Brain Gains the Best of Strengtheory

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BRAIN GAINS: THE BEST OF STRENGTHEORY

Greg Nuckols STRENGTHEORY.COM

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Read This First: Let me start by saying thanks for downloading a copy of this ebook. Next, let me explain what this IS, and what it ISN’T. This is not a comprehensive training manual. You won’t find much that looks like “do x sets of x reps of these exercises and you’ll get big and strong.” There are plenty of books like that, and I’m planning on writing specifically about programming in the future; but that’s another book – not this one. Also, this is not a book in the traditional sense of one section building upon another. It’s a collection of articles and essays from my blog, loosely organized around themes. Because of this, don’t feel obligated to read it cover to cover. If a heading looks interesting to you, dive in. If it doesn’t grab your attention, skip on over. More than anything, I want this to serve as a repository for some of the best work on the site. If you’re a new reader, this will save you a lot of time separating the wheat from the chaff – a lot of the early articles on the site were admittedly pretty rough. If you’ve stuck with me from the start (double thanks!), this will give you most of your favorites in one place. One more note – the articles in this book go back 2 years or more. As I’ve learned more, my views on some of these subjects have shifted somewhat, or have at least become more nuanced. However, I’ve gone back through all these articles to make sure there’s nothing in here that is just flat-out wrong; but there are some topics presented in a manner that’s a little more simplistic than my current way of looking at them. Ultimately, though, if I were to put out a book to capture exactly what I think about every fitness-related topic, I’d have to write it in one day, and pieces of it would already be outdated by the next week. I guess what I’m saying is that you shouldn’t take everything in this book as my final word (and CERTAINLY not THE final word) on these topics.

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Contents PROGRAMMING ....................................................................................................................................... 5 More is More ................................................................................................................................................ 5 Peaking – AKA, How to Hit PRs in Meets .................................................................................................... 16 Increasing Work Capacity ........................................................................................................................... 22 The Bogeyman of Training Programs (and Why It May Be Just What You Need) ...................................... 29 In Defense of Program Hoppers; DUP Revisited ......................................................................................... 36 Study Write-up: Sprints Are Anabolic*, Even When Fasted! …but with Big Gender Differences .............. 47 Cardio and Lifting – Cardio Won’t Hugely Impact Your Gains in the Short Run, and May Be Beneficial for Strength and Size in the Long Run .............................................................................................................. 54 Practical Considerations for Combining Cardiovascular Training and Lifting ............................................. 61 Cardio Isn’t Going to Kill Your Gains. Need More Evidence? You Got It..................................................... 72 Making Your Novice Strength Training Routine More Effective – Two Quick Tips..................................... 78 PubMed Doesn’t Replace A Strength Coach ............................................................................................... 82 Do Women Need to Train Differently Than Men?...................................................................................... 89 What I Learned on the Way to Squatting 500 ............................................................................................ 93 What I Learned on the Way to Deadlifting 500 pounds ............................................................................. 98 What I Learned on the Way to Benching 350 pounds .............................................................................. 103 DIET ........................................................................................................................................................... 107 The Three Laws of Protein ........................................................................................................................ 107

3 Being Strong Is Not an Excuse to be Fat (and Being Fat is Probably Holding You Back)........................... 111 TECHNIQUE ............................................................................................................................................. 117 Should You Wear a Belt or Not? Study Write-Up ..................................................................................... 117 Everything You Think Is Wrong With Your Deadlift Is Probably Right ...................................................... 122 Fixing the Good-Morning Squat ................................................................................................................ 132 Hamstrings – The Most Overrated Muscle Group for the Squat .............................................................. 135 It’s Time to End this Nonsense. High Bar vs. Low Bar Squatting .............................................................. 139 Squats are not Hip Dominant or Knee Dominant. Some Biomechanical Black Magic. ............................. 147 Speed Kills: 2x the Intended Bar Speed Yields ~2x the Bench Press Gains ............................................... 159 Band-Resisted Pushups = Bench Press for Strength Gains? Plus, How Useful is EMG? ........................... 172 MISCELLANEOUS ................................................................................................................................... 182 Making Sense of Strength ......................................................................................................................... 182 Unleash Your Inner Superhero.................................................................................................................. 199 What it Takes to Break World Records ..................................................................................................... 211 The Science of Steroids ............................................................................................................................. 225 Stress: The Silent Killer (of gains) .............................................................................................................. 247 Wrecking Your Diet, One Night at a Time ................................................................................................. 259 Poor Recovery and Increased Muscle Breakdown: Insufficient Sleep Part 2! .......................................... 266 Exercise Science: What is it good for? ...................................................................................................... 270 Buy-In ........................................................................................................................................................ 279

4 Be Honest with Yourself. Training for Health vs. Performance ................................................................ 288 The Size of your Pond ............................................................................................................................... 291

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PROGRAMMING More is More Key points 1) The most reliable way, though not the ONLY way, to get stronger is to do more. 2) Even advanced, drug-free athletes can make great progress training a lift just twice per week. 3) You probably don’t need to worry about overtraining. Participants in this study squatted 8 sets to failure with 80% of their max and made sweet gainz. If you don’t understand anything else about programming, understand this:

The most reliable way to make progress is to do more. It’s certainly not the ONLY way to make progress. Exercise selection plays a role, intensity plays a role, frequency plays a role, and proper periodization plays a role. But the primary contributor – hands down – is training volume. It’s been a while since I’ve done a dedicated study write-up. I’ve come across some cool stuff, but nothing that deserved its own article. This study really caught my eye, though, because it illustrates this concept perfectly:

The Effect of Training Volume on Lower-Body Strength by Robbins et. Al. (2012)

Participants

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Most of the guys were mid-20s to early 30s. The great thing about this study was that they were all experienced lifters. A minimum of two years of consistent training was required, but most of the participants had been under the bar for 5-8 years.

A squat of at least 130% of bodyweight was required to participate, and the average squat for the people in the study was around 155kg to start with. Strangely, the participants’ weights weren’t reported, but for most studies like this, the people are somewhere between 75-85kg. It’s pretty safe to assume that most of the people in this study were squatting around 1.5-2 times bodyweight. Not too shabby – these weren’t the untrained subjects typical of most strength training studies.

Training Protocol

Before the study, all the participants did two weeks of a body part split routine (chest and bis, back and tris, and legs) with standardized volume and intensity to make sure their prior training wouldn’t significantly influence their results. After that, they maxed and were put on different training protocols.

For the actual trial period, all the groups trained 4 times per week for six weeks. One day was squats and upper back work. The other was all upper body work (since you’d have a hard time recruiting well-trained subjects for a study if they knew they’d lose all their upper body swole). All of the training was the same for all three groups, except for their squat work.

One group did 1 set of squats to failure with 80%.

One group did 4 sets of squats to failure with 80%.

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One group did 8 sets of squats to failure with 80%. “Failure” was defined as volitional failure (i.e. when they felt like they couldn’t get the next rep), or when they needed to take more than three seconds between reps.

They squatted twice per week, with no extra exercises that were leg- or lower back-intensive.

They retested maxes after Week 3 and Week 6.

After Week 6, they were put back on a standardized protocol. They all trained four times per week, hitting each muscle group twice per week, and all squatted for three sets with a 4rm load.

Basically, they were on a training program that was similar to how people actually train, which makes it easier to generalize the results.

The one thing that irked me a bit was that squat depth was specified as 90 degrees of knee flexion – a bit above parallel. Oh well. That’s fairly standard, though. Assuming results are generalizable from a slightly above parallel squat to a slightly below parallel squat isn’t too much of a leap of faith.

Results As it’s explained in the study, the 1-set group did not get any stronger at three weeks, but did get stronger at six weeks, with no difference between Week 6 and Week 10. The 4-set group got stronger by Week 3, but didn’t gain any further strength between Week 3 and Week 10. The 8set group was stronger at Week 3 than Week 1, but wasn’t significantly stronger at weeks 6 and 10 than at Week 3. The 8-set group gained significantly more strength than the 1-set group, but

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there was no significant difference between the 4-set group and either the 1-set group or the 8set group. However, I don’t think those results are telling the whole story. This study, like many exercise science studies, was plagued by small study groups (10-11 people per group), which means pretty big differences between groups or time points are required to reach statistical significance. The chart of the results themselves tells a somewhat different story.

From Robbins (2012)

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Over three weeks, the 4-set and 8-set groups got almost identical gains, but between weeks 3 and 6, and between weeks 6 and 10, the 8-set group starts to pull away.

Average strength gains through the first six weeks.

By the end of the six week intervention, the 1-set group had gained about 16kg on their squats on average (~148kg to ~164kg), the 4-set group had gained about 23kg (~157kg to ~180kg), and the 8-set group had gained about 31kg (~160kg to ~191kg). So while the difference between the 4set and 8-set group may have not been *statistically* significant, it’s still probably relevant in the real world. The effect sizes (often used in studies like this where the sample size is rarely large enough to produce significant results) bear this out – the effect size for the difference between 1 and 4 sets was small, and the effect size for the difference between 4 and 8 sets was moderate. The authors say as much in the abstract as well: “At 6 weeks, the magnitude of improvement was significantly greater for the 8-SET, as compared with that of the 1-SET group. The magnitude of improvement elicited in the 4-SET

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group was not different from that of the 1-SET or 8-SET groups. The results suggest that “high” volumes (i.e., >4 sets) are associated with enhanced strength development but that “moderate” volumes offer no advantage. Practitioners should be aware that strength development may be dependent on appropriate volume doses and training duration.”

Another interesting thing to notice is that the 8-set group was the only one that gained strength during the four weeks of training heavier at the end of the study (about 7kg, on average). Again, the results weren’t significant so you may not want to put TOO much stock in them, but it conforms to typically-held beliefs about overreaching and peaking – only the group that was previously doing a lot of volume actually got stronger during a heavier, lower volume phase (somewhat similar to a peaking program) before the final maxes.

Another interesting thing to note is that only in the 4-set group did everyone actually get stronger. In the 1-set group, eight people were able to increase their training loads, there was no change for one participant, and two actually had to decrease their training loads. In the 8-set group, nine out of 10 were able to increase their training load, but one was not (no change). So while 8 sets of squats produced the best average results, 4 sets was the only condition that caused strength gains across the board.

Discussion

I wanted to write about this journal article because it represents a larger trend, both in research and in-the-trenches practice. This was the particular article I chose because it was 1) done on dudes who were actually pretty strong and experienced (5-8 years training, on average) and 2) because it was about squatting, not leg extensions or something of that nature.

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If you want to get stronger, the best thing you can do is train more, provided you’re sleeping enough, managing stress, and have good technique. Sure, other factors certainly matter. And sure, it’s certainly possible (though unlikely) to overtrain. But in the simplest terms possible, your current program is probably less effective than it would be if you just added an extra couple of sets to each exercise. If you’re not making progress, your default thought shouldn’t simply be, “time to find an exciting new program!” It should be either “time to add more work to my current program” or “time to seek out a new program that employs more volume than my current one.” Another thing I’d like to point out in the face of the current prevailing wisdom in the powerlifting world: It is entirely possible to get great strength gains just training a lift a couple times per week. The current trend seems to be recommending everyone (especially drug-free lifters) train every lift 3-4 or more times per week.

These were experienced lifters with an average of five to eight years under the bar and an average squat of ~155kg. Every group had non-negligible strength average strength gains. Every person in the 4-set group made strength gains, and the average strength gains over 10 weeks in the 8-set group were around 37kg (82lbs). Yes, there is a trend for higher frequency to yield better results (one, two, three), but you can certainly get stronger doing a lift just once or twice per week. Another interesting thing to point out about this particular study – the point of diminishing returns doesn’t even seem to be kicking in yet at 8 sets for these experienced trainees. The difference in average strength gains between the 8-set and 4-set group was actually greater than

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the difference between the 4-set and 1-set groups (again, the difference isn’t statistically significant, but the effect size was considerably larger). Although 8 sets to failure may sound like a ton of work for a single training session, this study indicates that it’s perfectly reasonable. Another thing to point out about the awesome results the subjects got – this wasn’t even a periodized training program (which tend to yield better results). It was the same percentage of their 1rm, for the same number of sets, week-in and week-out. They didn’t even do any lower body exercises EXCEPT squatting. However, the average squat gains across the board were still 10-20% on average. Fancy programs with a ton of bells and whistles may be more fun and engaging (which shouldn’t be discounted), and may produce better results yet, but you can DEFINITELY get stronger on a basic meat-and-potatoes training plan. This should be obvious, but just to explicitly mention it – 8 sets to failure (average of 7 reps per set) was not enough to cause overtraining, rhabdo, and death. It’s the level of volume that the participants responded the most positively to.

Another thing worth mentioning: Although doing more work yields better strength gains, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s efficient. The 8-set group gained about 80% more strength on average than the 1-set group, but they did about five times as much total work (131 total reps versus 670 total reps) over the six weeks of volume manipulated training. As I’ve said before, it’s entirely possible to get results with a low volume program, but it probably won’t give you the BEST results. And although the process gets less and less efficient the more you do (less gains per unit of increased work), more gains are still more gains.

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When comparing the 1-set group to the 8-set group, you’re looking at ~five times as much work for ~80% better results. One last practical caveat – before ramping up the volume (especially if you’re training close to failure as these guys were), make sure your form is good. If you get a ton of practice with great technique, you get stronger and further ingrain great technique. If you get a ton of practice with bad technique, you’ll still get stronger, but you’ll further ingrain bad habits you’ll have a much harder time unlearning.

Practical Application

So how should you apply this information to your training? Well, here’s a super simple decision tree:

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Disregard the HRV bit if you’d like (I made this for a presentation for Elite Fitness Mentoring where I’d already talked about HRV, but you can read more about it here), and substitute it with “feeling great and energetic” for “high HRV” and “feeling crummy and worn down” for “low HRV.” Essentially, if you’re getting stronger, don’t fix what isn’t broken. If you’re not getting stronger, assuming you aren’t feeling worn down all the time, do more.

That could take a few different forms:

1) sticking with your current program, but doing more work sets or adding dropback sets

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2) starting or increasing accessory work targeting specific weaknesses

3) adding more work for your stalled lift on another day of the week The amount of work you do doesn’t need to double overnight, but if you look through your training journals and see that a lift has been stalled for a year, and you’re doing the same amount of work for that lift today as you were doing a year ago, you’ve probably found your culprit.

If you find yourself unable to increase training volume while still recovering, the factor bottlenecking your progress is probably work capacity (read more about it here and here). In this case, you still need to eventually do more work, but you need to take a step back (put maximal strength on the back burner for a while so you can focus on increasing work capacity) so that you can ultimately take a step forward (increasing training volume productively).

Wrapping it up

As an athlete or coach, you should have a lot of tools in your toolbox. However, increasing training volume should be one of the tools you always keep at the top of your mind. If you don’t see any glaring issues in program design, you already have good technique, and you’re taking care of business outside of the gym, simply doing more is the most reliable way to keep making progress.

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Peaking – AKA, How to Hit PRs in Meets How many times have you heard someone say something like this, “Well, I squatted 500 in the gym a few weeks ago, but 450 felt heavy at the meet and I missed 475.” That’s because they peaked wrong. I’m even convinced that if you ONLY hit your gym PRs in meets, you peaked poorly. If you’re good at programming, meets should be PR city.

Here is a breakdown of my last two meets:

August 2012 Gym PRs (under the same circumstances)* – 625 squat, 415 bench, 625 deadlift Meet – 650 squat, 419 bench, 645 deadlift

May 2013 Gym PRs (under the same circumstances) – 725 squat, 420 bench, 675 deadlift Meet – 750 squat, 425 bench, 710 deadlift

*I had hit a couple bigger benches in the gym before my meets, and before my 2013 meet I had pulled more with straps. However, I’m a low bar squatter and squatting low bar before benching makes a little biceps tendonitis flare up, so I listed my gym PRs after low bar squatting to mimic meet conditions, and I listed my strapless DL PRs.

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I don’t intend for my own example to be perceived as bragging. This is essentially what meet numbers SHOULD look like compared to gym numbers. When you walk into a meet, you should be set for PRs across the board. Any other outcome, barring something beyond your control (getting sick on meet day, sustaining some random injury at work, no AC at the meet venue, etc.), either indicates that your training lifts didn’t mimic meet lifts (high squats, bounced benches, hitched DLs, etc.), or your programming was bad. Oh, you may want to chalk it up to some trite excuse like, “oh, it was just a bad day.” Well, why was it a bad day? Because you failed to peak properly. Simple as that.

Matthias Steiner hit a 12kg (26.5 pound) clean and jerk PR to win Olympic gold in 2008.

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So, now let’s examine the factors that influence how well your peak goes:

1. Training volume leading up to the meet This is an important factor. I’ve written about this subject before here. Peaking 101 – you’re training hard, you taper volume, your body supercompensates, and you’re stronger on meet day. Well, if you’re not training hard in the first place, there’s really no peaking that can occur. There’s no overreaching from which you can supercompensate. And when I say “training hard,” I’m not talking about hitting a vein-popping 1rm or 3rm. I’m talking about putting in volume. High-intensity stimuli (heavy freaking weight) tend to cause primarily neural adaptations which tend to occur fairly quickly. Increasing volume, on the other hand, will have cumulative effects that may take a few weeks to fully recover from once overreaching occurs.

If you train a lift only once per week, and in that session you get in less than 25 or so heavy working reps, and then you pack it up without hammering accessory work hard, you simply haven’t been doing enough work to warrant a taper, and if you try, there’s no overreaching to warrant a supercompensatory response from your body. Higher frequency helps fix this problem (because you can get in a lot more volume over two or three sessions without having to kill yourself in any given one of them), and if you prefer lower frequency, make sure you focus on constantly increasing your training volume leading up to a meet, so when you DO pull back, you actually benefit from the taper.

2. How long you take to taper

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This is another common mistake. People either tend to overdo or underdo tapering. Overdoing: You either see people who read old Westside articles about the “delayed transformation” method and trying to taper volume over 3 or 4 weeks, only to peak a week or two before the meet (because, keep in mind, you only peak for a short period of time, and then optimal performance quickly becomes detraining). When you’re aiming to squat 1100 and you’re cranking out 12 training sessions a week, you may need that long to taper. When you’re the other 99% of lifters (especially raw lifters), one week of lowered volume followed be one week of deload is plenty. That approach works great even for me personally. I may take one more week to not push quite as close to failure (same general training plan, but shave a rep or two off of everything), but I only purposefully taper for one week before my deload. In my experience, very few people are strong enough to warrant a taper longer than two weeks before meet week. During this period, maximize your schedule for sleep. Shoot for 10 hours a night, or at least an extra hour compared to your norm. On the other hand, other people think “peaking” means just taking a session or two off before a meet. They may hit their openers Monday, skip training the rest of the week, and compete Saturday. That’s simply not enough time off. (Warning, it’s about to get bro-sciency, but this is a reflection of my experience and conversations with a LOT of lifters) It’s enough time for your body to get shifted into recovery mode and for you to lose your “edge,” but not long enough for you to start really getting the itch to tear into some weights. Your physical strength and your psychological aggression simply don’t have enough time to manifest themselves. It’s like preparing for battle the next day, but then being caught off-guard by your enemy during the night. Be willing to take some time off. If you trained for several months to get ready for a

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meet, one easy week and one off week isn’t going to make you weak. You think strength that took that long to build is going to leave you so quickly? Trust the work you put in, and give your body a chance to reward you for your efforts.

3. Nutritional factors

For people cutting water weight: get the weight off as fast as possible, and put it back on as fast as possible. Don’t spend hours jogging in a trash bag the day before a meet. Get in a hot tub or run a hot bath. Water has a much higher thermal conductivity constant than air, which means more heat is imparted into your body, so you sweat WAY more. Get that weight off fast, then have a couple gallons of 1/2 Gatorade 1/2 water waiting for you. Then hit a buffet. You should be heavier than you were prior to the water cut within an hour or two of stepping off the scales. Don’t let a botched weight cut ruin your meet.

The night before and the entire day of the meet, eat as much salt and as many starchy foods as possible, and drink as much water as possible. You want a huge bloat. I recommend cutting out caffeine a few weeks before the meet. You’ll be re-sensitized by meet day, and you can use that to your advantage. High doses of caffeine have been shown to reliably increase power output, but only in people how are caffeine-sensitive. I’ll usually have a coffee and a monster in my system before my first squat attempt, and drink 4 or 5 more highly caffeinated beverages throughout the course of a day. It makes weights feel much lighter and move much faster. And, before anyone asks, this caffeine strategy is about maximizing weight lifted, not about maximizing cardiovascular health. And besides, it’s just one day, so no big deal.

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So, there you go. I’m sure I glossed over some details, but contained in this post are the basics of consistently PRing in meets. Get your volume in in your pre-meet training cycle, take a week or two to taper volume and a week of deloading, make your water cut as fast as possible (if you cut), consume massive amounts of carbs, salt, and water, and use caffeine to your advantage. If you don’t feel comfortable setting up your training plan, hire a competent coach or take the time to study training logs of lifters who consistently do well in meets. On meet day, you shouldn’t be wondering IF you’ll PR, the only question should be, “HOW BIG those PRs will those PRs be?”

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Increasing Work Capacity A common question I get asked has to do with how to effectively build work capacity.

First, let me just start off with a working definition of work capacity, and an explanation of why it’s so important. Work capacity is, essentially, the total amount of work you can perform and recover from.

The total volume of work you expose your body to essentially determines the magnitude of the training effect you receive from the work. We all intuitively know this. You don’t walk into the gym, warm up, do one easy set of 10 biceps curls, and expect to find yourself ripping the sleeves of T-shirts any time soon. You have to expose your muscles to more of a training stimulus.

How do you progress then, to attain your 18 inch pythons of glory? Well, obviously, you do more work. You pick a more challenging weight, increase you sets do more exercises, decrease you rest intervals, etc. It’s not rocket science, and we all know that eventually, if you want your arms to grow, you’ll have to do more work.

However, this concept seems foreign to most people when you apply it to anything besides arm hypertrophy. The fitness world has become so entranced by minimalism that we’ve forgotten that eventually you just have to do more work. People are surprised when they do the same program with the same sets and reps and the same accessory work for several months, and they eventually plateau. Then they ask about it on a message board and get a response like, “oh, you’re doing too much so you can’t recover. Dial back what you’re doing and you’ll keep getting stronger.”

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So, lo and behold, they dial back their training volume and the gains start coming again. Only they last for a mere 4-8 weeks. Then they plateau even harder. Why? They weren’t getting stronger. They were peaking. Their body was used to a certain level of work. When they reduced the amount of work, supercompensation happened, and they could put more weight on the bar. However, that’s not something that happens indefinitely. But, the fact is, it “worked” for a while, so this person ends up banging their head against a wall on a super low volume routine wondering why they’re not getting any stronger, not questioning the efficacy of their new routine because it worked initially.

Eventually, after months of wasted time, they decide to change things up. They start increasing their training volume, only to find that it beats them up, their lifts start regressing, and they start losing motivation to go to the gym. So clearly low volume was the way to go, they’ve just hit their genetic ceiling and are in for a lifetime of hard-fought, incremental gains. Then they weep and drown their sorrows in cheesecake. Let’s dissect this little (perhaps all-too-familiar) vignette: 1) The guy originally plateaued because he wasn’t increasing the stimulus to his muscles and nervous system. Remember the SAID principle (specific adaptations to imposed demands)? The demands didn’t change significantly, and eventually the guy’s body had adapted all it intended to. Sure, as he initially got stronger, the slightly heavier weights were a slightly greater stimulus, but his body finally reached the point that training was no longer disrupting homeostasis enough to elicit a response.

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2) He dials back the volume and gets stronger! It’s a miracle! Or…it’s what happens when your body is used to adapting to a certain level of stress, then you dial back the stress and your body is still used to the same magnitude of response. It would help to look at training in the (overly simplified, but still instructive) light of simply tearing a muscle down and building it back up. Let’s say you’re muscle mass is currently 100%, and your training breaks it down 20%, and since you’re plateauing, you build it back up 20% between sessions: 100 – 20 + 20 = 100. Then you dial back how much your tearing your muscles down, but your body is used to recovering 20% between sessions: 100 – 17 + 20 = 103 – 17 + 20 = 106. However, the fun doesn’t last forever. Your body catches on to the game, and your recovery again aligns itself with the training stress: 106 – 17 + 17 = 106. Viola, another plateau.

3) When he tries to add back in more volume, his body is used to recovering from less per session. However, he’s still trying to train at maximum intensity: 106 – 20 + 17 = 103. He perceives himself as getting weaker, and sees no way around the plateau.

Work capacity, in essence, increases the amount your body is used to recovering from. As it increases, you can increase your total training load, therefore the stimulus to your muscles and nervous system, therefore your results. There’s a catch, however. As you’re increasing your work capacity, you shouldn’t expect to be a peak performance (and certainly not PRing). PRs come when you’re recovery outpaces stress. The whole point of increasing work capacity is for stress to slightly outpace recovery until recovery catches up to the stress. Once you’ve increased your work capacity and allow recovery to catch up, you’re in a position where you’re able to tolerate much more volume, which means a greater stimulus, which means an increased potential for gains. Also, it gives you more ability to taper and hit PRs at meets. You know those guys

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who always hit their biggest lifts in training, but fail hard at meets? Typically, they’re the ones who never trained with high enough volume to get any significant supercompensation when they tapered.

Basically, increasing your work capacity over time is THE ONLY way to continually make gains. You can only say you’ve reached your genetic ceiling when you no longer have the ability to increase your work capacity.

So, that finally brings us back to the question: How does one actually go about increasing their work capacity? For a full, in-depth answer, I’d recommend you read Supertraining, some Zatsiorsky, some Verkhoshansky, or some Issurin. This answer is more based on implementation and strategies that have proven themselves effective over time. There are several different ways. The one in the original question really isn’t a bad way to do it. Adding sets DOES increase work capacity. Let’s say you can do 3 sets of 3 with 315 on squat. What’s easier? Trying to go 325 3×3 (assuming you’ve exhausted your linear gains), or doing another single with 315 at the end? The single, obviously. Then a double the next session, then a triple the one after that. Once you could do 6-8 triples, you could drop back to 3 sets, and probably go 335 3×3 and do it all over again. That’s a 20 pound increase in about 2 months. Not too shabby. The key is that adding one rep per session isn’t all that taxing on your body over your established baseline. Then when you drop back to just 3 sets, it’s less volume than you’ve grown accustomed to, setting you up nicely for the subsequent re-ramping of the volume.

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Another version of that same idea is the Doug Hepburn method. He’d pick a weight he could do 8 singles with, and slowly add an extra rep to each set until he was doing 8 doubles, at which point he’d increase the weight and start over with singles again.

A more sophisticated way is the way Sheiko waves volume week to week, but always increases volume over time. A program for a ranked lifter (i.e. a novice) usually starts with a week that’s the exact “right” volume, based on where the trainee’s at. The second week has significantly higher intensity, with a slight increase in volume, the third week dials back the intensity a bit but raises the volume, and the fourth week drops the volume and intensity, allowing for supercompensation. This same pattern basically holds true for months as well. Then, when you’d start over, you’d dive back in with slightly higher volume to continue to drive adaptation. Unfortunately, not all of Boris Sheiko’s writings have been translated into English, but you can see the progression from ranked lifter routines to CMS/MS routines, to MSIC routines. The volume increases incrementally as the lifter gets stronger until you’re on a MSIC routine that makes you want to cry just reading it. Another way is to increase training density. Although this doesn’t increase your work capacity in the strictest of terms (total volume you can handle), it does increase your work capacity PER UNIT TIME, allowing you to supercompensate when you spread you sets back out. Let’s say you’re doing 5×5 with 315, and you’ve plateaued. You currently rest 5 minutes between sets. Next workout, just knock 15 seconds off your rest periods. Continue to do so each workout until you’re only resting 2 minutes between sets. You could probably then jump to 335 5×5 with 5 minutes between sets again. This method has the drawback of not increasing your total

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training volume which can make peaking for meets a little trickier, but it’s ideal for someone who doesn’t have room in their schedule to increase their weekly gym time.

Another way to increase work capacity is to add extra workouts. This method was popularized by Westside, and can be easily implemented (although what I’m about to say isn’t how they do it). Let’s say you squat 315 5×5 twice per week, and you’ve plateaued. Try adding in a third squat day. Start with 225 5×5. Just the simple act of practicing the motor patter more often MAY get your maxes moving again. However, 225 5×5 shouldn’t be enough to mess with your recovery. If anything, it would enhance recovery by promoting blood flow without inducing any more muscle damage. Add weight on your third squat day until it becomes difficult to get 315 5×5 on both of your main workouts (maybe 275-295 5×5). Then drop the third workout. You should be able to increase the working weight on your main training days. Then, slowly build back up the weight on your third squat day again, initially starting very light.

Finally, just something to keep in mind: over time, your total training volume MUST increase. Most of these suggestions I’ve written about tell you ways to effectively wave volume and benefit from a short-term reduction in volume once you’ve acclimated to SLIGHTLY more volume. As you progress, BOTH the peak volume you’re handling, and the reduced level of volume need to increase. So if you’re working from 3×3 to 6×3 now, eventually you’ll need to only drop back to 4×3 and increase to 7×3, then from 5×3 to 8×3, etc. If you’re adding a third workout to two 5×5 days, those days will need to eventually become 6×5 days, or 10×3 days, or some other loading pattern that adds up to more overall volume. The reason I gave examples of waving volume was that waving helps make the overall increase in volume over time easier to manage. If you’re plateaued doing 5×5, you can’t just start doing 8×5 and make progress

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forever. The way to add volume is to make the peak volume of a wave higher, and the reduced volume slightly more. That way you’re never overreaching too far, you’re still giving yourself a break for supercompensation, and you’re gradually increasing the total magnitude of stimuli your body can handle, and therefore your potential for growth. Increasing work capacity really is the “secret” to long-term progress if ever there was one. The best lifters, over time, have simply developed the ability to do more work than anyone else, so they get better results than anyone else. Look at the Eastern Bloc PLers, successful nations in weightlifting, pro strongmen, and practically any other group of incredibly strong people for plentiful examples with surprisingly few exceptions.

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The Bogeyman of Training Programs (and Why It May Be Just What You Need) It’s always interesting to see how long it takes for scientific practices to gain traction on the internet, and then in gyms everywhere. Sometimes there’s an exciting paper, it gets discussed on social media and across the internet, and then people become guinea pigs within weeks or months. Other times, it’s a slow burn – creatine has been researched for well over 2 decades, but only recently (in no small part because of the great work of Examine.com) have most people accepted that it’s both safe and effective.

Daily Undulating Periodization (DUP), also called Daily Nonlinear Periodization, has been another beast entirely. It’s an idea that seems to be gathering cobwebs in the fitness world at large, in spite of the fact that it’s been well-supported in the scientific literature for over a decade.

Sure, a few articles on popular websites have popped up here and there, and a lot of the better coaches have incorporated DUP into their programming, but the concept of it hasn’t taken root generally yet. It sounds so scientific and complicated, and that scares people. However, I’m here to explain it in simple terms, and tell you how you can use it in your own training.

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DUP primarily serves to mitigate the repeated bout effect – the idea that the more you’re exposed to a stimulus, the weaker your reaction to it will be. Think about your first days in the gym vs. now – back then you gained strength and size much faster, and you got much sorer after each session – that’s the repeated bout effect in action. With conventional training, you’re exposing your body to essentially the same stimulus every time you train. Sure, you’re going to apply some sort of progressive overload, but the volume is similar, the weights are similar, the reps are similar, and the goal is incremental progress. An alternative is a periodized plan, with shifts in training variables every few weeks. However, the theory behind DUP is that even periodized plans don’t go far enough in varying the stimulus to mitigate the repeated bout effect – several weeks is still plenty of time to adapt to a stimulus. Indeed, some research from Charles Poliquin showed as much back in the 80s – changing stimulus every 2 weeks wasn’t any better than classic linear periodization (1).

With DUP, rather than changing your volume/intensity/rep ranges every few weeks, you change them every day you train. That way, your muscles don’t adapt with as much specificity as they otherwise could, decreasing the impact of the repeated bout effect allowing responsiveness to training to remain higher. Now I’m sure one of the questions I’m going to get is, “So bro, basically this is saying that muscle confusion is scientific, right?” I almost hate to dignify this with a response, but I know I need to beforehand – DUP is only “muscle confusion” in the broadest sense. It maintains that the body will respond more strongly to more novel stimuli, BUT without the haphazardness of what is typically seen as “muscle

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confusion.” This isn’t barbell curls today, dumbbell curls tomorrow, preacher curls after that, followed by drag curls = all kinda gainz. It’s more like squat with more reps and volume today, then squat heavy doubles a couple days from now, and squat with a classic 3-5 sets of 5-6 reps a couple days after that. You still get the motor learning benefits of frequent exposure to a motor patterns, while retaining the benefits of enhanced muscular responsiveness to changes in stimulus. So, enough theory – let me throw a study at you as proof of concept:

In one of the classic studies in this area, two groups of subjects that had been training for an average of about 5 years prior to the study (not elite athletes by any stretch of the imagination, but they at least had some time under the bar) used either a linear periodization, or a DUP training plan.

The two plans were set up thusly (from Rhea et. Al. 2002):

The results? Mindboggling. These two groups had put in essentially the exact same work over 12 weeks. The workouts were the same, the order and structure were just different.

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The DUP group experienced almost exactly double the results. 28.8% vs 14.4% improvement on bench press, and 55.8% vs. 25.7% improvement on leg press. Several other studies have shown similar results, but the study groups weren’t large enough to reach statistical significance (often a problem in training studies).

Of course, to be honest about the data, there is one study showing that block periodization may be slightly better than DUP under certain circumstances.

However, the fact remains, DUP is a better setup than most of the popular programs out there. So, to make this article useful, let’s go into how you can set up a simple DUP program for yourself, and how to make adjustments moving forward. Step 1: Choose exercises. These should be the exercises you’re trying to improve in, or close variations of them (i.e. close grip bench is fine for bench press, but DB incline may not be the best choice)

Step 2: Pick 3 different set/rep schemes for each exercise. The Rhea study showed that 3×4, 3×6, and 3×8 is plenty of variety, but some coaches I’ve talked to who rely heavily on DUP have told me that larger swings works as well. In general, make these in line with your primary goal. If you’re trying to gain size, 12s, 8s, and 5s might be perfect. If strength is your main goal, 6s, 4s, and 2s might be a better option. Step 3: Define how you’re going to overload each lift and set/rep scheme

Step 4: When you plateau on one set/rep scheme, make some substitutions that keep the integrity of overall program intact.

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Example:

Day 1 (combo strength/hypertrophy day):

Squat 5×5, progress by adding weight

Bench 5×5, progress by adding sets until 8 sets are attained, then drop back to 5 sets and add weight

Deadlift 6×3–>4; Start with 6 sets of 3. When you can get 6 sets of 4 with a weight, go up next week.

Day 2 (hypertrophy day):

High bar squat 3×10, progress by adding sets until 5 sets are attained, then drop back to 3 sets and add weight

Close grip bench 3×12, progress by lengthening the eccentric from 3 seconds per rep on week 1, 4 seconds per rep on week 2, and 5 seconds on week 3. Then add weight and go back to 3 second eccentrics on week 4

RDL 5×8, progress by adding weight

Day 3 (strength/overload day):

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Chain squat, Start at your current 5rm. Add 5 pounds each week until you can no longer do a double. 2 Board press, 4×2 – progress by adding sets until 8 sets are attained, then drop back to 4 sets and add weight. Rack pull from mid shins – work up to a conservative 3rm. Pull it for one more rep each week until you hit it for 5 reps. Then add weight and start over with 3 reps.

Once you stall with one of your progressions, simply substitute it for something that accomplishes the same purpose (max strength, hypertrophy, or a blend thereof) and keep rolling. Scary sounding programs aren’t so intimidating when you can apply a paint-by-numbers approach to building them, are they? Or, if you don’t want to add your own creative flare, you can just run a linear program for each lift on each day, but still achieve DUP simply by rotating workouts. So instead of crazy sets/reps/progressions, it could be as simple as sticking with the same set/rep scheme on day 1, having a different one for day 2, and having another one yet for day 3, and running each training day as if it was a linear progression – adding weight as you’re able. Like:

Day 1

Squat 5×5

Bench 5×5

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Deadlift 5×5

Day 2

Squat 3×12

Bench 3×12

Deadlift 3×8 (who does 12 reps on deadlift?)

Day 3

Squat 3×3

Bench 3×3

Deadlift 3×3

It can be as simple as this example, or way more complicated than my first example (adding in RPEs, biofeedback, and all kinds of goodies). The elegance of it is that it’s not a rigid workout – it’s a system you can work with regardless of your experience and confidence in programming.

Hopefully now another bogeyman can be laid to rest.

(1) POLIQUIN, C. Five steps to increasing the effectiveness of your strength training program. Natl. Strength Cond. Assoc. J. 10:34–39. 1988.

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In Defense of Program Hoppers; DUP Revisited Ever since I wrote my article on Daily Undulating Periodization (DUP) a couple months ago, I’ve had a nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right, like something was a little bit off. (If you haven’t read the first article, or if you don’t know what DUP is, I’d suggest you check it out first) Physiologically, I’m not sure the rationale behind DUP totally makes sense of the situation. Not that it is entirely nonsensical, but I had a feeling that the effects and benefits couldn’t be explained solely by the physiological mechanisms proposed.

The basic notion is that your body meets a new stressor, and responds strongly to it. The more times it’s exposed to the same stressor, the weaker the reaction to it is. When you give someone similar workouts week-in-and-week-out their body habituates to the stressor, so the rate of adaptation slows down. This is known as the repeated bouts effect. With DUP, since you’re changing the volume and intensity with every training session, you’re not dealing with the exact same stressor all the time, so less habituation takes place, so your body keeps adapting faster. DUP, the theory goes, minimizes the factors contributing to the repeated bouts effect, so you get better gains from it. That’s the basic theory, and it’s certainly a plausible one. And I certainly believe that it can account for some of the differences observed in the research. However, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced these physiological differences don’t account for the entirety of the difference, or perhaps even the majority. I’d like to go back to the study I used as an illustration in my first DUP article, Rhea (2002).

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Just to recap the study, two group of people trained their bench press and leg press. One group did linear periodization (LP), and the other group did daily undulating periodization.

The LP group did 3×8 for each movement three times per week for 4 weeks, then 3×6 three times per week for 4 weeks, and then 3×4 three times per week for 4 weeks.

The DUP group did 3×8 for each movement one day, 3×6 the next training day, and 3×4 the last training day of each week. They continued with that pattern for the 12 weeks of the study.

Training volume was the same, average intensity was the same, but the DUP group got, on average, twice the gains of the LP group.* 28.8% vs 14.4% improvement on bench press, and 55.8% vs. 25.7% improvement on leg press.

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So let’s just stop and think about this for a moment. Volume and intensity, which are generally considered the most important factors for strength and hypertrophy, were equated. Simply changing around when people did which workout made a big enough difference to result it basically twice the gains for the DUP group. Let’s think about something for a moment, though. Are the sets of 6 on Wednesday REALLY that different from the sets of 8 on Monday? Are the sets of 4 on Friday REALLY that different from the sets of 6 on Wednesday? Although the stressors are slightly different, are they really so different that your body wouldn’t experience the repeated bouts effect? I don’t think there’s a definitive answer, but I’m skeptical of the notion that your body’s adaptations are so specific that its response to training at 75% 1rm (about what you’d use for 3 sets of 8) would have no bearing on how it would subsequently respond to training at 80% (about what 3 sets of 6 would be) or 85% (about what 3 sets of 4 would be).

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However, I think there’s something else going on here. I think there’s a psychological component that is quite important. There’s an old British proverb that has become popular in sports psychology, “a change is as good as a rest.” This notion is captured in the Russian weightlifting concept of “staleness” – the idea that if an athlete does the exact same type of training for too long, they’ll lose motivation and burn out emotionally, leading to decreased performance and adaptation. Let’s do a scary thing with a scientific study. Let’s forget about the data for a moment, remember that the participants were human beings and not robots, and step into the subjects’ shoes. You’re in the LP group. First day in the gym/lab. 3 sets of 8 leg press and bench press. Time to kill it. Let’s give this 100% and hop aboard the gain train. Workout went well. Looking forward to the next 12 weeks. Second training day. You gave it everything you had on day 1. You’re a little sore, but you’re pretty sure that if you push yourself, you can lift a little more than you did a couple day ago. Sure enough, you get sets of 8 with 5 more pounds on your bench press and 10 pounds more on your leg press. Feeling good about yourself.

Third training day. Man, it took everything you had to make improvements on day 2. Getting those sets in with a little more weight seems a bit more intimidating today, but you’re going to

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give it your best. You end up having to repeat the same weights on bench press, but you get 10 more pounds on leg press. Not bad.

Fourth training day. Really not looking forward to this. 3 sets of 8 again?! Stalled on both. Oh well, I’ll do better next time.

Fifth training day. 3 more sets of 8? If I HAVE to. Do I seriously have to do two and half more weeks of this exact same workout? Now you’re in the DUP group. First day in the gym/lab. 3 sets of 8 leg press and bench press. Time to kill it. Let’s give this 100% and hop aboard the gain train. Workout went well. Looking forward to the next 12 weeks.

Second training day. 3 sets of 6 for each. Fewer reps mean I can go a little heavier than day 1. Time to load up the bar/leg press and destroy these weights.

Third training day. 3 sets of 4. Heck yes, even heavier. Low volume today, too, so walking out of the gym feeling good. I am a god among men. Fourth training day. 3 sets of 8 again. Good week of training last week. I’m pretty darn sure I can get more weight than I did on day 1. Sure enough, I can. Let’s keep the gain train rolling. Fifth training day. 3 more sets of 6. Let’s keep this momentum rolling. If I could go up for 3 sets of 8, I bet I can do the same for 3 sets of 6. What do you know, I can. Let the sweet, sweet gains shower down upon me forever.

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You see where I’m going with this. Even though both groups were doing the same workouts across the 12 weeks of training, the way the LP program was structured all but ensured that the subjects would hit a wall with each set/rep combination at some point, and even if the participants WERE able to keep adding weight to the bar, the only exciting thing about the training was the gains – the workouts themselves were bound to get pretty dull, pretty quickly.

For the DUP program, since each workout was always a bit different from the previous one, they would be a little more novel and exciting, and it would take longer for the participants to reach a point that they couldn’t progress with a certain set/rep scheme, thus avoiding the demotivational effects of failure. Those factors – enjoyment and novelty, can affect perception and effort, which can impact performance and training effect. If you do two equally difficult tasks, the one that is fresh and challenging without throwing you too terribly far outside your comfort zone is the one that will seem easier, and the one you’re going to pour more effort into. Like I said previously, if we lean solely on physiological explanations for DUP’s success, we have to ask ourselves, “Are sets of 6 on Wednesday really that different from sets of 8 on Monday? Are sets of 4 on Friday really that different from sets of 6 on Wednesday?” It’s not that I’m saying the repeated bouts effect is totally unimportant, but I don’t think you can lean on it, and it alone, to explain the difference.

So, what do we do with all this?

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Let’s take a look at some of the popular training programs floating around out there, and try to understand why people tend to hop from program to program. I’m sure there’s an element of chasing the exciting new thing – the strength world’s flavor of the week – but I think there’s more to it than that. Let’s start by looking at the various beginner routines out there. When you look at the Starting Strength program, or Strong lifts 5×5, or any of the other LP programs, what do you see?

Basically the exact same workout every time you walk into the gym. The same exercises, with the same volume and intensity, in the same rep ranges, 5 pounds heavier than last time. I’m not saying it can’t work, but for many people it’ll be just as much a test of their patience as it will be a test of their strength. Why not keep the latter while dispensing with the former? When you move past that, you see a much broader range of approaches. There’s Sheiko with vanilla exercise selection and the same general intensities, with weekly fluctuations in volume. There’s Westside with a load of exercise variation, but similar volume and intensity week to week. There’s the Cube and 5/3/1 that have more weekly variation in loading, with the Cube having a broader array of exercises than 5/3/1. There’s Madcow and the Texas Method with variations in volume and intensity workout to workout, but the same training setup week to week. Going back to the Rhea DUP study from earlier in this article, the same principles apply. Some things change (volume and intensity with each session), while others remain constant (exercise selection and the structure of the training week). In all these examples, there’s variety of some sort or another to keep the training fresh, while retaining enough consistency for you to gauge progress.

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The great thing about this scenario? They all work. Plenty of people have gotten good results with all of them.

So what do we make of the program hopper? Are they ADD, lacking diligence and motivation? Or are they simply trying to find the type of training that clicks with them?

Motivation comes from both intrinsic and extrinsic sources. Your choice of training plan can substantially affect your extrinsic motivation. The more you enjoy your training, the more extrinsically motivating it is. It’s the whole behaviorist idea of reinforcement. The more you enjoy going to the gym and training, the more that reinforces the behavior. The more apt you are to continue lifting, and the more effort you’ll put into your training. Conversely, if you’re intrinsically motivated to train, but your training plan bores you to tears and you stop looking forward to going to the gym to carry out the training you have planned, it starts setting up a more aversive relationship with training. When you like what you do, it sets up a positive feedback loop. You enjoy training, so you’re more motivated to train harder, so you get better results, so you enjoy training more, so you’re more motivated to train harder, so you get better results, etc. Worst case scenario is that, even if the training is psychologically appropriate, it’s not physiologically appropriate. In that case, you can retain the training structure that you enjoy, and make some changes within that framework to get the results to start coming again. Easy peasy. When you don’t like what you do, it sets up a negative feedback loop. You don’t enjoy training, so you’re less motivated to train, so you get worse results, so you enjoy training less, so you’re less motivated to train, etc. Best case scenario here is that you get good results in spite of

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hating your training plan – the results of training are motivational while the training itself is demotivational. Certainly not the worst possible scenario, but why suck it up and deal with such a scenario when it can be improved upon? Not to mention, this isn’t Soviet Russia or Bulgaria where your ability to lift a barbell is directly related to your ability to provide for your family. Why hate the process, in spite of good results, when you’re just doing it for personal enjoyment anyways? There are other options out there that have worked for loads of people that you could also get results from, while also enjoying training.

Now, obviously different people are affected more or less by different motivational factors. If your only drive to train is to be the biggest and strongest you can possibly be, you’ll probably find yourself enjoying any type of training that “works” for you, because the primary reinforcer is the result of the training, not the process of it. But keep in mind that not everyone is wired like that – many people do want to get stronger and sexier, but the results themselves aren’t the only thing that draws them to the gym. Maybe they lift for social reasons or for stress relief or just to stay healthy. People competing at a high level (or striving to) are usually in the first category, while more casual lifters tend to be in the second. It’s worth pointing out that not everyone finds the same type of training enjoyable. Personally, I know that if I got my lifting advice from the internet when I first started and thought the only way forward was to run an LP program, just adding 5 pounds to the bar each workout for sets of 5, there’s no way in hell I’d have stuck with it for more than a couple weeks. However, there are people who totally dig training in that style. More variety and ambiguity drives them crazy, while predictable workouts and easily measurable progress are very motivating.

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I still think the goal should be to stick with a training plan long-term – for 12 to 16 weeks minimum. However, I don’t think you should necessarily stick with the training plan you have NOW long-term. Just because you’ve done a program for a week, that doesn’t mean you have to do it for 15 more. Try out a few training plans for a few weeks apiece. When you find one that’s enjoyable and clicks with you, where you say, “Hey, I’d really look forward to training like this for the next year or so,” then stick with THAT one. Until that point, program hop to your heart’s content. You may find you enjoy more exercise variety, or more changes in rep scheme, or weekly changes in volume and intensity, or you may just like doing the same thing every day, a little bit heavier. Until you’ve tried, you don’t know what type of training you’ll find motivating and productive.

The key is to find something that meshes with your unique psychology (motivational factors) and physiology (it actually makes you bigger and stronger). When you find it, stick with it. Until then, don’t feel like you’re married to any particular program because you used it for 2 weeks. *I realize that subsequent research hasn’t been AS eye-popping as Rhea’s 2002 study, but there is a trend in strength training right now moving toward DUP. Additionally, though most of it hasn’t been published yet, Dr. Mike Zourdos has done a lot of research that’s either in review or being prepared for publication showing DUP’s benefits specifically for powerlifters. Here’s a link to his dissertation for anyone interested. So while we can’t make any definitive statements about DUP being better for all people, at all times, in all circumstances (which is obviously a ludicrously high bar in the first place), this is based on the general assumption that it tends to be better than linear approaches, and Rhea’s

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study was used our illustration since it just make it easier to dig our teeth into some of these concepts.

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Study Write-up: Sprints Are Anabolic*, Even When Fasted! …but With Big Gender Differences This is by far the most interesting journal article I’ve read in a long time. It touches on so many things that are relevant to all of us – fasted training, sprints vs (?) lowintensity cardio, gender differences, and insulin (so, by extension, peri-workout nutrition). On top of that, it’s a really well-controlled study that uses a really challenging protocol, so it should be more applicable than most. I’ll warn you up front, the beginning of this post will be pretty dry and sciency, but stick around and I promise it’ll get exciting by the end. The study is called “Sprint exercise enhances skeletal muscle p70S6k phosphorylation, and more so in women than in men” by Esbjörnsson et. Al.

What they were doing:

This was essentially a follow-up study. The same researchers had used a similar protocol in a 1996 study, and found a pretty substantial hypertrophy response in women after 4 weeks of doing sprints 3x per week (+25% in cross-sectional area of type IIB fibers), with NO hypertrophy response in men. Obviously that’s a puzzling result, since men tend to hypertrophy easier than women do, primarily – it’s generally assumed – due to differences in testosterone levels.

Since that 1996 study, more research had been done on gendered responses to sprinting protocols, examining the mechanisms that could explain the difference – primarily the via the mTOR pathway – which “…controls the initiation of protein translation and ultimately skeletal muscle growth.” In short, various protocols had shown that the mTOR pathway wasn’t activated

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in men due to sprinting, so Esbjörnsson wanted to repeat the original protocol that had produced gender differences in hypertrophy to see if women and men would have differing mTOR responses, which would then explain the differences in hypertrophy.

Methods: They recruited nine men and eight women, aged 20-30, who were active and healthy but didn’t compete in anything at the elite level. The testing protocol was brutal – report to the lab fasted, then 3 successive Wingate tests with 20 minutes rest in between. The Wingate test is a 30 second, all-out sprint on a stationary bike to measure your anaerobic power. It may not sound difficult, but it’s generally considered one of the most crushingly hard research protocols in existence. Doing it three times is, for lack of a better term, insane.

They took muscle biopsies before the first sprint and 140 minutes after the last, and they drew blood before the first sprint, between sprints, and 9, 80, and 140 minutes after the last sprint.

What they found:

1) When controlling for fat free mass, there was no significant difference in power output between the men and the women. That’s a HUGELY important point, since that means, normalized to negate body fat differences, the men and women were exercising at the same relative intensities. So the potential contention that difference in response may be due to one gender or the other working harder simply isn’t founded.

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2) There were also no significant fiber type differences between the men and the women. So it can’t be contended that the differences in outcome were actually due to fiber type differences. After ruling out fiber type and work rate as potential differences, it really seems like the influencing factor has to be gender – which is exactly what the authors were going for.

3) mTOR phosphorylation after exercise was increased about 120% on average, with no significant differences between men and women.

4) AMPK (a protein that, more-or-less, has an antagonistic relationship with mTOR) phosphorylation was not different between men and women, or between pre- and post-exercise.

5) p70S6k, a downstream protein in the mTOR signaling pathway, was elevated in both men and women, but the increase was 230% in women and only 60% in men. (VERY important implications here that we’ll discuss later)

6) Plasma leucine (the amino acid most associated with mTOR activation) was significantly higher in men pre-exercise, but decreased significantly more in men pre- to post-exercise, though it decreased significantly in women too.

7) Lactate levels were the same at rest between genders, and plasma lactate increased significantly for both genders, but increased more in men than in women when measured between sprints. 8) Glucose levels weren’t significantly different at rest and increased in both genders in response to the sprints, but the increase was larger in women.

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9) Serum insulin levels weren’t significantly different at rest, and increased in both genders, but the increase was roughly 3x over baseline in men, and 5x over baseline in women.

10) Serum growth hormone levels were higher at rest for women, but increased to a larger degree in men, though peak values weren’t significantly different.

11) There was a pretty strong correlation (r = .68) between increase in p70S6k and increase in insulin in response to the sprints.

Making sense of it all: I warned you that it would be a little science-heavy at first, but here’s the pay-off. There are a couple of really exciting implications here. First and foremost – if you train and don’t get to eat right away, though it’s not optimal, you certainly don’t need to worry about getting “catabolic.” These people were training fasted, doing an absurd protocol, and didn’t eat for 2 hours after they worked out – and they STILL had elevated mTOR – one of the primary markers of anabolism. Secondly (this is the important part) – energy status of your cells has a lot to do with hypertrophy response to the same stimulus.

Let me break it down for you

a. Women had a larger rise in blood glucose, so the liver was putting out more glucose to be used for the sprints.

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b. Women had a larger increase in insulin, so there was a larger hormonal signal to drive glucose uptake into the muscle.

c. Women had a SMALLER increase in lactate. Lactate levels acutely decrease insulin sensitivity.

d. Women had a SMALLER decrease in plasma leucine Add all this together, and the men’s muscles were in a much more depleted state post-exercise than the women’s. mTOR is, to a degree, a “fuel gauge” for the cell.

So, what you wind up with is the SAME activation of mTOR due to exercise, but significantly blunted downstream signaling in men, as evidenced by the much smaller increase in phosphorylation of p70S6k. Implications (one serious, and one *sort of* joking, and one to make you go “hmmm”):

1. If either hypertrophy or the maintenance of muscle while dieting is your goal, consider eating or supplementing with some carbs before or during really depleting workout. Although the jury is definitely still out regarding pure resistance training and carbohydrate supplementation, this study seems to suggest that some carbs around your training would have a beneficial effect on workouts that are similarly challenging to your anaerobic energy systems.

Obviously the rest periods (20 minutes) make this a difficult study to generalize to traditional circuit training in general, but this at least seems to suggest that, as long as cellular energy status is maintained, HIIT may actually be anabolic. At the very least, the type of training described in

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this articles is definitely NOT catabolic to muscle tissue, even when done in a fasted state with no food consumption for over 2 hours post-workout.

Interestingly, the authors of the study propose that one reason that the women may have had a larger spike in insulin is that men tend to have higher catecholamine output (epinephrine and norepinephrine) in response to sprint training, and catecholamines have been shown to blunt insulin secretion. Maybe that should call into question the SUPER JACKED HARDCORE preworkout you take, considering the correlation the authors found between rise in insulin and phosphorylation of p70S6k (and thus, hypertrophy)

2. The differences in gender response here may help explain why CrossFit women are so freaking jacked. The physiological responses these women had to SEVERELY depleting training – elevated glucose, elevated insulin, blunted elevations in lactate, smaller decrease in insulin – might suggest that they’re metabolically suited to this type of training. At the very least, we have mechanisms to explain a previously-observed hypertrophy response. 3. Hypertrophy is not just a man’s game. This study sheds some light on the fact that there’s a gendered response to various hypertrophy stimuli. I think it’s pretty well-accepted that high muscular tension tends to cause more hypertrophy in men than in women. However, stressing the energetic capacity of the muscle cells evoked a larger response in women, at least in this study. What’s more, as was previously established, the primary response is in the most powerful fibers – type IIB!

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Thanks for wading through this one with me. Not as clear-cut and straight-forward as my belt vs. beltless article, but I think this one gave us the opportunity to touch on a lot of interesting topics.

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Cardio and Lifting – Cardio Won’t Hugely Impact Your Gains in the Short Run, and May Be Beneficial for Strength and Size in the Long Run The strength and fitness worlds have, unfortunately, fallen prey to cardio fear-mongering, and I think that’s to their detriment. At this point, it should be indisputable that aerobic training can improve almost every major marker of health, however, I think that it might actually improve your strength and size gains (or, at the very least, not hurt them) as well.

Short-Term For starters, we don’t really have to guess about the short-term effects of cardio on strength and size gains . I’ll give you the cliff notes.

1) You can still get bigger and stronger with doing strength training and cardio simultaneously.

2) In the short term, concurrent training (strength training and cardio together) is about 31% less effective for hypertrophy, and about 18% less effective for strength. 3) Frequency and duration of aerobic training affected strength and hypertrophy gains – more frequency and volume of aerobic training meant smaller strength and size improvements.

4) When looking at the data more closely, mode of exercise mattered. Running, but not cycling, negatively impacted strength and size gains.

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So, there’s one major takeaway here – aerobic training does not hamper strength training in and of itself. The effect starts materializing when it begins causing additional stress to the muscles and soft tissues. Running, with its impact element, affected strength and size gains especially as volume increased, whereas cycling didn’t. I’d venture that the old-school bodybuilding staple of incline treadmill walking would also have minimal effects, just like cycling, due to its minimal impact, and hence its minimal addition to training stress.

If your choice of cardio is 1) low impact, and 2) not overboard on volume and intensity, you shouldn’t have to worry about it negatively affecting your training or your results. There’s also a strong vein of broscience suggesting that low intensity steady state cardio may actually aid in recovery from workouts by promoting blood flow to the muscles without causing further damage. It makes sense intuitively (and I’ve noticed it to be true in my own training), though there’s not any studies confirming it at this time.

My friend Alex Viada is a poster boy for combining aerobic and strength training as an ultra-endurance athlete and an 800 pound squatter.

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Long-Term

So, short term, running for hours on end all the time may not be the best idea, but a reasonable volume of low impact stuff is fine. But what about long-term effects? This is where the potential benefits come in. This part is a little more theoretical, but also a lot more exciting. For starters, there’s preliminary evidence that aerobic training increases intra-muscular DHT conversion. For those of you who clicked on the study, yes, it’s in rodents, so I realize that we can’t put TOO much stock it in. However, the potential implications are huge, especially for drug-free athletes. Not to mention – the training protocol wasn’t anything crazy: 30 minutes, 5x per week.

DHT is a derivative of testosterone which binds more readily to androgen receptors and stays bound for longer – allowing it to exert its anabolic effects for a longer period of time. The linked study found that aerobic exercise can increase the activity of the enzyme that converts testosterone to this more potent androgen, without altering the levels of the sex hormones in the blood. Essentially, if this finding holds true in humans, it means you can get a lot more “bang for your buck” from the testosterone you produce naturally. Luckily scientists have begun studies examining the effects of exercise on DHT in healthy humans. Though there’s not a ton of research yet, early studies ARE finding that exercise (in this case, sprints) affects DHT in healthy young people as well, and aerobic training can increase DHT without affecting testosterone in middle-aged men. So, maybe cardio is a little “manlier” than you’ve been led to believe!

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Programming

To add a little context to this discussion, we also need to bring up periodization. The effectiveness of any programming is based upon the work capacity of the athlete – the amount of work the trainee can perform and recover from. In all the literature on periodization and program design, one major principle is that work capacity should be built from general to specific. Start with a strong foundation of generally being able to move for long periods of time, progress to more specific movements, and finally work on movements that are highly specific to competition.

In these longer-term programs, building up work capacity at the beginning of the training cycle is necessary for the volume and intensity of training that’s necessary to hit PRs at the end of the cycle. Aerobic work can be used to build up that base. I’m sure someone will object and say, “Well sure, people write about that in training books, but no good strength athletes ACTUALLY train that way.” I suppose no one told Ilya Ilin, Olympic champion weightlifter and one of the greatest strength athletes walking the face of the earth. Near the end of the article: “Ilya has a program that encompassed 10 months and went from swimming and rowing to a gradual inclusion of the lifts, to an ultimate elimination of everything but the lifts and squats.” The Chinese weightlifting team, whose lifters have been winning international competitions like they’re going out of style for the past several years, also jogs or plays aerobic-based sports regularly to improve and maintain conditioning and work capacity. Also sprinters, who are some of the strongest and most explosive athletes pound for pound in the world, get a large portion of their training volume from “tempo runs,” which is basically a fancy way of saying “jogging.”

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Body Composition Next, aerobic training positively influences body composition. Yes, I know, “abs are made in the kitchen.” However, the combination of aerobic and resistance training has been shown to improve body composition more so than either in isolation. Resistance training increases metabolic rate, while aerobic training decreases hunger more so than resistance training, which is perhaps what makes the combination especially potent.

With improved body composition comes a host of improved hormonal and metabolic markers. Improved insulin and leptin sensitivity, increased testosterone, lower estrogen (since adipose – i.e. fat – tissue contains the aromatase enzyme which converts testosterone to estrogen), and many more – all of which contribute to an improved biochemical environment for muscle and strength gains.

On Energy Something else to keep in mind is that lifting heavy things is an energy-intensive endeavor. A 2000 study found that energy expenditure when deadlifting is almost linear. If you’ve been training for a while, you’ve probably noticed this in your own training, or in training others. I’ve seen relatively new lifters take the 20 rep squat challenge and be just fine afterwards. Maybe they squat 200 pounds for 20 reps. Sure they’re a little winded afterwards, but they catch their breath pretty soon, and can continue with their workout soon thereafter.

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I made the mistake of squatting 405×20. I will never do that again. I felt like I was going to die. Am I in THAT much worse shape, aerobically, than the guy who’s fine after squatting 200×20? Not necessarily. Double the bar weight means double the work and double the energy expenditure (if you assume the findings for DLs hold true for squats – and there’s no reason not to) in the same amount of time. If you double your strength, your training isn’t just twice as demanding on your muscles. It’s also twice as demanding on your aerobic system. So if you get twice as strong without also improving your conditioning, recovery time between sets increases dramatically, so you simply can’t do as much work per session and handle the same training volume. Improving your conditioning may not pay huge dividends in the short term, but there’s a very real chance that insufficient conditioning could limit your progress in the long term.

Counter Arguments and Context

But what about the arguments against aerobic training? All the people crying that your muscle will shrivel up, leaving you skinny fat?

Check their sources. Oh, in spite of a meta-analysis showing that strength and size improvements absolutely occur with concurrent training, they’ll claim that it’s impossible, and cite research from people running for hours and hours each week in a massive calorie deficit. Well sure, in that context, they may be onto something. Starving yourself while putting in 100 miles of road work every week without lifting isn’t exactly ideal for muscle growth or metabolic health. However, in that regard, they’re less prophets and more just stating the obvious while making huge extrapolations.

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Remember, we’re not talking about running to purposefully open up a huge calorie deficit. We’re talking about aerobic training, accompanied with strength training and adequate calorie intake, aimed at improving performance. Context is everything. As with most things, the dose makes the poison.

Summing it all up

Hopefully, at the very least, you can walk away from this with the assurance that the worst case scenario when combining strength training with reasonable aerobic training is that you’ll still get bigger and stronger, but perhaps at a slightly slower rate. However, when programmed correctly, it can actually improve your results, and your body composition as well! Share this around with your cardio-phobic friends. Hopefully they’ll see the light and “cardio” can stop being such a dirty word in the strength and fitness worlds.

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Practical Considerations for Combining Cardiovascular Training and Lifting After a huge response to the previous article, I got my friend Alex Viada to go into a little more depth on the subject. Combining the two is what he does for a living, so he’s the guy to really talk about application.

After Greg Nuckols posted his excellent piece on Cardio and Lifting, I was more than pleased when he offered me the opportunity to do a follow up based on my practical experience working with concurrent/hybrid programs, and relay a few of the major lessons I’ve learned both from programming for myself and for my athletes… a group that includes dozens of 200-300+ pound individuals with 450+ pound bench presses, 600+ pound deadlifts, 600+ pound squats, and other such numbers that are useful to throw around in heated internet arguments… in other words, none of these folks are delicate flowers who shrivel up and die when asked to run a few miles. For the strength-focused athlete, incorporating cardiovascular training into one’s program is something that is approached with everything from mild distaste to outright horror- and potentially with good reason. Introduction of cardiovascular training into an already stacked strength training regimen without proper attention paid to recovery or overall work load can result in a loss of strength, overtraining, and underwhelming performance gains in the aerobic realm to boot.

This is an extreme case, however- it is not terribly difficult to intelligently incorporate aerobic conditioning into a strength program, and as Greg’s article points out, if done correctly the net

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effects can be improved recovery, greater work capacity (both specific and general), and overall just not feeling like a generally un-athletic heap of crap when trying to go up a flight of stairs.

In my experience, when it comes to training hybrid athletes (those who train for strength and endurance, concurrently), the major considerations in designing a program are: Recovery management, energy systems management, managing progressive overload in the aerobic arena, and correctly timing workouts in the microcycle.

Figure 1: The author on a bike. You helmet does not have to look this silly.

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Recovery management and choosing the correct form of activity Resistance training and “aerobic” training both tax the body’s energy stores and various structures in a number of ways- certainly both forms of activity consume energy stores, cause muscle tissue breakdown, stress bones and connective tissue, and so forth. What is important to remember, though, is that the level of stress is very different between the two, and if properly managed, the body can recovery from a greater overall level of stress provided the TYPES of stress are varied.

For example- sprinting and high repetition squatting are relatively similar in terms of physical stress- both involve relatively high peak loads at momentarily acute joint angles, as well as heavy eccentric and concentric stresses, so treat these as nearly identical workouts in your planning (and understand that they can, in fact, be combined). On the opposite end of the spectrum, slow, easy cycling or swimming are completely different than standard resistance training- far less trauma to the muscle fibers (very low mechanical stress), far less damage to bone (these are not load bearing, for the most part), and can therefore be programmed with less consideration to heavy lifting.

Without getting into a breakdown of every single kind of exercise, just remember that it pays to examine HOW your existing routine is stressing your body, and choose your aerobic exercise modality accordingly. Pushing your leg strength to the limit or focusing on your squat? Avoid heavy sprinting or fast cycling, and opt for low intensity swimming, low intensity cycling or even rucking (hiking with a weighted pack) as your cardiovascular activity. Bench specialist? The erg or the pool are doing you no favors. SHW athlete? Forget running entirelyrucking is an excellent option, (possibly even superior to cycling, since few things are less

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comfortable than putting 300 pounds of pressure on your crotch.), just make sure you have solid, supportive, well-fitting boots.

Another point to consider- to maintain explosiveness and specificity, ensure that the aerobic activity chosen is as DISSIMILAR to the required movement patterns as possible, particularly if you are an athlete who typically struggles with rate of force production. Swimming tends to hurt Olympic lifters less than endurance cycling, while cycling interferes minimally with the bench press. Rucking, because it uses movement patterns very different from most lifts in general (no acute joint angles, low intensity movement, etc.) has been (in my experience) the MOST tolerable for all strength athletes. This sounds like common sense, but seems to escape many individuals- the body adapts to how it is trained, and if you perform similar movements with different cadences, you may be “training” your body to perform sub-optimally in both. Of notedespite all the arguments both for and against “speed’ work for powerlifters, I find that incorporating speed work for concurrent/hybrid athletes is nearly a must, while for pure strength athletes it can often be optional- implying that frequent RFD work is more important for athletes who are performing high volume non-explosive activity on a regular basis. This is consistent with the findings in the summary presented here.

Energy systems management- proper recovery and recuperation The second most critical piece to remember- think about what energy stores you’re depleting, and recover accordingly. A true LISS (Low intensity steady state) session WILL deplete your glycogen, but it’s remarkable how LITTLE glycogen you need to perform maximum effort lifting the next day. I’ve had dozens of athletes do 20+ mile runs one day, then squat heavily the next. They may require more bar-only warmups to get loose, and their overall workout duration

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will be shorter (they will NOT have re-synthesized their full glycogen stores by the time they go squat, so their drop down sets may suffer), but their maximum power output will be largely unaffected. The takeaway here is to plan volume accordingly- high repetition/hypertrophy work or extended RFD/dynamic effort sessions require more stores than a few maximum effort lifts, so take care to allow sufficient time after extended aerobic activity to replenish… this can take up to 72+ hours if sufficiently depleted. Do note- no matter how “slow” the activity or low intensity the activity in question is, you still ARE burning glycogen. Ultra runners moving at a 13:00/mile pace can still bonk when they run out of glycogen, and are nearly unable to even maintain a steady walk at this point. Do not think that any sort of “metabolic optimization” (such as eating massive amounts of fat rather than carbs during activity to keep the body burning fat over glucose, or any such nonsense) will preserve glucose for lifting. Also note that, while the post workout “anabolic window” is indeed overstated in terms of its importance, it is not ideal to perform long duration cardio immediately after a lifting sessioncatabolic hormones are already high, significant microtrauma has already been done to the muscles, and the body needs to recover. Short duration sprints may not be contraindicated (as 15-20 minutes of HIIT may be little different than simply performing a few burnout sets of squats), but the athlete should always perform longer duration aerobic activity when the body is at least marginally recovered from resistance training. While I am a big advocate of “big picture thinking”… i.e. the athlete’s overall program over the course of a week matters more than a few minutes here or there post workout… it still pays to consider when the system is primarily

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catabolic, and when you’re better off recovering versus simply wringing out an already exhausted body.

Finally, do note that SHORTER duration, lower intensity aerobic activity can indeed aid in recovery. Anecdotally, simply getting the legs or arms moving can increase blood flow and mobility, prevent tightness, and warm up the body enough for active mobility work or stretching. Endurance athletes have done similar such “recovery runs” for decades for great effect- just make sure not to overcook these sessions and try to turn them into challenging workouts! A “recovery run” 6-8 hours after a leg session (or the next morning) can, certainly anecdotally, speed recovery significantly.

Progressive overload and preventing stagnation

Aerobic activity is no different from resistance training- simply performing the same exercise at the same intensity and volume week after week will result in no improvement. Any individual, even if his or her goal is simply to improve background aerobic capacity, should vary his or her aerobic training to prevent stagnation and chronic overuse. Careful incorporation and gradual accumulation of low intensity, extended duration steady state workouts (The “long slow run” or “overdistance” work, to be done on its own training day), moderate intensity “tempo” work (also to be done on its own training day), and higher intensity, shorter duration sprint or interval style work (which can be done at the end of resistance training, provided it is taxing the same muscles as those worked in the previous workout) should all be incorporated to maximize adaptation and ensure progression.

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Over-doing any one of these will result in overtaxing discrete systems already pushed to their limit- too much sprinting or interval training will rapidly overtax the same energy systems and muscles you need for strength training, while too much low intensity extended duration work will result in chronic glycogen depletion/fatigue and potential overuse injuries.

Figure 2: I have no idea what’s going on here, but it seems relevant

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Also, according to the internet, your CNS will burn out if you do just one thing over and over again. I asked the internet specifically what this meant, but nobody could really agree on an answer, just that it was very bad. So please, don’t anger the internet.

Putting it together So what, then, is the ideal template? One you create yourself- nearly every athlete I’ve worked with has a unique program, with cardiovascular training implemented completely differently. There is no one “magic bullet”, particularly with strength-focused athletes. I HIGHLY recommend that the individual experiment with different types of training, from swimming to aqua jogging, hiking and trail running to rucking with a loaded pack, from distance cycling to cross country skiing. Simply thinking of aerobic activity as “running” is shortsighted- unless you are specifically training for an event, it pays to consider all the above factors when incorporating aerobic conditioning into a program.

It ALSO pays to understand when aerobic conditioning should be decreased or even eliminated. Prior to peaking for competition, strength athletes may find a benefit from reducing volume in the aerobic component of the program- shortening their duration by 25-50% two weeks before competition, and 50-75% the week of competition. If the athlete has consistently done some sort of aerobic conditioning throughout the training cycle, however, I would NOT recommend eliminating it entirely… the athlete has adapted and become accustomed to the regular stimulus, but has also become accustomed to the regular mobility and “loosening up” that aerobic conditioning can provide, on top of the particular hormonal/neurological effects. Loosely translated- don’t change ANYTHING too dramatically right before competition- you may find that the regular cardiovascular conditioning has been helping your

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legs recover, has been helping your appetite, and helping you sleep at night, and suddenly eliminating it a few days before competition may REALLY disrupt things for the worse.

Finally, as Greg noted in his article, for the athlete entering a competitive season, the nature of your aerobic activity should change as you approach competition. Consider WHY you are incorporating it, and do not hesitate to drop it to a bare minimum during a peaking phase- just ensure that this is done gradually. Of the various athletes I’ve had the privilege of working with, from Powerlifters to military Special Forces to Strongman competitors, the VAST majority of individuals have been able to maintain or even increase the rate of strength and size gains when intelligently incorporating cardiovascular conditioning into their routines, and very few of these individuals restricted this conditioning to HIIT, prowler pushes, or other such typically recommended exercise modalities. Regular cardiovascular conditioning improves their recovery, their overall work capacity, and (not unimportantly) truly teaches pain tolerance and a willingness to push through discomfort, an additional benefit that cannot be discounted.

The human body is a remarkably adaptable system- it is designed to respond to whatever stimulus acts it is exposed to, and it is simply foolish to assume that, because strength adaptations and endurance adaptations SEEM at opposite ends of the spectrum, that an individual cannot train for both and reap rewards from both ends, as long as they refuel and recover properly from both.

A final note- treat aerobic activity no different than lifting weights- it PAYS to know what you’re doing. Get a good pair of shoes before running (a good pair for YOU- go to a specialty

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running store and get evaluated, don’t just run in shoes that look fancy). Get a good bike fit if you want to cycle. Get good supportive boots and a well-balanced pack if you want to ruck. Get proper goggles and a real swimsuit (or jammer shorts) and not board shorts if you want to swim. And sign up for a lesson or two from somebody who knows what they’re doing. Most strength athletes are so specialized for power production that we have terrible mechanics for lower intensity activity, and spending a bit of extra time looking at our running form or finding a proper bike saddle will prevent a HUGE amount of issues down the road.

Figure 3: Hoka One One shoes next to a conventional running shoe. Learn what’s out there, and know your gear!

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The final lesson here - if anything, give Greg’s article another read - from practical experience, it is certainly 100% accurate - incorporating aerobic conditioning in no way means a strengthfocused athlete cannot continue to gain size and strength, it must just be done carefully, so as to not lose gainz.

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Cardio Isn’t Going to Kill Your Gains. Need More Evidence? You Got It. After I published my first article on this subject, my inbox was flooded with questions about it. Half of them were asking if I was crazy, and the other half were asking me how to implement some cardio in their training (which Alex already covered in the article above). If you’re in the former group of people, this article is for you. A study in January 2014 covered this topic, and did so on the molecular level. By necessity this post is pretty science-heavy. I’ll do my best to explain things as we go along, but if gene expression and protein phosphorylation aren’t your shtick, feel free to skip to the “Takeaways” section at the bottom.

New species identified: Quadrasaurus Flex

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Without going too far afield (and putting most of you to sleep in the process), there are two major cellular pathways that largely govern aerobic and hypertrophy responses to training. The AMPK pathway is activated by essentially anything that depletes cellular energy – low calorie intake, aerobic exercise, etc. The mTOR pathway is activated by food intake (especially leucinerich protein sources) and resistance exercise. The two are typically thought to be essentially antagonistic. For our purposes here, it’s commonly believed that activating the AMPK pathway is going to shut down the mTOR pathway and the hypertrophy response. It’s much more complicated than that, but most people still assume that aerobic training –> AMPK phosphorylation –> mTOR inhibition –> small and weak. A new study flips that assumption on its head. The study is titled (spoiler alert!) “Exerciseinduced AMPK activation does not interfere with muscle hypertrophy in response to resistance training in men” (Lundberg et. Al, 2013).

Background

The recent meta-analysis I linked to in my first post on this subject essentially said that you can absolutely get stronger while doing some aerobic training. Cycling is better at running for this purpose, and duration is a key factor.

However, the question remains: If you have to do aerobic work and then train directly after, can you still get jacked?

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This is an important question to answer because it’s putting the muscles in catabolic conditions from the outset. The same authors showed that strength and hypertrophy could coexist with aerobic training if there were 6 hours between sessions, but for this study, the participants did their strength training a mere 15 minutes after cycling – when the muscles were already fatigued and glycogen depleted, and when the AMPK pathway was already activated.

The subjects

The subjects selected could be a little more relevant for out purposes. They were young (mostly between 20 and 30) and healthy, performing recreational activities ~3x/week. None of them were currently active in strength training. I’d like to see trained subjects (some strength trained and some aerobically trained would be awesome), but these people were in decent shape, and with a fairly short study period (5 weeks), untrained subjects are more apt to see noticeable changes.

The training protocol

This protocol was a little strange, but certainly creative for ensuring the results were from the training itself and not differences between groups.

The subjects acted as their own controls. With one leg, they performed aerobic exercise followed by resistance exercise, and with the other leg they only performed resistance exercise. The aerobic training was cycling with one leg, and the resistance exercise was knee extensions – 4 sets of 7 reps at maximal effort.

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The one legged cycling sounds pretty freaking hard – 70% of maximal work load at 60RPM for 40 minutes, and then, to ensure fatigue of the “aerobic” leg, work load was increased further and the subjects cycled until failure.

Then, after only a 15 minute break, it was on to leg extensions.

Aerobic training was 3x per week for a total of 15 sessions, and strength training alternated 2x per week and 3x per week, for a total of 12 sessions (but always occurring after an aerobic session).

The results

After 40 minutes of pretty challenging aerobic training, eventually going to failure, peak power in the subsequent leg extensions was 10-20% lower in the aerobic leg vs. the strength training only leg. That was to be expected

Contrary to other studies where strength increased but power output decreased or remained unchanged with strength + aerobic training, both legs increased in power output to a similar degree.

Endurance improved in the aerobic leg but not the strength training only leg. That was to be expected.

Peak knee torque increased for both legs, but while only eccentric increased significantly for the aerobic leg, both eccentric and concentric increased for the strength only leg.

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Hypertrophy was twice as great in the aerobic leg vs. the strength only leg! A 6% increase in quadriceps area vs. 3%.

The aerobic leg had more glycogen (stored carbohydrate) at rest after training, but glycogen stores were about 32% less than the strength-only leg after the single leg cycling, heading into the knee extensions. There were a lot of gene expression changes. I won’t bog you down with all of them, but two worth noting were PGC-1a, which has been implicated in a wide range of health benefits, and myostatin, which inhibits muscle hypertrophy. Increases in PGC-1a were significantly higher in the aerobic leg (10.3-fold increase vs. 2-fold increase), and myostatin reductions were significant in the aerobic leg (65% decrease), but not in the strength only leg (31% decrease).

AMPK phosphorylation was greater in the aerobic leg compared to the strength only leg, but there were no changes in p70S6K phosphorylation (a downstream protein in the mTOR pathway).

Limitations

As stated, it would be awesome if this study was performed on trained athletes. While the study design was cool in that it let the subjects function as their own controls, it’s hard to know for sure whether single leg cycling and knee extensions will translate to regular cycling and squats. I’d also like to see this study repeated with higher resistance training volume. 28 reps is pretty low for a workout, especially if hypertrophy is the goal. It could simply be that the added

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training volume from the cycling was the determining factor for the different hypertrophy responses.

Takeaways The AMPK-mediated effects of aerobic exercise probably aren’t going to negatively affect hypertrophy, even if the aerobic training is performed directly before strength training. Protein synthesis is elevated for 24-48 (perhaps even up to 72) hours post-resistance training which means, to quote the authors, “the very short-lived AMPK activation induced by AE most likely evokes minute, if any, impact on the net protein balance accumulated between exercise sessions.”

At least based on this study, hypertrophy was enhanced by preceding strength training with aerobic training, but improvements in strength were somewhat decreased. This may simply be due to the fact that performance was hindered by the preceding aerobic work – the volume was sufficient for a larger growth response, but the inability to train at maximum strength hampered improvements in concentric knee torque. So, to broaden our scope just a little bit, when combining strength and aerobic training – the hypertrophy benefits may occur regardless of when you do your aerobic training relative to your strength training (and due to decreased myostatin without changes in mTOR signaling, cycling before leg training may actually be better for hypertrophy. Counter-intuitive for sure, but that seems to be what this study is suggesting – at least for untrained people), but cycling to exhaustion right before strength training probably isn’t the best idea if you’re trying to get stronger.

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Making your Novice Strength Training Routine More Effective – Two Quick Tips This is something all new lifters need to read when they’re doing Starting Strength, Strong lifts 5×5, Greyskull LP, or any of the other beginner programs out there. From a practical standpoint, it’ll help them get the most out of their first couple of years under the bar. Taking the long view, it’ll also be a good introduction to some basic principles of program design.

1. Periodize Periodization is a massive subject, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the minutia. However, in the simplest terms, periodization simply means “having defined times in your training where you emphasize different goals.” The application can get really hairy, but the easiest way to periodize your training without an in-depth knowledge of the theory behind it – changing set and rep schemes.

Yep, it can be that simple. So, should you periodize your training? In a word: “YES!”

A 2004 meta-analysis essentially showed that periodized training is almost always better than non-periodized training. To quote the authors, “As a result of this statistical review of the literature, it is concluded that periodized training is more effective than non-periodized training

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for men and women, individuals of varying training backgrounds, and for all age groups.” That’s about the most conclusive statement you’ll hear from an exercise scientist. Here’s the easiest way to periodize one of the common beginner training programs: instead of sticking with the kosher 3-5 sets of 5 reps for everything, proceed thusly: Start with 3×8 for your lifts, adding weight each session until you’re unable to do so. Once you can’t add weight every session anymore…

Switch to 5×5. Repeat the process.

Then 5×3. You don’t have to switch all your lifts over to the new rep scheme all at once. If you plateau on your bench or OHP before your squat or deadlift, go ahead to switch the stalled lift to the new rep scheme, and continue as you were with the others.

This setup allows you to stick with the basic progressive overload you would usually get from a beginner’s program, while also implementing some basic periodization, which will almost certainly make the program more effective for you. You’ll be able to linearly add weight for a longer period of time, and odds are very good that you’ll end up with bigger maxes than if you stuck with 3-5×5 for the entire program.

2. When you finally plateau, add volume Something I’ve never understood is the stock advice of “when you stall with your linear gains, take 10% off the bar, and build back up using the same progression.”

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What’s supposed to happen in the couple of weeks while you build back to your old plateau? Is that when the gains fairy visits to defy the basic principle of progressive overload, thereby granting you a substantially improved response to the exact same stimulus?

Pictured: Gainz Fairy

Instead, if you decide to stick with the same program, deload a little more than you otherwise would, and build back up with 1-2 more sets per exercise. So if you were doing 3 sets, do 5 sets. If you were doing 5 sets, do 6 or 7 sets. The scientific literature agrees almost unanimously that more volume is better for both strength and hypertrophy. Some studies don’t reach significance, but this is mainly due to lack of statistical power due to small sample sizes (a common problem in this field).

If you want to combine these two pieces of advice, deload to about 10% below where you switched from 3×8 to 5×5. Build back up by proceeding from 5×8 to 6×5 to 7×3. This will more reliably keep your progress going than sticking with 3-5×5, deloading a bit, and building back up with the same sets and reps.

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I’m sure if you’re a regular Strengtheory reader, none of this is new to you, BUT it will be new and helpful to a lot of novice lifters. Share it around so they can see better results in their first few months under the bar, and perhaps get their first exposure to the practical application of periodization.

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PubMed Doesn’t Replace a Strength Coach What’s worse than someone who thinks science is worthless? Someone who thinks it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but doesn’t understand it (including its limitations) whatsoever.

PubMed will never replace the need for a strength coach. I think that someone can gain a lot from staying in the scientific literature, and especially by building a solid base in anatomy, physiology, and basic physics. However, if I was choosing a coach and had to pick between someone who knew every strength training study on PubMed, and someone who had been coaching athletes 20 years without knowing the first thing about science, I’d pick the latter every time. Here’s why: Irony Alert – we’re starting with a journal article: “Significant Strength Gains Observed in Rugby Players After Specific Resistance Exercise Protocols Based on Individual Salivary Testosterone Responses.” by Beaven et. Al (2008). However, it is, I’m pretty sure, the most bonkers study in the history of sports science. And the implications are pretty huge. Here’s what they did:

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The researchers put a group of sixteen amateur rugby players (all of whom had at least 2 years of experience lifting) through workouts utilizing 4 different sets/reps/load/rest schemes, each separated by at least 2 days

1. 3 sets of 5 reps at 85% 1RM with 3 minutes of rest between sets

2. 4 sets of 10 reps at 70% 1RM with 2 minutes of rest between sets

3. 5 sets of 15 reps at 55% of 1RM with 1 minute of rest between sets

4. 4 sets of 5 reps at 40% of 1RM with 3 minutes of rest between sets They assessed acute testosterone response – how much it rose or fell short term in response to each protocol.

Then they assigned half the people to train for 3 weeks with the protocol that caused the largest acute testosterone response, and assigned the other half to train for 3 weeks with the protocol that caused the worst acute testosterone response. They used progress week to week – adding weight as able – to estimate changes in 1RM each week. I’ve been emailing the lead researcher, and he’s the first to admit that such an endeavor is inherently prone to error – especially with the 40% group, since 1RM had to be estimated based off changes in bar speed. However, they did retest maxes at the end of each 3 week block.

Then they retested the protocols to see how many people still had their best and worst acute testosterone response to the same protocols (all but 4 had the same best/worst acute responses).

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Then they swapped groups. The people who trained with the protocol giving the best T response initially trained for 3 weeks with the protocol that produced the worst T response, and vice versa.

Then they retested maxes.

Before some of you jump down my throat about the fact that they used acute testosterone response to assign protocols, in spite of the fact that acute hormonal changes may not have as much of an effect on strength and hypertrophy as once thought, don’t worry. The researchers are the first to admit, “it does not prove that T(estosterone) is the effector,” but they do contend, “T can be used as a marker for selecting protocols to maximize functional gain.” Here’s why:

Results:

For the group that trained using the protocol that maximized testosterone (Tmax) response initially, they saw: A ~7% increase in bench press strength, and a 9% increase in leg press strength on average…

Followed by a slight decrease in bench press strength, and a 4% decrease in leg press strength on average when they switched to the protocol that caused the worst acute T response (Tmin).

For the group that trained using the protocol that minimized testosterone response initially, they saw: A ~3% decrease in bench press strength, and a 4% decrease in leg press strength on average…

Followed by a ~7% increase in bench press strength, and a 10% increase in leg press strength on average when they switched to the protocol that caused the best acute T response.

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The interesting thing about this study is that the results don’t only show up when using averages. In the group that used the Tmax followed by Tmin protocol, every single athlete had significant increases in bench press, leg press, and body weight when using the Tmax protocol. When using the Tmin protocol, 6 of the 8 participants either got weaker or gained no strength on the bench press, and 7 of the 8 either got weaker or gained no strength on the leg press.

The same pattern held true for the group staring with the Tmin protocol. For the first three weeks, 6 of the 8 got weaker or gained no strength on the bench press, and 7 of the 8 eight either got weaker or gained no strength on the leg press. When they switched to their Tmax protocols, all of them had significantly better improvements on bench than on their Tmin protocol (though the way it’s worded in the study, I’m not entirely sure whether that means they all actually got stronger, or whether it just means they did better – i.e. perhaps gained no strength instead of losing strength), and all 8 of them got stronger on the leg press.

Interestingly, 3 of the 4 people who got stronger on bench using their Tmin protocol were actually people whose Tmax or Tmin protocol changed midway through the study, perhaps indicating they were able to respond positively to a broader array of stimuli than the others.

Weaknesses of the study:

-they used body weight rather than using MRIs as a crude way to approximate changes in muscle mass (however, they were mainly interested in strength changes, so that’s really no big deal – it’s not a hypertrophy study).

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-They also didn’t report the actual 1RM values, only % change. Even though we know they had at least 2 years of training experience, they may still have not been very advanced trainees – without reported maxes, we don’t know.

-As was previously mentioned, if you look at the actual study, they report % changes week to week, which may be a little inappropriate since they were all projections – however, since they DID retest in between training blocks and at the end of the study, the week to week changes also aren’t all that important.

-Finally, each training block was only 3 weeks long. However, 7-10% average strength increases in just 3 weeks using the Tmax protocols is pretty substantial, especially since these guys had at least 2 years of lifting under their belts.

Sam Byrd has squatted 850+, and does most of his training with about 60% of his max. “Science says he’s doing it wrong,” you may say. Nonsense. Keep reading.

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Takeaways: Here’s where things get crazy. Two of the participants had their best acute T response to 4×5 at 40%, and their worst to 4×10 at 70%. If you pitted these two protocols against each other using groups of 30 lifters for each protocols, I absolutely promise you the average increases in the 4×10 at 70% group would be WAY more than the average increases in the 4×5 at 40% group. 4×5 at 40% is barely any work at all, and we all know more volume and more weight on the bar typically give better results, right?

Except (and I emailed the lead researcher to verify), the two individuals who had their best T response to 4×5 at 40% got stronger and gained mass on that protocol, and either got weaker or failed to improve with 4×10 at 70%. Of course, that runs counter to everything in the scientific literature, except… It doesn’t, because science looks at averages – it has to if you want to use statistics to establish significance. And it plays out in this study too. 7 or 8 people (including those whose testosterone-optimizing protocol shifted throughout the study) had their BEST response to 4×10 at 70%. So if you’re just looking at average responses to each protocol, for 4×5 at 40% you’re looking at 2 positive responses, but for 4×10 at 70% you’re looking at 7 or 8 positive responses – 4×10 at 70% almost certainly had a significantly better average response in this study.

In most studies, those two guys who got stronger with 40% but not with 70% are nothing but statistical noise.

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And that’s the biggest reason why scientific knowledge without a strong experience base is of only marginal utility. Now, I think a strong knowledge base is going to help you glean more from your in-the-trenches experience, and help you generate better hypotheses in troubleshooting problems your athletes may have, but reading about science and talking about it on the internet leaves you with huge blind spots until you’ve spent time training hard and coaching athletes.

A good coach recognizes there are special snowflakes (the 40% guys in this study), and knows how to troubleshoot and try things out until they start seeing results. If you have the means to test acute T response in your athletes every time they’re in the gym, more power to you, but for most of us, that process still takes place using subjective feedback. That’s where the science trails off, and the art of coaching begins. Physiology is great, but individuals often don’t fall into the neat little physiological models we like to use, or have their best results on a training program that, on average, produce great results. Individuals have different genetic makeups, different training histories, different preferences, different goals, and different stressors outside the gym. All those things contribute to how they respond to training. And many of them aren’t static factors either – they shift with changes in time and circumstance. If you could collect data about everything going on in someone’s life physically, socially, and psychologically, you MIGHT (though still probably not) be able to use a purely scientific approach to training. However, in the real world, to get the best possible outcomes, decisions need to factor in the science, past experience, and the situation of the individual.

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Do Men and Women Need to Train Differently? For those of you why don’t know, there’s an absurd amount of misinformation in the fitness industry. In few niches is that more true that training for women. For starters, let me give you the TL;DR of this article – 90% of a woman’s training should be just like a man’s. Allow me to elaborate on the other 10% by going through the major physical differences between men and women that affect weight training, and the impact they should have on a woman’s training program.

1. Larger Q Angle For those of you who don’t know what a Q angle is, here’s an illustration:

The average female has a steeper Q angle than the average male, which means more valgus force on the knee during activity. In general, this fact leads to two suggestions. First, women need to really keep an eye on knee health if they’re doing a lot of running, especially if they have a

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broader pelvis, and thus a bigger Q angle generally (including straight running, soccer, basketball, etc.). The same amount of running has the potential to do more damage to a woman’s knee than a man’s. This isn’t to say women should never run, they just need to be judicious and ensure their knees aren’t collapsing in. Number two: women should focus on VMO work and always squatting below parallel. The VMO helps stabilize the knee when valgus forces are placed upon it, so strong VMOs help prevent ACL injuries for women. Terminal knee extensions (TKEs) and step-ups will help with this. Squatting below parallel will help reduce shearing forces on the ACL as hamstring involvement increases with squat depth. So to recap: A steeper Q angle shouldn’t mean any huge changes in training for women, it just means watching running volume, making sure you squat to the depth you should be squatting anyways, and building some nasty VMOs.

2. Narrower waist Ladies, I have some bad news. Getting a ginormous squat or deadlift usually means you won’t have the most pronounced hourglass figure on the planet.

The two largest determinants of how much force a muscle can produce are cross-sectional area and neuromuscular efficiency. In layman’s terms, a trained woman with the same size thighs as a trained guy (assuming the same body composition) should be able to produce about as much force with her legs as the guy can. This simple formula tends to work pretty well for things like leg press or hip thrusts, but not for squats.

What accounts for this difference? Guys have thicker torsos with thicker abdominal musculature that can better support the pelvis and spine to transfer that force from the legs and hips to the

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bar. To close this gap, ladies need to focus on “core” work even more than guys do. I’m not talking about sets of 500 crunches or buying the latest pseudo-sexual ab gadget. I’m talking breathing paused squats and front squats, farmers walks, waiters carries, and other HEAVY core work that will strengthen the transverse abdominis and thicken the obliques, allowing for better support of the pelvis and spine under heavy loading.

3. Broader hips This isn’t true in all cases, but it is in most. In general, women tend to do better with a wider stance on squat and a sumo deadlift rather than conventional. This is true both because they have the hip mobility to get to those positions which allow them to shorten the bar path substantially, and because a wider stance means a more upright torso, helping to address the problem of having a narrower waist.

4. Fewer and smaller fast twitch fibers

In general, fast twitch fibers are the ones most prone to hypertrophy and that most contribute to maximal force output. There are two implications here for women: 1) You should train even heavier than a man (relative to your max). Since you’re already working with fewer fast twitch fibers, you need to train in such a way as to ensure you optimize the fast twitch fibers you DO have. 2) You should do more volume than a man. Since you’re going to be more reliant on your slow twitch fibers, you need to increase your training volume and include some higher rep work (1020 reps, not 100) to get everything you can out of your slow twitch fibers.

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I remember reading an interview with the Chinese weightlifting coach. When asked how he trains his female lifters, he replied that he trains them just like the men, except with about 15% more volume. Keep that in mind.

One more offshoot here to keep in mind is that since women tend to have a fiber blend that is more fatigue-resistant, they shouldn’t rely as much on rep max calculators. I’ve seen a girl squat 155×15 with a 1rm of 185. 155×15 would project a 1rm of 235-255ish. If a man can squat 185, he’s only going to get 6 or 7 reps with 155.

5. Hormonal factors This is probably what people expected me to lead with. However, I don’t think it’s really worth dwelling on since there’s not really any proactive steps a woman can take to address it (except good ol’ vitamin S). However, it is worth noting that higher testosterone levels are the primary reason there’s a bigger gap between the upper body strength of men and women than lower body strength. The muscles of the shoulder girdle have more androgen receptors than any other muscle group. This means that testosterone’s anabolic effects are most potent on these muscles. As an aside, that’s the biggest reason a big chest and broad shoulders are seen as a sign of virility in men – it’s a sign the man has higher testosterone levels and is therefore probably more fertile than other guys.

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What I Learned on the Way to Squatting 500 There are three types of strong people.

1. Lucky ones

2. Injured ones

3. Smart ones Unless you’re simply a freak, getting stronger requires a mind that can keep up with your body. If you’re not constantly growing in your mental pursuits, you’ll run into some serious problems in your training. You’ll stop getting stronger, start getting hurt, or both.

You would be hard pressed to find an 800 pound raw squatter or deadlifter who get that strong by accident. Knowledge precedes strength. When you apply all the knowledge you have and finally hit a wall, it takes more knowledge to know HOW to get around/over/under/through that wall before you can direct your efforts towards doing so. You may clear a few barriers by accident and luck, but that’s not the best strategy to stake your long-term results on. With that in mind, I’m going to be writing an ongoing series about the main things I learned to reach particular milestones in lifting. I’ll start with my first 500 pound squat, then work in 100 pounds increments. I’ll do the same with my bench, starting at 350 and working in 50 pound increments. Deadlift will also start at 500 and go 100 pounds at a time. My PRs are currently 650/445/655, so hopefully I’ll have three installments per lift (up to 700/450/700) fairly soon. So, without further ado, here’s how I squatted 500 pounds:

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Lesson 1: Work hard. This is the most important thing I’ve learned about attaining anything in life. In some sports, talent often trumps hard work (i.e. you can’t play center in the NBA at 5’7″ by sheer force of will). However, I don’t think this is true for powerlifting, except in extreme cases. I’ll illustrate with something that SHOULD be a death sentence for a power/strength athlete: not having true fast twitch muscle fibers. About 18% of the population has two nonsense copies of the ACTN3 gene which codes for a binding protein necessary for fast twitch muscles to “twitch fast.” Basically, with two copies of the nonsense allele, none of your muscle fibers truly function as fast twitch fibers.

Two different studies have linked having two working copies of the allele to elite anaerobic performance. One showed that elite sprinters and power athletes are much less likely to have the nonsense allele, and another showed that elite bodybuilders and strength athletes are much less likely to have the nonsense allele. None of this should be surprising as fast twitch fibers are the ones with the most growth potential and are primarily responsible for very high levels for force production. However, don’t let another pair of statistics slip by you: about 7% of ELITE bodybuilders/strength athletes, and about 6% of ELITE sprinters have two copies of the nonsense gene. Approximately 1 out of every 15 elite athletes lacks true fast twitch muscle fibers in sports where force output and/or hypertrophy are ESSENTIAL. Let that sink in for a moment. I’d almost guarantee you, though: that 1 in 15 had to work twice as hard to reach the same level of achievement. But if you’re willing to put in the work, you can get there.

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While I was working towards a 500 squat, I learned to work hard. I.e. puked-the-first-4workouts-straight hard. I’ve since learned to pick my battles (somewhat) and give my body a rest when it needs it, but strength is only earned through hard work, pure and simple.

Lesson 2: Form is king

You can lift light weights with bad form. If you lift heavy weights with bad form, you will break yourself eventually. Killer tendonitis in both knees and constant erector spinae strains taught me that lesson the hard way. It wasn’t until I made serious strides in technique that I reached 500.

Lesson 3: Nutrition basics At the point of squatting 500, I didn’t know a ton about nutrition. However, here’s what I did know, which worked just fine at the time:

a) Have some meat in front of you every time you sit down at the table

b) Never be hungry (I went from 170 to 213 in about 4.5 months, and took my squat from 405 to 523 in the same time span. Additionally, I stood up with 551 but got red-lighted for depth. It was deeper than my previous 405, but a smidge higher than 523). Food is the best anabolic on the planet. c) Supplements are to supplement. I’m pretty sure the only things I took when I first squatted 500 were a protein supplement and a multivitamin. Early on I noticed a strong correlation between the number of supplements someone obsessed about taking and how weak they were.

Lesson 4: Atmosphere

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This is a lesson that I didn’t realize I was learning at the time, but it became painfully obvious soon after my first 500. The gym I trained at when I first started lifting was the home of Travis Mash. He was at his peak at the time, and I saw him deadlift and back squat in the 700s and front squat in the 600s fairly often. Additionally, Lavan, the guy I trained with most of the time, was (and still is) slightly wider than most doorways with a 500 pound bench and a pretty decent squat. Also, Joey Smith and a lot of geared benchers would come on Friday nights and all handle 700-800 on a pretty regular basis. Throw all this together, and I’m the weakest person in the picture BY FAR. Oh, except for another occasional training partner named Seth who was only about 150 pounds at the time and constantly just 10-20 pounds behind me in every lift. I think I got stronger just because I saw so much room for improvement in myself. They were my “normal,” so there was no good reason to not get a lot stronger in short order. Lesson 5: You’re only as strong as your stomach I’ll be honest, this is one I’ve gotten away from (to my own detriment). No matter what, I always ended training sessions in my early days with absurd amounts of abdominal work. First I worked up to situps (on a hyperextension machine) with a 165 pound dumbbell on my chest for sets of 10. Then it was with a heavy band around my neck for 10s. Then it was with 90 pounds behind my head for 10s. Never will you regret getting brutally strong abs. Looking back on it, there are safer and more beneficial ways I could have strengthened by core, but those heavy basics worked just fine at the time. How I trained: Westside, mostly. Except it was Travis’s form of Westside. The main modification: DE days start as DE days (8 sets of 2 fast with band tension for squats, 8×3 for

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bench), but after you’ve hit your speed sets you just max with the band tension. Everything else was pretty kosher. Lots of hamstring work, upper back work, and triceps work.

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What I Learned on the Way to Deadlifting 500 pounds This is installment 2 in a (currently) 9 part series. The first was “What I learned to squat 500 pounds”. I’m planning on doing one installment for each 100 pound increment for squat and deadlift starting at 500, and each 50 pound increment on bench starting at 350. Just as a refresher from the first installment: “There are three types of strong people.

1. Lucky ones

2. Injured ones

3. Smart ones Unless you’re simply a freak, getting stronger requires a mind that can keep up with your body. If you’re not constantly growing in your mental pursuits, you’ll run into some serious problems in your training. You’ll stop getting stronger, start getting hurt, or both.

You would be hard pressed to find an 800 pound raw squatter or deadlifter who get that strong by accident. Knowledge precedes strength for all but a few freaks. When you apply all the knowledge you have and finally hit a wall, it takes more knowledge to know HOW to get around/over/under/through that wall before you can direct your efforts towards doing so. You may clear a few barriers by accident and luck, but that’s not the best strategy to stake your longterm results on.”

1. Grease that groove

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Deadlift was a very natural movement for me the first time I tried it. Why? Prior to deadlifting, I spent my whole childhood figuring out the heaviest things I could pick up: rocks, logs, people, etc. On top of that, my family burned a wood fire all winter, so I’d spend a fair amount of time hauling logs, picking 18″ segments of trees up to load them in a trailer, and pushing a loaded wheelbarrow. When I first got a weight set, bending over and ripping something off the ground was pretty second nature to me. What’s more, I found that having the weight on a bar that I could wrap my hands around made the whole process significantly easier. As such, when I got my first little weight set (I was 11 or so. It was a Christmas present in 6th grade), I could load 200 pounds on the bar (as much as it came with. As a note, the largest plates were 25s, so it was a 2-3 inch deficit) and pull it that Christmas morning. In about 3 months I could do 5×10 with 200, and would do that 2-3 times per week on top of all of the other various things I did that required picking stuff up.

The first time I actually pulled a max deadlift with a real bar and 45 pound plates I was 14, and got 405 clean and 425 with some hitching. For most people, when they hear that they assume I’m just a freak. They ignore the fact that I’d been effectively training for deadlifts since I was 5 years old. During childhood, neural development is hugely important. You’re not going to get jacked, but you can improve muscle activation in patterns you practice. You see YouTube videos of 9 year olds in China clean and jerking 135 and wonder how they’re so strong. Actually they probably aren’t much stronger than your typical 9 year old. They’ve just had enough practice to get their tiny little muscles incredibly efficient at Olympic lifting. That’s basically what I did for deadlifts.

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If you didn’t have the same type of childhood I did, you can still benefit from greasing the groove; it’ll just take longer for your nervous system to adapt. However, neural plasticity is a wonderful thing, and if you put in the reps, really substantial neural improvements will occur. This means using less weight for fewer reps, but picking heavy stuff up every single day (if possible), or even multiple times per day. The more often your nervous system is exposed to a stimulus, the faster it will adapt to it. When you’re a brand new lifter, you’re not gaining strength because you’re getting so much more muscular. You’re gaining strength primarily because of neural adaptations, with hypertrophy coming in a distant second in terms of importance. Hypertrophy is important on down the road, obviously, but isn’t of primary importance early on. Doing more reps, more often steepens the learning curve. It’ll feel boring and counter-productive, but you’ll thank me for it in the long run. You’ll be stronger, and since you’ll get more perfect reps in (remember, lighter weight), you’ll have a lower long-term chance of injury and you won’t have to unlearn and relearn form (which can be quite frustrating, and is a product of not taking the time to learn it correctly the first time)

This stands in stark contrast to a few sets of 5, once a week that most beginner programs recommend. I’d say you’re better off with 15 singles, 3-4 times per week minimum until you can deadlift at least 1.5x your bodyweight for all the singles with perfect form and relative ease. The amount of reps your need decreases as you increase in training age, but at first you need to grease the groove.

2. Commit to the pull

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This is crucial no matter who you are or how long you’ve been lifting. Deadlifts are hard freaking work. No two ways about it. On top of that, you don’t actually get to feel the weight before you’re expected to do something with it. You don’t walk it out like a squat, or press it out of the pins like a bench press. It’s just sitting there lifeless on the ground, taunting you. This is especially true for a new 1rm attempt. You may have pulled that weight for a partial, but you have no idea what it feels like when it breaks the ground. As such, you can’t be a mental midget when you’re deadlifting. You have to be 100% sure about your intention to destroy the lift, as well as the lift’s parents, children, and extended family. Compared to the other lifts, not being able to get your head into deadlifting makes a much larger difference. A 635 top squat (705 max) or a 405 top bench (445 max) is a bad day for me; about 90% of my max. For deadlift, there are days I’m simply unmotivated to deadlift and 545 looks up at me and says “not going to happen,” doesn’t budge, and that’s just how it is. For this, it helps to have a ritual. It could be Magnusson’s mini charge, it could be Hatfield’s jump, or it could be as simple as “I’m taking 3 breaths, and on the third, I’m pulling this sucker” (that’s mine). Little things like that take your mind back to the place it was when you’ve done the ritual before (hopefully that place is “ready to destroy worlds”). Sometimes it doesn’t work, but it’s better than just approaching the bar all willy-nilly each time. It also gets you in the same starting position each time you pull to reinforce your groove. I’m a pretty chill guy, but if there’s a lift I’m going to yell, put on loud music, and generally make a fool of myself for, it’s the deadlift. Most people say a generally slow burning rage is the most helpful. That’s the approach I like to take. Once the bar’s loaded, I’ll stare at it like it’s prey that’s about to get it’s throat ripped out. I’ll find a deep, dark place to go to (people who

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know me may find that one hard to believe), put on “Calm like a bomb” by Rage Against the Machine, take about 30 seconds to develop a brief but intense hatred for pretty much all of existence, and then pull. Find something that works best for you, but more than anything, whether you make yourself angry, cocky, or Zen, just be ready to pull.

3. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link And by chain, I’m referring to the posterior chain, of course. When I started, my back was fine, my glutes fired okay, but I had some weak hamstrings. Hypers and leg curls every training day fixed that in a hurry. I found this weakness out via a grade two hamstring strain (sprinting) that bled enough for blood to pool all the way up to mid-calf, so it took extra hamstring work to just get back to where I was previously, much less build from there. Your weakness may be different, but odds are it’s something on the back side of your body (unless it’s grip). Just to point you in the right direction:

If your back rounds instantly (lumbar), it may just be your back is weak, or it may be weak hips (making you need to start the lift with your back instead of your hips) If your lockout is weak because you can’t get your shoulders back, your lats, traps, or thoracic extensors are weak. If your lockout is weak because you can’t get your hips through, your glutes are weak

If you miss around knee height, either your hamstrings are weak or your hips are too far from the bar If you just can’t break the weight off the ground, you are just too weak in general.

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What I Learned on the Way to Benching 350 pounds This is the first of three (planned) installments about the bench press.

1. Practice the pattern

I was a pretty good bencher the first time I tried. The main reason was that I had always done a TON of pushups. When I started playing football in 3rd grade, I asked my coach how I could get stronger. He told me to do pushups. So I did. Every day for the next 3 years. I’d do as many as I could in the morning, after school, and at night. When my parents got me a weight set for my birthday in 6th grade, the first thing I did was max on bench press (I was a bro from the start). I got 150, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of bodyweight. I didn’t lift weights very often at first because I was playing sports essentially year-round (and was told never to lift weights in season), so fast forward another 3 years of essentially only doing pushups, and by my freshman year in high school I was benching 275 with very little time spent under the bar.

This basically mirrored my experience with the deadlift, which was strong from the start because of practice with the pattern from a young age, as compared to my squat, which was an uphill battle for a long time. I’ve seen this with essentially all my friends who have joined the armed forces as well. In spite of sleeping very little, running and marching all the time, and doing enough pushups and pullups to make the most people cry “over-training,” they almost invariably come back from basic training with bigger bench presses than they left with from doing bazillions of pushups.

This is a principle that can be applied to almost anyone, regardless of training age. If I find myself in a rut with my squat or bench, I’ll spend several weeks doing a few hundred

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bodyweight squats or pushups a day, and the increased work capacity, combined with the neural effect of greasing the groove, almost always pays off for me.

2. Train the triceps

I heard bench was all about the pecs when I first started lifting. That was the common wisdom in the YMCA weight room and the school gym. However, when I met Travis Mash and he told me about Westside, I learned about how important the triceps are. Now, looking back it seems obvious because the bench press requires you to extend your arms, but it was pretty revolutionary to a 14 year old. Not much more to add to this point, and in those early days I probably took things a bit too far by over-emphasizing my triceps and neglecting my chest (just like the shirted benchers who taught me how to bench), but it is erroneous to think of the bench press as purely a chest exercise, although obviously you shouldn’t totally neglect pectoral development.

3. Get comfortable with heavy weight in your hands

When I first started training, I used bands and chains all the time (because I cut my teeth on Westside). I’m less sold now on bands and chains being superior to straight weight for raw lifters, but I do think they have one big advantage: they let you feel heavier weight in your hands and move it through a full ROM. Everyone who’s spotted for someone benching heavy weight knows what the “oh crap” face looks like. You lift out a weight to them for a PR attempt, and as soon as they feel it in their hands their eyes bulge, they look like a deer in headlights, and you know they have no chance of completing the lift. Using bands and chains (and nowadays things the Slingshot or the Titan

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Ram) lets you feel supermaximal weights in your hands while still moving the bar through a full ROM, so that when you attempt a new max, the weight at least feels manageable in your hands and you have a fighting chance. When I was starting out, I used bands and chains all the time, so even when I missed lifts I found out the weight was too much when I couldn’t grind it to lockout, not when I got a liftoff. 4. Don’t fixate on numbers. I had a bad mental block with 315. I’d hit 310 in either a meet or in training probably a dozen times, but when I got 3 wheels on the bar I would literally be unable to budge it off my chest. All my other bench press variations were going up (remember, I was training Westside style, so I was rotating through several different bench variations), but my plain old competitionstyle bench press was staying put. My training partner at the time, Lavan, fixed this one day by telling me I couldn’t look at the bar during my workout. Between sets I had to sit up and face away from the bar, and he’d load the weight for me. He made sure to use an odd assortment of 10s and 5s so that after 2 or 3 sets, I honestly had no idea how much weight was on the bar. I ended up benching 330 that day before I finally missed 335. When I finally missed and was allowed to look at the bar, I was both relieved I’d crossed that barrier, and pissed at myself because I had obviously been capable of doing so for quite some time. If a number is screwing with you, having a training partner do something like that for you might just be the ticket to a new PR and fresh gains once you get past the mental barrier.

5. Train with volume

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I always loved benching with a TON of volume. I’d do the normal 9×3 Westside speed work one day, then work up to a max, then drop back for a burnout set or two, then do a DB press pyramid accumulating 80ish reps over 6-8 sets, then direct triceps work, and 8 sets of rows and 8 sets pullups or pulldowns. On my other bench day, I’d work up to a max single or triple on some bench press variation, then strip some weight off the bar and do 8 sets of 5, followed by the same basic accessories from the other bench day. By no means do I think what I just described was optimal, but for bench I’ve always found that erring on the side of too much was better than erring on the side of too little (ditto with squat, opposite for deadlift). If nothing else, it builds the work capacity to help you adapt and supercompensate when you take up a saner training program or taper for a meet.

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DIET The Three Laws of Protein The purpose of this article is straightforward and simple – help you reach your fitness or physique goals with three simple, science-backed tips for getting the most from your dietary protein. Protein consumption is such a popular subject that the basics can be lost in all the noise (and supplement company hype), so the goal here is to simplify and get to what’s actually important.

1. Eat enough protein

How much? .82g/lb. (1.8g/kg). Rounding up to 1g/lb. or 2g/kg may be easier to remember, and getting a little more certainly doesn’t hurt, but the point here is that the crazy recommendations of 2g per pound (or even more) are overkill. As you eat more past that point, rates of protein synthesis and breakdown both increase at essentially the same rate – so again, there’s no problem with erring on the high side, but unless you’re on steroids to further elevate protein synthesis (to make use of extra protein), you hit a point of diminishing returns. On the flip side, if you’re not getting in this amount regularly, you WILL probably benefit from increasing intake. For some people, .82g/lb. may seem like a ludicrously high number. However, if you’re currently under that level of intake, you will accrue benefits as you eat more protein.

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As an aside, increasing protein intake above .82g/lb. may have benefits if you’re trying to lose weight. Protein is more satiating per gram than either carbohydrate or fat, and in a caloric deficit, erring on the high side to ensure you hold onto as much muscle as possible is wise anyways.

2. Space your protein intake throughout the day

A recent study showed that, on average, 24 hour protein synthesis rates are about 25% higher if you space your protein intake out throughout the day, rather than eating the majority of it in one meal. Obviously there are implications for intermittent fasting (personal opinion – it can be a useful tool for cutting, but for gaining size, it’s hard to beat eating food all day. Shocking thought), but also for extreme post-workout nutrition protocols.

In a recent meta-analysis, Alan Aragon, Brad Schoenfeld, and James Krieger showed that postworkout nutrition only “worked” insofar as it increased overall protein intake for the day. Essentially, getting enough protein in your diet is the important factor, not bombing huge amounts of protein around your training session. Maybe there was some wisdom in your parents’ insistence that you eat 3 square meals a day after all (provided they all have a fair amount of protein).

3. Get your protein from high-quality sources This issue is definitely not as important as the first two, but it’s still worth mentioning.

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Whey, in particular, seems to be particularly good at stimulating muscle protein synthesis, leading to hypertrophy. It’s been shown to be superior to both soy and casein for this purpose (and not just acutely, but in training studies showing increased lean mass gains from lifting). Although all possible protein sources haven’t been compared at this point, obviously, as a general rule of thumb animal sources are better than plant sources for stimulating protein synthesis. When in doubt, though there are a ton of options on the market, it’s hard to beat a plain old whey isolate when you need some more protein and don’t have time to make some meat.

Pictured: Gains

The takeaway:

Get somewhere in the neighborhood of 1g/lb. or 2g/kg of protein per day, space your intake out rather than concentrating it all in one period, and prioritize protein sources like whey, meat, and eggs. It sounds so simple, but it’s amazing how often people get sucked in by some exciting new study or fad and forget the basics

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Want to learn more? Check out Examine.com’s series on Schwarzenegger.com. They go into a lot more detail than I do. This article is simply meant as a helpful reminder to some, and a basic primer for others. It’s the type of thing that should be shared around for people who are confused or new to working out – the Schwarzenegger series is for people who want to go into a little more depth.

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Being Strong Is Not an Excuse to be Fat (and Being Fat Is Probably Holding You Back) There are many things I know now that I wish I could go back and tell teenage Greg such as “if you had a book to read along on during loading screens in Madden 2005, you would practically be a literary scholar at this point,” “if she says she doesn’t like beards, she’s no good for you,” and “wearing a fedora is never acceptable.” Also on this list – “Getting strong is no excuse for gaining a lot of fat.”

Astoundingly, this flies in the face of a lot of nutrition advice swirling around in the strength world, particularly as it applies to brand new trainees. The astounding features are twofold. Firstly, it’s astounding that anyone would think that a substantial degree of fat gain is a good idea for any goal where sheer weight isn’t a primary benefit (i.e. anyone other than offensive lineman and sumo wrestlers). Secondly, it’s astounding that numerous people who hear this obviously bad advice, regardless of the source, still take it and run with it. Unfortunately, while “substantial fat gain during periods of intense strength training should be expected and even encouraged” seems like ludicrous enough advice to dismiss out of hand, an alarming number of people believe it. Therefore, it’s necessary to explain exactly WHY it’s bad advice.

The explanation hinges on insulin sensitivity.

Many of you probably know what insulin is and what it does. For people who need a brief primer, insulin is the body’s primary anabolic hormone. It halts almost all forms of catabolism

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(tissue breakdown, including stored carbohydrate and muscle protein), signals for glucose uptake into your body’s cells, aids in amino acid uptake and amplifies protein synthesis, and much more. Basically, it’s the main hormonal driver for adding mass, whether that be muscle or fat.

Insulin sensitivity describes how well your tissues respond to insulin. When a tissue is insulin sensitive, a little insulin goes a long way. When it’s insensitive, more insulin is necessary to have the same effect that was once accomplished with less insulin. Now, I’m not going to deal with how insulin insensitivity and hyperinsulinemia are primary risk factors for a host of chronic diseases. Not my domain of expertise. I’m talking about performance and training goals – gaining muscle, getting stronger, and crushing your competition.

So, the problem with gaining fat while training for mass and strength is this: gaining fat specifically reduces insulin sensitivity in skeletal muscle.

As you accumulate fat, blood levels of free fatty acids (FFAs) increase. Elevated blood levels of FFAs decrease insulin sensitivity in the muscles two different ways. Firstly, they directly decrease insulin sensitivity, and secondly, they contribute to increased muscle triglyceride levels, which also decrease insulin sensitivity. However, it doesn’t stop there. As fat mass increases, the release of adipokines (hormones from fat tissue) also increases. Of these, some (like TNF-a) decrease insulin sensitivity and others (like leptin) increase insulin sensitivity. However, over time, your tissues lose sensitivity to leptin if levels are chronically elevated, so the net effect of these adipokines is also decreased

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insulin sensitivity (and the loss of the effectiveness of leptin – your body’s most powerful hormone for countering weight gain).

Also with increased fat mass comes increased inflammation (related to those adipokines, and a few other factors). Inflammation decreases insulin sensitivity in muscle, AND increases expression of genes that aid in fat storage and creation of new fat cells.

I hope the picture is becoming clear by now.

The more fat you gain, the LESS anabolic insulin is for muscle, and the easier it is to increase fat storage. It’s a positive feedback loop where the more you eat over baseline, and the more fat you gain, the less it benefits strength and hypertrophy and the more it simply increases the proportion of extra calories that go to fat storage.

Jesse Norris is one of the best PLers in the world today. However, staying lean is obviously killing his gains. Imagine how strong he’d be if he gained 50 pounds of fat. Sarcasm.

Implications

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Learn how to count calories.

Seriously. Gaining mass uses the same basic principles as shedding fat, except in reverse. Keep track of weight and waist circumference (a good indicator of visceral fat, which is much more a culprit in this process than subcutaneous fat). If you’re fairly lean to start with, eat at a little above baseline with the goal of gaining a pound every 1-2 weeks, and don’t let your waist circumference increase by more than 1/4 inch every couple of weeks. If the numbers are increasing too fast, bump calories down. If they’re stuck in place, bump calories up. You’ll still probably gain some fat. I mean, you ARE in a surplus, and it’s much easier for your body to store extra energy as fat (relatively cheap metabolic currency) rather than muscle protein (expensive metabolic currency). However, at the sane rate of weight gain I proposed, fat gain shouldn’t be extreme as long as you’re training hard. Minimizing fat gain means that your muscles will stay more sensitive to anabolic signaling than they do on more extreme bulking plans. So, in essence, I think it’s a fool’s errand to try to gain a ton of muscle with absolutely NO fat gain, but the notion of “Let’s gain 60 pounds this offseason with 5000 food calories per day + a gallon of milk per day!” is even more misguided

Also, for sports where weight matters, this approach should be common sense. For weight-class governed sports like powerlifting, weightlifting, or wrestling it’s a no brainer: the more muscle you can have with the least amount of fat possible, the greater your potential. However, the same principle applies to almost every sport in existence because the more force you can generate per pound of weight, the faster and more explosive you’ll be. Additionally, the less

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non-functional fat mass you have, the longer you’ll be able to perform at a high level in any sport with an aerobic component since you won’t be lugging around as much mass.

Short term and long term Short term, you MAY see better results with a huge surplus. Sure, I’ll grant that. However, it’s absolutely a case where there are diminishing returns past a certain point. So if you are seeing better results initially, they’ll be marginally better, NOT exponentially better. And yes, exercise will mitigate the decreases in insulin sensitivity, but that’s still not the same as no decrease at all. You may have to pay the piper later, but that day will still come eventually.

In the long run, gaining a bunch of fat is going to decrease the effectiveness of your training for muscle and strength gains as muscle insulin sensitivity decreases. Additionally, if you need to cut for 16 weeks after your aggressive bulk, you’ve essentially shortened the period of time that you could have been making progress by 2-3 months (assuming you’d need to cut for 4-8 weeks if you’d managed your weight gain better).

Clarifications

By no means am I saying you can never gain any fat whatsoever, or that you have to be 6% body fat year round for your training to be effective. Nor am I saying that you plunge off the deep end and instantly wind up obese and diabetic with moderate fat gain. However, as I see it, there’s really no reason to ever be over 20% body fat for men, or 30% for women (although 15% and 25% are better targets for most people). You’re not going to get massively better results with a 1000 calorie/day surplus than you will a 300-500 calorie/day surplus, and if excessive fat is

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gained in the process, any immediate benefit will eventually be erased by decreased muscle insulin sensitivity.

Get lean. Gradually add size. Repeat the process.

Citations:

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/85/3/662.long

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20973164

ajcn.nutrition.org/content/83/2/461S.full

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18094066

https://www.uoguelph.ca/hhns/grad/courses/HBNS6130W08/HBNS6130W08Week9APSreview copy.pdf

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TECHNIQUE Should You Wear a Belt or Not? The belt vs. beltless discussion is a common one in the strength world. What I have for you guys today is a study write-up to cut through the speculation and actually provide some data for the discussion. The study is titled “The Effectiveness of Weight-Belts During Multiple Repetitions of the Squat Exercise.”

A few notes about the study itself: – It’s actually uses relatively strong subjects. Not world champions, but the subjects had to meet one of two minimum criteria: either an 8rm of 125.5kg (~277 pounds) or an 8rm of at least 1.6x body weight. So these guys at least had a little experience under the bar, which means the results are more apt to translate to people who have been lifting for a few years than if the study had been done on untrained people. – They looked at a lot of different variables. They used a force plate to examine force output, they used a camera system to gather kinematic data (joint angles and how the body moved, essentially), they measured intra-abdominal pressure, muscle activation via EMG, and time it took to complete each phase of the lift (bottom of the lift to 90 degree knee angle, 90 to 135 degrees knee angle, and 135 degrees to full extension). This is good because it gives us a broad picture of how wearing a belt affected the movement as a whole, not just one variable.

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– The subjects used the same load for both sets – their beltless 8rm. This is an important thing to point out. I’ll touch on its importance later.

What they found: 1. The “sticking point” became much more pronounced without a belt. Although there weren’t huge differences between total time it took to complete the eccentric and concentric portions of the lift with or without a belt, the period of the concentric with the knee angle between 90 and 135 degrees increased throughout the sets both with and without a belt, but increased significantly more without a belt. Of course, this is to be expected since the load used was the beltless 8rm, so it would be relatively less difficult with a belt than without.

2. There were no significant differences between belted and beltless with regard to kinematic and force plate data. HOWEVER, in both groups, the amount of forward lean increased across the sets, from a minimum of about 51 degrees to a maximum of about 46 degrees.

3. Intraabdominal pressure was 25-40% higher in the belted group, as opposed to the beltless group.

4. EMG data was taken for the vastus lateralis (a quadriceps muscle), biceps femoris (a hamstrings muscle), external oblique, and spinal erectors.

a) No significant differences were observed for the spinal erectors in the belt vs. beltless set, and muscle activation in the eccentric and concentric phases was actually quite similar, indicating that it takes about the same amount of effort from the spinal erectors to keep the spine extended during both phases of the lift.

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b) No significant differences were observed for external oblique activation either. The EO is one of the muscle used to compress the abdomen along with the internal oblique, rectus abdominis and transversus abdominis. Proponents of beltless training often argue that these muscles will contract harder without a belt to product the necessary intraabdominal pressure. Such was not the case in this study. However, they did observe about twice as much EO activity in the concentric as the eccentric, regardless of belt usage.

c) The vastus lateralis showed significantly more activity during the concentric portion with a belt than without across most time points, and especially during the sticking point of the lift. This increased activation of the knee extensors may help explain the smaller increase in time spent at the sticking point with a belt than without. Both with and without a belt, the VL showed about 50% higher activation during the concentric than the eccentric portion of the lift.

d) The biceps femoris showed about twice as much activity during the concentric portion of the lift than the eccentric both with and without a belt. The biggest difference seen with vs. without a belt was that the increase in BF activation during the concentric portion of the lift increased more across the set with the belt than without. Initially the values were about the same, but activation only increased 31.5% across the set without a belt, vs. 42.5% with a belt.

Implications:

1. In spite of the set with a belt being easier (since both sets were performed with the beltless 8rm), it still resulted in greater quad and hamstring activation, especially during the sticking point and as the set progressed, respectively.

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2. Wearing a belt seems to increase intraabdominal pressure (which should reduce net shear stress on the spine) without diminishing abdominal activation, at least if we assume that external oblique activation is representative of the rest of the muscles of the abdominal wall.

3. Increased forward lean is an undesirable effect of fatigue. The researchers found that the subjects experienced more and more forward lean as their sets progressed. In their discussion at the end of the article, the referenced another article (here) saying that the more proficient someone was at the squat, the more upright they stayed and the more they relied on knee extension rather than hip extension. I’ve written about it here.

4. It seems like abdominal weakness may have more to do with the back rounding at the bottom of a squat than spinal erector weakness. Spinal erector activation was about the same for both phases of the squat, which means that if weak erectors caused the back to round over, the rounding should be expected to start from the moment you unrack the bar. Conversely, external oblique activation was about twice as high for the concentric as the eccentric, indicating an increased challenge to that muscle (and potentially the muscles of the abdominal wall in general).

5. There is a bigger difference in eccentric vs. concentric muscle activity for the biceps femoris (hamstring muscle) than the vastus lateralis (quad muscle). It’s hard to draw definitive conclusions from this factoid, but it could mean a couple things. It could mean that people tend to excessively load the knees relative to the hips in lowering a squat. It could also mean that loading the knees to lower a squat is the more natural pattern (i.e. the Olympic style squat vs. the “butt back” powerlifting style squat). No definitive guidelines can be drawn from this one study, but it’s worth keeping in the back of your mind.

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Based on the variables assessed in this study, it seems like one could use it to argue for training with a belt. Wearing a belt allows you to lift more weight, and even with the same training weights it increases muscle activation in the quads and hamstrings without decreasing abdominal activation. An argument for beltless training either needs counter evidence or a rationale based on other variables.

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Everything You Think Is Wrong With Your Deadlift Is Probably Right Key Points: 1) If you’re afraid you deadlift with your hips too high or too low, it’s probably just a matter of how you’re built. 2) Rounding your back when you deadlift “works,” primarily, by decreasing how hard your glutes and hamstrings have to work to move any given weight. 3) If your back is rounding unintentionally when you deadlift, either your hip extensors are too weak or the weight is too heavy, in all likelihood.

Here is why you deadlift with a rounded back, and why some people deadlift with their hips lower than others. I want to be straightforward about what this article IS, and what it ISN’T. It’s an explanation of why a rounded back deadlift tends to allow people to pull more weight. It’s NOT a recommendation to deadlift with a rounded back, and it purposefully doesn’t address the potential for injury. I’m not a physical therapist. I have my own opinion (the fairly kosher PL opinion that thoracic flexion is probably okay, but lumbar flexion should be avoided), but I am by no means an expert on injury mechanisms and prevention. The question of “what lets me lift the most weight?” and “what’s the safest way to lift the weight?” are two different questions, and I’m only addressing the first one, because the second is well outside my scope of practice. With that out of the way, let’s dive in.

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What are you doing in the deadlift? For starters, the deadlift is not a squat. I don’t mean that in the way most people mean it. People who say this usually mean “you should start with your butt high, rather than starting with a low hip position to ‘squat the weight up.'” I’ll be addressing this misunderstanding later in the article.

All I mean is that the forces your body has to overcome are quite a bit different. The deadlift doesn’t have nearly the balance of knee and hip extension demands that the squat does. Yes, the knees DO have to extend in the deadlift, and yes, knee extension can aid somewhat in hip extension as I discussed in my last article, but these factors do not influence performance in the deadlift NEARLY as much as they do in the squat. Heck, a properly performed deadlift with the bar close to the shin until it clears the knee, has an external moment arm for the knee extensors with a length of basically zero. As an aside, that’s a major reason most people can deadlift more with a trap/hex/diamond bar – your knees can shift forward so your quads CAN actually contribute substantially to the movement, rather than being constrained by keeping the bar in front of you and the shins essentially vertical.

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So, at least in the lower body, hip extension is the primary limiting factor. Other things can limit the deadlift, such as grip and the ability to extend the back again once it goes into flexion, but from the waist down, it’s your ability to produce enough hip extension torque – getting enough juice from your hammies and glutes – that’s the make-or-break factor. We’ll come back to this later when we talk about pulling with a rounded back. So if a deadlift isn’t a squat, is it a problem if I pull with my hips low? Everyone tells me I stiff-leg my DLs and that my hips are way too high. Is that a problem?

You cannot pull with your hips too low. When the bar breaks the floor, it will be directly beneath your shoulder joint. Otherwise, you’d have to be doing what would amount to a partial front delt raise isometric, or a partial straight arm pullover isometric with the weight you were deadlifting. I mean, it’s probably possible, but it 1) would be incredibly inefficient and 2) just doesn’t happen in the real world. Furthermore, the bar won’t leave the ground until your shins are basically vertical. There may be a *very* slight forward shin angle for the first inch or two, but for the bar to have a clean vertical path, the shins have to straighten out pretty quickly, otherwise the bar will shift forward and you’ll lose your balance. (For the sake of nuance, what’s really happening is that the bar will be, at its very farthest forward, under the middle of the knee joint and over the middle of the foot JUST as the weight breaks off the floor. However, it only takes an inch or two of bar movement for “under the middle of the knee joint” to give way to an essentially vertical tibia.)

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So to clarify this concept in nice tidy terms, we’ll treat your arm and shin as fixed, vertical segments when the bar breaks the floor. That leaves us with three basic variables we’re working with: the lengths of your arms, femurs, and torso. Those are the three basic factors that determine how your deadlift will look. Not how an “ideal” deadlift on the Vitruvian man will look, but how YOUR deadlift will look. (At least for the conventional deadlift, although hip abduction/adduction factors in SLIGHTLY, that’s not going to make a huge difference)

Rather than talk through how these three variables will influence your starting position (nothing is more imposing than a wall of text of biomechanical jargon), I made some doodles in MS Paint to illustrate the effects that different segment lengths will have on your deadlift form. In all of these, the torso length is expressed relative to the length of the femur.

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In each of these, the bar is directly below the shoulder, and the tibias are vertical. This is the position in which the bar would break the ground.

In some videos, it may appear that someone is pulling with their hips low because they squat down while setting up for the deadlift, but watch when the bar actually breaks the ground. That is the hip height dictated by their anthropometry and the constraints of the lift. A couple good examples are Mark Henry and Misha Koklyaev.

Deadlifting with the lowest hip position possible will tend to be the most efficient way to pull the most weight. Can you start with your hips artificially higher? Of course. However, that does two things that are typically undesirable: 1) It decreases, even more, the amount of assistance you’d otherwise be able to get from your quads.

2) Since higher hips can only really be accomplished by allowing the knees to drift backward (remember, we’re constrained by some basic geometry here. Since the lengths of the segments aren’t changing, if the hips raise and your hands stay on the bar, your knees will have to drift backward), you’ll typically wind up with your hips even farther behind the bar, meaning more hip extension torque – which is already the limiting factor – to overcome. Here’s what that looks like:

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So here are the takeaways from all this: 1) Pull with the lowest hip position possible. No, you’re not “turning the deadlift into a squat.” You simply have body proportions that make that the most advantageous position for you. 2) If it looks like you’re “stiff-legging” a deadlift, but your knees aren’t drifting backward substantially when you pull, you probably aren’t doing anything wrong. A combination of long legs and a short torso (perhaps paired with short arms) will give the lift a “stiff-legged” appearance, but that’s simply how the deadlift will look for you with your body proportions. No amount of training to get your hips lower will make much of a difference.

Why can you lift more weight when you round your back?

Remember, hip extension strength is the primary limiting factor for the deadlift. With that in mind, the explanation is very straight-forward. Rounding your back a bit shortens the length of the torso in the sagittal plane. In non-nerd speak, it lets you keep your hips closer to the bar

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front-to-back so they don’t have to work as hard to lift the same amount of weight. It’s actually very similar to how you can lift more weight in the low bar squat than the high bar squat – dropping the bar a couple inches lower on your back effectively “shortens” your torso so, all other things being equal, it requires less work from your hips to move the same amount of weight.

The two black lines in the above picture represent your spine in the deadlift (yes, natural kyphotic and lordotic curves, etc. For the sake of simplicity, we’re just assuming it’s flat. It doesn’t change the point, and straight lines are easier to draw in MS Paint.). The numbers assume a lifter is 6 feet tall with average body proportions – 72 inches tall, the torso is about 30% of total body height for the average person, so that gives us 21.6 inches. With the spine in a neutral position, it’s about 15.3 inches “long” front-to-back. With some (pretty substantial) rounding, that number is decreased to ~11.7 inches. That change in length front-to-back represents a huge decrease in the amount of hip extension torque that would be required to lift any given weight. Don’t get hung up on the 24% number, thinking “oh, if I pull 500 with a perfectly flat back, I should be able to pull 620 if I let my back round!” That’s just one example, that would change

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based on degree of rounding, whether your lats, traps, and spinal erectors are actually strong enough to get your back extended again after it rounds, and it would also be counterbalanced somewhat by the increased tension on the glutes and hamstrings that would come with the increased hip flexion required to pull with a flat back. Furthermore, as your spine flexes more, your hip position also changes so that your shoulders will still be over the bar (i.e. your torso still has to stay roughly the same length, front-to-back, as your femur), which negates a pretty fair amount of the advantage. Bret Contreras and Andrew Vigotsky informed me that based on some modeling they’d done after this article was published, the difference is reduced to about 6%, which seems much more realistic. Your body isn’t a physics equation – this is just to illustrate the main reason why you can pull more with a slightly rounded back: for any absolute load, the required hip extension torque needed to lift it is decreased if the spine flexes a bit.

Who better to illustrate this with than the champion of round-back deadlifters himself: Konstantin Konstantinovs. Here he is, deadlifting a casual 350kg (771 pounds). Here’s a screen shot of right when the bar breaks the floor, showing where his spine and hips are when he’s actually deadlifting, and roughly where they would be if he kept his back completely flat:

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As you can see, his hips would be lower in his start position, and they would be quite a bit farther behind the bar, requiring more hip extension torque to lift the same weight.

He has deadlifted 939 in competition, but has said in interviews that he once tried to train his deadlift without letting his spine flex at all, and was unable to pull much over 700 pounds. Obviously an extreme example of this principle. A lot of times when people round their backs unintentionally when lifting heavy loads, they’re afraid it’s because their back is too weak. However, more often than not, the opposite is true. Their back is strong enough to lift more, but the hip extensors aren’t, so they unintentionally round their backs a bit so their hips will have an easier time producing the required torque to lift the bar.

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Takeaways: 1) Contrary to what the internet tells you, you can’t “turn your deadlift into a squat.” All other things being equal, the lower your hips are when the bar breaks the ground, the more efficient your deadlift will be. Otherwise you’d RDL more than you deadlift. 2) If you “stiff-leg” a deadlift but the bar stays close to your shins and your knees don’t drift back a ton, it’s probably not something to worry about. That’s just how you deadlift based on your body proportions.

3) Rounding your back makes the deadlift more mechanically efficient by reducing how much hip extension torque your hamstrings and glutes have to produce in order to lift any given weight.

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Fixing the Good-Morning Squat For those of you who don’t know, a good-morning squat is ostensibly a squat, but when the lifter starts coming out of the hole, their butt shoots straight up, so instead of squatting the weight up, they end up using their hamstrings, glutes, and back primarily, effectively taking the quads out of the movement.

A good-morning squat = when your “squats” end up looking like this. When you squat like this, odds are you’re going to wind up missing the lift when the weight rounds your back over and folds you forward. Consequently, the common prescription is to strengthen your back or hip extensors (glutes and hamstrings) to keep you from getting folded forward. Makes sense, right?

Nope.

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You see, your body is pretty good at optimizing movement. Do something enough times, and your body is pretty good at finding the most efficient way for you to accomplish the pattern, given your strengths and weaknesses. So, when you find yourself GM squatting, you’re in that position in the first place BECAUSE your back and hip extensors are strong. Strengthening them further MAY help you lift more weight, but it only furthers the imbalance that already exists.

Instead, you need to strengthen your quads. When your quads are weak, your butt will shoot right up out of the hole without your shoulders moving much – getting knee extension out of the way without much of a change in center of gravity – taking your quads out of the equation and shifting the load to the muscles that are already strong, and putting you in a GM position. Strengthen your quads, and they can pull their own weight, allowing you to stay a little more upright so you won’t have such a tendency to round forward with heavy weight.

Training your quads will also increase your max more for the amount of effort you invest into the training. If you strengthen what’s already strong, you’ll probably be able to move more weight, but it’s a matter of diminishing returns. If you bring up the weakest link, you get a much, much better return on investment. Now, before anyone jumps down my throat for implying that training the “posterior chain” isn’t the be-all-end-all of lower body training, I do absolutely think it’s important. Most new lifters need more work on their posterior chains, and it should be prioritized to a point. However, once you develop a GM squat problem, that’s a good indicator that the posterior chain is definitely up to snuff and no longer the limiting factor of performance. Also, I understand that mobility problems, especially poor ankle dorsiflexion, can cause this problem is the absence of any

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strength imbalances; however, in my experience, most lifters can get around that just by getting some weightlifting shoes with a raised heel. And, just for social proof and all that (as an aside, it’s a little funny I feel like I need to justify a recommendation to train the quads. They’re big, strong muscles that need to be well developed for powerful knee extension – which is one of the basic tasks involved in squatting. But the strength world has been so enamored with the “posterior chain” lately, I feel like I’m being slightly rebellious by suggesting that people should directly train their quads!), consider that Dan Green shares my opinion with his 865 squat, and the study on elite powerlifters I wrote up for Bret Contreras’s blog basically said that the hallmark of elite squatting was *minimizing* GM-ing the squat.

So, if you end up looking like Miley Cyrus on Robin Thicke at the VMAs every time you squat heavy weights, train your freaking quads. Your back, and your squat numbers, will reap the benefits.

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Hamstrings – The Most Overrated Muscle Group for the Squat After the huge response I got to my article on the infamous Good Morning Squat, I realized that most peoples’ whole conceptual schema for proper squatting is out of whack. So, I wanted to keep building upon the same concept – a huge squat depends on strong quads, and as a corollary, the hamstrings are vastly overrated as a contributor to a huge squat. Since there’s research on the subject, I think it’s best to start there. Chris Beardsley has reviewed some relevant research on hamstring activation in the squat, and I’d suggest you take the time to check it out. The basic conclusion is that the hamstrings aren’t activated very well during the squat and that, in fact, the lowly seated hamstring curl achieves about 3x as much hamstring activation as the squat with equally challenging loads.

So, what are we to do with this knowledge?

Some people would say that, naturally, you should try to make the squat more hamstring dominant. The hamstrings are powerful hip extensors, hip extension is important for the squat, and the more musculature you’re activating to a high degree, the more weight you’ll move.

Nope. I see where that point of view is coming from – advocating the low bar squat with considerable forward-lean to engage the hamstrings more in the squat. But I think its proponents fail to remember one important fact about the hamstrings…

The hamstrings are two-joint muscles.

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Originating on the ischial tuberosity and inserting near the top of the tibia, the hamstrings are effective at both knee flexion (i.e. hamstring curls) and hip extension (i.e. RDLs or good mornings). Furthermore, when you flex the muscles, it’s not like it can pick and choose which end it pulls on – without other muscles activating to stabilize the joints, hamstring activation means both hip extension and knee flexion torque.

Hamstrings: both for extending the hips AND flexing the knees

So, what does that mean for the squat? Referring back to my article write-up about characteristics of elite squatters: “The three group A lifters (the best squatters in the study) exhibited the largest extensordominant (i.e. quadriceps producing more torque at the knee than the hamstrings and gastrocnemius) thigh torques. This is not to be confused with merely having the strongest quads. It means that throughout the movement, the group A lifters’ quads were producing more torque relative to their hamstrings and gastrocnemii, resulting in a higher NET extensor torque.”

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In layman’s terms, what all that means is that excessive hamstring activation is actually detrimental to optimum squatting performance. The harder your hamstrings are pulling you toward knee flexion, the harder your quads have to contract to produce the SAME amount of net knee extension torque. That’s the exact opposite of what you should be shooting for!

Context: As a powerlifter, I’m primarily concerned about lifting the most weight possible. I’m assuming that applies to many of you also. If so, purposefully aiming for high hamstrings involvement in the squat is counterproductive. Plain and simple.

I can somewhat understand the inclination to teach a more posterior-dominant squat to new lifters, especially if they’re using one of the many typical beginner routines which include high frequency, fairly high volume squatting with very little deadlifting or hamstring accessory work. However, if that describes you, be warned: you are forming a bad habit you’ll have to break later! I personally think you should instead squat in a more efficient manner (either high or low bar, trying to maintain a more upright torso and prioritizing quad involvement), while also doing some accessory work for your hamstrings such as GHRs, hamstring curls, or RDLs since, like we’ve already established, the squat is NOT a good hamstring builder anyways! Now, just to preempt a question I know will pop up – I am NOT saying you shouldn’t train your hamstrings. Strong hamstrings mean a big deadlift, healthy knees, and a potentially lower risk of hamstring tears. Just don’t use the squat to train your hamstrings. Use hamstrings exercises to train your hamstrings.

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Also, just so we’re clear, I’m not saying hip extension isn’t also important for the squat. It’s just that it doesn’t need to be coming from your hamstrings. Prioritizing glute activation is a much better route, since the gluteus maximus is a one joint muscle – only producing hip extension without accompanying knee flexion torque as with the hamstrings. The good news: (based on my understanding, at least) range of motion is the primary determinant of glute activation during the squat, so as long as you’re squatting deep, your bases are covered there!

Putting it all together:

If you want to get a massive squat you should train your quads, try to minimize forward lean, and not concern yourself with hamstrings involvement when squatting. Squat for a huge squat, and pull or do direct hamstring work to turn you hamstrings into pork cords. Purposefully trying to increase hamstring involvement in the squat is an exercise in futility if your goal is to move more weight and get stronger. Share this article with your misguided friends who preach “posterior chain” and then wonder why their squat is stalled. When they see the light, they’ll love you for it.

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It’s Time to End this Nonsense. High Bar vs. Low Bar Squatting Sayre’s law: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake”

There are few arguments in the strength world more common than high bar vs. low bar squats, therefore, you can probably assume prior to knowing anything more about the subject that there are few arguments more pointless. Just to make my opinion known before diving in (if you can’t guess it already): It really doesn’t matter.

Of course, though a hearty shrug of the shoulders and the timeless wisdom from the Big Lebowski: “well, yeah, that’s just like, your opinion, man” is sufficient response for anyone who argues too shrilly for one or the other, that’s not my style. Usually I won’t take a side in an argument without having a solid case in favor of one position or against the other, and in this instance, I think my ambivalence has a more solid case than either of the “sides.” Let’s dive in:

1. A very brief primer on torques

Your muscles pull in straight lines, but the result is angular motion at joints. The effort you have to exert for straight-ahead things in measured as force, and for angular things it’s measured as torque.

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The relatively linear bar path of a squat isn’t the result of any type of muscle activity directed straight up. Rather, it’s the result of muscles producing torque at joints.

To overcome external resistance (i.e. a bar on your back), your muscles have to produce sufficient torque at the joints to move them.

Just as in illustration, extend an arm out in front of you. Imagine someone hung a 25 pound plate from a rope, and hung the rope around your wrist. How long do you think you could hold your arm straight out in front of you before the weight started pulling it down? Now imagine someone hung the same 25 pound plate from a rope, and hung the rope around your upper arm, just above your elbow. How much easier would it be to keep your arm extended straight in front of you? That’s torque in action. The external resistance is the same, but since it’s closer to the fulcrum (your shoulder, in this case), your deltoids have to produce less force to produce the necessary torque at the joint.

2. The difference between high bar and low bar squats

For low bar squats, the bar is 2-3 inches further down your back.

Yep, as big of a deal as people like to make about high bar vs. low bar squats, the previous sentence sums up the one single difference that has spawned so much vitriol.

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Dropping the bar a bit farther down your back means that you’ll have to lean a bit farther forward as you squat down to keep the bar (roughly your center of gravity, especially if you’re squatting a few times more than your bodyweight) over your foot. It also generally means that your knees don’t track quite as far forward.

Also, typically people can squat 5-10% more weight low bar than high bar.

3. Torques, applied to the squat

There are two main things you have to overcome to stand up from the bottom of a squat. You have to extend your knees, and you have to extend your hips. This means that your quads have to contract hard enough to produce the required knee extension torque, and your glutes, hamstrings, and adductors magni have to contract hard enough to produce the required hip extension torque.

Going back to our illustration of keeping your arm raised with a weight hanging off of it, the distance your knees are in front of the bar, and the distance your hips are behind the bar are analogous to how far away from your shoulder you hang that 25 pound weight. Here’s what that means: When you drop the bar a little lower on your back, you’re effectively decreasing how long your torso is for the purposes of the movement. It’s like moving the 25 pound plate a little closer to your shoulder and farther from your wrist. The same basic principle applies to how far forward your knees track. Since they typically won’t track quite as far forward when squatting low bar, that’s also analogous to moving the 25 pound plate a bit closer to your shoulder. That means that

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your muscles don’t have to produce quite as much force to produce the required torque to overcome the resistance. In non-nerd speak, that’s why you can squat more weight with a low bar position. It makes the movement more mechanically efficient.

4. Does it matter that you can move more weight low bar? I’ll nuance this answer a bit more later, but simply for training to make the lower body strong: no, it does not matter.

Remember, torque is what produces tension is what produces a training effect (strength and hypertrophy). Your muscles don’t know how much weight is on the bar. They just know how hard they have to contract to produce the necessary torque. The difference in torques between high bar and low bar squats is minimal, the way they’re typically done. (Just to preempt a potential criticism – this doesn’t deal with every possible iteration of squat form. Sure, you could low bar squat much more upright with a ton of forward knee tracking, and then there would probably be more knee torque. Or you could high bar squat with a silly amount of forward lean, and then there would be more hip torque. If you’re concerned about going into that much detail, take a physics class, video tape your squat, and do some calculations. This discussion covers 90%+ of people, though)

Of course, this similarity is to be expected. Your body is pretty darn good at finding the strongest positions for itself once you have the feel for a movement. If your quads can contract

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harder to produce more knee torque, it’s not like they’ll think “We just about made a terrible mistake. We’re squatting low bar right now, which is more hip dominant, so we need to relax.” Similarly, your glutes won’t quip, “gotta make sure we contribute as little possible to this high bar squat since it’s knee-dominant, dontcha know.” You may be able to bias your knee or hip extensors with submaximal weights by purposefully altering your technique, but with maximal weights or on sets taken fairly close to failure where you’re doing all you can to stand up with those last few reps, your body finds the position it needs to be in to give you the best chance of completing the rep. Why don’t peoples’ knees track farther forward on low bar squats (thus giving them the illusion of being more hip-dominant)? Your quads are already doing all they can at the bottom of a squat. Since there’s less weight on a high bar squat, they can track a little farther forward because the required knee extension torque is the same as for a heavier low bar squat. Why are you typically a little more upright for a high bar squat? Because the bar’s a little farther from your hips, so even though you’re staying a bit more upright, you’re having to overcome the same amount of hip torque as you would for a low bar squat. Like I said previously – the only difference is that the bar position changes by 2 or 3 inches. It doesn’t make THAT much of a difference, and it certainly doesn’t transform it into an entirely different exercise. The slight technique differences don’t fundamentally change what your body has to do to complete the lift. Rather, they make sure that your body has to do pretty much the exact same things to complete the lift.

When you squat heavy or at high RPEs, does your back angle relative to the ground decrease a bit as you’re coming out of the hole? If so, you’re giving your quads all they can take. Does bar

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speed decrease at or slightly above parallel when you squat heavy or at high RPEs? If so, you’re training your hip extensors hard. No more to it than that. Both of those things will happen when you train your squats hard, whether it be high or low bar. 5. But since there’s more forward lean with a low bar squat, won’t they train the hamstrings better?

Probably not. First off – with the low bar squat, the bar is closer to the fulcrum, which means similar hip extension torque has to be produced even though there may be a little more forward lean than with a high bar squat. Similar hip extension torque means similar challenge to the hip extensors (including the hamstrings). Second – the squat isn’t a very potent exercise for the hamstrings anyways. I’ve written about this before, but just to cover the high point: when comparing the squat to exercises where hamstring strength is apt to be a limiting factor (RDLs and leg curls), squats produce much lower hamstrings activation with the same percentage of a 1rm. This leads you to believe that 1) your hamstrings are probably not a limiting factor for your squat, and 2) squats aren’t a particularly good exercise to train your hamstrings. Lastly, there’s not even a significant difference in hamstrings activation when comparing back squats and front squats. Surely if altering squat form would change the training effect for the hamstrings in any meaningful way, you’d see it when comparing front squats and back squats, which are much more different (different-er?) than are low bar and high bar back squats.

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Squat to build the squat, do exercises that target the hamstrings (which do not include squats) to train the hamstrings.

Now that my main argument is articulated, here are a few caveats: 1. Since you’ll be able to move more weight low bar, if you plan on competing in powerlifting, it would probably behoove you to learn how to squat low bar. Powerlifting isn’t exactly about being the strongest person – it’s about moving the most weight. If you’re slightly stronger than someone else, but you squat high bar and they squat low bar in competition, and they post a higher number than you, they beat you. It is irrelevant that you may have been producing more hip and knee extension torque – the sole measurement of proficiency in powerlifting is the amount of weight you can squat to competition depth. With that in mind, since the form is slightly different, I’d recommend you take at least a few months to squat mostly or exclusively low bar to learn the motor pattern. Establishing a skill takes more practice than reestablishing or maintaining it. After you’ve mastered the movement, train however you want. Plenty of good squatters train mostly high bar (Fred Hatfield is a prominent example. Though I wouldn’t put myself in the same category, 90% of my squat training is high bar as well, and I’m no slouch), then transition to low bar squats for a few months to peak for a meet. Plenty more (Eric Lilliebridge and Andrey Malanichev come to mind) train exclusively low bar all the time. If you’re going to compete in powerlifting, learn how to squat low bar. After that, train with whatever bar position you’d like, but make sure you squat low bar for at least 4-8 weeks leading

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up to a meet to make sure your groove is fresh and locked in, and so you have time to get comfortable handling the 5-10% heavier weights you’ll be able to move low bar. 2. If you’re training for weightlifting or CrossFit (for which weightlifting proficiency matters more than a huge 1rm squat), there’s really no reason for you to ever squat low bar. As was previously established, there’s no significant difference between high and low bar squats in terms of how effectively they’ll train the muscles involved in squatting. High bar squats, since you can do them with a more upright torso, will help ingrain a more favorable position for catching heavy cleans and snatches. 3. If you’re training for literally anything else, I stand by my basic premise: it really doesn’t matter. If you like moving more weight in the gym, squat low bar. If your elbows get banged up squatting low bar, or you just want to give your body a break from handling really heavy weights, squat high bar. Squat however you enjoy squatting. Both will make you stronger. Personally, if I had to give the edge to one, it would probably be the high bar squat since, for most people, it allows for a slightly longer range of motion, but the difference isn’t big enough to make a ruckus about. Squat however you enjoy squatting and the rest will take care of itself.

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Squats are Not Hip Dominant or Knee Dominant. Some Biomechanical Black Magic. Key Points: 1) The origins and insertions of the hamstrings and rectus femoris allow them to extend the hip and knee simultaneously, even though their actions oppose each other. 2) Two joint muscles allow force from single joint muscles to be transmitted to joints they wouldn’t otherwise be able to effect. For example, the rectus femoris allows the glutes to help extend the knee. 3) You can put these principles to work for you by learning the best way to grind through your sticking point on a squat 4) Because two joint muscles transmit force throughout all of your hip and thigh musculature, squats aren’t truly knee or hip dominant, regardless of how they look or what the external torques at the joints are.

If you guys haven’t figured this out yet, I think about squatting a lot. It was the one lift that took a long time to “click” with me – usually I can pick up a new movement pretty quickly, but squats were always uncomfortable and awkward for about half a decade once I started doing them. Because of the amount of work it took to master them, they now have a special place in my heart. I don’t think there’s a subject I’ve written more about, and I don’t expect that to change any time soon.

This article is a continuation of the previous one about high bar vs. low bar squatting. If you haven’t read it yet, I’d suggest you do so, because this article picks up where that one left off, going a bit further down the biomechanical rabbit hole.

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Assuming you’ve read my last article and you have a basic understanding of torques, applied to the squat, it’s time to talk about Lombard’s Paradox.

W.P. Lombard was a biomechanist in the early 1900s, and he investigated an interesting phenomenon. When you walk or run or rise from a chair, the quadriceps and the hamstrings contract at the same time to cause movement. Your quads and hammies, however, are antagonists, producing opposing movements (hip extension and knee flexion for the hamstrings, and hip flexion and knee extension for the quads). “Why,” Lombard wondered, “don’t these antagonistic contractions cancel each other out?” Why don’t they just lock your hips and knees in place? Opposing muscles firing together seems like a great way to accomplish absolutely nothing, NOT sprint at high speeds or jump or move heavy loads.

The answer, it turns out, has to do with the different distances from the hip and knee joint that the quads (specifically rectus femoris) and hamstrings originate and insert.

The hamstrings originate on the ischial tuberosity, and insert just below the knee joint, on the back of the tibia. The rectus femoris originates just above on hip on the anterior inferior iliac

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spine and the rim of the hip socket, and inserts a couple inches below the knee joint on the tibial tuberosity, via the patellar tendon.

Hamstrings: Origin a few inches away from the hip, and insertion very close to the knee

Rectus femoris: Origin just above the hip joint, and insertion a couple inches below the knee.

What that means is that when the hamstrings contract, the amount of hip extension torque they produce is considerably greater than the amount of knee flexion torque they produce. The opposite is true for the rectus femoris – it produces much more knee extension torque than hip

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flexion torque. Those basic facts “solve” Lombard’s paradox – since the origins and insertions of these muscles mean they hamstrings are much more efficient at producing torque at the hips, and the rectus femoris is much more efficient at producing torque at the knee, when they contract together, you get both knee and hip extension. Okay, cool. Co-contraction of the quads and hammies doesn’t give you rigor mortise. But what can we actually do with that information? Here’s where things get cool:

Let me point you in the direction of a paper titled From Rotation to Translation: Constraints on multi-joint movements and the unique action of bi-articular muscles by G.J. van Ingen Schenau (1989).

It was a study trying to figure out how, exactly, humans coordinate muscle contractions to move and transfer force so efficiently. The study itself examined speed skating, jumping, and cycling; however, the authors found the same principles to be in play for all three, and propose that their findings are generalizable to all movements involving two-joint muscles (such as the hamstrings and rectus femoris) based on some basic physics and geometry. The model they propose makes a lot of otherwise-confusing facts about squatting make a lot more sense. In their investigation of jumping, they examined the role of the quads in plantar flexion – pushing off the balls of your feet as you leave the ground for a jump. Of course, the quads don’t cross the ankle joint. If you cut all the other muscles away from the human body and contracted the quads, nothing’s going to happen at the ankle. However, force from the quads is transferred to the ankle by the gastrocnemius, which originates just above the knee and inserts on the

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heel. As the quads extend the knee, the gastroc would stretch slightly if it were relaxed. However, if it remains the same length or contracts, the lengthening that would otherwise occur due to knee extension is instead transferred to the ankle where it aids in forceful plantar flexion.

In fact, previous studies had estimated that only 25% of the plantar flexion force that occurs when jumping is actually attributable to the contraction of the calf muscles. 25% actually comes from the quads, and is transmitted to the ankle via the gastroc, while the other 50% comes from the elastic properties of the Achilles tendon.

If the gastroc stays the same length, as the knee extends, the ankle is pulled into plantar flexion.

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A slightly more in-depth illustration, showing how the quads – pictured here as a spring – can cause plantar flexion even if the gastrocs – pictured as a string – don’t contract at all, but merely stay the same length.

From this, we can draw some surprising conclusions, and make some practical recommendations. I’ll start with the surprising conclusions.

1) The glutes can aid in knee extension.

2) The quads can aid in hip extension.

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Just let that sink in for a while. Here’s the same model from this study, illustrating how the glutes can cause knee extension via the rectus femoris:

As long as the rectus femoris isn’t actually lengthening during the concentric phase of the squat (which it wouldn’t be), hip extension torque is transferred down the rectus femoris, causing knee extension. Likewise, here’s an illustration of how the quads (vastus lateralis, intermedius, and medialis) can cause hip extension via the hamstrings:

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Again, as long as the hamstrings aren’t lengthening, knee extension causes hip extension. This concept also makes an interesting piece of a study I’ve discussed before make a lot more sense. In the Bryanton study I discussed in this article, at face value it would appear that squats are quite challenging to your calf muscles, with relative muscular effort (RME) hovering between 65%-80% for a hefty portion of the movement. However, RME was normalized based on the strength of the calf muscles alone – when you throw the assistance from a forceful quad contraction into the mix, it makes sense that your calves aren’t as wrecked after a hard squat workout as your quads and hips are.

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Practical Takeaways 1) If you’re prone to turn your squat into a good morning, these findings throw another potential culprit into the mix – your glutes. Since they can contribute to knee extension via the rectus femoris, if you’re unable to produce enough knee extension torque to come up out of the bottom of a squat without your back angle relative to the ground decreasing (hips rising faster than the bar), they could potentially be to blame. 2) This provides even more evidence for the idea that it’s probably NOT your hamstrings that are limiting you. Actually, they are probably the last thing that could potentially fail you. When weights get too heavy and you wind up having knee extension without concomitant hip extension, what that’s actually doing is lengthening your hamstrings so they can increase

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their independent contribution to hip extension torque, rather than allowing them to function primarily to transfer force between segments.

In my previous article looking at the effects of wearing a belt on squatting performance, one of the things that jumped out at me was the effects of fatigue on forward lean in the squat. As you get more and more tired, you start leaning farther and farther forward. Based on this model, the most reasonable explanation is that the prime movers (the quads and glutes) start fatiguing as the set wears on, so the hamstrings, which are still relatively fresh, are put in a position where they can independently do more to aid in hip extension. Getting your hamstrings more involved in the movement should not be a priority – their increasing involvement means your quads and glutes are failing you. 3) Lombard’s paradox explains beautifully the proper way to grind a squat.

This is a video of my friend John Phung, who may have this technique more dialed in than anyone I know. Watch as he comes out of the hole, and bar speed slows almost to zero. In that position, co-contraction of the hamstrings and rectus femoris can reposition your body under the bar so you can finish the lift. When you fail a squat above parallel, the culprit is pretty straightforward – the amount of hip flexion torque the bar is exerting on you exceeds the amount of hip extension torque you’re capable of producing.

By driving your traps back into the bar (to provoke a stronger contraction from your hamstrings, similar to a good morning), and squeezing your glutes to drive your knees forward and out (transferred down your rectus femoris, resulting in increased knee extension torque to keep your knees from flexing as more stress is shifted to your quads), you shift your hips forward

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slightly. That shortens the moment arm they’re working again, and voila! Same weight + shorter moment arm = less hip extension torque necessary to get through your sticking point and finish the movement.

Before he knew this trick, this is a lift that would have pinned him. The key to grinding a lift is to keep yourself from getting stuck with your butt a mile behind the bar, and to fight to get your hips forward, even if the bar remains motionless for a moment – Lombard’s paradox lets you do that.

4) “Knee dominant” and “hip dominant” squats are misnomers This concept also helps us make sense of a study I’ve linked in the past that has been met with disbelief (and, admittedly, I didn’t really understand it either). Muscle activation in the back squat and front squat is just about identical. Is there a longer moment arm for the hips in a back squat? Of course. However, although a squat may look more “hip dominant,” the quads are still aiding in hip extension via the hamstrings. Conversely, although a squat may look more “knee dominant,” the glutes are still aiding in knee extension via the rectus femoris. If the external torque is less at one joint, the prime movers at that joint are “freed up” to help overcome the increased external torque at the other joint.

Now, Westside-style box squats may truly be hip dominant, and something like is probably knee dominant in a really substantial way:

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But just about any other form of squat is going to train your hip and thigh musculature in pretty much the exact same way. (A quick caveat – a wider stance may train your glutes a little harder, but other than that, the only major variable that changes how hard your muscles are working is depth.)

So what do squats train? Is it the quads, or the hamstrings, or the glutes? All of the above to a point, but none of the above specifically. The squat trains the squat. For training purposes, just find where the bar is most comfortable, squat as deep as you safely can, and repeat. The whole system of muscles that extends your hips and knees is tied together by your hamstrings and recti femori, which make sure the work is distributed over all the muscles involved.

Just stop worrying about the minutia and squat.

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Speed Kills: 2x the Intended Bar Speed Yields ~2x the Bench Press Gains If you want to get stronger, training volume and intensity are the two most important variables, right? Well, a recent (May 2014) study published in the European Journal of Sports Science sheds some light on another crucial factor – bar speed. Now, if you’re like me, you’ve always heard that you’re supposed to lift the bar (concentric) as fast as possible, and that doing so would recruit more fast twitch fibers since you’re producing more force, and more muscle fibers activated = more gains. However, I’ve never heard anyone pinpoint how much of a difference maximum rep speed actually made – at least not with any credible sources backing them. Well, this recent study – Maximal intended velocity training induces greater gains in bench press performance than deliberately slower half-velocity training – suggests that it makes a huge difference:

Approximately double the strength gains by lifting the bar with maximum speed each rep, as opposed to a slower cadence, even when equating training volume and intensity. VERY cool. Personally, I would have expected a difference, but not anything THAT dramatic. Let’s dive in.

Background

As I previously touched on, the thinking behind lifting the bar as fast as you possibly can is this:

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1. To produce more force, your body uses more muscle fibers (as opposed to each fiber just contracting harder to produce more force)

2. The first fibers your body uses are the smallest, slow-twitch fibers. To produce more and more force, it recruits progressively larger and stronger fibers, with your largest, strongest fast twitch fibers being the last ones integrated into the movement. (This is called Henneman’s Size Principle) 3. Recruiting these fibers isn’t based on the weight you’re using per se, but rather the amount of force you produce. Force = mass x acceleration, so all other things being equal, lifting a bar faster means you produced more force to lift it.

4. Therefore, lifting the bar faster recruits more muscle fibers. 5. The fast twitch muscle fibers – the last ones you recruit – are the ones most prone to hypertrophy, so lifting faster = more fast twitch fibers used = more strength and size gains. Sounds great in theory, right? Except…

The bulk of the previous research looking at the effects of lifting velocity on strength gains showed that there was no significant difference between lifting as fast as possible and lifting at a slower cadence.

Oops. That theory sounded so appealing and straightforward a moment ago. But wait a second – as the authors in this current study point out, much of the past research on the subject was methodologically flawed.

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1. Many of the studies didn’t equate load and volume. This was a problem with the studies that HAD shown intentionally lifting fast was better than intentionally lifting slower. If you’re intentionally lifting the bar slower, you’re not going to be able to handle as much weight or volume, so of COURSE the protocol lifting at maximum speed would yield better results – but you have no idea whether it was the bar speed itself that mattered, or whether it was simply the difference in intensity and volume.

2. In the bulk of the studies showing no difference in lifting fast vs. lifting slow, they were doing sets taken to failure, or close to failure. Going back to Henneman’s size principle, another application of it is that as the first fibers you recruit start fatiguing, you recruit larger and stronger fibers to take their place to keep producing force. Also, many of those studies weren’t volume-equated either. Additionally, regardless of what the cadence was SUPPOSED to be, when taking sets to failure, all your reps eventually end up being slow! So with these studies, the differences in ACTUAL bar speed weren’t substantial, and the real takeaway is that if you push yourself to failure, rep speed doesn’t matter as much. But what if you don’t WANT to train to failure for all your sets, all the time (i.e. most of us)? Well, that’s where this study fills in some gaps.

Subjects:

24 men were recruited (4 dropped out), mostly in their early to mid-20s, and of normal height and weight (1.77 ± 0.08m, 70.9 ± 8.0kg). They were healthy and physically active, with 2-4 years “recreational” experience with the bench press. “Recreational” is a slippery term. Their 1rms averaged around 75kg to begin with – slightly more than 1x body weight. So it wasn’t the

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first time these guys had picked up a barbell, but they also weren’t elite athletes by any stretch of the imagination.

Protocol:

The subjects maxed at the beginning and end of the program to assess strength gains. Also, bar speed of all of their warmup sets was recorded (both groups were instructed to lift the bar as fast as they possibly could on all of their warmup sets) to see whether training fast or slow affected their force production capabilities. They split the subjects into two groups. Half of them trained at max velocity (MaxV – controlled eccentric, and explosive concentric), and half of them trained at half velocity (HalfV – controlled eccentric, and 1/2 maximum bar speed for the concentric). They benched 3x per week for 6 weeks, then assessed results.

The way they made their weight selections for each day was *very* interesting. Prior research had found that average concentric bar velocity (how fast you can push the bar up) correlated very strongly with given 1rm percentages for bench press. An average maximum bar speed of 0.79m/sec means you’re lifting about 60% of your 1rm, 0.70 m/sec is about 65%, 0.62m/sec is about 70%, 0.55m/sec is about 75%, and 0.47m/sec is about 80%.

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Percentage Average concentric velocity (m/sec) of 1rm 0.79

60

0.7

65

0.62

70

0.55

75

0.47

80

To make sure they were using, say, 75% of a subject’s ACTUAL 1rm for the day, rather than 75% of their initial 1rm (which would become outdated as they got stronger over 6 weeks), the researcher would have the subject lift each warmup rep as fast as possible, until their average concentric bar speed was 0.55m/sec. That would be their working weight for the day.

(As an aside, a common knock against percentage-based programs is that you have a harder time accommodating good days and bad days. As your strength fluctuates, 80% of your all-time PR may not actually be 80% of your actual strength for the day. Using bar speed as a way to approximate percentage of 1rm may be a smart way to account for daily fluctuations in a percentage-based program)

So, on 75% day, the people in the MaxV group would warm up, find the heaviest weight they could lift at .55m/sec, and do the assigned reps for the day. The HalfV group would warm up,

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find the heaviest weight they could lift at .55m/sec, and do the assigned reps for the day, but with an average concentric velocity of ~0.27m/sec, with visual and auditory feedback from a screen in front of them letting them know if their cadence was too fast or too slow.

There were 48-72 hours between training sessions.

On week 1, they did 3 sets of 6-8 with 60% each day, eventually progressing to (decreasing volume, increasing intensity – kosher linear periodization) 3-4 sets of 3-4 reps on week 6. The study was impressively well-controlled. Here’s a great little line: “Sessions took place under supervision of the investigators, at the same time of day (±1 h) for each participant and under constant environmental conditions (20°C, 60% humidity).”

Time of day matters because circadian fluctuations in hormones like testosterone and cortisol may affect the training outcomes. Additionally, heat and humidity can affect performance – if it’s too hot and humid you’re more apt to fatigue because of thermal stress or dehydration, and if it’s too cold you can have a harder time getting warm and performing well. Studies like that are *supposed* to control for environmental factors, but many don’t (or at least they don’t explicitly say that they did).

Along with the training study, the researchers did another study with different subjects to assess metabolic effects of lifting with different bar speeds. In this study, subjects came in, had their blood drawn, performed one of 6 routines (3×8 @60% with MaxV or HalfV, 3×6 @70% with MaxV or HalfV, and 3×3 @80% with MaxV or HalfV), and had their blood drawn again to assess lactate and ammonia concentrations.

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Additionally, fatigue was assessed based on changes in the heaviest load the subjects could move at an average velocity of 1.0 m/sec pre-workout vs. post-workout

Results:

Before the training, there were no significant differences between the MaxV and HalfV groups. Average concentric speed WAS faster for MaxV, as you’d expect (0.58 ± 0.06 vs. 0.32 ± 0.03 m/sec)

HalfV spent more concentric time under tension (360.9 ± 19.2 vs. 222.8 ± 21.4 sec)

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In every single category, MaxV saw basically twice the gains of HalfV

1rm bench press: +18.2% vs. +9.7%

Average velocity with weights they could move faster than 0.8 m/sec at both the beginning and end of the study: +11.5% vs. +4.5%

Average velocity with weights they could move slower than 0.8 m/sec at both the beginning and end of the study: +36.2% vs. 17.3%

Notice – right around 2x the gains across the board

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In the metabolic study, there was actually a larger rise in lactate in the MaxV protocol vs. the HalfV protocol for both the 60% and 70% workouts, and fatigue (as assessed by the heaviest load they could move at a set speed) was greater in MaxV than HalfV on the 60% workout (7.6% vs. 1.4%), with a trend (that didn’t reach significance) toward more fatigue with the 70% workout as well (7.1% vs. 3.9%). Now, take the lactate and fatigue data with a grain of salt – both protocols reached pretty moderate levels of lactate (we’re not talking about the metabolic difference of a heavy triple vs. a max set of 20 reps) that may not make a meaningful difference, and the standard deviations for fatigue were pretty large. They’re interesting trends to see, but any tentative conclusions drawn from them need to be even more tentative than usual.

There were no ammonia differences for any of the protocols.

Breaking it all down:

So, lifting the bar faster means more gains, and it makes you more explosive with lighter weights too? Sweet.

Not so fast.

Remember the issues with past research? This showed that when you equate for training volume and intensity and when you’re not training to failure, lifting faster may produce superior gains in maximal strength.

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Additionally, the improvements in bar velocities with concrete loads doesn’t necessarily mean faster training makes you faster. If you’ll notice, the degree of improvement in bar velocity was pretty similar to the degree of improvement in 1rm strength. Essentially, let’s say you bench 300. 50% of your 1rm is 150. If you get your bench up to 400, you’ll almost certainly be able to move 150 faster than you could when you benched 300. But will you move 200 faster than you used to move 150? Maybe, maybe not, but this study at least seems to indicate that it wouldn’t have to do much with whether you were training fast or slow – the larger gains seen in the MaxV group were with absolute loads, not loads relative to their new 1rms. The biggest takeaway is that being able to pick up heavier things makes it easier for you to move lighter things faster.

Another interesting thing about the improvements in velocity: For both groups, larger gains were seen in bar speed for heavier weights (ones they moved slower than 0.8 m/sec; 17.3-36.2% improvement) vs. gains in bar speed for lighter weights (ones they moved faster than 0.8 m/sec; 4.5-11.5% improvement). This has implications for pure power athletes. Getting stronger DOES help you produce more power, but it’s not highly specific. Lifting heavy things has a much higher carryover for lifting heavy things fast than it does for lifting light things fast.

So will you be able to throw a shot put further by increasing your bench, or be able to jump higher by increasing you squat? Absolutely! To a point… After that time, training specificity becomes a bigger concern, and the carryover you get from producing force against something really heavy (training for an 800 pound squat or an 600 pound bench press) becomes increasingly less if your goal is to be able to

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produce a lot of force against something relatively light (your body or a 16 pound ball). This is an aspect of training specificity people don’t talk about quite as much. Training is specific to the muscles and movements you train, sure, but it’s also specific to the velocity you train with. Going back to fatigue and lactate for a moment – more fatigue and lactate accumulation with the MaxV protocols may indirectly indicate a larger reliance on fast twitch fibers (as Henneman’s Size Principle would lead you to expect). Fast twitch fibers are more fatiguable than slow twitch fibers, and they rely more on glycolytic energy systems. However, the differences between the two protocols were really pretty minor in both these regards, so an indirect conclusion based on shaky foundations shouldn’t be something you put TOO much confidence in to account for the difference in training effects.

One thing I really loved about this study was that it actually recorded average velocities and concentric time under tension. TUT has been preached by some as a driving force in strength and hypertrophy gains. However, the HalfV protocol had substantially more TUT than the MaxV protocol, but it produced substantially worse results. Perhaps TUT should be amended from “time under tension” to “time under maximal tension” – how much time you spend actually moving the weight with as much force as possible.

Of course, that runs counter to the pretty little 4 number notations people like to use (3-1-3-0 would mean 3 second eccentric, 1 second pause at the bottom of the rep, 3 second concentric, and 0 second pause at the top before the next rep). This study seems to suggest that for maximum strength gains, you may dictate a certain cadence for the eccentric, and time at the top and bottom, but the concentric should be completed as fast as possible.

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Now, before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, there is a time and place for controlled concentrics – learning. If someone has poor awareness or is trying to fix a technique flaw, slowing down the concentric while focusing on appropriate cues can help reinforce proper technique. If someone can’t perform a movement properly slowly (weightlifting aside), they probably aren’t going to be able to perform it properly at maximal velocity. You can also use controlled concentrics if you want to practice a movement for the day, but want to employ a means of naturally limiting how much weight you can use for the exercise. However, for most lifts, most of the time, it’s probably most beneficial to lift the move the load as fast as possible. One last thing to point out from this study: you DON’T constantly have to train to failure or close to failure if you want to get strong. Sets of 3 at 80% (an ~8rm weight) or sets of 6 at 60% (a ~12-15rm weight) aren’t going to be incredibly difficult. But the MaxV group averaged gains of about 30 pounds on their bench in 6 weeks – not too shabby! The frequency in this study (benching 3x per week) was fairly high, and the weekly volume (36-60 reps between 60-80%) was fairly high too considering the strength and experience of the trainees. However, I’d wager than none of their sets pushed them within a rep or two of failure. Total training volume is more important than running yourself into the ground every set.

Wrap-up

When not training to failure, moving the bar as fast as possible probably produces better gains than intentionally slowing your rep speed. When you’re constantly training to failure, it may not matter quite as much. However, you DON’T constantly have to train to failure to get stronger.

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Moving heavy things as fast as possible improves your ability to move heavy things fast much more than it improves your ability to move light things fast.

You can use bar speed as an indicator of your strength day-to-day. You can use this knowledge to adapt a percentage-based program to fluctuations in strength day-to-day and (hopefully) improvements in strength over time without having to max in the gym regularly.

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Band-Resisted Pushups = Bench Press for Strength Gains? Plus, How Useful is EMG?

First things first, please give this post a little time to get rolling. There are bits of it that are primarily for nerds like myself, but there are also directly actionable parts, so be patient while we get there. You may have heard of EMG before. EMG stands for Electromyography – essentially measuring the electrical activity in your muscles.

Muscle contraction starts with a nerve impulse. If the nerve impulse is strong enough, it creates a small electrical current that runs down the muscle (wave of depolarization), setting off the chain of events that leads to muscle contraction (excitation contraction coupling). The harder your muscle needs to contract, the more muscle fibers will be activated in this manner, so the stronger the electrical current measured in your muscle will be. That’s the basis of EMG. If you can measure the electrical activity in the muscle, you have a good idea of how hard that muscle is contracting and how many muscle fibers are being used. So, a higher EMG measurement means more muscle fibers used, which means a greater training effect, which means more strength gained, right?

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Well… not so fast. That’s the story you’ll hear from people who fully endorse the use of EMG as a primary factor in assessing exercise effectiveness. It sounds nice in theory, and it “feels” good for an uninformed reader. 100 people may have 100 different opinions, but with EMG you can actually measure something, and get a nice objective number you can use to compare one exercise to another.

In that regard, overreliance on EMG can really give you a false sense of security.

There are a few issues with this, though. First and foremost is that EMG readings are relative to load, not just exercise. Let’s say you bench press 30% of your max, and then bench press 80% of your max. The 80% load will give you higher EMG readings than the 30% load. So EMG isn’t necessarily telling you one exercise is better, but that a given load with a given exercise may be better (i.e. comparing an 80% bench press load with an 80% incline press load may be more appropriate). Of course, extending this idea further, you’ll also get higher EMG readings with 100% of your max than with 80%. So if you’re relying solely on EMG, the logical assumption is that you should do singles with your max and nothing else, which is obviously absurd because it doesn’t take training volume – the much larger driving force – into consideration

Furthermore, to normalize EMG data to compare results for different people, you have to base it on something – you typically don’t just use raw electrical data. That “something” is the Maximal Voluntary Isometric Contraction (MVIC). An MVIC is essentially how much muscle activity you can attain without actually moving a load. By definition, your MVIC is 100%MVIC. However, the basic recommendation that goes along with EMG data is that exercises and loads

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that produce average EMG readings above 60%MVIC are probably going to be good bets for increasing size and strength. As an illustration of this, average %MVIC for squats at 70% 1rm (an exercise and load that we can all agree will build quad size and strength) averages around 6080%. If EMG was all you used to compare exercises, you’d think that training your quads purely with isometrics was better than squatting with 70% of your max.

We know that volume, load, and range of motion are all major contributing factors for getting bigger and stronger, but EMG doesn’t account for these by itself.

With that brief primer on the function and limitations of EMG out of the way, we can dig into the study at hand: Bench press and push-up at comparable levels of muscle activity result in similar strength gains

The first thing that jumped out at me, right in the abstract, is this statement which is pretty damning for people who have put too many eggs in the EMG basket to this point: “While researchers assume that biomechanically comparable resistance exercises with similar high EMG levels will produce similar strength gains over the long term, no studies have actually corroborated this hypothesis.”

However, from there, things really start looking up for the usefulness of EMG.

The subjects:

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There were 30 subjects (22 men and 8 women), mostly in their early 20s, who weighed ~70kg. They were lean (average body fat about 14%), healthy, and had been training an average of 2 years (1 year minimum). They met the NSCA’s definition of “advanced trainees”: minimum of 1 year of resistance training experience, performing at least 3 strength training sessions per week at moderate to high intensity, and currently involved in strength training (more on that later).

Procedures:

After 2 familiarization sessions, the subjects worked up to a 1rm bench press on their third session, and during their 4th session, they worked up to a 6rm for both band-resisted pushups and bench press (half of them did pushups first, and the other half benched first to make sure exercise order didn’t affect the outcomes). During their 6rm test, EMG readings for their pec major and anterior deltoid were recorded.

Band-resisted pushups

After that, they split the subjects into 3 groups. One group trained bench press for 5 weeks, one group trained doing band-resisted pushups for 5 weeks, and the third was a control group.

The pushup and bench press group both trained with the 6rm load they established at the beginning of the study, doing 5 sets of 6 each training day, twice per week.

The researchers controlled for basically everything that could have affected the outcomes. Volume and intensity were identical, rest periods were timed (4 minutes between each set), hand placement was standardized (50% wider than shoulder width) and enforced every set, and rep cadence was standardized (2 seconds up and 2 seconds down). Read how intended rep speed can

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affect results here) ROM was dictated (elbows to 90 degrees. So at the bottom of each rep, the bar was a couple inches off the chest/the chest was a couple inches off the floor for most people. However, if you’re a short-armed barrel-chested grizzly bear like myself, that’s your normal bench stroke. Yes, the bar rests on my chest when I do floor press.), and bench was done in the smith machine to make sure technique was similar between subjects (i.e. there wouldn’t be differences from some people flaring their elbows and others tucking their elbow). I’m sure some people will read “didn’t touch their chest” and “bench in the smith machine” and throw the baby out with the bathwater. But that’s how good research is done – control as many variables as possible to make sure that what you’re studying is the thing making the difference, not some unrelated variable that wasn’t accounted for. However, I would be the first to admit that what we’re getting out of this study (as with most studies) is a principle, not direct application.

After 5 weeks, they hit new 1rms and 6rms on their bench press.

Results:

The EMG differences between bench press and pushups were negligible for both the pec major and anterior deltoid.

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Additionally, there were no significant differences between 1rm and 6rm bench press for the two groups at the start.

The pushup group and the bench press group saw similar strength increases for both 6rm and 1rm. The control group did not get any stronger, which should be expected. However, this study

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did something interesting – the subjects were currently training when they started this study, and were told they could continue training as they currently were, so long as the bench press and pushup group didn’t do any pec-dominant exercises or pushing movements. We can assume that the control group, however, WAS still pressing in their training. So the fact that the control group didn’t get any stronger during the same time period that the two intervention groups made substantial improvements speaks to the inadequacy of their training program.

Takeaways: This study shouldn’t be taken as a ringing vindication of using EMG at all times for all purposes, but it did show that EMG can be used to draw a comparison between two biomechanically similar movements. However, more dissimilar movements (i.e. squat vs. deadlifts rather than bench press vs. pushups), or movements that are going to be performed with different volumes (i.e. trapezius activity between Olympic lifts that you may do for 10-20 total reps in a workout, and shrugs that you may do for many more reps), or through different ranges

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of motion (i.e. comparing hamstring activation in the RDL vs. the glute ham raise) should still be approached with caution when trying to compare using EMG. Also, I just want to point something out if you missed it in the “procedures” section. They found these peoples’ 6rms, and made them do 5 freaking sets with the same load for the same 6 reps. This isn’t one of those exercise science studies where they put the subjects through a foo foo training program that doesn’t have any relevance to the real world. 5 sets of 6 with a true 6rm would be somewhere between very difficult and impossible for most people. Since they could actually perform all 5 sets, I think that speaks to their initial training status, though. With less neural efficiency, they couldn’t induce as much fatigue on each set, so they could keep the same intensity across 5 sets, whereas if a 400 pound bencher hits a 6rm of 330 or so, I can promise you they aren’t doing 4 more sets of 6 with 330 in the same workout. Another interesting thing about this study (though I’m not entirely sure what you’d do with this information) – they didn’t apply any sort of progressive overload. They had data that the initial 6rm loads resulted in similar muscle activation, so those are the same loads they stuck with for the entire study. However, the average strength increase was ~20% in spite of doing the exact same workout twice per week for 5 weeks. If someone’s fairly untrained to begin with, a fancy lifting routine isn’t required to make them stronger. Heck, progressive overload isn’t even required to make them stronger. Just making them work hard (and 5×6 at a 6rm load certainly classifies as “working hard!”) is enough to make them stronger.

In terms of an interesting finding about EMG research itself, from the study:

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“…using EMG levels below the threshold of 60%MVIC has been considered ineffective to produce strength adaptations, another relevant and novel finding in our study is that lower EMG values (i.e., 52%MVIC) induced a high intensity stimulus, which were adequate to produce muscle strength gains.”

As an aside, assuming a threshold of 60%MVIC was required for strength gains, that would mean the bench press with 6rm loads (~85% 1rm – 52.7%MVIC in this study) would have been ineffective in strengthening your pecs. Sorry Arnold, for science has spoken. Hopefully, this study will cause people to reevaluate applicability of EMG research, since there are so many other factors in play. In terms of exercise selection – if you’re going on vacation or your gym is closed for a holiday that coincides with Monday (international bench press day), don’t lose any sleep over it. Just get a heavy elastic band to provide resistance and you can still get a decent faux-bench workout in. It would be a stretch (get it? Elastic band? Bad joke, and I’m not sorry) to assume it would be as effective for you if you’re more highly trained than the subjects in this study, but it’ll do the job well enough that you don’t have to worry about losing all your hard earned gainz.

Another point worth bringing up is the difference between muscular strength and efficiency of movement. Since these people clearly weren’t training optimally (as evidenced by the control group that continued to train how they were previously without getting any stronger), they probably didn’t have an incredibly efficient bench press stroke. So getting stronger at pushups, since they’re similar enough, transferred directly to a bigger bench at the end of the study. However, if you’re already very efficient, the transfer probably wouldn’t be 1:1 as it was in this study, even if you strengthened your muscles to the same extent doing a similar movement. We

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*may* be seeing that starting to occur with these subjects already via the % change in 6rm vs. 1rm. Both intervention groups increased their 6rm by essentially equivalent percentages (21% vs. 22%), but the bench press group increased their 1rm by a larger % than the pushup group (14% vs. 20% – though the difference didn’t quite reach statistical significance), perhaps indicating slightly larger improvements in efficiency.

Finally, and most importantly from an application standpoint, if you want to generally improve your upper body strength, or you’re training someone for a sport other than powerlifting, bandresisted pushups can get someone stronger effectively (more effectively than however these study participants had been training for the past year or more, at least!). Since they allow the scapulae to move through their normal range of motion (instead of being pinned to the bench) as well, I’d argue that heavy band-resisted pushups (along with other exercises that let your scapulae move freely like push press, dips, and landmine press) will probably improve performance more than bench press will. Just my 2 cents.

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MISCELLANEOUS Making Sense of Strength “The Map is not the Territory”

-Alfred Korzybski

For starters, I just want to be up front about the fact that the subjects covered in this post are very vast subjects. There are dozens of very long, technical books written about them, and this post is just a basic introduction. Also, don’t skip the abstract stuff. There are several concrete examples, but they’ll make more sense if you actually take the time to understand the conceptual bits. With that out of the way, let’s dive in.

Your body is insanely complex.

Humans, with all of our scientific knowhow and the aid of vast computational power from supercomputers, have just reached the point of being able to model a single cell of the world’s simplest organism. We’re still a long way from having a comprehensive model for a single human cell, let alone modeling, from the bottom up, how individual cells interact, or how entire organs signal back and forth with each other, or how the human brain works in its entirety, or

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how it interacts with, influences, and is influenced by the other tissues of the body, and how we interact with other complex organisms (each other) and our environment. We, as a species, know a lot, and we’re quickly learning more every day. But we still have a long way to go to understand all of the workings of a single one of our cells.

Just let that sink in for a moment.

A nihilist, when faced with this realization, would throw his hands in the air and lament, “compared to how much there is to know, we know effectively nothing. There’s no way to understand all of this stuff, so why even try?” Luckily, I’m not a nihilist, and I think that response is nonsense. Not knowing EVERYTHING doesn’t mean we don’t know anything. Far from it. We know enough to treat many diseases, put a man on the moon, and split the atom. Heck, hundreds of years ago Isaac Newton could describe, with stunning accuracy, how the planets move the way they do with nothing but a telescope and some calculus. We, as humans, are really good at doing a lot with astoundingly little (relatively) information. But, because we don’t know everything, we have to construct models. Models are our way of wrapping our minds around complex systems that we don’t know everything about, distilling them down to their most important features, and being able to have a basic idea of how they work and being able to predict how they’ll respond to various challenges (stimuli or stressors).

A good model has three main features:

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1)

It captures enough of the system’s complexity to be useful in describing how it works

and how it will respond.

2)

It accounts for few enough factors to actually be user-friendly

3)

It actually works

It captures enough of the system’s complexity

I want to use the study Effect of squat depth and barbell load on relative muscular effort in squatting by Bryanton et. Al. (2012) as a lens through which to see this issue.

The study is very straightforward and very well-done. They researchers measured each subject’s maximal plantar flexion, knee extension, and hip extension strength.

Then the researchers got people to squat with weights from 50% to 90% of their 1rm squat, working up in 10% increments.

They set up a camera directly to the side of the people when they were squatting, and analyzed the net joint moment (NJM) for each joint at each point in the movement. NJM is the minimum amount of torque necessary to keep the joint turning at the observed rate. Then, with the NMJs determined, they calculated relative muscular effort (RME) – a measure of how much torque is required at each joint, relative to the maximal amount of torque the subjects were capable of producing at that joint.

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Here were the results:

Notice how the solid line (calf muscles), is higher than the dotted line (quads) for almost the entire movement

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Notice how similar all the trends on the left graph are.

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Just to break this all down a bit: Squat depth and barbell load affected how much torque was required at the hips. Barbell load had the biggest effect on plantar flexion RME. Depth, but not barbell load, increased knee extensor RME. Just at face value, without understanding the limitations of this type of research, you’d make a couple surprising conclusions.

1. Ankle plantar flexor RME gets a lot closer to 100% than knee extensor RME. This would effectively mean – at face value – that squats work your calves harder than they work your quads. 2. Since barbell load didn’t affect knee extensor RME, squats at 50% of your max would train your quads just as hard as squats at 90% of your max.

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However, as the authors explain in the discussion section, that’s clearly not what’s going on. Because, while RME provides a useful biomechanical model for analyzing a movement, there are variables it doesn’t account for. Most saliently here – it’s based on Net Joint Moments which are the minimum amounts of torque required to keep movement going at that joint. Here’s the problem: we have pesky antagonist muscles that make sure we’re never only having to produce the minimum required torque from our prime movers at any given joint.

For example, with the quads, although RME may be virtually identical between 50% and 90%, since plantar flexor RME and hip extensor RME were increasing as the load increased, that means the gastrocnemii and hamstrings were contracting harder and harder as the load increased. The gastrocs are plantar flexors, but they’re also knee flexors. The hamstrings are hip extensors, but they’re also knee flexors. So at 90%, although the nice tidy description of the physics of the situation says “the minimum amount of necessary torque at this joint hasn’t changed from 50%,” in reality the quads DID continue having to work harder, because they were fighting against more force from their antagonists.

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He’d stop smiling if he learned that science called and said all those squats were doing nothing for his quads (sarcasm).

So, returning to our discussion about the usefulness and drawback of models, we can see that models are only useful insofar as they account for enough complexity to make them a decent enough approximation of what’s actually happening – and that you have to be aware of the limitations of the model you’re using so you don’t come to a silly conclusions like “squats at 50% are just as hard for your quads as squats at 90%.”

In this study, the model took into account three important factors:

1)

The pure physics of the situation (net joint moments)

2)

How much torque the subjects were maximally capable of producing at each joint

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3)

The contributions of antagonistic muscles (though not quantified).

Just relying on RME, you come to less accurate conclusions because your model is accounting for fewer factors (only the physics and maximal torque, without taking into account antagonists). You decide that squats are a calf exercise more than a quad exercise. Just relying on physics, you lose another variable – maximal torque at each joint. You know how much torque is required, but have no idea whether the resulting numbers are big or small because you have nothing (maximal torque at each joint) to compare them to.

As each model accounts for fewer and fewer factors, it manages to account for less and less complexity, and it becomes less and less useful. In this instance the simplest model – an analysis based purely on physics – is useful for perhaps pointing you in the right general direction of what’s going on, and nothing more.

It accounts for few enough factors to actually be user-friendly

A perfect example here is calories in and calories out. We all “know” calories in minus calories out equals caloric surplus or deficit equals weight loss. While this may be “true” from the perspective of pure physics, things are a little fuzzier in the human body – it’s essentially impossible to pin down an exact value for either “calories in” or “calories out” under reasonable conditions.

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Different macronutrients (carbs, fats, and proteins) take different amounts of energy to digest and process in your body. They can also influence various hormones like leptin and thyroid hormones that change your metabolic rate.

A caloric excess or deficit is met with regulatory responses from your body to naturally adjust how active you are or how many calories your metabolism will burn at rest. They’ll also affect hunger, which mediates how much food you’ll want to consume without forced self-restraint or gluttony. Not everything you eat is even absorbed by your body to be utilized as fuel – you naturally excrete a small percentage of what you eat, which can change a bit with dietary composition. Furthermore, some foods will be used as fuel by your intestinal bacteria to a greater or lesser extent, meaning more or less of it is actually “left over” to be used by YOU.

Of course, then you toss in the monkey wrench that nutritional labels only have to be within 20% of the actual energetic values of the food – and that regulation isn’t always followed to a “t” by food manufacturers or restaurants. So even if you COULD know what your body was going to do with the food you ate, you still wouldn’t ever know for sure exactly how many calories you were putting in your body unless you made two identical meals, ate one, and tossed the other in a bomb calorimeter.

Also, even if you could know the exact number of calories that were going into your body or being expended by your body, other hormones like cortisol alter the relative amounts of each type of fuel your body is using –fatty acids, proteins, or carbohydrate. So being able to predict

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changes in weight with perfect accuracy still wouldn’t mean you could predict changes in body composition with dead-on precision. Then, pressing further, you can’t know exactly how many calories your body is expending in day to day activities unless you live in a metabolic chamber in a lab. Different people display various degrees of efficiency in movements, so two people who are the same size who run the same mile will burn slightly different amounts of energy in doing so.

So am I proposing we throw the baby out with the bathwater and scrap CICO? Of course not! What would we replace it with, or how would you improve it?

Could the model account for more complexity? Sure. However, let’s go back to the fact that for a model to be useful, it has to be user-friendly.

Attempting to account for ALL that complexity would make the model much less user-friendly. You could fine-tune the calories in and the calories out sides of the equation if you burned your feces in a calorimeter, accounted for fluctuations in lean and fat mass, measured the concentrations of various hormones a few times per day, took your temperature at regular intervals, and measured your daily activity by wearing an accelerometer all the time…but who’s going to do that.

There would be issues with gathering data (who wants to burn their poop and draw blood a few times per day?), and there would be issues analyzing data (the equation would be quite a bit more difficult to use than calories in – calories out).

And, as a segue into the next topic, although CICO is not a perfect model, it works well enough.

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It actually works

This is what it all comes down to. Does the model work? The first two factors – accounting for enough complexity and being user-friendly, are necessary factors, but they aren’t sufficient.

Any model, no matter how elegant or thorough it may appear, is ultimately of little value if it doesn’t actually describe the system well and lend itself to making predictions about that system that are fairly accurate (or more accurate than a competing model). You can’t assume that a model is automatically a good model if it meets the first two criteria. Heck, you can’t even assume it’s an accurate model because it meets the first criterion, userfriendliness be damned (accounting for so much complexity that it’s no longer user-friendly).

Bringing this full circle, refer back to the initial part of this post about complexity and how little we know. If we simply don’t know enough about a system, a model built on everything we know is still not going to be a good model. Even if we know enough to construct a good model, if we need a massive computer to account for enough factors to run the model, it’s still not going to be very useful to a coach or an athlete in-the-moment in the gym.

Imagine you have a machine that you feed a number into and, through a massively complicated algorithm you can’t understand fully, it spits another number out the other side, and the number

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it spits out isn’t always the same if you feed the same number into it repeatedly, though the output usually falls within a reasonably small range of values. For example, if you input “5,” the machine may spit out 33, 37, 32, and 35, but not 2 or 13243. You’re playing a game with a friend where you have to get the machine to spit out the biggest number possible. Through trial and error, you find a range of inputs that tend to results it high outputs. You don’t know WHY it works, but you know that it works.

Your friend, on the other hand, knows more about math and computer science than you, and he does his best to figure out the algorithm. He constructs the best model he can to describe how the machine will respond, based on what he knows, though he can’t yet account for the full complexity of the machine’s operation.

When you play the game, you consistently get the machine to produce higher values than your friend does. His model looks better on paper (accounting for as much complexity as he possibly can vs. simple trial and error), but yours is better at reliably getting the machine to produce higher numbers.

This is the reality test. The ultimate usefulness of a model is not in its construction, but in its results.

If trial and error produces better results than a model accounting for everything we know, there may have been a problem with the actual construction of the model, or it may just be that we don’t know enough to construct an adequately good model.

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You see this in exercise technique and program design a lot. There’s nothing wrong with trying to build a model for ideal exercise technique, or proper program design. But does it produce results? Does it produce better results than competing models? If it’s been tried and it’s failed, it’s not a good model, the elegance or complexity of it be damned. If it’s been tried and it works better than the other models out there, it’s a better model even if it seems rudimentary or simplistic on paper. If it simply hasn’t been tried, you have to treat it as an untested hypothesis – you can’t assert that it would work better than the other things out there, because what should work isn’t always what does work (refer to the multitude of “can’t-miss” drugs that fail badly when put through human trials).

A bit about humility So, going back to CICO, even though there are a lot of factors it doesn’t account for, is it a good model? YES! Because it simply works. It produces results that are within 5-10% of what would be predicted by the model in the vast, vast majority of cases. For a model as simple as CICO, trying to describe the behavior of an enormously complex system, perfection is an unrealistic standard – 5-10% is truly exceptional.

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However, we can’t forget what we’re dealing with.

We are dealing with models.

Models are not the system. Models approximate the system and its behavior.

Models help us wrap our minds around and work with a set of factors, circumstances, and interactions that can’t be (at this time, potentially ever) fully known. Building and using effective models helps inform practice and helps us make useful predictions, but they are not Fact. They are not Truth.

They are maps, of varying degrees of quality. Your body and the world it interacts with are the territory. A perfect map of the USA doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be American. As such, don’t fall into the lazy intellectual trap of treating your model as the facts about the situation. It simply helps you deal with facts that aren’t fully known. Your body changes day to day, and it won’t respond exactly the same way to an identical stimulus if it meets it twice. Your body is different from someone else’s, and theirs won’t respond exactly the same way yours does. It’s usually weak people who try to argue that one exercise technique or one program is the best. Chasing optimal is a fool’s errand. There are very few raw lifters who I’d instruct to squat as wide as I do, but I have hips that let me drop into an almost-full split with no stretching, but that go bone-on-bone with very little straight-ahead flexion.

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This is what my hips do with no stretching whatsoever. This is a very comfortable position for me. If that’s not the case for you, you probably shouldn’t squat like I do. There are very few lifters who I’d recommend to squat heavy once every other week in pursuit of a 1000 pound squat like Eric Lilliebridge. If you construct models and treat them as Truth, you’d think I squat wrong (still the highest raw drug-free squat at 242 all-time), and you’d think Eric Lilliebridge programs wrong (totaled 2000 when he was a teenager, and highest raw total of all-time at 275). I’ve never had a strong person (someone who understands what it takes to actually get results) tell me I should squat differently, and I doubt Eric has ever had a strong person tell him he should program differently.

Your model (exercise technique, program, diet plan, etc.) may be a useful approximation of the facts for a lot of people, but it’s not the best for everyone, and it’s not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

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This is not to say that everything comes down to trial and error. It’s not the nihilist “we can’t know, so why bother,” position. Gathering more facts and trying to build progressively better models as we learn more and more is a worthwhile pursuit. If we ever get to the point that we CAN model the human body from the bottom-up, it will doubtlessly save us a lot of time and resources in just about every branch of biological science. If we COULD build a model from the bottom up (taking into account individual differences) for proper exercise technique, it would save people a lot of trial and error and frustration. But for the time being, we’re not there. Learn, experiment, build models, test hypotheses, and troubleshoot, but be humble about your conclusions.

More than anything, never lose sight of the single most important question: Does it work?

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Unleash Your Inner Superhero Key Points: 1) Your beliefs influence your physiology directly, and the choices you make. In these ways, they strongly influence your training success. 2) These effects have been noted in almost every area that’s relevant to your performance and progress. 3) Mental hang-ups can harm your success just like a bad training program or diet can. Remove them to unleash your inner superhero.

Beliefs have consequences. Usually this statement is a segue into a discussion about how it’s important to use reliable criteria for coming to beliefs about the world, because beliefs motivate action, and our actions affect others. More often than not, it’s a launching point for a (typically condescending) discussion/diatribe about some political or religious issue. That’s not what this article is about.

This is an article about the beliefs you hold, and how they influence your ability to make sweet, sweet gainz. As I’ve talked about before, it’s not appropriate to try to sum up who you are and the results you get from training solely by describing physiological processes. Obviously those things are important, but they aren’t everything. (I realize there’s an argument that can be made for strict determinism, but I think we can all agree that regardless of that philosophical possibility, we don’t know nearly enough about the body to describe it yet in such terms.) What you think, what you expect, and what you believe about yourself can make a huge impact on your progress.

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Training

In my recent article on steroids, the majority of the feedback I got was about the section discussing the placebo effect. The purpose of this article is to go a little deeper down that rabbit hole to explore other ways your beliefs influence your training outcomes. Just to rehash the bit about steroids, placebo studies have shown you can get “steroid-like” strength gains from simply thinking you’re on steroids. In one study, experienced lifters gained 4x the strength in about half the time (100 pounds in 4 weeks, vs. 22 pounds in 7 weeks, across 5 exercises) because they thought they were taking steroids. In another, national-level powerlifters put an average of 10-12kg (22-26 pounds) on each of their lifts (squat, bench, and deadlift) on the very same day because they thought they were given a fast-acting steroids. Two week later, when half were told it was a sham, their new strength gains vanished, while those who still thought they were on steroids managed to hit similar lifts again.

When people thought they were taking steroids, they believed they were going to get substantially stronger…and they did. Some of them were able to lift more on the very same day (putting about 70 pounds on their powerlifting total), and some of them gained strength at ~7 times the rate they had been, on the exact same training plan.

For a more anecdotal treatment of this same topic, you may like this article from about 18 months ago. (My views on some of these things have evolved since then, but the overall message is still a good one, I think).

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Nutrition But your mind isn’t just powerful when it comes to strength gains. It could also play a role in diet success.

In one study, participants all drank a 380 calorie milkshake. However, the researchers put different labels on the milkshakes. One of the labels said it was 620 calories, and the labeling portrayed it as delicious and indulgent. The other label said it was a scant 140 calories, and was a sensible, figure-conscious choice. After drinking the milkshakes, the researchers monitored the participants’ ghrelin levels (a hormone associated with hunger – the higher your ghrelin, the hungrier you feel), and their feelings of fullness and satiety. The group that thought they drank an indulgent 620 calorie milkshake had steep drops in ghrelin, and reported being quite full and satiated, whereas the group thinking they drank the sensible 140 calorie milkshake maintained fairly consistent ghrelin levels, and reported being hungrier.

Even though they drank the exact same milkshake, they had different expectations of how the milkshake would affect them. It’s not overly surprising that they reported less hunger (a psychological phenomenon – expectancy – affecting another psychological phenomenon – perception of hunger), BUT they also had different ghrelin responses. The expectation didn’t just alter psychological parameters, but physiological ones as well. It’s very likely that the best way to make dieting suck is to expect it to suck, and that expecting it to be more pleasant can actually make it so.

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Pain

So your beliefs can affect your performance in the gym and your dieting success (assuming hunger influences how well you stick to a diet). They can also affect whether or not you hurt.

In recent years, people have come to new understandings about what pain actually is. The old idea was that pain was solely about tissue damage, and that degree of tissue damage scaled pretty much linearly with the amount of pain you felt. For example, if your quad is undamaged, it’s not going to hurt. If the muscle experiences a little damage from intense training, it’ll be sore. If you push too hard and partially tear it, it’s going to hurt a lot. If something really bad happens and you have a full rupture, things are going to be pretty excruciating. However, it’s been revealed that pain is a much more complicated phenomenon than that, because pain isn’t “in” your tissues. It’s a perception generated by your brain, after taking into account a host of different inputs. Some of these inputs are from the tissues themselves, obviously (usually by way of nociceptive fibers), but other factors such as your mood, social situation, and expectations also influence IF you feel pain, and HOW MUCH pain you feel.

If you really want to dig deeper into this topic, check out the resources and studies here. If you want the quick and dirty version, I’d highly suggest this article, or this podcast. These are some highlights, though:

1) Up to 40% of people in the ER for massive injuries feel no pain from their injuries

2) Large numbers of people have injuries like bulging discs or torn menisci, in spite of feeling no pain whatsoever.

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3) Putting people in a situation where they expect to feel pain can make them feel pain, even if there is no activation of the nociceptive nerve fibers themselves. 4) Simply explaining what pain is, and that it’s not synonymous with tissue damage, can decrease the perceptions of pain in many people. Here’s why this is so important for athletes, and especially coaches: since pain is based, at least in part, on expectations, you can increase the chances that you or your athletes experience pain needlessly because of the nocebo effect. The nocebo effect is sort of like the crappy version of the placebo effect. With the placebo effect, you expect good things to happen, so good things happen. With the nocebo effect, you expect bad things to happen, so bad things happen.

A recent meta-analysis found that the nocebo effect could have a moderate to large effect on how much pain someone experiences. Because of this, I’m of the opinion that using fear of injury to get someone to perform an exercise correctly should be your very last resort. For example, if someone’s knees are caving in when they squats, instead of saying they’re going to hurt something (ACL, MCL, meniscus, etc.), use performance-based language. Tell them that if they keep their knees out, they can get their hips more involved in the movement and squat more, or something of that nature. Now, it may be true that what they’re doing is increasing their risk of injury (tissue damage), but you don’t need to beat them over the head with it, because you could wind up giving them knee pain by influencing their beliefs, even if they never end up experiencing a real injury. There may be a time and place to eventually say to an especially stubborn individual, “stop doing that exercise that way, or you’re headed for snap city,” but that should be your last resort, not your first.

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Willpower In recent years, it’s been en vogue to tout the research about “ego depletion.” Ego depletion is the idea that willpower is a limited resource that can be used up. If you use too much of your willpower resisting the urge to punch your coworker in the face, you’ll be more apt to splurge on your diet, because you won’t have enough willpower to resist the cheesecake in your fridge. If you use all your willpower dialing in your diet, you won’t have enough left to really push yourself in the gym.

However, new research is calling that notion into question. Your beliefs about how much willpower you have and how willpower works (i.e. whether it can be depleted or is essentially unlimited) can actually affect how much willpower and restraint you’re capable of displaying.

Behavior change strategies built around notions of ego depletion have been very effective, though. It’s not a concept to completely discard by any means. These strategies usually involve limiting how many hard choices you have to make every day that might sap your willpower. For example, if you’re on a diet, but you have a box of cookies sitting on the counter or a cake in the fridge, every time you see those things, you have to choose to not eat them, even if you’re craving them. So to mitigate the effects of ego depletion, you might only buy things that are on your diet, so that you aren’t constantly seeing stuff around your house that you shouldn’t be eating. You have to make good choices when you’re at the grocery store shopping, but you don’t have to make those same choices multiple times per day when you’re at home. When it’s time to indulge, you might either go out, or buy a quantity of indulgent food that you plan on eating in one sitting. It’s based on making it as easy to succeed as possible, rather than making it easier to fail.

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However, if you can adopt strategies like that without also subscribing to the notion that your willpower is a fragile, limited resource, you may be even better off yet. Think of yourself as someone with infinite willpower and restraint, but still adopt strategies that make it easy to make good choices and hard to make bad choices, and you’re getting the best of both worlds. Focusing too much on the concept of ego depletion may actually be a nocebo of its own, artificially limiting how much willpower you’d otherwise be able to use.

Who you are We all tell ourselves stories. They’re important for us to frame our concept of who we are. We don’t remember and survey all of the events in our lives and every thought we’ve ever had, and treat them as a totally flat landscape. We pick out the ones we find the most important, and assign meaning to them to frame who we think we are as individuals. Those events and thoughts, and the values you ascribe to them, inform who you see yourself as, and what you think you’re capable of. The important thing about this process is that it’s not an objective process by any stretch of the imagination. We pick and choose what we weight more heavily, those decisions influence what we’re more apt to remember, and the whole narrative informs where you think you’re capable of achieving. The exact same set of circumstances could be viewed through entirely different lenses, crafting two entirely different personal narratives.

You see this a lot in people who were raised in tough situations. Some people see it as a challenge to rise up and overcome, and every little step up the totem pole frames them as someone who’s capable of beating the odds and continuing on an upward trajectory. Chris

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Duffin, an amazing powerlifter and all-time world record holder in the squat in the 220 class, seems to typify this personal narrative and orientation toward the world. Other people see it as a world where the deck is stacked against them, they’re the victims of things outside their control, and they can never hope to rise up. This seems to be the case of a lot of people who feel caught in the vicious cycle of poverty (for good reason). The “truth” (though obviously it’s contextspecific, and a multitude of things factor in) is probably somewhere in the middle – there are a lot of ways people are more privileged and have more opportunities than others, but there are almost always opportunities for people who are willing to take risks, work hard, and aren’t beaten down by the world.

The important thing about personal narratives is that they tend to be self-perpetuating due to confirmation biases. We tend to seek out and remember information that confirms thoughts we already have about the world, and forget or avoid information that conflicts with what we think and believe in the interest of minimizing cognitive dissonance.

A lot of this has to do with the idea of your locus of control. Locus of control is basically your concept of who is in charge of your life. Is what happens to you a simple result of the actions you take and the choices you make, or is it the result of more powerful forces you can’t do anything about? Someone with an internal locus of control is someone who ascribes their successes to their hard work, and their failures to their own shortcomings. Someone with an external locus of control is someone who ascribes their successes to luck, and their failures to other people, outside forces, or the fact that the task was too hard. Again, neither of these is “right” or “wrong” in any objective sense. It’s more a lens you use to understand the events in your life.

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This is important to us (athletes and coaches), because it can have a lot to do with success in athletic pursuits. For example, there’s not a significant difference between people with an internal and external locus of control in regards to how anxious they get about competition, but people with an internal locus of control tend to interpret the pre-competition jitters as a good thing – something that will help them perform better – whereas people with an external locus of control interpret the same feelings as something that will harm their performance, psyching them out. Also, people with an internal locus of control are more apt to make decisions that will benefit future performance, such as sticking to a rehab protocol following injury.

It is worth noting, as well, that locus of control is domain-dependent. Some people can feel in control of their athletic pursuits, but out of control in the rest of their lives, or vice versa – you may feel like you are in control of your job and social life, but out of control in the gym. I’m not a psychologist so I’m not even going to touch the “rest of your life” stuff, but as a coach it’s my job to help foster this self-concept in the gym (strategies for doing so would be an entirely different article, however). Help your athletes come to expect success, see their outcomes as a results of their own hard work, and feel like they’re in control of their results when they’re dealing with stagnation or injury, so they’ll be more motivated to do everything within their power to continually reap the rewards they expect from their hard work.

Your inner superhero Everyone has both physical and mental limits. The physical limits aren’t worth losing sleep over, because you really can’t do anything about them. If something is outside the realm of possibility with the genetic hand you were dealt, it’s just not happening, and there’s really not anything you can do about it.

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However, the thing about physical limits is that you have absolutely no freaking idea what they are. Although differences in genetic potential are very real, you don’t know what hand you were dealt until you play it, and play it with the expectation that it’s a good one. Adopt ideas that help you along the way, rather than holding you back. As we’ve seen from placebo research, pain research, nutrition research, and willpower research, the things you think have a huge impact on the results you achieve. Since the story you tell about yourself isn’t true or false in any objective sense, tell yourself one that gives you a ton of potential, and that puts you in control of your life and your results.

The first step is simply to be aware of how powerful your beliefs and expectations can be. That was the purpose this article was meant to serve. Obviously you can’t chalk it all up to psychology – physiological factors are very real, and you can’t simply “out-think” a poor program or diet. But these psychological factors interact with and influence physiological factors in a really major way. You can’t focus solely on one set of factors while ignoring the other. Remember your successes without getting cocky, don’t dwell on your failures, and put yourself in situations that make it easy for you to think of yourself as a winner. Don’t do programs that drain your confidence, don’t make it harder on yourself to make good food choices, and don’t think of yourself as someone with feeble amounts of willpower and restraint. Don’t concern yourself with things that are outside your control (like your genetic draw), and always assume the sky is the limit, and that your own choices and hard work are the way to get you there.

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When I talk about “Unleashing your Inner Superhero,” I don’t necessarily mean that anyone is capable of accomplishing anything. Your Inner Superhero is you without mental shackles. It is what your body is capable of, with the help of facilitative ideas and beliefs, rather than the burden of debilitative ones. Because of how psychological factors can impact your physiology, the simple act of believing your training plan or diet will be effective will increase the odds that it will be. Unleashing your Inner Superhero starts with believing you have an Inner Superhero to unleash.

Finally, to bring this full circle, beliefs motivate actions. Your beliefs have their own innate power, as can be seen in the milkshake study, the placebo steroid study where people got 5% stronger on the very same day, and much of the pain research. However, your beliefs also affect how you behave, and whether you’re willing to do the things necessary to reach your goals. If you feel in control of your results, you’ll take the proper steps to set yourself up for further success. I think that’s what we’re seeing in the placebo steroid study where the participants gained strength at a ~7x greater rate, and it also seems to be implied by locus of control research.

If you really feel like you are capable of doing great things on the power of your own hard work (especially if you don’t think your willpower to make good choices is a precious, limited resource that you’ll run out of by working too hard), it motivates you to take the appropriate actions to reach your goals and make the progress you want. If you feel like you’re a slave to misfortune, blaming genetics, other people, or circumstances, you’re almost certainly shortchanging yourself and limiting how many sweet gainz you’re going make by imposing false mental limits on yourself.

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Achieving your goals starts not just with a plan of attack, but also with a deep belief that the plan of attack will be successful.

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What it Takes to Break World Records This is something I feel like I need to say And I don’t mean that in a “this needs to be said, so I may as well say it,” way. I mean it in a, “It does not benefit me to say this, and I benefit from not saying it, so I feel like I’m the one who is supposed to say it because then people will actually listen,” way.

This is what it really takes to be the best and set records in powerlifting. I don’t broadcast this, so a lot of people – even consistent readers – are unaware that I’ve held three all-time records in powerlifting. Not federation records in some obscure division, but “no one in this weight class in this style of lifting in any federation has ever lifted this much” records. Two have since been broken – my 1714 total with no drugs or knee wraps at 220 pounds, and my 1885 total with no drugs at 242. My 750 squat at 242 is still on the books (powerliftingwatch.com hasn’t updated their records to reflect it yet, so for all I know it’s already been broken with another lift that hasn’t been recorded yet, but it’s still the record to the best of my knowledge), but it wouldn’t surprise me to see it fall soon. But, for a time, I was at the very top of the world of drug free powerlifting in two different divisions. I don’t say any of this to brag (you’ll see why in the rest of the article), it’s not something I bring up more than is necessary (also to be elaborated on), and I’ve never sought sponsorship for more exposure.

Why not?

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That’s the purpose of this article. People wonder what it’s like to be one of the best, I’m going to tell you, and you’re going to be disappointed. But that’s okay, because then you’ll understand.

What did it take for me to break records? Train consistently, identify weaknesses, and avoid injury. Yes, that was entirety of the revolutionary strategy that helped me get to the top.

First, a bit about my background.

My parents got me a weight set when I was 10. It was a small bar (not an Olympic bar) that could only hold 200 pounds. I rushed down on Christmas morning, and, as any true future bro would do, I maxed out on everything. That first morning, I bench pressed 150 and deadlifted all 200 pounds with ease. Fast forward 4 years. I barely used that little weight set because I wasn’t allowed to bench without a spotter (which was rarely available), and I could deadlift all the weight I had basically until I got bored. Finally I had access to the high school weight room with full-size Olympic bars and plates. At a bodyweight somewhere around 165-170, I benched 275 and deadlifted 425 that first day in the weight room – keep in mind that I’d done both movements maybe a dozen times in my life, spread over a 4 year period prior to that point – untrained for all intents and purposes.

I took up powerlifting seriously a year later after some concussions knocked me out of basketball and football. I did a little local meet with no training leading up to it and broke the state records. I learned about the 100% raw federation soon after, checked out their record books for my age and weight, and thought, “oh, I can break all those records now,” so over the next few months, I did.

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At this time, my training was incredibly stupid. Imagine the ignorance of youth combined with the added arrogance of breaking records with minimal effort, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of how insufferable and closed off to critique and criticism 15 and 16 year old Greg was. My training routine was a high volume, high intensity, high frequency, high band tension, high accessory work, high disregard for life, limb, and proper form monstrosity. And with it, I managed to squat mid-500s, bench 400, and deadlift 600 not long after turning 16 at a bodyweight hovering around 195-205.

I got hurt pretty badly not long after, and proceeded to get pretty bad rehab (I had a torn QL, but they didn’t actually figure that out until I was on my 4th physical therapist). Combine that with the fact that I jumped right back into training full bore every time a PT gave me the green light, re-aggravating the injury within a couple weeks, and you wind up with a very frustrating year. Finally, I just gave up lifting for a while.

I went from being a pretty good athlete to being a pretty good powerlifter, to being a lazy fat slob. I realized one day that I used to be able to run a 5 minute mile, but was having issues walking up stairs or standing up off the ground. I was 260. That wasn’t cutting it. I basically stopped eating, started doing a ton of cardio, and had a strength training routine consisting of only bodyweight pushups and pullups. At the end of 4 months of less than 1000 calories per day, I was 190 and could do 40 strict bodyweight pullups. From there, I started powerlifting again at ground zero. Ground zero was a pretty easy 405 deadlift and 275 bench and (my memory is hazy on this one) either a 275 or 315 squat. I got back to my old PRs pretty quickly – mid 500s squat, 400ish bench, 600ish deadlift.

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After that, I took up a program of daily maxes for squat and bench. I put 100 pounds on my squat and 30 on my bench in 12 weeks, leading up to my 1714 world record at 220.

I was lazy for about 4 months, registered for another meet, trained hard for about 5 months, and put another ~70 pounds on my squat, 10 on my bench, and 80 on my deadlift for my 750 squat and 1885 total at 242. I’ve since squatted 755 without wraps and benched 475. The squat progress came from working up to a 10rm one week, 8rm the next, 5rm the next, and then starting over until I was pretty sure I was good for a big squat PR. The bench PR came after 3 months of not benching. I did some overhead work, and some weight dips for a few months, laid back down on the bench, and PRed 3 weeks later. During all this time, I’ve used a variety of training styles. Just about any program out there with a name (Sheiko, 5/3/1, Westside, etc.), daily maxes, basic linear periodization, and just screwing around and doing what sounded like fun for a month or two at a time. I’ve also tried a variety of different diets. I was eating strict keto for most of my prep leading up to 1714, and a more carbcentric IIFYM approach for 1885.

As long as I was consistently challenging myself, recovering effectively (sleeping/minimizing stress), and not getting hurt, I got stronger, regardless of the methods I was using. I used to want to pin the success on small factors. “Ah hah! I added 100 pounds to my squat doing daily maxes!” Well yeah, that helped. It was basically a crash course in REALLY teaching my body how to squat. But keep in mind I squatted 545 with god-awful form before my body had any idea of how to squat. I also got a lot of mileage out of breathing paused squats (for both

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squat and deadlift), but that only worked because I had another glaring weakness – super strong legs and a relatively weak torso.

I just lifted weights, practiced the movements, addressed weaknesses, stayed healthy, and broke world records.

No secret formula. The thing that people, especially other people in my position, don’t want to come to terms with is that innate genetic factors are hugely important. I wanted to believe I was the strongest because I was so smart and worked so hard.

Nonsense. I think I understand training pretty well, and when my training is focused for a meet I do work very hard, but those are small factors compared the more salient issues.

My first day with a real weight set when I was 14, I hit numbers that some people work years for. In my first year of real (incredibly stupid) training, I hit bigger numbers than most people will in their entire life. The former didn’t have a damn thing to do with how hard I’d worked on the weights, and the latter didn’t have a damn thing to do with how much I knew about training.

The more I learned, the better I became at identifying weaknesses and staying healthy. That may be what pushed me over the edge from “really strong” to “world records,” but I promise you that it will not push you from “average” to “world records.”

I could benefit from (and people like me do benefit from) tacitly implying that we can make you as strong as we are, or that we know some sort of secret. That’s nonsense. If you’re as gifted for strength as I am, I can make you as strong as I am. If you aren’t, I can’t.

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The range of natural ability really becomes obvious when you start working with general population clients. A lot of powerlifting coaches never see this because they give off a very elitist “if you don’t squat 500 why are you even talking to me? Just push yourself harder, pussy,” vibe. I do my best to be down to earth and approachable, though, so I get a lot of very average clients. I also get a lot of very gifted clients. I put just as much time and effort into both groups. I’ve had an experienced lifter in his 40s put 30 pounds on his deadlift in 10 weeks for his first triple bodyweight pull. I’ve had an experienced lifter put 115 pounds on her deadlift (345 to 460) in 12 weeks while losing 20 pounds. My sister-in-law pulled 380 at 18 years old with the most basic program imaginable (she only lifted 2 days per week, with relatively low volume because she was in-season focusing on volleyball). I’ve also had very average people come to me barely benching bodyweight wanting to get a second wheel on the bar, or desperately wanting to squat 315 at 200 pounds, or gunning for their first 400 deadlift after 3 or 4 years of consistent training. And they also make progress, slowly but surely. The game is the same, they work just as hard, but the results are dramatically different.

We like to believe that anyone can be the best if they work hard enough. At least for my American readers, that’s something woven deep into our cultural mythos. There’s nothing you can’t do if you put your nose to the grindstone and apply a little elbow grease. Such notions are furthered by Malcolm Gladwell’s famous 10,000 hour rule – all it takes is 10,000 hours of focused practice to achieve greatness. However, recently that idea has been, if not totally debunked, at least shaken significantly. We want, so badly, to believe that people who

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have achieved have done so solely because of their efforts. While practice and effort do CERTAINLY matter, you can’t use them at a catch-all to explain the entirety (one could even argue the majority) of someone’s success.

If most people did the things I have done to reach the level of strength that I have, they would probably improve, but that would not make them lift as much as I do. If a perfectly genetically average person (assuming that exists) was twice as smart about training and worked twice as hard as me, I would still lift more.

One of the things that really struck me as I started reading more and more research was just how strong the average person is. If I open a study, look at the subject characteristics, and see “untrained,” I usually just close it. I look for at least “moderately trained,” and usually “trained,” or “highly trained” – people who have been lifting consistently, at least 3 days per week, for at least a year or more.

A common measure of strength is bench press max. Especially since most of these studies are conducted on college-aged males, you can safely assume that if they’ve been lifting for at least a year, there was a gratuitous amount of bench press work included for most of them. A pretty typical average 1rm in these studies is 70-80kg. I’ve seen a couple in the 90-100kg range, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a study not using competitive powerlifters with an average bench press max of even 125kg. Sure, they probably haven’t had a perfectly thought-out and periodized strength training program, but these people who have been in a weight room for at least a year, presumably bench

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pressing like any red blooded American males, are nowhere close to “strong” by powerlifting standards. That’s one reason I abhor “strength standards” tables, particularly when they use words like “novice,” “intermediate,” and “advanced.” Especially because many people (most, perhaps) assume there’s a strong correlation between the category and the experience/knowledge of the lifter. “Bro, you’ve been lifting 2 years and you’re still not an intermediate? What’s wrong with you? Train harder and drink more milk, bro.”

That makes my blood boil. Strength standards may be useful for football players or competitive athletes, to connote “if you can’t squat this, you’ll probably get wrecked on the football field” or “if you can’t deadlift your bodyweight, you probably won’t be competitive at a powerlifting meet,” but not for applying to the general strength training population.

It makes a lot of ungifted but knowledgeable people feel inferior (Some of the brightest people I’m working with currently are some of the weakest – they’ve been reading so much about how to get stronger because they’ve been led to believe they must be doing something wrong!), and it gives dumb, gifted lunks (16 year old Greg) a false sense of superiority.

There is another salient factor in play here that skews our perception of how strong most people are. You have to take into account selection bias – who is actually lifting weights? People tend to gravitate toward mastery activities; they find something they’re naturally good at, and then find

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it rewarding to continue trying to improve in that area. Most people who have minimal aptitude for strength training probably lift weights a couple times, realize they’re not very good at it, and give it up for something else. So, in all likelihood, these “averages” are already based on the typical attainment of a population with above-average natural aptitude. Very few people who are lousy at something and have extreme difficulty improving are going to stick with that activity long-term. Someone in the bottom quintile of strength for day-to-day gym lifters (not even competitive lifters) is probably well above the median of the population as a whole, both in terms of natural aptitude and actual strength. This isn’t to say that there’s absolutely no validity at all in claiming a certain degree of expertise because of your achievements. Some people probably just tensed up, ready to shout “APPEAL TO AUTHORITY” at their computer screen. Cool your jets. While that’s certainly a logical fallacy, such fallacies are only particularly problematic in a deductive argument when you’re trying to prove something. In 99.99% of strength training discussions, you’re dealing with probability more than proof.

If you asked a dozen 700 pound squatters a question and a dozen 300 pound squatters a question, you’ll probably get on average more useful answers form the 700 pound group. This isn’t to say there aren’t some people who are strong and still idiots, or that plenty of weaker people aren’t very bright about training (I’ve already acknowledged both of those things). But let’s say you squat 400 now. Don’t you think you’ll know more about squatting and training the squat when

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you squat 500? So while stronger does not equal smarter in all discrete cases when comparing two individuals (so don’t think you know nothing if you’re weaker, or that you’re the omniscient god of training because you’re strong), there will be that general trend. One more thing I’d like to tie into this – my total ambivalence about drugs. People recoil against drugs because they say steroids make it an uneven playing field. I laugh at that, because it implies the playing field was ever level in the first place. Genetic differences make the playing field much less level than drugs ever could. I haven’t checked their standings recently, but my drug free world records were all top-10 or 15 all-time for untested lifts as well. Quite a few USAPL and IPF (drug tested) lifters have all-time world records regardless of drug usage, or are within 5-10% of those records. Also, something I didn’t realize until I started making more connections in the strength world – a lot of the guys you assume are on drugs are clean, or on amazingly little. A lot of fairly weak people are on everything and the kitchen sink. A lot of people who are on drugs now were already astoundingly strong before they touched anything (can’t name names of obvious legal reasons, so don’t ask). Sure, drugs make a difference, but they don’t make as big of a difference as people like to think. Obviously, since there are federations in powerlifting that allow you to take drugs, I think it’s ethically wrong to compete in a drug-tested division if you’re on. However, to be entirely honest about it, although that’s an ethical conviction I hold, it’s not one that I particularly care about. No one makes a living off powerlifting. It’s not like the drug cheat in a tested division is taking food off the second place guy’s table. He’s a jerk, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter enough for me to REALLY get fired up about it.

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One final thing I’d like to touch on. Where you start is a poor indicator of your genetic potential. Someone may say “Oh, look how much I’ve accomplished, and I’m not genetically blessed at all. I was so weak and small and I broke all of these records in spite of my poor genetic draw.” Nonsense. I’d like to introduce you to my friend Eze. I have never met an adult male weaker on his first day in the weight room. He literally could not bench the bar. I don’t mean that hyperbolically. He tried to bench press the barbell, and couldn’t. He also could not deadlift 225. Not only could he not lift it – he couldn’t even break it off the ground. He was amazingly, astoundingly weak.

Prior to lifting and learning that Nickelback is garbage.

Five years later, he benches 355 pounds, clean and jerks ~160kg, snatches ~130kg, pulls in the 500s, and is one of the most muscular drug free athletes I know of. He rocks sub-12% body fat year-round at a bodyweight between 205 and 210 (when last I checked. Note – I don’t train Eze, so I’m not trying to take credit for his progress. Just using him as an example).

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He doesn’t train any differently from the other athletes at the same gym. Actually, he’s considerably lazier than quite a few of them. But he’s one of the best lifters in the bunch, and he easily has the most jacked physique.

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Some people start out with a lot of strength (like me), and others gain strength and muscle quickly after a low initial starting point (like Eze), but you do not accomplish truly exceptional things in strength sports without the right parents. One last caveat: “But Greg, isn’t this post horribly condescending? You’re basically saying that you’re an ubermensch, the best are just going to be the best, and there’s nothing anyone else can do about it. Could you possibly be more elitist?” I’m expecting this criticism, but I think it comes out of a horribly skewed value system. No one is better than someone else because they can lift more weight on a barbell. There is much, much more to life than a big total. If anything, this is an egalitarian position. If there’s a value judgment to be extracted from this rambling article, it’s precisely that I’m no better than you because I lift more. It’s not like I’m saying, “I’m more empathetic than you, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” or, “I have more close meaningful relationship than you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” That would be condescending because those are things that actually matter.

Quite the contrary. I have a lot of aptitude for lifting heavy barbells. Our destinations may be different, but the journey is the same – that’s the piece that really matters.

This should only be interpreted as elitist if your self-worth comes from how much weight you can lift, and you project that same value system onto others. And if you do, the way you’re assessing personal value isn’t too different from a teenage (literal or metaphorical) dick measuring contest.

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So, getting back to the original subject – what it’s like breaking world records, and how you have to train for it. Well, in all honesty, it’s not all that different from how you probably train. Be consistent, stay healthy, pick exercises that have the biggest carryover to performance (practice your main lifts and choose accessory exercises that address weaknesses), and aim for measurable progress over weeks or months. If you’re reading, learning, training, and improving, you’re doing it right. The better goal is to be a progressively better you, not to be better than everyone else. For one thing, it’s attainable for everyone, not just people like me who picked the right parents. For two, if you did get the lucky draw, by trying to constantly be a stronger you, the records will take care of themselves.

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The Science of Steroids Steroids are a very taboo subject in our culture. They are Schedule III controlled substances, meaning they are illegal to own without a prescription, and illegal to distribute unless you are an MD. Furthermore, they are banned in almost all athletic competitions (with the exceptions being some untested strength sports). This is not meant to be read as an article condoning steroid use. They carry numerous short-term risks (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, liver toxicity, etc.), with the potential for long-term risks (atherosclerosis, infertility, hypogonadism, etc.) dependent on the particular compounds used, the dosages, and the duration you take them. Anyone who knows anything about steroids has probably heard about the risks they carry, so I’m not going to beat you over the head with that.

With that standard disclaimer out of the way, I still think steroids are worth having frank, open discussions about, for two main reasons. 

They’re really interesting.



People are going to use anyway, so they may as well be informed.

In fact, as of 2002, 4% of high school students were willing to self-report that they had used steroids, and that number was trending upwards. If I had to take a guess, that number is probably low since people are known to underreport their involvement in socially undesirable behavior, even if they know they’ll remain anonymous.

Other surveys indicate that between 1-3 million Americans use steroids. For context, there are about 60 million people with gym memberships in the country, and 2/3 of those people never go to the gym, taking the number of actual gym goers down to about 20 million. If we assume that

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the people using steroids are actually working out, that means that between 1 in 20 and 1 in 6 people you see in the gym are on, or have at least tried, steroids. It’s hard to pin down an exact number because these types of surveys about illegal behavior are notoriously unreliable, but it’s safe to say that it’s certainly a not a negligible proportion of the gym going population. Odds are, whether they’re open about it or not, you know someone on steroids. (If you’re interested in understanding the basic physiology of how steroids work, then just keep reading from here. If you already know it, or if it doesn’t interest you, skip ahead a couple pages to the subheading “Steroids work, in part, because you expect them to work.”)

The first question is, how do they work? The mechanism of action for steroid hormones (like the anabolic steroids we’re talking about, though the same is true of any steroid hormone including cortisol, estrogen, aldosterone, etc.) is pretty straightforward. They’re lipid-soluble, so they can diffuse directly into a cell (rather than needing to bind to a receptor on the surface of the cell like peptide hormones – like insulin and IGF-1), bind to their particular steroid receptor, and go to the nucleus of the cell so they can influence gene transcription. Those transcribed genes determine what proteins are produced, and those proteins affect the structure and function of that cell.

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From tube.medchrome.com

The steroids we’re talking about are mostly derivatives of testosterone (or similar hormones like DHT, though some like Deca-Durabolin are derivatives of progesterone), and have the same mechanism of action. They diffuse into the cell, bind to a receptor, influence gene transcription, and ultimately influence the proteins the cell produces. Different steroid hormones cause cells to produce different proteins, but in skeletal muscle, testosterone and its derivatives primarily increase the production of the actin and myosin that are the major proteins that make you strong and jacked.

Backing up a step, though, before these steroids can make their way into the muscle to have an effect, they have to actually travel in the blood to the muscle.

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So the first issue is getting those steroids into your blood. Routes of administration that don’t involve digestion tend to be the safest for your liver, including injections and transdermal administration (like Androgel). Oral steroids have to be modified so your liver can’t immediately excrete them – things you swallow are absorbed, and then pass through your liver before they can make it to general circulation. Your liver isn’t particularly keen to pass high doses of steroid hormones directly to general circulation, so it will break them down into non-bioactive metabolites unless they’re modified to resist this process. Because of this, your liver tends to have to work quite a bit harder to handle orals than injectables, so orals tend to be more damaging to your liver. There are orals that aren’t very hepatotoxic (damaging to your liver), and there are injectables that are quite hepatotoxic, but since this post isn’t meant to be a how-to guide for steroid use, recognize I’m painting in broad strokes here.

Now that the steroids are in your blood (either by direct injection, or because they survived their first pass through the liver), they need to make it to your muscles.

Most testosterone in your body is bound to proteins in your blood, most notably albumin and sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG). If you get your testosterone levels checked, the lab should report total testosterone, and free testosterone. The free testosterone is the stuff that’s most available to diffuse into your cells and affect the body. This is a key point, and is the main reason why steroids don’t seem to have much effect until they’re taken in supraphysiological doses – presenting your body with a concentration it wouldn’t experience in normal circumstances. When you don’t have any major endocrine problems and your testosterone levels are within the normal physiological range, your body will

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produce more or less binding proteins to make sure you have the right amount of free testosterone – not too little, and not too much. Your body can’t just jack up albumin production because it plays a critical role in keeping fluid concentrations stable between your cells and the extracellular fluid, and while SHBG levels increase when you introduce high levels of some exogenous steroid hormones into the body (including estrogen, which is a major reason many women experience loss of sex drive when they go on birth control – increased SHBG binds more of their precious, tiny amounts of testosterone that are so important for sex drive), testosterone actually decreases SHBG levels slightly for reasons I admittedly don’t quite understand. This is the main reason why over-the-counter “testosterone boosters” don’t work for building mass and strength if you have normal testosterone levels, and steroids work really, really well. Even if your test booster increases your testosterone by 40% like it claims, you’re still relying on your testes to produce it, and they simply won’t pump out enough to push you to supraphysiological concentrations to outrun the effects of the binding proteins. You could have 40% more testosterone but the same free testosterone. So, this was a long way of explaining why steroids “work.” You put enough of a hormone into the body that the body’s normal regulatory mechanisms can’t quite cope, so you wind up with more free androgens to make it to your muscles and make you jacked. This is quite a bit more dry physiology than I like going into, but I think it’s important to cover because a lot of people are ignorant of it, and it can help provide a basic backdrop of understanding for discussions about steroids.

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Of course, an article basically saying “steroids make you strong, and here’s the physiology behind steroids work,” really wouldn’t be saying much that’s relevant to you. So now it’s time to actually delve into the fun stuff.

Steroids work, in part, because you expect them to work Let’s take a look at two studies examining the placebo effect’s impact on “steroid-induced” strength gains.

In the first (Ariel, 1974), researchers told 15 trained athletes they could get their hands on some free, legal steroids. The subjects were already relatively strong at the start of the study – with squat and bench press maxes around 300 pounds, and military press maxes a shade under 200 pounds.

They trained for 7 weeks with the promise that the people who made the best strength gains (to give them an incentive to train hard and make as much progress as possible) in those 7 weeks would get free, legal steroids. So the athletes trained for 7 weeks, and put a combined total of ~22 pounds on their bench, military press, seated press, and squat. Then, 6 of the participants were selected at random to take part in the “steroid” trial. They were told they were being given 10mg/day of Dianabol, when really they were taking placebo pills.

They trained for another 4 weeks, thinking they were on drugs.

In just 4 weeks, they put a combined total of ~100 pounds on those same four lifts. 100 pounds instead of 22, in 4 weeks instead of 7. Simply because they THOUGHT they were on steroids.

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Strength on each lift, in kg

Strength on the 4 lifts combined, in kg

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4x the strength gains in a bit more than half the time. The placebo effect at work, because the lifters *expected* to gain so much strength.

So the placebo effect clearly increases your strength gains from training when you simply *think* you’re on steroids. You expect more gains, so you get more gains.

However, what about lifting more today?

For that we turn to another study (Maganaris, 2000).

In this one, the researchers were in a perfect position to study the placebo effect. The researchers were coaching a powerlifting team, and the eleven members of the team actually asked their coaches about using steroids. Presumably they trusted their coaches, so when their coaches told the lifters they were providing them with fast-acting steroids, the lifters bought it hook, line, and sinker.

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Their coaches gave them saccharine pills, telling them they were steroids. Then they maxed out on squat, bench, and deadlift.

An important thing to note is that these were all nationally ranked powerlifters. The average bodyweight was around 85kg, with average maxes of 257kg squat, 207kg bench, and 260kg deadlift (566 squat, 456 bench, 573 deadlift at ~187 pounds). Based on how close the bench is to the squat and deadlift, I’m assuming they were lifting in powerlifting gear, but I’m not positive. However, they weren’t new lifters – these guys were really strong.

When they maxed, thinking they were on steroids, every single one of them hit PRs on every lift. The smallest PR on any lift was 5kg. Most were 10 or 12.5kg PRs. These PRs represented 4-5% improvements on their maxes, taking their 724kg average total to ~755kg (1597 pounds to ~1670).

After that, they trained for two more weeks, continuing to think they were on steroids.

After these two weeks of training, they were asked how their training had been going. All of them reported that they’d been lifting heavier weights, lifting the same weights for more reps, and generally feeling more energetic and having better training sessions.

Then they maxed again. However, the coaches put a twist on it. 6 of the lifters were allowed to continue believing they were on steroids. 5, however, were told they had been taking a placebo the whole time.

The results were astounding.

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The group that continued to believe they were on steroids stayed at about the same level they had reached two weeks prior. There were a few small regressions and a few small new PRs, but on the whole they held onto the 4-5% extra strength they’d gained by thinking they were on steroids. The group that was informed they’d been taking a placebo absolutely tanked. Their maxes essentially returned to their pre-placebo baseline. None of them could hit a single lift that equaled what they’d done two weeks prior. This is IN SPITE OF knowing they hadn’t been taking steroids when they had hit PRs two weeks before, and in spite of reporting better training for the two intervening weeks. As soon as the mental crutch was removed, they couldn’t perform on the same level, even though they knew the initial PRs and the two good weeks of training were just the result of their hard work – not drugs.

10-12kg PRs are nothing to scoff at. But notice the gray bars – when they found out they weren’t actually on steroids, their lifts headed back to pre-placebo baseline immediately.

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4-5% stronger on every lift. When they continued thinking they were on steroids, they kept it. When they didn’t is evaporated, even though they reported two exceptionally good weeks of training, and knew they were drug-free for trial 1 as well.

Placebos = PRs all around. 33 opportunities for PRs (11 lifters, with 3 lifts apiece), and 33 PRs, ranging from 5-15kg.

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Still thinking they were on steroids, there were some 2.5kg PRs and 2.5kg regressions, but most people had just about the same strength as for trial 1.

Take the placebo away, and no one could match what they’d done previously, even though they knew they were clean for trial 1, and for two awesome weeks of training in between trials.

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So from these two studies we see a piece of why steroids are so effective. On top of how well they work physiologically, when people go on steroids, they THINK they’re going to get a ton stronger. They can lift more weight just by thinking they’re on, and they’ll gain more strength from training just by thinking they’re on. Part of the reason steroids work so well is that you expect them to work so well. Of course, the effects of steroids aren’t just all in your head. They do, very much, work. Let’s take a look at a major study (Bashin, 1996) that confirmed what bodybuilders had known for years – namely that supraphysiological doses of testosterone work really really well for building size and strength.

The subjects were split into 4 groups. One group was given a placebo (sesame seed oil injection instead of a testosterone injection) and didn’t lift. One group was given testosterone and didn’t lift. One group was given a placebo and lifted. The last group was given testosterone and lifted.

They maxed on bench press and squat at the beginning and end of the 10 week program. The program itself was a mix of DUP and linear progression, by the sound of it – pretty decent programming if you’re trying to get people bigger and stronger.

The results:

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Check out the strength and mass gained while not touching a single weight in the second column. From the New England Journal of Medicine Yes, you’re reading that chart correctly. The group that took a placebo and worked out only gained slightly more strength than the group that took testosterone and sat on the couch for 10 weeks. The group that took testosterone without exercise gained just as much, if not more, muscle mass than the people taking a placebo and actually working out.

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Keep in mind, the dose for this study was 600mg/week of testosterone with nothing else added in. This wasn’t a several-grams-per-week pro bodybuilder steroid stack. This was a fairly low dose that might represent someone sticking their pinky toe into the world of steroids. So for people who say, “Oh, steroids don’t make you bigger and stronger. They just let you work harder,” I’m sad to inform you that such a statement is patently false. They may help with recovery and let you work harder, but I guarantee you that you could stick with the exact training routine you have now, start taking steroids, and gain more size and strength from it – no extra work required. And an untrained person might (would probably) gain more muscle from just taking steroids than they would if they actually worked out.

Steroids clearly make you bigger and stronger. But how much of an advantage do they actually provide for sports?

For sports where absolute strength and size are paramount, they give a huge advantage: The superheavyweight class of any sport where you can weigh as much as you want comes to mind. Powerlifters, weightlifters, and strongmen in the very top weight division. Obviously bodybuilding and physique sports as well. For everything else – I think they help, but not to the degree people would like to make it seem, and not at super high doses.

Most sports, at their core, are about producing as much force as possible relative to your bodyweight, while effectively meeting the energetic demands of the sport. The “relative to your bodyweight” piece is the part I’d like to hone in on.

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You see, steroids don’t directly make you stronger. They directly make you bigger. They cause your muscles to synthesize more protein, but there’s more to strength than muscle protein accretion. There is a relationship between “bigger” and “stronger” (obviously), but the relationship isn’t 1 to 1. (Edit: the statement “they don’t directly make you stronger” may not be entirely true. Testosterone does have nervous system effects that could directly improve strength output, and many lifters report substantial acute benefits of various fast-acting oral compounds due to mood alteration and lowering of central inhibition. However, the former works on a slightly longer time scale compared to muscle protein synthesis, and the latter DOES probably contribute, but there’s no research to determine how effective orals are at altering mood, perception, and expectancy relative to placebos. Thanks to Dr. Mike Israetel for the catch.) Especially in sports with weight classes, added muscle mass isn’t good for much if your strength doesn’t increase at the same rate. At least based on the scant research available, it looks like it may be the case that if you take too high of a dose, it’ll actually hinder your performance by increasing your mass much more than your strength. The first place I’d like to look is at a study examining the effects of different doses of testosterone. Participants’ natural testosterone production was slowed down, and then they were given test in doses ranging from 25mg/week (really really low) to 600mg/week (well above the physiological range).

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Linear increase in muscle mass gains, but not much of a difference between 300mg/week (which took the people about 40% above the top of the physiological range) and 600mg/week (which took them several times above the physiological range, effectively increasing their testosterone by 4-5 fold) for strength gains, in spite of the substantially increased mass gains with 600mg/week. From the American Journal of Physiology.

Gain in muscle size was quite linear. However, gains in strength were not. The 300mg/week group got nearly the exact same strength gains as the 600mg/week group, but with less hypertrophy (about 5 pounds less fat free mass). Over time, this could potentially mean lower force output relative to bodyweight for the group taking a higher dose.

This notion is borne out in further research (Yu, 2014), comparing strength and muscle characteristics between lifetime drug-free lifters and long-term steroid users. In this study, the steroid users had larger legs and more lean mass, but the drug free lifters squatted considerably more relative to lean body mass and leg muscle volume. Each pound of leg muscle for the drug free lifters could produce more force than a pound of leg muscle for the steroid users.

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Check out Maximal Squat Force relative to Lean Leg Mass. 88N/kg vs. 130N/kg – about 47% more force output per unit of muscle for the drug free lifters. From PLoS ONE.

Of course, in this study, a confounding factor is training histories. Due to ethical constraints, there was no intervention – it was merely an observational study. The drug free lifters were all weightlifters or powerlifters, whereas the steroid users included a mix of lifters, strongmen, and bodybuilders. So it could simply be that the differences could be attributable to the sport-specific training, not the drugs. Because the difference was SO profound, though (almost 50% higher

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force output per pound of leg muscle in the drug free lifters), I don’t think we can chalk it all up to training. However, I’m not entirely sure WHY someone would be stronger, relatively, if they built their muscle without drugs. Maybe the rapid protein synthesis and decrease in protein breakdown doesn’t allow for effective remodeling. Maybe muscle strength increases faster than tendon strength, so sensory mechanisms like the golgi tendon organ don’t allow the muscles to contract maximally. Maybe the muscle is being built so fast that neural factors simply can’t keep up, so the lifters in these studies wind up with large, inefficient muscles that could be made more efficient with training and by transitioning into a training phase focusing on adding strength without any more mass. Or, of course, I could be entirely wrong. There’s not a lot of research on steroid use in healthy, athletic populations, and there are obvious confounding factors in both of these studies. I will say, though, it matches some of my observations. The guys on drugs who tend to do the best in weight class dominated sports like powerlifting, are the ones who add mass slowly, gradually increasing their doses or sticking with a conservative cycle for a long time instead of aggressively trying to add a lot of mass all at once. Look how long it took for Ed Coan to go from 165 to 242, as an example. Based on what I’ve seen, the guys who get the most out of their drugs – for strength – are the ones who take enough to primarily improve recovery, while gradually add mass over time – not put on 20+ pounds over night. Going back to Bashin, 2001, if you’re a powerlifter, you want the results of the 300mg/week group, not the 600mg/week group. The last thing I’d like to talk about is how long steroid use benefits you.

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The short answer – basically forever. When your muscles grow, your muscle fibers add new myonuclei – each nucleus can only “manage” a finite amount of real estate in a muscle fiber, so your fibers have to add more as they grow. If you stop training, you may lose muscle size, but those myonuclei stick around for much, much longer. That’s the main reason behind the phenomenon of “muscle memory.” If you take a few months off lifting, you can come back to the gym and get back to your old levels of strength and muscularity pretty quickly, because your body doesn’t have to fuse new myonuclei again. The old ones are still sticking around (unless the muscle fiber itself dies, as could happen with aging or severe injury), so your body just ramps up protein synthesis and voila! It takes you a month or two to gain back the muscle it initially took you years to build, because protein accretion can proceed at a quicker rate than gaining new myonuclei.

The blue lines represent years of hard training. The red line represents a couple weeks or months. From the University of Oslo.

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Of course, the application for steroids is pretty obvious. You take steroids, you gain mass, you go off, and those myonuclei are still hanging around, keeping you more jacked than you would have been otherwise.

So, here are some takeaways:

1) Steroids, physiologically, work. This much is not debatable.

2) On top of how well they work physiologically, a major factor is how well they work psychologically – if you do something expecting to get a ton stronger, there’s a good chance you’ll get a ton stronger. This applies to much more than steroids. 3) Steroids do provide a substantial advantage for sports that aren’t governed by weight classes. However, taking too high of a dose right off the bat may actually decrease performance (increased strength and mass, but decreased relative strength), especially in sports with weight classes. If you decide to use steroids, you’ll probably get the best bang for your buck, strengthwise, with very conservative doses initially. 4) If you take steroids and then come off of them, you’ll probably lose some of the size and strength you gained, but you’ll always be at an advantage relative to a lifetime drug-free athlete.

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Stress: The Silent Killer (of Gains) One of the biggest problems we have when we talk about training is that we tend to only talk about physical stressors.

We like complicated periodization models, manipulating training volume, intensity, and frequency. In short, we like having a sense of control. We like thinking, “If I plan out and control these training factors, I’ll get this outcome.” Sure, nutrition and sleep play a role too, but as long as those factors (often given the blanket term “recovery”) are accounted for, you’re in the clear. However, those factors don’t paint the whole picture. Biology is messy. Your body is not a simple machine that you can feed inputs and expect predictable outputs. Now, you can have a general idea of what’ll happen. But 1+1 doesn’t always equal 2. Maybe it’ll be 2 most of the time, but sometimes it’ll be 5, and sometimes it’ll be -3. The reason is that your body isn’t in a static state, only being challenged by the workouts you put it through. There are billions of reactions taking place in your body every moment affecting what’ll happen at the systemic level, while dozens of inputs are simultaneously entering the system via your thoughts and your senses (which then affect and modify other thoughts and sensations). 1+1 won’t always equal 2, because your body isn’t dealing with 1+1. It’s dealing with 1+1 plus a million other inputs and moderating factors. The result may be between 1.5 and 2.5 most of the time, but there’s plenty of built-in ambiguity that’s difficult to predict, harder to account for, and impossible to quantify.

Biology is nonlinear. You cannot control it. You can, at best, influence it.

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Via trial and error, you can get a pretty good idea of how your body will respond to a certain set of training parameters. However, that response is still context-specific, and is largely mediated by how well your body can respond to stress. When you’re in a comfortable schedule with a 9to-5, a predictable social life, no large sleep or diet perturbations, etc., you can develop a good idea of how your body will respond to training stress. The more constant the other inputs, the more predictable the result of imposing a particular stressor (training, in this case) will be.

However, increase the overall stress your body is coping with, and your ability to then cope with a given level of training stress is decreased. Although simplistic, Selye’s “General Adaptation Syndrome,” is still very useful, even 80 years after its introduction.

Even if your training inputs haven’t changed, the rest of the inputs feeding into the system have changed, so the system with respond differently and perhaps unpredictably.

General Adaptation Syndrome essentially says that your body feeds all of its stress into a generalized pool of “adaptive reserves” that your body can use to elicit the specific adaptations necessary to respond to the stressor and strengthen the body against it in case the same stressor presents itself in the future. In the case of lifting, the strain on the structural and metabolic

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capabilities of the muscle are the stress, and your body responds by building larger muscles with more ability to resist strain and more of the enzymes necessary to handle exercise metabolically. However, if other stressors (work stress, poor sleep, heavy drinking, marital issues, moving to a new city, etc.) are present, they’re dipping into those adaptive reserves, so your body can’t respond as robustly to exercise. This is something we all “know,” but which hasn’t gotten much attention in research. In fact, though specific stressors’ (sleep deprivation, food deprivation, high altitude, etc.) influence on exercise and subsequent adaptations have been studied for decades, there was actually only one measly study previously conducted on how general stress affects recovery from strength training, and it lasted less than 24 hours (i.e. not long enough to assess recovery on any meaningful scale). However, now we have a brand new one which is really really good. It’s not a 12 week training study, but it’s – I think – useful.

Chronic Psychological Stress Impairs Recovery of Muscular Function and Somatic Sensations Over a 96-Hour Period by Stults-Kolehmainen et. Al. (2014)

The researchers sent out a questionnaire to 1200 people to place them on the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). Based on their PSS scores, the researchers purposefully sought out people who scored high or low on the scale to make sure there was a significant difference in stress level between the participants.

Participants

All the participants were enrolled in college weight training classes.

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Once the subjects were selected, they were given two stress-related questionnaires. One was to place them on the PSS scale again (to see if their scores had changed since they last filled out the questionnaire), and one was the Undergraduate Stress Questionnaire (USQ).

PSS evaluates how stressed you *feel.* USQ evaluates how many stressful events are taking place in your life. This is a useful distinction to make, because some people tend to be able to just let the stress roll off their backs, so to speak. Others respond more negatively to life stressors. The high-stress group in this study both had stressful events in their lives, and felt mentally stressed about those things.

Procedure

The study procedure was pretty freaking brutal. The subjects worked up past a 10rm (i.e. they did sets of 10 until they could no longer complete 10 reps). Then they dropped back to their established 10rm for another set of 10. Then they took 10% off the leg press for another set of 10. If they got all 10 reps with that weight, they stayed with that weight and did 4 more sets to failure. If they didn’t get 10 reps, they took 10% more off and did 4 more sets to failure.

Before the training session, the researchers measured Maximal Isometric Force (using the same leg press – MIF), vertical jump height, and cycling power. They reassessed MIF directly after the workout and 60 minutes post-workout, and they reassessed all 3 performance-related variables at 24, 48, 72, and 96 hours post-workout.

They also assessed soreness, perceived physical energy, and perceived physical fatigue before the workout, directly after, 60 minutes after, and at 24, 48, 72, and 96 hours post-workout by having a number line with a statement like “I have no feelings of soreness” on one end and

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“strongest feelings of soreness ever felt” on the other end, and telling the subjects to place a mark on the line that corresponded with how sore they felt.

Results

First of all, it should be noted that there were no significant differences in any of the parameters (MIF, 1rm strength, jump height, cycling power, etc.) between groups at the start of the study. Additionally, total workload and cardiovascular response to exercise (max and average heart rate) were similar between the high stress and low stress groups, indicating that the results can’t simply be explained by saying one group worked harder than the other.

Rate of recovery from exercise was strongly correlated with the stress inventories.

For Maximal Isometric Force, everyone was gassed after the workout, with strength dropping off almost 50% directly post-workout, recovering substantially at 60 minutes post-exercise, and continuing to improve from there.

However, the low-stress group had already fully recovered by 48 hours post-exercise, whereas it took a full 96 hours for the high stress group to recover pre-exercise MIF.

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It should be noted – the researchers found this pattern by simply comparing the high stress and low stress groups. Then, to make sure there weren’t confounding factors, they made adjustments for fitness, training experience, and workload and found the same pattern still held true.

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Cycling power and vertical jump height were less affected by the exercise bout, and recovered much faster in both groups – near pre-exercise levels by 24 hours post-exercise. The researchers theorized that this could be explained by specificity. MIF was assessed on the same leg press used as the workout, so that was the movement pattern showing the most fatigue.

Perceptions of energy, fatigue, and soreness were also affected by stress. The higher stress group had less energy, more fatigue, and more soreness for longer than the low stress group.

Takeaways The results of your training can’t be reduced to how many sets, reps, and exercises you did. Other factors affect how your body will respond to exercise. Furthermore, you can’t take your exercise performance in the gym today as an indicator of how hard you SHOULD be training, given other stressors. Both groups lifted a similar amount of weight, did a similar amount of volume, and had similar cycling power and vertical jump height. That’s one factor that makes overtraining/overreaching tricky to manage. We like looking for objective signs – getting fewer reps, being able to lift less weight, etc. However, if this study is any indication, other stressors start interfering with exercise recovery prior to performance taking a major hit.

One of the things that was difficult to adjust to when transitioning from training 90% of my clients in-person to training 90% of them online was that subjective feedback was harder to come by. When an athlete walks into the gym, you can tell from their body language, how they move, etc. whether they’re feeling good or starting to get run down – and you can make adjustments

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accordingly. You don’t get that if the only feedback you’re getting from your online training clients in objective.

Online, communication is so much more important. The sets, reps, and weights someone can lift only tell so much. You also need to know how they feel, how they’re sleeping, how their appetite is, etc. There were times that someone hit a huge PR one week, then took a nosedive the next week. I saw “this person has acclimated to the workload and is getting awesome results” when, in reality, they had adapted to the stressor as much as they were capable, and their performance peaked right before they started backsliding a bit. Lesson learned. As hard as it is for people to accept (and trust me, I get a lot of push-back on this), I’ll usually deload someone directly after an unusually good week of training – steady, consistent PRs are one thing, but when an intermediate or advanced lifter hits a 40 pound PR out of nowhere, or gets 7 reps with a weight that was a max triple a month ago, I’ve found they’re usually teetering on the edge of overtraining – right when their results are telling them to push harder to see more big PRs. I don’t have any data to back me up, but it’s a pattern I’ve noticed enough times that I find it has good predictive value. 9 times out of 10, someone will hit a huge PR, I’ll pull back on the reigns for the next week of training, they’ll send me a few emails bellyaching, I’ll put my foot down, and on Tuesday or Wednesday I’ll get an email saying, “on second thought, the deload was a good call. Everything is feeling really freaking heavy this week.”

Physical fatigue often follows psychological fatigue, but the latter is harder to recognize without subjective feedback, meaning the former can creep up on you – or you can inadvertently rush headlong into it by putting your foot on the gas when the purely objective indications mislead you.

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As was previously mentioned, the stressed-out people in this study both had stressful events taking place in their lives, AND they felt stressed about them. You can’t make any statements from this study about someone who has a lot of life stressors but who manages to stay feeling relaxed, or about someone who has fewer stressors but who still lets every little thing stress them out. My hunch is that the perception of stress matters more than the volume of stressors themselves, but this study doesn’t address that distinction. I’d love to see a follow-up study looking as people with high PSS scores, and low USQ scores (feel stressed without many stressors) and people with low PSS scores and high USQ scores (stressful life events, but minimal feelings of stress).

Interestingly, much of the research cited in this article had to do with wound healing. While the connection between muscle repair and wound healing isn’t 1 to 1, there are some notable similarities. Namely, both are mediated by the inflammation pathway to a large extent, and both are inhibited by glucocorticoid dysregulation. Psychological stress screws with cytokine signaling (including IL-6, IL-1b, and TNF-a) and results in a chronic elevation of cortisol. In non-nerd speak, when your body’s stress response is switched “on” too much, for too long, the pathways that mediate the inflammatory response and tissue repair don’t work quite as well as they should. As a result, wounds heal slower and/or you take longer to recover from training. Remember, you can’t just draw out a plan on paper, look at the volume, intensity, and frequency, and know how your body will respond to it 100%. What may be low volume and easy to recover from in a situation with minimal life stress may be high volume and crushingly difficult when other stressors in your life rear their heads. Ongoing adjustments need to be made, and some

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wiggle-room needs to be built in so you can alter your training stress based on what life throws at you. This isn’t to say there’s no value in having a plan. It just means that plan needs to be interpreted more like a compass than like a road map.

Of course, ambiguity stresses some people out more than others. I love things that have a lot of gray area, while other people hate them, and want everything spelled out. In that case, a training plan with too much wiggle room can, paradoxically, cause more of the psychological stress that it was intended to moderate and account for. I think that’s one reason RPE-based training works so well for some people (people who can handle more gray area) but not-so-well for others (people who agonize about whether something was REALLY an 8RPE or not).

You are a psychosomatic being.

Psycho = mind

Soma = body You can’t divorce the two. Mental stress can manifest itself as physical stress, and physical stress can manifest itself as mental stress. Don’t be fooled into thinking the only thing that matters when it comes to training are the sets and reps you do in the gym.

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Don’t be fooled into thinking the time between training sessions, the food you eat, and the sleep you get are the only things that matter when you talk about recovery. Those things matter, but so do the other events in your life, and your perceptions about those events.

Personal Anecdote Managing stress is key for success in the gym. Here’s my own experience:

I started college as a triple major and double minor (History, Psychology, and Leadership, with minors in Economics and Mathematics). I started lifting again after a few years out of the gym the spring semester of my freshman years.

I got back to my old plateaus pretty quickly, but then progress slowed substantially for about 9 months as I took 19-20 credit hours per semester. At the end of my sophomore year, I decided to go with my heart and switch to Exercise Science. I dropped all my other majors and minors.

That summer, I interned at a gym. I only worked 3 hours per day, had very minimal life stress, slept as much as I wanted, worked out 3-4 hours per day, and generally enjoyed life. I added 100 pounds to my squat and ~175 pounds to my total in 3 months, destroying my old plateaus.

My first semester in the Exercise Science program, I took another 20 hours to get all my pre-reqs out of the way to make sure I’d be able to take all the upper level classes in the program (designed for 4-5 semesters) in my final 3 semesters. Progress = zero.

The next semester, I only took 12 hours, and all of my classes were incredibly easy. Stress was minimal, and I added another 100 pounds to my squats (in wraps this time, so realistically more like 50), 20 to my bench, and 80 to my deadlift.

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The work situation in the first half of that next summer was a lot more stressful that I was expecting, and I got married in July, so not much training took place after that (nice long honeymoon, and then only a week before going back to school). I got weaker that summer.

This past year (last August to this August) has also been fairly stressful. My wife and I were angst-y because we didn’t really have a plan for what we wanted to do with our lives. There was some stress about jobs, finances, and grad school that would take way too long to explain in a blog post about training, but suffice it to say that training wasn’t my #1 focus. As a result – very slow progress. Still hovering around where I was strength-wise 15 months ago when I last competed.

I like to look back and see what I was doing training-wise at peaks and valleys in my progress, but the factor that most strongly predicts how much strength I’ll gain at any given point in time – more than training (I totaled 1714 at 220 with a program utilizing daily maxes, and 1885 at 242 for a more kosher upper/lower-ish split) and more than diet (I was drinking the keto Kool-Aid for most of my training time leading up to 1714, and had a more standard carb-based diet for 1885) is simply how stressful the rest of my life is outside the gym.

Anyway, just wanted to leave you with that anecdote. Manage your stress and adapt your training plan to what life throws at you. You can’t separate your time in the gym from the rest of your life.

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Wrecking Your Diet, One Night at a Time “Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity”

The title of the study says it all. If there’s one subject I tend to get preachy about, it’s sleep. It’s not exciting like a new exercise protocol or as sexy as some new diet trend, so it doesn’t get the coverage it deserves. But it is absolutely crucial that you get a full night of sleep.

This article is about how sleep can help make you sexy. Putting aside the considerable health implications of neglecting sleep, we’re starting off on a topic more immediately relevant to most of you – body composition – losing fat while holding onto muscle. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

The study at hand was conducted to ascertain whether amount of sleep would affect results while dieting. It built upon previous studies showing hormonal disturbances with lack of sleep (which I’ll cover in more detail in a later post), and increases in appetite. So the authors wanted to know whether those changes would actually manifest themselves in meaningful body composition changes when on a controlled, low calorie diet.

Participants

The subjects were 10 overweight (average BMI 27.4) but otherwise healthy people, mostly in their late 30s or early 40s. They were excluded from the study if they were heavy drinkers,

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smokers, had jacked up sleep habits, had any major abnormalities on a physical, or were habitual heavy caffeine users. In short, they were pretty average, middle aged folks.

The study procedure

For 14 days, participants had to stay in bed for either 8.5 or 5.5 hours per night. At least 3 months later, participants swapped conditions. Food intake was restricted to 90% of resting metabolic rate. Doubly labeled water was used to assess energy expenditure (I won’t go too far afield explaining how it works, but rest assured that doubly labelled water is a VERY good method for assessing energy expenditure accurately). Meals were standardized and weighed to ensure calorie intake was controlled for as tightly as possible. In short, it was a very wellcontrolled study.

The results

Amount of time the participants actually slept increased or decreased as it was supposed to. Those in bed 8.5 hours per night slept, on average, 7hrs and 25min per night (pretty close to their habitual average before the study of 7.7 hrs./day), and those who were in be 5.5 hours per night slept, on average, 5hrs and 14min. Energy consumption was darn near identical – about 1450 calories per day. Daily caloric expenditure was also nearly identical – about 2140 calories per day. That’s essentially a 700 calorie daily deficit, which is quite reasonable.

Macronutrient breakdown was 48% carbohydrate, 34% fat, and 18% protein. Both groups lost about 3kg (6.6lbs) during the study, BUT…

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The 8.5 hour group lost about 50/50 fat and lean mass. The 5.5 hour group lost 20/80 fat and lean mass. That’s not a typo. Only 1/5 of the weight lost was actually fat. 0.6kg of the 3.0kg total. That’s substantial.

So, in more concrete numbers, the 8.5 hour group lost 2.33x more fat than the 5.5 hour group, and the 5.5 hour group lost 1.6x more lean mass than the 8.5 hour group. If most of us are aiming for body REcomposition (more muscle and less fat), would this be the definition of body DEcomposition?

It doesn’t get much better for the poor sleep deprived subjects from there, either…. Hunger was higher. This was accompanied by greater increases in acylated ghrelin – a hormone that promotes hunger.

Respiratory quotient was higher. That means that for each calorie burned, more of the energy came from carbohydrate, and less of it came from fat.

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You need more of this

And less of this

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Drawbacks

Well, for one, the participants were sedentary. That makes it a little harder to generalize results since resistance exercise helps you retain more muscle while dieting.

Also, at least in the eyes of most people reading this, protein intake was laughably low (about 65g/day).

It should be noted that lean mass also includes water. So of the 3kg lost, only about 1.2-1.7kg (2.7-3.8 pounds) of that should come from tissue loss (your body theoretically gets about 3500 calories from a pound of fat, and 2500 from a pound of muscle, so with an overall deficit of 9660 calories on average, some of those 6.6 pounds almost certainly came from water). With that in mind, let’s do a little rough math. Let’s say both groups lost about 50/50 water/tissue – a fair enough assumption. The 8.5 hour group lost 1.4kg of fat, which means .1kg left over for lean tissue loss (93% fat lost, 7% lean – not too shabby!). The 5.5 hour group lost .6kg of fat, which means .9kg left over for lean tissue loss (40% fat lost, and 60% lean mass. A little better than 20/80, but still pretty dismal).

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I’ll admit, that’s just a rough estimate, but it probably gives a little clearer picture of what was actually lost by both groups. The 8.5 hour group probably lost almost all fat and kept their lean tissue quite well, in spite of a 1450 calorie diet, low protein, and no exercise. The 5.5 hour group, no matter how you slice it or dice it, lost a considerable amount of lean tissue, whether that be from muscle, bone, or organs. If we wanted to go into the weeds of the effects sleep deprivation on cortisol, and cortisol’s effects on water retention, there’s even the potential that the 5.5 hour group was holding onto a little more water, which means even more of their lean mass loss would be muscle… but we’ll be charitable.

Breaking it down I understand if you’re a little skeptical about how well this would translate to you if you’re eating enough protein and you’re lifting. Sure, you’d probably do a better job of holding onto lean mass than the 5.5 hour group in this study, BUT we’re probably just talking about the degree to which you stop the bleeding. Maybe instead of 40/60 it would be 60/40 fat/lean. That’s still not painting a rosy picture.

Mechanistically, I have a hard time seeing how improved diet and exercise would mitigate ALL the lean mass loss that comes from losing sleep. There are some well-documented hormonal changes (I’ll talk about those in a later post), a higher RQ means less fat is burned proportional to total energy expenditure so that energy HAS to come from stored glycogen or protein, and acylated ghrelin does some nasty stuff on its own. To quote the authors, “Acylated ghrelin has been shown to reduce energy expenditure, stimulate hunger and food intake, promote retention

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of fat, and increase hepatic glucose production to support the availability of fuel to glucosedependent tissues.”

Literally the best case scenario with a shift in RQ is this: with adequate protein intake and resistance training, you’re still able to hold onto your lean mass. However, for every calorie you burn, more of it comes from stored glycogen, and less of it comes from stored body fat. Less fat burned per calorie burned means you’ll have to diet longer to get lean. More glycogen burned per calorie means you’ll have less energy for your workouts. Elevated acylated ghrelin means you’ll be hungrier. So, if you’re not sleeping enough and doing everything else 100% right, the best possible scenario is that you have to diet for longer, while having crappy workouts and being even hungrier all the time. Sounds like more fun than a barrel of monkeys, right?

The Takeaway

Sleep. It’s as simple as that. Let’s take it out of the realm of “sleep helps with recovery,” and let’s forget for a moment about the health consequences or fogginess that come from not sleeping. We have concrete evidence that sleep is essential for optimal body composition. Lack of sleep directly makes it harder to burn fat and increases your risk of losing lean mass. If it’s worth it to you to prioritize training and prioritize nutrition (as seems to be the case for almost everyone), make a point of also prioritizing sleep. Good sleep will magnify the effectiveness of the other two, and bad sleep will be a huge obstacle to your physique goals.

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Poor Recovery & Increased Muscle Breakdown: Insufficient Sleep Part 2 This article is pulling heavily from a 2011 review by Datillo et Al. if you’d like to follow along.

1. The anti-anabolic effects of sleep deprivation

Failing to get enough sleep is especially deleterious for your strength and hypertrophy based goals because it reduces circulating levels of two of your primary anabolic hormones testosterone and IGF-1.

Testosterone directly increases muscle hypertrophy, binding to androgen receptors, going straight to the cell’s nucleus, and increasing transcription and protein synthesis. It also inhibits the activity of other proteins that block the mTOR pathway – the primary cellular pathway of muscle hypertrophy. The effects of testosterone levels within the physiological range on muscle hypertrophy can be overstated (i.e. injecting steroids makes a noticeable difference, but swings within normal healthy range aren’t massively important), and testosterone levels don’t paint the whole picture of someone’s ability to gain muscle in response to training, but there’s no denying that it is an important piece of the puzzle.

IFG-1 is also important for muscle hypertrophy. It also works via the mTOR pathway to increase protein synthesis, and is critical for satellite cell proliferation and recruitment – that means the potential for more nuclei for each muscle fiber, which is the major limiting factor for muscle growth.

So, with sleep deprivation, you have a reduction in muscle protein synthesis via two separate pathways. But it just keeps getting worse from here.

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2. Catabolic effects of sleep deprivation

Building on the fact that sleep deprivation decreases testosterone release, testosterone inhibits the effects of myostatin. Myostatin blocks satellite cell proliferation and differentiation (opposite of IGF-1).

Lack of sleep also increases cortisol levels. Acute elevations of cortisol while training are totally normal and expected. However, chronic elevations can cause all sorts of nastiness. Cortisol blocks protein synthesis by inhibiting the activation of the mTOR pathway, and it activates pathways that lead to muscle protein breakdown. Here’s a handy little picture from the authors summing up what’s going on here:

Gainz: nowhere to be seen

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Worth considering

It may be useful to think of insufficient sleep being similar to the aging process when it comes to its effects on strength, size, and body composition.

1. Decreased testosterone

2. Decreased IGF-1 and growth hormone

3. Increased catabolism

Just thinking aloud (or in text) here, but mechanistically it makes sense. Melatonin does a lot of things in your body beyond promoting sleep, including stimulating growth hormone release, which is crucially important for IGF-1. Melatonin, growth hormone, and IGF-1 all decrease with age. Decreased melatonin release with sleep deprivation could be the first domino setting off the rest of the hormonal cascade. That doesn’t explain the testosterone and cortisol effects, but decreased melatonin production has been implicated in the aging process as a whole. In fact, in mice, swapping the pineal glands (the part of the brain that makes melatonin) from young and old mice substantially prolongs life in the old mice and shortens it in the young mice. Now, don’t think I’m saying that this is absolutely the mechanism behind sleep deprivation’s effects – it’s just an interesting connection worth stewing on (and, I might add, it’s one that gerontologists – scientists studying aging – are stewing on as well). Obviously there are other things going on as well – tidy explanations rarely explain everything going in in a biological system! So how much should you sleep? Honestly, it depends person to person. There’s no one-sizefits-all answer. Some people simply need to sleep more or less than others, and the amount of

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sleep you need will vary depending on how hard you’re training and how much stress you’re under. However, my one-size-fits-all answer is this: if you need to wake up to an alarm, you’re not sleeping long enough. Your goal should be to wake up naturally every morning, with an alarm reserved for rare occasions when you NEED to be up earlier or go to sleep later than normal – this should be the exception, not the rule.

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Exercise Science: What is it Good For? It seems like the anti-science backlash is beginning. (Warning: this is a 2100 word post about the scientific process. For a TL;DR, jump to “Is there really a conflict” at the bottom.)

The old-guard of strength coaches sat quiet long enough. For these people, science is useful insofar as it verifies things they already believe, but can be dismissed if it counters their own opinions and observations. Apparently, the relatively new trend of evidence-based coaches and writers questioning their claims and eroding their credibility has made them uncomfortable enough that they feel the need to start pushing back. And each time one of their articles gets published, it gets shared around and praised by a lot of very intelligent lifters and athletes, so clearly their position still broad appeal.

I feel like this position still has such a following because most folks like me suck at explaining how science works and both when it is and isn’t useful. We are stereotyped as nerds who are out of touch with the real world and in-the-trenches coaching, and boy do we deliver in spades. So, I want to use this article as a defense of exercise science, only insofar as it’s actually defensible. I’ll do this by rebutting the most common anti-science claims made by opponents. 1. The studies done in the exercise science literature don’t have much relevance to the athletic population

Often, this is the case. For every study that gets done about how to further elite athletic performance, 10 are done examining how to help obese people lose weight, or help old people

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maintain a reasonable standard of living. Why? Because, quite frankly, it ultimately matters a lot more that we reduce our society’s waistline, or that the elderly can live independent, happy lives than it is for you to take your squat from 500 to 600. Therefore, the more valuable studies are the ones that get funded.

You may see a study looking at changes in strength and bone mass due to training on a vibration plate and think “dumb scientists, why not just make the people squat?!” Well, they’re probably more interested in outcomes for people unable to perform traditional strength training programs (i.e. the elderly or diseased), or for women developing osteoporosis. Scientists aren’t idiots. If you see a study and think “the entire premise of this study does not seem to relate to my goals in any meaningful way” then it’s because…. that study probably wasn’t conducted with people like you in mind. HOWEVER, the fact that a preponderance of studies aren’t relevant to athletic performance does not mean that those studies that ARE performed on trained subjects and ARE relevant to athletic performance don’t have merit. Rejecting the relevant exercise science literature because the bulk of the literature isn’t aimed at elite athletics is like dismissing mathematics because most of the math textbooks printed are for grade school classes, not Ph.D. level mathematicians.

2. Exercise scientists are dumb and design experiments to answer obvious questions

This critique is based on a misunderstanding of how science works. Something that *seems* self-evident can’t be assumed to be true if it’s a testable hypothesis.

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For example, let’s say you see a study that says “hamstring curls increase EMG readings in the hamstrings, and heavier loads increase EMG readings more so than lighter loads.”

Those scientists probably knew they were going to get those results before they performed the experiment. However, if they wanted to do further research on the hamstrings (maybe something related to hypertrophy, strength, sprint performance, etc.), they need to establish the basics first. It may seem like a tedious process, but it’s the only way to make sure you don’t have faulty assumptions that affect your outcomes and conclusions. For example – dehydration causes cramping, right? Well, not so fast (example 1 and example 2). That’s an example of something everyone assumed to be true, but was found to be a faulty assumption when it was studied rigorously. One of the strengths of the scientific method is that it doesn’t take anything for granted. Studies about topics that SHOULD be obvious are just part of that process. They may seem pedantic, but they do occasionally find that things we all assumed to be true are, in fact, false assumptions.

3. Too many studies on untrained subjects

Refer to #1. Most people ARE untrained! A study on untrained subjects is less relevant to the trained population, but it doesn’t affect the relevance of the literature as a whole, or whether applying science to the training process is a worthwhile endeavor. 4. Science says “such and such” is wrong, but we all know it’s true

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I love this one (“love” as in, it makes me want to ram my head through a wall). This criticism carries with it the assumption that you’re more likely to be right than the entirety of the scientific literature.

One of my favorites is hamstring involvement in the squat. Numerous coaches have hailed the squat as a hamstring developer, and have scoffed at scientists who have found (repeatedly) that squats really don’t train the hamstrings very well at all. Do these coaches have EMG studies they’re hiding? Have they taken MRI or DEXA scans to assess hamstring hypertrophy utilizing squats vs. RDLs/GHRs/etc? As my mother was fond of saying, “the truth has nothing to hide.” “The barbell squat exercise causes substantial increases in hamstring activation, strength, and hypertrophy relative to (insert here any hamstring dominant exercise, such as deadlift variations)” is a testable hypothesis. If they think that’s true, they can test it and publish it, and then it will BE a part of the scientific literature. If all they’re saying is that the hamstrings do something in the squat, then they’re really not making a statement that’s at odds with the science at all.

Now, in some cases (the original steroid research prior to Bashin et Al comes to mind), science will come to poor conclusions because of poor study design, but that’s a question of context, and the correct response is to critique the methodology of the studies rather than to turn your back on the scientific process itself.

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If you think you’re right and the science is wrong, and you can’t find major design flaws in the studies you dispute, you’re either arrogant and lacking a leg to stand on, or you’re in the position of needing to “put up or shut up.” 5. Science flip flops, changes positions, or isn’t reliable Changing positions in the face of new evidence isn’t a weakness. That’s a sign of humility. Science doesn’t claim to have Truth (notice the capital T). Science merely tries to move closer and closer to what is actually true and verifiable. If something is found to be false, it should be discarded. That’s not wishy-washy-ness. That’s epistemological honesty.

6. You can find a study that says anything This is another fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. Applying science isn’t about finding a single study to support your position. It’s about looking to see what the bulk of the literature says. Science is consensus-driven.

For example, if you have 2 poorly-controlled studies saying GMOs are going to cause cancer and kill you, and 15 major, well-controlled studies saying they’re fine and carry no significant longterm risk of disease, you go where the best and most numerous studies are leading. The fact that there are dissent and conflicting studies doesn’t mean science isn’t useful – it just means you need to examine the literature as a whole and not try to cherry-pick studies to make a point.

Reviews and meta-analyses are good places to start for an overview of a topic.

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Drawbacks:

1. Prescription vs. principles Scientific studies don’t write training programs for you. They teach you about mechanisms and principles that you can then apply to your own training or to how you train athletes.

Science will never remove the importance of the strength coach. Science may give you the ingredients, but the trainer or coach is still the master chef. Training and program design will always be equal parts art and science.

2. Individual variation As I’ve harped on before, science deals with averages. It doesn’t (at least yet) account for individual variability. As such, it can help give you a starting point for programming, but a smart coach or athlete still needs to make adjustments to account for individual differences that can’t show up in a study that has to deal with means and standard deviations.

3. Insufficient literature This is a point the critics are 100% right about – right now, the scientific literature about training for elite level athletic endeavors is pretty thin gruel.

However, some would assert that the logical implication is we need to forget about exercise science. I couldn’t disagree more. The best way to fix bad science or insufficient science is with more science! It is a self-correcting process.

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For example, prior to the germ theory of disease, it was often thought that disease was caused by ill humors in the air, or by “bad blood.” Doctors weren’t held in particularly high esteem, and many were skeptical of the medical profession as a whole. However, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch helped demonstrate that infectious diseases were actually caused by microorganisms, and thus modern medicine was born, and doctors were actually able to treat disease well and reliably get positive results from their treatments.

Just because the exercise science literature is insufficient for many questions an athlete or coach will wrestle with, that does not mean the process as a whole is unsound – it just means more research needs to be done to expand the knowledge in the field. Luckily, I think we’re on the cusp of some really exciting times in strength science. Alan Aragon, Brad Schoenfeld (who has literally a dozen studies in review right now – I’m sure mostly on trained athletes!), and many others are pumping out research almost every week that’s relevant to most of us.

I think the critics are going to be amazed at the relevance and quality of studies that are coming down the pike in the next couple of years.

Is there really a conflict?

Or, to state it another way, why would a coach be critical of applying the scientific method to training athletes. To reiterate – the truth has nothing to hide.

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Honestly, I can only think of two reasons why someone would oppose exercise science. a) They don’t understand how it works, and come to conclusions about its usefulness based on bad assumptions. b) They don’t want to find themselves in a position of having to admit they’re wrong if the evidence comes out against them. The best coaches (even once who aren’t explicitly citing scientific studies) are already using the scientific process every day. Science isn’t complicated or reserved for the elites. It’s a simple process

1. Make an observation

2. Make a hypothesis (prediction) based on that observation

3. Think of a way to test your prediction

4. Run the test (experiment)

5. Ask yourself if the outcome of the experiment supported your prediction, or called it into question.

Any good coach should always be trying to figure out better and better ways to improve their athletes’ performance. When they observe that something could be improved upon, attempt a fix, and then check to see if the changes had the desired effect, they are doing science. That is how good coaches became good coaches, and continue to become better coaches.

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The only coaches not doing science, on some level, are the ones that say there’s only one way of doing things and refuse to change in the face of new evidence. They don’t realize that just because something works, it could still work better. Instead of innovation and improvement, this approach represents stagnation. It belies a stronger desire to assert that “I’m right, and have been right this whole time” than the desire to improve training outcomes for their athletes.

There is no true conflict between evidence-based coaches and in-the-trenches coaches. Evidence-based coaches start with the literature, and refine their approach based on inthe-trenches experience. In-the-trenches coaches start with experience, and apply the scientific method to their training programs to continue improving them. In my opinion, both are legitimate ways to learn and improve, and both camps should listen to what the other has to say.

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Buy-In I’d like to introduce you all to a friend of mine. This is Alex.

I’ve known Alex online for a while now, but I didn’t meet him until this summer, when he was cool enough to let us stay at his place while we got set up in an apartment (it’s hard to apartment search in CA while living an Arkansas and North Carolina). Luckily, he was the cool kind of person you meet online who turned out to be even better in real life than on the internet – not the kind that seems normal enough, until you wind up 6 feet under the earth in the New Mexico desert as soon as you close your eyes. Anyways, I’ve learned a lesson from Alex this summer that may be more valuable that any individual tidbit of information I picked up in the entirety of my formal education or experiential leaning so far. Namely, physiology only matters if someone’s already psychologically invested. Emotional buy-in is hugely important.

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I guess this was something I “knew” on an intellectual level, but it didn’t really make sense on an experiential level until I saw Alex’s work this summer.

Alex runs a kick-ass weight loss facility in Huntington Beach. In the corner of it, he has a fully equipped powerlifting gym (power rack, competition plates, Texas power bar and deadlift bar, DBs up to 200s… It’s awesome) where we’ve been training most of the time, but the majority of the facility is dedicated to his weight loss clients: mostly middle aged, mostly female people wanting to lose weight and look good. The place is always packed, and everyone always seems to be having a good time. So I asked Alex what his special sauce is – obviously weight loss is a big industry and HB is a great place to be, but he’s not the only gym in town by a LONG shot (there are 5+ in a 1 mile radius) and his place is doing *exceptionally* well, especially since it just opened its doors 9 months ago. His answer, “I tell these women that they’re going to lose 20 pounds in 6 weeks, and I deliver.”

Hold up. I did some quick mental math. That’s roughly three and a half pounds per week. It’s physiologically best to shoot for 1-2 pounds per week, right? I think he could tell I was about to protest, so he cut me off. “These people aren’t happy with how they look and they want to lose a lot of weight. We both know they need to start working out and eating right. What’s going to get them to do that? Telling them, ‘you want to lose 40 pounds, but the healthiest thing is to drop a pound or two per week, so I can help you get to your

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goal in 5-10 months,’ or telling them, ‘you want to lose 40 pounds. Sweet. How about we cut that number in half in the next six weeks?’”

Next I asked him about success rates. 68% lose 20 pounds in 6 weeks, and virtually everyone loses at least 15. I’m starting to get skeptical. I know the research showing that sustained, substantial (20+ pounds) weight loss is possible, but exceedingly rare without bariatric surgery. But that’s the norm for him. Sure, he’s only been at it for 9 months, but the hefty majority of the people who have been with him from the beginning have lost 30 pounds or more and have kept it off or are still losing weight.

So I ask him about his methods. He shows me the diets that he puts them on. He starts them at roughly 10-11 calories per pound of body weight, adjusts down if they’re unhappy with how fast they’re losing weight, and won’t drop someone below 100 grams of carbs per day or 1,500 calories per day. He puts a premium on protein and quality food sources. Nothing mind-blowing or revolutionary. So what’s his secret? Emotional buy-in. It starts with the pitch of losing 20 pounds in 6 weeks (a goal that is doable, but big enough to animate the people he’s working with), is intensified by the group classes and supportive environment, and is reinforced at every step along the way. These people are interested in losing weight (why else would they set foot in the door?), Alex makes them believe they can lose weight (“68% of the people I’ve worked with have lost 20 pounds or more in 6 weeks. You seem like someone who works hard enough to be in the top 2/3, right?”), and he has a solid plan in place – good workouts and solid nutrition – to make sure their buy-in

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isn’t squandered. More than anything, his adherence rate (a low adherence rate is the bane of every trainer’s existence) is absurdly high.

Rewind 4 years to when I started doing online training consultations. I thought online strength training was something I wanted to get into, but I’m a little sensitive about charging for things – I’m the world’s biggest cheapskate, so if I’m going to charge someone for a service I’m providing, I want to make sure I’m providing a service that’s worth the cost. So what I did was blast all over Facebook and the forums that I was a part of at the time that I’d be taking on training clients for free. I thought I knew what I was doing – I’d been writing training programs for workout partners and friends at my gym for quite some time with overall good results, and I thought that would translate online.

Oh boy was I wrong. Some people did okay. Most, however, did not. The biggest issue – they weren’t doing what I told them to do! Some would openly admit it. Others would complain they weren’t getting results, and as soon I told them they had to start taking video of their main lifts and their major accessory work every workout, in addition to taking pictures of all the meals they ate… they magically started improving.

After a lot of frustration, I finally had a success rate good enough that I felt like I was ethically justified to charge for my services.

And a magical thing happened. Adherence rate jumped a solid 25% right away as soon as people had some skin in the game. And results improved noticeably.

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Once that was off the ground and running, I haven’t promoted hardly any – occasionally I’ll brag on a client who has hit a big PR or had a major accomplishment – but that’s because I’m legitimately proud of the effort they’ve put in, and I think they should get some public kudos for it. Other than that, I don’t talk about it much. I hate hate hate sales.

The great thing about hating sales: my adherence rate is now very high: 90%+. Sure, people don’t work out when they’re celebrating their honeymoon, or will cheat like a beast if they get invited to a wedding (and I’d be disappointed if they didn’t; unless you have a world record or an Olympic medal in your sights, life should trump training) but on the whole, people eat like they’re supposed to, get all their workouts in, and see great results.

Why? I didn’t have to convince them to train with me because of brilliant marketing or sales tactics. They read this blog, see what I’ve done, and think “Hey, this guy knows what he’s talking about and I think he can help me get stronger. Furthermore, I’m convinced enough of that fact that I’m willing to pay him to train me.” I don’t have to use any fancy tactics to get belief and buy-in. No one contacts me asking me to work with them unless buy-in is already there. So at this point you may be thinking, “That’s great, but how does this apply to me in any way at all. Congrats to you and your friend, but I read your damn blog because I usually get something out of what you write, so get on with your freaking point.”

Okay, okay.

For the fitness professional:

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Are you having to aggressively market yourself and your services to keep your head above water? Think about taking a step back and focusing on the quality of the work you do.

Are you knowledgeable? Do you write or make videos that benefit your readers or viewers while simultaneously demonstrating you know what you’re talking about? If not, get on it.

Are you getting your clients the results they want and do you love what you do and the people you train? Then let people see that – it goes a lot further than fancy advertising schemes do in my opinion. Of course, if you’re selling a program, I do think there’s something to be said for marketing. How many new lifters are absolutely stoked to start Strong Lifts or Starting Strength because they’re convinced it’s the best thing since sliced bread because of how dang confident Medhi and Rip sound when they talk about training new lifters? Ditto for intermediate lifters starting 5/3/1 or the Cube Method because of how Wendler and Brandon Lilly sound 100% sure you’re going to get a ton stronger doing their programs. Without that emotional buy-in, I guarantee you that you’re going to get less effort and worse results. Of course, there’s a fine line between getting someone excited about your program and making claims you can’t back up, but if you can be honest while building justifiable excitement, you’re going to be able to get better results for your clients.

For the person looking to get in shape, get stronger, or look sexy: Invest in what you’re doing. The fitness industry makes it really easy for you to convince yourself you really care without actually buying in to your own fitness. You can get a ton of

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information for free, and you can get a gym membership dirt cheap most places – it’s easy to go through the motions without ever really putting any skin in the game.

How much do you pay for cable TV? How much is your monthly phone bill? How much do you spend on entertainment or eating out at restaurants?

How much do you spend on your fitness goals?

In a society like ours, spending habits are a pretty good indication of priorities.

Want to get stronger or improve your performance? Your best bet is to hire a competent local coach or trainer to work with you 1 on 1. Your next best bet is to get in with a group or semiprivate fitness class germane to your goals. If you don’t have good local options or you can’t afford them, THEN think about hiring an online coach (Yes, it’s last on the list for a reason. I get good results with my online clients, but as a coach I’ll be the first to admit that there’s a lot you simply can’t address and won’t see unless you’re actually there with a person coaching them in real time. If you can work with a competent coach in person, do not hire someone online).

Want to get sexy? Hire a diet coach. Some people have the willpower to make a meal plan for themselves and stick with it, but most benefit hugely from hiring a good diet coach. Here’s a (not so) secret: most diet coaches don’t do anything absurdly complicated: set calories, set protein, and either set fat and adjust carbs, or set carbs and adjust fat – then make small adjustments based on how someone’s progress is going. And you know what? It works, because the first law of thermodynamics is pretty accurate, and someone who cares enough to spend money on a diet coach is (literally) invested in their results.

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Want to improve your knowledge? Buy an anatomy textbook and an exercise physiology textbook. Read 10 pages per day. Assuming 600 pages apiece, you’ve read them cover to cover in 4 months. Suddenly, everything will make a LOT more sense to you, you’ll be less apt to fall for stupid marketing gimmicks, and you’ll find yourself less and less interested in the drivel on most popular websites.

In summation:

Humans are not solely rational beings. More often than not, we make decisions based on emotion, and then try to come up with logical justifications after the fact (no matter how much we may hate to admit it) rather than make logical decisions and grow emotionally attached to them later. I’d wager that very few people reading this need to be rationally convinced about the need to train harder and eat more/less/better to meet their strength, performance, and physique goals. Most people just need more emotional buy-in. They’ve tried and failed too often, or have never had enough belief in their ability to succeed to fully devote themselves to their goals in the first place. 1. Pick a goal that’s doable, but big enough to animate you (the first ingredient in Alex’s secret sauce).

2. Find someone who you think can get you there. You may know enough to do it yourself, but that’s often not enough. Plenty of coaches hire coaches. That’s how I met Alex in the first place. The other person – and the payment you send each month – keep you accountable

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3. And invest – literally and emotionally – in the process.

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Be Honest with Yourself. Training for Health vs. Performance Here’s a potentially touchy question: Does your training make you a healthier person? Do I get a resounding roar of “Yes,” or do I hear crickets? How many bold souls will admit that honestly, no, their training is not contributing to their health, but may in fact be damaging it? I’ll be the first to admit it. My training does not, in any way, maximize health. I think this is a point more of us need to be honest with ourselves about before we can help other people. Here’s what I mean. Let’s just take some general qualities of performance and body composition: strength, size, body fat %, flexibility, and endurance. Just throwing out some hypothetical numbers, a person (man, for this example) training to optimize health should reasonably be expected possess these general abilities/qualities:

Squat 315

Bench 220

Deadlift 365

Weigh 170-180ish (for a normal sized guy) at 10-15% body fat

Perform adequately for most measures of flexibility/mobility (be able to hinge forward and touch the floor, be able to touch their hands behind the back with one arm over the shoulder and one arm coming from beneath, etc.)

Run a 5k in 24:00

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Now, I’m sure we could quibble that some of those numbers are a little too high or too low, but I think most of us can agree that the person I just described is probably quite healthy.

Let us now assume that this person decides to take up competitive powerlifting or competitive marathon running. Do you honestly think they become healthier by pushing their strength or endurance to crazy levels at the expense of everything else? What if he decided to become a contortionist and did everything possible to drop muscle mass to be able to attain insane levels of mobility? What if he wanted to diet down to 4% body fat for a physique show, or get as huge as possible for bodybuilding? Although all of these things are associated with positive health outcomes (strength, muscle mass, cardiovascular endurance, reasonably low body fat, and mobility), pursuing any of them to the elite level does not intrinsically further your health, and it could even be harmful to you depending on your goals, methods, and potential exclusion of training for other physical characteristics and abilities. I know that, in my training, I’m not doing anything to improve my health by working to improve a 700+ squat. To think otherwise is asinine. I do my best to keep a decent body composition and maintain decent levels of flexibility and conditioning, but I am definitely increasing joint wear and tear which is especially hazardous for cartilage which has poor blood supply and does not repair very well.

Of course, joint wear and tear is also a result of excessive running. Cardiovascular disease can result from getting too big (regardless of whether it’s muscle or fat, you still have miles of extra blood vessels your heart has to pump to), dieting down to extreme leanness can cause endocrine disruptions, and (the elephant in the room), the level of training necessary to become truly elite

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in ANYTHING typically carries with it an intrinsic social cost, whether it be in lost time you could have spent socializing, or stigmas associated with your lifestyle or appearance.

Sure, training solely for performance in a given discipline is healthier than sitting on the couch eating junk and doing nothing, but is that REALLY a comparison that verifies the healthiness of your pursuit? I think it’s important to differentiate between training for health and training for performance. I am, obviously, not against training for extreme levels of performance by any means. Nor do I think that training for performance in a given discipline must me unhealthy, just that it can be.

Consider your goals. If your main reason for training is so you can look good, feel good, and live a healthy life, then ignore all the noise out there telling you that you should get down to 4% body fat, run a marathon, lift ungodly amounts of weight, etc. Your training is not somehow less important or less productive because you’re not training to break records. Your goals are your goals, and your training is perfect if it serves those goals. If a trainer tries to mold your goals to conform to his or her area of interest, give them the boot and find someone who prioritizes your goals over their own.

Hopefully, if nothing else, this will serve as a reminder to be cognizant of your goals (or your clients’ goals) and to not fool yourself with false reasons for why you do what you do. If you’re training to be healthy you’re training to be healthy. If you’re training to be a freak, you’re training to be a freak. I think both a perfectly good reasons for training, and you shouldn’t need to fool yourself about your reasons.

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The Size of Your Pond A friend of mine at the gym at school got sponsored not too long ago. He does physique stuff (hasn’t actually competed, but is still jacked enough to pick up a sponsorship. Pretty legit.), so we come to a discussion with totally different paradigms. He’s helped me a lot with “feeling” muscles that are inhibited and don’t want to fire properly, and I help him with approaching strength-based programming. It’s a surprisingly productive relationship for a commercial gym.

Today he asked me simply how I handle heavy weights. For him, he said, squatting much over 4 plates feels like he’s dealing with a crushing amount of weight, especially in the hole, and pulling anything more than mid-400s feels intimidating in his hands when it breaks the ground. So he was curious about how I seem so nonchalant when handling 500+, and how I keep progressing even when the weights feel heavy. I gave him some basic advice about exercise selection (partials and supermaximal holds can help confidence underweight, and paused squats can make you feel much more comfortable in the hole when you squat heavy), and then also explained the truly important change that needed to be made.

Everyone knows the illustration of moving a goldfish to a larger and larger bowl. Keep it in a little bowl and it will stay small. Move it to a larger bowl and it will grow. Put it in a pond and it will grow even more. You’re that fish, and your bowl is how wide you cast your gaze (metaphor time!). If you want to be the strongest guy in your gym, that’s great. Not a bad place the start, but also a pretty lousy end goal. Unless you train at Westside, Big Iron, Lexen, , in the weight room of a college or professional sports team, or one of maybe 3 or 4 dozen REAL gyms in the county, being the strongest person in the gym is pretty meaningless. You’ve simply become the biggest fish in a tiny fish bowl.

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Bench 315 in most gyms, and people will “oo” and “ah.” Squat 5 plates and people will be astounded. That’s one of the worst things that can possibly happen. You see, you’ve cast your gaze pretty narrowly. You’ve become the top dog. If you’re the strongest person in the whole gym, there must be a reason everyone else isn’t as strong as you. You must be pretty darn strong. How much stronger can you get? It’s hard to say exactly, but probably not much. You’re the strongest person at your gym, after all. You’re even stronger than that one guy who uses prohormones (or, *gasp* a low dose of test from time to time). It’s going to be difficult moving forward, to further cement your place as king of the hill. Cast your gaze wider than that. Let’s say you weigh about 180 – an average sized dude. Men your size have squatted 710, bench 556, and pulled 791. So much for your amazing *cough* lifts. Congratulations. You’ve cast yourself from a tiny fish bowl into an ocean. You’ve gone from being the biggest fish to being a painfully average-sized fish – which is fantastic (no sarcasm).

I honestly think newb gains are 50% physical and 50% mental. Sure, they have a lot of untapped potential for growth, but they’re also mentally playing “catch up” with everyone around them. Here’s an experiment I wish they’d do: take two groups of new lifters, and put them both on the same popular beginner’s program (SS, SL, GSLP, or any of the others). One group trains in a commercial gym. The other trains in a collegiate football weight room – when the team is actually lifting – but receive no extra coaching, etc. I PROMISE you the second group gets significantly stronger on the exact same program. All over the internet you see people talk about finally squatting 315 or benching 225. It happens at the gym I train at when I’m in school. At Mash Elite (not a shameless plug, but a serious fact), doing either of those things means

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“Congratulations. You’re a non-midget who just hit puberty. Pretty productive for your first 2 months of training. Now let’s work towards something that’s ACTUALLY worth bragging about.” When you broaden your gaze – throw yourself into the ocean – it sets you up to get stronger again, very quickly. Odds are, if you’re taking the time to read this, you probably have been training for a while and you think of yourself as pretty strong. You’re the strongest (or at least one of the strongest) of your friends. You can show up most of the people up in your gym. You’d probably beat most of the people at a state powerlifting meet. Forget it all. How would you do head-to-head against Ed Coan in his prime? Or Lamar Gant? Or Donnie Thompson? Or Larry Pacifico? Until you can honestly tell yourself that you’d be competitive – maybe not win, but at least be mentioned in the same sentence – you’re not strong. The sooner you can get that through your head the better.

Everyone knows about diminishing returns in the gym. The stronger you are, the harder it is to continue getting stronger. Until you’re at least kind of strong to begin with, though, gains come naturally. The longer you can delay your assessment of yourself as a strong individual, the better off you are. When people tell me I’m strong, I usually bluntly deny it. It’s not feigned humility – a practice I have no respect for. It’s the truth. I really don’t see myself as very strong. Not yet, at least. Travis has gone 805/545/804 raw. Right now, that’s strong to me. Until I take down each of those, I’m not strong in that particular lift. Once that happens, Coan’s records are my next target, my next standard. After that, who knows? Will it happen? We’ll see. Objectively it’s quite unlikely, but I wouldn’t keep training if I didn’t see it as a possibility. As useful as it is to avoid hubris (the whole point of this discussion), it’s

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also important to avoid doubt. So what if you widen your gaze, if doing so makes you throw up your hands and say “I don’t have a chance!”? No matter how crazy the goal, you have to entertain it as a possibility. Imagine young Dorian Yates:

Needs more Cell-Tech What if he told you his dream of becoming Mr. Olympia? You’d laugh at him. And you’d have looked like a fool for doing so in hindsight:

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Just a wee bit huge Luckily, as corny as it may sound, HE believed he could do it, and ultimately that’s what mattered.

People who follow my blog will recognize this as a variation on a theme I like to bring up fairly frequently: you limit yourself by having low expectations. To bring this full circle and to tie it back into the metaphor of the evening: throw yourself into the biggest ocean there is. You may never become the biggest fish, but only by venturing there do you find out just how large of a fish you can become.

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Parting Words

Thanks for taking the time to read through this compilation. If you got a copy of this book when you signed up for the Strengtheory newsletter, I hope you’ll be able to learn and benefit from the site and myself in the future. If you got this from a friend, I’d really appreciate it if you’d sign up for the Strengtheory newsletter to keep up to date with new information and goings-on. Remember, this is just a start – a first step. Never lose your thirst for knowledge if you want to attain your full potential as a coach or athlete.