Speaker 1Welcome back. Thank you guys for joining us for our 53rd episode. So we've been here for over a year. We're still here, which surely that means like we've made it in like the top X percent of podcasts. I'm sure there's some stat there that like, I don't know, 95% of podcasts don't make it through the first year. Maybe I'll make that set up now. So I feel like it's an achievement. Congratulations, Chris, you made it through the first year. Yeah. I know you've been doing podcasts before that anyway. In fact, we both have, so it's not actually that much of an achievement. But anyway, thank you guys for joining us for over a year of episodes. How are you doing today? Yeah, I'm doing well. Thanks, Jake. Just trying to think if we have any announcements we don't get, but we will have some soon. So stay tuned.
Speaker 2We will have. Yes. I'm very excited about that, but we shall keep quiet about it till next week.
Speaker 1We will. Yes. I shouldn't have said anything. Okay. Let's jump into the goods. I'm going to give you guys a... Workout plan. We're going to talk about... So last week we did a golden era plan. I forget whose it was, but it was wild. It was like 4 million sets or something absolutely insane like that. So I thought, you know what? We need to swing the pendulum back. We need to go back to silver era. We need to look at a, maybe a little bit more, I guess, sane type of plan. And we've got one from George Eiferman today. Now we have talked about George Eiferman, I think once before, and he was a fairly important figure in the silver era. So, you know, the fact we've made it a whole year and only mentioned his name, I think once is pretty impressive. But Eiferman sort of, he was another one of these characters who bridged the gap between the early silver era and coming into the golden era, or I guess you would call it kind of early golden era. So he was competing in the, he started competing in the late forties. And so he was kind of like, I guess, the generation after people like Steve Reeves and Reg Park. He still kind of cut his teeth. In the York barbell kind of scene. And he didn't start winning competitions until, I think he won Mr. Philadelphia or something like that in maybe 1948 or late forties. And then he won the universe in, in the early sixties. So he was very much a kind of like tail end of the silver era. And he's got an interesting backstory. I mean, you've talked about this kind of idea before where these guys back then, before they stood firm, they stepped foot in a gym, they were more active. Like they were just doing more physically with their bodies than most people are today. And they've, they'd acquired quite a lot of muscle. And, and it's interesting with Eiferman, cause we've actually got some of his stats and he was in the middle, I think it was in the Navy, some defense force. And in his time in the defense force, he didn't lift weights. Like they, they were using buckets of water and bags of flour and stuff like that. And they were doing physical activity, but they weren't actually, you know, in a gym, you know, in the gym. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he gained something like 25 pounds in his time in the military. And so by the time he stood, stepped foot in a gym, he was almost 200 pounds. He was one, 190, 195, something along those lines. So it's interesting if you were to then look at someone like Eiferman back then, the amount he's going to be able to gain in the gym is going to be significantly less in total than if you've got a beginner today who, you know, has been sitting on the couch, playing games, whatever, hasn't really been active. And, you know, a lot of this time people will ask, well, how much can I gain? How much muscle as a newbie, as a beginner, how much can I gain in a year? And you've answered this before. It depends on what you've been doing. You know, if you've been sedentary, it's going to be a hell of a lot more than if you're someone who's out there, you know, hiking and playing sports and whatnot. Anyway, so that was Eiferman. He was, he was active before he stood up in the gym. And what we've got here today is a plan that he was following in the late forties. So this is, you know, a few years into his training, he's, he started, you know, working towards some of these competitions, Mr. Philadelphia. And in the past episode of his, we covered a plan from the fifties where he talked about what was his favorite plan. That was his, his most favorite routine. And so this is an earlier plan of his. And if you guys are interested, go back and listen to that episode. I think it's like maybe episode 38 or something like that. Uh, and compare how these differ because I actually think this is a better plan in my opinion, but you guys don't know what this plan is yet. So let me enlighten you. So it was a multi-set plan as well. I'll mention that. So he, he used at least two sets for each exercise, uh, except possibly the first exercise. So the first exercise was hack squat. Uh, and he would often do this with three sets of five to 10 repetitions, but sometimes he would swap in a breathing squat. So we have talked about the breathing squat before. So breathing squat would be a single set of 10 repetitions. So he would swap in a breathing squat before. So breathing squat would be a single set of 10 repetitions. So breathing squat would be a single set of 10 repetitions. But you've broken it up. So depending on how you would perform it, it might be that you do 10 repetitions and that 10 reps will be more or less to like, you know, close to failure. And then you would sort of do these little rest pause kind of mini sets and get 20 reps in total. So sometimes you would do that. Sometimes you would just do a three sets of five to 10 repetitions. Then he would go from the squat and we talked about breath periods last week. And it'd be interesting. It'd be interesting to track how long one would need to rest for after doing a set of breathing squats. But anyway, so he then went into a wide grip barbell bench. And again, it was three sets of five to 10 repetitions. And then a flat dumbbell chest press. Now my understanding of the way Eiferman did these was it was a little bit more, I guess, more neutral grip. So we've contrasted that wide grip bench to a slightly closer grip with the dumbbell chest press. And that was for two sets of five to 10. And then we have bent over barbell row. I think that was more sagittal plane. And that was three sets of five to 10 repetitions. And then we have bent over barbell row. I think that was five to 10. And then a behind the neck barbell press. I think he did these seated, but they were being done seated and standing at this time. And he did three sets of five to 10 for the behind the neck. And then we have a single leg squat. Now, like this was done for a single set. Okay. So we do have an exercise here for single set. So single leg squat for one set of five to 10. So a pistol squat kind of variation. And then we've got calf raises, three sets of 25, which we've talked about in the past, you know, probably just a limitation on equipment and load that they can use. And then a barbell curl for three sets of five to 10, and then a triceps pulley push down. So I guess what we would use for the cable, three sets of five to 10. So we have nine exercises in total, almost each exercise, two or three sets with the exception of the single leg squat, or maybe the breathing squat and relatively low, I would say repetitions five to 10, you know, similar kind of rep scheme we see from people like Steve Reeves as well. What are your thoughts on that one?
Speaker 2So this is interesting. I mean, obviously everything I say here is kind of going to be sort of, you know, talking about minutiae really, because in essence, it is a very Soviet era program. There are lots and lots of programs that are very much like this. You know, so ultimately I'm really splitting hairs with any kind of comments that I make on this. But having said that, there are things about this that I do like quite a lot. And there are also things that I don't like about it quite a lot. So it is polarizing me a little bit compared to the average or more common Soviet era program. So I do like, I do like the five to 10 rep range. I like that because often, I mean, I am very much, I'm comfortable with a wider rep range. I think I can see practical reasons why people might want to go up as high as 15 sometimes. You know, but I'm generally much happier if I'm programming five to eight to five to seven, that kind of zone. So when I see five to 10, I'm like, I'm pretty, pretty happy with that. I like that because I think it makes the most sense for post-workout recovery processes. On the other hand, I don't like the volume programming. Again, it works. There's nothing wrong with it. I mean, I've got a quibble. Around the chest work, but I'm kind of, you know, like I would prefer to see a little bit more exercise variation and a little bit less, you know, multi-set protocol. I think that is not a good use of time and energy and recovery capacity. So, you know, I think there's that sort of balance trade-off, if you like. I would prefer to be on the variety side rather than on the, you know, volume side. I counted it out. And if you, if you, it's actually, obviously, if you count the superset, it's, it's 10 exercises, not nine. Yeah, that's right. With a breathing squat,
Speaker 1he would do that superset with the pullover as they generally did, which usually they would do high grabs, 20 grabs and not normally taken to failure. It was more like a light pullover.
Speaker 2So if he was just doing high squats, he wouldn't superset with pullover. Is that what you're
Speaker 1saying? Because that's not what you've written. I believe the way it was written, I believe he was insinuating that this superset would be done with the breathing squats, but not with the hack squat, but perhaps not. I'd have to go back and double check. It doesn't really matter, but it's just
Speaker 2interesting because the pullover would be obviously another back exercise and it would put the number of sets up in total. So I counted, if you count that he was doing a pullover supersetting with the hack squat, which we don't, we're not sure about, if he was doing that, then he'd have 27 total sets, which is actually quite a lot. I mean, it's not like a lot, a lot, a lot, but it, you know, it is, it's, you're going to notice, you know, like I'm much more comfortable kind of in that sort of 12 to 15 total kind of sets per workout I think pushing out double that and I'm squeaking I think that's starting to become you know definitely a challenge and I'm going to think that there's going to be exercise order issues towards the end of the workout you know unless they're being really spaced out with lots of intra-workout nutrition and rest and that kind of so there's bits and pieces here that I'm not you know super happy about um exercise selection I mean again very classic silver era stuff that we've covered 100 times or 52 times so far on this podcast um I don't like doubling up the the chest work I really don't like that I don't even though the wide grip is you know obviously the starting point which is going to get most uh you know all the chest regions even if the dumbbell chest press is more sort of narrow grip I'm still not I mean I can see why he's doing that because he's then got the behind the neck press which is more middle deltal and then he's trying to go for some anterior delt work but the way he's programming it I think it would be so much better if he had a steep incline version where he was getting very much more definitively you know kind of um anterior delt rather than being very much clavicular pec pretty much entirely um so I'm not I'm not really a fan of that combination especially when he's doing multi-set stuff again with the pec being so much more um susceptible to damage I really don't think that that will be the one muscle that I would kind of throw a load of volume out I don't think it makes an enormous amount of sense um equally you know um the the exercise selection more generally I really like I like the squat the bench um as in the wide grip bench I like the behind the neck press uh calf raise you know curl triceps push down fantastic obviously people are waiting for me to say that you know I'm missing the wide grip pull down or pull up and I'm missing the stiff leg pull up and I'm missing the wide grip pull up and I'm missing the stiff leg deadlift or other hamstrings exercise because that's what I always say and we are missing those things and it'd be great to see them and we don't actually have a shrug in there either you know and I think that's definitely something that I'd want to see so you know it's a
Speaker 1classic you know what there's a lot of the plans we've looked at don't really have any direct trap work in this every now and then there will be some but it a shrug was not that common um obviously there tended to be a you know quite a lot of deadlifting sometimes I would do like a deadlift with a shrug at the top so I guess I would be like oh I'm missing the wide grip pull up and I'm playing more on those exercises but it's almost you know what do they leave out more hamstrings or
Speaker 2traps and probably about the same hamstrings definitely is neglected quite quite severe but yeah I mean as is as is a wide grip um kind of pull down or pull up so you know I mean that is just one of those things that tends to get tends to get ignored but you know fundamentally you know done three times a week on non-consecutive days this is a great program again I mean like a lot of the time when we're going through these programs and I'm picking them apart and saying what I don't like about them you know I often sometimes just neglect to emphasize that even with all my criticisms this is still going to be a hundred times better than most of what you're going to see online today which is mad but it's true yeah a couple of interesting observations
Speaker 1I think so you've made the point there that that chest volume is obviously quite high and you know he could have been doing an incline for example and there were people at York doing incline dumbbell chest press you know Steve Reeves was doing that for example so I don't know why he didn't do that but it is interesting nonetheless to observe that almost all these exercises he is doing the three sets but the dumbbell chest press he's dropped one of those sets he's only doing two I can only imagine because he's observed that it is you know some additional recovery demand if he did add that third set to that exercise because he is doubling up on on chest work so I think it's interesting to see that there's been some thought process there presumably based on his his own personal response to that workout I don't you know anyone who writes a program it's always nicer if things are even in uniform you know you always want to make everything look the same and then you know there'll be requirements that force you not to so there's obviously been something here that's forced him to drop that set I imagine the single leg squat is an interesting choice
Speaker 2and it's not something you see much of yeah I honestly just um I forgot to mention that I would just take that out I mean I don't see it's adding anything at all um I mean just as a very very quick um kind of um practical comment if I were doing this routine or modifying this routine to do I mean personally I would just take everything down to a single set uh and I would just because I'm old um but I mean you could still do you know two sets probably or even three if you want to do per exercise um I would I would uh I would take out the dumbbell chest press I would take out the single leg squat um and I would I would put in the the stiff leg deadlift I'm keeping it in the silver era kind of equipment uh kind of uh sort of uh limitations I put in a stiff leg deadlift I put in a shrug and I'm putting a wide grip pull down or pull up and that would probably make the routine pretty much perfect for me in in the context of this of this equipment limitation situation obviously oh well you know you've got leg curls and you know kind of knee extensions and all that kind of stuff yeah but I know I'm trying to keep it in the context of the equipment that we've got so it's actually not
Speaker 1really very much that I need to do no no and like you said you know your preference is to do single
Speaker 2sets but you know someone could do two sets absolutely do two sets for all of that um you could even push it to three I think yeah yeah and especially if you look at something like like
Speaker 1you know he's got the triceps pushed down he's got the close grip or the you know more sagittal pain chest press he's got even you know behind the neck like he's he's got a lot of variation in there for triceps you know or chest you know technically speaking yes he could have adjusted that slightly but he's still he's still got exercises here for some of these muscle groups delts another one where he's getting you know some regional differences in the exercise selection so you know certainly it could be a lot worse I I think you know given limited equipment a barbell dumbbell I mean he does have a pulley but most of this is dumbbell and barbell I think it's it's not bad yes we're missing hams yes we could do the back work a little bit better yes it's one two exercises we don't need but physiologically speaking it's you know rep range good volume most of that should be recoverable I don't like the order of putting like a squat number one unless you're happy to wait five or 10
Speaker 2to and maybe he was happy to do that he probably chatted with his friend for like 15 minutes I mean
Speaker 1if he was doing this at York I mean fire those guys are spending hours just mucking about so yeah maybe but yeah all in all like I think this is a looks like a fairly fun workout and it's relatively physiologically sane I suppose to some of the stuff we've seen in in past episodes and the golden era now the five to ten rep range so I thought that was interesting it and I've this is a change I've made based on what we've talked about in in silver era plans is most of these guys were not using a very tight rep range some of the strength based guys were you know obviously we talked about people like headburn a little bit and Reg Park and some of these guys who are using more you know doubles and triples and fours and fives and you know sometimes those guys will will work between you know one or two repetitions in that range but generally speaking from a hypertrophy perspective five to ten six to twelve you know they ended up being the most common kind of ranges for people to work through and in modern programming you know what I was taught and what I see most people do we're kind of taught to use a very narrow range you know normally it's like six to eight or eight to ten ten to twelve it's like two repetitions and not that that's bad and obviously we've got access to equipment now that people didn't have access to back then but you know we've talked about well what are you getting differently out of a set of ten and a set of five well arguably a tiny tiny bit more fatigue like not nothing really significant that that's that different especially from a stimulus perspective so it makes sense to me to use these slightly large ranges five to ten and then have that flexibility where if your machine or your equipment doesn't allow you to do that small progressions in load and you know if going if going up and load means that suddenly you can't lift a single repetition with it well you've got you know this huge range there to actually play with so I think this makes for me personally I think this makes more sense just as a programming variable to use today especially for people who have limited equipment than what
Speaker 2we see most people doing totally and I mean like we were chatting about this before podcast and I said I always like to choose the exercise um or the the equipment for the exercise based on how the exercise feels rather than based on what the loading capacity is so you know if if one piece of kit has very sort of uh limited uh loading uh kind of increments that they are fixed and I can't really change them very easily but that that means that there are big jumps then I'm going to have to have a wider um kind of rep range when I'm working with that piece of kit otherwise every time I go up a notch I'm going to be completely incapable of sticking in the range that I want to work in um but if I you know really want to use that piece of kit then that's just a cost of doing business if you like but I'd always prioritize the exercise um because of how it feels because of what I'm trying to achieve in the location that I'm trying to work um you know with the body rather than saying oh no I've got to work in this reference therefore I've got to use this other piece of kit which not quite perfect for what i want to do it doesn't feel very good but it allows me to micro load my well that isn't the way around i'd want to work i'd always want to go for the exercise the biomechanical reasons rather than the loading parameter reasons so i'm in the same place as you i think it's always better to have that that rep range um kind of being a little bit more
Speaker 1flexible which brings us to what we want to discuss for the second half of this podcast which is progression models and and how to do that what that means what is i mean we've talked about progressive overload before but we'll just touch on that a little bit in context of what a progression model is and what that achieves and and you know what kind of rate of progression might people be able to expect when they're in the gym and you know i've made this comment in the past where while we do see some pretty funky programs i think that the most important determinant of whether a program works for someone or not is the way that it's executed and i think that too often people and this you know i don't want to blame individuals who are just following a program too much like i think that a lot of the time this comes down to instruction from the coach where there's there's poor expectation setting and there's poor instruction over how to you know whether that's reps and reserve whether that's rest periods whether that's just an expectation of how strong one should be getting or can expect to get and often i'll get messages from people being like i've plateaued i've you know i've you know i my chest you know this is this is the message i get like every week it'll be my chest can't recover from being trained three times a week and i'll say well have you dropped a single set have you tried that how do you know and they'll be like yep a single set i can't recover from a single set it's always chest it's always or maybe biases but usually chest and then i ask them well how are you like how are you determining that you're not recovering what are you what rate of progression are you looking for and like always it's always a question of how like always it'll be that well i i can't progress weight weekly you know i can't i've gone two or three sessions and i haven't been able to progress and i'll always write out like a basically i'll write out sort of like a hepburn style you know double progression method for those people and be like hey just try this tell me how you go and almost always i'll get a message back in a few weeks time oh my god i'm progressing again i hadn't plateaued and it's like okay so it wasn't a recovery issue it's simply that you didn't know what to expect as far as what progression actually is so maybe we start the conversation there what is progression what is progressive overloading what do these terms actually tell us what are these things concepts tell us and then we can
Speaker 2jump into the practicality of it all yeah in fact if you don't mind i'd like to go back even one step further and and kind of give us a runway into that uh because i've got um i'm kind of hoping to really capture almost everything possible in this episode related to progression so um let me add one bit on the front of that and we'll kind of hopefully get a flying start into that concept that you just um identified so the thing i want to kind of start with is to um give people a little bit of history into why there's some confusion about what progression means and how we use it is because we have two totally different um histories or cultures or usages um in this particular way and one of the usages which is very popular in the um olympic weightlifting community in powerlifting to a certain extent and it has been used in the strength training communities for bodybuilding in certain aspects um basically treats progression as a programming decision so basically somebody and it often fits into a block periodization type context so somebody will be writing a strength training program and they'll go i'm going to program these things or these loading protocols or these sets reps you know i'm going to do this you know whatever in this week and or these two weeks or these three weeks and then i'm going to uh change them and do this in the following weeks and then something else in these other weeks so they are proactively changing the loading protocols over time and they are referring to that as progression um and the often what you'll see is that either there will be a an increase in the amount of volume that's being done or you'll see an increase in the intensity of the load that's being done now that could be intensity in the old-fashioned way of talking about it which is um you know percentage of one rep max or it could be kind of more commonly uh used today uh way of talking about which is the number of reps in reserve doesn't really matter and you'll see a progression in that terminology so what they're saying is we are perhaps starting out with you know four or five reps in reserve then moving to two or three reps in reserve then finishing up with one or two reps in reserve so they'll say this is a progression and then or alternatively it could be percentage of one rep max they can say we're going to start with 75 move up to 80 move to 85 and they'll call that progression um you know or it could be volume as i say start out with one set two sets three sets four sets again it doesn't really matter but the point is that you are increasing some aspect and they are describing either more workload being done training close to failure or using heavier loads so in all of these aspects they are proactively programming an increase in either the load and the intensity of the load and the intensity of the load and the intensity of the load or the volume or um you know sort of some other you know kind of parameter that is related to the strength training program is this making sense so far yeah absolutely and you know most people i
Speaker 1guess will have probably seen a program like that especially in a power lifting context people will be familiar with this where you know week one like you said will be x number of reps at this percentage week two will be this it usually changes week by week doesn't it it does now
Speaker 2the important thing is that from a physiological perspective this has got nothing to do with progress or progression absolutely nothing to do with that because it is totally physiologically possible unlikely because strength training works okay so strength training works so you're likely to see adaptions happening but that's not the point it is physiologically possible to do a program like
Speaker 1this and not actually progress and actually follow it properly like actually do the numbers do the sets do the reps everything that it has to do with the program so i think it's really important that you take a look at it and see how it works and how it works and how it's going to change over the next two years so i think it's really important that you take a look at it and see how it's going to change over the next two years so i think it's really important that you take a look at it and see how it's going to change over the next two years so i think it's really important that you take a look at it and see how it's going to change that it has actually programmed yes and not progress yeah unlikely because strength training
Speaker 2works but it is feasible and so what we need to understand is that the entire block periodization terminologies are not physiologically correct because they are assuming that you can proactively make a progression happen by writing it on a piece of paper and you can't all you're doing is you're changing the within workout work out demands of you know kind of how fatiguing it's going to be and how many stimulating reps you're going to get at least from a bodybuilding perspective so all that's changing is that you're as i say changing very slightly how much recovery uh you're going to get um and how much recovery you need and you're changing how much of a stimulus you're actually providing what you're not doing is progressing by or you're not guaranteeing progression by doing that there is no progression there you are artificially creating the illusion of progression by progressing numbers on a piece of paper that does not translate automatically to progression in the individual's adaptive processes and this is super super important because i get many many many messages from people asking about progression and progressive overload and their entire worldview is rooted in what i'm describing now this popularization idea that you can write on a piece of paper what you want people to do and it's somehow going to make them progress and it doesn't it doesn't automatically do that you're just describing something on paper that has nothing to do with physiological reality now as i say strength training works so you know chances are that they will actually progress but it has nothing to do with the progression that you are describing on that uh kind of uh model you could equally program the exact same routine three sets you know or even one set to failure if you've done a week and it would do pretty much the same thing i'm not saying it would do exactly the same thing but it could do and it actually could lead to progression um you know equally well or not equally well again depending on the person so um that brings me to the other side of the equation so what i'm saying is that is a worldview which has been kind of foisted upon us by the periodization enthusiasts i'm getting i'm losing patience with daily actually i'm getting to the point where i'm actually going to start being quite critical of if i'm not being very critical already i'm going to start getting even more critical because i think they're actually being actively uh kind of problematic for an understanding of what's going on in in terms of the adaptions because the terminology is being used incorrectly so the other way of thinking about progression is to say well if i'm watching what's happening in a strength training program and i am seeing that the person who is maintaining or the the lifter who is maintaining the same proximity to failure whether that's two failure or they're leaving one more preserve or whatever and they are actually increasing the number of reps that they're capable of doing and or they are now starting to put the weight up i am receiving feedback from that training program that progression is happening as in i am observing writing down a piece of paper the numbers that they're achieving over the course of the training program that they are actually improving so on the one hand we've got this proactive like input based progression idea where i'm like i'm telling them to do more and more and i'm telling them to get stronger is somehow going to make them stronger but on the other hand i'm simply observing the fact that they are now actually getting stronger and i'm receiving that information and it's an output of the training program so I think really what we've got to understand is that there are two totally different ways of using the word progression in the strength training communities, which are overlapping. They do tend to come from different places and get used in different ways, but they are fundamentally different. One is like if I write down on a piece of paper that someone has to do these things in this order and get stronger, then magically that's somehow going to make them stronger, which I just don't agree with. And on the other hand, there is literally just observing the fact that the person is getting stronger and writing that down and noticing that it is happening, which is the output of the strength training that they are doing. Two totally different perspectives. One I think is fundamentally flawed and one I actually think is correct, which is the observation of what is actually happening.
Speaker 1I'm trying to put my finger on some subtle differences here and it's difficult because there's those kind of two polar opposites to an extent, but then there's some opposites. Overlap and middle ground as well. So I'm thinking of something like a method we've talked about in the past, like the Hepburn method, which you could actually feasibly write down ahead of time. These are the numbers you're going to hit. Yes. So it looks very similar to what you've just explained there.
Speaker 2Yes, it does. And that's kind of where you get somebody who is, you know, an absolute genius in kind of strength training, both intuitively and, you know, probably in kind of just the practical skill. I mean, he wrote. He was just very, really, really, really good at what he did, and he was able to figure out a rate of progression that would work for most people most time. And I speak from, you know, extremely kind of practical experience to this, having run Hepburn model for 18 months on the squat. And, yeah, I literally didn't do anything else for 18 months. Just run the whole thing. And, yeah, it wave loads, essentially. And, you know. Never really the same proximity to failure on anything, any really, at any point in time. And there are kind of weeks when it feels a bit easier and weeks when it feels a bit harder. And it's like, it's a very, very, very artful piece of work, that training program. Like, that's the exception that pours the rule, I think. That kind of thing where you've got somebody who's able to create something like that, and it does work. I mean, I think it's a strength program. It's not really a bodybuilder. It's a bodybuilding program. But I think that's kind of the exception that pours the rule, where you've got something that good. But I don't think most of the other stuff works.
Speaker 1It's almost as if, because you look at something like that and what he's done, what Hepburn did, and we've touched on Hepburn in the past. And basically just, you know, adding one repetition to one low rep set over, you know, weeks. And then eventually as you get up to, you know, three or four repetitions, depending how you're doing it, you drop back down. And we'll talk about that sort of progressive model more in a moment. But it feels to me like there's a difference here between laying out an expectation of here's how quickly one can expect to get stronger compared to almost overlapping periodization onto a progression model and kind of explaining it away with you're progressing because we're, you know, hitting these different strength qualities. Or because we're, you know, advancing volume or because. And it's. It's, it's pulling it forward. It's like, you know, it's this idea of like, well, we can, we can cause a progression by doing X as opposed to you will be progressing probably at this rate. And this is how you can continue to train given how much you're likely to be progressing. And it's, these are very minute differences, but they, they matter, don't they?
Speaker 2Totally, totally. And I think really the genius of, of Hepburn was that he understood. Understood that to create something reliable, it has to be small and contained. So it was like eight sets of two with a five rep max approximately. And you gradually add an extra rep on each of your sets until you get to eight sets of three. And then you put the weight up a little bit and then you start again. And that is a small and contained kind of wave load. So it's a very, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple, very simple. And, you know, he was really, really good at obviously strength training programming to the point where I was able to create that. When somebody is creating something on the fly that they, I mean, he obviously did that loads of times on his own. He probably saw a whole bunch of other people do it, you know, and he gained a lot of experience with that particular progression model. In contrast, what I see in the kind of. Why the strength training community today, people are just throwing together programs and go, oh, just do these. And like, honestly, you can't do that. You know, you can't just kind of guess the rate of progress, you know, and, and stop pulling programs together that you think are going to kind of work. You've got to limit. If you want to get to the point where you can create something as, as effective as what Headburn did, you're going to have to limit yourself to a small. I mean, I've tried, I've tried to do it and I wasn't actually that happy with what I did. I ended up with, I've tried to do it with, you know, kind of three sets of five rising, rising to eight and it kind of works. It just doesn't work for the same amount of time that the eight sets of two to three works for. You know, and I think you've got to kind of limit yourself to a relatively small kind of contained progression model and you've got to make sure it works for you for long periods of time and you've got to make sure it works for other people for long periods of time. And then sure. Wheel it out and, and like kind of popularize it. Fantastic. But that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is when people are constructing like on the fly, large sort of full on, you know, strength training programs across multiple exercises and the things are changing all over the place and there's percentages flying around and there's reps and reserve flying around and there's all kinds of things being changed. And it's like, there is literally no way you're going to be able to predict that's going to work in the way that you're planning it and the way that you're writing it.
Speaker 1And I think a lot of it comes down to, and it's almost luck because it comes down to what variable has that person chosen to, to periodize or progress or whatever in their plan. Because I've seen plans where people are progressing reps and reserve and they'll say this week you're going to do four reps and reserve, this week you're going to do three, this week you're going to do two, this week. And it's like, how, how? There's literally no reason to do that at all. Precisely. But then you might have someone who they've. Decided to periodize and maybe they have periodizing repetitions and they're saying we're doing the same load, but we're adding one repetition each week, or maybe they have like this, depending on what variable you decide to try to progress, you might just be lucky. And that's actually going to be beneficial for that person's actual progression. But if you pick the wrong variable, like reps and reserve, you're just wasting half of those weeks. So I'm just thinking back to some of the periodized programs I've seen.
Speaker 2Okay. Yeah. The point. The point that I'm giving here is not so much that periodization is bad. I mean, it is, but what I'm trying to explain is that most of the confusion that we have today in the fitness industry about what progression means is because the terminology has come through two totally different pathways and has different, you know, if you like, cultural settings and references and understandings and concepts behind it. Yeah. So when people start talking about it. They end up talking across each other. This is why a lot of the time you've got a whole bunch of creators rightly making the case for progression being an output as in a feedback, like information source from the strength training program, which is what we would think of it as, as in, you know, are you getting stronger? Great. That's progressive overload happening. You know, whereas you've got a whole bunch of other people going, no, progressive overload, it means that you have to add more into your program over time. And I'm like, no, that's coming from the block periodization community. It is fundamental. It doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1Yeah. It's, it's interesting to, to wonder when that changed. Because, you know, for example, I've seen videos of Mike Mensah where he'll talk about the, the thing that causes the progress will be say, you know, that, that final repetition because you're doing something you've not done before. So you need to get an extra rep you haven't done before. Otherwise your body's not going to be forced to adapt.
Speaker 2Because that's just not true.
Speaker 1Exactly. That's just not how hypertrophy works. And so we're seeing terminology like, you know, narratives like that coming up in the goal in the era. But then I don't see much of that in the silver era. In the silver era, it's you lift, you know, generally they would talk about, you know, not lifting on the nerve or however they talked about it. So you're not going too fairly. You're going to the point of congestion, they would say. So basically it sounds to me like they're talking about one rep in reserve. And then you try to add as, you know, load as you can, as you realize that you can lift. And it's just more intuitive. Like, can you lift heavier? Lift heavier. Can you lift heavier again this week? Lift heavier. And sometimes, you know, we've talked about Hepburn and Bob Hoffman had a similar kind of model where, and funnily enough, he called it the double progressive method, which is every second workout, see if you can add a repetition. Right? Not what we would call a double progression method and terminology gets confusing. But, you know, some, yeah, sure. Sometimes these people would say, oh, this is probably how fast one can adapt. But they weren't talking about it in the sense of, well, if you don't. If you don't add this rep, you haven't grown from that workout. So there's clearly been this shift in understanding, belief, whatever. That's happened 70s, 80s.
Speaker 2I mean, like the sceptical amongst us might kind of say, well, you know, at the point where anabolic steroids came in and made it impossible to tell what was going on, people just started making stuff up. I mean, that's kind of how I would sceptically describe it.
Speaker 1And potentially they were getting stronger every session.
Speaker 2And so, yeah. So, but anyway, all I wanted to do was to kind of just add on that little bit of historic kind of perspective, because I don't think anything about progression, any conversation about progression is going to make any sense to anybody unless they understand that the history has given us these two totally different kind of starting points. And if you've got somebody who's talking to you and they're talking from this perspective of popularization thinking, and you're talking about it from like a, well, are you getting stronger? Well, that's what is going to allow you to... To kind of display progressive overload. If you're thinking about it as an output and they're thinking about it as an input, then neither of you are going to be able to actually connect in the conversation that you're having. And that's, I think, what is happening most of the time on social media. You've just got one group of people talking about it from this perspective, the other group of people are talking about it from a different perspective, and nobody's actually able to understand what the other group are saying.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2But we would say, well, okay, what is, you know, what is progressive overload? Well, progressive overload, which is a horrible terminology, because ultimately, you know, it really plays into the block periodization kind of ideas. It really just means, am I getting stronger? Am I able to lift, you know, either a slightly heavier weight or do more repetitions with the same weight as I did last time? Now, somebody who's being really picky could say, well, you know, does it also mean that maybe I can leave, you know, shorter rest periods? Or does it also mean could I use a slightly larger range of motion? I mean, fine, okay, you can stretch the definition a little bit. You can use a little bit of weight to include those things if you, you know, really wanted to. But generally speaking, in the context practically of most strength training programs, it really just means, can I do more reps, you know, to failure or with the same proximity to failure? Or can I lift a heavier weight, really?
Speaker 1I mean, the simplest way to think about it is, did I have to get stronger to be able to do this?
Speaker 2Yes, exactly. Exactly. That's the best way of actually having an umbrella term across the whole thing.
Speaker 1So, okay. That is our framework. Did we get stronger to achieve this thing? Where does that land us?
Speaker 2What it means is that an adaption had to have happened in order for us to be able to achieve those new numbers. So, one of the strength-related adaptions, not actually in this context, not strictly just strength-related adaptions, but if you're working in a rep range that's above like three, well, maybe five, then you also potentially got a little bit of muscular endurance. Now, it starts off being really a little bit. I mean, like, if you look at the kind of adaptions in terms of muscular endurance that happen across rep ranges, one to five, you're not really seeing any kind of improvements in muscular endurance as a result of heavy strength training. As you get above that and towards 10, yes, you start to see a little bit, but honestly, it's not very much. When you clear 15, yeah, it's pretty meaningful. So, yeah. If you're working in 5-10. If you're working in 5-10, you might see a little bit of muscular endurance-related adaptions starting to help you as well. So, it's not pure maximum strength. There's also a little bit of relative muscular endurance in there as well. So, ultimately, if we kind of just work on the basis of maximum strength, obviously, you've got your coordination improvements. You've got correctivation reductions, which is more or less the same thing as coordination improvements. We've got motor unit recruitment increases. And then on the peripheral side, we've got hypertrophy, sarcomerogenesis, lateral force transmission, and maybe a little bit of tendon stiffness. But honestly, if we look at the kind of sort of strength training programs over time, if we're starting a new training program and we're doing exercises that we're not familiar with, basically, you're going to see just gigantic improvements in coordination and the accompanying reductions in correctivation. I mean, that's just going to happen. If we're not doing that, if we're doing exercises that we're very familiar with, then we're not really going to see much of a change on that particular score. Obviously, peripheral side, you know, sarcomerogenesis. Sarcomerogenesis is only really going to happen if we're kind of, you know, relatively, that's a relatively novel stimulus to us. Lateral force transmission, we don't really know very much about. So, broadly speaking, tendon stiffness tends to plateau. So, most of the time, we're really kind of seeing hypertrophy as the main driver of, you know, kind of strength gains in well-trained people who are familiar with the exercises. Now, does that mean you're not getting any of the other stuff? Well-trained? Well, no, it doesn't. You're still going to get a little bit of that kind of thing. But we are going to see that, relatively speaking, hypertrophy is going to be a pretty big component of the strength gains of most people most of the time in routines that they are relatively familiar with. Now, interestingly, what most people tend to do when they've been doing a routine for a couple of months and they start to see that their gains in strength are really grindy, they start to go, oh, I need to do something different. I'm like, no. You're just having it revealed to you precisely how fast hypertrophy is contributing to your strength gains. That's what's happening.
Speaker 1Yeah. That's a really important point. And that's something I always try to sort of drive home with clients when people have come from the background where they've been changing plans every four weeks, doing new exercises every few weeks, and they're expecting to be progressing, you know, often, you know, adding five kilos or 10 kilos a week to a lift because it's a new lift for them. And then they get four, five, six weeks in. And they start to see that slow down. They start to think that that's them plateauing. And like, okay, I need a new lift. I need a new exercise. I need a new phase. And the way I'll explain that to clients is, no, actually, what's happening now is now we're actually just seeing the hypertrophy. And yes, like you said, there's going to be some of these other bits and pieces that are still coming along. But most of it now is actually going to be due to adding contractile proteins as opposed to all these neural adaptions, coordination, et cetera, you were getting previously, which is why, you know, we've talked about this in the past. Programming new phases. Sure, there can be, you know, maybe repetitions might change, exercise might change, you might do some unilateral stuff, whatever. But by and large, the core exercise selection should really stay consistent across phases unless, you know, why do you need to change it out? Okay, there's a better exercise you've identified. You want to split that sort of muscle and then focus on different regions or maybe that exercise is hurting you. But just changing it out because you're now progressing. At a slower rate, that's really where the magic is happening.
Speaker 2Yeah, absolutely. I mean, ultimately, you know, that is a really, really critical point that I think practically is very helpful to take on board. That when we start to see an exercise progressing very, very slowly because we've been doing it for a number of months, absolutely is a time to, you know, be super clear about the fact that the rate of gains on strength on that exercise are slow. Because pretty much all of the strength gains are coming from hypertrophy and we've just got to let the rate of progress be what it is. And that's just such a great kind of encapsulation of what progressive overload really is, which is that it is a feedback to us about the success of adaptions happening in the context of the strength gain program. Now, I'm saying adaptions because it is adaptions. It is all of the adaptions. And therefore, the rate of progress will be faster when there are more adaptions happening, as in when we're unfamiliar with the exercise or we've got, you know, kind of capacity to increase recruitment or psychomagnesis or whatever it may be. You are going to see faster rate of progress because you are getting more individual adaptions. As you get fewer and fewer adaptions, you will see a slower rate of progress. It doesn't mean that hypertrophy is happening at a different rate. Hypertrophy is probably happening at the same rate all the way through. It's just that you were getting other adaptions earlier that you're now not getting later on. Progressive overload is the feedback that you are achieving some adaptions and the larger the rate of progressive overload, the rate of progress, the more adaptions likely are actually occurring. And of course, you know, just because the rate of progress is slow probably just means that we're just getting hypertrophy towards the end of that, you know, kind of time spent training with that particular exercise.
Speaker 1So if someone's not progressing, you can... You can't just force that progression. Yeah, I think that's a key distinction to make here because the way people talk about progressive overload, they're like, well, you're not progressing because you haven't got enough volume. You need to add more volume that will get you to progress. Or you're not progressing because you haven't planned the progression in the way you sort of talked about earlier. And what you're saying is, well, no, no, no, you're not progressing because the program itself obviously has missed the mark in terms of the stimulus and the variables and recovery and whatever else. And that's what we need to be focusing on. We're not just saying, well, you know, we need to just undulate volume or we need to undulate intensity or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 2So this is a really important point. I mean, this might end up being a separate podcast topic, to be honest. But I mean, what we can say, you know, to begin with, what we can say is that, as I've said before, stimulus is not really... volume dependent So, what I mean by that is that if I do a single repetition of an exercise and it qualifies as a stimulating repetition, so let's say I've got a five rep max and I do a single repetition, and that has a high level of motor unit recruitment and it has a slow movement velocity leading to high level of mechanical tension, and I don't have any fatigue mechanisms present or very much fatigue present. So, I'm definitely getting my high level of recruitment, my high level of effort. I'm definitely getting my high level of tension with my slow movement velocity. That has accomplished a stimulus for hypertrophy. If I then do another repetition or several repetitions, you know, 48 hours later and then again 48 hours later, and I'm avoiding any opportunity for atrophy to occur and I'm continuing to add the stimulus, then I will end up adding muscle mass over time. There is no scenario where doing insufficient volume is going to be an issue there. I mean, okay, fine, if you're doing single reps like, you know, kind of every other day, then it might take you six months to notice anything meaningful happening. But, you know, like if you're doing just a single set and you're getting five stimulating reps or you're doing maybe just one rep reserve or whatever, there is no scenario in which that is failing to achieve hypertrophy as long as my criteria for hypertrophy. So, if somebody is out there arguing that somehow that routine is failing because not enough volume is being done and that someone needs to go in and do two sets or three sets or four sets instead of a single set, I just fundamentally disagree with them because qualitatively, you know, the stimuli criteria are being met, therefore hypertrophy will happen. Yes, if you do a little bit more volume, you will increase the mass. You will increase the magnitude of that stimulus and so you'll make progress very slightly faster. But, you know, it's not linear. Your second set is going to give you probably 40% of your first set on top of what you're getting, which is not a huge amount more. And it's costing you in terms of fatigue, so it's going to affect the other stuff that you're doing. So, genuinely speaking, I think it's fundamentally not really valid to say, oh, well, you're not progressing on one set three times a week, therefore you should do two sets or three sets. I'm like. No, if you're not progressing on one set three times a week, then either it's just that your progress is slow or that you've actually capped out and you need to fundamentally change the exercise that you're doing by increasing the capacity of motor unit recruitment. So you either need to, you know, kind of move the exercise earlier in the workout or you need to do single kind of limb single joint stuff to try and get access to more motor unit recruitment or you need to do something that actually increases recruitment as an adaption. So maybe think about doing some isometrics. Before you even start the workout, just like as a warm up protocol to try and push motor unit recruitment to a higher level as an adaption. But simply just doing more volume is OK. You're going to move very slightly faster, but it's not qualitatively changing. And just what I want to be really clear about is that, yes, you are quantitatively moving slightly faster, but you're not qualitatively changing anything. So, you know, if you were to say, well, you know, you're not progressing on this on set three times a week, therefore do three sets and you will progress. No, that's not valid. And what you can argue is you're progressing very slowly on one set three times a week. And I think you could progress faster on two or three sets three times a week. Totally acceptable argument. What is not acceptable as an argument is to say one set is not creating a stimulus and three sets will create stimulus. That is fundamentally so physiologically flawed. It's actually getting me quite worked up to even think about it. You know, it is not a valid statement. It is not a valid statement. It's not even an argument. I don't know. I don't know how people could make that argument.
Speaker 1So I think that's really important because what you said there is if the requirements for hypertrophy are being met, then like we need to identify that first and foremost, right? So I made this point a few weeks ago where I said I think people are putting too much emphasis on progressive overload because to your point, if we know that the program is meeting those requirements, we don't need to get that caught up in the progressive overload. It's there as a litmus test to see is the program actually working or not. But if the requirements are there, why would the program not be working, right? So then ultimately what we've got is an issue of expectation. Yeah. So if we know the requirements are all met for hypertrophy to be achieved, then what we've got is, is someone expecting to progress quicker than they actually are able to? And that's what you said there where you said, okay, maybe adding more volume might get someone progressing more quickly than they would be otherwise. But they are still hypertrophic.
Speaker 2It does not change whether or not they will, unless they're doing a really silly program. Okay, fine. If somebody's training like, you know, body parts, doing one workout a week, then yes, at that point, the number of sets per workout does change whether or not they make progress. Because if they do three sets, then it's going to basically stay stunning. Still, if they do five, then okay, they'll make a little bit of progress. But fundamentally, if they're training two or three times a week, then the number of sets does not determine whether or not they make progress. All it does is slightly change the rate of that progress. So yeah, I think basically, as you say, what we want to do is say, well, look, is the program, you know, going to work? Is it actually physiologically plausible? In which case, let it run for a couple of weeks and yeah, look for a strength gain over a longer period of time. And if it's there, then yeah, the program is working. It's just happening slowly. So chances are, not that you're gaining muscle mass really slowly, actually, it's that you're just not getting any of that muscle mass. I mean, I think this is a really important point. People go, oh, I'm not gaining any muscle mass because I'm making strength gains really slowly. I'm like, probably nothing to do with that. It's probably that you're not getting any other adaptions at all. So actually, your rate of hypertrophy could be the same as it was when you were making super fast strength gains and you were getting really excited. When you're getting really excited, it was just coordination. Yeah? So the reality is your excitement is not a good metric for whether or not your muscle mass rate of progress is actually, you know, kind of good or bad.
Speaker 1Yeah, and if you were to think about how much muscle are you actually growing realistically, are you expecting that to translate to, you know, kilos and kilos in the bar every week? Well, obviously not if you're talking about grams of contractile tissue being added. So the way I see it is progressive overload is just confirmation that the program is working and progressive models are just expectation management. Does that check out?
Speaker 2Well, I think so in the context of the Hepburn model that you introduced earlier. Yes, I think that's completely fair to call Hepburn model an expectation management tool. I think it is more than that. I think it is a very strong guideline for keeping people within a sort of set and rep and rep in reserve protocol. Because the reps in reserve in Hepburn are changing all the time. And that's the genius of it. That's the thing. When you really sit down and start playing with it, you realize that your reps in reserve are moving and they're moving in a quite a subtle way constantly where you're kind of ending up brushing up against failure right at the very end. But you're not really getting there. And that just seems to hover around about the same kind of place all the time, which is the genius part. And that's where it's not only expectation management is actually kind of adaption prediction, because, because it is literally predicting that your adaptions will take you to a certain point and leave you with reps in reserve at that particular point, at that point in your kind of progress in the cycle. So it is, it's both expectation management. It's also adaption prediction, which is the bit that people think they can do with block periodization models. And they can't because they're not at the level that Hepburn was at. And they're not really kind of limiting themselves to what Hepburn limited himself to. I mean, Hepburn limited himself, as I said before, to a very, very tiny kind of, um, um, you know, rep set kind of protocol. Um, and it works. Whereas, you know, people with, you know, fraction of his experience and understanding and capacity are trying to do far more complex things. And it's just not really working at all. Um, but what we can say is then, yeah, um, a, a progression model is, um, potentially an expectation management tool. Um, but also, um, it could be a framework, you know, because, um, you know, you can't do anything other than eight sets and you can't do anything other than two or three repetitions. It's a framework that's just around what you're doing and it limits you and says you can't do in Hepburn eight sets of two rising to three. You can't do anything other than eight sets and you can't do anything other than two or three repetitions. I mean, that's, that's kind of your limitations. So it's a framework and it's an expectations management tool. If you kind of take the classic kind of way that most people, um, today are programming, bodybuilding, uh, kind of set rep protocols, they're going to do the same. They're going to do the same number of sets most of the time. Okay. You've got some crazy people doing, you know, kind of all kinds of weird things, but you know, like fine. Most people, most of the time are doing the same number of sets, um, per workout, per exercise. And, um, you know, they're going to do, uh, sort of a rep range. And when they get to the upper end of that rep range, they're going to, um, you know, switch the weight up and they're going to start again at the bottom end of the rep range. Um, and that's kind of what we saw actually today with the program that you introduced us to where you got five to 10 repetitions and the idea being that you would start at five and then you would sort of increase up towards 10 and then you would add the weight and drop down back towards five again and then we made the point that practically speaking that could be a little bit more malleable actually if the equipment that you've got means that when you get to the upper end of that rep range you then switch to the next weight up and actually it drops you a little bit below your target starting point okay well then you know that's just what the equipment is forcing you to do so instead of it being 5 to 10 it might be 4 to 11 and that's that's just because that's the dumbbells that you've got access to or that's the selectorized machine that you have access to and that's just pushing you in that particular direction now technically somebody could say well i just want to progress load and you can say well you're going to have a really really difficult time with that unless you've got like sort of really clever setup in your equipment you've got micro loading capacities and then technically yes you could stick around five or six reps all the time and you could micro load and make sure that you're always capable of doing that yeah not many people are going to do that though um similarly you could also kind of say well i'm just going to carry on increasing repetitions forever well you're going to run into fatigue issues by doing that because the higher up the rep range you go the more you're going to start finding that you can't do as many um you know kind of other things in the workout you can't do very you can't keep with your same um kind of uh frequency protocols if you kind of bump up against the top end of that uh rep range so broadly speaking you're probably always going to have to have what i guess some people call double progression which is you know i mean it gets used as you point to that in multiple different ways different people at different times but you could argue in this context it just means you know i'm working with a weight progression and a rep range progression um and i'm just going to manage those so i stay in this rep range all the time and just allow weights to increase over time and the thing is that in the context of what a lot of people are doing that process is just happening on its own so we just go to the gym and we just lift to failure and we just write down where we get to or we got to or where we are getting to or whatever and it's like okay well this time i didn't make any progress okay when i write down i didn't make any progress next time i don't make any progress okay when i write that down again and the third time okay now i'm adding repetition okay great fantastic and then it just kind of happens gradually over time and then we just um notice over a long period of time that progression is happening and the wording progressive overload is as i say really distracting because it sounds like we should be doing something progressive and then we just do something proactive but it's not really the case it's just telling us that we are progressing over time and that's a totally valid way of of of you know making progress and and you know verifying that strength training program is working um equally you could do exactly the same thing and you leave one rep and reserve all the time you know that is doable you just have to be very clear with yourself about what one rep and reserve feels like and then literally you are you know and that sounds like what a lot of silver era lifters were actually doing just leaving that last rep and reserve and just doing the exact same program so it doesn't have to be trained to failure to work in exactly the same way so i think that probably is the most practical answer for most people most time either two failure or one reserve um within the rep range of you know and i like five to eight five ten um five to seven whatever you want to do but again i think it works with um you know a larger number of rep ranges than that yeah good so practically
Speaker 1if you're a beginner you're probably going to add a repetition to each exercise and each set of that exercise and then for someone who's intermediate well it might be that we're adding a repetition to one set each workout and then someone who's advanced it might be we're trying to add one repetition to one set for that exercise per week obviously if you're doing multiple sets compared to single sets if you're doing an a b split you know that's going to differ a lot of times but a little bit but just as a bit of a rule of thumb obviously beginners are going to be progressing a lot quicker than an intermediate intermediate quicker than an advanced so you're saying okay let's add a repetition we get to the top of that rep range and what i think is a helpful practical point and you've alluded to this is this stuff is going to be based on the exercise it's based on the equipment so i might program people five to ten and say look you know we're going to do whatever exercise we'll do every exercise five to ten and i say you may find for the exercise you're doing some exercise you're doing is going to be based on the equipment so you're going to be doing some exercise you're doing is going to be based on the equipment so you're going to be may have smaller loading increments and you may just feel better going in between five to seven totally fine other exercises maybe you go down to five the machine doesn't just doesn't feel good or maybe it's got um you know larger loading increments and so maybe you need to go from six to ten or you go from five to ten i don't really mind yeah we're giving i would give people a window there where hey this needs to suit you and it needs to suit the exercise and it needs to suit the machine or the equipment you've got to do and so i'm going to give people a window there and then you get to the top of that range whatever that is for you you add a little bit of load and you come back down now there's two ways to do that i mean really there's one way to do that isn't there is you add the smallest increment of load that you can right now typically i would say to someone ideally i want that to be about a percent per repetition we're coming down so you've gone from five to ten okay we're going to go back from ten down to five just like what we saw at the start of this program and i want you to add five about five to ten and then you're going to go back to five percent total load because we're going down five repetitions now what i find with people is that five percent load of that one percent per repetition we're dropping it should be it should be manageable for basically everyone everyone should be able to do that and find you know what i've gone to five and i feel like i've actually got a repetition reserve now okay so i'm erring on on more of like a conservative side with that loading parameter and it again it allows me not to overshoot someone dropped down to five but i can't lift the load i feel demotivated whatever and worst case scenario okay we're two reps in reserve we're getting slightly less stimuli for that one week well it doesn't matter because next week we're upping it again we're going to six so that's a really practical way of of doing that that double progression method like you've said there you mentioned it's hard sometimes to just add load i find if i'm using very low repetitions with people like sub five my preference is to try to micro load and to try to go let's add a the smallest increment of load we can ideally fractional plates workout each week and if that's too much so you know ideally we'll do something like a hepburn method we will have multiple sets we're adding because usually if we're doing less than five reps we will have multiple sets anyway let's be realistic so then i'll say let's add the smallest amount of load possible to one of those sets per workout per week and if that is still too fast of a progression then i'll normally just go between one repetition just like hepburn did i'll go from five to six or from four to five and then back down so i find that the higher repetitions or i guess maybe the way to think about the lower repetitions we've got it's it's more viable to just be reliant on load and if we're using more repetitions we're really we're going to have to be using a repetition scheme there as well just progressing loading
Speaker 2yeah totally i mean um but i would kind of um i would still want to frame that in the context that the the limiting factor in each workout really wants to be the uh either point of failure or the one rep in reserve or two reps in reserve or whatever reps in reserve the person is going to do um and then you're just getting feedback from the kind of loading protocols i mean you're refining your kind of loading protocols to kind of land people in a particular kind of rep range that's all you're doing that's the sort of the the science behind what you're kind of sort of doing there um which is which is cool because i mean that it's a management of expectations and management of motivation as we've already pointed out which is great but it's not 100 necessary you know you could just go with the flow of what the equipment gives you as i've said kind of just i get stuck in whatever kind of commercial gym i'm in and this electrolyzed machine is whatever it is and i kind of do kind of a week or two with a particular load and then like i put the weight up and i just see how many reps i get and it is what it is and that's okay you know and especially for single sets that like that's
Speaker 1for my own training that's what i do with single sets yeah uh if i'm doing again you know say three sets of four to five repetitions i'll be a little bit more strategic in in managing my expectation with that loading but you know i it's not popular but like you know i said this before i think progressive overload is overrated i really think this idea of like beat the logbook and it's been drilled into people and i understand that and i think it's a really good idea and i think it's a really good idea and i think it's a really good idea and i think it's a really good idea to understand why and understand it was important but i feel like we've gone too far and i feel like now it actually it causes anxiety in people and it it's it's now become a master and it's like well it was there all along just to serve us to show us that in fact we are progressing on a workout we just need to be able to look back and show are we progressing you know from four weeks ago or two months ago or whatever exactly and this idea that we need to be beating the logbook every single session it's just not realistic and i think it's a really good idea and i think it's a really good idea and and you know you see this with a lot of the silver area guys how often will you look at a magazine or something and they'll be like oh this person you know steve would incline bench you know 10 repetitions of whatever 135 pound dumbbells or whatever and you look at it it's like how often was he doing that for this to be recorded for you for everyone to know this is the weight this guy does for incline bench what was he doing that for two years you know like how slow was this guy's progress that we knew that's what he lifted and the idea now that you need to progress every lift week, aim to do it, sure. But if you're an advanced lifter... i mean you know we've touched on this in the past is at a certain point maybe some of those lifts are there just to maintain what you've got and you're not actually going to progress them
Speaker 2yeah absolutely and i have talked to people in the past who've who've made the same point to me in their own training that they're like i'm really not seeing any growth on this exercise i'm just doing it because because if i don't then i shall lose the muscle mass that i've built exactly yeah okay yeah dropping down a single set do it twice a week that's just how it is um but yeah i mean i think the the the key point here the physiological reality is that um the the improvement is a feedback mechanism to tell you that an adaption is happening and if it's a exercise that you're very familiar with then that should be mostly hypertrophy and in an advanced uh sort of muscle um again advanced lifter is a kind of a bit of a an emotive term but if the muscle is kind of at a very very well developed state then you know you're not going to see a very very fast rate of progress and so it's going to be you know probably every kind of three or four workouts at best where you're going to see reps uh increasing um or the load increasing um you know but fundamentally that's just how um fast the muscle gains are going to be um and there's not really anything we can do about that well not to remain a natural lifter anyway
Speaker 1so is there anything else practically speaking that's a helpful tip for people to know i think it's helpful to people to know you're not going to always progress every single workout if you are it's probably because you're doing new exercises and that's not actually helping you in the way you think it's helping you so that's helpful we've talked about here's a progressive model you can use double progression add a rep when you get to the top of whatever range you're using add some load come back down go again we've talked about the fact that hey progressive overload is just there over time to show you what you're doing is working it's not dictating your workout it's not pulling forwards adapt it's not causing the muscle growth it's not causing the muscle growth it's not causing the muscle growth is just feedback is there anything else that would be helpful for people to know you've mentioned like you know going to that zero eruption reserve or one weapon reserve being that sort of litmus test for working out your loading and whatnot and you know honestly that's probably one of the most important points here is again if the parameters make sense you're not doing stupid amounts of volume you're not doing a frequency that doesn't make sense if you are going to zero eruption reserve one weapon reserve two reps reserve and it truly is then that adaption has to be done in a way that's going to help you in the right direction that's probably one of the most practical pieces here is a lot of these progression models we're talking about yes a the managing expectation but b they're also trying to keep people accountable to training close enough to failure and as long as you're aware of that and you're aware how you're not going to progress if you are four reps in reserve five reps in reserve six like you just let that float away and you use the same load sure you're not going to progress if you're not going to progress you're not going to progress because you have gotten stronger and you haven't added the load over time and now you are five reps in reserve so as long as you're aware of that and you are taking yourself to a close proximity to failure then all this other stuff like i said it's just
Speaker 2feedback over time any any other practical points for people um honestly um i think i just reiterate what i said at the beginning which is that um if you're interested in in progressive overload and progress is more on the academic side you're trying to understand you know what it is that people are talking about when they're talking about progress and progressive overload and what it means and how it connects to adaptions just be aware that there are these two totally different usages or descriptions or kind of um ways of talking about it which have come from two totally different places uh in the kind of strength training you know historical context and so you will find that if you read certain sources or listen to certain people talk you will be getting either the kind of the block periodization culture if you like uh which i just fundamentally don't think is describing what's going on correctly now alternatively you'll be getting this kind of more adaption physiological uh kind of description of what is um happening in terms of progressive overload which is the feedback which is what we're talking about um so you know if you are interested in this area and you're reading and you're listening to this video listening to people talk about it that kind of thing just be aware that that is happening um and that will help you sort of make sense of uh the ways that people are talking about it and why there are these disagreements and discrepancies um but yeah from a practical point of view you know um most of the time i think most people are just going to be able to um start working with an exercise um try and work within a given rep range and modify as they go along by simply um focusing what rep range they land on when they put the weight up so if it's pretty basic isn't it yeah like i've just started working out in the new gym a week and a half ago and there's a really really nice um seated uh row machine which is a wonderful action one of the best actions i've come across in seated rows for a very long time so i really like it and it has it's selectorized and so i just put the kind of selector in on a weight and i got like sort of six or seven reps i forget um and i pushed that up to eight and i thought i'll put it up a little bit more put it up the next one and whatever reps i got is what the reps i got and then i shall now work in like the five to nine or five to eight whatever it is that i've discovered is appropriate for that situation and it might actually change over time you know it might find that as i get stronger on that machine it just tweaks slightly because some adaptions the coordination stuff is stopping happening and it might affect the way that i'm working in that i don't know but i'm not stressing about it i'm just going to work with what the machine gives me science-based lifting gets this bad name
Speaker 1but over complicating things and this is so simple we're making this as simple as possible i don't know if if you've ever used like the old nautilus equipment so the ones before they were like this selectorized stuff that had like the there's this weird double prong that would go in it was i didn't i have no idea why they did it like that and so you'll have like each weight plate will have a hole and then you got this pin you go in that's got two holes or two pins you go and you just have no idea what weight you're using right like i can't work out for the life of me and the plates are barely numbered as it is and that has been a very useful tool in losing that emotional attachment to having to have this like perfected progressive kind of model where i just i don't know it was one up one down i don't know i just put it in and i go to zero eruption reserve and i got six reps out great you know it doesn't it doesn't matter that much does it
Speaker 2well that's that's the thing i think um you know if if we are well i mean just just being a bit kind of kind of clear there i mean um again assuming that we're talking about single sets to failure i mean um things can get messy if we've got fatigue present from a previous set or a previous exercise with the same muscle group but you know yeah broadly speaking you know if i'm going to use the uh you know the seated row machine and i've just done a press before that and i do the pull-ups and i you know it takes me actually because of the size of the gym i'm working on the different floors i have to walk up i have to walk up you know different floor and a mezzanine and across the way to get to the um row machine that i want to use threading my way through all these different pieces of kit um i get the the seated row sit down do a warp and then then start and then it's like um okay well i did that number of i did that weight last time that's that pin there and then put the pin up okay and then i'll just get what reps i get and it's okay well then that just goes in the log book and then just do it again do it again do it again over the next couple of weeks and see what happens um and i think i think there's definitely a tendency for people to be able to overthink and get like um sort of emotionally uh disturbed by either the lack of progress or whether or not they're doing it correctly or anything like that and it's like you're you're you're you're just recording feedback it's like how strong are you on the day fine it goes in the log book of of the as a piece of information and then just look at the trends over time um i don't think people should sort of are going to benefit sort of psychologically from trying to force themselves to hit you know uh you know uh sort of a new um you know strength goal every single time they go in the gym as a natural lifter i don't think that's a good idea um you know i think it's better to treat it as feedback and you know just do the best you can on each day yeah
Speaker 1yeah and you'll just see form technique will start to break down if if one well that's yeah that is that is definitely the risk yeah yeah um it's so funny to think that people would think that a set done near failure might not call the adaptions just because you didn't well that's
Speaker 2the same thing really as i mean like ultimately that's the intensities sort of um argument where the volume argument is being made so like you made the comment about mike benser uh kind of uh sort of talking about needing to uh do an extra rep or hit failure or whatever in order to trigger the action well that's really just the intensity kind of view of what the volume guys are arguing which is that unless you do more volume you're not really going to figure it out i mean both of them are talking nonsense it's like is the repetition stimulating or not if it is stimulating then qualitatively you have stimulated the adaption qualitatively, it might be quite small, but qualitatively, not say that the adaption hasn't happened you know and i think this is where uh physiologically sort of starting physiologically and trying to understand how things are actually being it's really really important because it stops you making these ridiculously absurd claims like unless your you know intensity is off the charts then nothing's going to happen unless your volume is off the charts nothing's going to happen and it's you can't do that from external parameters you can't do that with volume and you know sort of uh intensity and things like that it's got to come from you know what is the physiological reality um if stimulating rep has happened then hypertrophy has been stimulated end of story yeah yeah exactly okay i think that's it for us
Speaker 1i've i've battled noisy birds a construction site you've had it all today yeah so hopefully you guys were less distracted than i was we'll be back next week i mean that's that's my reward for our one year and one week podcast episode but we'll be back next week uh with a new topic but just to quickly say these topics that we've been doing lately have been topics you guys have been asking for and so they've you know they've been selected from questions you guys have asked either myself or chris and you said hey we want to know more about this or i don't understand this topic that's helpful you know we want it we want this stuff to be valuable to you guys so keep doing that keep letting us know what kind of stuff you're interested in what topics you feel like there's maybe some ambiguity over if it's a topic maybe you know we haven't covered it in depth as much as you guys would find helpful let us know okay that's it thank you guys for joining us we'll be back next week
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