Speaker 1Hello, and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardley. I'm here with my co-host, Rob Mouseri. I'm going to talk about periodizing exercises today. And this is more of a response that we're doing to what we see happening in the industry, because generally speaking, our approach is to not periodize exercises. So the type of programs that we would write would typically include a really good exercise for a specific purpose, and then essentially to do that exercise pretty much forever. There wouldn't be a reason to change that if the exercise was correctly chosen in the first place. Now, rather than me, because this is a kind of response kind of episode, rather than me leading off with a description of various physiological concepts, and then us moving into some practical comments, and then finally talking about some counter examples of what we see going wrong with what we've kind of suggested that people do, we're actually going to go the other way around. And Rob's going to lead off by saying that we're going to talk about by describing some of the horrible things that he's seen in the industry being done at the moment regarding the periodization of exercises over training programs. And then periodically, when I can't restrain myself anymore, I'm going to chip in and comment on things, and then we'll kind of just roll it from there and see where things go. But basically, this is more of us responding to a problem that we see happening. And now we can kind of briefly mention some of the sociological reasons why that happens later on. But fundamentally, we're just going to talk about and describe what we see happening, or Rob's going to describe what he sees happening. And then we're going to just talk a little bit about why that is a bad idea and, generally speaking, what people should do instead. So, Rob, lead us off with a horrible example of what you're seeing at the moment regarding the periodization of exercises over a training program.
Speaker 2Definitely. So, I think the first one's a pretty good one. So, it would appear, based on the description here, that this was designed to improve the back squat. So, obviously, it doesn't go with the back squat for the whole program. There's six phases here that I'm looking at. So, it starts off with a front foot elevated split squat. It moves in the next phase, which is a few weeks long, three to four weeks. Then it moves to a regular split squat. And then it moves to a heels elevated back squat. And then to a safety bar squat. And then paused regular squat. And then finally a squat. So, it's a very, very long, quote-unquote, progression just to get you to where you're actually training the exercise you would want to improve.
Speaker 1And that's exactly the point, isn't it? I mean, that didn't take long for me to be unable to restrain myself. I mean, that's the exact point. It's like, you know, you're foregoing all of this practice time you could have. I mean, assuming this is a powerlifting type program to improve the back squat. You're foregoing all of this practice time, this coordination input that you could be having and you're doing other stuff instead. And the reality is that not only is the coordination of the back squat absent because you're not practicing that movement, but also you're training a combination, a different combination of muscles than the one that you're doing now. And that's one of the reasons that you would actually want in order to maximize performance in the back squat. I mean, this is not to say, of course, that, you know, occasionally doing some accessory exercises isn't really valuable for the back squat, but you would pick those accessory exercises specifically because of them being really good at something that the back squat is not so good at. You know, so example, I mean, we've done all of this in the powerlifting kind of episodes that we've done. You would pick a hip thrust because it's so much better at training the glutes. You might pick a, you know, an adductor-specific exercise because you want a bit more adductor magnus. You might pick, you know, kind of a knee extension. Whatever you might do, it would be to kind of be really good at something that the back squat is not perfect at. Whereas what we're seeing here is just another kind of squat variations that are all going to have their own small limitations pushing in different directions. None of them are going to be amazing at any one thing. It's really, really strange.
Speaker 2It is, yeah. Especially like, you know, starting with split squats and that. I mean, we've talked about that. We've talked before about how neither of us is a fan of split squats. If you want to build some muscle, do a single leg-leg press. And certainly if you want to really go about improving your squat, which was the stated goal of the program here, I don't really think split squat, certainly as, you know, primary exercise, is doing very much for you at all. Especially, you know, an unstable variation, moving between a different, like a regular and front foot elevated. You know, it's just, you'd see no way that offers any benefit. Like you said, the muscles contributing differently in the exercises as you go through the program. It's never going to be the same, you know, in terms of like how much quad, how much adductor, how much glute you're getting. It's just, yeah. And then you'll never get any practice until that final, you know, brief few weeks at the end there.
Speaker 1Exactly. I mean, you just ticked off all the high points there. Essentially, you already mentioned the coordination, which I picked up on last time. But yeah, unstable variations are just horrible. For, you know, maximizing motor unit recruitment, there's always going to be a deficit of recruitment there that's bigger than it would be in a stable variation. Single leg press looks like, you know, kind of an inferior option to most personal trainers and strength coaches these days, but actually is so much better in this regard. So much better. As you were saying, so much better. You know, for somebody who is not really, really practiced, I mean, I think this is one of the problems, just going off on a slight tangent here. This is one of the problems that we have with social media. Influencers, they've got a bunch of clients who've been training with single leg variations, split squat variations for like the last two years or whatever. And they're all really good at it. You know, really, really good at it. And so they're moving decent loads. And everyone's like, oh yeah, you know, see they can use massive loads on their split squats. And so therefore, okay, fine. Try that with somebody who's not spent two years practicing. See what happens.
Speaker 2Yeah, it's never going to happen.
Speaker 1You'll spend basically 18 months getting to a point where you can actually move that kind of load. It is a really, really specific skill. It's very difficult exercise. And people mistake that difficulty for being valuable. No, you're just getting really good at that particular circus trick. You know, it's not actually kind of helping you in any other way, shape or form. And you could just jump on the leg press, do single leg presses and get the same recruitment.
Speaker 2Yeah, again, much better. You know, somebody's
Speaker 1got from spent 18 months practicing to get to the point where they can do it in a split squat variation. So what was the point of that hugely, you know, kind of, um, difficult learning process? It doesn't make any sense. So yeah, like I said, I'm really not a fan of split squat variations. I think they make very, very little sense for most people. Um, honestly, it feels a lot like a circus trick that, you know, influencers are developing to sort of show people, Hey, look, you can do this. Well, yeah. Okay. But what has it achieved for sport? Virtually nothing. Yeah.
Speaker 2And I gotta be honest, I, I don't split squat. Uh, the last time I can remember doing one, you know, I squat heavy. I could automatically barbell split squat. I think it was like 275 for some reps just to do it. Um, cause people in my gym were doing them. It's like, if you actually get strong on stable movements and, you know, even just like a back squat and that, if you're, you're pretty athletic and coordinated in general, you can just go do that exercise.
Speaker 1You're probably, you're burying quite a lot of information there.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're, if you're athletic background, but yeah, if you have only athletic background, you can just go do those things and then like, you know, it doesn't mean they're doing anything for you or they're like. Like, you know, using a heavy load on that isn't useful.
Speaker 1But again, that, that kind of picks up on something really important, which is that I think a lot of S and C coaches believe that by putting athletes through a training program that has these sort of exercises in there, that somehow they're contributing to the athleticism of the athlete. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Your athlete could was, was athletic at 12 or 13 years old. Yeah. You're not like 18, 19, 20 years old. You're not doing anything. I
Speaker 2think it's a bit of a kind
Speaker 1of, um, self-deception going on that. But anyway, but yeah, I was picking up on some things that you said. So you said, you know, the coordination issue that if you miss, um, if, if you're, if you're missing out the lift that you're trying to improve in the case of powerlifting, if you're not doing the back squat, it really isn't, uh, you know, you're missing this huge opportunity for actually training the lift that you want to improve. So in the case of powerlifting, we need to be doing the actual power lift. So we need to be doing the actual power lift. block plus after the safety squat block there will be whatever was unique to the safety squat so you'll essentially get some kind of commonality muscle fibers across all of the blocks which have managed to kind of build on each other and then finally you'll get a little bit extra from whatever was in the safety squat and if that isn't then used in the back squat which i doubt it'd probably be pretty much identical then you're losing those as well when you go into the back squat block so if you've done the actual back squat the whole way through you get everything that you've done in the back squat from the entire training program so changing exercises is insane when you think about it like that and it's literally just because i think and i make this point a lot on the other podcast that i contribute to with jake dollishaw i think that the last kind of 70 years of the industry having you know a lot of influencers and voices who have been using anabolic steroids i think what that's led to is that people just think that atrophy doesn't happen you know people think atrophy is just something that happens you know if you spend two years not training yeah it takes like a month at
Speaker 2least they think they think
Speaker 1it takes forever and i'm like look we've got literal maintenance literature data showing that it happens inside of a single training week like you can do three or four sets once per week and it'll basically just keep you exactly on maintenance you'll never improve you should be losing whatever you gained in that single workout i think we're living in this really strange environment people think that actually just doesn't happen and so then they don't apply that concept to all these kind of strange periodized exercises a periodized uh programs they have where exercises are changing every couple of weeks but ultimately as i say in a string of blocks like that the only thing that's going to be sort of present at the end in terms of muscle growth is what i was common to all of those different exercises plus the last block you know kind of on top of it will be will be unique to that last box exercise uh it really just doesn't make any sense
Speaker 2yeah i think you'll you might even hey
Speaker 1the next hit the next one even more go ahead and hit me with it
Speaker 2because it's it's an upper body example so there's gonna be even even less uh you know overlap of muscle fibers and that so this one goes and actually similar to the last one they also unjoint reps and things like that but that's not the topic for now um so it's inclined dumbbell press at uh 45 degrees flat dumbbell press flat barbell bench press and then 30 degree incline barbell press this one to be fair does not it does not say improving the bench press is the primary goal or anything like that i don't actually see a goal of the um program listed here it's just talking about sequencing exercises for um improving just just as upper body strength so we can uh we can unpack that one a little bit i mean again
Speaker 1um i mean i understand that in some circumstances you know people have a lot of weight and they don't have a lot of weight and they don't have a lot of practical requirement to use dumbbells in pressing movements and i get that and it's like if if dumbbells are the only equipment that's available to you you want to do pressing fine i totally understand that but honestly i would encourage people to use more stable equipment if they can for the pressing you know dumbbells are not not my favorite piece of equipment in that in that context but you know i understand that practicalities are you know sometimes get in the way but yeah i mean basically the same thing is going to happen that we saw with the split squat there's gonna be a lot of practice and i think that's going to be a lot of practice and i think that's going to be with dumbbells a lot of a subdued level of recruitment um simply because it's just a difficult exercise uh in comparison with a barbell variation or even a machine variation so um in terms of the kind of i think you said it was an incline um dumbbell to start with and then a flat dumbbell and then a flat bench and then back to an incline um barbell so it's kind of like a u-shaped kind of progression so yeah i mean the problem with that is that of course um you know again any muscle fibers that are unique to the incline variations are going to be a long way away from each other so you're not really and then the same thing again well the flat dumbbell will probably um have a decent correspondence with the the flat barbell just a little bit of difference in terms of stabilization i mean just to kind of unpack this a little bit more for people if you think about it um imagine just for a moment let's let's abstract this a little bit more and go imagine you're thinking about three different things you're thinking about dumbbell press uh again let's pick a flat um bench press at the moment um think about dumbbell variation and then a barbell variation and then finally imagine that you're working with a smith yeah so you've got three separate stability requirements with a dumbbell essentially your stability your your two kind of main concerns with stability is going to be it's going to be um unstable uh in the sagittal plane essentially it's going to uh the the way it is going to try and fall either um kind of backwards past your head or forwards towards your waist um with a dumbbell additionally you've also got medial and lateral instability in other words the dumbbell is either going to fall towards each other or away from each other now that lack of stability exists in both of those uh kind of directions if you now move across to the barbell bench press you don't have that medial lateral kind of instability it's very unlikely you're going to have a lot of instability there most of the instability is going to be um kind of um sort of either falling back towards your head or falling forwards towards your waist and then in the smith you haven't got any of those problems so essentially you've got these three very distinct stability environments now every time you've got to resist the uh kind of weight moving in a direction that it wants to go and you don't want it to go you have to exert muscle activation to stop that happening so you're going to have different sets of stabilizers involved in the dumbbell press compared to the barbell uh press again and even fewer involved in the smith machine so essentially you've got these different muscle usages happening well this is really really useful because it tells you essentially that if you're using those dumbbells to begin with and then you move into a barbell you are basically going to lose any hypertrophy you got in those stabilizers when you move across to the barbell they're just not going to hang if they're not being used they're not going to remain you know kind of hypertrophy that's just how hypertrophy works um but again and if you stacked a smith machine on the end you get the same issue the opposite direction um so what we're dealing with here really is the fundamental problem we're always seeing with these periodized exercise ideas which is that somehow people think that you can just hang on to muscle fibers that you're not using i mean and the only reason that they would believe that i believe is because of anabolics creating the interference effect in the way that people think about this stuff because if you didn't have those people would be like oh yeah muscle disappears really quickly because that's the only experience that everybody has
Speaker 2and we we talked about it on the powerlifting episode like you look at powerlifters look at the best powerlifters they you know if you want to get good at really specific exercise you know they just do the bench press for 15 years and then the greater the bench press and all the muscles involved in their bench press are quite big um you know they're not doing some sequence of exercises that's supposed to give some magical effect and you know maybe you know people think give you some kind of long-term better result obviously if those things give you a better result people benching you know six six hundred pounds someone that would probably be doing those things um you
Speaker 1know i mean that's not to say that there's no such thing as accessory exercises i mean we did yeah of course i mean like but they are accessory they're not the main they're not replacing the main lift exactly you want to practice yeah
Speaker 2you want to practice and then you want the very specific isolated accessories for the involved muscle you need
Speaker 1exactly that you specifically need but again even then and we made this point on the podcast that we did about this even then those specific exercises are generally a prime mover support they're not like you know i mean like it was i i mean i'm old enough to remember that like kind of 15 years ago people like oh no i need to work on my external rotation strength and that'll improve my bench press i'm like oh i remember what you i remember you know it's like you can't fire a canoe don't work like that um but yeah i mean like generally it's like you can't fire a canoe you can't fire a canoe you pick a you figure out what a muscle is that is not contributing sufficiently in your case you know like i've talked about this before but generally people in bench presses are going to be either kind of triceps dominant or pec dominant or anterior delt dominant you just find one of the other muscles or pick one of the other muscles that you think is really not contributing very much work that and it'll start to contribute more that's just how neuromechanical matching works um so you make the muscle bigger it has a bigger momentum it'll contribute more um and i think but again it's like it's not a stabilizer it's not a stabilizer it's not a that's kind of the point you're
Speaker 2making i think yeah um i think we got that one pretty well i do have another one
Speaker 1let's finish up with one
Speaker 2more yeah one more because this one is somehow even wackier so i say that because this one has you doing two lower body days a week it alternates between three different workouts it says to repeat three um repeat each workout four times over the So workout one is back squat for, you know, a bunch of reps. Workout two is front squat. Workout three is front squat, heels elevated. The reps do go from high to low across those three days. And then so, yeah, you go back squat, front squat, front squat, heel elevated. Back to back squat, front squat, front squat, heel elevated. Until you've done each of those four times. And I'm looking at this and it just hurts. It hurts me.
Speaker 1It does. Yeah, it's bad, isn't it? I mean, yeah, I think, I mean, mean really this is one of those this this really i mean like i could say all the things that we've said already um rather than do that let me just kind of move the conversation forward a little bit and say i think this is one of those um really good illustrations of how personal trainers and strength coaches have come to believe that unless they make a program look fantastically complicated you know their client won't see value in it you know and i think that's a really really bad um mindset to have you know i think that the value that um strength coaches and and personal trainers bring is uh identifying the exact correct set of exercises and loading parameters not only for the goal that the client has but also for the starting point as in you know the client's characteristics so it's about analyzing where that client is at what their moment times are like you know what their kind of preferences are and what their their goals are and putting all that into it and then you know i think that's a really good illustration of how personal trainers work so i think that's a really good illustration of how personal trainers work so all of that together and fitting that you know into the the right shape now that doesn't mean that generic programs aren't valuable you can kind of create a generic program that works for most people most of the time that's totally true but for somebody wants to pay that extra to have a you know kind of bespoke program if you like then that's what the this this sort of skill set is involved um you know and i think even then the program shouldn't look massively complicated it shouldn't be changing every five minutes because that's a massive downgrade from something that's going to work and i think that's that that's the tension i think we're seeing is people think that in order to sort of display value it has to have all these bells and whistles and you know kind of flashing lights and twirly things and it all has to look really complicated it's like well that's the sign of a bad program because yeah that's got enormous coordination demands in you know you've got muscle powers being trained and then atrophied there's no real kind of capacity to develop the coordination necessary in any of the exercises that anyone the client is doing such that they probably won't hit high levels of recruitment and then achieve an improvement in recruitment and it's like there's nothing right about this program it's just terrible but that's but because because of the desire to make it look expensive it has stripped everything you know out that could possibly work and that's that's really really on the one hand i'm kind of like i've got this horrified fascination you know this is a horrified fascination it's like watching you know watching an accident happen you know you can see the kind of glass or the the kind of the vase sort of tilting on the table and you just can't get to it in time before it hits the floor and smashes into tiny pieces you're looking at it it's a horrified fascination going there's nothing right about this but you can see the incentives that have driven it to happen yeah
Speaker 2and it's not like like i can get that because like over the years i mean even if even i've had clients who are like yeah i don't know i don't know i don't know i thought there would be like more variety and we'd be changing things up and this and that and yeah confuse the muscle things like that and it's if you're a good coach and it's up to you at that point like to you know you'd be able to show someone why probably they don't need to do that but also at the same time you can be good enough to give just enough variety over time that things are so similar that it's doing what you want to do it's doing something good you know you can change reps a little bit you could do maybe a different protocol you can you know use a cluster you can do something like that something that gives just enough instead of a wide grip pull up you do a wide grip pull down you know little tweaks like that that are over time going to give someone some semblance of variety but you know it's doing just about the same thing
Speaker 1i think this might actually be worthy of an episode um to kind of go through some suggestions of how people can how how program writers can vary programs in a way that is kind of not creating problems i think that might be a poor topic for us yeah that would actually i mean like yeah no i think i was going to kind of start spraying ideas out and i thought actually let's let's keep that and let's do that as a unique episode on its own because it deserves its own title um so yeah so that was basically a run-through of why periodizing exercises is a bad idea so let's just don't do it um so um we don't really need to tell you uh what we're doing because um it's just the opposite to that it's just pick the right exercises if you
Speaker 2watch my instagram i squat and deadlift and do a few accessories you are kind of training for
Speaker 1powerlifting competitions
Speaker 2i mean i jump too come on i
Speaker 1jump cool so um let's let's call that there and we will be back uh in two weeks i think
Speaker 2yes i'm away on vacation you're away so cool
Speaker 1so we'll be back in two weeks with another topic
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