun kind of one because um the only study that has actually measured um elevations in um muscle myofibril protein synthesis past kind of 24 hours or 28 hours i think um no sorry 31 32 hours it doesn't matter it's not it's not past 36 definitely not i mean certainly not 48 is um is is a kicking study really not a strength training study um and and even then muscle proteins in this it doesn't really reflect um you know the hypertrophy stimulus anyway um so that they start really building castles on sand and we've got really nice data showing that the 48 hour window post workout is statistically correlated with long-term hypertrophy suggesting that pretty much all of the stimulus period is in that 48 hours you know so all the good data kind of shows that we probably do have a 48 hour stimulus period irrespective of kind of what we've been doing and so that's and i think it's probably shorter than that um so again they start looking for reasons to kind of justify why a kind of uh lower frequency can work um it's a really really strange place to be because they're literally pushing water uphill because everything we've got whether it's like pre-steroid era bodybuilding data whether it's um physiology analysis whether it's long-term trials that haven't been kind of tortured by physical analysis to make them show something that they don't show um all the data kind of points in the same direction which is that three times is going to be better than two times um and then clearly it just becomes an emotional kind of thing for people that like oh no no we want to train two times a week or we want to train with different exercises multiple times per week instead of the same exercise multiple times per week it doesn't really matter i mean it's all just kind of we want to program in this way therefore we're going to make up reasons and you know kind of um put those opinions to our followers without noticing um and and argue against uh what is clearly probably most logical but you know yeah i think your point
Speaker 1before about obviously most people find themselves in this middle ground where they kind of loosely want to understand stuff but they kind of just want to be told how to understand as opposed to seeking to truly understand yeah i think it would be valuable for people to identify if that is in
Speaker 2fact where you're you're well if you're listening to a pocket then you are in that zone i mean basically unless unless you are in and unless you are actively educating yourself so you know unless you are working through the faq um unless you are part of the certification project um you know unless you've done the mentorship um or unless you are you know kind of going through very carefully and reading the infographics um and faq articles that i send out every week unless you're doing that then you're not in that zone and you're not in that zone those things which yeah sure a proportion of our readership are educating themselves actively sure cool great but i think most people are treating this as infotainment um and they're not structuring their education and that is going to put you firmly in the middle ground where you're basically just having your information your opinions are going to be um kind of implanted in your brain by by your kind of um what you see is all there is algorithm that just kind of looks at whatever image you've got in front of you and goes that's truth or you instinctively go that's true and therefore you now absorb and modify your existing opinions or you look at it and go that's not truth and you kind of discard it and push yourself further away from that and that's all that's happening and there's no process of education going on at all there's no cognitive education is cognitive right so uh if you are educating yourself then you're thinking about how things work and you're trying to move concepts your head and you're trying to connect that with an understanding of where that data has come from now in a perfect world you would actually read the entire paper but um most of the time that is going to take you an extremely long period of time to get to where you need to be and so you're going to have to rely on a secondary source an interpretation of that in order to understand so you need to know where the data has come from what type of data it is and what you feel you know kind of is important about that and that's that's doable without kind of reading every single paper word for word um but you're going to have to have a structured guidance through that which is what the faq does what the certification does what the mentorship program has done you know those are designed to get you to move concepts around in your head and understand them you don't have to read every single paper in detail um that's education but that's cognitive that's work yeah you know whereas emotionally if you're if you're interacting with stuff emotionally which is what human beings instinctively want to do then you on the social media basically what you're doing constantly is just judging whether or not you feel that something is true or not and based on how it feels and your interpretation of the person that is giving the information and whether you feel they're trustworthy or not and your brain is basically just going is that truth or is it not and then if it's truth then you take a little bit of the extra information that's provided and you add it onto your existing model and you get like another two years down the line and you're basically your model of how the strength training process works is now a conglomeration of different emotional inputs from a different fitness influence as who you've trusted and it means nothing it's absolutely nothing and it's not just about what you're doing it is absolute garbage it is absolute garbage you know because all it is is just a kind of frankenstein of opinions glued together from different people who didn't really know what they were talking about in the beginning and just managed to catch you on the right day in the right mood and it modified your opinion in a particular direction and connected with some other thing in your head in the past and made you feel it was true and that's what most people are walking around with a frankenstein of opinions that they've absorbed from other people
Speaker 1and then it's like venice is a floating city it's his whole whole infrastructure that's not really
Speaker 2built on much of a foundation i find that comparison a little bit offensive given it's probably my favorite city in the world but um yeah i mean um it's a frankenstein isn't it it's it's a frankenstein's monster of opinions that have been and that's what most people are walking around with they're walking around with a frankenstein's monster in their head of opinions that they've absorbed over you know years of watching social media and having depending on you know what you have for breakfast in the morning or you know what mood you're in and whether the fitness influencer catches you on the right day with the right idea and you just kind of then modify your belief slightly and it morphs into something slightly different and that's that's the that's the middle of the bell curve that's what most people are walking around with and that's and that's why when people ask me to take them seriously that i don't because it's not a cognitive process so they've come to their current
Speaker 1yeah when i do consults around like training with people often i'll try to gauge how much someone seems to know about the topic and sometimes people will you know they'll consult with me and they may be coaches themselves or they you know have a high interest in this and they've absorbed a lot of information and often they're doing what i would class a kind of fairly ludicrous things in the gym and i know that that's going to be a very difficult sort of conversation for me to try to win them over to you know my sort of way of thinking and how my you know i guess our model works and sometimes i get people who have no idea and they're like yep you know i've i've never been in the gym or i've just picked up a magazine and i've been following that and i get i just have a sigh of relief i'm like this is great because i can just explain to you the basics of what you need to understand and you've got no emotional attachment to you know i can tell you that actually this plan you've been once a week per muscle i can just in one minute explain to you how that stimulus period is over very quickly and each additional set's giving you about half as much stimulus as a set before it and we may as well just do one or two sets every two or three days and that's going to be better than what you're doing and they're like oh that's so interesting oh i get it now and it's it's so much
Speaker 2easier without that emotional attachment it is absolutely it's the frankenstein's monster is the problem yeah you know it's a barbell situation absolutely one one of the somebody just wants a routine you can just go yep silver era routine bang done well i want to
Speaker 1highlight that that's such a good point because if you are listening to this and you're in the middle maybe maybe you should actually allow yourself to drift over to that side of the spectrum where like okay sure consume this information if you want but maybe you don't don't don't go do something
Speaker 2more productive with your life seriously you know go and go and take up a you know a more wholesome productive activity seriously get get off social media go and do something you know kind of wholesome and and um life affirming instead of this horrible monstrosity that exists that just sucks the life out of people you know honestly um yeah i mean sure if you want to join me at the opposite end of the barbell then cool you know but that's a cognitive place not an emotional place
Speaker 1yeah yeah yeah so otherwise you know that's hey you know we still have to do something to start our podcast with usually silver era plans there's plenty of fun to say you can do next week we'll have half as many listeners thanks to your advice just telling everyone to turn off and stop listening to us that's not how you're meant to do it
Speaker 2yeah it's just i'm genuinely just who i am i just tell people how i see it um but yeah it's um definitely a uh very big problem for the middle of the bell curve which is that most of the people within that zone um are just i've just got frankenstein's monsters in their heads of opinions that they absorbed over multiple years that they don't really know how they got there you know um i mean um yeah it's and as you say it's very difficult to reason somebody out of an opinion that they weren't reasoned into that they were emotionally led into um and that's that's what you will see online as soon as someone gets triggered and starts getting emotional then you know it's because they never required the opinion that understanding cognitively because if if you argue with me about something then i'll say well this is why i think that and this is where i got the idea from the concepts from and these are all the kind of you can just trace it back through these these areas um and you show me that i made a mistake in any of those areas then i'll modify my position that i've ended up at but you try and do that with anybody else or most other people and they will be like oh well i just thought that i know you just thought that you actually didn't think that you felt that it's different but
Speaker 1um anyway so the sort of bottom line here is care less don't bother educating yourself unless
Speaker 2you're going to be an expert yeah okay unless unless you want to do it properly then what the infotainment infotainment is probably the worst uh what's the right word neologism i don't know the invention of a new word so there's definitely a word that um that describes that anyway um basically it's probably one of the worst uh words ever really to be coined because there isn't actually any such thing you know um if you're if you're actually educating yourself then it is is going to not going to have a heavy emotional content because as soon as there's emotional content then you're being persuaded and if you're being persuaded then you're not being educated really you know um i mean a number of times people have said to me oh if you just made your work more accessible if you just made your work you know kind of more click baity if you just made it you'd be you'd be so influential like yeah but um then i wouldn't be educating anymore. If you just made it more emotional, then more people will have an emotional attachment to it. That's what they're saying to you. Exactly. And I'm like, yeah, but that's the point, isn't it? If you've got, then it's not, you haven't educated. Let me just emphasize that one more time. If I persuade you that something is true by appealing to your emotions and making you feel good while I impart some information and giving you a reason to jump up and down about that thing and to criticize other things in contrast to it, then I'm not educating you. I'm brainwashing you into a way of, or a cult almost, of believing a certain set of things. If I set out a journey of educational content for you to work your way through, which is largely neutral in emotional kind of context, then I'm educating you. And you're like, yeah, but that's boring. Yeah, I know. But what you're looking for is excitement of emotion. But the minute I put that excitement of emotion in there, then I'm not educating you anymore. I'm not manipulating you. So ultimately, you've got to decide what you want for yourself. Do you want to feel good now, or do you want to actually know what's going on? And I think that, and I think that's a really good question. I think that unless there's something very abnormal about you, like there is about me, then you're always going to pick wanting to feel better right now and enjoy yourself rather than being obsessive about figuring out what's going on. You know, my brain just has an obsession with trying to understand what's going on. That's just the way it's constructed. So I'm always going to go down that route, however painful it is. But not many people are going to do that because it's just not
Speaker 1human. You know, I think it actually is an interesting point, even for content creators, for coaches. Like I think we've moved into a space now over the last maybe five years or so where coaches feel like they need to be educators. And that, from my experience, that didn't seem to be the case in the past. Coaches were happy to be coaches and coaches would potentially give out tips on how to make the experience easier for the client or how to, you know, optimize your results or whatever. But they weren't trying to educate on underlying science and physiology. And now I think coaches feel like they need to be educators, but they're not actually like they're first and foremost coaches. You know, they're not doing what you're doing. They're not spending. I mean, God, I was a coach for freaking years before. And like I was an obsessive coach where in my spare time, this is the kind of stuff I'm doing. Like I'm reading every book I can find. I'm talking to people like you. And it was years before I put out any public content on anything to do with training because I didn't feel equipped or qualified to do that. And I was like, I don't know if I'm equipped or qualified to do that. And now coaches who have been coaches for six months now feel like they need to be putting out education. So it's a really messy landscape, I think, even for content creators and for coaches to navigate.
Speaker 2Yeah, absolutely. And of course, the algorithms reward information, sorry, content, not information, reward content, reward content that spikes emotions. And so the algorithms themselves are pulling you further and further away from the possibility of educating yourself. I mean, ultimately, this is a really, really interesting dynamic because what social media is going to do is it's going to prioritize manipulative emotional focused content and deprioritize educational content. And I've said it before, I'll say it again. If your emotions are being spiked during the consumption of some content, then you are not being educated. It's not possible for you to be educated. You're not possible for you to be educated in that scenario, because you are not thinking, you are feeling. And if you're feeling, then you are being imparted an emotion, which is going to then add on to your Frankenstein's monster of opinions that you've got in your head, which represents what you think is real. And it's not. So yeah, I think actually it's inherently self-destructive. Self-destructive is the wrong word. It's inherently harmful, if you like, for the seeking of the right. or the truth of actually what's going on because the greater rewards are sent to the worst kind of type of content. The least truly educative content.
Speaker 1Yeah, the least educative content. So it is sort of self-defeating in that sense. Yeah, it makes me think, you know, maybe as content creators, like maybe I should be putting out more content around just helpful tips instead of trying to educate people.
Speaker 2I think, yeah, I mean, I think that that barbell idea is the place to start. It's that, you know, ultimately, you know, how can we make something that is useful as possible? Start there. So we want to make something that's as useful as possible. Then my mission is to try and get physiological concepts into a model format, which people can literally pick up and implement. And if they are capable of understanding the model and applying it to strength training, then they'll be able to write really great strength training programs. Fantastic. Okay, so I'm serving a group of people who are very small in number. They are willing to do some work to understand concepts. I'm not saying that these people are going to be wading through individual papers. They're not. They're going to be looking at what I'm describing in the FAQ as a concept and saying, look, these studies show this concept is in place. Like these studies show that calcium amylase, these studies show that calcium amylase is in place. And therefore, we need to be aware that there'll be these problems in this context, in intra-workout, and these problems in the post-workout period. And it can accumulate. And when you start to understand that concept, and nobody's had to read a paper to get this far. I can literally just do that based on what I just said. You can then start to change the way you program and think about stretch position exercises differently, think about higher repetitions differently, think about eccentric training differently, think about volume dose responses differently. And you start to incorporate that concept into your kind of training. And you start to incorporate that concept into your kind of way of strength training. I mean, it's like that is education. Equally, you could take the opposite end of the barbell. You know, kind of where you're excelling. And you could go, hey, look, here's some inspiration from, you know, this silver era lifter. This is the exact program that he did. You know, here is how you could do that in a modern gym with these equipment choices. Here's how you could do that in a garage gym setting with these equipment choices. Here's some modification. And you could literally do like a couple of slides together. Showing, look, here are your options if you want to do an inspired workout by, you know, I don't know, Steve Reeves or whoever else. Like, you could literally just, and you could even do a table where you could be like, you know, here's exactly the number of sets, reps and whatever. And you could literally speed people that. And I think it'd be really cool to go down that route of kind of. So, I think that's, you know, kind of there are directions that we can go in that would be more useful.
Speaker 1Yeah. I just think social media maybe. Is not the place for education as we've come to throughout this conversation.
Speaker 2Well, I think it's an anti-educative tool, really. Yeah. In the format that we experience, it's an anti-educative tool. I mean, you can argue that maybe it's different in other parts of the world, but. Yeah. Certainly where we are.
Speaker 1And, you know, that's why obviously we've got the certification, you know, that exists as an educational tool. And I suppose social media just can't facilitate that. Well, this isn't. Yeah. I anticipated us ending up, but hopefully people have found it a helpful conversation.
Speaker 2I'm always in this strange mood when I'm traveling, so that's the issue.
Speaker 1And yeah, I mean, it's my weekend, I think, Sunday. Yeah. And I've spent all day reading philosophy, so that's probably put me in a particular mindset as well. So, if you stuck with us this far through our rabbit run of topics that we've covered, thank you. Do you want to give any. Any summary to try to tie it all together, or should we just leave people with these disparate thoughts to do with it as well?
Speaker 2I don't think they're that disparate. I think basically it's, it's, it's, it's a, it was a series of observations on a recent debate regarding training frequency and, and, and training volume. That was the kind of the underlying thing, but the context of that was that the original perpetrators of that conflict, of that discussion online were people who were essentially falling into the trap. Of infotainment, you know, they were referencing a couple of comments around data and comments around, you know, long-term training studies and not actually providing any kind of full context or model or anything like that. So there's no education. It was just like, believe me because I'm jacked and believe me because I've got loads of people in my groups or believe me because I've got, you know, all these followers or believe me because I say I've read this and who knows whether they've read it or whether they've just pulled it off of AI. I mean. You know, ultimately it was a conversation about a specific question, but then it was a conversation about the context of that question as well. And it just happened to lead us in the direction of realizing that actually, you know, generally speaking, social media is probably quite a negative thing. And interestingly, actually, you know, some other prominent people in the space have made the same observation, but from a different angle. I mean, literally the other day you were saying that you, some of the creators that you keep, um, an eye on, um, because of their influence, they've been saying negative things about social media as well for different reasons, you know? they're experiencing other negative which i'm not even going to try and speculate upon because i try to stay away from social media as much as possible but ultimately um i think it is interesting just to kind of think about the very very negative effects that it can have and you know i think being kind of terminally online isn't necessarily a good thing for a number of reasons but the purpose of what i've been talking about today in that context is not to talk about those harmful effects it's just to emphasize that what people think they are doing when they are scrolling through social media looking at content creators in this space is not actually what is happening um they're not actually educating themselves they are absorbing opinions based on limited information provision that because of the spike in emotions that's coming alongside those is being incorporated into their belief structure inadvertently without it's like a virus that's being executed inside your brain really yeah it's like a mind virus that's kind of you you're absorbing why by allowing that content in in that emotional state and that's ultimately why a lot of self-help actually uses emotional kind of framing for many of the interventions that they they kind of recommend it's because it actually does change people so by giving online and exposing yourself to that emotionally kind of sort of framed content you're allowing someone to change your opinion without you actually having full control over that process and that's why i think the educational model that i'm doing is obviously a lot less successful in financial terms but actually is actually is capable of delivering what people say they want rather than what they actually seem to kind of respond to but there you a few weeks ago i put out a post and i
Speaker 1said that if you are looking at content and that content is making you feel anger or it's making you feel guilt or embarrassment or shame then ultimately that content is not there to educate you it's there to influence you or manipulate you totally totally i think at the very least if people understand that if you're watching something because the amount of arguments i see online it's like how embarrassing that people think three times a week is better than is ah okay you've just made it really clear for everyone what you're doing right now if you're using any of this shame-based terminology you have no intention of educating or maybe you think you've got an intention of educating me not and at least as viewers and audiences we can at least start to identify when that's happening to us okay that's it for us today thank you guys thank you for joining us we will be back next week with uh more philosophical pond drinks
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