How Powerlifters Get Stronger: Mechanisms, Principles, and the Future of Programming w/Dr. Zac Robinson @zac.datatdrivenstrength (ep.21)

I'm really excited for this. Hello guys, I've been listening to the podcast since you guys reached out. I mean, I really enjoyed it. I've gained a lot of insight just kind of listening to some of the conversations you guys had to kind of reframe or I guess make me formalize some of my thoughts a little bit better too. So I think you guys are doing some really good stuff and it's been spent good to kind of see the breath of the conversations you guys have had. That I think have been really interesting for me to sometimes I get in kind of my own silo sometimes so it's good to branch out get some different perspectives. So it's good. Has it has it been different than your own perspective on like strengthen hypertrophy? I think I mean, obviously I have like a lens about look through things, but as we'll probably touch on based on your guys outline. I try pretty hard and something I really like what you guys have done that I tried to do as well as I the way that I think about things and always I try to go about it is thinking about it from like a systems perspective and less about methods. I think methods are obviously important at the end of the day because you have to write down the training program, but developing systems heuristics models, those kind of things I think are important to try to get you to the different answers to problems and having a system that's adaptable and not bias as you guys kind of often mentioned. I think is is important to consider. So yeah, no, I really enjoyed listening to podcasts and they go be fun. Yeah, it's just been a big focus of this podcast is getting away from methods and focusing on the mechanism because I get something you guys mentioned just kind of focusing on the mechanisms, the principles and everything from there is a lot easier to problem solve. So yeah, I mean, just want to make sure like we're recording right we're good. Yeah, I saw the recording for you. Okay, sweet. All right, just want to double check so we don't lose any of this. How are you, man? Yeah, you can you can switch the cameras when someone's talking. Yeah, you can you can try it. Yeah, try. This is our first time doing this this set. That looks great. Yeah, I'm bringing down the quality right now. You guys look great. We're doing like the multi camera here too. You can see the changes in the room and watch out. But yeah, right. We'll do a formal intro here. Welcome back to stack cast your favorite powerlifting podcast after data driven strength. We'll be having a special guest today. We have Dr. Zach Robinson from data driven strength. We'll be going over principles of training mechanisms of strength and hypertrophy, research and fallacies and we'll be touching on future of programming from what we've been seeing. I guess like from research and from what we've been seeing in the powerlifting community. So Jack or Dr. Zach, how you doing? Doing well guys, but like I was telling you before we started, I guess officially recording. Yeah, big fan of the show, been listening to it a lot recently. Definitely been some good idea fuel for me. I'm excited to talk and I'm sure I'll have some additional thoughts while I'm brushing my teeth tonight. Based on what are we going to. Cool. Yeah, I guess we'll. Is there any specific topic you want to start with? We have a few things we're going to go over. I think starting with research and the most recent research that you've noticed, maybe like anything. I need like new breaking research we've we're seeing in this strength and hypertrophy field. Is there any big breakthroughs you've noticed recently? So I guess you could think as a couple of different directions. I'd say some of the more recent projects that I've been a part of that have been, you know, I think contribute like decent contributions to the to the literature and obviously the research overall. Our lab is done a couple bigger meta-analysis projects on training volume, training frequency, training proximity failure at this point on strength and hypertrophy. And I think those projects themselves, I think, are useful from the perspectives that they provide on each of those training variables, but probably even more so is just from like a kind of a medic cognition kind of standpoint on like what research is for how to interpret it. Ultimately kind of trying to get like something I keep coming back to is kind of like a metaphor that I think is the biggest perspective and paradigm shift I personally had and just kind of how I interpret evidence these days is like, I think very common social media kind of ingrains this and I also think it's just natural for our brains to kind of have like the the research ticker. So like you think of like ESPN or something like that, or like at the bottom of the screen, you kind of see new papers coming out and people are talking about it like that. And I think the more that I've learned and the more that I've been able to be part of these kind of larger projects that kind of make you realize that that is probably an inappropriate lens to kind of view things from. I think that's probably the biggest, biggest thing in terms of I think people nowadays have a pretty good degree of perspective on like, all right, interesting, but this is a grain of sand in terms of shifting principles principle moves principles moves slowly methods move quickly. And just like you said, kind of coming back to those principle based kind of approaches and way that we're kind of thinking things. So I think for me in terms of strength and hypertrophy, I think Josh, my colleague at Dijon strength has the saying that I really like. It's that simplicity is on the other side of complexity. And I think nowadays I think the picture is simplified a lot in terms of how I view kind of research and training for both of those variables, but that is on the other side of going through, you know, a lot of complex thinking on how we ultimately get to like these simplified heuristics that we're kind of talking about before we started. So it's kind of a non-answer in terms of like sexy research findings, but I think that's kind of the point at the same time is that I think we have pretty good understandings from a lot of these high level principles. And I think those are going to drive the systems and the heuristics and the models that we create to kind of try to solve problems creatively. But there isn't necessarily, you know, I have a couple things like like a couple of things that wrote down were like resensitization to training like those kind of things. That's like an area that's ongoing and an interesting another one would just be like non-hypertrophic strength mechanisms in the time course of those and how can a 83 lifter who hasn't gained weight on the platform continue to make progress of kilos and kilos and kilos upon years how is that occurring what mechanisms are underlying that those kind of things. So there's definitely areas of research that I think are interesting and things that will continue to shape our understanding over the years. But I would say for me, I think the biggest thing has just been kind of that like I said that paradigm shift in terms of how we're utilizing and viewing evidence and kind of making sure that it's not that research ticker kind of kind of a approach that I think leads to a lot of, you know, we've heard a program hopping and like kind of the more like applied program around. It's very similar to that. It's like belief hopping. And I think that is typically the approach of kind of a red flag in terms of how it's being utilized. Yeah, I mean, we'll definitely go into the mechanism. So I think that was actually one question we had about how does a person who says at the same body weight gets stronger, but we'll get into that in a minute here. I don't know if you remember back in like almost like 10 years ago when research was getting popular in the power thing community. You would have someone post any like finding like something from your training anything there just kind of thinking about like, Hey, I think this is helping my but list sumo deadlifting is helping with this quality. And then you see in the comments, everyone's like, you'll have someone in the comments asking for research for them to confirm this this hypothesis. I think now we're seeing less of that. That was more like in 2015, 2016, everyone in the comments just asking for research. Everyone's like miss interpreting research too. But now seems like people are almost have gone too far. And I feel like people don't reference research enough. Have you noticed? Have you noticed that? I know exactly what you're talking about. It's the classic pendulum swing on how this stuff is being utilized. And I think Yeah, it's tough tough on because on one hand, I think clearly like the the awareness. And I think even the the biggest thing is like the subconscious utility of research. I think that people don't even realize like if you're following a daily undulating programming model in 2025, like some people have no idea where that came from, right? And that's obviously. And you can you can quibble with like how revolutionary is it really to do fives on one day, eight, saying other day, like you can like it's not like a crazy concept, right? They've probably been doing that for years, but you know, you the point being like I think people are aware of research nowadays, which is a massive net positive because I think that at least makes people have pause with respect to what can we know? How do we? How do we understand cause and effect? How do we evaluate our own biases? Like just like the very foundational concepts of scientific thinking, which I think is going to be That's the bedrock of applying research to yourself is understanding the concepts of the scientific method and how to like I said isolate cause and effect and the humility that we have to have of when we make changes in in the real world, how does that ultimately influence the observations that we make? I think that's clearly something people at least aware of nowadays, whereas the, hey, I got the program from the biggest dude in my gym was how we all kind of grew up. And some could argue that's still the best citation one could have. But hey, I think it's a good world that we're in that I think research is something that people discuss. And then it's more so the nuanced application of that nowadays where we can discuss the exact application of certain findings because of the population they're utilized and the way that the study was carried out. It's, I guess the way that I view it is, it's a much higher level conversation nowadays rather than like the concept of like research being entirely useless, I think is pretty uncommon of an opinion these days. It's to what degree in what context in, yeah, and kind of what situation. So yeah, I think there's always going to be misinterpretations and the application is going to be probably flawed in a lot of ways because people tried to utilize research for ways that it probably shouldn't be relied upon. But I do think it's moving in the right direction. And I think overall, absolutely has been like a positive shift in the way that those principles are kind of integrated into practice. Yeah, and if people are curious about misconceptions and fallacies of research, you guys have a good podcast. And I think you mentioned a few different types of misconceptions or fallacies like the snapshot I believe like was one of them. So if you guys want to go ahead and like go more in depth as far as that goes, Zach and Josh have already a podcast over this, we'll start going over the stuff we want to talk about here with strength and hypertrophy. It's something we've been diving deeper into. We've done a couple episodes over what is fitness in parallel thing. I think that that's something people kind of throw around not really have a specific definition to it. So we did a podcast trying to define what fitness actually is in parallel thing. And we've done a rep profile podcast. Just kind of talking about the qualities and the kind of those contribute to strength expression. So I guess we'll start with a very basic question. And if you want us to give you a little bit more context, feel free to ask for more context, but very simple question, how do power lifters get stronger? - Yeah, that's a broader one, but I see where you're going with it. I really enjoyed the rep profile episode. I think about things in a similar way. And I think that was a good kind of litmus test on how to kind of navigate these different kind of heuristics and principles that we've kind of been alluding to. But yeah, how does a pilot get stronger? Very, very interesting question. And obviously, to some degree, you're going to have to simplify the reality of the situation in order to have a productive conversation. So when I'm going to kind of bucket some things, put things into kind of categories here, obviously that's not describing the 100% reality of the situation. That's my, put my scientists hat on, getting my disclaimers out of the way before I can speak freely, right? So yeah, with that kind of caveat out of the way, in terms of my personal, mostly as it's speaking as a coach, obviously with some scientific influence, my personal kind of mental model of how this stuff works is very similar to kind of what you guys outlined as we have aspects that contribute to our strength capacity, aspects that contribute to our strength expression. And then ultimately, we have this concept of skill which takes our strength capacity in our strength expression and ultimately applies that into a specific task. And that's essentially the way that I kind of conceptualize things in the sense that the strength capacity, those are going to be things like hypertrophy, your leverages, things like that that ultimately can strain how much force or how much actual load that we can move if we're just going to automatically apply us into parallel thing, the squat bench deadlift, strength expression. I kind of consider those like the underlying neuromuscular characteristics that allow you to produce force. So you could kind of think about those more in an isolated sense. So we're talking about things like motor unit synchronization, our ability to decrease the voluntary activation deficit, different aspects of neuromuscular efficiency. So those like real needy-gritty neuromuscular characteristics that allow you to send a signal from your brain to the muscle to produce force relative to the capacity that you have to produce that force. And then finally, the skill aspect is saying, okay, I have a given capacity. I have a given degree of expression for that capacity. How to actually transmute that into a skill and actually show up on the platform to actually be able to demonstrate those theoretical qualities. 'Cause you can show up jacked. You can show up with a really strong isometric leg extension, but if you can't actually perform the task, who cares? And so over the course of a career, obviously the contribution of each one of those things is gonna vary. You can only put on so much muscle. You can probably have diminishing returns in the other two characteristics as well. And that's the interesting component of the things, right? Is like how much of those things change, how much do those components shift in different scenarios? And that's kind of the million dollar aspect of the art of coaching as far as my view goes. But that's kind of my high level birds-eye view, kind of conceptualization of how the stuff works. But I don't know if there's anything there that I did not address your actual question. - No, I think that covers, that gives us a good starting point because we wanna dive deeper into those things. So what do you think is the relationship between those contributors to, I would call like strength expression? Because some of them are a little bit faster to acquire and some of them take, like for hypertrophy, for example, hypertrophy takes maybe years on end to optimize or at least reach a point where you're getting very minimal returns. So if you were to go over a let's say a five-year career for a lifter in the first year where those adaptations or the dispersion gets stronger, purely do hypertrophy, purely do to neuromuscular efficiency or is it due to something else? How would you describe, I guess, the timeframe of how those things adapt? Like how would you adapt to those qualities over time? If that makes sense. - Yeah, no, I mean, that's the million dollar question, right? Like I think if I had a great answer to that, I think that'd be awesome. I think this is something that's still debated in the research. I think there are some indications to say that early, like very early changes in strength are gonna be almost entirely due to these neuromuscular and skill-based characteristics. It's kind of like the classical view you'll see in the textbook, like however many weeks are gonna be neural adaptations and then it's gonna be taken over by muscular adaptations. And I think that probably is probably pretty accurate for the most part in the sense that, there's definitely a very skill and neuromuscular dominant phase of strength gains very early in studies are just in training in general. And then after a certain point, once those have kind of reached a certain level, those start to taper out and I think that's where hyperarchery becomes a little bit more dominant. The one caveat there is that particularly in the research those kind of mental models are developed, those protocols I don't think are necessarily optimized for one-arm strength or a given type of strength in terms of task. So typically speaking, those kind of extrapolations are made off of your gold standard exercise prescription for the general population, right? And then they're trying to extrapolate those kind of things into very high level strength performance that you guys are extremely specialized athletes. That probably isn't a one-to-one kind of situation there. And so there's been some other work that's kind of, at least made a theoretical case that some of these more neuromuscular skill-based adaptations can probably happen for a lot longer than people think. But at the same time that there is some pretty compelling evidence to say that the muscular size or the strength capacity is still going to be one of the biggest predictors of your strength kind of long term. And there's some cobbles there and definitely some debate on how that research is executed by I think broad strokes. That's kind of ultimately how I view it is you're definitely going to have a very skill dominant, neuromuscular dominant phase in the first couple months, maybe years of training, depending on how specialized the task is. Then there's going to be the vast majority of time there that's going to be kind of limited by your strength capacity. So basically how jacked are you? And then it's of my belief that where there's probably some room for a more nuanced interpretation is I don't think it's like, OK, I improve my skill, the initial 50% or whatever. And then that box is kind of checked. And now it's literally just about how jacked I am. I think whether you look at it from an anecdotal perspective, a little bit on the limitations of the way the research is designed to look at those questions, I just think it's kind of hard to say that there are probably not still some ROI to be had in both of those categories. I just think it's just extremely strong diminishing returns, just like everything else. Anyone that's been under the bar for many years knows that the returns that you get from training, no matter if it's in the high-perchery department or anything else. is going to strongly diminish. And I think that's probably how every single one of these categories operates. And the goal of programming of coaching of us trying to make progress and reach these higher levels are, OK, my goals are time-bound. Like you just mentioned a five-year career. And I think that's probably reflective of how long people are in the sport recently. This relatively short amount of time that people are interested. And so we're trying to make as much progress as we can. And then relatively short amount of time. So it's like, which one of these factors is going to give me the highest ROI in this specific situation? So again, I think I'm talking around the question. But hopefully that addressed it to some degree. No, it's interesting because I thought neuro-muscular efficiency is fairly short term. Within, let's say, a year, you've gotten 90% of how much you can get out of that quality. But you're saying there's probably more to be gained. And it's probably-- Yeah, it's one. Like I said, it's one of those things where I think you could make a really compelling case to say that it's relatively finite. But kind of combining my understanding of the limitations of the research that we've accessed to answer those questions, and also just the anecdotal experience and kind of combining just some speculations that I have, honestly. I do think that those cap out relatively quickly. Like I said, I think the dimension returns are pretty aggressive. Like at the end of the day, you're not going to be able to strength expression or skill your way out of not being jacked. Like I don't think that's the case. But I do think that at very high levels of performance, where we're talking a couple kilos makes a big difference. I do think there's aspects of neuro-muscular characteristics that come from kind of really hyper-sport specialization in a lot of different ways. I think those can probably still incrementally make a difference. But it's probably just pretty small ROI. But when we're talking about advanced power lifter, that small ROI may matter. So yeah, hopefully that kind of makes sense. I'm not saying that I definitely know that to be the case. I'm just saying that if we kind of just think about it conceptually in the saying in the sense that all of these adaptations probably operate on a diminishing returns relationship, where it's not like it's in a super halting plateau, per se. But more so, just like this gradual asymptotic relationship, where we're kind of approaching this point that will never reach where our progression is just ever slower. That's kind of how I think pretty much all of those operate. Maybe an example would be like, let's take skill. It's more of like a tangible quality that people can think of. I think you guys would probably say that purely thinking about skill, nothing else, right? Taking your squat training from two or three times a week to six times a week, that probably would benefit your skill. And so there's room to be gained there, but the difference between you squatting three times a week versus six times a week isn't so big that you're going to shift that to your programming because of all these other considerations, right? So there's like these diminishing returns aspects to all of these different factors that if you wanted to completely major in one of these factors, you may design training in a certain way, but we're kind of trying to take the constellation of all these factors to get us moving in the right direction. So it's kind of something I'm workshopping on the spot here. So hopefully that kind of makes sense. Yeah, I think, I mean, it's interesting talking about neuromuscular efficiency because with each one of these qualities, you can change your training dosage or like how you structure your training to emphasize one specific quality. So if we know how we train this specific quality, and like let's say it gets neuromuscular efficiency, and we know it's a bottleneck. It's a limiting factor, the hypertrophy, the muscle mass is maxed out, or this person is not in a good environment to gain more muscle mass. Maybe they're in a deficit, or maybe they're not pushing their accessory work heavy enough, or like close to failure to get that adaptation, and they're like, okay, okay, I'm not, I'm maxed out as far as like muscle mass in this way class. Let me put more of my eggs into the neuromuscular efficiency bucket. How can I train or emphasize this one quality if I know it has potential for like this much gain if I actually increase that quality? - Yeah, it's a good question. And I think these are the types of things that in the super specific example of strength sports is these are the types of like mechanisms and things I was talking about that I'm really interested in learning more about. So I'll definitely give you my reactions in my best guesses, but by no means are these subtle. But from the way that I conceptualize things, so I guess mechanistically my hypothesis for kind of how we can make predictions on what variables for strength are going to lead to favorable outcomes, at least in the kind of short to moderate term is kind of the way that I would think about it. It's ultimately it's a game of maximizing forced production in a specific context. So you just think about a bunch of different training variables. So if you think about the load on the bar, so the percentage of one or n that you utilizing, the more that that percentage increases, which is obviously getting more specific to the task that we're trying to train for, is going to increase the amount of force that we're producing. So that's going to become more specific or more like the task and that's going to hopefully benefit strength gain. So essentially what I'm describing is just the principle specificity, just at a really, really kind of diverse level. So that's that's load is one aspect. Proximity failure would be another aspect in the sense that, OK, one side selected a load, whether that be 90% of one or n, 80% of one or n, 70% of one or n, getting closer to failure with that load is actually going to decrease the force that I'm producing rather than increase it, which I think is kind of sometimes counterintuitive for people if they think about the forced velocity relationship more generally. That is actually only going to apply in the case of like a single isolated contraction in a non-fantastic state. But as I'm fatiguing, that velocity declines of my repetitions with a given load. I'm actually producing less force. So that doesn't seem to benefit strength gains and probably produces additional fatigue that may harm my ability to train with heavier loads. That's kind of the rationale for some of the quote unquote submax or low interest fatigue training you may have heard of. So that's another variable. Rest times are another variable you could think of for longer rest times are allowed you to lift a greater load, allow you to not have as much cumulative fatigue, which is again, making sure that your force production is maximized for as much of your volume as possible. So you can basically go down the line of like all the variables that we would think about from a strength perspective. And that's essentially how I kind of think about it is like, OK, if I'm trying to maximize the adaptations for neuromuscular efficiency, I'm trying to create an environment that allows me to accumulate as many high force repetitions as possible. But the final kind of variable that's important to think about this is like, this is where I think some of the divergence between strength and hypertrophy is interesting, is that, OK, when I say as many high force repetitions as possible, there's two things that are important in that statement. One is, what is the threshold for high force? The reality of that question is, I don't know. I don't know what percentage of like your true maximum force capacity that needs to be to be quote unquote productive. But that's obviously kind of important to the situation. If you think about it from historical trends, I'd say most people kind of agree quote unquote productive strength training kind of occurs in the range of like 70% to 100% of 1 or M somewhere about there. So you can kind of use that as a rough heuristic. But the second thing I was going to say is that volume is kind of a two double edge sword here. In the sense that the more volume I accumulate, the more that the stimulus is going up. But if I do too much volume, then it's actually going to decrease my force production in the next session because I'm fatigued. So it's kind of this double edge sword of trying to make sure you're theoretically getting the stimulus, but also not fatiguing yourself for the next session. And I think this is where a lot of the pacing stuff, a lot of the making sure that the primary day is coming and feeling strong. Those kind of narratives kind of get wrapped in here. I think that's kind of some of those things. So yeah, talking about it from my coaching experience and kind of my best guess, those are kind of the principles that I utilize as I basically say, OK, in this period of time is devising training this way, going to lead to the accumulation of more high force reps. I would assume that's going to lead to the best neuromuscular kind of expression for that task that we're training for, which is basically maximizing the stimulus and then minimizing the fatigue that allows us to continuously do that over that period of time. So that'd be my best guess as of now. But of course, terms and conditions always apply. I know you had a podcast with Dr. Eric Helms where he mentioned that the biggest indicator of someone's progress at a high level is the hypertrophy increase-- it seems like that's the biggest indicator that this lifter is getting stronger. Even if it's minimal increases in hypertrophy, that seemed from his perspective was the biggest driver. But I don't know if it sounds conflicting now where you're talking about maximizing the amount of high force reduction reps, which is something we've talked about in our rep profile episode. It's like we did also talk about the velocity relationship with hypertrophy and strength. And obviously, I could load plays a big factor here. But so you think there's still more room for a high level power lifter-- let's say it was been in it for 10 years, let's say-- who is still trying to stay in this one-way class. Maybe their skill is not changing that much. And hypertrophy has probably installed out the progress. can be neuromuscular. Just to clear. Yeah, you're, uh, you're making holding my feet to the fire. Right. Um, yeah, I mean, ultimately, I, I do agree that like the biggest bottleneck in the long term for most people, face my experiences going to be muscle mass. Like that's definitely like that's the, that's the size of the engine, right? You probably heard that analogy, the, the capacity. There's, there's only so much strength that you're going to have a reserve of that's going to be constrained by these, these other factors. But I guess the, the thing that I'm saying is that I think the degree to which these other things can be progressed while is going to be a relatively like shorter term effect. Um, in the sense that, um, I think there is, there is room to be gained, I guess I'll put it that way for, for people that are like 10 years into the game. More so than I think maybe people expect, but I still don't think it's a massive effect in comparison to muscle mass. That makes sense. So maybe let's put it in like a practical example that might, that might help. Um, so yeah, you have somebody that's weight class constrained. Um, and they're looking in a way to try to devise training that's going to allow them to, to make progress. And the implication there is that, oh, okay, if I am, uh, you know, in a situation where I don't think I'm going to grow ton of muscle, then what other things can I do? Um, is essentially what, what we're setting up here. The first thing I'd say is that we definitely don't know the kind of like, tasks, specificity of hypertrophy, for example, like how much, how many grams of muscle do I need to put on to make a meaningful difference in my total? Does that change over the course of a training career? All those kind of things. Like I would say I usually come back to the perspective that even if someone is weight class restricted, we can probably still aim for recomposition. We can still do some things to still kind of progress the hypertrophy arrow to some degree. But I guess what I'm getting at from the other thing is, are the, the strength expression end of things that we've been discussing is that I think people kind of make the assumption that like, all right, if I do a eight week strength block or something like that where I wash out the fatigue and I've done this for like the kind of the classic, you know, strength training program, window of like eight to 16, eight to 12 weeks or something like that, then basically that box is checked and there's nothing to be gained after that. Bigs mostly off my personal experience here. I think that that can probably be something that can be ratcheted up a little bit more and really been taken advantage of. So if you do a really good job with fatigue management, you integrate some of these strategies that really give you exposure to these high force conditions a lot of the time. I think there's like this pop sensation or things that just, and again, this is mostly just based on my experience that I think can lead to some progression in ways that maybe are not what you would expect. I guess it's kind of what I'm getting at. So to clarify for hopefully at the last time, high purchase is definitely the biggest bottleneck in the long term, but I think these other factors that usually are thought out of this very transient, there's a strong cap on them. Like, I think Mike T. He's talked about skill as an example a ton. So like, people like at the bench press, people like at the squat and they're like, okay, I do do that a couple of times a week. I basically tapped out the skill adaptations and there's nothing to begin more. Mike is really big on saying like, there is a multiple layers of skill that you can get to that can lead to more progress than people would expect by focusing on that and utilizing different strategies to really refine your skill in different ways. That's basically what I'm saying for the the neuromuscular stuff is based on my experience. I think there are different things that can be taken advantage of. If you kind of play into that a little bit more than people may expect. And I think that that's just like an interesting thing that I would be curious to keep my eyes on in the research and the long run in terms of are these these other mechanisms that we are not totally elucidated yet that are kind of not in the high-perch VIs. That could be contributing to strength long term, whether that be like tendon adaptations, whether that be non-morphological changes, type of purchasing in terms of like fiber orientation and all these kind of different things that are not necessarily the size of the muscle, but there could be these other adaptations that are helping us produce more force for a given amount of muscle size. For the most part, those don't seem to be huge contributors for the research that we have currently, but purely based on my experience and just some anecdotal observations. I think there could be more to the story there that I think is interesting to keep in mind. Yeah, no, that's perfect. So if we were to focus on the mechanisms a little bit more, I think hypertrophy is fairly straightforward, but just to clarify for listeners, because I don't think our listeners are too, I guess, aware of the very basic mechanisms. So how does hypertrophy occur on a muscular level? And let's say also for strength, is there any changes at a muscular level that we see? Oh, man. Okay. Yeah, big question. Definitely, I'm not a molecular researcher by any means. I will give you the high level applied answer on a brose understanding of the mechanisms hypertrophy and strength of the best I can. But yeah, so from a hypertrophic perspective, ultimately, what seems to be the case for the most part is that there is a tension stimulus when you produce a contraction that's going to lead to some sort of chemical cascade that ultimately upregulates processes related to muscle growth. There's a lot of debate in terms of, okay, what classifies as a quote unquote mechanism hypertrophy? You probably heard the term mechanical tension, probably heard the term metabolic stress, probably heard muscle damage. And I'm definitely not qualified to talk on the super nuanced discussion there. From my read of the research and my understanding, I would consider kind of tension as the primary initiator. And from a practical perspective, what that's kind of referring to, at least, again, from my lens of how I interpret these things, I kind of view it as a two kind of variable kind of problem. So any time I do a resistance training set, I'm going to pick a percentage of 1 or a m or a load on the bar, and then ultimately I have to choose one to stop my set. Both of those factors are going to contribute to the cumulative tension that I'm going to accumulate over the course of that set. So if my load that I'm training with is really heavy, I'm going to recruit a lot of the motor units and then the fibers that they intervate pretty quickly out of the start of the set. And so I don't necessarily need to take that set as close to failure to get a ton of fibers that are going to experience tension. Alternatively, if I choose really low load, I might need to take that set closer to failure to ultimately get a ton of a lot of fibers that are ultimately participating in that set to ultimately lead to a good amount of fibers experiencing tension leading to all those downstream pathways that ultimately upregulate growth. So for hypertrophy, for the most part, I think it's a combination of the load on the bar and then ultimately how close you are taking a set to failure. I don't think you have to take a set all the way to failure to stimulate hypertrophy, but from what we've seen for the most part on a percent basis and kind of an isolated sense mechanistically, the closer you get to failure, the stimulus for hypertrophy, if you will, is probably a little bit greater, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the stimulus over the course of whole training program would be optimized if you take every single set to failure. There's downstream consequences, particularly in the case of power lifter, as you guys are obviously aware, taking your sets of leg press to failure every single set is probably not going to optimize your squat session in a few days. So you guys get that, but from where hypertrophy ends, maybe the optimization game is a little bit different. For strength, there are tons of things that obviously influence strength. We've touched on a few of them already. You have hypertrophy, like the size of the muscle, which is ultimately going to lead to that strength reserve or that strength capacity. We have different aspects of muscle architecture that orient the exact same muscle size in different ways that can have downstream implications on force production, all of the neurological aspects from the brain all the way down to the muscle and everything along that chain that can be more efficient, less efficient that can ultimately, again, lead the exact same muscle size to produce more or less force. Then obviously, again, in the actual applied sense, the technical skill of an exercise is going to have some implications on how much strength we get there to. In terms of quote-unquote "what improves strength," that's a lot harder of a question, right? Because it's a kind of a concert of so many different adaptations that it's really tough to say, "Okay, this stimulates this, which leads to strength gain," right? It's just so much more of a multifactorial problem. So that's where, again, from like an applied sense, I think about it. The story that seems to paint inconsistent narrative with strength, at least in my opinion, is just specificity as king. People have known that for a long time, but I think that paints true in so many different regards that sometimes people don't really see how deep specificity really does run. And so that's where I kind of come back to the force production aspect of things. We're training for a maximal force production event or task, then the training that we're doing that's ultimately set up in that way. It's probably going to allow us to express that characteristic the best in the short to moderate term. And that's where you kind of, you know, lead into more periodized approaches to kind of combine all the things kind of together. But hopefully that was somewhat useful in the weeds. No, that's, that's, I mean, that's really good. For, would you say how hypertrophy is almost like an independent quality that doesn't really, that's not like strength, like where it's like multifactorial, like you mentioned, hypertrophy seems like it's a lot simpler where You good. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a good question. I saw this one on the outline and I was I was going back and forth on this one I would say if you really go down the weeds of hypertrophy in terms of like what does that even mean? I think it can get extremely extremely complex like you have Yeah, I mean there's just so many different like issues on what what constitutes Actually high-perturbed that we're talking about you guys have probably heard some of the controversy on swelling Cycoplasmic hypertrophy There's so many different things that kind of get all wrapped up in that conversation, but I know what you're saying in the sense that It kind of seems like it's like this one isolated Adaptation that we can kind of speak on in a more isolated sense and I tend to agree with that I think The example that I thought of is like there's definitely cases in the research where we can have a muscle grow and strength Is kind of operating independently in the sense what I mean by that is we can have an increase in muscle size But we can have more or less increases in strength depending on the other variables that are kind of manipulated So if we take a set with a really low low deflator we might have Increases in muscle size, but the transfer to strength is much less so it's it can kind of somewhat operate independently But I think if you think about it The way that I kind of conceptualize it is kind of like a stock in an index fund if you ever heard that kind of analogy where You know an index fund is like a hundred different stocks in combination Hypercivil is one of the probably the larger stocks that represents strength and so hypercivil can be up But if literally everything else is down then the strength could be potentially down as well So that's kind of the way that I view it is like yes, it's independent in the sense that You could probably create a scenario where it kind of operates in different directions But it obviously is playing a role in that or contributing in some way it just probably isn't a one-to-one Kind of correlation there because you can have so many other factors that are kind of changing the strength calculus there if you will Yeah So yeah, I mean I like the index fund analogy here because like that that kind of paints it perfectly so for Like let's say for power lifters because like that's our main audience most of them are very focused on the short-term strength expression and They're not really bought in on Investing into the hypertrophy stock because I don't really see the they don't see like the benefit Yeah, yeah, but how big of a contributor do you think hypertrophy is which I mean We've touched on already, but let's kind of make it clear how big of a contributor hypertrophy is So maybe people will change their training if they know this is actually a big like a bigger bottleneck than I thought it is Because like that's what we've seen recently people just kind of they're so afraid of fatigue and The hypertrophy focused work is one done wrong. It's not really Optimized for actually hypertrophy. It's usually done very far away from failure done at the end of the session and almost Not really prioritized enough Even though it might be like this person's biggest bottleneck. It's usually put on the back end of things So how big of a contributor is hypertrophy? So I'd say the Scientists in me wants to make it clear that the debate there is still occurring definitely in the research there are Tons of reasons that I will knock it into because it's extremely boring for the average person That that conversation is definitely ongoing now coach hat back on I think it's massive. I think it's I think it's yeah, that to me that's the biggest thing in terms of long-term development that someone's going to Be limited by that said where I think your question is kind of interesting and I think people think about this less is like People think about hypertrophy in the sense of this like long-term kind of like it only affects me down the calendar kind of thing I Think that that might be based on a faulty assumption in the sense that You won't notice when you've accumulated Miniscule amounts of tissue, but there's nothing to say Necessarily that that's not helping you in some way kind of immediately if that makes sense It's just not a lot, but it's it's I don't it doesn't make sense to me that I've heard I purchased it doesn't show up over night in a year You know what I mean? You get the Amazon package you put it you put your suit on you like okay good now I'm now I'm bigger it that's a progressive process that's occurring all the time That is just Occurring at a rate that's pretty slow so we're not noticing it every single day, right? So I think when people view like hypertrophy work or whatever is like this long-term investment I think that's potentially Downplaying its ability to impact you today tomorrow the next day the next block because this is a progressive process That's happening kind of all the time and I think as a Function of pretty much all powerlifting programs nowadays is like we've gotten away from this mindset of them being like this entirely distinct Kind of periods and there's more so something that's kind of woven in all the time and I think that reflects That process now I think there is an interesting game that you kind of have to play because I think some aspects of Like optimizing hypertrophy and optimizing strength expression to some degree those are at odds with one another Because of the idea that Generally speaking hypertrophy training is going to be more on the kind of fatigue generating side of the spectrum Whereas strength is going to be a little bit more on the trying to optimize fatigue management Cut not all costs, but wait that's way more of a consideration whereas hypertrophy is kind of the Hey as long as I can recover from it and the training is obviously organized in a productive way I'm trying to kind of find my red lines sit a little bit below that but like work hard. That's essentially why hypertrophy training Is that it's cooler So yeah, I think I think the idea that It is in some way harming your short-term progress is potentially misguided Because it's definitely going to improve your long-term progress if you're limited by muscle size and you're you know I don't know training in a way that's like only hitting singles or whatever kind of interesting way you could kind of go about it Um, I think that's probably going to harm you in the long-term But I also think there's to some degree some short-term ROI that people don't really think about it because it's this chemo It about adaptation Um, so I think that could help people a little bit the other thing I'll say too is that I think even if you have a program that's not designed for hypertrophy or doesn't have hypertrophy work Obviously if you have a relatively aggressive relatively specific program, you're still going to be developing muscle from that um, and The other thing that's just super interesting to me that we just don't know enough about this is the concept of like what I'll call tasks specific hypertrophy so Is the high-perchrophy that I get directly from my competition squatting is that there's the unit of carryover that I get from that Somehow completely distinct from a like extension and how does that Optimization problem change with the fatigue dynamics between an additional set of competition squatting versus You know some sets of leg extension like that that whole concept of um, you know What's the kind of the kernel of truth from the small obdays is kind of the way that I think about it right is like what is that what is that uh? Um, again talking about like systems and heuristics and kind of those higher level principles like the hyper specific duo my volume with the competition lifts There's probably a principle there that's interesting to to take from it and then try to generalize it in a way that's a little bit more nuanced and some of those things are interesting to me So point being hyper actually probably contributes more into this kind of cumulative sense than I think people realize and then to Even if you think you're not doing it you probably are to some degree if you have a relatively aggressive program and then particularly with heavy loads that kind of Takes care of some of those aspects But yeah, I think in general setting things up in a way that allows for That to be a friendlier process is probably a pretty big change that people can make to benefit themselves for sure So I know like there there might not be a clear answer to this but For a parallelster who does most of their training in non-necessary like the most lengthened Uh, muscle position not really super short and maybe like in that mid-range Uh, would that change how you program for someone Um, if let's say you have to pick between a haxquat which puts most of its tension in like the fully lengthened position Um, is the focus from the hypertrophy for work gonna be can't gonna be a little bit more nuanced for a parallelster who One is trying to maximize those high-force reduction reps and also maybe contract the muscle Um, in that maybe mid-range position does fully lengthened work Uh, for the purposes of increasing the muscle size Would that have like the same translation would that have the same carryover or would you be better off if you Still push close to failure, but you're in a more like mid-range tension Um, what does it not really matter as much? No, that's that's a good question. That's kind of the task specific thing that um that i'm getting at is like those are Things that people have brought up and in the research and and i think it just makes sense conceptually that there are probably some aspects of Whether it's the regional growth whether it's the um other kind of Adaptations you get from changing the resistance profile There's probably some more nuance there that could be could be considered but But you always have to weigh that against like, okay, let's kind of create a scenario where we have two options. Let's say I have a rogue Rhino belt squat or whatever, where I've manipulated the band placement to perfectly minute the squat or whatever versus some hack squat that's just like killing me in the bottom. There's probably some ROI there that, you know, in theory, the total muscular stimulus or total muscular growth you might get from the hack squat in theory might be a little better because of the length of profile. But if the kind of quote unquote, "transference" of the growth that you get from the belt squat because it's, you manipulate to match your squat perfectly, it's a little bit higher. Maybe that's a more preferable option, particularly if it's not as fatiguing and it doesn't record for your other squat sessions. So I do think that's an interesting consideration. I would say for the most part of these days, I do kind of tend to lean more so on the side of like, let's pick an option that I think is trainable is relatively like friendly for all the aspects of like a hypertrophy exercise. And then as long as it's training the tissues kind of generally, I think that's kind of probably a pretty good option. So I'd say that's usually how I kind of approach it. But I do think there are cases whether it's kind of a periodized approach, whether it's just something to kind of keep in mind is that, you know, particularly as you get extremely specialized competition techniques, I do think that kind of changes things a little bit. Like your squat, for example, I think like a wider stance squat, I think is something that is kind of changing the game a little bit in terms of like what are, what is, is kind of the limiter here or what is the positions or the angles at which the torque is being produced and that could play a role in exercise selection in terms of the, the quote unquote hypertrophy that I'm chasing. So, so yeah, I think the length and stuff I think is interesting and I think that probably is kind of a decent general heristic, but I do think I mostly think about it from the perspective of like, okay, in the competition task, what do I believe to be limiting me from a muscular perspective and then pick in an exercise that addresses that rather than saying for bench press, I go to the prime chest press that loads it in the length and position optimally or whatever. Like I tend to think about it in the case of strength more. So like what's the limiter and how do I address the limiter with the tool is essentially how I like to think about it. But the lim, the limiter here is let's say is it specifically muscular or is it a muscle at a specific position? If we're talking about like a hax squat, it's still addressing or at least working the quads, but the mechanics might be a little bit different. Are we thinking limiter as far as okay, I'm getting stuck in my squat, whatever halfway up and I want to load this like sticking point. Yeah, no, no, no, exactly. Like you're right again, you're raising good questions and these are the questions I struggle with as an I brush my teeth. Like I mentioned, I think like in theory, you could go down all the way down the rabbit hole and like identify what you believe your hypothesis for what is the region of the muscle, what is the kind of the position that I'm losing the most force or losing the most velocity. Like the basically the sticking point before the sticking point because that's actually where you're losing the force, not where you actually see it. And so what do I believe to be limiting the task at that point? What exercises, what resistance profiles, what ranges of motion, all those things you could consider at a very deep level. There's always that balance of like, all right, I think it's the mid range rectus, you know, you could go down a super specific hypothesis. And I think again, I think that's like conceptually interesting. It's just always that balance of like, all right, what has been successful in the past in terms of how I've thought about this from a mental perspective. What is the difference in okay, this person doesn't have access to this exercise. So like how generalizable is that framework for me to kind of think about the problem solving. Like if they don't have access to an exercise that can specifically match the part of the range of motion where the sticking point is occurring, those kind of things. So long story short, I don't have a good answer on like, how much does that matter? Because I do think it is conceptually interesting, honestly. And I think you could make a case of like thinking about things to that degree of like, okay, here's where I think the target task is limited. What is the muscular demands and at what positions of the range of motion, what resistance profiles are those most challenged by and how does that influence my accessory selection? I think that's honestly a super justifiable way to go about it. It's just one of those things where you have to wear on the ability to identify those things through video or through talking to the client. That's the one assumption that we're making. And then two, is that degree of kind of making or taking that leap of faith in terms of being able to act away, identify those things? If you do that and you come up with a certain intervention, is that going to be better than you taking the more simplistic approach of saying, okay, I'm pretty confident it's in this area. And then what's the trade off there between going through each of those processes? Because ultimately you could be wrong about the super minute specific answer and end of designing a worse program than one that's a little bit more general. But that's kind of the way that I think about it. The only is good is our diagnostic certainty. That diagnostic certainty can be kind of murky sometimes with the tools that we currently have access to. So I think hopefully that I'm kind of walking around it. But honestly, it's a good question that I think about a lot that I don't have a totally formed answer to because I think it is interesting. But it's one of those things that has some interesting downstream implications that I totally haven't thought through nor applied to be confident in saying, yes, that is how it works. So I don't know. It's definitely an interesting question. I'm just thinking about it on the fly here. This might be stupid and like doesn't make any sense. But I guess like the difference between the two applications where, okay, I want the most amount of tension in the mid range versus like to fully lengthen position. If we maybe zoom in on the muscle and like what's happening maybe under the hood, does a muscle that is like fully lengthened, whenever it's trying to produce force, does the, there's a force come from different places within the muscle. If it's fully lengthened, maybe like on like let's say I have two ends like the, like the proximal and this to end of the muscle, those maybe have to work a little bit harder. If it's like fully lengthened, but if it's a little bit in the mid range, maybe like that middle of the muscle belly has to contract a little bit harder. So maybe you're being a little bit more specific with like the force production from this muscle specifically. Does that make any sense? Yeah. 100% what you're describing is exactly like task specific hypertrophy. So basically let's just create a theoretical scenario. Let's add a leg extension machine, right? And I could change where the leg extension is challenging. In theory, the more challenging I make that leg extension at the very beginning of the range of motion, we might expect the growth to be a little bit more distal or down towards your knee on your quadricep. Whereas if I made the leg extension extremely challenging at the very top, then we might expect hypertrophy to be a little bit more dominant towards the top of your quadricep towards the proximal length. And what you're getting at is like, okay, well, that's the case. And I also expect the squat to be challenging at a certain specific point of the range of motion. Does it make sense to kind of try to match those things up with my accessory work? And my answer to you is that is a fantastic idea. And I hope we can test it more robustly because I do think that is a thing. And I think that is part of why hyper specific, like this is the way that I've always kind of viewed as like, you could, you can go down the specificity kind of aisle. For hard with like a shotgun, right? You can do, I'm going to squat every single day. I'm going to do tons of volume. I'm going to do tons of intensity. And you're checking every single box from specificity, right? And so those approaches, while obviously not sustainable and obviously have a ton of selection bias for who they are successful or clearly can produce results. And I think that nobody really argues that. But the, I'm so sorry for my dog barking, by the way. However, the thing that I like to think about is like, okay, what are the, what is the actual part of that equation that's leading to the highest ROI that we can extract and put in a more sustainable system that we can kind of move forward with? And so the kind of aspects of like task specific hypertrophy or whatever you want to call it, I do think there's like a, probably a kernel of truth there that would basically say, okay, for how, let's say we have 10 units of hypertrophy. If that is in the quote, unquote, correct spot versus generally dispersed around the quadricep, I think the carryover or the, the transference that you get from the hypertrophy, I think is probably better. That would be my guess. And so yes, ultimately, what I think is that there's probably to some degree a, that's worth considering when you're designing exercises. Or selecting exercises for somebody. But the magnitude of how much to the next difference, I just don't know. I think because if you have like a larger quadricep overall, like those fibers are still going to be connected from the, the, the, the same bones, right? You're still moving those, but the, the relative amount of torque that they might be producing might be different. So that's ultimately where it comes down. So like I don't know the implications of it, but it's a super interesting idea that I think definitely will be something that down the road. I'm sure we'll get investigated more. But I think that's part of why specificity is kind of like a broad, broad brush can work because it's again, it's kind of pushing you in that direction of like, okay, making sure that we're getting practice, we're getting some, you know, if it's heavier loads and kind of optimizing that environment, a lot of high force expression, kind of optimizing that. And then also the high pressure that we are getting is exactly in the right spots. And hopefully it can allow us to kind of push that forward is kind of my gut reaction to that to hopefully that makes sense. But yeah, what are you describing totally makes sense? And is there, I mean, I know we're spending a little bit of time here, but I think it's good to spend a little bit more. So with that being said, if we're still training it close to failure, is there still a big trade-off with hypertrophy or would I still get a little bit more in theory, a little bit more return in like if I train a fully lengthened position and the proximity to failure is static, is a control here. And like they're both pushed to fail a close to failure. But is there like a big trade-off, let's say, in how much hypertrophy stimulus you get if you do like a full like a astagrass pendulum or a haxquat versus like that busquat push to failure? Yeah, man, you're asking so many good questions that are just like kind of ones that I honestly don't have the the total answer to, but I'll just continue to get my kind of gut thoughts. So I would say we don't have a total like we don't have a great understanding yet of what so how do I describe this. So there's been some research recently that's like kind of compared taking a set to failure versus a set to failure normally and then continuing with like any partial repetitions that I can muster. So like calf raise, I think was the the first study that kind of did something like this. And so the first thing I'd say is like, okay, if we have these two exercises, one that's more lengthened bias and one that's maybe more kind of designed towards the sticking point of the squat, let's say. There might be more kind of gas in the tank overall for them for the musculature for the exercise that's more mimicked towards the squat that you could have mustered additional repetitions that might train the other components of the muscle. So that's something to consider in the sense that even though proxeter failure is quote unquote controlled, maybe it's not in that sense. And if we assume that the length and position is kind of further down the fatigue spectrum, if you will, which may not be the case for all muscles, but in some cases that might be something to consider. And then the other thing that I just again, I think it's super interesting. I just don't know the answer is like the assumption in the greater quote unquote, transference from that growth that's more kind of aligned with the strength, the strength profile of the exercise that we're ultimately trying to improve is that the additional transference that we get from that outweighs theoretically the additional growth that we might get for this other exercise just broadly. So let's paint that example, right? Let's say we get ten units of hypertrophy from this other example and eight of those go to our exercise. But if the other example gives me 50 units of hypertrophy and the ratio is like way less, but I still get like 20 units of of transference, it doesn't matter. It still wins, right? And so I just don't know, I don't know how that shakes out. My intuition is that globally the kind of the length in bias exercise is probably a little bit better, but I don't think it's like night and day different in the research that we have on trained individuals like comparing full range of motion to kind of really, really lengthened bias training or lengthened parcels. It doesn't seem to be like a massive difference. And so I think there's probably some ROI to be gained there, but I think if as long as you're training relatively close to failure and the exercise is not terrible in terms of like, okay, it's literally only challenging as a bicep curl when it's extremely, extremely contracted or it's only challenging as a legs, legs, then show what my knees completely straight. As long as that's not the case, which is not going to be the case if you're trying to match any of the power lifts, it's basically going to be for most people, bottom of the squat, on your chest when you're bench press, and off the floor on the deadlift for the most part. And so those are all going to be relatively lengthened positions. I don't think the ROI that you're going to be losing in terms of overall growth is going to be that much. And so the question just really is like how much additional transfer and stew again. And I just don't know. But I think it's an interesting idea. And in my head, whenever we're talking about tension, proximity to failure, what tension, mechanical tension is doing here is it's making the muscle work harder. So if the more lengthened it is, like maybe like the muscle has to work a little bit harder, you're recruiting more muscle fibers, more motor units. And that's why is that why like a more lengthened position is advantageous because it basically puts you puts this muscle in the most disadvantageous position. So it has to work even harder. And like with recruiting more like you've already fatigued your type one muscle fibers. And now the high threshold motor units are being recruited a little bit faster because it's like a harder position for the muscle to work in. But you're still getting in a medium lengthened position. You're still getting that work done, but the activation energy might be a little bit more. Maybe you can compensate it. Maybe you can compensate for that with like added load. But the idea is to the same. Like you're still trying to fatigue those muscle fibers. And yeah, it's this is a tough one because I still don't think to my understanding that this has been totally elucidated why the lengthened position exercises seem to be a little bit more hypertrophic. There's a couple of different speculations, but I know there's some some people that I think are have very reasonable arguments think that it does not occur for every single muscle. And it's more so related to where a muscle produces force more optimally. So like every muscle is going to have a different length tension relationship. Kind of just basic exercise science where you know your biceps that are producing their force more effectively where you have the most overlap of the sarcomers inside the muscle. So ultimately the point of it being more challenging, I'm not sure. The other the other I like I understand what you're saying. And I think that's a reasonable hypothesis. The other explanation though is that there are active and passive components to tension that the more lengthened aspects of things theoretically could contribute more to these passive aspects of tension. So it could be not necessarily that they lead to a greater amount of fatigue or whatever, but they're they're allowing us to tap into some of these other aspects of tension. I think that's a reasonable hypothesis. So so yeah, I'm not entirely sure why those those types of exercises seem to lead to more growth at least a little bit. But I think the kind of the concept of the length and exercise being a little bit farther down for most exercises on the quote unquote fatigue pool that generally makes sense to me. But I don't know if that'll be the case for like every single exercise. Like I said, if you think about like a calf raise, for example, if you load up a calf raise and you do a set to failure and you fail all the way at the top, you have way more reps that you can perform in that kind of bottom range of motion. So like if you do a lengthened bias exercise or even a lengthened partial, you're essentially going down further down that fatigue pool where I think your explanation makes sense. But in some other exercises like a dumbbell bench press, for example, you're already kind of failing in that range of motion when you fail the task. So there's less kind of ground to gain there so to speak. So so yeah, I'm not entirely sure on on the exact reason those will be potentially more beneficial on a percept basis. But I think there are a variety of explanations that could kind of favor either either reason to favor more length and oriented training kind of as your default or also failure more kind of specific resistance profile as your default. Yeah, this is just exposing to me how I haven't thought about this enough. So this has been good. Well, okay, I guess I just we'll not have to spend a lot of time here. It might be just like five seconds. So don't you want to minimize a man of passive tension. Maybe that coming from a gastroethreat reflex in a in a hax quad or something or just kind of bouncing reps out of the bottom and I can fully stretch position. Don't you want to minimize that passive tension because I can doesn't it's not like a big contributor for hypertrophy, right? I think there's different types of what you're considering passive tension there. I think there are kind of passive tensile forces that you can feel and ones that you can't. So there are like aspects that are occurring kind of underneath the hood that are more passive in nature that you probably aren't able to totally perceive. Like if you're doing a stretch reflex in a leg press you're doing a nice stretch reflex on a calf raise. It's very obvious on kind of what's what's occurring there. And there's some interesting things about the stretch reflex that might even like increased forest production, for example, that like kind of throws a realm, throws a wrench and all this stuff of like, okay, well, actually, if that allows us to reach higher levels of activation and produce more forest, how does that work out the calculus? I don't know. So that's all another thing. But just in general, my understanding is that there are, yeah, these passive aspects of forest production that you may not totally be able to perceive that that's more so what I'm talking about and not that you should kind of, like, it's like stretching you can't feel almost is kind of the way that I'm describing. It is like, it's, yeah, it's more underneath the hood rather than like these external stuff of like you're pointing at that guy and being like, he's getting passive tension. I think it's a little bit more hidden than that if that makes sense. Got you. Yeah. So just to be clear for their listeners, that doesn't give you permission to just like bounce your revs or just, uh, yeah, no, ideally you would want to like, let's say, it's more so for strength. Sorry. I said that in high-perch speed context. Yeah. The structure reflects my person. I'd say it's probably not, not, uh, not something I would currently like hyper recommend. Exactly. Okay. Um, and I guess just going over more nuances with the prescription from like a programming perspective here. Um, so we'll keep this example of a powerlifter who is trying to get as much, um, strength, stimulus as possible. And I know in the research, at least I heard it once mentioned that, uh, the hypertrophy results, like the hypertrophy gains you get from, let's say, low to moderate rep ranges is similar to, um, like high rep ranges. Is that correct? Yeah. I'd say the bottom end is not super clear still. In terms of like, if we take a set of failure, what's the low end of the rep range that produces equivalent equivalent results, some would say four, some would say five, some would say six, somewhere in that general range. Um, but yeah, generally, yeah, generally speaking, um, if you do, like let's say, yeah, five plus reps, which is like a decent amount of reps per per set, uh, versus like doing maybe like, let's say 15 reps, the approximated failure is equated. What we've seen is similar hypertrophy returns, right? And if we, okay, so for our, for our powerlifter, from, from like a hypertrophy, hypertrophy perspective, it seems similar, but there has to be a difference, I would say between those sets, right? Maybe like from like the sub qualities you get from these sets is like the way I was thinking about it, because you have load and force production involved, which might not be the biggest contributors for hypertrophy, but they are contributors for strength, maybe for, um, like maybe muscular endurance, if you do on, like go on the other end of the spectrum, maybe push like 15 plus reps, you are getting in my head, you're getting other sub qualities. And for a powerlifter, maybe they want to be specific with those sub qualities, is that fair to say? Yeah, I think, I think the concept there is definitely probably accurate. I think they're obviously it's a spectrum. I think it's less kind of used to be the days of like these, these are the rep ranges that contribute to this. These are the ones that obviously that's kind of fallen out of favor. And I think for good reason. So like that's probably an accurate, but I do think directionally that's, that's true. So like, um, I, I would hesitate to say, like I would, I would hesitate to even put forth something, but I think there are probably like sub structural things that are slightly different in the, kind of the, the component of the hypertrophy that's occurring. That hasn't been totally flushed out in the research. Like I think we have like pretty, um, not super fine tools, I guess to investigate. Like, okay, is every single aspect of hypertrophy the same when I train with sets of three versus sets of 30. I don't think we have the fine enough tool set to like know that to be the case. So again, I kind of take a step back and I'm like, specificity just seems to be a thing just across the board. So like when and out lean in that direction. So I think the, the idea that you're kind of getting across here is that yes, I think there are multiple qualities that you gain from a set and gain from a rep like you guys kind of, kind of went through. Um, and so I think that's important to think about when you're assigning the kind of the purpose of anything that you're doing, kind of trying to, okay, what am I trying to accomplish? And then how do I accomplish this in the best way possible? Um, and so I think, yeah, you could definitely take something kind of the lower rep higher load into the spectrum there and probably contribute to multiple qualities at once. Maybe you're accumulating, you know, a couple sets that are pretty heavy, but relatively far from failure, doing off of those sets. It's going to be a pretty solid hypertrophy stimulus, pretty solid from the technical perspective, pretty solid from the neuromuscular perspective. And then as you get more on the, you know, the higher rep side of things, there's probably more of like a local musculine endurance effect that you're, that you're potentially stimulating through a variety of different things. But, but yeah, I think you're, you're intuition there of like, whether or not the hypertrophy is the exact same. I think that's, that's remains to be seen until we get probably a little bit more sophisticated technology. But the other domains or the other sub qualities that we get from a set rep or whatever, I think are definitely something to pay attention to when you're kind of selecting something if that makes sense. Yeah, because like I think when people maybe heard that, like the okay, like if you do low rep stuff and like high rep stuff, you get a similar hypertrophy return, they're like, oh, they're exactly the same. So I'm going to, I'm not going to think about the rep ranges I'm prescribing. I'm only going to think about proximity to failure, which I think we're probably missing benefits we can get from that this activation energy. We can go, let's say like those from what you mentioned, those later reps in the set, they're a little bit more hypertrophic just because the motor unit recruitment is there. And like from the research and everything you guys talked about, those reps give you a little bit more bank for your buck from a hypertrophy perspective. But those initial reps, they can be used, you can manipulate them in a way where you get other things. And like the way we've out about it, it's more about, okay, well, what's the biggest driver for strength? Strength is basically force production. So do I want to do a lighter load and produce less force? Takes me a little bit longer to get to those like more hypertrophic reps in general, I guess here, do I want to or do I want to go into, okay, I want to increase the load and get as many high force reduction reps as possible and get to, let's say, like, I know a hypertrophy occurs in those earlier reps too, but let's say it's not as, it's not as much as those later reps. So what do I want to use those initial reps for? And I think for a parallel to now that I'm thinking about is like, okay, maybe I would want to push load a little bit more. And again, that is specificity, like you mentioned, and move. And I think also like the definition of specificity hasn't been super clear. I think most people think about specificity as do more of what you usually do, which for parallel to, for example, if you want to get better at heavy squatting, you want to get your one rep max up, do more heavy squatting, which is I feel like it's kind of flawed to with thinking about specificity in that manner. But you would say generally speaking, if you're a parallel to who's trying to maximize force production, maybe go on the, like, the lower end reps scheme to maximize force production, would that be a good prescription? I think this is where this is where. So I think I'm going to talk about the specificity thing first, because I think that helps answer this other question. So specificity to me, like, like we've kind of mentioned a few ways here, like that is something that I thought I understood, and then I came back to it, thought I understood it again, came back to it again, thought I understood it again, same thing. And it's something that has just continuously, like, just astounded me on how deep it probably goes, about how much it really does make sense. And that is, for me, like really, that's like from a systems-based perspective, that's how I think about the entire kind of equation of designing training, problem solving, that kind of thing, like that, that's what it is. And someone may hear that and say, like, well, that's weird, that would be only kind of leading to one, one style of training. That's how, that's not how I view it. I view specificity as like more so a, a framework of saying, okay, what is the task? What do I believe to be limiting that task? And then how do I design training to specifically address that limitation? And so obviously, when I have a task that's fixed across people, squat bench, devilus, 1 or M, the training is going to look relatively similar to make to solve these problems. But the limiter, in my experience, is pretty different across people, depending on their leverages, training history, external constraints. And then also you have to take into account what I call secondary limiter. So then we have things that inhibit our ability to train in a way that's actually going to address the primary limiter. So this is an example, let's say my squats limited by my quad strength. But my knees are killing me and I can't train in a way that allows me to actively progress the size of my quads. Then that's the thing I need to address with the way that I'm designing the training program, right? And so you can kind of do this kind of exercise of like creating like this theoretical map of like, okay, here are the qualities that are associated with this task. For this individual, what do I believe to be limiting these qualities or this task? And then and how to why design a training program to best address those limited things. And I think that's how you get to basically training prescriptions that fit essentially every anecdote of like successful training programs is like it's probably fitting into this bucket in some way shape or form. So coming back to your hypertrophy kind of question of saying, okay, so based on that, we should buy a similar rep range as I would say, I don't know because it requires the entire picture of the situation, right? If you're talking about in a relatively short term context where I'm simultaneously trying to maintain or like slightly progress muscle size and into a meat or into an important test, then yeah, maybe that makes sense to buy us a little bit more of the volume towards the exercise to improve skill, potentially improve neuromuscular efficiency for those kind of things. But in another case, I can see it's totally reasonable for somebody who has like chronic knee pain or something like that that doesn't allow them to accumulate a ton of work on the competition exercise with heavy loads to say, no, we're going to go do sets of 15 on leg extension or sets of 12 with a moderate RP on a leg press. And that's still accomplishing the same task that we're actually, or it's still addressing the same limitation that would the person in the first scenario is, it's just the calculus is different when you take into account all of the different factors. So I think for power lifters, it makes sense to have some volume on the main exercises to drive the specific hypertrophy that we just kind of talked about. Kind of that, I think that's where the volume work makes sense because like if you take a step, step back and you're like, all right, mechanistically, I'm going to do a bunch of singles and I'm going to do a bunch of like super not specific bodybuilding work. In theory, okay, I'm doing the sport exactly in that specifications and I'm getting the hypertrophy where I think that misses is there's a lot of other things to miss. But the main thing in this conversation, it misses, I think, is these aspects of just accumulating more force reps that probably have neuromuscular benefits for that task and then also maybe this task specific hypertrophy. I think you're kind of, you're, you're hedging your bets that that's going to be beneficial in a lot of ways. And I think that's one of them. So that's where I think pretty much every program is going to have back offsets, downsets, ascending sets of some kind. And I think that's where the quote unquote high force reps, at least close to competition. I think that's where that box is kind of checked in a variety of different ways. Whereas the hypertrophy work, I think that can come in a lot of different ways, shapes and forms depending on the exact limitations that you're trying to solve. And so I don't think there's like a blanket recommendation there necessarily to say like this is how I would do it. It's more so of like, okay, here's the whole picture. And then here's what I believe this person is missing. And then that's how I would design the training program to try to address those limitations. Does that kind of make sense? No, that's fair. Obviously, I mean, that's the more like, I guess like zoomed out lens, which is perfect for coaches to not be dogmatic and be like, okay, only a power lifter. I need to only do low rep stuff. But yes, like we're generally talking about if everything else is equal, there's no major bottlenecks you're trying to address with this. I personally answer your question. No, no, I think it was a really good answer. And it's good to start there instead of zooming in initially on like, okay, power lifter equals do five to eight reps. So it is good to lay the foundation first with you have to first have like a zoomed out lens, see like what's actually what you're getting. Is there like other limiters? But if everything else checks out, generally speaking, would a more specific work for high forage production be maybe a little bit more productive for power lifter? So okay, I'll give two answers. One, I would say if the limiter that they are so like, okay. This is an observation that I've had that I think you guys are probably agree with, but I'm curious if you don't. The people that tend to benefit a lot from the highly specific programs with lots of volume are the ones that are built for those lifts, right? The ones that have the really squatty kind of torso and femur length, they're doing great with three, four times a week squatting tons of volume, that kind of thing. I think that's because the limiter overlap and the tissues that are trained in the specific angles and everything have a ton of overlap. And so the tools to solve the job of the limitation or the limiter is the same one that you can accumulate tons of work in terms of skill and force reduction with. And that's why those types of approaches seem to work for really, really well for some people, but not other people that just can't tolerate training that way. And the limiter of the exercise or the task isn't the one that's predominantly trained when they train that exercise for lots of volume, lots of reps. I think that's a big reason why that kind of diverges for some people. And so yes, I think in theory for somebody where the limiter has a strong overlap with the high force reps that they're able to accumulate on that exercise, great, makes sense. Hyperchaphy and the kind of neuromuscular benefits you're going to get from that exercise, you can kind of do it all in one go and there's probably more efficiency that can be gained from that route. But for somebody where that's just not the case, then it literally doesn't accomplish the task anymore or it doesn't address the limiter anymore as efficiently. That's where you kind of have to have a bifurcation a little bit of like training the task or training the skill, getting obviously some task specific benefits. Again, kind of hedging your bets there of doing some volume with that pattern, I think makes sense. But there's probably way more efficient routes that are going to allow them to train that task. And this is where you get like the second and third and fourth layers of this is like, okay, if I have somebody who is a super leaned over squatter, do a ton of volume on that squat. In theory, I might get a little bit more transference there from that volume. I don't know if that's you going to say for assumption, but let's say it is. But when they do that, that's going to completely wreck their performance for the next time that they squat or the next time they delit. So that equation just isn't worth it. So that person, there's probably a different tool that's going to better accomplish that task. But I don't even think you can make the blanket statement other than the way that we want to design things is to try to address that limiter as directly as possible. And if you have a situation where the overlap between what is limiting the exercise and what's being trained by the exercise is really, really strong, then I think you have a good situation to accumulate a ton of those high-force reps and the quote unquote hypertrophy work at the same time. But that's not going to be the case for every single type of leverage individual. And then I can't remember the other thing I was going to say, but yeah, that hopefully doesn't make sense. Yeah, that answers it. So to summarize what you said here, would you say instead of looking at the focusing on the stimulus on its own, having the fatigue contributed here, maybe like having thinking about training? Sorry, I remember what I was going to say. Can I come here? Sorry. Because you said fatigue and it totally reminded me. I think the other aspects of deciding the rep ranges or the organization of the hypertrophy work that you utilizing, it would be less about the stimulus side, I think, and more so about the consequence side. Because when you're training for strength, the only stimulus you care about isn't just hypertrophy. We're not just optimizing around that. We're optimizing around a ton of other things that we have to keep in mind. So it's essentially saying, okay, for this individual or this context, if I organize training that is a little bit heavier, let's say that's going to appear to be more specific, I can probably also keep a few more reps in reserve and get the percent yield to be similar. And in theory, those lower repetitions, I think this is a nuanced conversation. But if you take it just from an experiential perspective, doing a couple sets of six to eight on light press with two or three reps in the tank is a lot more tolerable than 15 sets of 15 on a light press is zero to one R.I. So very, very different experience in terms of how that's going to impact the rest of your training week. And so that is why I may opt for a given approach for a power lift there as opposed to thinking that those are like two distinct different stimuli, because I don't think those that necessarily bears out currently. But I do think that the approach that is a little bit seemingly more specific is going to aid performance and fatigue management in other areas that might be a little bit better tool in some cases. However, you also have to layer on that. You're probably not doing sets of six with lateral raises, right? So like that, that's always the other consideration there is like some exercises just don't lend themselves. But I think we're mostly talking about like, all right, I'm doing some squats and then I'm going to have one other additional movement that's going to help me drive my squat. How do I program that? How do I select that? Belt squats, leg press, hack squat, pendulum squat, those kind of things. I think that's where manipulating things in that little bit of a lens of fatigue management does make sense and not necessarily the stimulus side. If that makes sense. Yeah, that's perfect. That's what I was going to mention. It's more about having specificity in mind from a stimulus perspective. You're using specificity to go in the direction of this is what the stimulus is, but also thinking about the fatigue costs. The fatigue cost is way too high. That's why you see training that's a little bit more varied because fatigue is a variable here. trying the most amount of stimulus for the amount, like the amount of fatigue we're spending, right? - Arms up. - Yeah, exactly. So yeah, and I think that's something we've mentioned before too. It's not purely about stimulus, it's not purely about fatigue. It's about the relationship between those two. It's like the ratio between stimulus and fatigue. Because people, if you don't factor in the stimulus, you get from the amount of fatigue you're fatigue costs you're spending. Most people are going to be on this end of, "Oh, everything's fatiguing. I'm not going to spend any budget on anything. They're going to be cheap with their, like, spending budget." And if people only think about stimulus, stimulus, stimulus, then they'll overspend and go in debt and, like, be, like, overly fatigued and, like, the strength expression is not going to show up. So layering the, this context on top of this would make sense because people will have, there'll be more informed consumers of their fatigue. Okay, I know when to spend this much fatigue. We have to support it. Or, okay, this is not worth it now because the fatigue causes and makes sense. Wait, does that summarize? Like, what are you trying to all? Yeah. - Yeah, I think so. I think, ultimately, the, particularly for performance-oriented goals, like, you just, you have to take that to account, particularly in the case if we think it influences how we can express and progress strength. If we think fatigue is going to influence that, it's definitely something we have to pay attention to. And if we're only considering one of those two buckets, it's going to lead, lead you to probably inappropriate decisions. So, yeah, I think accounting for both of those is crucial in the decision-making process, particularly when you have a lot of coaching experience and realize, if you major in either one of those, that leads to some pretty, pretty bad client outcomes usually. And to go back a little bit from what we talked about the beginning to now, just to kind of summarize the whole discussion so far. So, we said, strength expression is multifactorial. It depends on a few different variables. And for you to increase this strength expression, you have to be wise with how you spend your fatigue or like your budget to address the biggest limiter. So, you would want to use the fatigue cost, like the recovery budget, to be very direct towards those limiters. That way, you're addressing the bottleneck. And like if you're spending, let's say, too much time or too much budget on skill expression. And you're not getting the hypertrophy stimulus when it's like a big bottleneck, or like the neuromuscular efficiency. You're not loading heavy enough. Then the fatigue that you're inducing is not very productive. And you're mismanaging your budget. So, that's like what programming is. Yeah, that's a really good way to layer that in. Yeah, basically taking that financial, this has turned into a financial podcast, which is awesome. Basically, layering on that limiter aspect of things is like, it would be like trying to address the debt or the spending issue in like a separate bank account. That's like not actually influencing the issue and the account that has the issues. Or it has the problem. So, yeah, it's managing that budget that you have. But it's like, yeah, multiple budgets. And if some of them aren't getting addressed, you have to make sure the collective budget is ultimately moving in the right direction. So, yeah, it's perfect. And you'll be paying interest on those, because you haven't paid off. There you go. There you go. Well, let's go into a little bit of, we don't have to spend too much time on this, because I think you guys have covered the dosage extensively on your podcast. But generally speaking, because whenever we write a program, we have access to that selection, we have proximity to failure, we have load, we have sets and reps, those like the main, I guess, drivers of this dosage, right? What are, how do those things influence strength and hypertrophy? I guess like we'll start with access selection briefly. How does that influence strength and hypertrophy? Maybe from thinking about it from what we've mentioned already, as far as tension profiles, maybe like fatigue costs too. Well, yeah, I'll let you go. Hopefully that's enough context. Yeah, I mean, obviously, actually, selection's a big one. In terms of a big bucket, I would say, for hypertrophy, like you mentioned, a couple of things that seem to be influential is, obviously, is it training that muscle, which is kind of a crude thing, but I think that's important. I think you can even perform exercises in certain ways that kind of lose the, lose the goal of the exercise, kind of lose the force for the trees in a sense of like, I'm performing a bicep curl, but now my bicep is no longer the thing that's being challenged. That's obviously counterproductive. But yeah, the resistance profile and the range of motion, those two things probably are also important considerations that can influence hypertrophy. And then for strength, I think, man, that's a whole bucket of worms, because I think it kind of depends, again, what you're trying to target, right? It is like from a pure skill perspective, obviously, you want to have a task that mimics the task you're trying to improve. So, that's your competition squatting, benching, deadlifting. But the variations there of tempos, pauses, different grips, different stances, even leveraging different equipment. All those can be useful in some ways, shapes or forms, either to help you perform the target task, more effectively, more often, with more specificity of load or whatever, or it could help you ingrain habits that you want to kind of transfer into your competition work. So, I think exercise selection and manage for strength too. I just think it's a little bit more of a creative problem solving on how do I punish somebody for doing something I don't want them to do, but reward them for moving in the way that I want them to. Yeah, and I think we talk about specificity here a lot. And I think we can be super specific with skill, because I get something we, me and David talked about, where, like you mentioned, okay, we're trying to mimic this specific skill on target at the most efficient way. And like one thing we've thought about is not necessarily having to do though, like this quad bench deadlift, you have like this skill of maybe protract and retracting your shoulders. There's like nuances within. Yeah, the subskills, and you can be very specific with those things. So, like it's not okay if you're trying to improve your skill of squatting, you must squat. There are more efficient ways to be specific. Again, even though on paper, like you're having someone do like a protraction drill or like a goblet squat, like you're so far away from specificity, it's not, like it's not going to have a carryover. But if anything, you're actually being more specific with that skill component or like that sub skill component that you're trying to work on. So again, it is, again, I always goes back to specificity. But if you define it the same way Zach has, then you have more options and you not stuck in, I must do this one exercise for this one thing, because again, strength is multifactorial. And you have to be specific with how you address those bottlenecks. I wonder if there is like a way to address like the neuromuscular efficiency in a different way that is not just let's do a heavy barbell squat. Can we do this? And you're taking me down so many red holes, man. This is, you're exposing all my half-baked ideas. Yeah, I think this is interesting. Like a couple of things that I've played around with in my head is, so everybody's familiar with top sets. Now, right, that's very common. And those have multiple things that you're doing there. Some of that's more of like an adaptation perspective. Some of that's performance tracking. Some of that's kind of just exposure to the task, the hype up the competition environment. There's so many different aspects of that. But if we kind of isolate the neuromuscular aspect of it, one thing I've thought about is at least conceptually interesting is what if you went and warmed up and then you utilize like isometrics with no load and just an empty barbell, you don't have to load plates, you don't have to do any of the things that people think about with like doing those things and kind of the negative association with that. But if you just did like a slow, you don't want to do too rapid of contraction. There is benefits to doing that, but like that you're going to gas yourself out doing that too much. But if you kind of did a slow ramping isometric to get to that peak force like more often, who's to say that's not beneficial. Like that's like an interesting conceptual idea of like, hey, a force production matters. Isometrics are the highest force contraction we can do outside of like overload of these sentrics or something like that, which are going to wreck people. Yeah, it's an interesting idea. Like that's one aspect. Plymetric oriented stuff. Like I think there is some interesting ideas there. A lot of people kind of poo poo that kind of stuff for like the velocity specificity of strength in terms of like that's way too fast to matter. Again, purely just gut and in anecdote, I come from more like a team sports background. I think there is something there in terms of power or explosivity and its transference to maximal strength. It could be entirely just like correlational and they don't actually kind of intersect or it could be the chicken before the egg and kind of thing, but my gut tells me there's something there. So that's like another kind of neuromuscular oriented thing that like has nothing to do with like, you know, training the squat per se. So yeah, there's like stuff like that that I think is like conceptually interesting again, but I don't think anybody's gonna, you know, stake their raw nationals performance on throwing in some weird depth jumps or isometrics before every session, right? So I think, you know, there's always stuff like that that I think are cool and I think I go back and kind of look at strength history. Like I'm a fan of like the West Side oriented line of thinking 'cause I think Louie got so many things right. Just saying they maybe slightly different contexts like max effort method is top sets dynamic effort method is the low interest that fatigue back off. So high force reps repetition effort method is training for hypertrophy, close to failure. They're changing exercise selection is altering the mechanics of the movements to find the biomechanical limit curves of an individual like he had it all, man, like I think the dude was a genius. I just think it was applied in like a slightly different context that that led to some practical things. If you tried to apply it one to one that it wouldn't necessarily generalize, but like, yeah, I think they had a lot of like GPP stuff as well. Now, now totally missing the question at this point, but that's like another thing I'm like pretty passionate about is like, I think today's powerlifting programming culture is so far removed from what built all of the, like the current, you know, super six house with people. Obviously we have some younger individuals that are super super successful in sport, but I have a very strong feeling that like kind of work capacity and GPP and all this stuff's going to become way, way, way more important soon because people are going to hit probably like a pretty big plateau and and gap because they just don't have the general capacity and general kind of preparedness to tolerate, you know, more and more training or more specific training or whatever ends up being. So that's another aspect where I think you got it right. And then, yeah, so I could, I could blabber about that for way too long. I don't even remember the original question is, but yeah, I think he's, I think he got a lot right. I was actually going to say like you were making a really good case for conjugate like should we, should I go back here? Like as you were talking about, I was like, he's talking about conjugate here. And for like, I guess going with those like unorthodox methods, I would, I mean, I would be down to do it. I don't care about my national performance. So I will definitely do it. Yeah, no, I think there's so many interesting to like they, they toyed around with for my understanding. So many different things like bands and chains, for example, like that is allowing you to reach higher peak forces with a given mass because of the deceleration, but they had the loads low enough. So it wasn't incurring a recovery cost for the max ever met like there's so many different things that are like really interesting. If you really like give it a chance and don't aren't super biased against the, I also think like that's why I think bands and chains even for a lot raw lifter is, is an interesting concept. Because again, that's kind of isolating that neuromuscular component a little bit as long as the long of the, is the mass on the barbell is, is sufficient for the, you know, the mechanics and the strength profile to be relatively similar. The addition of accommodating resistance is basically allowing you to not have the deceleration, maybe reach higher peak forces, maybe train different aspects of rate of force development differently. That would be again, as long as you're doing the normal competition stuff alongside it, I think it's an interesting idea. They also played with like overcoming isometrics and different stuff like that too. So like they, they played with so many different things like this that I just think are super, super conceptually interesting that are like kind of like this sandbox that I kind of revisit. I'm like, all right, who's done similar things like this? And what, like how did they kind of utilize it? And, and what was the kind of, yeah, the system and the approach that they utilized it? And I think a lot of those things could kind of be revisited with a new light and a new understanding and probably applied in a slightly different way that might integrate better in kind of today's practice. So, yeah, I'm not a co-signing any of those ideas, but I think they're all cool and interesting. And, you know, if somebody's looking to spice it up, I'll put myself out there when I was kind of first playing around with some of the, the lower RP, low interest, effeutee stuff. When I hit my best squat, I was doing 32 back-off singles with 30 seconds rest. It was tough training, but I tell you what, man, I felt amazing when I was doing that. And it's interesting. And I think most of the, like those, what you call them, like the methods or the, like we've gone through conjugate and block realization that DUP, we've gone through all of these things. And I think they all had the right idea, but some part of the application wasn't there, like with conjugate, let's say, like for speed work load is insufficient enough. So, like you kind of start missing that quality. So, it kind of kind of negates the benefits you might get from this, but it can be applied, it can be applied better. And I think block realization was also like a really good concept, but the application of it, because like you do need hypertrophy, you do need strength, you do need a period to actually peak those qualities. But if you do them in, okay, this is only the phase for I'm only getting this quality, it kind of misses, like yeah, you're missing the strength. You're also not thinking about like how training is like a, like you don't get, we can't actually one quality. But the ideas are there. And I think now with the work you guys are putting out, kind of focusing on, okay, what drives those things, what, how does load contribute, how does proximity failure contribute, is it the best option for you to get your hypertrophy work through SBD? Because I got to think maybe that was like one mistake with block realization, they're trying to do everything and get hypertrophy from everything from like a budget standpoint, it's not the most efficient way to spend your money. But they all had a similar idea, even with DUP, they were trying to do it within the micro cycle, within the week. And now we're trying to see it, we're seeing it with concurrent training, where we're trying to get all these qualities in one session, like let's say, but there are times, and like this will kind of lead us into the like the future of programming. It's we're still trying to do the same thing. But one approach is might might not be the best, maybe thinking of it as a dial of, okay, we're maybe switching emphasis. And like depending on the limiter going back to specificity, depending on the limiter, you might have to turn one dial up, turn another dial down, and maybe be closer to like a hypertrophy block, maybe a few hypertrophy blocks, where strength expression peak strength expression is suppressed. But you are addressing this bottleneck. I guess I'll let you go from here on if that's enough context. What do you think the future of programming is headed based on what we've been seeing? Yeah, I'd say just to hit on a little bit of a preamble that you'd mentioned there, because I always think this stuff super interesting is like, I think as far as like old training systems, I think there's tons and tons to learn from those and continuously learn from those and revisit them with new perspectives and new kind of lenses of thinking. I think the phrase like all models are wrong, but some are useful holds super true there. But I think like basically all other training systems, you can kind of understand them even more if you kind of approach them with like the appropriate context. Obviously, West Side, the one difference there is the mostly for equipped lifting. So like that obviously has some implications. And then for like block periodization, I'm not going to make tons of assumptions, but like drug use is definitely something that is going to have some influences there, right? Like thinking about how much hypertrophy you can acute accrue and maintain during a very dedicated short term hypertrophy block is going to be very different in that kind of an environment than a raw lifter when you're tapering off the anabolic and you're peaking for competition. And now, you know, I mean, it's just the situation that you're optimizing for is just completely different. So it makes sense why why those types of things were potentially kind of kind of dominant approaches at the time. I think when you're able to view it like that, I think it a lot of it makes sense. But as far as the the future. Yeah, man, I think it really just comes down to I think developing systems that allow us to solve problems better as opposed to like, this is the meta now, like I think I always kind of laugh when when when that happens because obviously there are approaches that are more successful than others. But to some degree, by the fact that there is a meta, I think the meta will shift because training isn't operating in a vacuum, right? Like what you do now influences what you do in the future, advice versus like, that's where I come back to like the concept of like GPPE and work capacity and things like that. Like I think those kinds of concepts like I'm a pretty big believer that like I think work capacity is a thing. I think it's trainable. I think it's definitely something to consider for long term development because at some point as an advanced left here if you have to progress these adaptations or progress these limiters and you can't recover from the training or tolerate the training necessary to continue to progress like how many how many individuals that we see that are like busing through bench press plateaus by developing these pretty darn aggressive strategies of the first person that bench five days a week dude what are you doing six days a week what are you doing seven days a week what are you doing Sean Noriega's bench in 24 to 48 hours before his bench like his meet like things like always yeah like yeah whatever whatever it is like those kind of things like they seem crazy but like I think those aggressive strategies are only supported by people that have done all the crazy training right now that like got them to this point to these more you know obviously I think they're more intellectually justifiable approaches that people have land on these days like I think programming is is in a really good spot but I do think there are implications of like jumping into I'm a power lifter and that's how identify at really early ages then most of all this did like I definitely went through phases when I was lifting where I did every single exercise I could possibly think of and no is that productive for anything in isolation not really but that probably allowed me to tolerate you know certain types of training down the line that I think will be an important consideration for people at some point so what exactly develops that in the best way what's the most efficient way to manage that I think there's a lot of a lot of work that'll be kind of that's TBD I guess ultimately is what I'm saying but I do think that's kind of an interesting concept to keep in mind but as far as like exact program of strategies and stuff I think we're getting a better understanding of the things that do limit performance how to progress those limiters individually and I think really the main thing of like the art of coaching or the art of programming that'll continuously be developed and progressed is just your ability to diagnose those limiters as like a coach like how quickly can identify patterns trends and and the person in front of me of like okay what is the thing that's actually holding them back and how do I ultimately design a strategy to address that and that to me is really that's what good coaching that's what good programming is I don't think I don't think there's going to be any magic super secret sauce changes to like oh sixes or you know what I mean I just I don't really think that's ever really going to be the the the thing anymore it's more so just like okay we'll continuously get more and more clarity on what things what things do actually limit performance how far can each one of those things progress like we mentioned the neuromuscular efficiency stuff a little bit that's a speculation on my part that's mostly based on a peripheral experience maybe that comes out and it is something we can progress way more maybe it's something that is relatively finite that's going to influence your management on how you solve problems and how you identify limiters more so than any new sexy programming strategy right and I think that that's really to me like that's the the progression of coaching powerlifting programming is this will continuously get better at identifying what's limiting performance how to address those limitations do so sustainably and then ultimately do so for people on longer periods of time for the long run because they're in the sport for a long time because we're actually hitting on the thing that's allowing them to continuously make progress as opposed to kind of shooting darts all over the scenario people get bored people get burned out those kind of things so I think just kind of the combination of all those factors rather than any one individual thing so I think everything is far on its way and I think it's headed in the right direction for sure and people are as you guys are well aware the rates of progression are just absolutely ridiculous at this point some of that's probably due to the tools and approaches that that have continued to progress some of that's definitely just exposure to more people in a larger population but I think both of those are kind of kind of continue to play a role long-term and as long as we can continue to develop those processes of systems that are unbiased like you guys often try to say and like not trying to get siloed into any like this is how it's done like I that to me is usually I almost feel like that's like the red flag of like oh maybe we went too far in this direction of like hey if this is how it's perceived obviously there's heuristics obviously there's successful approaches that people will kind of gravitate to but if anybody ever thinks like oh this is how it's done it's like look back up that's probably not we have to we have to maintain a higher higher level than that because that's the reality is we're gonna need different tools for the job in different scenarios and anytime you think like oh I got a hammer everything's a nail that's what I think it's probably in a spot that could be adjusted yeah so what I'm hearing is all the half-baked ideas are good no no definitely not close on that unless and unless you guys hit a big PR from one of them then definitely I told you to do that but yeah I mean that's just like exactly what I was thinking seeing how like from what you guys were putting out from what we talked about specificity and like the the biggest limiter it's it's more about people are gonna be a little bit more accurate with their decision-making to address those limiters but at the end of the day it's the same we're trying to do the same thing but maybe just going in the direction of better managing this fatigue like the recovery budget you have to be more precise with addressing those limiters I think is the direction people are headed in I would yeah more precision for sure and I think for sure we're gonna stop seeing the the week for peak in my week for thing and like see more of oh I'm actually in my bodybuilding phase I am well that's like something I've been doing maybe I'm ahead of like ahead of the curve here but I've been trying to focus more on hypertrophy I'm like and understanding hypertrophy training a little bit more because I think now parallel thing coaches are so focused on strength expression how to maximize it how do I make sure the expression is showing up every three four weeks but the the underlying engine like the engine the size of the engine is not really addressed so I guess something I've been focusing on with myself with my lifters I'm like okay you actually need to put on some mass like I don't think I don't know how much we can optimize your skill and your muscular efficiency and keep peaking you I think you just kind of have to put on some mass which is like what of what I've been doing David anything yeah which I mean we've talked about this before there's there's basically like a three to four year career you know kind of lifespan that we kind of deal with and we we end up leaning into all this hyper-specific all this type of how do we maximize week four type of stuff but it's mainly just a response to the realization that we don't know how long this person's actually going to be engaged in this we don't know how long we don't really know like nobody's gonna come up to me at the age of you know 20 or in college and say I'm gonna do this till I'm 30 that's what's happening is where as coaches right you want to talk about you know creating results and doing things like that we end up like kind of zooming in a little bit and being like okay well we know that we can create a neuromuscular adaptation quicker than we can like this hyper-trophic thing and you know there's a lot of people saying oh build your base and build your and nobody wants to build a base so what's happening is you know you're getting this hyper-specific thing but you're only as a coach you end up stuck doing that because you don't the person said that he wants to make it a collegian that's or you know it's like so how do I get that all the way through where do I like and you end up getting stuck having to maximize their performance every week for every expression or what you see what I'm saying it's like oh it's so interesting like I this is something I was curious to get your thoughts on this because honestly it's just one of the things that interests me is like the sociological aspects of programming is interesting too right is like is the is the kind of the the the the week for meme like is that actually the the most efficacious approach or is it the fact that for whatever reason that is so societally like Pavlovian dog like the social media I get to post my week for everybody's gonna see my week for I get to build up content regularly it's the perfect it's the perfect amount of build up but also pay off in terms of social media content you know it's just all those kind of things are just so interesting to think about but yeah I think all this stuff is like super cyclical and I'm sure you guys recognize that too is like you know you have hypersophysity and it comes back to the guys who need to take more general approaches hypertrophy you know periodization approaches then it goes back to hyperspacific it's just super cyclical but yeah no it's it's I from a coaching perspective it's really really challenging because now you're now you're not just trying to optimize for the task anymore now you have the task and the individuals perception of the task so it just you know there's just yeah it's it's a tough job yeah I mean the hardest part is telling somebody you know that there's three to four years in they finally hit their goal and it's like hey you might have to give up some of this expression that you've been dope between feeding on for like three years you've been hitting your week for or every other week for there's a PR and it's like okay well now I need to get bigger and that takes a lot longer and then they take this I'm gonna get bigger just as fast as I'm expressing this week for you know then the whole thing clashes and then you end up with this big burnout thing that we can't seem to keep on seeing, but it's not really even like, there's no mystery why that's happening. It's like at all, like you get to the end of it and then you have something that takes longer to do. Like you're talking about diminishing returns, things like that, run out of your neuromuscular stuff and you're like, okay, like I need to get bigger in order to get more neuromuscular stuff and that takes longer. - So people don't wanna take that approach and like most lifters, yep. - You're not selling coaching with that. - Yeah, no, yeah. - I take the sustainable approach and you're gonna hit a PR in a year. - I'm going with this guy. - I'll sign up with you, I'll wait a year. But no one's gonna do that. But they can't take each other because in order for you to hit that, your potential or at least like be closer to it, you have to spend this time building and not necessarily doing like the sexy week four stuff. But it's not like as a coach, like how do you sell that to a lifter? You can't really sell it unless the lifter is like so educated and they actually understand this. I think for me and David, because we've been this for so long, we're like, okay, it makes sense. But for like a newer lifter, we just see Joe Bornstein, that lifting like 800 pounds for is like, oh, I just wanna keep peaking my stuff. So you can't. - This is a question I've considered. So again, workshop, half-baked ideas, red flag. - No, no, I need these half-baked ideas. - I've been waiting this entire podcast to actually get to this part. - Oh, I think when screening clients, I think an interesting question that could potentially kind of identify these kind of behaviors is asking them if they would keep training if they would never be Aryan. I think for every single one of us that have grown up with this stuff, it's obviously it's a yes. But I don't think that would be the case very much anymore 'cause that's not what it's based upon. We fall in love with training, we fall in love with the, you know, whether it's the intellectual process of it, the structure it gives our lives. There's so many other things. And obviously progress is important to all of us. Like that's something you continue to chase and that's an important part of the equation. But there are other things that you get out of it. Like I remember I was going through a phase of training where it was just really inconsistent for me. And it was hard, but then once I kind of got picked back up into a consistent process again, I realize all the other things that training does for me that I just like totally don't think about when you're consistently doing it and you're focused on progress. And it's just like, oh yeah, I like, I enjoyed this. Like, and I just don't think that's the mindset really much anymore. It's more so like, all right, like week four time, let's go, like you said, don't we mean hit PR PR PR PR? And it's like, at least that's just my perception. I absolutely haven't talked to this one to people, but it seems like just like the grassroots, you know, tatiness, rusty barbell, like just love training. I feel like that is definitely shifted a little bit. So I should have to know what you're going to get when you ask that question. You're going to get one out of 20 that actually want to do it for the long run. And then you're going to get the 19 out of 20 where again, same thing we've been coaching for so long. It's like, I want to hit this goal. Like they're going to give you their list of goals, right? And then you're going to look how big they are. You're going to look how much muscle they've probably already put on. You're going to probably already notice like how far you can go with like how much muscle they've built or how efficient they are with their lifts. You can just kind of tell like what they're going to do. And then you get down to it and you're like, OK, well, what's the goal? Is the goal like, you know, I'm in this for the long run or is the goal I need to hit this QT is it? And then you end up actually catering their training to what they want because that's your job. Yeah, that's your job. And then, and then so that's why, you know, like I've gotten ridiculously good at the three to four year career of, you know, I've gotten really, really good at helping people build neuromuscular adaptations, technique, efficiency, getting them to move a lot better, things like that. And then you're thinking about, you know, Hingy squats, things like that. It's like my job is to figure out, oh, you're your squats really Hingy, let's get out of that. Let's get out of that real quick so that you start looking squatty and then you start squatting a lot of PRs. Like that's what I ends up being my job is that optimization. But I just know that, you know, like there's not as many people like they can say, like also they can say that I'm running, but I just don't believe it. You can tell. You can tell. I just don't like, like I've seen the crash outs of the, you know, I haven't hit a PR in in two blocks, you know, like our camera man's here is, I've seen it. Like I've seen it happen. I haven't PRed in this much time. It's so short term. It's like, you know, it's like, what are we here for? Well, you know, we spend a whole podcast saying that hypertrophy matters, maybe putting in four or five years of actual dedicated effort when it's time to actually build muscle, like we, we, we know this, right? Why is everyone else going the other way right now? I think this podcast is hopefully trying to push people in the direction of long term progress and don't focus too much on just like the short term, short term progress here. We'll try our best to like change the, like the meta, the anti meta because there you go. It's so interesting because like the, the, the one thing I'll say about that is like I generally agree with that. But obviously to some of you, that's a bias, right? Like it is. If I'm saying that the quote unquote goal should be long term progression, it should be the, the, you know, following and love with the process of training and all the other things that it can, that will allow you to maximize that long term because you have to keep doing it. But if somebody's saying, hey man, I want to maximize this for three years, that's all you got. Go. I mean, if that's what, if that's what they value, I guess, to some degree like that. Yeah, it's just, I guess that's harder to relate to is, is more so the way that I'd frame it. Rather than I guess it being right or wrong, I think that's the wrong approach if they're trying to be the most competitive pilot or they possibly want to be, which I don't know. Yeah, I just depends what they, what they bring forward as like what they're actually trying to accomplish. Like you said, if they're saying, I want to hit a QT and that's it, then that's a different approach. Then I want to be the best pilot that I possibly can. So, so like what? Well, just for example, like what age group would you say has the most lifters in it currently for drug tested? Like what is this age group that we're looking at? Right? Like 20 or 30? Because you see 20 or 30. That's a huge thing. Like that when it comes down to it. Like, like this war is, I'm not, I'm not saying that this war is young, but I'm saying that people are leaving this sport so quickly that we just get new people that are 18, 17, 18, 19, 20, you know, something like that. And that's the majority of the microphone that we're that, you know, social media garners to that, you know, all this garners to we're not, nobody is preaching to the, you know, we're thirty two, thirty three now. Nobody's preaching to those guys. Those people don't exist. Like, you know, it's like we end up at the end at somewhat the end of the road somewhat in other people's minds, you know, uncofossil all the all the words. We end up at the end of this weird thing and we're just like, OK, we're still doing it. We still believe we can grow. That's a thing too. We actually believe that we can keep going. There's so much to do, you know, like, like I find movement deficits all the time. I find hypertrophobic, public deficits all time. Like we're finding things all the time. Like there's learning that's continuing to being done. And, you know, I, again, we're at the gym with people that are, you know, early twenties and the mindset is is a certain way. They want to, you know, see their friends PR. They want a PR too because their friends are PRing. They're ends up into a situation where it's like, OK, like what have I said, OK, too bad like this year, you're not going to PR any, but you're going to set up this massive thing. This thing that, you know, you'll be better later. It's like, I have not run into one soul that has actually been down for that, you know, and, and I don't, I, you know, to me, I've, like you said, we've been doing this for a long time. We're in it for the long run. We know that. And it's just a perspective shift. It's a perspective. It's understanding those perspectives to though. So like, that's why these concepts aren't talked about a whole lot. That's why we started the whole podcast. It was like, we're trying to push against the biases that we're, that we're getting. Yeah. So this, this has been really good. I know we've taken a little bit, we took a, took a lot of your time. So we'll, yeah, we can, we can talk for hours for sure, but easily, yeah, it was really productive. And yeah, we appreciate your, all your work you guys are putting out. It's been a big influencer for me personally, for my coaching, for me as a lifter, watching you guys put out the content you do, a diving deeper into those concepts. It definitely has changed how I personally coach and how I personally train. So yeah, we appreciate all your work. And yeah, we hopefully, hopefully we see more of it. Even if the, I guess like the, the return or like the interest isn't, isn't there. Cause like people are more interested in the other stuff like we mentioned, we still appreciate all the work you guys are putting up. Oh, I appreciate it guys. Seriously. I can't say enough. I, I've enjoyed the show. It's been good for me to kind of, yeah, just continue. to refine some of my thoughts. I didn't come across very refined for quite a few questions today. So I definitely-- white wave, the white flag on a few of those things. But now it's always fun to talk shop. And obviously, thank you for the kind words. That's obviously the goal is to try to put out stuff to mostly speak to the previous version of myself for how stupid I was and try to correct the record is basically the goal. But yeah, obviously I appreciate it. And hopefully it's helpful in some way and try to think about things from a systematic perspective that can be useful in a wide variety of ways as ultimately the goal. But yeah, we'll see how these trends in powerlifting and strength sport ultimately go. I think there's lots of different pinballs that could shake out that would change things in terms of continuing push towards professional funding, those kind of things. Like, who knows how any of that stuff shakes out? And that could change the incentive structure that shifts the week four to week five or something cool like that. Who knows? - Yeah, thank you for coming on. And hopefully we'll run into you at some point, maybe talk to you again. Yeah, we appreciate everything. And that's it for the podcast today. Yeah, so yeah, thank you so much. Oh, it was really good. Appreciate your time. That was really insightful.