Stop Following Methods, Start Understanding Training w. @saša venos Ep.2

Hicking something simple like a 5x5 and linearly progressing But what's the thing about this method? It will take you to minimum 40 kilos for turnips and weighted pull ups and The minimum 70 kilos for turnips and weighted dips and you can achieve minimum 70-80% of all the muscles you can ever achieve. I'm not a huge fan of what he's saying now the two set method It's a bit confusing though people don't know the details how to do it why to do it and What the real benefits are of doing two sets? Dude, I think it will change the game for you, bro. I unlocked full planche when I switched to high frequency You have to kind of like Stay within a healthy range and I really like that range because I feel like anytime that I exceed that range of Effort stress intensity whatever you want to call it is when I start flirting with injuries Hello and welcome so in this podcast series with Sasha say hi to everyone Hello guys, we will debunk the most common methods in the calisthenics world will break down the Horner stones of strength training and teach you how to properly conceptualize them You have seen from the clips that we ran before starting to talk the world of Calisthenics the world of strength training is full of methods that Say everything possible they go from two sets is the best and the rest is trash volume to you need to do a five times five If you're an intermediate athlete or for skills you need to do super high frequency low intensity training Italian street lifting circles you find people prescribing 10 times tens Absolutely a wide range of things and I think that as someone who hasn't Opened a book about strength training and you go and you look on YouTube and you start seeing all these people saying Completely contradicting a stuff to one another it can be extremely confusing We decided to clear things up without trying to bash anyone We will in the most nuanced way possible give your baseline Explained cornerstones of strength training then from there we will step by step go through these methods go through their pros Go through their cons we will very much focus on the Way that side of things so we will only touch the skills part of things at the end of this episode and Go into further detail in the next episodes because they add very very big layer of complexity to the whole story Which confuses most people for now we will focus on that so you understand the principles and from there We will look at the rest Sasha what are the cornerstones of strength training when we talk about strength We have to and you know making a program. We have to think about four five Cornerstones maybe a little bit more depending how you look at it by the way we're talking only about Weighted strength and hypertrophy all right, so as you said skills will be a little bit more complex If you understand, you know, we are roughly how strength hypertrophy works if you understand you know the coordination aspect of strength and everything It's not that hard to you know apply a little bit skills also So it's not really really like it's an entire different world But it does definitely add a layer of complexity So we have things like a volume as I said which would be defined as the amount of effective sets you do you have intensity Which is defined as the percentage of your one rep max? So it's not how hard it feels no, it's how heavy it is percentage of the one ram so you can train with you know 50% of a one rep max with which you can get a lot of reps with or We can train with like 90% of your one rep max Which is very intense and you're gonna get a very few reps and then you have the proximity to failure Which is also going to be very important and will be different if you want to train force strength adaptations being a little bit further from failure max makes a lot more sense and hypertrophy training which a little bit closer to failure is usually a very very good idea Then you always look at those three first and you could also you know look at the rest times you know rest periods Although you know just rest as long as you need to make another set productive You know get as many reps as you can with good form based on those three or maybe four if you count rest times You then also look at the frequency you can really look at frequency without these pillars whenever somebody asked me questions about how often should I train how do you expect me to answer it for you I know nothing about you. I don't know how hard training with how much volume with you know which addresses even it's too hard to answer a question without Having these basics in place. Yeah, the only one we probably can add which maybe it's not a point by itself But progressive overload that's an important one as well since we made a nice introduction we can start going through the Singular points and trying to define them starting off with volume if you Google volume or you asked chat GPT you will see that there's different definitions of volume So there's people and I think this is very old school But they simply count the sets they're doing no matter how intense the sets are they just count sets I think this way of thinking of volume is extremely outdated because just doing a set doesn't mean anything if your Proximity to failure is way too high the set doesn't really count towards any Hyper-traffy or strength stimulus and experience lefters. Yeah beginners in beginners Absolutely can and of course there's other adaptations that can take place That's why we will talk about skills later on because they're doing sets like this can make absolute sense That's a little spoiler. There's people that multiply everything so you take the number of sets You need to take the number of reps and you take the the weight that you're actually using and you get this Fancy cool looking number of tonnilage just as absolutely useless because it really doesn't make any sense at all the only thing that I like to Use tonnilage for is to explain people so there's this common idea That the more advanced of a lifter you are the more volume you need to make and the more volume you can actually sustain when taking tonnilage for example into account You will notice that even if you're doing the same amount of sets But you do it in the same Rapparage but with more weight the tonnilage that you're actually moving is higher This is a simple way to explain to someone You know you don't need to do more sets because there was this doing more sets craze to do more volume But you're automatically doing more volume simply because you've gotten stronger in something at the end The weight that you're effectively moving is more but I do not like to use it as a metric and as we've mentioned already a few times We both like to count the effective sets. What are effective sets is now the question? How do you define an effective set? I define an effective set a set that reaches a high level of recruitment and high degree of mechanical tension and that means basically Very simple you get within the five reps close to failure, right? So you can do 10 pull-ups max you want to get at least no five six seven eight nine or ten So that's it those reps will be the most stimulating for any experience leaders because they will expose the highest amount of your muscle fibers to This mechanical tension which is what causes muscle growth. So when your fibers are working when they Contract you have you know sensors on your cell membrane of the muscle fibers Then then you know get all of this thing going which is you know, I'm torsignalling whatever that causes more my Fibre addition which is muscle growth doesn't matter mechanical tension is king you expose many fibers to it people that have been training for a while They they have a lot of muscle fibers that can still grow because they have never experienced a lot of mechanical tension in those fibers So beginners can train within eight reps to failure and still grow Which is likely not gonna happen for you or me those fibers are already as big as they can be everything we do We are just maintaining their size right to be where they are any serious lifter really getting training Further from five reps failure not very smart idea what we're gonna talk about later is the amount of volume We do and depending on what you're training for hyper to feel strength you can train a little bit further from this point You know, maybe four or five reps in reserve which is okay in certain contexts or you can train even within Zero to two reps in the reserve depends on how much volume you do you know volume and intensity are always universally related I think this is a great response a few questions usually come up So I will play devil's advocate and ask him to you does this mean that I can make the same amount of gains if I take 5 kg dumbbells I do 20 reps and the last five reps of this 20 reps That I'm actually getting close to failure compared to taking a weight where I can only do three reps and I do two reps of that You can get the same amount of muscle growth doing both absolutely It will depend a little bit So let's say you do that set of 20 reps for the bicep whatever and you get to failure obviously So is a gradual you start you have a real of the reo we've heard you're training the fibers but only those fibers that Have already grown as much as they can so low threshold fibers the closer we get to failure the more your effort increases The more your brain needs to recruit those muscle fibers that are responsible for moving you know Have your loads or to just get recruited because you you're increasing your level of effort So as you get close to failure you're slowing increase that recruitment and at certain point you get to those fibers That's the can still grow quite a bit right? So you can still get to the same outcome now if you do a set of three which is very heavy you will have this high level of recruitment from the very start because if you don't have a good level of recruitment the weight will not move. It's impossible. All of those three reps will be, you know, very high recruitment. Many muscle fibers active, a lot of mechanical tension in those fibers. So it's still a productive set. Now if you do one rep or two reps, even three, not really the smartest thing to do in most cases, because it's usually better to lighten the load just a little bit and get a little bit more stimulating reps. Because we know we have roughly four, five, six of them, depending how trained you are, right? Just if you do like singles, single one rep max is you're missing out on some simulating reps. So training anywhere from four to 25 reps can go the same on fiber. Another caveat here is the total amount of actual sets and the total amount of time you actually have muscle tension happening is bigger on the longer sets. Even if you do slow reps, for example, you will have such a high cost in your fatigue that the recovery will actually be impaired because of that. You won't be able to do as much volume with these heavy sets. So very often you will see things like four times two, five times two, six times two, with quite heavy loads, which you would think, okay, I'm still getting my volume in. I'm still getting my muscle recruitment in. So I am actually gathering quite some volume. The downsides are your rest times need to be endlessly long to actually be able to perform something like this. And it's exhausting on your passive structures while it's very specific for a movement. You can get very efficient for in a movement. The stress on the passive structure is much higher and gathering volume this way is generally extremely exhausting. It can be a strategy. So you will find a overreaching block that use methods like this. They always come with a risk. They come often with great results also because you're actually hitting decent volumes at high intensities, but there's always the downside of being able to recover. So fatigue management is the last point that is interconnected with all these cornerstones that you always need to take into account. So when you talk about effective sets getting close to failure, we mentioned this range of around five reps where the magic happens. And there's always these two camps of people. There's people that tell you you need to train to failure. You need to hit complete muscle failure. You go need to go to rear zero. This has been studied a lot. Keeping one to two reps in reserve won't have any negative effect on your gains, but will make you recover much quicker, which means you can train more frequently. And here the frequency starts to make sense and come into play because training a muscle more frequently will allow you to get more efficient in a movement. And before we go into this, we can maybe say a few more things about intensity. Intense is defined by the percentage of your one rep max. The one to five rep range, which is usually around 85% of your one rem and everything under the AD threshold goes more in the five to 10 rep range plus. These are numbers that you keep in mind for your one rem to know in what rep ranges you are moving. There is not a magic barrier between strength and hypertrophy. As we mentioned before, as we talked about effective sets, that's what really counts. But there's some ideas you need to keep in mind to understand what is possible in what rep range and what will be the cost of it. And by choosing a higher weight, you will be your proximity to failure will happen way earlier. Anything else you would add to intensity? The last point you said about hypertrophy and strength, not having a clear cutoff line. So I think that's a very great point because people assume strength is one to five hypertrophy is eight to twelve. Just explain to me how that would make physiological sense. It just doesn't. The reason why usually recommendations for strength training are lower rep ranges because heavy loads require neural adaptations to move. And that's it. They also require a bit of tendoms stiffness to be able to move and lower weights just doesn't. That's basically the reason. If you want to move something heavy very efficiently, you have to be very coordinated. You have to have a very high degree of recruitment to be able to use muscle being able to use muscle fibers and also having stiff tendoms. That's basically it, but you can absolutely get stronger by getting by training in 10 to 15 rep range or feet in plus. Because every time you get bigger muscle, it adds to your muscle. You have more contractual units, more units that contract inevitable that you have more strength expression to develop the strength expression, the principle of specificity comes into play, meaning to actually learn to use these newly gained adaptations that you've had in higher rep ranges. For most people, there's exceptions. There's some people that have just a genetic affinity to low reps and are great at them even if they almost never trained them. What you enjoy, it depends. Yeah, exactly. You need to specifically train in lower rep ranges to have a specific stimulus to a certain load because these adaptations need to be very specific. Meaning if you do super technical work in a dip with 50% of your one or M, the risk is there that they will have no effect on how you actually perform a two or M in your dip. Meaning doing super fancy pause work that is super light might have zero effect that you move for two reps. So also technical work doesn't mean super easy work. It needs to be load specific people tend to forget it. People tend to forget it. They think that doing a few easy pause scapula activation work is going to get them the perfect technique. And then as soon as they touch out three or M weight again, the forum goes to absolute shit and all the compensation they had they come back. Another point is actually specificity, which becomes even more relevant when we'll be training about skills. Frequency wise, what the general guidelines will tell you is training the same muscle group twice a week is usually a smart idea. Exactly as a minimum for most people, it works very, very well. You can train it three times, but of course you can't just add one extra session manage volume. Exactly. You need to manage volume. You need to split up the volume because otherwise you run into the risk to creating too much fatigue and not being able to recover. And why is that a problem. So if you train too hard and you go too close to failure, there is a few different things happening. One big thing is you might cause so much damage to the structure that your body goes into and I need to protect this mode. So and it avoids for you to actually put more stimulus to the structure, which leads to less gains. So completely messing yourself up with two super intense sets in one session and having to take five days off because of that you might run into the risk and there's always a might here that you're actually not gonna have great adaptations here. They just go too hard and your body tries to protect yourself and you won't be able to actually add to that. I think it's called repeated about effective. That's a great point. Great point. So trying to fail will usually cause disproportionately more fatigue than stimulus, which is still more stimulus is just that the fatigue is in most cases. It just is just not worth it. Now what causes the post workout fatigue has almost all to do with muscle damage and calcium ions that you accumulate inside the muscle. The muscle damage is what ultimately causes the CNS fatigue that people often like you talk about. People for some reason think that your brain gets tired, you know your brain somehow can't send signals anymore. That's not what happens. Your brain, you know, you get sensory feedback from your muscles. Not always because you feel it, but because the inflammation that happens. Not always a feeling you get it and it just your brain as a protective mechanism decreases the amount of recruitment. It can send you know globally to your muscles. You know, the more muscle damage you have accumulated in your body, it doesn't matter where your brain just tries to protect you and decrease the amount of recruitment and does the amount of product training you can do. So usually trained the failure just isn't the best way to go and this accumulation of calcium ions is like exponential. As you get closer to failure, it just you know goes to the moon, right? So if you look at the charge, it's actually an exponential increase. This doesn't mean that you should never train to failure. You have to know how it feels like it's a great baseline. It's a great standard. You need to understand how to push yourself to complete failure. And what it means to not being able to do one more rep because otherwise it's going to be impossible for you to know what to reps in reserve means also in your last loading week. You might want to push certain movements to failure that don't cause all too much fatigue or bring you at a risk of injury to squeeze everything out. You have a deal afterwards. You can recover from it. It's not a necessity. But some people really enjoy that. It brings motivation into training. People love the feeling. And this can be still a factor to take into account. It's not needed, but you can do it. And on some accessory exercises, you can recover from it. So like doing bicep curl set to failure is not going to impair you from doing anything else. The last two points that we want to touch on are number one. Now we've talked a lot of theory. People always want numbers and I know the feeling of listening to something and getting out and having this all sounds great and good, but in practice. What does it mean? It's hard to give numbers because people get so fixated on them. That's the reason why methods sell. This is the reason why people love methods. They do not need to think. They think, ah, five times five, nice, like easy, linear, beautiful. I don't need to think I just need to follow and you know, if it's not your job to train people, then that's actually what you're looking for. So you want numbers, potentially how many sets in a week you can do depends on a muscle group and depends on the proximity to failure. In general, the guidelines will tell you that anything between four and 20 plus sets per muscle group is a great range in which to stay. That's this big of a range. And it just how it works. Yeah, exactly. It's a big range. If you want to really have a number where you can think, okay, am I for sure doing enough and am I probably not doing too much is around 10 effective sets per muscle group, at least for most muscle groups, ah, some or some less. This doesn't mean that you can make gains with only four sets a week. This doesn't mean that if you're doing 15, 16, 20 sets, all the extra work is completely wasted and you're just gathering fatigue and trash volume. It can mean it. That's, but it doesn't need to mean that. This is especially important if we start talking about skills. 10 is a good number because if you do 10 sets of quite intense work in a week, you do three sets of pull ups on one day, three sets of pull ups on a second day. In the week, you have six good effective sets and then you do two sets of accessory, always for the back where you one time might try to hit the idiot, flat fibers, the tiny bit more and have more of a vertical pole pattern. And one where you try to hit your horizontal muscle fibers, the tiny bit more, if you have some variation, you cover some weak points or you do some technical work for the pull up, getting more efficient in the closing, for example, you have a good number of sets where you know, okay, I'm doing enough and then you can actually see am I improving? Am I not improving? Of course, if you do all three sets to rear one and rear zero, you won't recover. Then that's too much. If you do, if you use these intensities, you need to do even lower volume. If you keep four reps in reserve in all these sets or most of these sets, you probably have still room for improvement in there and you're leaving some gains on the table. So these are some concrete numbers that aren't set in stone that need to be conceptualized, but that's why we always named them now after having introduced everything. I think the last point that we need to touch on or last two points are rest times and progressive overload. So rest times Sasha just rest bro. It's the best tip. You know, it's the best type of advice. So people think that for some reason, you know, hypertrophy works should be done with lower rest times, you know, to get more blood flow, more metabolize. We have very good reasons to think it doesn't actually cause hypertrophy, very good, you know, studies and everything. So I would just recommend don't overthink it rest as long as you need. You know, you're to your till your rating is fine till your heart rate is down and do another productive set. So that's what I would recommend for strength. I would be maybe a little bit more careful because I would actually make sure my coordination is on point, you know, maximal. I would rest me probably longer than five minutes if I just want to maximize maximize strength. Right. So very focused because you want to focus more on those neural limitations when you train movements, right. So just make sure you're training it like an athlete, like an Olympic weightlifting between its snatch or something, you know, high precision, high everything. And when it comes to progressive overload, what you set about these set recommendations. So one thing I want to add to that is just write down what you do in a lot of order in our train log app. In train log app, just write it down and see how much if you're progressing week to week. So it doesn't have to be complicated. I know that 40 to 20 seems like, you know, what should I do? You know, maybe the lower end first six, seven, eight sets a week, maybe try to train it or 10, you know, train it, you know, this is really hard. Write down what you do. Write down the amount of reps in reserve. You think you have and just compare your results week by week, right? Compare yourself. But what how do you do seven days ago? How am I doing now? It gives you all the feedback you actually need to tell you if you were training, how you should be training, right? If you're making progress and give it some time. So don't just compare last week to this week and then draw conclusions to it for other two to three weeks and then start a few months would be best. And then you can actually draw some conclusions. That is a good point regarding rest times. So I usually do like to prescribe some ranges where I tell people, you know, take at least one and a half to two minutes of rest, rather prescribing a minimum time that people need to take. Some people will feel ready earlier, rarely under one and a half minutes. Make sense? Besides you have some fun intensity methods that are rather fun than anything else and for strength, yeah, anywhere between three to five plus my minutes is great until you do not get cold between the sets because that can happen if you rest way too long. Is the groove no, no, progress to the workload is not something you have to force or add for your training. So progressive overload is something you will display as a result of adaptations that are occurring in your training. So you train regularly week by week your compare results, you know, seven days previously and let's say you get a rep more or something. It means you have managed to display adaptations. You manage to display progressive overload and that's what happens actually. So if you go to the training one day, you do 10 reps and you come next week, you think I have to hit 11 or otherwise nothing is happening. That's not how it works. That's just not how it works. You can hit the same 10 reps, but you know, it feels just a little bit easier that's still progressive overload. You can even hit nine reps and it feels harder. Doesn't mean you lost any muscle. It can just be, you know, temporary reduction in performance, which happens, you know, all time. Maybe you had a bad day, whatever. That's also to your point, what you said previously about don't just compare one week, whether it's good or bad. So some people like to, you know, claim crazy progress in one week, like it's actual progress that's happened, like, you know, adaptations, it's not most likely, you know, just better conditions, you're maybe a bit lighter feeling more motivated, lasting a good song in your ears, and it can also go the other way around. So worse conditions, you have worse performance. It doesn't mean you're losing any adaptations. To sum it up, as you mentioned, progressive overload is very often misunderstood. People think that every session or every week needs to get harder. You need either to do more reps, more weight, more volume, whatever. It simply means that the stimulus in a workout generally needs to increase over time. As a result of greater fitness, the same stimulus can actually trigger adaptation week by week. With time, it becomes less impactful, but it's still useful, just becoming more efficient in technique. There are P going slightly down. That's all progressive overload and something we need to take into account. So I think we covered the most important points here. I think we covered all the bases and now we can go into the methods and we will touch high frequency low intensity as the last point. Now we've given, I think, hopefully, good overview of all the training variables that exist and their importance and how they play together and what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. We can take this so debated two set method that you find everywhere. Currently, people are criticizing it left and right and other people are saying, I only do two sets and it's the best thing I've ever done. Now we dissect it. A two set method has described in the clips that we've seen before. It means you do two sets very close or to complete failure, actually. And you do them with a frequency of every five days. So you do two sets and then I think you do push pull legs. So the next time you get around and then rest and next time you get around, you will actually have had around five days of rest in between, which is a frequency of less of two per week. Rose fleet. What are we doing? What are we doing? Rose split exactly. But so many people say it works. It's great. They only have 40, 45 minutes to work out this way. They can get their work done and they see results because you know, people have stuff to do in their life. They have a lot of stress and it works very well for them. So I would say we start with the positives. Why does it work? Where do are the problems with running something like this? So the reason why it works is because you are doing two very intense sets very close to failure. Two failure. Two failure. I hate saying doing sets to failure so much that I automatically add to not do it completely to failure, but yes, you do two sets to complete failure. You fuck yourself up super hard in two sets. And then that's it. Then then you say goodbye. You do a few warm upsets, then you go all out, balls to the wall and yeah, so you actually gather quite some effective wraps. You have two very effective sets. These old trigger adaptation. You actually have mechanical tension on your muscle for quite some time because I think the rebring just that usually our advice here are a bit higher. Eight, seventeen. Super random. But okay. Yeah. Okay, so I beat on the higher side a lot of people are doing too much of the wrong stuff or they're doing too much with not enough intention. Meaning they often do not use the right muscles for the job. They compensate a lot and they actually get nowhere close to failure. And this is a big problem for a lot of people. And that's why they don't see any gains with something like this where you need to completely fuck yourself up. You actually have a very tangible goal and this is great. You also have just two sets to think about. You can focus very much on these two sets. And without thinking, oh shit, I have other three sets to do how I'm gonna survive this and you go way easier than you actually could. And this is the reason why it works. It's very, very simple, but it comes with a lot of downsides. What are the downsides? I have to say I love the pros. So I totally agree. It's very straightforward and it will get you results. So in most cases, the cons, and there's quite a bit of cons. Now I don't think the method is that bad. I definitely don't think a training every five days is optimal. So just because you're sore for four or five days doesn't actually mean you're building muscle for those five days. So that's not how muscle protein synthesis is going to work. Soreness is no indicator for hypertrophy. Exactly. You want to hit every muscle group two times minimum a week, three maximum. So two to three, you're golden. This doesn't really take that box. So just by that, it's not really a good idea when it comes to that. Second thing, training two failure for a lot of people is actually good advice. I think because they don't train anywhere near close to failure. So it's actually going to give them better results. You know, a lot of the more marginal increased risk of injury because you know, they don't know what they're doing, whatever. But when it comes to the stimulus side, it's actually quite decent, right? So take a step box for sure. So that's training to failure. Now I don't actually like to train to failure in any, you know, intermediate to advanced lifters. I don't think it's a very good way to train as we talked about before keep some keep a rap or some in reserve, train a little bit more often. You likely get more results, more per-resue overload. Another thing I don't like is why do just pull ups and dips and why just two sets. So it's actually okay to do one set for something. It's completely fine to do more exercises to hit more fibers because not not all exercises even if they're for the same muscle group. Not all of them, they hit the same fibers. So for example, an underhand pull up would hit slightly different fibers of the legs than overhead pull up when you do, you know, adaction, you know, to the size. Same thing with your chest. So you have your upper chest, you have a minerals chest, we have a lower chest. So you know, you can do dips or that. Dips are actually primarily a tricep exercise. Not that much for the dip actually. Not much for the peck, although it is, you know, depends. That's a bit in one. I don't know. I wouldn't say it's a primarily tricep exercise. It really depends on your execution very much. Where your fibrous goes here. But if you do it, you know, close to the sides of the body, you know, you have like shoulder extension. So it's actually quite a good tricep and front-out exercise. And not that much for the pecks. But if you do it, you know, flared elbows a little bit like this. It's actually, you know, because you have this adaction. So I think it's a, the, doesn't matter. Also your chest position, also your scapula position matter a lot. So to sum it up, you can do more exercises. He hitting the same muscle group in a different angle and actually generating more stimulus than doing just the same thing, even to failure or doing the same thing over and over again, which is something we will talk about in the next method that we will dissect. Also keep that in mind for later. And the biggest problem with this method is as a beginner doing more sets of something actually very often makes sense because learning a pattern is extremely important. And limiting the pattern of a movement to twice every five days for two sets for most people isn't nearly, nearly close enough to really get efficient and good in a pattern, understanding how to adjust the technique correctly, how to perform something correctly, how to become actually neuromuscularly efficient at something, understanding what are the right muscles for the job. And if all these things aren't present and you're trying to do two sets of dips, which is actually in my opinion, a very complex exercise that so many people have problems executing right and actually understanding how to modulate certain technical details that we've shortly mentioned now to actually hit the muscles. They actually want to hit that they will start compensating in every way possible. They will never understand if they're actually going to failure with the muscle groups they want to go to failure with and the risk of overloading other structures too much, which might simply get hurt in the process because you do have enough time to recover. You have fucking five days to recover, but if you go too far, it doesn't matter. Like once a tissue is too damaged, it's too damaged. And this way your risk of injury still is quite high doing this. If you have no idea what you're doing, you might actually not get the stimulus you want in the muscle groups you want to. And these are very big minuses of this method that are very present also when you want to learn skills. I think it's very important that you have certain movement patterns in your training through assistance work that might help you to understand certain activations better. And just by doing pull ups and dips and nothing else, this might not be enough for a lot of people because if you're at the point where you've worked with hundreds of people, some people just have never moved in their life. They don't understand how to activate a muscle. They don't understand how to move. They need this extra work to understand little movements that might come extremely natural and easy to you. Especially this method being so big, written so big by someone who is clearly genetically extremely gifted. You don't have a site for these things. And yeah, I think this is a big thing. Also, you will see the general trend of influencers nowadays prescribing two sets prescribing lower volume. Very often all these influencers, all these people have been doing a lot more for a lot of years. They've probably been at their upper cup of volume and fatigue for extremely long times. And only now by doing two sets, they actually touched a sweet spot where they progress more for the first time. And I think this is one thing you can forget. Plus, they have years and years and years of experience doing much more, which does create a certain margin at the end of the day. They have the capabilities, the understanding of performing exercises with the right muscles at these very high intensities and having a muscle recruitment very early on leading for them to do a lot of effective reps. So these are a lot of minus points. And this is why you shouldn't blindly follow something, but rather understand, when does this make sense? When do I put it in a plan? Why do I put it in a plan? And I will have a lot of exercises in my plan that I just do one or two sets off. Like, that's more than enough for me. I've been training for 13 years. Like, I know how this shit works. I know how to get the most out of a set. I still, for most main movements, if I'm not just trying to maintain them, I do like around three sets is a good sweet spot. I think it gives you enough room that if you do it twice a week, you still can do two sets twice a week of an accessory exercise and hit that sweet spot of around 10 sets a week. Talking about pull ups and accessories like rows and one on pull ups. I am a little bit more biased, I would say towards a lower volume that that's just my preference of training. Comes down to maximizing your race of progressive overload. I think that's the best approach to build as much muscle as possible. So in the long run strength and hypertrophy have incredible correlation. They're very highly correlated. So the more you can increase your strength in a rep range, whatever you're doing, the more weight the reps you push, the more muscle you have in the long run. You know, muscle always equals more strength. I've actually read an article in the book that I'm currently reading by Alex Viada about hybrid training. If more muscle always equals to more strength and he actually brought up the point that after a certain size of your muscle, you actually can't hit a certain range of contraction and that the muscle fibers actually they kind of squeeze each other and your possibility to recruit a maximally might suffer from it at a certain point. I think before we are all at that point, it's a non-relevant for most people. I don't know. I thought it a tiny bit dubious as I read it. Don't think it makes sense physiologically. How can you even get, unless we have really weird muscle shape, how can you even get your fibers to that size? You know, you have a genetically limit for them to grow. You can't grow them infinitely. They have a cap. I think this makes more sense for enhanced athletes at a certain point, rather than a natural athlete. The only points where I would think it could be significant in our sport is having a biceps so big that it actually leads to you not being able to close well a chin up because it's physically in the way, for example, and you at this point, if there's more space, you can actually go into this last range of flexion and close the rep, while here, if the biceps is too big, your stock and the muscles are ready, especially on top of the muscle, they're so shortened already that you can't generate force with them. So they're biomechanically simply because the muscle belly is bigger in a spot where they can produce as much force. So there's a slight correlation. I just read it and I thought about it and I found it actually quite dubious for an author that really, really puts down things super scientific. where it's so extremely edge case. Okay, let's get back to the fucking point. Next method, I think we talked about the two times too, enough we covered the plus, the minuses. Also, there's been endless discussions if it's great for skills or not. This is, I think, something where can universally say doing two sets of a skill is just not fucking enough to improve if you're. Ian said it himself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So people make fun of him. There are good reasons to make fun of him, but that's not one of them because he never claimed something like that. People just love to make fun, I think. I mean, people like to criticize and talk shit. I love doing it. You love to do it too, don't you? Yeah, yeah, of course they do. But I tried to give reasons. Two sets of doing something is great to maintain. Like, you might be able to maintain a movement that you're very gifted at. Like, that's quite simple. Like, a front lever with two sets a week. Easily, if you still hit the master group enough with other exercises and you know how to execute it. Perfect, easy, great. So one thing to keep in mind, you can maintain skills like that. I think we can go to the next five times five, the magic number for not a beginner, but the intermediate lifter, whatever that means. Usually it's prescribed twice a week. So you will be doing ten sets a week every time of five reps and just linearly progress on it in your main exercises. What are the pros? What are the cons? The pros of the five times five is. Compared to a two set method, for example, you actually do the movement quite often. You will end up doing ten sets of this exercise per week. You will go through the motions quite often. You will make sure that you do enough volume, but you need to be very careful about the intensity that you choose. Because if the intensity is slightly too high on a five times five, you will burn out very quickly in the first sets. And the last sets will be very unproductive and I'm already at the negatives. If you choose them too light, you might just have one set or two sets where you get somewhere close to having effective reps. Doing five sets compared to two sets is mindset wise. You do your first set and then you're like, "Fucking hell, I need to do order four sets." Not so great. While on two sets, you're gonna give it your all, which you don't wanna do also in the five times five in the first set already and motivation wise, keeping the concentration up the time that you will invest in doing a five times five because you need to take quite long breaks. It's gonna end up taking quite a lot of your session making it maybe a tiny bit harder to follow and also doing actual assistance work for the muscle groups that actually are hit in the, and whatever exercise you do a five times five for might just be actual trash volume because you're so exhausted from doing all these sets. It all very much depends on the intensities. You choose, I do find that simply doing three sets with a better tuned intensity makes more sense and leads to you actually accumulating more effective reps and effective volume in general rather than doing so many sets of five reps. I mean, usually when our main Ian are we allowed to say names? Why not? Ian usually says that the two set method is not the best for strength and not the best for hypertrophy but it's the best for a mix of both and it just doesn't work like that. That's exactly my face that I do when I hear that. Then you have the five by five which Ian would say, I'm sure he would say it's maybe five out of ten for hypertrophy, full muscle growth and ten out of ten for strength. You know, he would say something like that. So yeah, I think we're talking about the different things that doesn't really work like that. hypertrophy is a fundamental part of strength and as you said, I don't know, even matter I'm taking this, you know, five by five. I don't think he's the best approach for strength because there will be sets that are not just going to be very stimulating, just simply not heavy enough to even improve your movement coordination at heavier loads, to improve your ability to recruit motor units and to grow any muscle. And not even tendance stiffness because if you're doing like sets of five, you have to do like 10, 12 rep max. Not even the best for something like tendance, yeah. It's a weird in between. It's somewhere at a point where the mix between word intensity needs to be for you to be actually be able to do so many set of an exercise for this amount of reps just is very little. I think the advantages that you can say is very straight forward. It will work for some time as everything works for some time. And you don't need to think about it and you get repetitions in pasta. Fair. It's in this weird limbo. My way to go about it, go down with the sets, maybe two, three, exactly two, two, three sets. And depending on the phasier at choose the rep range, like you can do a three times five. That's absolutely great. With something like an eight rep max or something, you know, going to be this stimulating, you know, or we can do depending on phasier in absolutely something like five by three, you know, with your six aram. It's also very good or four by three going to be a bit heavier. For sure, I'm going to work more on that specific movement coordination ability to recruit motor units. Depends how you look at five by five is as you said, something weird in the middle, you know, just because it's a nice round number, you know, five by five, 25 reps total. That doesn't actually mean anything, you know, before we throw round numbers, like is now three times six better or three times five or five times three. I think we can just open a very quick parenthesis that we can talk about in later podcast episodes. A great way to go about it. And it's not the only way and it's not the best way is you have something that you can actually build over time. Is you start off with higher rep ranges. And every month you go down one rep or two reps for each exercise. So you start with three times eight. And in the next measure, you do a three times six. And then you do a three times four. And in the last measure, you do a four times two, for example. And then you do rampings with one top set and three back of sets. Something like this is a very straightforward approach to actually make progress. You can always repeat it for an infinite amount of time where you will be in certain phases for a certain period of time. See which rep ranges you also perform the best with because you're logging your training and where you perform best and what works for you and what doesn't work for you rather than just taking a number and thinking, this is the way to go. You can change rep ranges, do it over the months, see how your body responds, see where you're stronger, see where you're weaker and you want to specifically try to get stronger in certain rep ranges. If that's your goal, you will need to spend time in them, but you need to be prepared to be able to do these. Because if you always work in singles and doubles at high intensities, this is not going to work for a long time. You're very probably going to hurt quite quickly, even though it's great and specific. But this is for next time, I would say the last method that we find people talking about in here, we go a tiny bit more in the, there's the 10 times 10, but I think it's self-explanatory, why that's stupid. It's like the five times five on steroids. Yeah. Four times the volume just what? Yeah, I mean, six to eight of these sets would need to be in such a low intensity for you to actually survive. Probably your cardiovascular system is going to give up before you actually get a decent muscle stimulus. So yeah, not great at all. And then to touch on the last point is high frequency low intensity or the so loved grease to groove. And now we go more into something that's used either in very technical sports like weightlifting or in the skills work. So yeah, high frequency low volume and also consequently a little bit lower intensity. I'm not really the way to go at all. I think everybody can agree on that when it comes to hypertrophy. If there's anything we can all agree on that of a bit, right? When it comes to strength and expressing strength, it's not a bad idea. It's a good idea. It can absolutely work. So you will see many Olympic well-liters that train five times a day, high level Olympic well-liters, you know, Olympic level. The same way you will see high level calisthenics that train five to six times a week maybe even more. You said five times a day. You said weight lifters that train five times a day. Oh, fuck no, fuck no, fuck no, fuck no. And you will also see some power lifters, especially those that are a little bit lighter in lighter weight categories that train the movements more often. Like three, four times a week maybe even more because you also have your technical work. Not every training is very heavy, right? It's not very possible. You have to practice your technique and failure. It's a good approach for strength. Now higher frequency does make sense for something like strength and therefore skills because it allows you to work on neuro-alaptations a little bit more. And what are even neuro-alaptations I'm mentioning them all the time. So this is something for another podcast, for another video. However, you know, everybody talks about neuro-alaptages. Nobody really understands what they mean. We have three things, three major things. So at the absolute king of neuro-alaptations is your coordination. It's incredibly moving, specific, incredibly just task, dependent, your motor instant conversation, your synergist activation, you know. There's so many little things going on when you perform things that brain can make more efficient. So it's called your motor program is just your brain will relentlessly try to find the most optimal way to perform a task. But you also have to show it how to do that. You have to actually think about what you're doing. We focus maybe on external focus of attention, think about details, and then the brain will improve your motor problems. Take time, but it's the absolute king when it comes to neuro-alaptages. Absolutely doesn't increase your strength. So for example, you do a planche and somebody gives you a light, nice little tip to, you know, the pressure. for all the blazing and lightning. bit and just because of that you get some practice in that you actually decrease the moment arm ever so slightly you know between the shoulder and the hip and actually decrease the torque. You didn't increase the amount of muscular force you're producing but you did decrease the torque because of improved coordination which is the whole point. Then you have your ability to use muscle fibers so basically just how well your brain is at recruiting motor units. You can't recruit every single muscle fiber in your body because some are just too big and you always have those activation deficits so especially something like the planche you have so many things that just prevent you from using a lot of fibers so for example your wrist sensations your scapular sensations, protrusion there's too many things to think about and the more things there are to think about the less your brain can focus on just sending the signals to your muscles so that's why you have those deficits and the more practice you get the more you train the better your brain gets at recruiting motor units for the specific task. This works also the other way around. For example knee sleeves in the squat especially if we're not talking about stiff sleeves or knee wraps people can squat way more weight even if the sleeves are simply soft and that is simply because of a tactile sensation that you have in the knee joint giving your brain the sensation of being more secure. It works the other way around while certain things your brain might be okay I need to be careful there and you can't recruit as much muscles and that is very common with injuries and why injuries get chronic over time and you need to be very careful especially if you're training very complex exercises but you will develop compensations without you noticing but at the same time while people feel like they can perform so much better just because they use some sleeves that actually do nothing on their elbows giving them just tactile feedback and sensation of security you will be able to have a better recruitment or feel safer just wanted to add it goes actually both ways. Last things just going into your sensory part of the brain just means your brain has to focus on less things and can focus purely on the task which is a generating force. The less complex the task is the easier it is to recruit more motor units that's why you will always have more recruitment when you do a unilateral knee extension a lot higher recruitment than you do a squat. It's impossible to hit some levels of recruitment in a squat and the third one would be antagonist co-activation so basically very simply as you improve your coordination of the movement your muscles on the opposing sides of the body actually start to work less which in return allows you to produce more net torque at the joint which you know makes sense you have less force that pulls you the other way around you have more torque pulling you in the direction you want to go. So for example you're something like a planche as you improve this this neural adaptation actually happens very slowly so it's not like coordination and proof is you know with ears or training so as you do planche for you know very long time you will notice that your tricep actually is working less and less and less and maybe even the other muscles so I actually did a fun experiment with my brother so I told him you know go do like a planche lean or something actually it was planche lean and you know I just tried to feel his muscles and I could see you know that his tricep was very active most of his muscles were very active you know antagonists and then I did it you know just lean I asked him you know try my triceps you know it was not moving at all. That is one thing you will generally see when learning skills and one thing that I think makes sense queuing as a coach as well is in the beginning you will tell people to really over focus on certain cues and really try to contract as many muscle fibers as possible they will do it automatically when trying to hold the movement and with time where you become more efficient to actually understand what do I need what don't I need you will be able to relax further and because of that spend less energy actually over focusing on things that are an important rather focusing on the task at 10 making for these longer holds someone who's gonna hold a front lever for 20 seconds he's gonna be very relaxed his antagonists are very relaxed and also his primary movers won't be at maximal contraction because otherwise they wouldn't be able to hold it for more than 3 to 5 seconds and that's it those three the point was the neural adaptations right does that mean you have to train every day necessarily absolutely not these adaptations are worked on by training twice a week you can do it twice a week just get the good workout in a good cue is good everything you still work on them the reason why a little athletes can do that is because they build up to that point usually genetically gifted absolutely not necessary in order to have the best amount of gains so you can absolutely train the movement skill twice a week maybe three times a week that's what I do with majority of my clients which some I do more if I see that they improve very fast or just I see that they're gifted I don't care we're gonna do four times a week maybe maybe even more include more light sessions yeah it just works two to three times a week works for everybody if you manage all six times a week doesn't work for everybody you mentioned in the beginning how it can work well for strength I don't like strength as a definition so much because I connect strength with a specific intensity which goes in the direction of one or M simply I feel like you can have task specific strength so a weight lifter will train very often in a week because his exercise is extremely technical and usually their explosive movements where the muscle fiber recruitment is very high simply because it's an explosive movement and they need a high recruitment to actually generate this movement even if the weight isn't as heavy so the weight isn't very specific to strength in the sense of a one-arm lift and they have still this this recruitment that's very technical and they need to do quite often recruitment is completely voluntary yes you can generate maximum recruitment with no dumbbell like this is maximum recruitment exactly on skills I feel like it's somewhere in that range also it's very specific and it's a big voluntary recruitment while something where we talk about one-arm strength you can do an explosive rep with a lower weight and have a big recruitment but there's always the question to actually specifically get better in a one-arm it's better you take a higher load and you actually use that load because your loading pattern your path will be different that saying that it's good for strength in general maybe it's not the best way to define it at least in my opinion simply because there's nuances to it and everything else I think yeah sounds like absolutely great it makes sense and I feel like people like to give Greece a groove as an idea you do something very often at a low intensity most people fuck up from the beginning because the intensity statues are way too high anyway because they don't have their ego in check and secondly you will overwork certain structures without you noticing until it's too late and you like giving your body more time to recover having some time to actually recover and your brain to fortify in these movement patterns is not a bad idea and as you said two to three times a week is great a powerlifter that will train a movement four times a week will have two sessions that are very specific where he uses intensities that are specific to his one or M and the other one session usually is going to be very technical where for example they cut the range of motion they do a board bench press where they mostly work on the triceps so their chest isn't a limiting factor and the chest can actually mostly recover on this day because very often otherwise the risk of injury is gonna be big just doing something with a higher frequency you might mix a bit more specific work with unspecific work or not only I find for advanced athlete where you are able to do more work even with advanced athletes I actually like to try to keep the work as minimal as possible because with time especially in skills you will add variations to them when you start doing presses, planche pushups and so on you will end up training a planche effectively four times a week it's very difficult to find ways around them but I find someone who for example is a beginner but has super hard time with activations and notice twice a week is not enough he might do a very technical session in a day in the middle where he really works at intensities that won't fatigue him for the last session but he might work on certain details like his hips so you need to know when something makes sense to use and you can't just say high frequency low intensity is great it's gonna work I've heard in a podcast people say that it's the only way you're gonna get full planche no I've had so many clients getting full planches with twice a week as them why you need high frequency low intensity and explain listen to them not be able to explain it you know physiologically yeah of course they're not it needs to be a movement where you don't need to warm up for it you do it so often that it's second nature it's like walking what does it do for you I can do tack planche all day alone what does it do for me we should have patients I'm working on can it be can always improve a little bit but what am I doing with it exactly it's not specific to the actual stimulus that's gonna get you better your point I should have formulated it a little bit better when it comes to high frequency always always being better for strength not really what they meant it will also be very absolutely always specific so a very strong power lifter you won't be training deadlifts even twice a week probably you know heavy you'll likely change once a week maybe even less frequently. And yeah, if you're a 60 kilo guy who has a Planche 1 rap max currently, it doesn't mean you're gonna be training it once a week. No, that's not how it's going to work. Yeah, I wanted to add that because when you don't know this background, it can be very confusing. I find I always tend to assume people will get things. But yeah, that's a good thing. Good. I think we did halfway well. We got lost somewhere in the middle. But otherwise, we were quite nice. I think it's okay. We went through all the methods. I hope this was clear. It's a bit long. It's a lot of stuff. The next time around, we will go more into details about skills and talk about volume landmarks and skills defining volume and intensity in skills. And once we have that out of the way, we will look at micro meso and micro cycle structures, which we shortly mentioned today and how to actually use Set and reps over time to get better without having to rely on a fixed method. See you guys. See ya.