#414 ‒ Resistance training as we age: optimizing exercise selection and training intensity for muscle growth, function, and injury risk management | Jeff Cavaliere, M.S.P.T., C.S.C.S.

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My guest this week is Jeff Cavalier. Jeff is a physical therapist, strength coach, and founder of AthleanX, one of the most trusted and influential fitness education platforms in the world. Prior to that, Jeff served as the head physical therapist for the New York Mets, and he has spent decades bridging the gap between rehabilitation, performance, and strength training. This is Jeff's second appearance on The Drive after joining us, last year for our Strength Roundtable. In this episode, we talk about how to train for strength and hypertrophy while minimizing injury risk, especially as you move from your 40s into your 50s and beyond, why junk volume is one of the biggest mistakes lifters make, and how to think about productive reps instead, reps in reserve, how to use them correctly, when to train to failure and when not to, Jeff's own injury history, including shoulder and foot issues, and how they shaped his philosophy on training around pain, training for aesthetics, and functional training, and why they're not actually at odds, Jeff's list of common graveyard exercises that increase injury risk without delivering enough gains to potentially justify them, why calves, glutes, and smaller stabilizing muscles deserve far more attention than they get, how to adjust training variables like volume, intensity, and frequency as you age without giving up performance, and finally, a body part by body part breakdown of some of the best bang for your buck exercises. So, without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Jeff Cavaliere. Jeff, man, thank you again for coming back to Austin. So good to see you again. Super happy to be back here. You've been here in the heat. You've been here in the cool. It's all great. This is a beautiful place. We were talking to the driver on the way over, and I said, where's the one place in Texas that I should, if you were to choose one place, he says, honestly, Austin, because it offers the most diverse, opportunities and not just the nightlife, but it has the scenery, the culture. So I love it. Awesome. We'll try to get you to move here. Yeah. Well, there's a lot I want to chat about with you today. And I also realized that for some people listening or watching right now, they might not know a lot about you. So maybe just briefly tell us a little bit about your journey to here. We didn't talk about it really on the round table. So maybe just explain a little bit about how you found your way to doing what you're doing right now. Growing up, I always, wanted to get ultimately involved in some career where I could help people or educate. Cause I always loved doing that. My father was a doctor. I had aspirations at one point as the third kid of three to maybe become a doctor because no one else had. But for me, I always had this other love of sports though, too. So if I could figure out a way that I could get into working with athletes at the same time that I could help people, not just athletes, cause that's a smaller population that I would find, I would feel would be my perfect fit. Well, I started being able to work strictly with athletes as I got a job at the New York Mets. I'm a physical therapist. I was our head physical therapist for three seasons and then left to pursue whatever this was ultimately going to become. But I started pretty early making videos for YouTube, educational videos for YouTube, focused on trying to take the lessons that I learned from training with top level athletes and apply them to people who are never going to get paid to do this. We're never going to get a pro contract, but just want to get paid to do this. We're never going to get a pro contract, but just wanted to be able to benefit from what they need to focus on to perform at such a high level. Cause I think we all have a lot more we can do if we focus on the right things. And I started off with a couple of videos and the next thing you know, a couple more subscribers. And I saw that there was an opportunity to continue to pursue that path. And I did. And ultimately here we are now almost 15 million subscribers doing what I've done since day one, which is just trying to use the platform to educate and empower people with the techniques that I've learned. And I've been doing that for a long time. And I've learned techniques and strategies from both the realms of rehab as a physical therapist and strength and conditioning as my other role was with the Mets. Because to me, they're all one continuum. If you're hurt, you're just less functional at the moment. But as you become able to get higher and higher levels of function, you could get to extreme levels of functioning capabilities. And that's athleticism. What year did you start the channel in earnest? 2009 is when I actually started to make content for it. My years with the Mets were 2006, seven and eight. When you think about the evolution of the channel, there's so much content on there. How do you think about that from the standpoint of injury prevention to a lot of the stuff that I actually probably discovered maybe on Instagram a few years ago, maybe a little longer than that. I've been following you for quite a while, but a lot of it is on honestly, like why is it that when you're doing a lat pull down, you're not getting the right engagement? This is geared towards function and hypertrophy. As you said, like this is not about an injury. This is about making progress. Has that been an evolution for you or have you always provided information on that continuum? I've always provided people information on that continuum because I feel that's the part where my skill as a physical therapist comes in. Because if you're in a rehab setting and somebody comes to you with whatever ailment they have at the moment and they need help, you will never be able to follow the playbook as instructed or as written or as the protocol comes that says, this is what you're doing one week later, two weeks later, three weeks post-op, whatever. Something always comes up where that individual has something that doesn't feel right, or they don't have the range of motion that's expected, or something is preventing the playbook from being able to be executed. That's where you need to be flexible enough to be able to say, well, okay, try this instead. It could just be simply moving your leg further out into abduction to then go do a leg lift. All of a sudden, pain-free motion again, they're able to do the activity. So if you don't have that ability to have a lot of flexibility in your approach, then I don't think you can effectively perform a rehab on somebody. It's no different in weight training and strength training. Not every exercise will feel great for every person or feel as effective as it should. There's tips that you can give them to increase the stimulus that you're feeling, and that might work for almost everybody, but there's still going to be people who don't have that effect with the exercise they're doing. So you need to find exercise number two or three. And the beautiful thing about strength and conditioning is there's never just one option. There's usually like hundreds of options to go to. So if you're diverse and you're in your playbook, you're going to be able to do that. So I think over the years, my ability to navigate even similar issues, I've done 1700 videos at this point. I mean, we've covered a lot of the same issues twice, but coming at it from a different angle and making it click for somebody for the first time, because we're explaining it slightly differently is probably where the power is. You've probably observed the same thing that many people have observed, which is some combination of the human attention span appears to be getting shorter and shorter and platforms seem to recognize that and prioritize shorter and shorter content. Now, I think I'm a bit of an unusual person in that I don't like short form content. I really like long form content. I like watching a 20 minute video where I will learn something in depth that's at the master's level, as opposed to a one minute video that just shows me something at a superficial level that obviously, even if it's correct, it's incomplete. How has your ability to provide content evolved in that environment? And are you still making a lot of long form content? And how have you basically struggled with trying to educate people as much as you can, but understanding that your opportunity to do so, like every one of us who's trying to educate people, it's narrowing? It's been a huge challenge for me personally. And I think even for obtaining the information that I do like to obtain, because I like you, I like to find that long form content. I like to dive deep. I have no problem making a three hour podcast, or even just a 40 minute video and chunking it down into sessions so that I can watch 10 minutes now and then watch 10 minutes again later. I have no problem with that. What I don't like is the watering down or the thinning out of the content, specifically because it needs to fit this format, this short form format. What you're forced to do as an educator is to pick and choose the things that you think are going to be the most impactful, but you're not really even given the opportunity to explain why. I'll give you a great soundbite, but is the soundbite really valuable if you don't also understand why? Because unless you remember or memorize that soundbite and can implement whatever the soundbite is telling you to do, if you forget the why, then you may never be able to actually understand why you're doing what you were told. That is why I've always done long form content, because I want to have the opportunity to explain the. We have a joke internally at my company where they say, sets and reps, please. Because that's what people literally will say in comments. They'll bypass the entire explanation of why, which again, I feel is not just. I'm not trying to make a long video. I'm trying to give you the information that you need to be able to implement that. this, not just on whatever I'm teaching you in that video, but other things too. Sets and reps, please, is basically the punchline to like, I don't want to hear any of that. I just want to know, tell me the what. I struggle. I still struggle, but I will always continue to make long form content. Now we've had to make short form content. I've had to take clips from these longer videos and convert them into things that we can present in short form format. I have had to make them more intentionally engaging in the first three seconds, because I know that is the attention span of the person who's about ready to flip that thumb one more time and skip right past me to have something that's going to catch their eye, just so that I can have the opportunity to teach them whatever I think is going to be valuable. I think that's a game that kind of sucks, to be honest with you, but it's sort of part of what social media is evolving into. Well, the good news is, I don't know how many minutes we're into this discussion, probably 10 or so. I can assure you that any of the people that need to get hooked in the first three seconds are not only gone from this, they're, they're like, they're 10 steps removed. Anybody who's still sticking around is in this for the long haul. So we should not be apologetic for the fact that we're going to talk about many topics in depth. Let's start with, well, one other kind of personal question that I think helps set the stage, Jeff, is help people understand your own personal injury history. You don't get to be in your fifties like we are without a lot of stripes on your back. And I think that can also explain sort of where you're coming from. So I know of at least two injuries you've had, and I think that's you probably had more like, what are some of the major sports injuries, training injuries that you've experienced? The most significant injuries that I deal with on a daily basis are probably a result of poor training advice over zealous attempts to become something that I wasn't, you know, in my teens and early twenties, in terms of being a lifter or a bodybuilder, most of all, not correcting some of the issues that I knew were there, but I felt were like old man issues when I was 20. So for instance, I have incredibly flat feet. If I took my shoes off now and stood, do you think I have flippers on my feet? That is how bad they are. There's no arch in my feet. Knowing now what the implications of that could be with every single step you take having to be the consequences of those absorbed somewhere else up the kinetic chain, my knees, my hips, my back. I would have done something back then to become a lot more diligent with finding the right orthotic, with actually staying true to wearing the damn thing, not taking it out because it was uncomfortable in one shoe or it wasn't really, couldn't wear my favorite shoes because of it. So that had a lot of impact on me. And I think that's one of the things that I've repercussions on my knees that I feel every day, every day. Now there's things that I've been able to do and work around, which we can talk about because I believe you should be training no matter what your pains are. There's ways to train around them, but I have been able to navigate that. Now, the other one that I significantly deal with is in my right shoulder, torn labrum, 50% tear of my supraspinatus rotator cuff, degeneration in that shoulder as a result of provide a nice level of support inside the joint. When you tear that in that bone is able to kind of move around a lot more freely than it should without the stability. You can get a lot more accelerated arthritis and degeneration in that shoulder. I was told that I had the shoulder of an 80 year old person. So I'm only 50. That's a little disconcerting, but right now that doesn't actually hurt. So I'm able to do almost anything in the gym. That's not unwise because I've learned how to sort of train around those things, but it's always going to be persistent there. To be clear, you have a 50% labral tear and independent of that tore the rotator cuff. Yes. And you have at least a 50% tear. And did you say infraspinatus or supraspinatus? Supraspinatus. And the other three muscles are? They're pretty intact. Yeah. And how many years ago was that? So that was actually the funny part about that injury because that I've told this story before that was on a day or on a bet. Oh, I know this. Yeah. So I was coaching with the New York Mets and it was my second year with them. And so I was very comfortable around the guys at that point. Definitely would be known to ride each other's weak points and where their insecurities would be. And I think they all knew I wanted to be an athlete one day. I wish I was the baseball player on the other side in uniform, but I picked up a ball one day and I was standing next to one of our all-star outfielders. And I said to him just casually, because we used to do our conditioning on the out and right field. I said, you know what's crazy? It doesn't look that far from here to third base. It just doesn't. And he's like, really? And he hands me the ball. He said, how close are you to the wall? We're on the warning track. So just in front of the warning track. To me, it looks far as hell, by the way. To me, it didn't look so bad. And maybe again. No, but I think when you're on the field, it's different. It is different. It's definitely different. Things look a little closer. So he handed me the ball. I said, what do I get if I do it? He says, thousand bucks. And so I said, all right, give it to me. And I basically curl hopped about three steps or so. I backed up a little bit through it. As soon as I let it go, I don't even remember seeing the ball land. I think it was somewhere around second base that it landed and bounced and rolled pathetically towards third base. I felt like a zipper-like pain in my shoulder. And I knew that I had just screwed up. It was pretty debilitating for the next couple weeks in terms of that really acute injury. But then I was able to, of course, I still had to go to work every day. But there's a lot of laughing that went on at my expense. My ego has hurt way more than my shoulder at the time. But I've since lived with that because that was a variety of exercises without pain. Impossible. Impossible. And I tried all different ways. I did everything I just mentioned to you before, the slight angling of the arm and the changing of the nothing would work, except for completely getting away from some of those irritating exercises and then getting into some other movement patterns. And I was able to get back to the point where now I can bench press. I don't talk about bench press, but I talk about bench press. I'm able to, I'd say, pretty much do a full training routine without limitation from the shoulder. I do know that if I let's say a dip too low, and I do this sometimes trying to demonstrate the wrong way to do things and I'll show, okay, don't do this. I'll feel it for days after. So unless I'm intentionally trying to show a mistake, if I were to do something dumb, like if I were to try to attempt the muscle up again, which I've done, that could go from feeling so good right now to back to feeling awful. And it could be for a long period of time. So I'm very careful in terms of the things that I do engage in and don't do. When you had that, failed throw to third base, did you sublux as well? Or was the torn labrum a totally separate injury that resulted from presumably subluxations elsewhere in your life? No, no. I had never had any other shoulder issues my whole life. So that labrum you think came from that as well? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because when you try to throw it that hard, that quick velocity, you can get a slap tear from that one extreme effort that was overreaching by everything I had, basically adrenaline driving me to not look stupid. I did have a nice punchline to that story. I don't know if I shared this one last time, but I was subsequently challenged, just goes to show you how dumb I can be with that mentality of an athlete. The following year at home plate, we're looking at first base. Now that looks very close. I don't care. Even if you're sitting in the stands, it doesn't look that far, but that's 30 yards. And so I said, isn't it crazy how like quarterbacks who throw the ball 60 yards in the air is like, that's a huge feeder. They talk about how incredible it is. I said, that's 30, that's half the distance right there. You could throw this on a regular pass. Knowing what I did the previous year, another player stepped up and challenged me to see if I could throw a football 60 yards. 60 yards? 60 yards. How did you go from 30 to 60? Because I said it was only half the distance to this accomplishment of 60 yards. Like I could do that with my eyes closed right now. You can see how I tend to put myself in horrible situations quickly, but I was then challenged to do that. And we got out of spring training, went to Miami, where we opened up our season. And of course there's a football field there. So we're played on a converted football field back before they moved into the new stadium. And they walked off 60 yards for me. This time it wasn't just one player. The whole team gathered around. Everybody's there. And I had, they had someone pace out 60 yards and I had the football. I crow hopped a few times. I threw it. I threw it 60 yards. When we were at our- Some redemption. Some redemption. When I got to the- But sorry, this is only one year after you've torn the rotator cuff in the labor room. This is what's so great about this story. It's not that I threw it 60 yards, which by the way, I was handed a thousand yards. In cash shortly thereafter. So they did hold up to their end of the bargain. What's interesting about that is the only difference was the plane that you're throwing in. When you're a baseball player and you're throwing and you're out here, there's so much stress on the shoulder and the rotator cuff from here. When you're in this position here, like a football player, there's so much less stress. You're putting your body into what we call the scapular plane. You get a lot of triceps that are helping this movement. It feels completely different. I don't have the pain and stress in my shoulder when I throw from there. How is it that one person not only destroys their shoulder doing the other thing, but does something that somebody from the outside would be looking at as the same thing? Oh, he's throwing again? But it's not. It's a completely different throw. Pardon my ignorance, Jeff, but I understand why a pitcher would be out here because they often want to put spin on the ball. But if you're the outfielder and you don't need to put spin on the ball and you're just going for distance, why wouldn't you mimic the quarterback's mechanics? Probably a good question, but I think that you're able to get more torque from out here. Obviously, that's because you have that longer distance in the arm. So you're able to throw that ball further and faster. With a football, usually your targets aren't as far down the field and when they are, your desire is going to be to arc them and lead them. It's more timing than anything. I think when you're trying to throw for maximum velocity, you're going to want to rely on that longer arc of movement. And when you're an outfielder, ball's got to get there fast. You got I throw the guy out at second base, third base, or home so to get maximum velocity you're going to probably want to be out there mechanically and a football player they can do it with a strong arm and distances of 20 or 30 yards 15 yards 10 yards but when you're throwing long and deep usually got so much arc that you don't have to have as much of that speed but just the arm strength to get it out there when you look at some of the greats let's take Bo Jackson as an example and obviously for you and I I mean that's we can remember every single play he ever had I realized that some people may be too young to remember what it was like to watch Bo Jackson but one never got the impression that Bo was got that way through training he literally just seemed like he I don't know was somehow born knowing how to do what he did is that because his natural innate talent was around the mechanics of throwing or do you think that there are innate differences in the structure of the rotator cuff and the way that you're throwing it and the way that you're throwing it and the way that you're that would enable him to get away with a higher torqued position I think that the idea that athletes are born is not entirely accurate and I also think that athletes are made is not entirely accurate I don't think that people who are unathletic can achieve the highest levels of athleticism simply by spending the 20,000 hours that right and vice versa so when you look at a guy like Bo Jackson like these outliers as just tremendous athletes they are always going to have characteristics that make them the outlier they're going to have higher percentage of type 2 fibers they're going to have because we have a lot of muscles where we have distribution of type 1 and type 2 slow twitch fast twitch they're going to be a lot more twitchy is what we say they're going to have stronger mind muscle connection so when they go to do something the reason why it looks so easy when they pick something up for the first time is that the coordination requirements that are tough for a lot of us even just getting on a bike and trying to coordinate that they pick these things up so easily most of all they're going to have a lot of characteristics that make them the outlier because I think they have great neuromuscular efficiency they can do what they're telling their muscles to do and I believe they have amazing proprioception which is another perception of your body's position in space or really what your joints positioning is in space that a lot of us have to learn and practice and get good at they have inherently great proprioceptive intelligence I think when you can put all those things together and then you have someone who's actually very fast because speed isn't something everybody has either when they're fast when they're explosive twitchy as I said strong now you're able to do things and again when you can pick these skills up so quickly you're able to do things that look almost effortless that others would require a lot of effort to even make it look like they're doing it right let alone doing it at the level that they're doing it so I mean Bo Jackson he was a once-in-a-lifetime athlete it's just amazing how short his career was because of injury and that's another thing no matter who you are you might recover faster because of some of the things we talked about but injury is injury injury can happen to anybody at any time especially in a contact sport like that but his was such a freak injury too awful and again you don't see that injury a lot like if you said oh it was a ACL or something like that you'd say yeah yeah but to have the avascular necrosis of a hip that comes out as I mean it's just even like it's crazy not knowing because I remember actually when that happened and he went down he got injured and what it could have been at that time could have been a bunch of different things but when it was determined okay as a hip fracture then to heal that way heal him properly and then he develops avascular necrosis that's just sort of tragic especially the sports fan to see like that have to happen to him because it could have healed normally but it didn't that's somewhat tragic one of my best friends from the Mets David Wright amazingly talented all-star perennial all-star he was fielding a ground ball at third base coming in and Carlos Lee big they call him the caballo or something like big guy came down the line and collided with him he broke his back a transverse fracture of his lumbar spine it healed him properly basically healed with a lot of bony spur formation now he gets a lot of compression on the nerves there feels like a hamstring injury the following year because he's getting burning down the leg but it's not the hamstring that's causing the problem and ultimately that led to his injury and he's now in the short fire hall of famer short fire hall of famer from a freak accident that just continued to cascade in terms of its healing gone wrong basically took him out of the game early so some of the greatest athletes we've ever seen can still be brought down by injuries and it's tragic when it happens because it has so much so when you see athletes that combine the best of both worlds which is to say they have the skill to be all-stars but then they also end up having the career longevity to realize that dream I can't think of a greater example than Tom Brady it always annoys me the hell out of me when people talk about his lack of athleticism it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard right like he's a better athlete than anyone you've ever seen let's forget that but again what also allows Tom to go down in history as the greatest football player in the history of the sport is that he played so long and that he did so relatively injury free I mean he had an ACL injury that didn't derail him at all missed a year and when you think about something like that Tom is one of the most deliberate people in the world when it comes to how he thinks about conditioning his body and one of the things he talks about a lot is pliability and he talks about how at least at his position it's less important how strong he is it's more important how pliable he is how trainable do you think that is across the board I think it's trainable I think it's basically sometimes avoiding some of the things that take away pliability so if you're focused on just strength and just building as big muscles as you possibly can then you're going to be trading off some of the elasticity of that muscle so being able to build to a certain point or try to create as much growth as possible to a point where you're still able to functionally use that muscle and to have the elasticity in that so that means you still have to work on your flexibility you still have to work in your mobility I hate the term muscle bound because it just sounds like such a cliche from the old days but that is really essentially what's happening when you become muscle bound you're not also working in the elements of flexibility and mobility and I think Tom Brady has always done that he's never been worried about being Mr. Olympia wasn't his physique that was leading his success on the field it hasn't been for any quarterback and yet it still strikes me that there's something Tom is doing different than all the other quarterbacks or most of them I mean to me when I think of Tom Brady and I've actually heard this from some players he is the epitome of this is a great because it segues into anything we're talking about later on in fitness consistency he is the epitome of consistency consistency is the key that unlocks every single door when it comes to physical performance or just overall health and longevity if you can stay consistent with what you do then you're going to have a lot more resilience to injury you're going to have that ability to focus on the things you know you need to focus on and even if you don't like them I don't like stretching I hate stretching but being able to show up and continue to do that that's the consistency part of it he I'm sure has so many things that he did in his preparation that weren't his favorite things but it was never a negotiable of him not doing them so to me I think his superstardom and his legendary status comes from his consistency in doing even the things that he didn't really want to do I think what happens to a lot of people and even a lot of athletes is that they tend to narrow down to the areas that they like the best or they perform at well you're never going to be as good as you can be if you always focus on the things you do well you have to focus on the things you don't do well at to sort of round out and fill in those gaps so that you're able to create an end product that is more fortified than not and that's really a lesson that goes far beyond trying to be the best player in the history of the NFL that's true for all of us and you've heard me talk about this a lot is I do want everybody to think of themselves as an athlete and then the sport it's not football and it's not tennis or necessarily anything like that it's just life life is a sport luckily it's not as demanding a sport as being on a football field but it's still a sport it's a sport where you get to define the rules you get to define the objective of the game but if you treat it like that and then you start to adopt an athlete's mindset the athlete's mindset says there's a distinction between training and exercise training has specificity training has sometimes doing things I don't want to do it means creating a well balanced and structured program and I want to talk about all these things with you today so let's start with the idea of transitions and stages in life so I'm sure you feel the same way I do but we're half the men we used to be already and we're not even there being reminded every day yeah sometimes people I've said this to people and they're like I don't know what you're talking about I feel amazing and I'm your age and I'm like that's great I'm very happy for you that you do but it's also you didn't do half of what I did when I was younger you were sort of a fat out of shape bump on a log until two years ago and so that's why at 55 you feel better than you did at 53 and that's great nothing makes me happier than seeing somebody who's never done anything their whole life and they're now finding their own that's great but there's another subset of people like you and I who have been insanely active our whole lives and we're still doing fine but if we're being brutally honest we're a fraction of what we used to be we don't have the recovery we don't have the speed we don't have any of those things knowing and understanding the inevitability of some decline how should people who have been active their whole life who are showing up in their 40s and their 50s and their 60s with the I don't want to say inevitable but the very probable wear and tear that came from doing dumb things when you were young and experiencing a decline because you're starting from a higher place, how do you think about coaching these people such that they get to 90 and they can still do everything they want to do? And by the way, do it at the level of what we would think of as a fit 65-year-old. That's a good question. First of all, I think you have to do what we've done, which has come to the realization that it isn't exactly like it was when we were younger. Because some people will fight that. They'll fight the fact that things have changed. They'll fight the fact that it might require a longer warm-up than you used to do. Or I used to be able to do this. Like for instance, I'll say, I used to be able to do just one quick warm-up set before getting into my working sets. Why can't I do it now? I think we fight that for a while. I did fight it for a while. Probably in the last three to four years was my transition period to start to realize and see some of these changes. And what was the signal for you that you needed to do that? More achiness in the morning when I would wake up from training. I'm okay. I'm accustomed to feeling sore when I wake up the next day. I think that makes me feel alive. The soreness I'm talking about is not joint soreness. I'm talking about muscle soreness. I know I worked the muscle two days ago or a day ago. But when it starts to get to be more joint feel and joint related, I know that I'm maybe not allowing myself to recover enough or I'm doing too much at too quick of a pace or I'm not preparing myself to do whatever I am doing. And therefore, I think that's the part of the warm-up that I wasn't really doing enough of. And you just have to be honest with yourself. And say, hey, what am I not doing that I could try that is going to potentially change whatever it is I'm feeling? I think you're going to feel something though. And that is going to be your sign as to where you should start. And that for me is usually in the form of either that joint soreness, like I said, or too much fatigue, waking up fatigued, maybe even irritability at things that wouldn't have made you irritated before. These are signs that you might want to start looking into your recovery. From the recovery point of view, I think it's going to be more the two factors of that are what is the actual work you're doing and then what are you doing to prepare to do that work? Sorry, in that second category, Jeff, just to make sure I understand that, the first category is what are the activities I'm doing to recover? And then the second is how am I eating, sleeping, all the other things that go into it. Or what is the actual workout that you're doing? What does the training look like that you're doing? So the training itself could be problematic because it could be too much volume. Or what am I doing to prepare myself? And that does occur not just in terms of the warm-up or right before the workout, but your eating, your nutrition, your sleep, the other elements that will go into recovery. I'm sure we're going to find, all of us will find one or two or five areas that we're probably not doing the things that we could or should that might make us feel better. And I say might because I don't believe that there's one recommendation for people when it comes to preparing to do something or recovering from what they're doing that's going to work for everybody. I think we have to conduct our own experiment on ourselves and see what the end result is. How do you feel after doing whatever it is that you're doing? So try something different. For me, I actually tried to utilize bands before training. I could take my bands out and work on warming up my rotator cuff or doing some of the movement patterns I'm going to be doing that day, but just doing with bands. And then I always say that the beauty about bands is that they're perfect for warming up because they stretch as you're able to do more. So they have that built-in capacity to handle more as you're doing that. As you can give more. So if you're just doing the first few repetitions with bands and you're just kind of feeling creaky or you're not really warmed up yet, as you're able to do more, they can handle more. They can absorb more of what you can handle. I like the fact that bands can be used to warm up. And it's something that I started doing just individually. I'm not saying that everyone should run out and try bands, but it is a good recommendation. And when you do that, you warm up your joints, the muscles actually get more prepared to do what they're going to do. Now, even if I handled the same loads that I did in a workout without that warmup, my joints are more ready to handle it. Proprioceptively, my joints can feel what I'm about to do because I just did something similar to that and that motion. And then I actually can get into using the weights, which provide a different source of tension. The weights are going to be differently felt than the bands will. I'm more prepared to handle that. The joints are more prepared. And as I said before, that muscle up, all it takes is one bad repetition to make this shoulder go from a hundred back to zero again. So you can imagine the accumulation of however many repetitions you're going to do in a workout, ill prepared or not prepared well enough can pile up and start to have some negative consequences. So I think that's what people have to do. They need to come to grips with the fact that not everything is going to remain the same. I've mentioned before that I've always had great eyesight after I had them fixed with LASIK, but I've had great near vision. Last two or three years, I struggle every time I pick up something to read, a pill bottle or anything. It's very difficult to read and it frustrates the hell out of me. I don't know what I'm doing to merit that type of decline. Nothing. I'm very consistent with what I do in all aspects of my life. So that is simply just an age-related decline that has nothing to do with anything that I'm doing to cause that acceleration of that. I take care of my eyes, have regular eye visits. It's something else that's causing that. I have to understand that that is going to come from age. What are you going to do about it? Yeah, no, it certainly will. When you think about this transition from your 40s to your 50s to your 60s, and I focus on that not because there aren't people listening to us who are 20 or 30, but I do think that there's a huge cycle between that 40, 50, 60. So I want to kind of focus there for a moment. What do you think is the most prudent strategy for reducing risk? And I'm just going to limit this to resistance training for the moment. Is it reducing overall volume? So if I said to you, Jeff, when I was in my 30s and early 40s, I would be doing 25 sets per body part in the should I be taking that down to 10 to 15 sets? Is it reducing absolute weight and therefore increasing reps a little bit? So, hey, I've always trained at one to two rep and reserve, and I'm going to continue to train at two rep and reserve, but that weight is actually coming down. What it's taking me to get to one to two RIR is a lower and lower weight as I age. Is it frequency of training? The number of times, how many days that go in between training muscle groups? How do you think about all the potential levers a person can pull? To still maximize their performance while minimizing the risk of injury? That is the essence of what we try to do. That is what we have to master. So there's a couple parts to this. The first thing I'll give you the short answer of those three options. I want volume to come down. I want productive repetitions to go up. I want repetitions to actually mean something. And when I do that, that means the intensity is going to go up. So you'll have to train harder, but I will save a lot of the junk volume that I believe just winds up wearing and tearing and creating an accumulation of wear and tear. That's not only not necessary, but again, it's ultimately unproductive. So we have to look at it though, starting from this concept of reps and reserve and whether or not you actually prescribe to the exact reps and reserve specifications of, hey, one RIR, two RIR. Some people don't train that way, but they think- Can you explain? I rattled it off quickly, but I want to make sure everybody knows what I mean. So reps and reserve is essentially a measure of how hard, let's say you've taken a set. So a zero reps and reserve is you've taken that set to full mechanical failure where you cannot lift that weight anymore in good form. One RIR would basically mean that if you were to do a grinder, if you were willing to grind out one more repetition, you probably have one more repetition in you. Two to three RIR is essentially where you've got another one or two left in the tank, but it's still difficult, but you're stopping at that point. Nobody that was watching you from outside would visibly really be able to tell that you've reached your maximum. Four RIR or more to me already starts to become junk volume. And it's exasperated by the fact- Outside of a warmup set. Yeah. Outside of a warmup. It's just exasperated by the fact that we as a whole, and I'm talking about even some trainers themselves, we don't fully appreciate or have the internal scaling tuned in to measure what real effort is. And that's for a variety of reasons. I would guess that we undershoot what we're capable of doing by one to two to three repetitions often. So when you don't have this measurement of zero, what zero means, then everything else is very difficult to gauge, especially if you don't have a lot of training experience to be able to feel the nuanced difference between a one or a two or a two and a three. So to me, what I want people to do is to start at almost every opportunity, training as close to mechanical failure as possible. Now there's a few things that get in the way here. There's psychological failure. Psychological failure is not necessarily I can't mechanically lift or make my muscles contract to lift this weight again. It's I don't really feel like doing another repetition because the discomfort that's caused by this repetition is something I'm not really willing to put up with. There's a big difference between that and what your muscle can actually do. So when we push ourselves, past psychological failure, then we get into what we call form failure. And form failure is where the speed of the repetition might go down. I'm okay with that. I actually advocate for slower repetitions anyway, but the speed might go down a little bit. The form might get a little loose in terms of like a little bit of cheating, but that's okay too because as long as you're properly stabilizing your body when you're doing it, you don't look like you're performing a different exercise. That's still okay, acceptable. What's not okay is joint pain. If you feel joint pain at any step of the way, you're not doing the right thing. You're not doing the right thing. the way, you should stop because you're probably not even training the muscle at that point anymore you're obviously putting the joints in the middle and then allowing yourself to just push to that point where the exercise can't physically be completed where the exercise you're doing in a bench press you can't move the weights anymore that's where you stop and that's where i believe people need to get themselves to do more often and most of us either have that calibration that's not calibrated correctly so we're not gauging that effort correctly even if it looks like we're doing the right things and we're accumulating the right volumes like you said on paper the signal is not there the intensity is not there you need to get to a point where you can objectively say well the signal is here because i can't move this weight anymore and the more you do that you can take away a lot of those sets and so even though you might be counterproductive think by training harder i'm going to apply more stress to my body and make it harder for me to recover no you're actually because you're applying less of that junk volume and certainly in terms of joints less of that wear and tear because even just raising my arm up here every single time is another as i say rotation on the tire at some point the tires on that car have to get changed you're going to run out of rotations on the tire why waste them in a repetition that is completely non-productive for you mentioned building muscle because that is what we're trying to do in this case we're training for hypertrophy so if you're not pushing yourself to a point where you can stimulate those high threshold fibers the ones that can grow then what are we doing we're not accumulating that muscle and we're not accumulating anything that's going to build strength or hypertrophy so therefore we're not building that resilience that we're trying to build so objectively getting you to do more of your sets to good form failure not talking about ugly repetitions and losing stability of your body while you're doing it i'm talking about good form failure then you can bring down those repetitions and those sets quite a bit get rid of a lot of that volume and through the increased intensity you have a way better outcome so for certain exercises it's safe and relatively straightforward to determine a zero rir to your point and i agree with you completely this is exactly the thing we explain to our patients is especially people who are new to resistance training and we're trying to build these habits you can't know what one or two rir is until you know what zero is you have to fail yeah and so i want you to start to learn what failure looks like it's safe and straightforward to learn what failure is if you're doing an overhead tricep extension because the cost of failure is really low especially if you're doing it on a cable pulley or something like that but how do we map that out to somebody who's doing front squats or back squats when we're talking about the big compound lifts especially if you're trying to train for strength where your rep range is going to be lower i don't believe training all the way till failure is the way to go i think saving one repetition there maximum two repetitions i'm just saying to learn when you want to teach them what one or two rir is how does someone figure that out in a squat obviously with the right setup you can put somebody in a rack and have the safety pins there and you can even have them squat to a box so they have a little bit of the assuredness of knowing that they're not going to bottom out yeah they can get to a box so i think there's things we can do to manipulate that deadlift one of the things we do oftentimes is elevate the bar either through a trap bar so the handles are elevated or put the plates on just to be able to give them a little bit more security and knowing that when i do fail here it will feel like i'm in a safe secure position you could always strip away the pads at that point or you can take away the box but again in those big compound lifts it's not really even necessary to do that to go all the way to failure to see those benefits you can take that one rep shot because again remember i said that the zero rir is really truly that maximum last rep that is going to look like a grinder to people doing these things on those front squat or other lifts can become a recipe for disaster especially for people that's a sport it's called powerlifting right exactly right it's not necessary when we're talking about those exercises but something like a lap pull down like you said or a barbell curl like i say a barbell curl there's nothing safer in the world when you're going to fail you can simply just release it from your body i'm gonna say i'm not advocating to throw the weights around the gym but it's in front of you and it's going to safely go down to the ground to the floor to the bench whatever's in front of you you don't have to worry about that it's not like you're getting crushed under the weight in a bench press i gauge a lot of the train to failure or absolute failure recommendations based upon the environment of the exercise you're performing and how safe it is to actually do that because there's no benefit that you're going to gain that's going to outweigh the risk that could come from a poorly performed repetition with a weight that's already in a fatigued state where you're handling a weight in a fatigued state already i know from all of my time training that there are just certain days when i'm not able to push as hard as other days and this is not just true in the weight room it's true on the bike it's true in the pool so it's true with cardio it's true with resistance and i've long wondered why what is it that allows me on some days to push so much harder and why are there some days where there's almost like a built-in governor and it just says i'm not gonna let you go past this threshold of pain today i'll be honest with you that is something that i've probably noticed a little more of lately than i noticed in my 30s in my early 40s even up into my early 40s i had almost a supernatural ability to do a lot of things that i didn't want to do what i called burn the matches every single day and i would do this very strangely even on a recovery day if i was out for a recovery ride i would still always do a four or five minute all-out hill climb even an easy swim i would still do an all-out set for 400 yards or 300 yards today there are many days when i could never do that so do you think that's a consequence of aging do you think that's a consequence of stress in life or other things that the body can only manage so many things and if you have too much stress in your life about work and kids and things like that you just can't bring all of your energy to a workout i mean what do you think is driving that i'll add one final question which is really the question at hand which is how can an individual understand are they at psychological limit or mechanical limit those are definitely the two biggest contributors of the psychological and mechanical factors however psychological could be driven by your recovery so whether you're getting a good enough sleep that night whether you are undergoing stress outside the gym in your life these factors chip away they chip away at your ability to tap into that next level i think they don't chip away at your ability to show up that's just part of your habit at that point they chip away at your ability to tap into that next level of intensity to train and do what you're saying burn the matches because that does take a reserve you're tapping into reserves there and if the reserves are already tapped out because of these other stresses or your again lack of sleep and other factors that lead to poor nutrition that lead to the feeling that you're having then that's going to prevent you from tapping in i think what contributes more to that though it sucks because it's sort of the inevitable part of what we're dealing with but it is the aging contribution we know that as we age obviously we're losing type 2 muscle fibers we're getting weaker we're losing the muscle mass itself so things that used to be achievable with less effort because of the lack of sleep and other factors that lead to poor nutrition because of higher levels of strength in the higher distribution and proportion of type 2 fibers that's starting to physically go away so things that you used to be able to do are going to become more challenging now we try to like push through that and say okay i gotta push harder but then we have the hormonal contributions to that too that make pushing harder and doing harder things more easy that is starting to get challenged too as we get older so we start to get a decrease in the hormones the male hormones that are driving and women see the same effect they're getting a decrease in their hormones that provide that level of effort and also the hormones that help to regulate stress and help to regulate sleep and help us to have undisturbed sleep these are all starting to get disturbed as we get older and i think that whole picture makes it more difficult to do the things that we used to do let's stay on this sort of physique hypertrophy side of things for a while and let's take kind of a nuanced look at muscle and muscle group specifics head to toe and i want to talk about the most common misconceptions the biggest mistakes people are making and maybe what the greatest unlocks are for folks who have been frustrated in lack of gains in these areas and whenever possible or whenever you feel that it adds value feel free to distinguish between male and female but i also kind of assume at the end of the day male and female training has to be pretty similar right i mean the same principles of progressive overload so i don't know if that even makes sense as a valid question i also realize that of course men and women sometimes have different goals with respect to what they want physique wise but anyway feel free to handle that partisan any way you choose so where would you say we're starting at the top shoulders traps shoulders okay so you got somebody like me with salmon shoulders they don't really bulge out at all if and by the way i'm taking notes for myself what are the biggest mistakes people make and when people want to beef up their shoulders what should they be doing what are they doing wrong the shoulders are a three-dimensional problem and i think that's three-headed muscle posterior deltoid middle deltoid and front deltoid so people do take an approach where they try to choose exercises that will focus more on one head versus the other there's a lot of people who say that the front delt doesn't need to be trained because it gets a lot of work and pressing and overhead pressing it depends on how detailed you want to get or how specified you want to get in terms of building up shoulder development but it's a head of the deltoid it's a muscle and it needs to be trained i think if you were to try to develop optimal size of your shoulders you're going to want to choose exercises that do focus on each one of the heads of the delt individually and that with the most attentions you're going to isolate one versus the other but with the most attention and then you're going to want to make sure you're still doing your compound lift which is always part of every muscle we're going to talk about like what's the compound lift you could do where you have other muscles assisting that work so you can push that muscle to and through its failure point like we talked about for me it starts with a vertical pressing movement of some sort to be able to do some vertical pressing which is really a point of contention for some people because that's going to be orthopedically one of the things that hurts the most but there's always some modification to that that i believe you should be able to do and sorry let's just say why is the vertical press so important to you is it because it's getting all three heads simultaneously it gets all three heads simultaneously it's a functional requirement of life to be able to lift our arms up overhead i'm not saying that we have to lift overhead with weight in our hands 40 50 80 pounds or whatever we're doing if you want to put a suitcase well yeah i mean i just witnessed it as we were flying here someone trying to lift their suitcase i was wondering if i had to step in and jump in and help because it looked like a struggle to get it up into that overhead bin you need to be able to handle weight overhead and so i also think that it also uses full range of motion to do that we never want to forego full range of motion full range of motion is the nutrient to the joint if we only stuck with movements that the front middle and rear delts we could theoretically stay below shoulder level our entire training session i want to see you get your arm up overhead so we're getting that shoulder through its full range of motion joint itself through its full range of motion it's not always about just the muscle itself it's about the joint that you're trying to train around to get the full function that we're looking for now someone like you jeff with some arthritis already in your right shoulder let's just assume you had a little bit of ac arthritis as well so now i do have some of that so there you go so what are the modifications you make how do you safely accommodate that motion because obviously gosh i mean back when i was a kid in high school we were doing it behind the head i don't think people are doing that anymore are they most people are doing an overhead press in front i assume they've been watching me i hope not no but this is the thing that people get a little bit disturbed by if i say this or if i throw an exercise i say into my iron graveyard it's not because i want to have an issue with the exercise it's that i know i can give you an exercise that will give you the same benefits at less risk yeah what's the point right we should just make that disclaimer now because i can already see the hate comments coming in because there is always going to be at least 100 people on planet earth that love every single exercise and have a great argument for why you should be doing back squats on a piano standing on one leg with an elephant strapped to your testicles and anybody who says that's a dumb idea is a total poser yeah totally and it's like no you're right if you can do that without getting injured you should absolutely do my answer to that is like if that's what you do and again go back to what we mentioned before if you can feel a greater stimulus that way no that's the best way i feel my middle delts work then do it i'm not saying don't do it but i have to make recommendations for people that i think are largely appropriate for the majority of people and i don't think that that exercise is going to give people this superior benefit that i can't get from just simply getting your elbows out in front of your body and doing the press from in front of you for me specifically i can do things like a landmine press where i can get my elbows out even a little bit further in front of my body so tell folks how you do a landmine press so a landmine press is essentially take a barbell put it into a corner of a room if you're training at home put a towel there so you're not ruining the corner of your room but you basically put the empty bar in the corner you put you load up your weight on the front side of the barbell you put two hands on that end of the barbell and you're pressing up and away from your body like that all you're doing there is taking away some of the verticality of the exercise again going straight up and then you're pressing up and away up is going to require the most range of motion at the shoulder and people that have orthopedic issues might find that all that range of motion is tough to tolerate right now so when you put it out in front of your body you're cutting down that angle by about 45 degrees you want people doing this symmetrically meaning not off to one side straight up and down the middle i love asymmetric loading i love that too oh yeah so you'll do one arm you could do that too yeah absolutely i could do them up and over i love to do things that are a little bit more challenging in the multiple planes when we can but if we're starting out we're trying to get somebody to actually just feel this motion definitely i would have them start right center chest and push up and out but you're basically cutting down some of that overhead requirements from the range of motion requirement which is going to make the exercise feel a little bit more tolerable you're also as i mentioned earlier you're getting a little bit more tricep involvement the closer those elbows get in because you're getting more flexion at the elbow so they have to extend so you're getting some assistance from triceps on your way to being able to do your shoulders which is i think a good point to point out here any injury you're dealing with is not a mandate to completely rest it's not it's a mandate to choose safer more appropriately loaded and progressed exercises that's the requirement here not to completely rest because resting in and of itself actually contributes to more of the dysfunction time is one part of recovery but the loading of the tissues themselves is another promoter of recovery so when you remove that load entirely things start to go wrong at an accelerated pace so what you want to be able to do is find the exercise modification that you can do and then you progress you add more weight to that or you start to step closer to this landmine so that your positioning is now a little bit more vertical and then to the point where you can actually press overhead vertically and it's not going to always be limited potentially if you follow the right progression there's an analogy i use if you thought of an injury to a certain joint or painful exercise like this overhead press it shouldn't be looked at as a city shutdown it's just a single road closure for now that's it we can take that overhead press that i can't do your let's say the just the dumbbells overhead and then we reroute it and we do this landmine press instead okay great we didn't shut the whole city down to do this now let's just say though that all those are harmful at the moment they're all hurt and i use pain as the guidance pain of joint pain as the guidance then we take the back roads and we do something completely different like a row because if i row i'm not training my overhead pressing at this point but i'm putting the shoulder through range of motion i'm going into extension of the shoulder i'm bathing that synovial fluid into that joint i'm helping to promote recovery these little steps along the way though they might look remedial are part of the overall progression back to function so when we talk about again this landmine press don't think that you're married to this exercise for the rest of your life understand it's a step in the way to being able to overhead press i think that's what people do a lot of times is they just they feel like they're not able to do the thing so therefore don't do any more choose something completely different that's not going to provide the same stimulus that we're looking for and we talked about that with squats a little bit the last time we were here just doesn't feel right for you but there's other things you could do to maybe progress yourself to the point where squats would feel right again but for overhead pressing i need that and i need to have that as my compound movement whatever form it might take whatever step in the progression it might take in the hierarchy of barbell straight in front of you to dumbbells is the idea that with dumbbells look i'm going to allow you to take a little less pressure off the ac joint by bringing them like the more midline you're going you're approximating the landmine so for you personally with your shoulder history are you using a barbell or are you using dumbbells i'll use barbells infrequently maybe 20 of the time and again sometimes because i want to retest my abilities to see how close i've come to being able to use them paint free again and i can i can use them paint free now one of my best modifications when you're doing a barbell is to narrow up the grip because the narrower the grip is you can see the elbows follow so as i start to narrow my grip my elbows will follow the elbows start to bring obviously a change in shoulder alignment with it so now i'm back into sort of that scapular plane and i'm able to press from there so that's one modification i'll make if i use the barbell i will almost always opt for dumbbells one of my favorite things to do with dumbbells is to simply do one at a time so you mentioned the asymmetrical i love being able to do one dumbbell at a time i can handle more weight that way so i'm going to do one at a time and i'm going to do one at a time and i'm going to do one at a time so that's back to that idea of increasing the stimulus increasing the intensity i can increase the intensity improve the mechanics of the exercise on the joint because i can take that one dumbbell push it up and overhead and stack the joints i talk a lot about joint stacking wrist over elbow over shoulder and have that good stability from underneath when i'm pressing from out here we don't get that same level of stacking so if you have any instability type injuries like a labrum tear you're not going to feel as comfortable out there unsupported as you are with everything stacked on top of each other so i like to do that variation of the exercise it also feels some exercises are just more fun it feels fun to be able to do that seated or standing standing i like to do as many things as i can standing because even for a shoulder exercise again if i'm advocating not trying to always go so light and again increasing some of the weight you're using here then i like the fact that i can have my legs to rely on if i need a little bit of that extra cheat to push myself through to those higher intensity repetitions i'm not saying that you always have to do them with cheat or with a push press but they're there if you need them otherwise you could simply do them as a strict rep but still standing is just a more athletic position for people to be in i think that has the best carryover what i'm hearing you say is if you only have time for one deltoid exercise it should be the overhead press because it's the compound movement that hits all three heads yeah okay i believe so so now if you could add a second or a third movement presumably Presumably, you're not going to want to bang on the anterior portion again because you're you're getting enough of that through presses, but you're going to want to do something for the lateral head or the posterior head? Yeah. So either of those other two options, again, I agree with your question there entirely. And that would be the third choice. The front delt would be the third choice of the three. But I think back to what I said originally, if you were trying to maximize hypertrophy of the shoulder, you can still do front delt exercises. Again, there's a lot of fear around doing that. Can I ask a silly question? You know, when you see somebody who's, and this again is both male and female, both tend to prioritize having a nice separation. Is that visually created by the lateral delt or the anterior delt? So that's where I think the front delt is a little under appreciated because I think it does create, if you're talking about the visual aesthetic of it, that separation between the chest and the deltoid, because you're getting that line that comes in on the anterior part of the shoulder. But when you're looking at that roundedness of the shoulder, that is almost entirely coming from the middle delt. You're not even really seeing the rear delt there. The visual benefit of the front delt is that you're not seeing the rear delt. You're not even seeing the benefits of the rear delt is when someone turns to the side and then you see whether they have a rounded shoulder there or whether they have like an emptiness to their shirts in the backside of their shoulder there. But the rear delt is one of the most functionally important for maintaining proper balance of the joint itself. So I think as a physical therapist, my next answer should be the rear delt. Because I know the exercises that go to training that are going to have a lot of other benefits to you posturally and again, maintaining joint health for the long run. But if you're talking about strictly aesthetics and what you want to do with your body, what you want to do to have a better appearance when looked at from the front, then it's going to be the middle delt. So what's a middle delt exercise? So any lateral raise is good. I do like the cable lateral raise a lot because it's got tension throughout the exercise for a longer portion of the range of motion. If we do a lateral raise with our arms at our side, the exercise has basically zero tension at the bottom and it starts to rise up as I raise the dumbbell up. But with the lateral raise of the cable, first of all, I have a stretch tension on the delt itself in that starting position. And as soon as I start to pull, I'm already getting higher levels of tension in the middle delt. And they are maintained as long as you sort of manipulate your body or your arm position in space as you go. We're always trying to get, when we use cables, this perpendicularity between the cable and that moving structure. So if I have my arm here, it's my forearm that's really the moving structure that I'm focused on. How long can I maintain this relationship of the cable? And my forearm in this perpendicular alignment. If I can do that and pull up again, I sort of manipulate my arm in space to feel where that is. Then I'm going to feel that middle delt working at a high level throughout almost the entire range of motion. For people who are just listening to us and not watching us, you're doing kind of a cable raise is almost the wrong word. You're basically doing a cable movement across your body. Across like a rowing movement. Because you don't need gravity when you have the cable. You're doing an across the body kind of row. And by the way, what we'll do in the show notes for this podcast, is we'll link to videos you've made on each of these, because that'll actually make it really productive for people to go and see like, okay, that's exactly what he means. Okay. And by the way, I have no affiliation with the company, but I have become completely enamored with and obsessed with Voltra. Have you been using this thing? No. Do you know what I'm talking about? It's kind of electromagnetic. I really, really like it. Oh yeah? What have you been using it for? One of my patients gave it to me. I love it. I actually bought a second one. So now you can pair them and I use it for a lot of things right now. Like where you can manipulate the separate tensions, eccentric tension. Yeah. That's the first thing that I fell in love with was the manipulation of concentric and eccentric tension. It's frankly, I mean, just a space-saving device. Like I've got one of those big free motion things. I'm selling it. I've got all these other things I'm just getting rid of because it just replaces them. Frankly, if I didn't already have a lat pull-down machine, I'd get rid of that thing too, because you can do pull-downs on this thing. You can do belt squats with this thing. I mean, all you need is a really good rack and this device because it clips into it. Right. Yeah. We had one in the gym for a while as by a company, Keneo, who had lent the piece to me. We were able to do some really cool things with it, but it was hard for me to show them to people on YouTube because nobody had the machine and nobody could do it. But as far as like geeking out on the stuff myself, I love that. I mean, I love the ability to increase the eccentric load even more than we can concentrically because our bodies are able, obviously, to handle a lot more eccentrically than we can concentrically. So if you can take a load that you can handle concentrically, but then double that load concentrically, you're getting challenged in a big way. And I've been so interested in which exercises I have more eccentric strength than others, you know, and it might just be a function of the absolute weight, but it's been amazing to me on some areas where having a big eccentric load is manageable. And in others where the eccentric addition above concentric can't be that much, it can only be like 10 or 15%. So I think I'm scratching the surface of how to use this thing, but I am enjoying that a lot. There's a million things you can do with those. They even have the different modes of the elastic. You can make it feel like a band or like a chain, right, right, right, right. So, I mean, it's really cool stuff. It's definitely for the nerdier types like ourselves who like to do this, but as long as we know how to use it and apply it with the people who see us, then they can benefit too. Okay. So that's your go-to middle delt. Obviously the rear delt is something you already alluded to where you could be doing a row. You could be doing face down on a bench, doing a lateral raise or something like that. What would be your kind of number one go-to rear delt? I believe that though a smaller muscle group and though one that doesn't often get trained directly, it definitely gets skipped the most out of the three of the delts by most people. So number one skipping is leg day. Number two skipping is rear delt day. Rear delt day. Yeah. It doesn't get the love it should. But again, as a physical therapist, I know its importance in more than just looking a certain way. I, at the same time, believe that it doesn't get loaded anywhere near what is capable of being loaded or it doesn't get subjected to the stresses that most, when they do actually don't skip the day, they actually do the exercises, they're not loading it enough. So for me, the most effective way to hit the rear delt and hit it with a lot of weight is a seated cable row. And we do the seated cable row with wide elbows. So you have your elbows lifted up away from your sides. And your goal is to drive the elbows back behind your body. And all you have to do is just simply, you could even do it sitting in your chair. If you drive your elbows back behind your body in a row, you'll feel that rear delt really, really. Contract strongly. Well, with a row like that, we can utilize good weights and we're getting good assistance from the other upper back muscles and from the lats to do the exercise. But the rear delts will feel the brunt of that load. If especially you're focused on, this is where I think sometimes it's never just the movement. It's not just A to Z. It's A through Z when you do a movement. I don't ever want people to just look at an exercise and say, oh, I see he's going from here to here on this row. Just moving those elbows back. How are you moving it back? If you focus on driving it with your rear delts and contracting your delts as you pull, you'll feel less on the lats. You'll feel less of the contribution from the other areas that are contributing, but not dominating. It's easy to let the muscles that are usually dominating that movement, like the lats, come in and dominate. But if I focus on that rear delt doing the move, which relies on the knowledge of knowing the rear delts are going to pull the elbows back behind the body, that's part of this whole why these shorts versus long videos. We have problems because I want you to not just see the exercise, but understand why this works. When you understand it's the moving of the elbows back into extension behind the body that drives the rear delts, then you know why that exercise could work and you could actively work to make that movement recruit more of the rear delts when you do it. And your load is going to be significantly more than you'd ever use if you were doing a IY or a T, which a lot of people will do if they say, I'm going to do some rear delt work. Nothing against those exercises. They're fine. But those are, light work for a muscle group that can definitely handle more. Again, for people who aren't able to watch us, one of the things that you did that I think stands out is the elevation with which you're doing it. So the higher those arms, so you're almost pulling to your face. Upper chest, the elbows are going to drift away from your sides around 45 degrees or maybe enough to 60 degrees or so. They're going to drift out away from your sides. Yeah. So if you're just doing a normal narrow grip cable row, you're not getting enough rear delt. And that's how, again, this is why I love exercise so much because that is how you shift the focus. It's still the same exercise. It's still a row. It's still a seated row. But if my elbows are driven tight to my sides and I ducted tightly against my sides, I'm going to get more lats. If I allow my elbows to drift, I shift it away from the lats into the upper back and rear delt. So movement is not enough to describe what you're doing. It's the muscles that contribute and how you do the exercise that determines the effect you get. Should we say anything then about the anterior delt as a dedicated activity or have we kind of hit it? Simple enough, as I said, if aesthetics were your goal and you wanted to build the ideal shoulders that way, I would still do a front delt exercise. It's something as simple as a front dumbbell raise could do the job or a cable stretch raise because I can hold onto the cable, step away from the machine a little bit. My arm is now behind my body to start. So I'm getting a good stretch on the front delt to start and then I can rise from there. So you could also do this in an incline position, sitting on an incline bench, maybe 60 degrees or 70 degree incline. You sit there, your arms will be behind your body just because of the positioning of the incline bench to start. So you have a little bit of a stretch on the front delt before you go into your front raise. Any injury considerations with that? Are there any people whose shoulders are going to hurt with that pre-stretch? No, I don't think so. No, I think that's a pretty safe position to be in. I mean, just getting back behind, I think a lot of us don't do enough of that actually. We don't get behind our body enough. That's a good safe position of the shoulder because you're not in an elevated position. More problems with the shoulder come when it's elevated than when is down at your side. Any of the impingement type issues things that you feel that are uncomfortable come more when you get past this area they call it a painful arc which is beyond 60 degrees of elevation and abduction into like the 120 degrees or past shoulder level and then of course when you get towards terminal range of motion that stuff can become more problematic but positions of the shoulder down with your arm at your side don't tend to be aggravating and when you're starting from that pre-set position and lifting let's say you're at that 60 degree incline how high do you need to lift just arm parallel to the ground parallel to the ground yeah all right so that's pretty good on dealt everything you just described how many sets are you thinking how many working sets meaning one to two rir working sets for total right that's key because without the intensity indicator there it's going to vary completely so given that i'm a big believer in the intensity being near failure at failure you're looking at eight to ten sets in a week is needed some people separate those depending upon what split they're following but i mean if you're doing just let's say a traditional bro split we call it where you're just doing one muscle group at a time when you've hit eight high intensity sets across the exercise you could mix them up you don't have to do them all each week no no you can vary i mean i like to always include the compound i might shift the focus between the rear delt and middle delt specifically if i was limited to time or volume okay where do you want to go next you want to talk about go down the arm or let's talk chest and back well let's go down the arms okay let's hit the triceps okay so there's again three heads of these bad boys three heads here again so you don't have to be as specific here because really there's one differentiator between the long head the tricep and the other two heads the lateral medial head all three of them extend the elbow so they straighten the elbow out the long head because it has an attachment that crosses the shoulder joint onto the scapula is affected by positioning of the arm itself the shoulder itself so when you put your arm up overhead you're putting that long head in a more stretched position to start the exercise when you put that arm back behind your body and extend your elbow you're having an effect on the groove contraction of that long head because you're getting a more complete contraction if your arm is back behind your body so what i always recommend is though there's three heads i really like to see you do a good compound exercise that just focuses on extending the elbow do an exercise that places tension or a higher amount of tension on your body and you're getting a more complete contraction if your arm is back behind your body the long head in that stretched position and do an exercise that places more tension on that long head or takes advantage of the fact that the long head could be in a position of greater contraction with the arm back behind the body so those are my three real staples or requirements the compound exercise is not as big or as important to me in terms of let's do something like a bench press where i'm getting assistance for like a close grip bench press i'm getting assistance from the chest and shoulders too i think you still do a heavy lying tricep extension as your compound exercise and you're also checking off that box of the stretching of the triceps long head at the same time that's my favorite exercise for a number of reasons so laying on the bench you've got a bar you could use an easy bar or a regular straight bar but that could be harder on people's wrists okay but you would prefer a bar to dumbbells dumbbells are okay i don't mind dumbbells at all i use dumbbells a lot myself but people sometimes can feel it to be a little awkward because they can't ever time the dumbbells right in terms of extension so again the technical term for what you just described right would be humeral extension or extension of the of the elbow yeah and so how much do you need to get enough long head pre-stretch are you doing that with so again for people listening i'm trying not to use my hands that much if i'm laying on the ground and i bring my arms up to my humerus up to perpendicular to the ground is that enough stretch no or does it need to be needs to go back really opening the axilla up yeah you have to open up those armpits for sure you got to get your body to a position where i'd say so if you're laying on your back and your arm was directly pointed to the ceiling you would be at a 90 degree right so i'd say you're going to want to be at least 120 degrees or so more you go a little 30 degrees back behind your head a nice ballpark area for that is that your arm is sort of approximating towards your ear so your bicep is sort of getting close to your ear so this is the workhorse of the tricep i believe this is the best exercise you can do it could be loaded up really well again i like the compound nature here comes from the fact that the lats can assist you in coming back to the top so if you have a little bit of fatigue you always have that lat that can actually pull and kick in and help to pull that arm back up towards the top of the extension matter of fact there's a great exercise that utilizes that on purpose it's called a pjr pullover where you're just taking a dumbbell in this case two hands on the dumbbell allowing it to go back into what would traditionally look like an old bicep so you're going to do a bicep pullover where you're just taking a dumbbell in this case two hands on the dumbbell allowing it to go back into what would traditionally look like an old bicep pullover where you're just taking a dumbbell in this case two hands on the dumbbell allowing it to go back into what would traditionally look like an old bicep pullover where you're just taking a dumbbell in this case two hands on the dumbbell allowing it to go back into what would traditionally look like an old bicep pullover where you're just taking a dumbbell in this case two hands on the dumbbell allowing it to go back into what would traditionally look like an old bicep pullover where you're just taking a dumbbell in this case two hands on the dumbbell allowing it to go back into what would traditionally look like an old bicep pullover where you're just taking a dumbbell in this case extension our humerus stays generally fixed are you saying with a dumbbell no with a cable i'm sorry with the cable yeah how do you compare those two do you prefer the lying one or would you do them both and just say i'm going to use much more weight in the lying down one because i'm getting lat to help me lift it back to a perpendicular 90 degree position i don't like that exercise performed that way very much because i think that again we talked about that perpendicularity of the cable and the moving segment that is lost pretty quickly in that exercise to become pretty parallel pretty quickly so you lose a lot of the tension what i advise when people do that push away type exercise is to get the arms up overhead in a higher position so if you're using a rope when you pull down you can see that that's pretty perpendicular there and as you come to the top the rope is still sort of perpendicular to the forearm to a greater degree you'll feel it much more in the tricep throughout the entire exercise as long as you are doing it from a higher arm position throughout when you start to lean forward and do that again you can see like as i'm leaning forward the cable is going to be right up in front of me and you're going to be able to pull it back up right about here almost in line with my forearm and you're going to lose some of that tension the dumbbell variation which is i thought you were asking about the dumbbell overhead variation where you have two hands on one dumbbell and extend overhead that one gets more elbow flexion but doesn't get as much of that shoulder flexion up behind the body relatively so you could feel it less in the triceps for that reason but it does create some internal rotation of the shoulder to grab the dumbbell in that position that could be very uncomfortable for some people the more you can get your elbows out in front of your body externally rotating your shoulders and getting your hands to almost squeeze the dumbbell in your elbows almost to pinch together that will alleviate some of that shoulder discomfort but you can manage that by simply taking an incline bench and performing it on an incline bench because now your arms don't have to be back like they would in a vertical position here all the way to here i could be in an incline bench and get that level of extension of the elbow but not have to have this arm as high on my body as i have to and then so it feels more comfortable and it's a lot more comfortable and it's a lot more comfortable and it's more comfortable to people and when you're in this vertical position again you're bearing the weight of gravity completely and you're going to have the most range of motion at the shoulder to do that than you would you know we talked about 120 degrees on the lying version so there's less of that overhead range of motion that's required in the lying version of that okay so clearly you've established what the workhorse is on that one lying tricep extension with a bar ideally what would be the for lack of a better word the accessory or additional tricep activities you would be doing to get that range of motion if you're in a vertical position what would be the for lack of a better word the accessory or additional tricep activities you would be doing to get that range of motion if you're in a vertical position you would be doing to get that range of motion i don't care if you do ropes if you do a straight bar whatever seems to be most comfortable what are the pros and cons of each i think it depends on people's health of their wrists some people might find the rope gives the wrist a little bit of a break whereas if you have the bar you have two hands on a fixed bar because of that if you have some immobility issues in your wrist then what happens is the shoulders actually do get affected by that the position of the elbows gets affected because if i can't grab on to a straight bar because i lack the ability to get a fully flattened wrist then what happens is your elbows will flare your shoulders will internally rotate so now all of a sudden you're doing your push downs from what i call this jackhammer position which is like this because i can't get there so i have to do this when i do that now all of a sudden i'm pushing down if i have a straight bar a lot with my chest i basically turn this into a straight bar dip and so i'm taking a lot of the focus away from the triceps so is there a different difference between let's just say you're doing it with a single arm to make life easy so you're doing a press down where your palm is facing laterally i'm trying to be descriptive for folks not watching but you're sort of coming down this way versus turning the palm to the floor this way if assuming your wrist can accommodate both does it have any bearing on the tricep provided the upper arm is in the same spot if the upper arm is in the same spot no and that's where there's some controversy around because people i've actually talked about the underhand tricep push down that people can do and there are benefits the underhand tricep push down if you are not you have to be conscious about what's happening to the rest of your anatomy we're not just a disconnected arm we have multiple joints here so what i'm saying is that when people do this underhand grip what happens is the elbows will tend to become more approximated to the body and then what that will do is it will actually give you a chance to stay in this closer position and get into a deeper position back behind your body to get that long head into a more contracted state whereas if i'm here my elbows are in front of me i can't almost get blocked by the bar i can't really get back to that position so it's a subtle difference but again when we talk about training like an athlete again i'm And I always say that the reason why we say that is because athletes would care about the subtle differences because it matters. And when you're looking for every edge, when you're looking for every possible nuance that might contribute to a better exercise, you need to consider these things. So the arm position gets affected by that wrist position. And so if you are able to get into that position more effectively because of the change in wrist position, then you might want to consider that too. The trade-off there is it's a weaker wrist position, so you can't handle as much weight as you could when your palms are on top of that bar. So trade-off. But again, tension is the language that muscles speak, not necessarily the weight. Exactly. And even though you have less weight, if you're able to get the elbow behind you and get that huge amount of stretch into it. You're going to get a little bit more stimulation on the long head added to the other two that you're getting just from the extension itself at the elbow. That is, again, this dance that we play between, well, a little less tension, but more effective contraction. So I feel, what is the end result? It's all going to factor into that tension, that language the muscles are speaking to determine how much of an effect you're feeling. Okay. What other exercise would you consider a very important one for someone who is struggling to add mass or strength to the upper arm? This is another controversial one, but it's true. You need to do an exercise that would get that long head in its fully shortened position. So something that contracts that elbow with your arm behind your body. So we're talking about some form of tricep kickback. You could do it. You could do it with a cable. You could do it with dumbbells. You could do it on an incline bench face down, but the long head of the triceps will be in its fully contracted state when you are able to get full elbow extension and shoulder extension at the same time. And that is one of the only exercises that allows you to do that. Other than some of these pushdown variations I've talked about where you can get a straightened elbow and get your elbow positioned back behind you a little bit. You could do that on a pushdown if you had a long rope, right, a long rope that you could position your arms behind your body and we call it a drag pushdown, where you're actually dragging your hands down your body. So when you finish, your hands will be on the side of your legs, your elbows will be back behind your body. You'll have the same type of effect there, but not everybody has a rope long enough to pull that off. A regular gym rope won't cut it. If you attach two ropes, you could possibly do that. Before we move on to bicep, maybe we can talk about this after or before, but benefits and cons to supersetting tricep with bicep with deltoids. How do you think about the entire complex? Because it's not uncommon for somebody to say, "I'm going to do arms on a day." And that might just be delt, bicep, tricep if they're going to do chest and back on another day. So how do you think about the trade-offs of that? All that does is really affect your overall volumes for the week and how you're distributing your volumes for the week. It wouldn't impact my exercise selection, I don't think, triceps if I was training biceps on the same day. Unless I had some kind of an orthopedic issue where the accumulation of multiple positions, from these different exercises, is causing me to feel more joint soreness. Again, if we're choosing the right exercises, it shouldn't be doing that anyway. So if that's not the case, I don't have any objection to people doing biceps and triceps together. They tend to look at them as two smaller muscle groups that, because they're antagonistic to each other, it feels good to train them on a day. While you're fatiguing one, you're not necessarily fatiguing the other. So I feel fresh on both sides of that. People that do triceps at the end of shoulders or chest. It's another good thing to do when you're talking about maximizing recovery, because all those, pushing muscles that have a similar function are going in the same day, so when I come back the next day, if I'm doing pulling, biceps and upper back and back, then I'm getting a complete reprieve of those muscles. And if I go do legs the next day, I'm getting a reprieve of two days of rest before I come back to them again. So that's really the consideration is how it impacts recovery, but from an individual exercise selection, my choices wouldn't change on the triceps if I trained them on biceps. If I did train them with something that was doing a similar function, like chest and shoulder, shoulders, then I might decide on how I want to change exercises up. Like there, the bench press we know is going to act as a secondary compound to the triceps or it's going to help the triceps. So let's say you did that split. You said I'm going to do chest, shoulder, tricep is one day, back bicep is another day. You would still start presumably with your chest exercises because that's the biggest compound movement and you would move probably from chest to shoulder toward tricep? Unless again, it depends on how aesthetically driven somebody is and what they're trying to accomplish here. If you had a weaker triceps or weaker development of their triceps, you might want to prioritize your triceps first and go do your triceps training first when you're most fresh, and then come back and do the others if they weren't of as high a priority. So for those of us with puny biceps, what are we doing wrong? What are the most common mistakes people make and how do they fix it? When it comes to biceps, I believe the number one stimulus for bicep growth is the eccentric overload of the biceps. The fact that, especially when we're talking about most of these pulling muscles, the eccentric overload is the part where you're lowering the weight under a slower tempo, trying to accentuate the stretching tension that we get in addition to the fact that the weight itself is applying tension. So we're getting tension two separate ways. We could do that with a heavier barbell curl. We could do a cheek curl where you're actually, you do some repetitions that are as strict as you can, but you get a little bit loose on the form to get the weight up and then you have to really fight the weight on the way down. You will always be stronger on that way down than you are on the way up. So if you never really do that, you're going to have a lot of stress. If you never really do that and tap into some of the cheating of the concentric to get up, you're never really going to apply the same level of eccentric overload that you can. So I like doing the barbell curl with a cheat. Chin ups are one of my favorite ways to eccentrically challenge the biceps. So if I get up there and lower myself down, I could change the exercise to be a little bit more focused on the biceps by just opening the angle a little bit of the chin up. A lot of times people will do a chin up and they'll pull until they're, you know, they're biceps are touching their forearms and that's going to get a lot of lat engagement. But if I can just open the angle and get my body a little further away from the bar, now I've shifted some of that focus to the biceps and I want to, again, handle those eccentric repetitions as slowly, as painfully in a good way as possible. I was always a fan of doing chin ups and trying to challenge myself to hold on to the bar for as long as I can. I used to win the flexed arm hang every year at field day. I used to basically work at it in the off season of field day. I was like determined to win that every year. I enjoy trying to hang and hold myself in a flexed arm hang position. What did it take to get the top mark? I remember this vaguely. Oh God, I bet you I was around 45 seconds to a minute I was able to do it for. Like, I think that was like the winning requirement was, which is still tough now. I usually do them only in a fatigue state though. So at the end of a workout, it's a great way for me to finish. And remind me, it's taking me back to third grade. Yeah. You had to keep your chin above the bar? Chin above the bar. Yeah. And just hold for as long as possible. Now I extend it past that though, so now what I'll do is it's not just chin below the bar. I keep going until my feet hit the floor. So as long as I can go for a set is what I'll do. But again, I like to do that as a finisher at the end of what I'm doing, not as the primary source. Any type of eccentric overload is great. And again, when it comes to biceps, where's the risk? If I'm on a chin up bar, I simply let myself go and my feet hit the floor. If I have a barbell and it's going down, it's going to accelerate faster, I put it on the bench or wherever I have to put it, back in the rack. It's not like the stress that we have when we are doing a bench press of some sort where the weight's coming down on top of us or a squat when the weight's coming down on top of us. We have such a safety net when we do these exercises that not utilizing them is a big opportunity missed. Now what about hitting different parts of the bicep? How about for example, like a preacher curl versus an incline bench with arm behind you curl? Like what are the trade offs or advantages? So short head, long head is the differentiator here. The two heads of the bicep are the short head, long head. The long head gets its name because its attachment is higher in the shoulder. It's actually attaching inside the shoulder joint to that labrum. And then the short head has an attachment that's lower. The long head is going to be better hit because again, it's crossing that shoulder joint with things that place it on stretch by getting it back behind the body, which is the incline dumbbell curl that you mentioned, the incline position when my arms are hanging is going to put them back behind the body a little bit, and it gives you that slight pre-stretch on the exercise. That slight pre-stretch is supposed to allow for a better recruitment of the muscle fibers to the exercise, but it also, I believe this main drivers, it just gives that second level of tension, that second source of tension beyond just the dumbbells itself. You're getting a stretching tension on top of the dumbbells themselves. So an incline dumbbell press is good. That could become a little bit irritating to people that have shoulder issues though, if they go too low on that. - You would incline at what, 60, 45? - 45 might be a little right on the edge there. I'd say 60 degrees is more comfortable for me. The short head is really, again, just flexing the elbow, getting your arms out in front of your body. - So that's the pre-treatment curl. - Pre-treatment curl, cable curls, just a standard cable curl. The traditional barbell curl would hit more of the short head. And then there's also this concept of what you see is what you train. So when you're looking in the mirror, if your arms are rotated outwards and you can see the inner portion of your bicep more, that's your short head. This portion that you see on the inside is the short head. That would be working more of the short head. So I have an exercise variation we call the no-money curl. So I have no money, my hands are out here at the side, I got nothing. External rotation of the arms there, curling from that position there is gonna work more of that short head. When I have my arms internally rotated more, and curling from that position like I would from a drag curl, anything like a garanda drag curl, then I'm seeing more of that outer portion of the bicep visibly in the mirror, then I'm going to be working more of that. long head also so that's another indicator of how you can differentiate between the exercises now for someone who's not a bodybuilder or really in the minutiae of trying to differentiate is bicep one of those things where as long as you are adhering to really good principles of eccentric loading getting something on long head and short head exact arm position might not matter it's get the volume right get the stimulus right and go yeah i think for most of these muscle groups if people did even just these basics and they're just trying to make sure that they're checking off the boxes of actually doing some exercises for bicep shoulders chest all these muscles are going to talk about they're going to see amazing results from them arnold was famous for having his golden six just having six exercises that you can do that are going to essentially provide the biggest bang for their buck you worry about progressively overloading on them and getting stronger they're going to create a good physique at the end of the day but the nuances i think help a lot when it comes to training around and navigating around injuries or limitations because again back to what we said in the beginning if you have the understanding of where you can go when you do hit one of these roadblocks or closures then you have the rerouting possibilities and if you don't understand what's part of making up that movement you don't have the ability to do that so freely and would you put bicep and tricep in the same category as dealt where you're talking about eight to ten working sets per week to make gains or do you need a little more i don't think you need a little more i think if anything you could get away with less i mean as long as they're high effort taken to failure sets i mean they're a smaller muscle group they don't need as much and they're definitely going to get additional benefits from the other compound movements that you do when you're training chest you're going to be training your triceps when you're training your back you're going to be training your biceps so you're going to get some additional volume in any way in their accessory role okay what are your favorite forearm exercises that aren't obviously getting all the work already with bicep and stuff like that forearms i think it's rather boring when it comes to forums because if you look at the wrist function side of forums meaning the extending and flexing of the wrist you can get a lot done with two basic exercises just simple barbell wrist curls or barbell wrist extensions or dumbbell wrist extensions dumbbell curls or cable you can do the same thing whichever position or whichever device you want to use you can do that when you extend the benefits beyond that to the form itself we can move our forearm in space and still work for our muscles so the brachialis is a muscle the brachialis is a muscle that crosses from the upper arm down to the forearm itself that we can get with reverse curls and exercises we can load more heavily but it is a big muscle that sticks out and provides a lot of forearm development so just limiting it to wrist curls and wrist action is not enough to train your form you can get even more into the minutiae when you start to do radial deviation and ulnar deviation and pronation supination and those are all amazing movements i like to just resist them all with bands i've actually done a video where i show you how to do all those movements with just bands and again it's something that can match your ability level based on just how much resistance or how far away you step from the anchoring point i do like one other functional type exercise which we used to do in baseball a lot it's just a roll of some sort so an over under roll you could take just a barbell itself and roll forward until you fatigue and then you roll backwards fatigue all it's doing is basically the rolling forward is essentially creating wrist flexion and getting the flexors and the rolling backwards of the bar is getting a wrist extension training the extensions on the back of the forearm and you're doing that on the ground just standing in space with a barbell in my hand just rolling over that barbell until you can't do it anymore we've shown before more elaborate version which is really pretty cool but you take a band and you wrap it around the edge of a barbell that's in a rack you take that band and then anchor it to a kettlebell or a dumbbell you just tie it around the kettlebell you have that and now what you do is you roll over the top of that end of the barbell until you lift that kettlebell weight all the way to the top and then more importantly you unroll it just as slowly and under control because what it wants to do is just go right back down to the ground so you have to unroll it very slowly and go back down to the ground so it's another way to like almost gamify forum training because again forum training can be pretty boring and straightforward but effective okay let's go to everybody's favorite let's talk packs packs international chess day every day i was talking to a buddy of mine yesterday and i hadn't talked to him in a while and he's a really serious guy when it comes to his training and i was like all right what's new in your workouts man and he goes chess day every day yeah yeah which of course he's being facetious but the fact that that was his joke i mean it's the centerpiece on the torso so i think when people that and abs so when people see themselves in the mirror every day that is the thing that catches their eye first so i think that's why it gets so much attention when it comes to the chest there's two major requirements here you want to get some type of pressing movement and you want to get some type of movement that adducts or brings the arm across the chest so when it comes to the pressing movements you have options of obviously barbells dumbbells machines they're all going to do pretty much the same thing in terms of the movement itself but how it feels can be drastically different and this is where when you have shoulder issues and i can speak from experience here some of them are going to feel a lot more uncomfortable but when you have shoulder issues and i can speak from experience a lot more uncomfortable than others when i was going through that period of inflammation in that joint which was long after by the way long after the injury itself i had kind of re-aggravated that injury in demonstrating some of these bad exercises to do early on in my channel i couldn't do any pressing i could not do any pressing at all there wasn't a pressing variation that i could find that was comfortable for me so i did all of my work through the adduction crossover type exercise taking a cable grabbing onto the handle and then crossing my arm over my body i think the ability to pull the cable in with your bicep to kind of get it going or know you have that option takes away some of the instability that might come from having your arm way out in front of you and that long moment arm that could be placed on the chest so i found that to be a good rerouting option for me i was able to after doing those exercises get back to the point where i could press but when it comes to the press itself incline flat decline if i had to choose one i'd say incline because most people have one and i would say incline because most people have one and i would say weaker development of their upper chest relative to their lower chest or middle chest so an incline bench press will cover the weakest point of development and still do a really good job of hitting the rest of your chest but i think dumbbells give people with any issues the most opportunity to train pain free and if you still have pain when you train with dumbbells slow it down the slowing of the dumbbell especially during the eccentric portion of it is going to give your joint the opportunity to feel safe and overcome any instability that might be causing some of your pain i believe that a lot of times even though there's structural problems in the shoulder when you combine structural issues with instability they feel really vulnerable those structures feel very vulnerable so when you can provide stability mostly just by slowing the pace down then that structure itself could feel a lot more supported and safe and it doesn't cause the pain in the shoulder and it doesn't cause the pain in the upper chest and it doesn't cause the pain in the discomfort that it would and you're able to get into those fine-tuned positions we talked about before where you know it feels good there yeah you can sort of bring the elbows down a little bit and so you're at a angle that maybe doesn't allow for the maximum i mean you're using more tricep potentially but you're also taking more stress off the ac joint it feels like something that is overall but it's interesting that you would preferentially say look if you've only got time for one pressing movement make it the incline over the flat and then let's get you over doing flies or cables or anything like that but i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a good point i think that's a really good point i think that's a really good point that's probably a common mistake people make is maybe spending a disproportionate or too much time pressing and not enough time using the adduction definitely and i think that you should not over exaggerate the angle of your press though when you're doing the incline bench i like to keep it around 30 degrees or so the higher you start to go the more you start to shift that focus into the shoulders and that front delt again so i think 45 degrees would be the maximum for me but 30 degrees where i like to train from on that incline and then let's talk a little bit about different ways that one can do adduction you obviously referred to cables of course all of us grew up watching arnie do flies it looks like there's a lot of risk on the shoulder with just a heavy fly on a bench i've thrown that one in in my iron graveyard too and again only because i cannot wait to see the comments of people who are just so angry that you've said that i'm so look at they say it's fear-mongering i'm not fear-mongering i'm saying i hate the exercise i'm recommending people do the alternative because the alternative can give you many of the same benefits without the risk the anterior shoulder capsule is quite vulnerable in that position period you have a weight in your hands and they'll argue just use lighter weights what if i want to use weights that are somewhat heavier because i want to challenge myself more eccentrically well i could take the exercise down to the floor i'm still doing the fly you like the fly i'll do the fly i'll do it down on the floor now i have can you get as much stretch when you're on the floor you can't get as much but again we're doing these little trade-offs back and forth if i wanted to get a little bit more stretch i could stand up and go do a cable crossover and because i can position myself differently in a cable crossover and i could get my arms in a slot that are more comfortable for me and because i can control some of that vulnerability to stretch because i can utilize the biceps to offload that in any way by engaging them more or not in that back position then i have a safer exercise option that still most importantly gives me the adduction and also gives me better resistance through more range of motion of adduction if i take a dumbbell fly and i pull it to the top once i get to the top i don't have much resisted adduction anymore if i have my cables and i pull them i could go to midline and still go past midline and still get more of that effect. Do you remember the old Nautilus machine? You'll never see these things anymore, but I feel like they were some of the best machines ever engineered. But this machine that was just a fly machine, it had round bolsters that I'm sure other companies make it besides Nautilus, but it allowed you to do a fly with your arms at 90 degrees. And so you could actually load this thing up to the ends of the earth and your shoulders didn't hurt. Whereas today you go into most gyms, the fly machine is a handle. You just can't go that heavy. Why the difference? Because I think people didn't take to that machine as much because they didn't feel that big stretch as much. And what happens a lot of times is when you extend your arm out, the elbow out, you start to involve other muscles that get subjected to stretch that get perceived to be stretch itself, like on the pec itself. The only thing that's gonna dictate that stretch on the pec is the position of the humerus relative to the body. So if I get to here, whether I'm here or whether I'm here, is not really affecting the stretch of the chest. But you feel the bicep stretch when you're out here. But you feel other muscles start to get involved, the coracobrachialis, you start to feel other things get involved that give the perception of more stretch. And when that happens, people feel like, oh, I like this exercise more because I can feel this stretching me more. Again, it's the unsupported nature of that that I don't like as much. When we're doing that cable crossover, it may seem unsupported, but it is supported because the stacks are gonna engage at some point depending upon how far away I get. Okay. Okay. So I know I've got that bottomed out position depending upon how far away from the machine I get or how much I pull. Do you like to cable fly with single arm or double? I like them both. I like them both. When I'm really trying to focus on one side is when I'm trying to get like a really good contraction on that side. If I'm just trying to move heavier weight, then I wanna grab them both together and make sure I do that. What I always advise people against when doing that exercise is like leaning too much on that because they'll lean in as they do it. And basically that promotes the rounding of the shoulder or they'll get too much dominance of the shoulder to do it. I always say as you're pressing, you wanna lean back, almost wanna stand upright. So your chest is out in front of the movement and doing the majority of the work and not your shoulders tending to round out and dominate the movement. I don't care what direction you go there. You can go straight across midline. You could go high to low. When you go from this position from a higher grip position down towards a lower grip position, you're gonna work more of your lower chest 'cause basically stimulating more of a dip. And then if you go from a lower hand position, to start in a higher hand position at the finish, then you're stimulating more of that orientation of the upper pec fibers. You're mirroring their direction more. So you hit those more effectively. That's again, that's more of a weak point. - And would you say like 50/50, if you're gonna do 10 to 12 working sets of pec, would you say half of that should be pressing, half of that should be fly? - I think that's fair, yeah. - You mentioned dips. Where do they belong in our toolkit for triceps and lower pec? - I like dips. I know that people find them to be, they believe them to be somewhat of a risky exercise. But I think if they're done responsibly through reasonable ranges of motion, not extreme ranges of motion. I've seen recommendations of people saying to get really, really low. And things change when you're fatigued. So when you start to get more and more fatigued in a set, even something that started out that seemed to be a good, safe exercise can become unsafe because of the fatigue. The dip is one of those exercises that can become more and more unsafe because of fatigue because all of your body weight is being basically sunken downward as you're trying to hold and push yourself back up. But as it sinks down, it's putting more and more internal rotation onto your shoulder. But if you're aware of that as a negative feedback point, like that is something you're trying to avoid, then you stop yourself in that range of motion higher than the point that becomes vulnerable. And if you start to perceive that your fatigue is overcoming your ability to control yourself in that range of motion, then you stop the set. So I think there's ways that you can do that. Exercise, you could also put a band there and do an assisted dip. So you're just basically hanging it over the handles and you're putting your knees on top. There's a lot of things you can do, but I don't like to avoid the exercise entirely because I think it's one of the best ways to stimulate, especially the lower chest, with that good stretch from the bottom position. - So you're basically using depth and range of motion to manage, 'cause again, you're the perfect candidate of somebody who shouldn't like that exercise with your torn labrum. - Yeah, always, I use depth and control of that depth. When I do try to get a little bit more into a stretch position, I feel like how stable, can I keep my body position? One of my big keys, I say, is to be able to drive your shoulders down. You want your shoulders away from your ears. If you start to feel that your shoulders are riding up towards your ears, or you feel like you're shrugging, you don't have control anymore. You should, at any point in time, be able to keep your shoulders depressed and have that distance between your shoulders and ears as a check, informed check, regards to your stability and control of your shoulders in those bottom positions. Then when I get to the top too, same thing, 'cause when you get to the top, your whole body weight's gonna wanna sink you down into that shrugged position. You wanna actually actively drive your elbows down, unshrug the shoulders. But the dip would fall into the pressing category, as would a pushup. Any of these where you're just pushing your arms out, down, overhead, in terms of a chest activation, it's usually the pushup, the dip, and the bench press as your main pushing options. Only the adduction exercises are gonna be the ones that cross that arm across midline. - You wanna do back next or abs? I mean, stay on the front of the body, or? - Stay with the abs. - All right, let's talk abs. They say that most of the ab work is done in the kitchen. - That is so true. Strengthening the abs and getting aesthetically pleasing abs is really two different things, too. I think that when we look at the contributions of nutrition and whatever ab exercises you're doing, this is nutrition 99 times out of 100 is what is responsible for what you're seeing. Nutrition's gonna control your body fat levels, period. What you see when you get rid of that body fat is determined by your dedication to ab training. I do not believe that doing the compounds is enough for your abs. I never believed that. I think that there's so many other things that your abs are responsible for in terms of motions and movement patterns. You're not doing that all from a series of compound exercises. As a matter of fact, in the compounds, their role is mostly just to stabilize. They're not creating rotation. They're not preventing rotation. Sometimes they're preventing rotation, but they're certainly not creating rotation, not creating rotation under load. So how do we do that? - Okay. - The exercises that you pick once you get your body fat levels low enough should hit these major functions. My major functions when it comes to abs are their ability to create top-down movement, which means pulling my rib cage towards my pelvis, 'cause the flexion of the spine is really the main responsibility of the movement of the abs. Their stabilization requirements are huge, but there's no movement going on there. So the flexion of the spine is coming from top-down movements, bottom-up movements, where the pelvis is moving towards the rib cage itself, any type of reverse crunch. The same two things, but done with rotation. So it's now not just top-down, but it's top-down and rotating, so we call it top-down rotation. Bottom-up with rotation, so anything where you're bottom, you're pulling that pelvis up, but rotating at the same time or twisting. Then we have the obliques themselves that are gonna be feeding right into working in conjunction with the abs. And then sort of mid-range movements where both rib cage and the pelvis move towards each other at the same time. So those are like V-ups and exercises that do that. How do you do these? Anything done on the floor is generally gonna be easier, generally gonna be easier, than if you were to perform them hanging from a bar, because we have more of our body weight being subjected to gravity that we have to lift. Anything like a leg raise done from the floor is a hell of a lot easier than a leg raise done from a bar. - How do you do top-down on a bar? - If you're gonna do it with weight, you're gonna do a cable, like a crunch pulldown. - Got it, okay. - Yeah. - And how does one think about their portfolio when they think about all those things? So obviously the easiest top-down is a crunch, and then crunch with rotation is top-down with rotation, leg up from the floor with rotation, hanging leg raise with rotation. You're basically picking from those. How are you defining sets and reps for this funky muscle group? - So I believe it's hard to define sets and reps for people when it comes to ab work, because a couple things. Number one, we all can do different amounts. More so, we do a better job of creating good quality contractions when we're not just focused on a number. If I really just wanted to get a good ab workout, I'd really just focus on getting slower, meaningful, concentrated contractions on the abs, because it's too easy to involve the hip flexors. It's too easy to involve momentum, and we get so lost in the ability to say, "Yeah, 30, 35, 40 of what? "40 of what? "Of waist?" There was nothing that actually was very productive there. So I'd rather see you either just do it until you can't do them anymore, so just train the exercise to failure, whatever that is, and know that you've done them slowly and concertedly so you're doing the right thing for you're trying to develop, or I'd like to see you just do them for a series of specific amount of time, but focus on rotating through them as fast as possible. So I might not get complete fatigue from the one 30-second bout that I'm doing, but knowing that I'm gonna go immediately to the next, the next one, mechanically offset so I can still do it even if I'm fatigued from the other one, right? There's always a mechanical drop-down effect that's happening so I can still keep doing exercise, but knowing that the end result of this will be at the end of these six minutes, seven minutes, whatever, I'm gonna be toast. I can do that if I shift the focus a little bit around the abs from the top-down movement to the bottom-up to moving those focuses around is gonna allow me to keep going for 30-second intervals with very little rest periods in between, that at the end of it all will have a cumulative effect so those are the two ways that i usually like to do it we have plenty of workouts where i posted where i do it in follow-along fashion where i just program it and tell you what to do but there's a lot of variety within those because it's the movement pattern that's most important the exercise itself isn't not as important it's the ones that you tend to feel the most and feel the best contraction on are the ones i try to push people towards what would be your favorite pure rotation exercise if you're going to pick one pure rotation exercise would it be one knee up one knee down with a cross body cable so i like any type of we call them sledgehammers where you just basically take two hands on a cable and you're trying to rotate what i also like from those is when you get out to that position having to hold them and then step out even further because especially if you're doing with bands you would prefer you want to see that standing you want to see that standing stance or standing yeah standing well i mean this is standing this is a squared up stance standing if we wanted to get really powerful with i could split your stance a little bit more because now i'm focused on driving as much power from the ground up and i could do that too and those are explosively performed but still under control everything that i say is explosive is still under control because it's not enough to just get yourself out into that position but to control it on the way back always so i like to do any of those variations again we could do them even isometrically where if i have the let's say again band in my hand and it's out in front of my body i can jump out even further laterally which is going to increase the tension on the band and want to whip myself back and to rotate towards the anchor point don't let it you keep your body face straight ahead you're undergoing like these spontaneously increased rotational demands or these isometric rotational demands and that's a great way to is that's a really good athletic way to train because a you're on your feet but because we do get subjectivity and we do get the ability to train and we do get the ability to do so many spontaneous forces that require stabilization yeah try to change body position and we don't allow it some people that have a hard time being able to do this well you might have seen it before they'll take a physio ball and they'll hug the physio ball with a cable so they're doing the rotation yes yes it's a great way to go for beginners too because they feel like okay i'm hugging and i'm moving as a unit i'm not just like moving my hands in space because a lot of the tendency if you're just doing these band exercises for beginners is to try to move with their hands they'll be like oh my god i'm moving my hands i'm moving my hands i'm moving my hands i want you to think of your hands being united with your belly button and core and you're moving it as a unit because that's how you're actually going to train the core itself so if you find that your arms are independently moving lock them up with that physio ball and that sort of helps to do that let's talk about dorian yates in the back again notwithstanding the fact that like a body builder will break this down into every possible angle of the back but if we're just talking about this through the lens of normal people who are going to throw 8 to 12 sets per week at the same time how would you think of traps rhomboids lats the whole thing even the lower muscles the erector spinae muscles how would you create a protocol and again always for the person who is saying look i want more of a v-shape i want to taper down here a little bit i have to get my lats bigger what are the mistakes and how do we need to train the back is obviously made up of a lot of muscles and it's a big area the most effective way i think to look at it programmatically is to think vertical pulling horizontal pulling low back specific upper back focus right upper back scapula type retraction work so the upper back work pulling versus the vertical or horizontal pulling is mostly dictated again by the positioning of those elbows like we referenced earlier like the more those elbows drift during like say a seated row and they drift higher the more you're going to get into that extension of the arm as the main focus so you're going to get more of this mid back rhomboids upper traps mid traps that's going to be tapped into the most when you allow the elbows to drift if you do a row which should be a basic compound exercise to perform then you're going to get more of the lats if you're doing that with a tighter arm position the issue with the row could be that someone with a low back issues or weakness might find that any freestanding row position could be challenging where they start to fatigue more in the low back prior to their lats in that case the chest supported row done face down on an incline bench gives you the option to continue to build up your low back strength i don't ever recommend you do chest supported rowing and that's where you stay i think everyone should be able to row under load from a standing position and so you just have to work your way up to the point where you can do that that's where the low back strengthening comes in okay so you're working your way up from your chest supported row to your standing barbell row variation but at the same time you're working on your low back you got to strengthen your low back and there's a lot of ways to do that i like classic hyper extensions over a physio ball i like reverse hyper extensions just to my favorite ways to do that i like superman type exercises where you're laying flat on the ground and you're raising your thighs off the ground the same time that you're raising your arms up because then we could stimulate some of that upper back muscles too those are the things that look a little rehab-ish but at the same time they're only looking rehab-ish because they're exercises that you never do and they're exercises that target smaller areas relative to their larger neighbors let's go through the superman as an exam so if you're doing that what constitutes a working set failure how many reps how long a hold how do you think about it anything where especially these corrective type exercises because i say corrective like you're correcting a weak low back in this case so these corrective exercises they should always be done with a mentality of really good high quality repetitions so i hate when we say do a set of 15 of these i'd rather you think of that as doing 15 sets of one right i want you to feel every single one of those purposely in the low back and also in a superman you're trying to teach the low back to be supported by the glutes one of the biggest reasons why we get low back issues is because the glutes are not doing their job to basically support the pelvis from below and so it's causing the low back to have to take on more of the brunt of that so the low back gets overworked if you can do the exercise where you squeeze in this case to squeeze your glutes together first and then you can do the exercise where you squeeze your glutes together get that stability then lift off the ground and get into this extension then you're going to feel it differently but you're going to feel it properly so doing enough of those in this 15 sets of one mentality will start to get that neuromuscular re-education that's lost it's not so much about being able to overcome huge loads there it's about being able to train the muscle neuromuscularly to start to respond more effectively so i think when you start to do some of those exercises and work them in and i work them into regular back day it's the end but it's just no less important than the heavier vertical pull or push exercises i see so we're going to hit lower back primarily through the horizontal and vertical stuff so for example a seated unsupported cable row when you're going heavy your lower back has to do a lot of work if you're doing a standing row more so in the standing row yeah yeah so that's where you're getting lower back but then you'll finish it with the superman with direct work yeah got it yeah and try not to be bored with them thinking that there's something remedial they're they're just as good as they are and they're just as good as they are and they're as important as the other exercises because they help to connect those weak links that are probably taking away some of the capacity you have on the bigger exercises because they are the weak link going back to the kind of workhorses of this are the vertical and horizontal pulling but the key is if you're doing this for the purpose of your lats keep the elbows in elbows are going to be tighter yeah so you do not need wide grip activity here you don't need a wide grip lat pull down like if you used to think yeah well i want a v-shape i should be grabbing the thing out as far as possible but really you don't need to no the wider the grip actually you start to shift the focus to the muscle called the teres major which is they call it the lat helper so it does functionally very much the same but the angle of the hands being that far out actually shifts more of the load away from the lats to the teres major again aesthetically something that a bodybuilder would want it's going to actually support the overall appearance of what you're seeing back there but functionally for 99 of us you don't need to go that wide to do that and you're probably just inviting some awkwardness to the shoulder joint that you might feel the repercussions of down the road and then upper back and scaps specifically what are sort of your favorite activities my favorite is the face pull i talk about the face pull all the time i like the face pull because it isn't necessarily just corrective in nature it could actually be loaded up enough to cause hypertrophy of the rear delt the mid traps the rhomboids the rear delts like it's got a lot of benefits tell people how you like to do it you're doing with a rope you're standing yeah so it's definitely become a lot more popular since i've talked about it for many years which i love seeing i see people literally do it in the gym now but there's two ways to do it the first thing is you really should attach two gym ropes to the device to be able to do this properly when you do one like the regular gym rope that we see in all the gyms it's not long enough to get the elbows open enough to a 90 degree angle what's going to happen is your elbows are going to be bent in this position the bending of the elbows once you add weight starts to drive what starts to drive your hands forward and your shoulder into internal rotation so if i can get my hands wider it's still going to promote internal rotation but i wind up being able to get into a stronger position here and work external rotation like i have a target to go towards external rotation i can't here with the short rope i can't so by attaching the two ropes now i have enough length in each hand and then what i try to do is again get a good stable base i don't usually do this with a split stance i usually perform these out of a split stance i usually do them out of a squared up feet even with each other stance And the reason why I do that is I think it's a good way to limit the amount of load that you're using there. So while I think you can go a little heavier here, I don't think you should be loading these up so heavy that you're relying on a split stance to get so much stability that you can pull that weight back. So it gives you a nice top end when you can't balance yourself anymore and you're being pulled forward on the exercise because you're probably doing too much, too much. Now we use the pulling of the hands as the guidelines. I don't want to just pull the elbows back because I might let the hands lag behind. To get external rotation at the shoulder, I need to drive with the back of my hands. So if I can think about opening my elbows up or opening my chest up, squeezing those scapular muscles together and then pulling my hands back, that's how you want to perform the face pull. At the end of it, you want to have almost looks like you're doing a double bicep flex for someone who's looking at you from the front or the back. You have those 90 degree angles and you're pulling straight back. At that point, there's one other little tweak that I think is amazing if people can handle it. Is you then from this position, not only are you increasing your tension and time under tension in that spot, but you raise your arms up overhead. So what you're doing there is in this peak contracted position, now you're raising your arms up and that starts to get into the lower traps. So the lower traps have a lot of control and function when you raise up overhead and the shoulder blades are rotating. They provide good stability there. So you're adding one other element to the exercise at a very little extra cost and it's very simple. It requires a raising and then a lowering of the hands back again to where they started and then you let the weights go back to the beginning position. So you're just basically adding one additional raise at the end position and then let the arm go back. So it's basically a face pull and press. And again, it's really, you're really overlapping rear delt here as well, correct? I mean, you're hitting that rear delt again. Is that an argument for doing delts on the same day you do back? I do that a lot. I look at upper back and delts as having a lot of shared functions, so I think that you can pair them up if you're trying to do the agonist muscles working together. All right, let's talk about legs in any way you see fit. Do you want to talk about quads, hamstrings, or do you want to talk about everything from the knee to the hips as one and let's just go through it? No, I think you split them up. I think of them sort of as anterior, posterior, but even within that, I think there's exercises that stress the hamstrings from a lengthened position and those that stress them from a knee flex position and anteriorly. And anteriorly? I mean, I think when we're talking about the quads, we have a lot of different options from squatting that will do a great job. The squatting will hit the posterior chain too. So let's start with anterior. If you were to do the anterior and you wanted a more quad-focused option, then there's a couple of things that you could do. Number one, you can carry the weight more anteriorly, so that's why we have the front squat. Front squat, cyclist squats, all these. That gives us a chance to direct some of the load a little bit more effectively towards the quads. I love the front squat. You have to be okay. You have to be okay with the fact that you're not going to be able to handle as much weight there. But again, that's almost irrelevant when we're talking about at the end of the day, it's the tension the muscle feels. It's not the actual weight that's on the side of the barbell or dumbbells. So that gives you that chance. A goblet squat would be another option for that. The transition between the two is a belt squat because that weight gets directed more directly downward. I love the belt squat because it doesn't require the loading on the back for people that don't have the strength to support that. And I have an exercise that I like to do, which is a squat. It's a squat variation called the Spanish squat. And you basically take a band and you put it around the back of your knees, take your pair of dumbbells, usually done with dumbbells, you back away from the band. So it's already, if you were to let the band pull you, it's already pulling your knees into flexion. It's trying to drive you into flexion. The only way to get that band to get into the proper position is to drive your knees back against the resistance of that band. So you're getting really resisted terminal knee extension. Now you have your dumbbells at your sides, you reach down to the ground, you pick them up. Now. You squat down. As you squat down, obviously your knees are flexing. You get down to the bottom of the squat and you can go pretty, as heavy as you can hold the dumbbells here. So you can go 60s, 80s, 100s, whatever you can hold. As you come back up to the top, you get toward that last 20 degrees or so, you have to drive your knees up against the resistance of that band to get that fully extended knee. It's basically taking the elements of a leg extension, but because you're doing it in a closed chain way with your feet in contact with the ground, it's brutal, but it's a great combination of exercise. It takes a regular squat. And it adds an element of resisted knee extension at the end. That's just amazing. I like doing that. If people are limited by their grip strength, they're not able to load heavy enough because they can't hold that weight, then that may not be a great option for them. But a lot of times they're overcoming that because of the added resistance of the band that makes it so difficult. I also have taken to Bulgarian split squats as a favorite of mine, because I know that I can effectively hit the quads more. One leg at a time, which is another benefit. So when you're doing a Bulgarian or rear foot elevated, you're fatiguing in the front of your leg more than the back of your leg? If you maintain your upright posture. So the big cue there is to maintain as tall of a chest position as you can. A lot of times what we'll do is we'll go down into the exercise and angle forward. As we angle forward, that is going to quickly and significantly shift the load to your posterior chain, to the glutes, and of course the quads too, but more so to the glutes as you start to lean forward. If you maintain an exaggerated and not in a harmful way, but an exaggerated way, your upright posture, just don't allow yourself to sink forward, then you're going to hit the quads very strongly in that. Same thing with a reverse lunge. Absolutely one of my favorite exercises for posterior anterior, depending upon how much angle of my torso I allow. Okay. It's funny because we're kind of talking legs in general anyway. Yeah. It's impossible for me to think about legs as anterior posterior. I just think of legs as legs. The balance shifts a little bit between, am I lifting my heels? Am I not lifting my heels? Yeah. You don't hear me talk much about, if my exercise favorites were the leg extension, you might hear me speak a little bit more like that, but anteriorly, I know I can shift the focus by positioning the body differently in space, but I don't have a lot of go-to specific, hey, quads. I'm really focused on the quads here because I don't do a lot of leg extensions. They're not a great exercise personally for me for my knee. Given my history of knee issues, and for a lot of people, they don't feel so great. If you can do the exercise and there are no issues with pain, it's the equivalent of a concentration curl for the biceps. If somebody is saying, you know, my legs are just so skinny. I really just want to put some muscle mass on my legs. What are you saying? Is this where, hey, we got to go up to 16 sets working in a day. I want you to focus just on the compound lifts or like what guiding principles do you give that person who's trying to put some muscle on their legs? Definitely have to go heavier. I think that a lot of times people don't go heavy enough with their leg training. And I think that legs respond a little bit more to slightly higher volumes. So I think rather than potentially doing more and more in one day, which you really start to, you know, how fast you can tap out when it comes to leg training, it'd be better to probably just schedule a second session in the week, volume wise, increasing the number of sessions that you're training legs. So that's where these options of being able to shift the focus a little bit around anterior, posterior. Gives you some flexibility and not doing the same exact workout twice, but it gives you a chance to train your legs and stimulate them twice. So you have more opportunity, but being able to build bigger legs. I mean, some of us are just never going to be able to build them as big as others because it tends to be one of those areas like the calves that are just genetically, I call them calves or cab knots and I'm a cab knot for sure. The leg growth and size and strength and power, even from the athletes, like it's, it's quite oftentimes something you're born with, but not that you can't improve it all, but that's something that's heavily influenced by Gen X. So what we want to have is a good rotation of movements and basically say, look, if I'm going to just try to do it all in one day, I'm going to get 12 to 14, 16 sets working for legs on a given day. I'm going to pick and choose from these exercises and I'm not necessarily doing the same workout every time. Yeah, definitely not. You don't have to do the same workout every time, even just between. If I had to choose between reverse barbell or dumbbell lunges and Bulgarian split squats, both similar in that position, I don't need to because the positioning of the legs is similar enough. I don't necessarily need to do that. One is more dynamic than the other. So I factor that in when I think about programming, like the lunges is going to be more dynamic, whereas you're more fixed in the Bulgarian split squat. But I'd want to have something that I wasn't potentially being limited by balance or coordination. That every time I train my legs, it was some sort of a squared up, balanced out squat, two footed squat. I mean, the problem I have with training legs, which I enjoy, I really, for whatever reason, I've always enjoyed it since I was very young. There's just too much to do because in addition to all of the exercises you just went through, which are important for strength hypertrophy, there are all these sort of unsexy things that we have to do as well. We've got to get all that glued bead training in. We've got to make sure we get the. The adductors working and they're not really adding size, but they are adding time to the workout. So how do you think about making sure people are doing a lot of the lateral movement with the legs, like really dumb looking things, curtsy squats, things like you just got to kind of do those things. The same way that we talked about the low back being the stuff that it can be relegated towards the end of the workout requiring less of your energy, but it's still part of the workout and it's no less important. As a matter of fact, it's just as important for me. That is. It is the gloop me trading, it is the fact that we don't get frontal plane stimulus from the bigger more popular exercises all the ones we just mentioned lunging split squatting and squatting they're all sagittal plane exercises so unless we are lunging laterally or if we're like a caustic caustic we could do but that's not going to give you much hypertrophy right it depends i mean depends on how out of caustic i mean if you're getting deep into that squat and you're in your yeah i mean again it's that same tension equation like as long as the tension is high enough and you're overcoming it and fatiguing because of it and reaching failure because of it then you're going to gain benefits in hypertrophy but the ones that i think about for glute medias like i have a series of exercises where we do hip bumps against the wall all you're doing is letting yourself drop down to this one's a little bit hard to describe but you're essentially standing close to a wall you're standing on your outside leg so not the inside leg the inside leg is just lifted off the floor you're letting your hips get lazy i say you're letting your hips drop out to the side straight in the frontal plane just letting away from the wall away from the wall okay and then from there all you're going to do is just drive yourself back to where because at that point your pelvis is going to be tilted towards the wall you're going to drive yourself to a level pelvis that's coming strictly from the glute medias and abducting the hip in to get into that position and sorry what do you call that exercise i call it just a hip drop or hip bump you'll feel that very quickly and you'll realize how weak you are in that plane even if you are a heavy squatter because if you're not totally different right if you're not doing it you're not doing it those muscles aren't really as active nearly as active in that position as they are when you're doing a regular squat these are humbling exercises but they're no less important to do you need to get over the fact that okay i'm pretty weak here we had some of the best athletes in the world i would have do these exercises or even we would test people by having them get on their stomach and essentially bend their knees and then i would rotate their leg in or out right so they're from that i'm using their leg as a fulcrum and i'm basically rotating it out the degree to which i can control that leg in space when i tell them don't let me move it is crazy they just don't have the external rotation strength no none i mean and we're talking about best athletes in the world yeah seriously powerful people because they don't train that enough you could actually train that motion specifically by literally getting a band anchored to something stable and then putting yourself in that position on your stomach and rotating against that resistance you can work it is it goofy looking yeah i mean if you're doing that in a gym it would be goofy looking would you feel self-conscious because it's hard to do and you can't even imagine why you can't make your leg move like that sure but it doesn't negate how important it still is and when we're talking about people with low back issues or hip pain these become a factor because it matters it matters getting those weak muscles to become more in balance with the other dominant muscles is going to provide more stability for that joint and then take some of the load and stress off the muscles that are trying to do too much like the low back okay now again i'm keeping this deliberately away from the recovery side because there's so much more we could talk about on how to stabilize a knee and things like that but i'm trying to keep this to the aesthetic let's finish it up with calves two big muscles what are the principles around training calves again we're talking about those of us who are don't have these genetically perfect calves you see on uh the odd specimen so you mentioned two muscles so there's the gastrocnemius and the soleus gastroc is one that crosses the knee that's again there's these muscles right we talked about before the triceps some of these that cross those joints it crosses the knee and the soleus does not so how you train them is determined by the position of the body when you do it so to hit the gastroc most effectively you're doing them from these straight knee positioned exercises like a standing calf raise or toes in toes out whatever that variation might be to do the soleus you could have a knee bent so any of those seated calf raises are going to do that the biggest thing that i think i've advocated for when it comes to calf training is the removal of the ballistic element of the exercise because the calves the achilles is so accustomed to handling the ballistic transition from foot on the ground midfoot absorbing those forces and then locking up and propelling you into the next step so good at handling those quick transitions by the way i just want to pause on that for a second jeff sorry to interrupt i just don't think from an anatomic perspective we appreciate how remarkable that part of our body is oh gosh the ability of the foot achilles calf complex to navigate us through the world it is in many ways sort of heartbreaking when you come across somebody who's never taken advantage of it they've never run they've never jumped and they're now in mid late life and they're shuffling around and that achilles has atrophied away those muscles are not reactive anymore the tendon doesn't have the supple nature to do all those things and yet you realize we were all born with the capacity to do something as dramatic as a broad jump or sprint jump off a box the forces that are required to me it's the timing too the timing is so precise you're basically asking your foot from the moment it hits the ground the midfoot which is just a series of bones in there right that are all sort of aligned to become adaptable to the surface so they loosen they literally loosen they loosen through that active pronation of the ankle complex and the foot complex so as it starts to hit the ground you're getting this loosening of those bones so that you can adapt to the surface they call it a mobile adapter function of the foot so you can adapt because maybe the ground's rocky or a hill you're running you can't just be rigid so it gets into that position and then it has to be able to within a moment's notice if you're running especially be able to as it's being brought back behind you again into extension quickly shift from being mobile and loose from to be able to absorb the forces there and not just jolt your entire knee and hip joint to then becoming rigid and locked up to become basically a propulsion maneuver like a lever that's going to then drive you into the next step so it happens in microseconds to be able to go from this to this to this to this completely opposite functions and if it doesn't handle it well and it stays a mobile adapter for too long when you go to propel yourself you don't have that rigidness to basically lever your body off the ground now you're going to rely too much on the structures in there to try to do that that's where you start to get plantar fasciitis you start to get achilles tendonitis all these things start to go wrong same thing if you don't have a good enough adapter to the surface then every step you take becomes too jolting to all those joints up that connection so that's where you start to get plantar fasciitis you start to get all those joints up that connection so that's where you start to get plantar fasciitis you start to get chain they're going to have to absorb the force that the foot couldn't it is definitely remarkable and so with all of that said we could do an entire podcast on just how you do that fortunately we've done a bunch of content on that but now coming back to this main principle you're saying look if you want those muscles the soleus and the gastroc to get bigger you can't let the body cheat its way out of doing what it's so good at which is what it was designed to do for that so i think there's a hack to calf training it's to try to turn off that responsibility of the achilles tendon so that it's not trying to jump in and ballistically do what it does but it forces the muscles to almost inefficiently temporarily because that's what we're trying to do is inefficiently stretch them so they can grow is it makes them do more of the work so you go into a bottomed out position you stay there for four seconds and then you start to come out of that position you do it slow and controlled you don't try to position because you can quickly turn back to that tendon elasticity to do the job i'm talking about making the muscles inefficiently have to slowly contract and drive your body out of that position and doing it one leg at a time tends to allow for the overload that people don't get when they're just doing these two-legged exercises so if you don't have external load from a machine or a calf raise or something like that you can do it more effectively one leg at a time but the biggest key is to lower yourself slowly stay down that position for four seconds and then kind of drive yourself up out of that over a slower graded pace than just explosive getting out of that position and that's the same thing whether you're doing the seated calf raise focus more on soleus or whether you're doing the standing calf raise there's so much literature on this and i've seen it and it's very interesting that shows that if you're just training for hypertrophy and strength and not sort of injury recovery i've seen different things that say range of motion doesn't matter as much as people think it does or it's the bottom half versus the top half of the range of motion any thoughts on that for hypertrophy yeah i think that all of that content got like a little wayward in the last year or so to the point where i was seeing recommendations of avoiding the concentric on exercises like working on the stretch position that sort of terminal position of the exercise and the contracted position didn't matter as much first of all it didn't sound right to me back then and i think research is starting to already prove that not to be the case none of that makes sense to me as a physical therapist from a function perspective 100 and ultimately even hypertrophy is going to still require normal functioning to maximize that muscle so i think that you want to apply like i think where that all came from is that stretching a muscle is another form of stimulus it's another form of tension the weight itself provides that tension when you stretch the muscle you're adding a second form of tension to believe that stretching positions of exercises cause better results is not a surprise because it's providing more accumulated tension but to think that that would mean okay let's just hang out in this position and let's not focus on this other range of motion requirement certainly not for strength but even for hypertrophy i don't think it really adds up or makes too much sense what about a volume perspective on the calves. They're kind of an unusual muscle in that they're being used a lot throughout the day, every day. Is there an argument that you can't just train them once a week if you want to make gains? I actually think that's true. I think that they're similar almost to the abs in a way and that the abs are also highly responsible for postural stability and they're working very often, not under high loads, but they're working very often. So I think that when it comes to the calves, they're used to handling very high loads. They're carrying your own body weight around one leg at a time for many, many steps in a day. Subjecting them to more of this focused, inefficient hypertrophy work more than once a week is certainly worthwhile, probably two to three times a week, maybe even four times a week. It's like, again, like abs, you don't have to do it for a long period of time. A couple sets, just do it focused and get it done. I don't think for ab training, I don't spend more than, I hate to say it, like six minute abs, five to ten minutes, you're done. You don't need to do a whole hell of a lot, but you need to do it every time. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Not to create rage bait, but can you give me some of the other graveyard exercises? We've talked about a couple. You've actually got a great video on this, which we'll link to, but just to give people a precursor for what goes on the, and again, we'll frame it as not that these are absolutes just for the people who can't work in gray. These are things that for most people, you're not getting enough juice out of the squeeze. Your risk of injury is going up to the gains. And you might be able to get somewhere between 90 and a hundred percent of these gains doing something at far lower risk. That's what we're talking. That's the whole premise. And I believe that you're always going to find the person who says, I've done these my whole life. And nothing happened to me. Yep. And my grandmother smoked her entire life and didn't die of lung cancer. That doesn't mean that everybody should smoke. That's the way to think about my, my answer. Sometimes if I want to get them a little irritated, I said, yeah, we're doing it my whole life. Well, it hasn't done it yet. Who knows? Because I'm pointing to the parts of the exercise that are just not biomechanically ideal. And therefore, just like the exercise I described before, where especially you start to add fatigue into the equation, they increase the risk that you're going to break form enough to potentially cause issues in that regard. I hate the upright row. I have no problem expressing my hatred for that exercise. It is the dumbest single exercise that was ever created simply because I can fix it by just changing one position of the elbow and the wrist. That's it. And you can still have your upright row, but just let's call it something different. Let's call it a high pull because the upright row is essentially relying on the fact that you're going to pull this barbell or dumbbells as high as you can towards your chin, lead with your elbows, get as high as you can, which I can't even do because of these shoulders of mine, but get as high as you can with your elbows to the point where they, some people you've probably seen them. They look like their elbows are almost vertical, right? Exactly. You do a much better job than me of doing the wrong thing. But I, I basically think not only are you getting into this extreme position, but you're loading it. What am I loading? I'm loading internal rotation. I'm driving this arm, this shoulder into internal rotation under load and elevation. When all I have to do is just lead with the wrist rather and keep the elbows down and I'm still pulling high and I'm still getting up into this position. I'm still getting abduction of the shoulder, which is why you feel in the shoulders. I'm still getting trap work, which is what you're going to feel when you do the upright row also. And all I've done is I've just changed one position that doesn't sacrifice any of the benefit of the exercise. It sacrifices none of the benefits. So if you ever wanted to heat me up and talk about one exercise that belongs in the graveyard, that's the one that will always be in the graveyard for me. And there really is not a defense of it. If you've done it and you like it and you haven't gotten injured with it, then keep doing it. But why would you not at least consider an alternative that sacrifices, you said maybe 90% of the value, this still has 100% of the value without the wrist. So why wouldn't you try that? So that's one. These behind the neck positions that we talked about, the press, overhead press, lat pull down, but there's leeway there. Some people feel it more, I think, when they do it behind the neck for whatever reason. Depends what it means though. I mean, like, as you said earlier, you might feel it in terms of a stretch more when you're doing a deep fly off the bench, but be careful what you're feeling. Like, yes, of course you feel it more. You're going to feel more of a stretch in the lower bicep, but that's not why we're doing the exercise. I always wonder when people say, I feel it more if. They feel it more where they should feel it more. Another guy, you mentioned Dorian Yates. I used to watch Lee Haney a lot. Remember Lee Haney? So Lee Haney had a shrug that he did behind his back. Oh, I remember this. Right. And he called it Haney shrugs. And he says, and they asked him, why do you do it behind your back? He said, where are the muscles? They're back there, aren't they? So it's like, okay. But when you're an eight time Mr. Olympia or whatever he is, I think you can get away with saying anything. Right. And then, you know, along the same lines of the barbell positioning for front squat versus squat, I understand what he's talking about, but I do think that there's this feel element, that comes into play there. So if you do the behind the neck pull down, you can safen that up a little bit by just allowing the elbows to not flare back when you're doing it, but let them drift a little bit more towards the front. I can still pull behind my head, but have my elbows drifted more towards that scapular plane. So there's some modifications I can make that would make that exercise better. It's not necessarily a horrible graveyard exercise with this modification, but again, for many or for most, why not pull to the front? I think you're going to get a better. pull when you pull to the front anyway, you're going to get a better engagement of the muscles you're trying to build. Same thing with the overhead press. You could press more safely there. You can actually get the elbows out in front of you even when doing that, which would allow you to do that. But personally, I feel like the press from the front just feels better for me and for most. What else? I think I have this dumbbell side bends in my graveyard. I mean, that's just a pointless exercise. It's just basically riding the seesaw by yourself up and down. No additional benefit. You're going to have more effect in training the obliques with rotational work every day than you are with just straight side bending. They have a function of side bending, but they're going to be way more effectively targeted and trained with rotational work than they are with that. That one's in my graveyard. There's not many more. The fly we talked about was in the graveyard. Honestly, I might get the criticism from now and again of creating this graveyard for certain exercises, but I think more than anything else, I'm adaptable to most things because I think that, as we talked about earlier, my biggest, asset is my ability to take an exercise and figure out ways to adapt it to become something someone can do, even in the face of discomfort at that moment. Because I know how important it is to continue to stress tissues and not immobilize them or not completely get away from them. The fastest way to slow recovery from an injury is to not do something for it. You want to be able to still stress those tissues. Time is not the only thing that heals injuries. Time and the stress, the particular stresses of those tissue structures is what's really important. Mechanical stress is super important to that recovery process. Well, Jeff, this was a super interesting conversation. It's actually given me a lot of ideas for things I want to tweak and modify in my training. I suspect it will be for others. Like I said, we're going to put together in the show notes videos from your archives that will actually demonstrate all these exercises. My hope is that people can go right to that and become their own trainers. It's like, how do I formulate my own workouts here? Anyway, as always, so much fun sitting down with you, Jeff. Really appreciate it. Appreciate you having me on. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. Head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash show notes if you want to dig deeper into this episode. You can also find me on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, all with the handle peteratiamd. You can also leave us review on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast player. 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