Build Your Ideal Physique | Dr. Bret Contreras

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Dr.

Brett Contreras.

Dr.

Brett Contreras holds a doctorate degree in sports science and is a certified strength and conditioning specialist.

He has over three decades of experience training everyday people, athletes, and coaches on how to get stronger and develop larger muscles.

These days, Brett is best known as the glute guy for his pioneering of exercises for women and men to strengthen and build their glutes in order to be able to move better, prevent and heal pain and injuries, and of course, for aesthetic reasons.

Today's discussion is a very important one because anyone interested in their immediate and long-term health needs to resistance train.

The science is extremely clear on that.

However, there are a lot of questions about how best to resistance train.

Today, Brett clarifies how often to resistance train, what movements to do, and how to make continual progress, and in particular, how to build a resistance training program that is tailored to your unique aesthetic and performance goals.

For example, we discuss how to prioritize the growth and strengthening of your glutes or arms or shoulders or calves or back, basically whichever body part or parts you need to emphasize while not losing progress in other areas and in many cases while still making progress in other areas.

We also explain how to gain muscle while getting leaner, why the speed of your weight movements probably matters less than selecting the proper variety of movements to target all parts of a muscle, and Brett explains exactly which movements you should do in each workout to ensure well-rounded development of the various muscle groups, including, of course, the glutes.

Dr.

Brett Contreras is considered one of the most trusted voices in this entire space.

And that's because he's highly credentialed, meaning he knows the science inside out.

He also has trained thousands of people and he gets them spectacular results.

In fact, the before and afters of his clients are nothing short of extraordinary.

So if you currently resistance train or you want to start resistance training, and perhaps you're one of those people who's wary about getting too big or you want to just grow one part of your legs and not another, or just your glutes but not have larger legs, or maybe if you just want to be bigger overall, today Dr.

Brett Contrera shares the knowledge that anyone, novice or experienced, can incorporate into their fitness routine to achieve better results faster.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.

And now for my discussion with Dr.

Brett Contreras.

Dr.

Brett Contreras, welcome.

Dr.

Andrew Huberman, it's a pleasure.

Thank you so much for inviting me on.

The pleasure is mine.

I've been following your content for a long time now, and I and many other people are super interested in how they can resistance train best for the purpose of getting stronger.

And let's admit it, most people who do some resistance training probably want some hypertrophy, some muscle growth, perhaps not in their entire body, some people do, but in specific body parts.

They want to grow bigger arms, they want to grow bigger glutes,

they want to grow bigger calves.

That seems to be a theme nowadays.

Glutes and calves seem to be the new biceps, as they say.

So let's start off with the basics.

Let's take the typical, if there were one, there isn't one, but let's imagine the typical woman or man in their 30s or 40s who's never really done any resistance training, maybe done some yoga, some running, maybe did a sport in high school, maybe not.

And they are interested in building some muscle to shape their body the way they'd like to shape it.

What is the frequency of workouts that you could give us kind of across the board?

What's too many, what's too few

per week.

Yep, so I would say two times a week full body would be like the minimum.

Now, you could see results training just one day a week.

Imagine if you, you know, and if you tracked your weights and like if you had a coach that was, that knew what they were doing, you could get good results just lifting weights one day a week.

It would be a brutal day, but it would be full body.

You'd hit mostly, you know, the big, basic multi-joint multi-joint movements.

But if you stuck to that, you would see a lot of gains.

And you could keep seeing gains for

theoretically an entire year or two.

If you want to maximize your gains, you need to hit a muscle probably twice a week.

There's some evidence that you,

that, you know, maybe three times a week is best, but that's hard to recover from.

But I would say for the majority of listeners who are eager to get started, you get so much of your results from the first set.

The first set you do.

The first work set out.

The first working set you do.

And then, you know, adding more volume, adding more frequency, it's not linear.

So it sounds like if somebody is relatively new to resistance training, like they're in their first year of resistance training, the lower limit, given that most people don't have a coach and are probably not willing to put in the kind of intensity for a whole body workout to just train once per week, seems like twice per week, hitting each body part twice per week.

So whole body twice per week is that that's what i'm hearing how many sets do you recommend uh per exercise after a sufficient warm-up in my online programs i always recommend three sets when i train people in real life it's typically two sets

but i it's and i would say most of the world does four sets you know like most people just generically do four sets

per per exercise it's just kind of what and most people do bro splits they do body part splits.

Like

what the most of the world does isn't always what's best.

And there's nothing wrong with doing four sets.

It's just that people aren't focused.

They just kind of go through the motions.

You'll say, you know, hey, Andrew, what's your workout?

And if you go, well, I do, you know,

bench press, I do 135 for 15, and then I do 185 for 12, and then I do 205 for 8, and then 225 for 5.

Well, that's what you do every week.

Then why would you grow?

Why would you adapt?

Why would you see results from that?

So a lot of people just go through the motions.

When you have a plan and you're utilizing progressive overload, so we can talk about volume, frequency, all these things, but the main thing is, are you progressively overloading the muscles?

Are you putting more tension on the muscles over time?

And that's how people grow.

So it's like you can...

you can geek out on the variables, which I love to do.

But if your program is working, then you're getting stronger over time.

You don't need four sets to do that.

You need to take notes, have a logbook or an app that keeps track of your progress, and you have a goal in mind.

And I don't think most people do that.

So it's like if I have one of my female clients and we're doing a leg press or a hip thrust or something, and say their main goal is to grow their glutes.

And my goal for the day is for you to set a PR, PR meaning personal record, on

hip thrust.

And, you know,

they've hit, they've done 315 pounds for eight reps.

And I say, Okay, I want you at least tying eight, but nine or ten would be good.

In the beginning, they you can gain strength.

You newbie, we talk about newbie gains, you gain strength every time you come in for the first few months.

It's the greatest time to be a lifter, it's so funny.

In fact, you get spoiled, and then it's depressing when the newbie gains end.

But if they reach the goal, if they say I have them warm up and then they hit 315 for nine or ten, that's the goal is done.

That's what I wanted.

And so do you need a second set?

Yeah, you can do a second set.

You can also, a lot of my colleagues would say, you shouldn't go to failure your first set because then your second set, you'll be fatigued.

And you could do four sets where your fourth set is to failure.

There's a lot of ways to do things.

And every coach has their own system.

My system that I've had success with is kind of like focused on gaining strength over time.

So that you don't require so many sets.

In fact, I would rather I like my clients training three times per week.

Full body, three times per week.

Full body, three times per week.

Or L-U-L-U-L.

Lower, upper, lower, upper, lower.

With a rest day in between?

No, Monday through Friday, lower, upper, lower, probably.

Take Saturday and Sunday off.

Wait, step it through because you're speaking fast.

Lower, upper.

L-U-L-U-L.

Lower, upper, lower, upper, lower.

Keep in mind, 74% of my followers are women.

I'm the glute guy.

So people, so my, most of my followers are women.

So they, women and men have different, they can train the same way for their gains.

There's a lot of kind of experts coming out now saying women and men need to train totally differently.

They don't need to train differently as per like the

variables and stuff.

The thing is, they have different goals.

A lot of women want their glutes.

They prioritize lower body more than, whereas men want more upper body.

So then our exercise selection is going to differ and our splits are going to differ.

If we do split it up, they want typically three lower body days and two upper body days, whereas men would want probably the opposite, three upper body days and two lower body days, for example.

But

anyway, there's so many ways to do things.

We could go on and on for an hour about the different ways to do things, but

many roads can lead to Rome, but you do need to make sure that you're gaining strength over time if you want a muscle to substantially change.

But you can't have that increase, that PR can't come at the expense of decreased range of motion or sloppy form.

That's the number one tenant of strength training is progressive overload.

And the listeners need to understand that because otherwise you're just going to be spinning your wheels.

Now, it's not to say you can't make gains not utilizing progressive overload.

In fact, we talked about this when we were working out yesterday, how to use the mind-muscle connection.

But ultimately, how do you know you're placing increasing demands on the muscle over time?

Your barometer should be like, you know, the loads and the sets and reps that you're doing.

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Let's just, if you don't mind,

I just want to take a slight step back and highlight a couple of things that you said and maybe clarify a few of them for myself and for the listeners.

The goal of going into the gym to train is foremost to create a stimulus that you need to adapt to so that the muscle grows and gets stronger.

In theory, one could do that by training the entire body once per week, but that would be a very taxing workout,

probably requires a coach to do properly.

And in general, most people are probably going to benefit from training two or three times per week minimum.

Okay.

It does seem to be the case lately that most of the papers, as I understand, point to every muscle should be trained twice per week.

Perhaps not as intensely in the two workouts, but at least twice per week.

And you said three times per week is probably even more beneficial.

I like this lower, upper, lower, upper, lower, lull,

lull, lull,

five days per week

format that you listed out.

When I see that, I think, okay, lower body three times per week.

Wow.

Right now I train my legs once per week intensely.

So that's calves, tibs, hamstrings, quads.

I know because of your tutorial, train adductors, the inner thighs, and glutes, all in that one workout.

And then four or five days later, I do a sprint workout, which is my second leg workout.

It's not an in-gym workout.

It's a sprinting workout.

Training legs three times per week in the gym with weights and machines, et cetera, sounds like a lot.

So my question is, for the three or even the two lower body workouts that men or women are doing, are they doing the same exercises in every one of those lower body workouts for the same muscle groups?

Or, and in addition to that, are they hitting quads three times a week or twice a week directly?

Because many people can't recover or at least the soreness doesn't go away in between workouts.

So how are you splitting up lower body if somebody is training lower body

two or three times per week?

Great question.

So first of all, I want to mention before steroids became a thing, the bodybuilders back then, if you can look up like Steve Reeves, Reg Park, John Grimack, they did three full, but I think they all did three full body workouts a week, or they trained mostly full body, but they'd hit muscles frequently.

The thing is they didn't do,

now we have so many machines.

They did mostly barbell training, and you know what I mean?

They focused on the big basics, and they would repeat movements.

So squatting three times a week, deadlifting three times a week.

The goal is gaining strength.

So with every person, it's unique.

And there's so many ways to do this.

If I have some people deadlift hard twice a week, they might get back pain, even if they're using good form.

What if they're really weak, have really weak hamstrings in isolation, and I start giving them seated leg curls, and it transfers to their deadlift.

The seated leg curls doesn't put stress on their low back.

You get stronger

by identifying weak links,

and there's a lot of transfer between the different lifts.

So I don't believe you need to repeat the same movements all the time.

And I also think you should switch it up every month.

And that's one thing I've had a lot of success with.

With my system, I've had a lot of success.

We have like

a squat and bench press month.

Then the next month will be a deadlift and chin-up month.

What does that mean?

That means that during all lower body workouts, you're doing squats and deadlifts?

No, you always do all the movement patterns.

It's what you do first and what you focus on.

That's what you're going for the PR on.

But I'm not trying to have you get stronger at squats every single month and if you don't like barbell squats you can do you know hack squat hack squat leg press it could be a single leg movement it's the movement pattern from the side view does it look like a squat so that could be a squat hack squat lunge belt squat leg press V squat

step up Bulgarian split squat a lot of different buffets people can pick what from the side view does it look like a squat on one or two legs it's they all work very similarly so i want you getting stronger at those um but not every month because the next month i might switch to like deadlift and uh and but they all have different rules so here's what i kind of realized have you ever focused on you you say you don't want your your chest and back you're not trying to grow maximally But if you, let's say you're just trying to get as big as humanly possible, have you ever said, I want to see if I can work my way up to 20 chin-ups?

I haven't, but you mean in a single set?

Yeah.

No, No, I have not done that.

Well, if you did do that, your back muscles would probably get bigger, right?

But you'd be like, okay, I have this chin-up goal.

I want to get 20 chin-ups.

How am I going to get there best?

I'm going to start doing more chin-ups.

Maybe you don't like chin-ups all the time, so you do heavy supinated pull-downs.

I've realized they transfer.

There's like a one-on-one, one-to-one correlation.

I never realized that till the last couple years.

Supinated,

treating it like a chin-up.

Okay, so for those that don't know, supinated means palms facing you.

Basically, palms facing you, pull-down or on a pull-down machine to your chest level or something that to the front, obviously.

You can recover quickly from those.

So you could do chin-ups or pull-downs three times a week.

But what's gonna, what else will help your chin-ups?

Training more biceps.

When I have my female clients start doing barbell curls and easy bar curls, their chin-ups went up.

So it has its own rules.

When you focus on like the chin-up month, you can hit these movements frequently.

You can recover from them.

But what about deadlifts?

If I said you're going to focus on deadlifts this month, I don't know many lifters that can deadlift really hard twice a week.

They beat you up, especially when you get strong.

So you might have, you might, if you're hitting three full body workouts a week, maybe only do heavy deadlifts once a week.

But the other time you're doing...

a more like a hingey like a stiff leg deadlift or a good morning real strict not going crazy you might leave some reps in reserve or you're just really strict so you don't get you don't get as sore from that.

And then the other day might be a hamstring.

You start out with a hamstring movement or something.

These lifts have different rules that you figure out over time and it also depends on the individual.

Some people can squat three times a week.

Some people can't get away with that.

They'll develop hip pain, knee pain, low back pain.

So there's kind of this art of how to design programs that allow the masses to build strength.

But whenever you work with someone individually, you have to stray from it a little bit.

But anyway, I do believe hitting a muscle three times a week is a little bit better, but it's more risky.

You can spin your wheels.

I don't want to say overtrain because over-training syndrome is something, but we all know what it means.

It means stagnating because you're not properly recovered.

You're spinning your wheels.

You're not, and it's really hard to recover from three times a week.

So that's why the safest bet is hit a muscle twice a week.

But I think if you know what you're doing, you can do three times a week.

My understanding and my experience is that if you do a proper warm-up and then you train close to failure or to failure for one or two sets, maybe a third set, that it takes at least three or four days for that muscle to recover.

Now, I realize some people recover much more quickly, but I feel like most people...

don't.

So for me, it's always been hard to wrap my head around three times a week training unless people are not going to failure or they're switching up the movement so that the muscles are being targeted differently each time first of all there's what you're saying about most people you're in you're um insinuating that people have different recovery genetics and there's research on that there's pump some people experience way more muscle damage than others and some people have like a recovery gene like i'm sure there's recover quickly yeah it's an old paper

i don't have that gene i don't have it either clearly and i'm very envious of people who do because the the listeners

you'll probably have people split in half, people going, I can do these crazy marathon workouts and the next day I'm not even sore.

And other people like you and I go, I get so sore.

I wish I could.

But here's the thing.

You could train it three times a week.

You have to adjust the variables.

If you're always training when you're fatigued and beat up, you're never going to get stronger.

So you might have to adjust the variables.

You and I might not be able to do as many sets as we could when we were 23.

You know what I mean?

Now that we're approaching 50, we have to do a little bit less volume.

Maybe we can't train three times a week, but we could train twice a week, but everyone's unique.

But in general, everyone can recover from two times a week, but you might not be able to recover if you do, you know, touch and go deadlifts.

you know, to failure being like where you're maintaining really good form, but some people can just round their backs and keep going.

And then the next day you feel like you got hit by a bus.

And a lot of times it's the muscle damage, but it might not just be muscle damage.

It could be connective tissue.

It could be fascia and other

structures too that are just, if they're damaged, it signals the central nervous system, hey, don't maximally recruit these muscles.

So if pain inhibits muscle activation, damage, it's probably a wise

evolutionary strategy for the body to say, hey, chill, you're not recovered yet.

Let's limit the gas pedal.

How much, you know, let's put the brakes on a little bit so this person can't keep hurting themselves.

But you want to be recovered, so you sometimes have to adjust the variables, which are exercise selection, that's probably the most important, volume, effort, how hard you push yourself.

These are your tools.

Program design is an awesome concept, and there's an art to this.

We have a lot of science, but there's an art to combining them all.

And that's why I like strength training is an applied science.

It's very,

that's why it's fun for me.

There's an art to this.

And you you can't just read a research, like a review paper and be like, oh, here's how, here's how everyone should train.

But could you recover from hitting a muscle three times a week?

You mentioned that you want your hamstrings to grow.

You know you could do two sets of lying leg curls three times a week, especially if you stopped your sets two reps shy of failure.

Lying leg curls don't beat you up as much.

It's when you throw in the stiff leg deadlifts, the good mornings, even seated leg curls the way we did it yesterday, where I enhanced the eccentric and made it harder on the way down and really made you upright in that seated leg curl position.

So you got to stretch on the hamstrings, that tends to create a little more damage.

So, some of these exercises that give you the most bang for your buck and they're the most efficient exercises,

they sometimes aren't the best exercises if you're training them on muscle frequently.

And

I like to say walking lunges are probably the best glute exercise there is.

The problem is they're too good.

If you really go to failure where you can't get another step with a, you know,

they can beat you up a lot.

If you do three or four sets to failure and then you're trying to train legs two days later, there's no way.

Like, you'll be so sore, it'll be counterproductive.

That's why I like step-ups more than lunges, not because I think they're more effective, they're just more conducive to training a muscle frequently.

And this doesn't get talked about enough.

There's an art to training frequently.

So, when men

we grew up

in the, we're almost the same age, we're both 49 right now.

We grew up where bodybuilders trained legs one day a week.

You know, everyone trained, you had your body part split routine where you train a muscle one day and then you damage the hell out of it and you need a whole week to recover.

The workouts back then were like four sets of squats, four sets of stiff leg deadlifts, four sets of leg press, four sets of leg extensions, and then maybe two types of leg curls or something, and then you'd be annihilated for the whole week.

Can that work?

Yes, the bodybuilders got big legs back then.

But I think better results are seen when you don't go so crazy.

So you're saying, okay, my girls train their, my programs and my glute squad,

I have one in San Diego, one in Florida.

They train their legs, they train lower body three times a week.

They do one squat pattern, a squat lunge pattern.

Per workout.

Yep, one and three sets.

But when I train them in person, it's typically two sets because I push them harder and we have a goal in mind.

And also what I've realized is I typically only push them really hard during their first exercise because I realize if I sit there and hover over them for all four exercises, well, three of the exercises are hard.

One's a squat lunge pattern, one's a hinge pull movement, meaning a type of deadlift, stiff leg deadlift, good morning, or a 45 degree hyper or reverse hyper.

And then

you have your thrust bridge pattern, where it's either a hip thrust or a glute bridge, and we have lots of different hip thrust tools, but those don't create as much muscle damage because you're training the glutes in a shortened position.

Anyway, they don't,

the squat lunge hits your quads, glutes, and adductors.

The hinge hits your hamstrings and glutes.

The thrust mainly just works the glutes.

And then you throw in an abduction movement at the end, which is glute medius or upper glute max.

And that tends to be recovered you can recover from that.

Also, I want to mention women can recover a little bit better than men.

The research is mixed, but having trained men and women my whole, like for literally literally like 30 years now I will tell you women recover better like I don't need studies to tell me that they can do a little more volume also it might matter if you're on a specialization routine meaning

men we're hitting our traps we're hitting all three heads of our delts we're hitting all the muscles in the body So the

a lot of the women, their upper body workouts, if they train full body, they might just do a compound or multi-joint upper body press and pull, and that's it.

No direct arm work, for instance.

A lot of them, yeah.

Because they don't want their arms to grow, they don't care as much as men do about arms.

And they're going to get decent arm development focusing on one upper body press and one upper body pull, but do that three times a week.

We might do 36 sets a week for glutes, and you think, oh my God, that's so much.

It's 12, 12.

I mentioned the four patterns.

So you've got your squat lunge, hinge pull,

thrust bridge, and then your abduction.

And those can be in any order.

Sometimes we prioritize the squat lunge, sometimes the hinge,

and it makes it fun, because it's fun to PR on your favorite type of squat or hack squat or lunge or whatever.

And then the next month we might prioritize a hinge, but you're always doing all three of them.

But you're going for PRs on one of the movement patterns each time.

And then you mix it up throughout the, that's my system that tends to work well.

There's a million ways to do, to do it.

But anyway, you can recover from that because it doesn't beat you up so much, but there's rules to it.

You alternate with the squat lunge pattern, you alternate with a bilateral and unilateral because the unilateral tend to get you more sore.

Could you clarify bilateral and unilateral?

Bilateral is double leg or

double, like two limbs at a time, and then unilateral is single, single arm or single leg.

Like rear foot elevated.

Yeah, so the rear foot elevator split squat or the Bulgarian split squat, they tend to get you more sore in the muscles

than,

and also vertical hinges, meaning deadlifts and good mornings, where it's a vertically loaded, compared to like 45-degree hypers where you're kind of at an angle.

The 45-degree works you a little bit more at shorter muscle lanes, not as much in the stretch.

So you can recover from those a little bit easier.

With my system, we tend to alternate.

You don't try and do RDLs and good mornings three times a week.

That would be overkill.

There's so many ways to do things, but that's how you make it recoverable.

And then if you have a client that's like, I'm beat up all the time, I feel like I'm not recovering, let's reduce the sets.

Okay, I don't want you training as close to failure.

Let's switch the exercises.

You're doing Smith machine reverse lunges and they're annihilating you.

Let's see if you can do a glute-dominant step up where you're leaning forward.

And it works for all the muscle groups too.

It's like delts.

I prioritized delts the last year and I feel like they grew.

I wanted to do more delt volume, but if I just do dumbbell ladder raises all the time and I'm always going for progressive overload on them, I start heaving,

it starts kind of irritating my joints a little bit.

But I've found that

cable ladder raises don't beat me up as much.

But I will use dumbbells, machines, cable columns, even bands.

You can do band exercise.

Those work you most in the squeeze position.

They don't create as much muscle damage.

So you use this knowledge to maximize your recoverable volume.

MRV is this concept of maximum recoverable volume.

You want to do as much volume as possible, but still recovering from it.

Okay, this is an extremely important concept that most people, I believe, have not heard of.

Certainly in exercise science circles, I'm sure everybody knows, but maximal recoverable volume.

I think this is so critical because it frames basically everything we've been talking about up until now.

And I also think it can help clarify a lot of confusion for people, in particular people that are starting to do resistance training and want to better understand what works and what doesn't work over time, both men and women.

But also experience lifters.

Because

my

sort of weaning and understanding around resistance training came from the high-intensity folks.

Okay, this is years ago.

And this can be basically summarized as you warm up, you do a super intense, focused set, maybe two, maybe three, and then you maybe do that for another muscle group, and then you take a couple days off and then come in and train other muscles.

And really, you're hitting each muscle directly once per week, very intensely,

both with mental focus and with physical, you know, intensity, obviously.

And then you leave it alone and you try and get stronger every single workout.

That was kind of the idea.

Nowadays, I'm hearing a lot more about the kinds of things you're describing, like training each muscle group two or three times per week, dividing upper and lower body, so not dividing the body up as finely into like chest and back one day, shoulders and arms another day, legs another day, and so forth, and doing a lot more volume, but maybe not going to failure and certainly changing exercises each workout.

So these two things, obviously they both can work.

I think what we were talking about this yesterday,

they both can work, but there was this additional kind of element to it that I want to frame up here, which was the idea from Mike Menser and Arthur Jones of, you know, and all the Nautilus folks that really believed in these really brief, super high-intensity, infrequent workouts was one that I do think is true, at least in my experience, which is as you gain more experience with resistance training, you are able to generate more directed intensity.

Not like coming into the gym with more energy, but being able to really focus your mind and energy on, let's just say like a

pull-up.

Rather than just trying to get one's chin over the bar, which is what we do early on when we're trying to get pull-ups and then just count pull-ups, you drag yourself slowly slowly out of the bottom position, paying attention to really using your lats and not using the biceps, so like focusing on elbowing someone behind you.

You get to the top, you try and bring the bar to your chest or even lower to like the, you know, for lack of a better way to put it to the nipples, and then really squeezing the lats and then lowering yourself slowly.

This is very different than trying to rep out chin-ups.

And the idea always was that Doing things in a more focused way comes with experience, that the beginner can't generate that kind of intensity.

They don't know how to do the movements,

which led me at least to believe that at the beginning, when somebody's in their say first four to six months of training, that a bit more volume is necessary in order to really learn how to do the movements properly, really develop the mind-muscle connection, really understand how to train without getting hurt, and really learn what that MRV, we didn't know that concept back then, but really learn, you know, okay, I can train my legs twice per week, it's fine, but if I go to three times, I start getting weaker in my workouts, not stronger.

Or if you're like me, I can train my legs once per week really intensely, but you know what?

Not every muscle in my legs is growing the same way.

Maybe I need to do twice a week for hamstrings because one muscle group is lagging.

So, the reason I'm

sort of spooling out this essay here is that I think there's a lot of confusion for people about where to start and where to go.

And MRV seems like it should be the kind of governing factor, the compass in all of this.

So, for instance, if a client walks into your gym and let's just say she, because you train a lot of female clients, but this could be also a man talking about chest training.

But let's talk about a woman comes in and she just says, Listen, I don't want to be big, right?

This is kind of what you hear, but I really want my glutes to be a bit bigger.

And I would like to see some abs.

And, you know, and I,

and she's athletic, you know, she's done cardio, done

maybe a sport, maybe played some soccer, but she wants to really focus on her glutes and her quads.

What do you do to assess MRV?

Are you looking for her to get stronger every single workout?

Or do you spend two or three weeks just like teaching her the movements?

Do you spend two or three weeks teaching a guy, hey, you know what?

You think you can do a biceps curl, but let's do a biceps curl where you really learn to...

activate the biceps at the beginning of the movement.

You're not swinging your elbow forward.

You're contracting the biceps.

Let's really learn how to bring like your pinky higher than your thumb at the top and really learn how to cramp that thing down.

That to me is a skill.

It's something that requires time and it eats into recovery.

So

the bigger question in here is how do you determine MRV?

And is skill and ability in being able to target muscles a factor in MRV?

Because to me, it seems like the most important factor.

Forgive the long question.

So yeah, that's the hard thing about working with people online compared to in person.

Online, you kind of have to have a generic cookie cutter approach.

In person, you can individualize it and assess where they are.

If I have a beginner, yes, I agree with you.

They benefit from more volume to have the motor learning and gain the coordination.

Also, you should, like, I remember standing in the mirror when I was like 15, 16 year old flexing.

And I'm like, I can't, how do I flex my lats?

How do I flex my, if you can't flex your muscles, how can you flex your muscles against resistance?

Super important point.

I'm just going to highlight it.

I'm interrupting you to highlight that.

If, folks, if you can't contract a muscle without a weight in your hand or on your back or whatever it is, you're not going to be able to properly train that muscle.

So you can use what Mel Sif back in the day,

legendary sports scientists, he passed away too soon, but he wrote the book Super Training.

But all of us strength coaches back in the day, that was our Bible.

And

he called it loadless training.

but yeah you you want to flex and squeeze but then after a while you don't need to do that you can you can use that you can feel that muscle doing any movement if you want do you think people could do a self-test for instance where just on their own in their bathroom with no one around they could just kind of walk from you know calves up you know just not walk physically but just move from calves up like can you flex your calf on both sides can you generate a hard contraction can you do that for your quad can you do that for your hamstrings that to me seems like the most important thing to do before touching a weight or a machine.

Because then one can get a real sense of what kind of neuromuscular control do they have.

Because it's going to vary by sports, by injury history, by genetics, by all sorts of things, right?

Men probably have an advantage with when they start out because when we're going through puberty and you're like, oh, wow, my body's changing.

And no one was looking and you're in the mirror.

I remember.

Every dude flexes his biceps.

Biceps, and you're like, you practice flexing.

Well, that's training.

That's resistance training.

You're flexing your muscles.

You're providing the resistance, you know.

And there's some evidence that you can gain muscle that way.

There's a classic study by Brittany Counts.

you know, with the biceps, where one side used a dumbbell, the other arm just body weight, just like concentrating, using no load, four sets of 20, flexing your arm throughout the range of motion, trying to squeeze your biceps.

And interestingly, this arm grew the triceps because you're using your triceps to provide some of the

no weight arm.

And so that's pretty wild.

Yeah, so

you can, but then how, but that's not suggesting that's the training people stick with.

Right.

I mean, this is sort of like an assessment.

Self-assessment.

Yeah, if you can't feel your muscles, you know, if you can't flex your, it's kind of hard to like, how do I flex my delts just standing here?

But like, yeah, you, you start tweaking the body and contorting and you're like, oh, I can feel my delts when I do this, flaring your lats.

That took me some time back, you know, 30 years ago when I started.

And then you start to realize, oh, and then another thing, sometimes you go to a gym that doesn't have a lot of equipment or you're limited in loading and you're like, you know, I'm going to do lat pull downs.

And you figure out, wow, I feel my lats more doing it this way.

Lifting is a lifelong journey.

You can always be improving your form.

You can always be learning new skills.

But in the beginning, yes, you want to learn how to flex your muscles.

You want to learn how to perform the exercises with good form, gain the coordination factor, the neural gains.

Then over time, most of your gains in strength will come from the muscle growing, from hypertrophy.

I think these are incredibly informative things to do because then when you arrive in the gym, perhaps you put more priority on the muscles that you have a harder time contracting.

Well,

this was like proposed by this researcher, Vladimir Yanda, Jonda, whatever,

and kind of got trickled down.

I know Stu McGill, you've had him on the show, he started talking about glute amnesia, and then it gets a lot of backlash because people are like, oh, you really have glute amnesia, your glutes don't activate at all.

But what we're talking about is some muscles,

and I learned this from doing EMG electromyography testing back in the day.

I'm like, man, when people walk up stairs, their quad activation is through the roof.

When you just stand up from the couch, quad activation through the roof.

Glute activation doesn't get very high during everyday normal movements.

So they're probably more prone to atrophy and you know disuse.

You're just gonna, the muscle will shrink.

You're also not activating as much.

Why would the neural gains be as efficient?

And then probably there's a genetic element too with your anatomy and with your sport history and stuff.

So there's kind of like neural, think of it as neural programming.

I know glute activation gets a lot of flack from people because it got so popular back there.

Low-load glute activation.

It's funny because I'm a personal trainer, but my roots come up as a strength coach.

I wanted to work with athletes earlier in my career.

And I think that's what differentiated me from all these bodybuilding coaches have a different mindset.

I have more of a functional outlook on things, but also...

We were doing low-load glute activation back in the day, and there were all these coaches, the popular strength coaches were doing it in the early 2000s, up until the late 2000s what's low load glute activation you're using lower loads body weight or bands and you're just doing like you know movements trying to

you're not going to failure it's not a working set you do it in the in the general warm-up you know that your dynamic warm-up you might be able to do 100 glute bridges but you're doing two sets of 10 trying to really squeeze the glutes to feel them moving you lateral bandwalks things like that so we were doing that in the early 2000s to wake up the glutes and there is evidence of this though it's there's a there's probably 15 studies on it main like key studies a lot of them show no benefit but a couple of them um show definitely definite neural gains like one study just in one week that people doing like an hour a day of isometric like a on all fours you put a band around the knees and you did like kind of this weird movement where it's like hip extension, abduction, external rotation at the same time, kind of lifting your leg out to the side.

Yeah, almost like a fire hydrant, but also extending.

It's called a fire hydrant.

The fire hydrant moves.

Because like a dog move.

You're on your floor, then you lift a leg up.

But they want it to be isometric because they thought isometric, you're focusing, you're using the brain.

Isometric, folks, is where you're pausing the movement, typically in the fully contracted position, but where you're holding the movement and really trying to contract the muscle.

So there's, obviously, you got to get the knee up to pee on the fire hydrant, but then you're holding it there and really trying to contract.

So they try to do like 20 minutes, three times a day for a whole week.

Like that's crazy.

20 minutes of isometric holding?

So it was like as much as you can tolerate, but three times a day for a whole week.

Because they did the study in one week.

But in one week, they showed significant, I don't know all the terms because this is the, you would know these terms.

You would know the neural side.

The motor cortex.

One way or another, there's a strengthening of the neural connection.

Yeah, the brain,

the air in the brain, the motor cortex responsible for activating the glute saw increases in just one week.

But it's obvious.

Like it's obvious you can improve that side of things.

So, but then here's the thing about what we're talking about.

People get carried away.

You can get sidetracked.

MRV can

distract you.

People get obsessive with the number of sets.

The main thing is, are you gaining strength?

And I don't mean all-time PRs every single, like, especially if you've been lifting for a lot of years, like you and me.

Can we keep going up in strength?

But you set a baseline on week one.

And can you gain strength for three weeks in a row after that?

And then you switch, then you start up based on can you gain strength?

And are you kind of moving up over time?

You know, you said it yesterday that it's going to be a jig.

So, what did you call it?

Saw

up into the right sawtooth pattern.

Sawtooth pattern, but up into the right.

Over time, are you making gains?

And that's where

I've been heavily influenced by a strength coach, a powerlifting coach who passed away, Louis Simmons.

I really liked the idea that his

his powerlifters were like, you know, platform ready year-round.

They would max out year-round.

And I'm going, how do you max out on squats, deadlifts, good mornings?

Year-round, they'd have one max effort day a week, and then they'd have a dynamic effort day, you know, where they focused on speed or like reps, but it wasn't going crazy.

But their max effort day, they'd switch it around a lot.

That's how they could compete year-round like that.

And, you know, a lot of what I do is influenced by him.

All of us strength coaches back in the late 90s, the early 2000s, he was our primary influence.

We, and you could talk to all the popular strength coaches back when I came up, they would all say they were influenced by Louis Simmons.

But he did things a certain way.

Where now I'm going, okay, it makes sense to me now after studying biomechanics.

He used a lot of bands and chains.

That's a little bit easier in the stretch position, a little bit harder in the end range position.

He did

one max effort, but is rotating the list lifts every several weeks.

And so that's what I do, but

I'm not just preparing my clients for powerlifting.

I love the squat, the bench, and the deadlift.

I also love the military press, the chin up, and the hip thrust.

Those are my big six lifts.

But we also use leg press.

We use whatever machines, tools, whatever.

suits the clients well.

And I help my clients figure out what their favorite exercise are, and they evolve over time.

But here are the tools and we try to set PRs over time, but you switch it around.

Because what you talked about in a previous question, this old nautilus and hip philosophy was, you know, hit a muscle infrequently, hit it hard, recover, blast it, and try to get one more rep or go up five or 10 pounds.

It sounds great in theory.

It just doesn't work out in real life.

You can't get stronger continually over time anyway.

Eventually you get hurt.

That's the thing.

If you just repeat repeat the same exercises, say, say, you and I just said, look,

let's, you know, say we worked out tomorrow together.

Let's set our baseline with deep squats and stiff leg deadlifts.

And whatever we hit, we hit.

And then we're going to go up either one more rep or

up five or 10 pounds.

You know,

even if we maxed out and said, okay, we're going to try and get one more rep each week, you won't get, you know, 52 more reps each year.

Right.

You won't get five more pounds each month.

That's 60 pounds in a year.

You won't keep going up 60 pounds.

Maybe you can the first year, maybe the second year, depending on the lift.

But after a while, then if that were true, in 10 years of lifting, everyone would be doing 600 plus pounds on every exercise.

It doesn't happen.

And that's what people don't talk about with progressive overload.

You got to talk about this because you can't just keep going up.

It doesn't happen.

And then it's frustrating when you think you have to progressive overload and then you don't get one more rep or you don't get five more pounds or you don't set set a PR and then you start getting contorting your form and you start getting joint pain and nagging injuries and then you start going backwards.

That's one thing you definitely want to avoid.

We talked about this yesterday is avoiding this pain cycle, avoiding this nagging injury cycle.

How do you keep making gains without being hurt, without being, and that's where you got to use more variety.

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Real quick question and then

more about what we were just discussing.

You mentioned six lifts and you rattled them off very fast.

I caught them.

People can slow it down, but I heard squat or hip hinge in there.

Could you list off the six things that you consider?

And I realize there are many, many more exercises, but what are the six that you listed off?

My top six are squats, bench press, deadlifts,

military press, chin-ups, and hip thrusts.

Great.

And if you do those six lifts, so it's like I loved powerlifting, but if you just did the three lifts, your shoulders might not be maximally developed.

Your lats might not max.

You might be leaving some glute, some room for glute growth on the table.

And so this, in my opinion, you're going to develop all your muscles with these six lifts.

Squat, bench press, deadlift, military press, which is overhead press.

Overhead press.

Could be standing, could be seated, front of the, you know, et cetera.

Then chin.

and hip thrust.

And there could be and variations of those.

All the variations of those.

But let me tell you a lesson I learned.

In 2020, we have the quarantine, right?

We're all so bored.

And stressed.

I mean, we're bored and stressed at the same time.

I have a gym in San Diego, and it's like,

I remember like week one of the quarantine.

I'm like, okay, I can do this.

I'm lucky.

I have a gym.

I can go to the gym.

I don't have to do these silly body weight workouts that we're telling everyone to do.

I can actually still use all the machines and the free weights.

And I had my client, Allegra, call me, coach, you know me.

I'm going to go crazy.

You know my mental health.

I have to be lifting weights.

I'm like, well, come to the gym with me.

Who's going to know?

And then, you know, California was pretty hardcore.

But I'm like, I don't want my, you know, I know it was like, is this a sensitive topic?

Cause people were dying back then.

How tragic.

But I'm a very social person.

And I'm like, all right, I'm going to let my clients come and train with me.

Well,

long story short, 2020 was sad enough, probably the best year of all of our lives.

We'll say it was the best year.

We lifted lifted weights all day long because you didn't have to, you weren't so focused on your career back then and posting to social media.

You were just trying to survive each day and you weren't even allowed to post on social media about like your workouts and stuff because you weren't supposed to be in a gym.

So my clients would come to me for two, three hours a day, six, six days a week.

I was in the gym all day long.

And all of a sudden, I'm like, Jesus, my clients are getting so freaking strong.

They're insane right now.

They're so strong.

So that's when I thought up the idea of strong lifting.

It's like powerlifting is the three lifts.

Strong lifting is the six lifts.

Those six lifts I just mentioned.

We're going to start competing.

And I did this like psychological trick where I'd have my computer up and I'd have the spreadsheet and I'd

have all my clients names and all their strength and they'd start looking because I gave awards out like the so if you got the absolute best or the relative best strength divided by body weight at any lift and then we had the total lift and then we had strongest upper body strongest lower body strongest presser which were squats military and bench strongest puller which was chin-ups and um you know deadlifts with so i strongest lower body strongest upper body we could mix around i had like 55 awards i'd give out but the point was

the women would go like my clients like amanda would be like carly just hit a pr

I got to beat her like they got competitive with it and so were they training these every single day of those six days per week?

No, I would say we did kind of like the lower, upper, lower, upper lower because they wanted to come in every day.

They were bored to death.

So we'd have three lower body days and we would do

probably a variation of each, but you some days it would be like we're trying to hit squat really hard.

Some days we're trying to deadlift hard.

You can't squat, deadlift.

And you could hip thrust hard three times a week.

That works you in the short, the squeeze position.

It doesn't beat you up as much.

But as we start getting stronger at Deadless, we realized some things.

We were doing touch and go, meaning you bounce the weight up.

You don't reset.

You don't set the weight down, reset it, then lift it up.

You're stronger when you do touch and go compared to reset reps.

I remember my client, Ashley Hodge, hits 315 for 18 reps.

And like Dominique gets it 315 for 11 reps.

And it's the environment's crazy.

We have their PR song going on.

You know, what song do you want to hear?

It's blaring it at max volume.

And you have 10, 20 of your lifting partners, your colleagues around going, come on, you got it.

Come on.

The videos back then were crazy.

And they're hitting these crazy PRs.

And then they say to me, coach, I don't know.

Cool.

I set a deadlift PR, a touch and go PR, and then I'm sore for my next week and a half is shot.

It can take when you're really training that kind of psychological arousal, when you're training that hard and doing like some lifts, like like that hack squat you have at your place it's it's more horizontal you can keep going with it if i'm there going come on andrew you got this keep going you get you get in some zone there's some lifts where you can just keep going and then it annihilates you so bad your knees are sore for a week so we kind of realized then we're not going to train with that we're not going to yell in each other we're not going to train with music it beats you up too much we're not going to do touch and go we're going to do reset reps and we're going to do lower reps with stricter form because they beat you up too much so we learned during the when we were training for it we learned some stuff can beat you up too much and you don't know that until you've hit it you until you've worked that hard and you got really strong most of the listeners you know ashley hodge weighed 130 pounds and hit 315 for 18.

now she's even stronger but you don't most people never train that hard most people need to train harder then there's the category that people who train too hard what we now know is that that Arthur Jones back in the day, the Mike Menser approach hit once all out set to failure.

That probably is the most efficient way to train, the most economical way to train.

You're in the gym, you can be in the gym 45 minutes, twice a week, and make good gains.

The problem is it leads to injuries over time if you don't swap, rotate the exercise, and you don't have to perform every set to failure.

In fact, there's some evidence now emerging that you can get just as much hypertrophy, similar strength gains, but like you might want to leave a rep or two in the tank and do a little more volume.

So everything's very nuanced, but when I moved away from San Diego, I moved to Vegas.

Now my squad is left to train on their own.

Well, I was always there to watch them, you know, and so if

I'm training you, Andrew, and you're like,

Coach,

my low back feels a little off.

And then I'm going, okay, we're not deadlifting today.

Or if you're like, my knee feels weird today, okay, we're not going to squat today, we're going to do this instead.

I'm there to swap it out.

But if I'm not there and you push yourself through it and you do that for a few weeks, now it becomes a chronic problem and it takes a long time to go away.

So now my clients are getting, with me not being there, they're getting injured more often.

They start developing nagging, low back pain, and things like that.

So now I've learned to, I still love strong lifting, but we, you need to, you can't just keep getting stronger at the main barbell lifts week in, week out.

You've got to introduce more variety.

You have to,

so we now cycle things around and we stray, but we we still, it's still about progressive overload.

But we incorporate more machines, more like you said, overhead press.

It could be dumbbells, it could be Smith machine, it could be barbell, it could be seated, standing.

But you can pick a lift like what Louis Simmons would do back in the day.

You can pick a lift and get stronger at it for a few weeks, you know, for a month, and then recycle it.

So we're always using progressive overload, but you can't always just go set all-time PRs every week in the gym.

It doesn't work that way.

And that's the hardest thing to instill into people is this topic of progressive overload.

What does that look like over the long haul?

What does it look like over a 30-year lifting career?

One of the things that I've done as the years have gone by in order to generate hypertrophy and strength increases, but not necessarily by always trying to add more weight, is to change my mindset around lifting where after a couple of warm-ups, do the work sets.

Typically for me, that's two to four work sets per exercise.

Generally, it's two, occasionally three, rarely four.

But the idea is to make the final reps of each set, each work set that is, as difficult as possible.

It's completely transformed my progress in the last, I would say, two or three years, right?

I'm making more progress in the last two or three years than I did in the previous eight, despite having been at the resistance training thing for a long time and not really changed much else.

So the idea is always trying to do repetitions in really good form, always trying to isolate the muscles that I'm trying to target.

For compound movements, I'm not trying to isolate one muscle, obviously, but to execute the movements properly in the case of compound movements.

And then as the set gets harder and I can say, okay, you know, failure is approaching somewhere to stop counting repetitions and just focus extremely hard on the form and execution and the targeting of the muscles so that a lot of times I don't even really know how many repetitions I did.

Of course, I know how much weight I'm moving, but I just keep telling myself, make it harder, not easier.

Make it harder, not easier in the final two to three repetitions of the set.

Sometimes I'll go to failure where I can't move the weight anymore.

Sometimes I get close to it and just stop.

And I've noticed that for me, this has translated to better strength and hypertrophy increases, but also just better ability to execute the movements and far fewer little nagging aches and pains and things like that.

So it's been an inversion of the mindset of like

complete X number of repetitions at a given weight, then increase it every couple of weeks or every workout ideally.

My mindset is, nope, I'm going into the gym to use the weights as a tool to generate adaptation, strength and hypertrophy increases.

And I'm going to make each work set as hard as possible by making the final two or three reps harder and resist the temptation to move the weight just to complete more repetitions.

I just would like your reflections on that because I'm actually interested in getting better at what I'm doing.

And I imagine that is useful, but you're probably going to tell me that there are times when I should just actually try and max out the number of repetitions I can do.

Well, I watched you lift yesterday, and you do a good job of that.

So there are people who who use sloppy technique and you come in and as a coach and you're like, oh, God, I got to really clean up the way they lift, their form, their tempo.

Then there are people who are really, really strict and you're like, okay, you could benefit from

you typically with women, you'll see this with

like people who are real big on yoga and Pilates and then they come to lift weights and they think everything needs to be so slow and controlled.

And

this is going to be a shock to the listeners.

Tempo doesn't affect hypertrophy that much.

You can have like a one-second repetition and an eight-second repetition, and it builds muscles similarly.

Really?

And it blows people's mind because they go, what?

You don't have to control the negative.

You can't just like let the weights crash down, but as long as you are controlling the weights on the way down, also the lift matters.

Some lifts are less range of motion.

I used to laugh it when I'd see people.

This is how you know who's really a coach and who's not.

When you see them prescribe an exercise and you're like, like, do this with a two second concentric and four second eccentric, six seconds per rep

and it's like a shrug, imagine what that would look like.

Shrugs are like explosive, you know,

one second per rep, if that.

You know, some lifts are just quicker.

And then if you see that they prescribed a set of 12 and it's a...

you know, six second,

okay, six times 12 is 72.

That's a 72 second set, and then you're telling them, and it's a say it's a step up, so you got one leg, then you go right in the next leg, and then you're saying, rest one minute, you'd be breathing so fast, you would not have a productive second set.

But I digress.

I think tempo matters mostly for longevity.

If you're just like being very erratic and so explosive and not controlling the weight, you have a big, better chance of getting injured over time.

And so I think tempo is more important for hypertrophy in the long run

by preventing injury.

My clients, they will do hip thrusts explosively and people will say, you got to control the weight on the way down.

Well, there aren't a lot of, there aren't tons of studies on this topic, but it appears that they're wrong.

You can explode up, you can lower it slowly, I mean, lower it quickly, or you can go a lot lighter and really control it.

It makes more sense to me to try to explode at the bottom and like really,

but you want to control it, but you want to use that explosion because you're trying to create maximum force in the stretch position the bottom position but then you still want to use full range and control it the whole way and maybe have a brief little pause at the top but

that but yeah people get too strict on tempo and those are the same types that that when they're you're so focused on tempo and form and feeling that you don't use progressive overload.

Like what you just said, you don't even count it.

You don't even know how many reps you did, but you saw results this way.

So a lot of times people see results just from doing something different.

You and I talked about how when you were in your teens learning how to lift weights, you were influenced right away by Mike Menser.

So you right away learned how to get your all out of one hard set or like, you know, low volume, low volume training.

I was the opposite.

I learned from Arnold and Arnold and Menser were like opposing.

They actually didn't get along in real life.

So I read Arnold's encyclopedia and I'm like, I got to do all this volume.

So I did high volume training for eight years.

When I was like 24 years old, I started doing low volume training, one set to fair.

It took me a while to get good at it.

I sucked at it initially.

And then

you get really good at pushing one.

It's a skill.

You get so much better when you're only doing one set.

You get really good at getting your all out of that one set.

You mentioned that then you saw good results realizing I can benefit from more volume, doing more sets.

Same with when you said, I'm going to focus on making the last reps harder, not using momentum or body English to squeeze out a couple more to make it easier.

And you definitely see gains that way, but it's this concept where something that can get you gains, then it can

limit you eventually because your focus is now on.

So you're relying on your mind.

You're relying now on your mind to use progressive overload, meaning you're not going to progress with weights.

You're going to try to produce increasing amounts of muscle force through a mind-muscle connection, through an internal attentional focus.

And

you lie to yourself.

It's the same as if I don't have

my logbook in front of me.

And I go, um, yeah, I...

I can, I hit 315 for six last time.

And then I get it for seven, I get it for seven.

I'm like, yeah.

And then I, and I, and then I get my, my book, and I'm like, oh my God, I hit it for eight.

I forgot.

I could have probably gotten more.

That's what I like about taking notes and writing it down.

You lie to yourself and you limit yourself and you're like, God, if I knew, somehow if I knew that I had hit and I had to hit eight before, I probably could have hit nine.

But the set still felt hard.

But we're capable of a lot more, but you got to be reminded.

That's why for my clients, I give them autonomy.

So say we're doing hip thrust first and they say, coach, what should I do?

I want them involved in on it.

It just, I think things work better better when you get them involved so go okay which hip thrust do you want to do at my gym we do rotisserie hip thrusts ramp hip thrusts and thruster pro you won't know what those mean but i which hip thrust do you want to do or say it's say they're doing a squat Do you want to use the glute builder squat machine?

Because it's really good.

Or do you want to do a Smith machine squat?

Do you want to do a barbell squat, box squat?

Do you want to use the T-bell and do the squat that way?

Which squat do you want to do?

And I let them choose.

And they go,

let's do a rotisserie hip threser or let's do a T-bell squat.

All right,

what are your records?

And then they say, well, I've done,

you know, my record with the T-bell squat is I've done 100 for 16.

I've done 125 because we load up 25 pound plates on that.

They are very involved in the process.

And I go, okay, which do you want to beat today?

And I give them some autonomy.

So yes, a lot of the coaches listening to this would say, so you only have them go hard on one set.

You should have them go do three or four sets and then the last set go hard on.

But that can work well.

And there's also some evidence that you can trade off volume and effort, meaning if you left three reps in the tank, but did an extra two sets, that might be equal to doing a couple less sets, but go training to failure.

There's some evidence that.

But I'm just saying my system, I want them focused on progressive overload.

And when they have autonomy and they say, okay, coach, I think I want to go for the 125 for a seven.

I want to get eight.

All right, let's do it.

And then you're focused on it.

And then you go all out, you hit eight.

Great.

They set a PR.

Now I'm not going to follow them through the rest of the workout.

Now get your volume in, but you achieve the goal.

Everything else is icing on the cake.

You achieve that goal.

People don't understand how hard it is to continue

to keep using progressive overload.

Most people stop after a year or two.

They just quit paying attention.

I think you've done that because we get older and you're like, oh, I can still get awesome workouts.

I can still improve my physique.

But what you're talking about is using my muscle connection to produce increasing muscle force,

putting more mechanical tension on the muscles through your mind, but your mind plays tricks on you.

It's not objective.

What is objective is the load on the bar, but that can play tricks on you too, where you're setting PRs but using sloppier form, not controlling it, using a different tempo or a different range of motion.

So that happens too.

That's why you've got to have this yin and yang, the external and the internal, like the

progressive overload with the mind-muscle connection.

Those two are the yin and yang that keep each other in check.

And those two pathways are necessary to optimize hypertrophy over the long run.

Yeah, I definitely pursue progressive overload still.

I should have been clear about this.

What you're describing is using progressive overload.

You're just keeping the same weight.

But I like to, I used to make, I remember writing an article, like 10 different ways you can progressive overload.

And that's just confusing people.

No, there's two main ways to progressive overload.

You use the same weight for more reps or more weight for the same reps.

But in a way, you are using progressive overload because you're using the same weight, not necessarily getting more reps, but having more control over it, which does produce more tension on the muscles and can lead to muscle growth over time.

It's just, it's not as objective.

It requires you to come in fresh and work your hardest.

And you can, there's no studies on this topic, by the way.

It would be cool to see one group focus on just on the the numbers quantity and the other group focus just on the quality for a whole year

and maybe in your first year you might tie but over the years like I don't know it's I'll tell you who I think will look better men and women I think the people that focus on quality and that raises a new question which I would disagree I'd say the quantity group but being just heavier for more reps either beating the reps or the load but because I think people can get too caught up up on quality to where they never go heavier and they're cool.

You're well, this is your area of study.

So you would, I trust your area.

People will agree with you.

It'll be divided.

If you put up a poll, what do you guys think about this?

You'd have 50% say quality and then 50% say quantity because the and over the long run, quantity leads to injuries.

And we don't talk about this enough because it's like the typical bros in their 20s that are like, just squat deadlift and you know okay how does that pan out 30 years or 20 years from now when you've been you know lifting like you don't they don't even understand they haven't gotten there you have to have the nagging pain that you were like

should I deadlift today or should I do you know single leg RDLs or like a seated leg curl I have a

thought around the role of the gym in training and recovery as it relates to how one feels outside of the gym.

Okay, I don't think I'm alone in this, although I've never heard anyone bring this up as a kind of like formally introducing the topic, which is for many people, including myself, the reason I train three times a week, different body parts each time I train, is because I also like to run.

The other reason is I love to train, but after three or four days a week of resistance training, I'm not as excited to resistance train.

I want to arrive in the gym excited to resistance train.

I also have other things in my life, and it's not just a matter of time.

If I'm training with the kind of intensity and frequency to maximize hypertrophy, a lot of times I'm tired.

You know,

I need more, a bit more sleep, and I'm not going to get that sleep.

I have a very, very full life.

You know, I often say my dance cart is very full.

And I think I'm not alone in this.

So I feel like for a lot of people, the ideal training frequency for them has something to do with, yes, they want bigger glutes and yes, they want to be leaner.

And yes, they're willing to work hard in the gym, but that they also have to acknowledge like the real life constraints.

Like how often are they really able to train five days a week?

Maybe in certain phases of the year they are, but I found to be very beneficial to kind of set a minimum of three workouts per week in the gym, resistance training.

two or three cardio workouts per week, and then stay with that and adjust the intensity and do these various things that we're talking about so that I wake up in the morning feeling pretty fresh, so that I can focus when I work, so that I'm not, you know, dragging and that I can, you know, like carry my luggage through the airport like I had to do the other day without feeling like my body's going to explode in pain or something like that.

Because at some point, the gym

for many people is the end point.

But I think for far more people, the gym is a tool to create a body that can do things in the outside world, including feel refreshed.

And so that's why when we started off today and you said, well, in principle, one could get away with training once per week, whole body, but you'd have to put so much intensity, you'd probably feel like garbage for the next two or three days, and then pretty good for the remainder of the week.

Maybe divide that into like two or three workouts, right?

Or this lower, upper, lower, upper, lower sounds great, but five days a week of training, even if it's, you know, varying the lifts, et cetera, just even like commuting the same way to the gym, I don't want to sound overly lazy lazy here, but again, people have stuff to do.

It would be awesome if people

would look at their schedule, I think, and say, you know, how many days a week can I go to the gym and really put real work into it?

Progressive overload, focus training, all these things.

How much time can I really dedicate to that?

And then back engineer the ideal split and way to work out from there.

Is that something that seems, I just want to check myself on this.

I'm not proposing this as much as I just want your thoughts on this as a trainer who's trained so many people, and including people who are not physique athletes and just like people who want to like have a great shaped body, be lean, be strong, live a long time, feel awesome.

I think what you're talking about is so important.

Like yesterday, we were in your gym working out and you know you you

took a shower and came out in a towel, peeled down.

You have ripped abs.

Some people don't know this about you.

You look amazing.

You're 49 years old.

You've been lifting weights since you were 16.

16.

Same here.

We've both been lifting weights for 33 years.

We started when we were 16.

We're both 49.

You can learn a thing for a thing or two from us.

You know why?

Because we didn't fizzle out.

You know, we didn't fizzle out over time.

And that's what you get a lot of gung-ho people that are like train five, six days a week, spend two, three hours a day in the gym.

They don't last.

So there's this what's best for short-term hypertrophy, what's optimal.

We can geek out over what's optimal, but the main thing is what's going to keep you motivated.

Also,

you're not going to, if, if you train, even training five days a week is tough.

My, my, my clients will typically have, like, typically on Friday, if they hit it too hard on Monday and Wednesday, and then they're trying to hit lower body on Friday, and this happens to a lot of them.

Coach, I'm beat down today.

I'm just going to do kickbacks and abduction and keep it light.

And I go, that's fine.

Guess what?

They come back on Monday crushing it.

They had to do a wimpy workout

and then they take Saturday and Sunday off.

They come back again on Monday ready to rock and roll.

You have to make adjustments when you're training frequently.

When you're training one or two days a week, you don't have to make that many adjustments because you're recovered.

The more frequently you train, the more adjustments you have to make.

You have to auto-regulate based on biofeedback, meaning like you just got to listen to your body and

stray from the plan.

But what you're saying is you start feeling overwhelmed.

You're not a psyched when you start start trying to lift four or five times a week because you also like to be functional.

You sprint, you run, you have a life.

And you've learned that three days a week is what

the optimal frequency for you and your lifestyle.

And you look amazing.

And so you figured that out.

Most people don't ever figure that out.

They don't think out.

They just are these rote, you know, robots going through life taking, and they don't think for themselves.

And so that's what I encourage people.

You're going to see way better results training two days a week, but you're psyched up, you're recovered, you're feeling, you want to, you're itching to go to the gym compared to if you train six times a week and you're always sore, you're beat up, you're dreading it, you don't use progressive roll, you just go through the motions and it's just to check off a box.

And you're not going to see many gains that way.

So you're absolutely right that you're psych, I always say we talk about anatomy and physiology and we ignore the psychology component.

The psychological component is huge and that gets ignored.

And I try to help people tune into that as a coach.

And I try to stray from, like, I have my system, but

I've had great gains,

you know, like with people straying far from the norms.

I remember this client, Sammy, I had in 2013.

And I'm like, she's the strongest one of the group.

I started training six bikini competitors all at once.

I didn't even have a gym at that point.

I trained them out of my sixth floor condo in Phoenix, Arizona.

I smuggled equipment up to my sixth floor when the security guards were distracted.

And I had like six pieces of equipment and they got so strong.

I think Sammy probably doubled her glute size in six months.

But I'm like, every month, I only trained her twice a week, Monday, Thursday back then.

And I'm like, every Thursday, her workouts suck.

And I'm like, oh my God, she's gaining so much strength, but every Thursday workout sucks.

I'm going to just give her one set to failure.

And one set to failure on of like, so she'd do, she'd she'd do like five or six sets on Monday, five or six sets on Thursday.

And the other girls would go, Coach,

why does she only have to do one set?

And I'd go, you can do one set if you want.

I think you want to do more.

I don't think you want to do one set.

Most people want to do more volume.

But I'd say, it's because she's so strong.

She gets, I remember I had this 106-pound kettlebell they were deadlifting.

160-pound kettlebell.

No, no, no, 106.

106.

But she could, she quickly got to where she could do it 50 reps.

So I had to buy a 203-pound kettlebell.

It looked like a cannonball because I didn't want to have like a barbell and this is on the sixth floor of an apartment.

No wonder they didn't want you have weights in there, like drop through the bag.

No, I know, and I and I look back because you still see the video on YouTube.

It's hilarious because I would, the, the, the bench was against my TV stand and I had travertine tile and I'd put this, I'd pick up this easy bar and sit in their laps and they do hip thrusts.

You see in some of the videos like this red envelope, like the Netflix, back when we used to order Netflix DVDs.

That's how long ago this was.

But if they would have dropped the weight or their feet slid out, I would have cracked my tile.

But anyway, I saw great results just having minimal equipment.

But she could gain a lot of strength, but she did best with single sets.

And I don't think, and there's some, there's one study I remember on the

ACE gene, the angio-con angiotensy converting enzyme gene.

I don't know what the hell that has to do with strength and volume, but there were like different alleles.

This is not my field, but like different, different phenotypes or whatever, not phenotype.

I don't know, whatever.

This was years ago when I read this study, but it seemed that some people do better with lower body doing single sets versus multiple sets.

Interesting.

And that was, that study was like 12, that study was, I think, a lot of years ago, maybe like 10, 15 years old study.

But there's probably a

genetic element to how many sets is optimal for us.

But she saw that if I trained, if I had to do three lower body workouts a week, she spun her wheels.

Could I have have said we're gonna do three but we're gonna do more sets way less effort but who likes stopping five reps shy of failure yeah that's it's hard to do it's hard to build

when it's easy and you stop

people like training

serious lifters like training close to failure and then if someone just generally doesn't like i know there's genetics to that exercise enjoyment you know that there's genetics of everything i mean i love training and part of the reason i set that frequency at three times per week i i've trained four times per week from, you know, from time to time, but is that I love training and I love making progress and I don't like being in pain.

I can handle soreness.

I can handle pain during the set, during the workout.

I'm talking about, I'm talking about like headed towards injury type pain, that just, you know, feeling like you can't get up out of bed in the morning because you got a strain or something.

But I've always loved exercise.

I never understood this concept of, you know, I hate working out, but I always feel better afterwards.

People say that.

And I'm always like, I wish I could train six days per week.

I don't have the time and I just can't generate the intensity.

So you're telling me that there are genetic differences in exercise enjoyment?

Yeah, I remember one day I was bored.

I was blogging back, you know, like 2015.

I started, I was like, looking at everything.

There's a, you know, genetics of pain tolerance, genetics of exercise enjoyment, genetics of...

muscle damage, recovery.

There's obviously look at, I remember I wrote this article for teenage and back in the day, and there were some fascinating studies back then they took the top responders versus the the non-responders and they compared their physiology and this is again this is like 15 year old research maybe 20 year old research but it was like

the top responders um had better satellite cell efficiency meaning um the satellite cells are like stem cells that lay

they lay quiescent unless they're called upon through stimulating gains.

You know,

mechanical tension or whatever,

some evidence that metabolic stress and muscle damage can signal them, but like

they're called upon when you hit a hard workout, and then what they end up doing is the satellite cells

have nuclei in them and they fuse, they fuse, and there's steps to it.

I can't remember the exact steps, but they fuse to the muscle cell and they lend their nuclei

because muscles are multinucleated.

They don't just have one nuclei, they have multiple nuclei.

And there's this myonuclear domain theory that your muscle size is limited by the number of nuclei in it.

So

the top responders, say you start out with 50,

a muscle cell has, well, just say 20 nuclei and 20 satellite cells.

I'm going to butcher the hell out of this.

But anyway, after training for 12 weeks, I think the study looked at training arms two or three times a week.

And some people, like newbies, trained arms like two, three times a week and didn't even gain arm size.

Like these are people that you look at them and you're like, they don't even lift or they don't know what they're doing.

They just might have really poor genetics for growth.

And that, but the best responders, like,

you know, I remember one of them like doubled their strength and like dramatically increased their size by like maybe like 20, 30 or maybe more.

I can't remember the percent increase in muscle size.

So the non-responders start out with 20

nuclei in the muscles and 20 satellite cells, and they end with 20, 20.

The top responders would end with 3030, meaning now they have 10 more nuclei, but they also somehow have 10, like the satellite cells replenish.

They have 10 more satellite cells, and that seems to be a big difference.

There are also like mechano growth factors, a splice variant of IGF-1, I think, and there's like myogenic growth factors that have different names like myo D.

They have different,

it's not, people think testosterone is so important and growth hormone and all this stuff, but it's, there's so many things that are important.

There's so many pathways, so many.

If you study muscle physiology, I just

send these studies to my friend Brad Schulenfeld and hope he reads them because I don't understand all the all the pathways.

There's so many of them.

They tend to have acronyms, you know, the JNK pathway, the

red pathway, the FOX F, you know, these pathways that only the muscle scientists, but we don't know, we don't have a grip on this, but there's genetics to every aspect of it.

There's genetics to your anatomy, your muscle bellies, how you're going to look.

There's genetics to how you're going to respond.

There's genetics of everything.

And so what you've tapped into is how you can keep the goal, the goal.

Keep lifting weights to where you enjoy it and don't make it something that feels like a chore or something you dread.

And that doesn't get talked about enough.

And this whole concept of

long-term hypertrophy, long-term gains has a lot to do with remaining injury, not having these crushing injuries, not being in pain all the time.

And that we talked about this yesterday.

I've never heard anyone discuss this, but I think it affects your knee, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, where you don't move around as much.

If you're injured.

If you have nagging pain, my knees hurt right now.

I can't do squats right now.

I love training quads hard.

Or just run up the stairs.

Yeah, run up.

Yeah, but like right now, I have some knee pain right now as I'm sitting here.

So if I think of standing up, I'm like, eh, maybe I'll just chill.

I'm not going to to get up.

If you have low back pain, you don't want to pick something up off the ground.

Well, this matches the data that was published in Science, I think, about a year or so ago, which was shocking to the world that our metabolism doesn't really change much over

our lifespan.

What happens is people move around a lot less, less meat, non-exercise-induced thermogenesis.

And I totally agree.

And I'd not heard this idea before until yesterday when you said that when we have a nagging pain or injury, we just move a lot less.

And when we move a lot less, we burn less calories.

And then there's a feedback where we tend to feel more lethargic when we move less as opposed to more.

One of the perhaps most valuable things that I've ever learned in my work life, my workout life, and just life, I try and apply this everywhere.

And I haven't always been successful in doing this.

When I was a graduate student

at Berkeley, there was a professor there.

His name is Bob Knight.

He's a neurologist.

So he's a clinician and a very good one and also a researcher.

And I remember asking him at the beginning of graduate school, I don't know why I had the nerve to do this, but I caught him outside of the building and I said, You'll what's a piece of advice?

What's it to being really good at this whole research science thing?

In addition to reading papers and learning the field and collecting data and

I was driven, obviously, but I want to know how he was able to do as many things as he did, be a clinician, run a lab.

And he seemed like a pretty chill guy, which it turns out he was.

And I'll never forget what he said.

He said, figure out what you can do consistently each week and don't do any more except under conditions of emergency, like a deadline or, you know,

just figure it out.

He said, for him,

it was something like eight to nine hours a day of real work.

This was before smartphones when you would actually go in and work.

You didn't have to compete with

phone for attention.

And he said, for him, it was also on the weekends.

He said that he liked, I'll I'll never forget, he said he liked mindless recreation that was not destructive.

So like not drinking a lot, not partying a lot, not staying out too late.

But for him, it was fishing, hanging out with his family.

And I think he was into exercising as well.

So I was like, that's pretty clever.

So I figured out, you know, how much I could work per day.

across each week and still continue to do that output.

But he said something else that was really key that maybe we can kind of

transport onto the exercise piece because you can probably sense where this is going, is he said,

and every five years, update that number.

And I was like, really?

He's like, yeah, every five years.

He said, you know, you're in your 20s now.

Back then, I was in my 20s.

He said, you could probably work 15 hours a day, which I probably did.

I probably, at that time, I was a little maniacal.

I probably worked 15 hours a day, five or six days a week.

In graduate school, that number actually went up, but then I noticed I started getting sick a bit when I was a postdoc, so I had to throttle back, right?

And so I wonder if we could kind of transport that onto the exercise thing, which is, because we've got people listening now that are probably in their teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, men and women, different goals.

Sort of like, what can I do every week?

for the next five years, assuming you don't get injured, no major life crisis.

I feel like that's kind of the way I approach this.

And it turns out for me, it's just been three days a week of resistance training, two or three days a week of cardio, one full day off.

And likewise with my work,

I adjust every five years or so.

And I'm wondering what your thoughts on, I take no credit for this.

This is all Bob Knight, MD, PhD, who, but I thought, wow, like this simple thing is such a gem for me because back then I thought, I just need to work as much as possible.

But he understood eventually you'll hit a wall.

You need to update these schedules.

So I think there's so much truth to this.

And not just with working out, but like even nowadays, if you're an entrepreneur on social media you feel guilty the rest of your life because you could always be doing more but it's like what's sustainable you could work now we can work

especially you how many comments you must get how many dms you must get how many emails how many opportunities there are um

like i realized for me with my career i'm like if i lift weights if i train clients for a few hours If I read research at night for a couple hours and make a social media post,

That's a busy day, you know, and respond to the comments and stuff.

I did good, and we need to pat ourselves on the back.

That's hard to sustain day in, day out, week in, wee out, week out, because you can take on too much and then you fizzle.

What's realistic?

What's realistic?

And I've had to learn, quit taking on too much, quit, and quit feeling guilty that that's a lot.

You do this consistently.

You have something sustainable.

I'd like to take a a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function.

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Along those lines, let's talk about glutes.

When I was growing up, glutes weren't like a thing.

I mean, people still had them,

but it wasn't a thing that was emphasized in the media.

There weren't songs about them.

It wasn't something that people selectively trained for.

Nowadays, you hear glutes are the new biceps, etc.

Setting aside

different preferences about

glutes, moderate glutes or no glutes, everybody has glutes.

Could you describe for us what are the major functions of the glute and why it's useful to build strength and in some cases hypertrophy for the glutes for men and for women.

The glutes do three main things hip extension, hip abduction, hip external rotation.

They also do posterior pelvic tilt which is like hip extension but I'll explain all three roles.

If you're sprinting your leg is out in front of you you power it down you know your foot touches down and you accelerate forward.

That's hip extension.

Front to back the thigh is up it's moving downwards

Most people are aware of hip extension.

It also does hip external rotation, which means think of a baseball player, you know, about ready to swing a bat.

They're going to rotate and the hip rotates laterally.

So you twist the body laterally.

And then abduction is simply raising your leg out to the side like you're doing a jumping jack.

When you're bent over, though, you can also do hip abduction.

That's like doing the seated hip abduction machine.

I think most people are probably not familiar with abduction and adduction.

Could you explain abduction and adduction?

I'm thinking about

the exercise in the gym where people are seated.

It looks like kind of like a recliner chair or a standard chair.

And then there are these pads that either are on the outside of the knees or on the insides of the knees.

And you're either squeezing in against resistance or you're pushing out against resistance.

Yep.

So the squeezing in, you're adducting.

Those are your inner thigh muscles.

And you can think of adduction as adding to the body.

Whereas abducting, you think of the word taking away from the body.

That's where you spread your legs outwards against resistance.

So

when you're upright or leaning forward, then you involve the gluteus maximus more and a little bit less of the gluteus medius, or it might be the posterior fibers of the gluteus medius, not to get too complicated.

But basically, the glutes do the gluteus maximus mainly, I would say does, you know, hip extension is by far the most popular.

And then

hip external rotation is more in sports.

We don't have a lot of exercise that involve hip external rotation.

There's a couple of good ones, but they're not very common.

And then hip abduction, especially transverse plane hip abduction or the horizontal plane hip abduction, like the seated hip abduction machine.

is effective too.

So it's a very versatile muscle.

You don't even have to focus on pelvic tilt.

That's a more advanced concept.

Same with like transverse plane hip abduction.

Mainly, if you just know that the glutes pull the leg backwards, as in sprinting, or if you're in a deep squat or lunge and you stand up, that's hip extension.

It also raises the leg out to the side and also rotates the body outward, not inward, outward.

And those are the roles of the glutes.

And then how you create a proper program design

is an interesting topic because most people in the past, they've only focused on hip extension.

In the past, it was always just

squatter, deadlift, or lunge.

Back in our era, it was squat, deadlift, lunge.

That's all people did.

Those are vertical hip extension exercises, and they're very, very effective.

The thing is, they also grow the legs very well.

So if you're a male and you want to grow the legs, yes, have at it.

What if you're a woman that doesn't want a lot of leg growth or you're just trying to maximize your recoverable volume?

I've noticed a very important phenomenon happen over throughout my career being the glute guy.

In the 90s, you remember it.

In the 90s, it was people just did squats, lunges, deadlifts.

That's how you developed your glutes.

And then I come along and earlier I mentioned these strength coaches.

that were doing glute activation.

And the glute activation wasn't squats, deadlifts, lunges.

We were doing glute bridges on the ground.

We were doing fire hydrants.

We were throwing bands around, doing lateral bandwalks.

What we were doing was using the glutes from different vectors.

So instead of just going up and down in the sagittal plane,

you know, like what we've always done, we were doing lateral and rotational stuff and also working the glutes from front to back.

So I started this new terminology because we always had the planar terminology, which was sagittal plane, frontal plane, transverse plane.

And I said think of vectors instead.

You have axial loading, which is your vertical squats, deadlifts,

lunges, step-ups, split squats, good mornings, etc.

Then you have your inter posterior loading.

That's front to back.

If you're doing a back extension, you know,

a horizontal back extension, if you're doing a glute bridge, you're loaded from the front, pushing forward again, like pushing front to back on the body.

So that's interposterior vector.

And then you have your lateral vector left to right, and then you have your rotational vector, which is rotational force.

I created this, what I called rule of thirds, and I just said, this is a way to maximize your recoverable volume.

A third of your exercise selection should be vertical in nature.

Those are the hardest to recover from.

They also build your legs.

They're...

Probably the most efficient exercise because they work so much muscle mass.

These are your variations of squats, deadlifts, lunges, split squats, step-ups.

Good mornings.

Then you have your horizontal movements.

These don't beat you up as much.

They don't work you as much in the stretch position.

They work you in a squeeze position.

These are your variations of hip thrust, glute bridges, back extensions, reverse hypers, 45-degree hypers,

and to an extent, cable kickbacks.

They don't beat you up as much.

And then the remaining third, it can be lateral rotary.

These don't beat you up at all.

They're your hip abduction abduction movements, your cake from a cable column, putting

the ankle strap on, or using ankle weights, or putting a band on.

But these are your, basically what we did yesterday, that glute medius exercise at the end.

They're lateral.

They build.

the glute medius and minimis and also the upper subdivision of the glute max but they don't beat you up that much they're not so hard to recover from so that's where i said you can do you know with my that movement pattern checklist we said earlier, where you pick one squat lunge, one hinge pull, one thrust bridge, and one abduction movement, you could do three sets of each of those.

That's 12 sets.

You do that three times a week.

That's 36 sets per week.

People would say that's overkill.

But I was learning from the strength coaches back then, and we were doing similar workouts to that three times a week.

All the popular strength coaches, they would do a

a knee dominant movement and a hip dominant movement, meaning a squat lunge variation and then a hinge variation.

And they people could recover from it.

Well,

I knew that the athletes could do that three times a week.

They're recovering.

I'm like, if the athletes can recover from it, then if you add in a thrust bridge movement and an abduction movement, it's not going to be too much more, especially because we were doing abduction and bridging movements in the warm-up.

So kind of how I became popular, I invented the hip thrust.

I remember just going, these movements are awesome.

Why don't we load load them up?

Why don't we make them harder?

Why are we doing them as glute activation in the warm-up?

Why don't we do them as a resistance exercise?

I'm like, these guys are brilliant.

They're using bands and body weight stuff, but why are we doing wimpy movements?

Why don't we push the envelope on these?

Because I don't like doing high reps.

You don't either.

We hate high reps.

I want to do low reps.

I don't want to do 20 reps.

So something, how can I load up that bridge pattern?

And that's how I came up with hip thrusts.

And then I'm like, how can I load up some of these abduction movements?

And I came up with more movements to load up abduction.

So then I said the rule of thirds, a third of your movements should be lateral rotary, a third horizontal, a third vertical.

You can recover from it.

But you're also, people will say that's 36 sets for the glute max.

No, 12 of those sets are more for the glute medius and minimus, which are different muscles.

They're different muscles than the glute max.

So it's really 24 sets for the glute max.

There's some overlap there.

But the point is, I've learned that people can recover from this system And I learned a lot.

I have to credit these strength coaches back in the day for helping me come up with those ideas.

And then I transitioned that into the bodybuilding world where people attacked me and said, there's no way you can recover from it.

And I'm going, trust me, they can recover.

But the women listen because they're like,

I want to train my glutes.

I want to build my glutes more so than you know, these men are telling me, train five days a week, train upper body four days and legs once.

I want to train, I want to listen to this guy.

It makes sense because I would always say back then,

someone said you need to put, you know, an inch around your glutes in the next month, you know, or you can win the, you know, I'll pay you a million dollars to put an inch around your glutes in two months or whatever.

Are you going to train glutes once a week?

No, you're going to train them three times a week.

Same with arms.

Or at least twice a week.

Yeah, if I said, Andrew, I'll give you a million dollars if you put an inch around your arms in the next two months.

You're going to train them once a week?

No, you'll probably train them every other day.

And you'll realize the sweet spot where you can still recover from it.

So the people listening to me, and what really what they listened to was they saw my before and after transformations.

Yeah, before and afters on your social media are.

Super impressive.

I mean, clearly people get incredible results.

I want to make sure I ask a few questions that I'm guessing are on people's minds now that everyone's thinking about glutes.

Let's say a woman or man comes to you and says, hey, I want more lower glute max, the area where the glutes meet the hamstring.

What is the movement that you prescribe?

Let's make it extreme.

Let's say they were only going to do one or two movements for their glutes, and that's where they wanted more growth.

What movements would you give them?

I think the reverse lunge is the best

for the lower glute max.

But it's almost too good.

So if you're going to train it three times a week, I would say don't do reverse it's too good okay so once or twice

yeah so if you're just going to train glutes once a week reverse lunge is your go-to movement um

uh we we don't have a lot of research on what should you do a deficit should you do smith machine should you do dumbbell but they're all going to be effective um

deficit means stand on a box to get a little more range of motion

but i like step-ups because they don't tend to get you a sore so if you're training three times a week you could do step-ups probably all three times stepping up

But we used to do high step-ups where you're more upright, foot is up higher.

That's going to work more quads.

I think the most glute-dominant way to step up is to lean and just go to a thigh parallel position.

Meaning the thigh is parallel to the ground.

So you reach back.

I think that's the most glute-dominant way to do that.

Just stepping back off the box so that the thigh that's still up on the box is parallel to the floor.

Yep.

And you lean, you reach back,

control it all the way down, tap the foot down, then come up.

But you also have to

remember, if you train glutes Monday, Wednesday, Friday, if you do train glutes three times a week, you have an extra day for recovery on the Friday.

So that's where I could say, do two sets of reverse lunges or walking lunges on the Friday because you have an extra day to recover.

A lot of times when I'm training my clients, they'll go, coach, what else should I do?

Nothing.

You're done.

You did good.

You got to train in two days.

It's a different art to training glutes three times a week.

I mean, think if you had to train pecs three times a week or biceps three times a week.

You wouldn't do these marathon workouts.

You'd know, I got to have a good session in two days.

I can't do too much.

This system works well, but it can be overdone.

It needs to be...

individualized and tinkered with so that you can keep coming back and being recovered.

For the lower glute max, I'd say best movement is probably reverse lunge, but it can be too good.

It can can make you too sore sometimes it makes people's adductors adductor magnus super sore and then two days later you have a crummy workout if that's the case don't do reverse lunges do step ups instead squats and RDLs and leg press fit in single leg leg press especially glute dominant with your foot higher up on the platform work good for that category as well for the upper gluteus maximus we need more research because

I've thought probably hip thrusts are probably the best for that according to EMG the electromyography, but EMG doesn't perfectly predict growth.

What I like about hip thrusts is that you can do a lot more volume.

Lately, I've been just prioritizing hip thrusts.

I do nine sets every third day, and I think that's overkill, but

I do different types,

and I can recover from it.

I don't even get sore from it.

It's crazy.

You can do so much volume, but...

But hip thrust, I think theoretically, people feel it more in the upper glute max.

But again, again, we don't have evidence of this.

Can you really different get differential growth?

I would say for sure the seated hip abduction leaning forward, though, I don't think that's going to grow

or at least like upright.

If you're perfectly upright at a 90-degree hip angle doing seated hip abduction, I think that would target mostly upper gluteus maximus without a lot of lower

based on analyzing the fiber directions, but that's just theoretical.

Okay, a couple of practical questions.

What is the most common mistake that you see people making when they do hip thrusts on the hip thrust machine or using a barbell

over their pelvis in the gym?

I'm not talking about your clients.

I'm talking about when you go into a gym, because I go into a gym, you'll see typically it's women doing hip thrusts.

Sometimes men, but most often it's women on a hip thrust machine or a barbell loaded up with the pad or the towel wrapped around the barbell, and they're doing hip thrusts.

What's the most common mistake that you see?

and what is the solution to that mistake?

And this might not even be a mistake.

This might be an advantage.

We don't know yet because we haven't looked into range of motion on hip thrusts.

What we always said the first decade was

people are loading up too heavy and you're not reaching full hip extension.

So you're not getting into that sort of reverse table pose.

I think of it as like a, in gymnastics, I think they call it a crab pose where you put your hands behind you, your feet are flat on the ground, and you make right angles with your knees and you make your shoulder extension.

Like a tabletop.

Like you could want like a tabletop, like reverse tabletop.

That's essentially what the hip thrust is, except, you know, you're not going to have your arms back that way.

They're not reaching full hip extension.

Okay.

And the hip can go into hip hyperextension.

With bent knees, average is probably around 10 degrees.

With straight legs, you can get a little more hip hyperextension.

You can get about 20 degrees, but there's a genetic, like an anatomy component to that.

Some people can get 40 degrees.

Some people can get zero.

They have have trouble just reaching neutral.

But

you can go higher than like straight a lot of times.

You can kind of almost be bowed.

Bowed up, but it's important to make sure the hyperextension comes from the hip, not the lumbar spine.

So anyway,

just

think of it like this.

You do vertical movements to work the stretch position with the glutes.

These place the most torque, the most loading on the hip when you're deep down in the stretch.

Vertical movements like the squat.

The squat, the lunge, they really load up the stretch position.

So when you do hip thrusts, don't try to make it a stretch position movement because you have better movements for working the stretch.

I do think full range hip thrusts are best for glute growth compared to just doing partials, but make sure you're coming up all the way and reaching full hip extension.

Maybe on if you do a set of 10, maybe your last two reps don't quite reach full hip extension, but it shouldn't be like where you're only getting a third of the way up.

So really hump the ceiling.

I'm really squeezing at the top.

I want to

make sure that we return to one specific thing before I move on to questions about stubborn body parts in general and how to overcome stubborn body parts.

But the two relate.

So let's say somebody wants to improve their glute development.

They just want maybe bigger glutes or more rounded glutes or more shaped glutes.

It's funny whenever we say bigger, when it comes to muscles, oftentimes like the men typically are like, yeah, bigger.

And the the women are like, well, I more want shape.

But of course, tone is something related to leanness combined with a bit of muscle density, etc.

There's a bunch of stuff there.

Well, let's just say women want bigger muscles.

It's hard for them to

know that.

They want bigger glutes.

They don't want a bigger muscle.

Women don't want a giant glute.

But what they're saying is, I want rounder glutes.

So rounder glutes that

when you're when you're you look at the glute muscle, if it's there's not a lot of bulge to it, it's flat.

It's atrophy there's not as a hypertrophy to get that round shape you need bigger glute muscles you need hypertrophy they need hypertrophy specific training for the gluteus maximus and let's face it most people don't have really good glute genetics most people they're only well especially a lot of women who desire big glutes their only chance at getting

big round muscular glutes like well not big even just round glutes that they want is to do really optimal glute training and have the diet that matches it.

So they need to know that.

They need to know that this advertising campaigns with like Pilates and, you know, bar and all these classes that they say, well, these will give you long, lean muscles.

These are get a lot of the female specific marketing preys upon women's fears of getting too bulky, too muscular.

But for the glutes, it's how are you going to grow the glutes if you don't get strong?

How are you going to grow the glutes if you're just doing wimpy movements, holding for time or like stretches?

It can't happen.

So they do need to know

what you're seeking is not glute tone, it's glute hypertrophy.

Yeah, excellent point.

And I think that we can't speak for all women or all men, certainly, but what seems to be the theme is that people want hypertrophy of specific muscles.

They would like to replace what is currently adipose tissue, fat, with muscle and have more quote-unquote shape to a given body region, right?

But in the end, as you point out, this means more hypertrophy, more growth of those given muscles.

And then the amount of adipose tissue is handled by the calories in, calories out formula, plus a couple of other little details there that do matter, but are far less important than calories in, calories out.

So

if somebody wants to grow their glutes,

You've recommended the three types of movements that will do that well.

A vertical movement, some squat, hip hinge, RDLs, lunges, reverse lunges, step-ups, these kinds of things.

Hip thrust,

which you invented.

I didn't know that until recently, but that's awesome.

Hip thrusts and then something for the inner thigh,

and the outer thigh, right?

I don't know if you're treating inner thigh and outer thigh both as relevant to the glutes, but something where you're pushing your knees outward against resistance on the outside of the knees.

So Abduction.

Abduction.

So.

By the way, the inner thigh gets worked a lot when you do the vertical movements, the hip extension exercises, like squats, lunges.

Some people don't want that.

So that's where you got to get.

Because it makes the leg bigger.

Yes.

Yeah.

So that's something to talk about is what if you want to grow your glutes without growing the legs?

Okay, let's definitely talk about that.

In the meantime,

What I'm hearing is the person that wants to grow their glutes should be doing those three types of exercises, typically those three types of exercises, at least twice a week and perhaps three times a week, with the understanding that the third session in that week may have to be at slightly less intensity that Friday session before the weekend if you really beat up the glutes on your previous two glute days.

But training your glutes twice a week might be sufficient.

I mean, there's not much evidence that three times a week is better than two times a week in the literature, but two times a week is safer.

It's your safer bet because you're going to be recovered.

Three times a week, it's more problematic.

My opinion, you can get away with it.

But for a lot of men,

if you come to me and you're a man and you say, hey, I want more glute growth, I'm not going to tell you to do booty by bret.

My booty by brett program is like

squat lunge movement, hinge movement, you know, thrust bridge movement, abduction.

And then we do one upper body press and one upper body pull.

And you get really strong at those upper body movements because I'm always having you do chin-ups and push-ups and bench press and military press it works well but men have different goals we also want to grow the biceps the delts the pecs the lats so you don't tell them to do glutes train glutes three times a week you just say look what are you doing for legs are you are you some guys will like you got the typical guy who skips legs who says like oh i just run on the treadmill for legs That guy needs to start training his legs.

Also, you have the guys that are like, I just do leg press, leg extension, leg curls.

Okay, you should probably do more glutes.

But if you have a a normal, if the guy already does squats and deadlifts, great.

Add in hip thrusts because they're not going to compromise your recovery.

Just add in hip thrusts and if you feel okay doing seated hip abduction, throw that in too.

More men are doing seated hip abduction and more men are doing hip thrusts with the

advent of all these plate-loaded machines you see now in gyms.

They're making it way more convenient to hip thrust because people don't want to set it up.

The setup, back the first like decade, we always had to set up these.

My OG followers will laugh at the times where we had to drag plates and barbells and aerobic steps and risers and benches all across the street.

Now you just buckle in.

Now you buckle in.

It's so much more convenient.

But just add in hip thrust or 45 degree hypers, glute dominant fashion.

So you're already doing the stretch position work.

If hopefully the man is already for his quads, he's already doing squats or like lunges or split squats or deep leg press.

He's already doing that.

If he's already doing stiff leg deaths or RDLs, great.

Just add in a squeeze position work because it's not gonna tack it's not gonna you're gonna be recovered and I think there's some synergy to it It's weird because like if you've only trained we saw this with you yesterday you have you have big glutes, but you don't train the extended range the squeeze position So you're very weak compared to how strong you are in the flex position you're

you're you belt squat a ton of weight you can you're strong in the flex position, but not the squeeze position when you start getting that squeeze position strong good things tend to happen across the body so it's not just for it's for function too

and i've seen i've heard just so many stories over the years of people going man when i start hip thrusting my lower body mechanics change my function change i no longer get this type of pain i know i i feel myself being more functional so you do it for a function too but i think it really adds to the glute growth because Every man is sold with isolation movements or single joint movements.

And it's weird because I've noticed men kind of getting salty of this glute phenomenon, this glute training phenomenon.

So if you know, I've never heard, like say you were doing, you posted a video of yourself doing curls on your Instagram.

You're not going to get a bunch of men that go, bro, just do chin-ups, LOL.

Bro, just do...

Pull supinated pull-downs.

You're wasting your time with that.

Yeah, there's this sort of understanding that compound end isolation movements are important.

We all know that.

If you're trying to maximize your arm size, yes, you can get big arms.

If you have a really strong bench press, dips, shoulder press, you know,

chin up, pull down in rows, you're going to have big arms, but they're going to get bigger if you add in some dedicated elbow flexion and extension work.

Everyone knows that.

And all the women know that with glutes, too.

It's the men that tend to have a problem.

They like the old days, like in my day, we did this.

And they want to say, quit wasting your time with those silly hip thrusts or those kickbacks or that abjection.

Just do squats and deadlifts and lunges.

I will tell you, the listeners, the listeners who train glutes know this.

A lot of people don't end up with big glutes when they focus on squats and deadlifts.

You can go to powerlifting competitions.

These are people who make a,

their main hobby is squatting and deadlifting, and they're in their singlets.

You can't hide it.

You go to a local powerlifting competition, you will see singlets are like the wrestling, you know, yeah, in powerlifting.

You'd think you'd see good glute development.

You see, you're like, how are these people squatting and deadlifting all the time and they don't have glutes?

My clients have better glute development than what you see at powerlifting competitions.

It's because they're using the rule of thirds, they're training the glutes through different vectors.

That can be a distraction if you get too carried away and want to do every glute exercise because sometimes it's like, no, just get stronger at the basics, and then sometimes it's no, incorporate more variety.

But I will say, if men want to grow their glutes, so if you're a male listener right now and you say, I would like to have more glute development, I'm already doing

a type of squat or lunge, I'm already doing a type of like hinge, like an RDL.

Just add in two sets of hip thrusts twice a week.

And if you want to throw in the seated hip abduction machine, do that too.

You'll notice some good glute growth over time and especially get strong at the hip thrust.

Start out light.

Master that mind-muscle connection.

Make sure you're using the full range and then gain strength over time.

Get to where you can do 315 for 20 reps.

If you don't like high reps, do 405 for 10 reps.

Trust me, you will notice some improvements if you control the weight through the full range of motion.

That's very simple, actionable advice.

Where is the bar?

For let's assume someone doesn't have access to a hip thruster machine and they're using the barbell placed over the pelvis.

So the bar, for some people, you just keep the bar right above the pubic bone and it stays right there throughout the whole range of motion.

Probably like

probably 66% of people can do it that that way.

If you have a type of hip anatomy where

your pelvis is off to the side where that where when the bar is right above your pubic bone, it's going to be hitting your

pelvic bones, then it's excruciatingly painful.

For those people, they push it forward as they come up.

So what happens is probably one-third of my clients,

as they rise up, they push the bar up onto their onto their upper thighs.

Oh, onto their upper thighs.

That's what my women do.

The men tend to keep it above the pubic bone.

We have different pelvic anatomies, and so I can get people to do it comfortably.

It takes time, though.

Everyone can do, every client I've had can do hip thrusts.

You learn to keep the bar right there in place.

It stays put.

It's scary to look at it.

You might think it looks dangerous or hard to pull off.

Also, no one starts with 405.

You start off with body weight.

You start over the barbell, lightweight, and build up the tolerance to that pain over time.

It's the same as when you start doing like low bar squats or high bar squats.

It's like, ah, this hurts.

And then you,

if you have ever done Zerture Things, ah, this hurts.

Or front squats, this hurts like hell.

Hook grip, ah, this hurts like hell.

And then three weeks later, four weeks later, you're fine.

Okay.

You adapt.

So the bar placement, though, does need to change depending on your hip anatomy, but those are the two main things people do.

But when you, there's a difference with how, what I recommend for men and women to build their glutes.

And with men, if you're worried about hip thrusts, learn how to do glute-dominant 45-degree hypers.

That's an awesome glute exercise.

It's hip extension.

We call it the back extension.

It's hip extension.

And if you round the back, flare your feet out a little bit.

When you round the back, you're shutting the erectors off.

And then you're using your glutes to pull you up.

It's an awesome hip extension exercise.

So add that in or hip thrusts.

And then if you're comfortable doing seated hip erection, you're going to see results just from that alone.

You don't have to pay attention to all this stuff we've talked about in this podcast.

Just do a simple thing of adding in hip thrusts, or you can do glute bridges off the Smith machine.

Those are kind of easy to do.

You set a bench down.

And glute bridges or hip thrusts.

We'll put a link to it.

I saw a clip that you've posted that made it really clear how the Smith machine can be useful, especially you get angles that might be more difficult to get with the classic hip thruster approach.

And then 45 rehypers, add one of those in twice a week to your leg day.

If you train legs once a week, start training legs twice a week and

do a compound movement or a multi-joint movement for

the quads, the hamstrings, and the glutes.

And you'll be able to recover just fine.

And that will help you grow your glutes.

But also

train the glutes from different vectors.

I'm telling you, I can say this with so much confidence.

When you start doing hip thrusts correctly and really feeling that squeeze, if you've never done it before, good things start happening in the body.

It's just, we should be strong at N-RAIDE hip extension.

And if you look at the glutes on anatomy chart, it's kind of the keystone.

It's like the keystone muscles that tie everything together.

A lot of good things happen when you do that.

And then just resist.

You said what are the main errors, what are the common flaws with hip thrusting.

I kind of got sidetracked, but it's not coming up all the way or

like people's knee angle.

If your feet are too far out, you feel more in your hamstrings.

If feet are too close, you feel it in the stretch in the rectus femoris.

You don't feel as much in the glutes.

And just ego lifting.

In fact, I kind of think it's this tightrope we walk where you got to push it hard.

And then all of a sudden you realize you watch a video, if you record yourself or something, you're like, eh,

yeah, I was progressively overloading and now my form looks ugly.

I got to dial it back.

and that's a common thing we have to do with a lot of exercise.

I realize I was a little too greedy with my progressive overload and my form is compromised.

My range of motion has been compromised.

I'm a little sloppier.

I'm going to reset and you have to do that from time to time.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Those are very helpful tips.

And I'll just add that

the glute medius exercise,

glute medius hip thrust,

it could be called like a plate standing abduction, but the, because you eventually use a plate, but it works the grounded, the gluten medius of the grounded leg,

not the up leg.

It works the down leg, the gluten.

We'll put a link to that specific time stamp where you showed me the movement.

It requires no equipment.

I will say that adding those in, even though I now realize I wasn't doing them exactly right, but adding those in a few years ago

on the suggestion of Jeff Cavalier.

from AthleteNext, resolved what I thought was a back pain issue completely.

An ongoing nagging back issue that would leave me feeling completely debilitated, folded over,

often from sitting too much or even from certain mistakes made in training.

And getting glute media stronger resolved that.

And what you just described yesterday and took me through was incredible because I could really feel the activation and I can really sense how it stabilizes the pelvis and does all the great things that people can look up that glute medius does.

So thank you for that.

Although we're mainly talking about the glutes, you've also been giving us a beautiful description of how to prioritize a lagging muscle group.

It just so happens that the glutes are lagging for most people.

Let's transfer that to essentially any muscle group with the understanding that different muscle groups have different needs, right?

Different size muscle groups recover more or less, they can handle different volumes.

We certainly don't have time to get into all the details of that.

And

it's highly individual as as well.

But what I'm taking away from what you've said so far is that

if one does a really honest assessment of their development, their aesthetic development, their strength development, there almost always is one or two body parts that are lagging, that need help, that aesthetically or functionally or strength-wise or all of the above are behind the rest of the body.

I think men more than women, in my observation, tend to to focus a lot on their stronger lifts in the gym.

Like, oh, if they can bench a lot and they've got really, you know, a lot of chest development, they'll like bench a lot.

I always want to pull them aside.

Like, listen, like lay off the benches.

You see these guys with like heavy lower pec development, no upper pec development, or just like huge chest and then like pipe arms and no forearms.

And you just kind of want to be like, listen, man, like, is it really that?

necessary to like lean into your strengths that much.

Could, you know, I think many people, men and women, could afford to do an assessment of like where they could prioritize so can we just transmit what you've already said so far and just say listen if i want to bring up my shoulders for instance maybe i train them two or three times a week um currently i'm training them once a week but really twice because i train my shoulders on shoulder i have a shoulder and back day it's actually a push push-pull upper body day minus arms and then on arms day i'm doing some reverse bench dips i tend to do rear delt flies Again, I do some things that I do dips.

So I'm basically hitting shoulders twice a week.

But let's say I wanted to bring up my shoulder development or another muscle group.

Would you suggest adding another day, like a third day, and then throttling back on some other aspect of my training, just as you would for glutes?

Because that seems to be what I'm taking from what you've said so far.

So absolutely.

Add volume to the lagging part and take some volume away.

You can't just hammer everything.

And I think that's one of the main

limiters of

especially men,

but also women with glutes.

Like you want to do every movement there is.

And I want people to understand how easy it is to maintain size and strength.

There's this classic study by Bickel.

It took,

they looked at young and older subjects.

I'm just going to focus on the younger subjects, but I think it was like four months they did a, like they hammered quads like three times a week with three sets of squats, three sets of leg press, three sets of leg extensions, three times a week.

All three of those three times a week.

All three, three times a week.

Grew their quads, quads got way bigger.

27 sets.

And then one group just stopped training.

One group did one-third the volume, so just one day a week.

So instead of three days a week, they just do that same workout one day a week.

And one group did one-ninth the volume, meaning once, meaning just one set of squats, one set of leg press, one set of leg extensions.

So went from doing 27 sets a week to just three sets.

And

you look at it, they maintained most of their size and strength doing just one set

for like six months.

Doing just one set of

squats, one set of leg press, one set of leg extensions.

And so you can maintain very, that was like this classic paper that, but I kind of realized that too.

I'm like, man, it's really easy to maintain strength and size once you've built it up.

It's hard to build.

It's easy to maintain.

And that could have something to do with this muscle memory concept where it's like, well, muscle memory has an epigenetics component to it and then a myonuclear component to it.

But once you've gotten those nuclei

fused as extra nuclei from the stem cells, the muscle stem cells, the satellite cells, and now they're now in the nucleus, they're now in the muscle fiber.

They're there to stay.

That's kind of debated,

but as long as you're lifting weights, it's hard to gain, it's easy to maintain.

So sticking with this concept of

like maintain certain muscles, we know from the extreme high volume literature that for brief periods, if you specialize, you can blast a muscle with high volume and it can grow.

It's almost like the

more the merrier, which is crazy for me because there's now five studies, I believe.

There's the first was this Radielli study, then there was Schoenfeld, two by Ennis, there's another one I'm forgetting, but

these are five studies showing that over 30 sets a week, you get more in a dose response.

You get more growth the more volume that you do.

Some influences have argued that it's just swelling, you're getting more swelling, but that is doubtful based on a study I think it was from Rafalo.

It looked at like cells, like the swelling three days after and five days after.

It looks like that's legit, but all of us know that's not sustainable.

You can't just do 30 sets for every muscle group indefinitely.

That's the recipe for disaster.

What people should be looking at is, wow, you can blast a muscle with high volume for brief periods and grow.

So

how does this translate for lagging muscles?

For a lot of my followers, they're just on a permanent glute specialization routine.

They want glutes so much and they don't want other muscle.

Like a lot of my followers are like, don't really care about my upper body or my quads or my hammers.

I just want bigger glutes.

This is mostly female followers.

Mostly female followers.

But I will say a lot of men care about, we care about every muscle, and we kind of look in the mirror, and it's whatever your weak part is.

Some people, it's their calves, some people, it's this.

So, can you follow?

Unfortunately, it's not most guys' neck.

I see that a lot of guys need neck training, and they don't do it.

They don't do it.

And it's amazing how neck training can positively affect the male aesthetic.

Like, you look at a strong neck makes somebody look strong.

It also incidentally makes other lifts like for upper body go way up.

You know, if you guys...

Look at your neck is jacked, but you've trained it for how many years?

I train my neck twice a week.

How many years?

I've done it for, I can't remember how many years, many years.

Like 10 years?

At least 10 years.

But you have a thick neck, and there's a study on that.

Because the old adage was just do,

you don't need to train your neck.

If you do deadlifts, shrugs, you know, rows, it's going to grow.

No, it doesn't.

The study showed that they had one group doing that, just the deadlifts, the shrugs, the rows, and another group doing neck flexion extension.

The group doing the

deadlifts and shrugs, they grew their trouts, but not their neck muscles at all.

If you want to grow the neck muscles, you have to train the neck muscles.

So critical.

The neck is the upper spine.

And also nowadays, everyone's hunched over in the C-shaped position because we're texting all the time and we're sitting too much.

But Jeff Cavalier has a great video on how to properly train the neck using a plate in the gym wrapped in a towel, how to do this with the mouth closed, nasal breathing, tongue on the roof of the mouth.

There are a lot of things you can do wrong.

So neck training, I think, has to be approached correctly.

And bridges are probably, according to Jeff, are probably not the best thing because you can slip a disc and it happens in a moment.

I think neck training is vital.

I think women shy away from neck training because they don't want a larger neck, which I, and so I haven't...

quite figured out the solution to hand off to them.

And I'm not a, again, I'm not a trainer.

This is just my experience.

So I agree with you.

Like, and it's funny, I have an identical twin brother and he's always like, man, I love your neck is bigger.

My this little bobblehead.

Yeah, you have a properly sized and shape.

But I don't do neck training, but I think what happens is a lot of people, like pull downs and military press and even like bench can irritate people's necks because we flex it.

When I bench, I always want to be here.

When I compete in a powerlifting contest,

I had to learn how to keep my head back.

So a lot of times we're just flexing it isometrically, and I think that's what I do when I'm doing like chin-ups and stuff.

And I'm always like flexing it isometrically, which can provide a stimulus.

I get bigger, a bigger neck if I train it by that.

I think that's the hard part is I love having strong forearms.

I love grip training.

I love every muscle.

How do you work it together in a comprehensive program and do it week in and week out?

That's the hard part is how to train everything.

So we end up going, the six lifts we mentioned, you know, you're going to get most of your muscles, even like deadlifts are going to train your grip muscles.

But it's like, then how do you, how do you hit all of them for maximum function?

How do you strengthen everything

and not get distracted?

Because time-wise, you're right.

I think the problem is when you try to say, I want every muscle in the body, I'm going to do, you know, 20 sets for my forearms, 20 sets for my biceps, my triceps, each head of the delt, my traps, my pecs, my lats, and upper pecs, lower pecs, upper lats, lower lats, erectors, glutes, quads, hamstrings, calves, adductors, you name it, I want it.

And then you, it's a recipe for disaster.

So you have to specialize a little bit based on your goals your your preferences your individual weaknesses as per your anatomy and that's where you could say look

what we've talked about throughout this podcast gives people some tools it's like look the first set is the most important it's for bringing up lagging muscle groups but also what if you just wanted to maximize hypertrophy What if a bodybuilder, a pro, like, what if I, it would be kind of cool if I could test this theory.

I just don't think anyone would want to train this way.

If you said, look, I'm going to go on this blast and cruise type philosophy where it's hard to build, easy to maintain.

So instead of trying to build everything at once, I'm going to really prioritize one muscle from the upper body and one muscle from the lower body or two each month.

So month one, it's, you know, it's

quads and pecs.

And

Month two, it's back and hamstrings.

Month three, it's delts and then glutes and adductors because they kind of go together.

Maybe you throw arms into that, delts and arms and then you know glutes and adductors.

And then you rotate.

You rotate through that cycle and you're doing all of it.

You're just skewing the volume a lot and the focus, the progressive overload focus.

So on the months that you're maintaining, you're just trying to do one or two sets, limited volume, trying to maintain your

exercise, two or three exercise.

Well,

then you're really blasting the muscle that you're focused on.

Theoretically, those would grow a lot during the focus month, and then they'd maintain.

Maybe that's a better way to grow muscle.

It's just no one would ever do it.

To me, what you described for glutes and what you're describing now for essentially any body part, there's a common theme here, which is that short periods of, let's say, four to six weeks of prioritization, training with more of muscle three times a week, different movements, perhaps even different rep ranges.

And this is the key thing that I'm taking away from what you said, and then throttling back on the volume for other muscle groups, not panicking panicking that you're going to lose all your development in these other muscle groups is really what allows you to bring everything up to the more or less same level.

And yet I also agree with the last sentence you said.

Most people lack the discipline or just the ability to throttle back on the volume of work for body parts that they're strong in because it feels so damn good to train the things that you're strong in.

And yet it's the exact opposite of what we need to do.

I did that for delts, but it gets to a point where I'm so sick of doing delt raises for the front side and rear delt.

You just get so sick of it, but I would do a lot of variety, but I started training more volume, more frequency.

I wasn't necessarily focused on progressive overload either.

Like I've preached progressive overload, but my delts grew at the age of 48.

Now I'm 49, but they grew last year, which is hard to do at our age to have your all-time best delts after all these years of lifting.

But used, I incorporated a lot of variety.

I was doing lengthened partials, cables, machines, dumbbells, bands.

I was doing it all.

And just the extra volume grew my delts.

I didn't get stronger at shoulder press or lateral raises.

I was just hitting them more frequently,

doing more volume.

You reach a point where you're sick of it and you're like, I don't want to do any more delt raises.

So it naturally lends itself to like, four-week spurts.

You know, I do do it for four weeks, then I throttle back.

And with grip training, training, I was always like, man, I will never be able to hold on to the bar with my max deadlift weight.

And then

I did a powerlifting competition a lot of years ago.

I'm like, shoot, I can't wear straps.

I got to strengthen my grip.

Well, what I learned was like chalk adds like 80 pounds to my grip.

Mixed grip adds another 80 pounds.

And using a really neural bar adds like another 80 pounds to my grip.

So I've gotten to where I almost deadlifted 675 once.

I got it so close to being locked out, but I could hold on to the bar.

Once I focused on my grip training for like two, three months, I got it super strong.

Now I don't have to train it that much.

Every once in a while I notice, okay, my grip limited my deadlift.

I got to train a few sessions and it's back to good.

It's like you blend that into your motor programming or something.

Now you use it more and it's easier to maintain it for some reason, but you got to put in that work up front.

So these are just things that kind of

lend credence to what you're saying.

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I take one week off every

say

14 to 16 weeks.

I just don't lift on purpose.

Sometimes life events dictate that.

Most often it's deliberate.

It's scheduled.

And I do it because it keeps things fresh.

And I notice it hasn't hurt me.

But what are your thoughts on layoffs of a week or longer in terms of them being beneficial?

I mean, I will say if I go much longer than a week, like I've gone 10 days before, and I'm just going crazy.

I want to get back in the gym and train.

And I'm doing other things.

I'm running, I'm doing exercise, I'm moving, or if I'm on vacation, typically I'm walking a ton, like

40,000 steps a day, like I'm backpacking, or I'm doing some other movement of some kind.

But

if

I take more than 10 days off, I then start to notice that my urge to train actually starts to diminish again.

And then I start training again, and it kind of comes back.

So there's clearly something there, and everybody's different.

But what are your thoughts on layoffs of a week or longer?

Are you okay with your clients saying, you know, I'm going to take a week off and go to Hawaii and I'm just not going to lift.

I'm just going to lay around on the beach and have a good time.

Or, you know, what are your thoughts on extended layoffs?

So this was something in the like early 2000s.

I think his name was Brian Haycock.

He had this hypertrophy specific training and he called it strategic reconditioning or something like that.

And, you know, we always thought maybe there's something to it where it primes your,

then it primed you to get newbie gains again,

or at least it will actually help you grow more muscle.

But it was always just kind of a theory.

But in practice, a lot of bodybuilders don't tend to do that.

They tend to train year-round.

But the thing is, you need to deload.

It's really hard to not get nagging pain.

It's important to not necessarily take a week off, but chill for at least a few days, maybe a whole week.

But this was recently put to the test in the literature,

taking a week off.

Brad Schoenfeld was on that paper.

And what they found was you didn't see better benefits taking the the week off, but you also didn't lose much.

So it's like,

but what I want to talk about is this literature.

I'm not well versed in it.

I'd have to go back and look.

But it's people who did periodic training.

Like if you train for a few weeks and then take a week off and then train for a few weeks, you, yes, you lose strength, you decondition, you lose strength and some size, but you quickly gain it back.

And this whole notion that you have to be training year-round all the time, it's just not evidence-based, based on a few studies that have shown that you,

they show similar results with people that take some periodic time off.

You gain it back quickly due to like muscle memory.

Here's where it can be beneficial.

If it helps your psychological desire to train,

or if it helps heal nagging injuries or pain, then it can be beneficial.

I don't recommend it to my followers, but I do recommend having times where you chill.

Life sometimes forces you into that.

You either get sick or you get injured, or you have to go on a vacation and you just don't have access to a gym.

But I tend to

just listen to my body, and there are just times where you're pushing it hard and you just feel beat up.

And it's like, have a few easy days.

It doesn't have to be a week.

It doesn't have to be, it could just be three training days.

And you'll come back refreshed.

But I think it's a vital, necessary, crucial component of long-term lifting.

And if you don't do that, you are going to, it'll end up hurting you.

You can't just train.

It's like,

how do you make sure you're not overreaching?

Like, how do you nail that perfect volume?

and effort and where you're not pushing it too hard, where you're not

inhibiting your muscle activation because you get things perfect and you can't predict your sleep and your stress and your recovery physiology all the time.

So I think it's a good idea to chill for a little bit and do lesser volume or do different exercises that are just easier on the body.

And then you'll be pleasantly surprised like, wow.

And what I always like doing with my clients is, and that's what I like with my booty by brett programming is I want my clients to know you don't have to squat and deadlift your round.

When you're doing a step up or a lunge with weight, that two studies show that one on step ups, one on Bulgarian split squats, one group did bilateral, one group did single leg, and they both gained the same squat strength.

I'm not going to tell, you know, the world's strongest powerlifter, don't squat, you can maintain all your squat strength with single leg training.

But for the masses, yes, it's a single leg squat pattern is the squat pattern.

It builds your bilateral double leg strength as well.

You don't have to do every lift year-round.

They transfer each other.

Pick one.

one exercise from that pattern and trust that you're going to maintain most of your strength.

Yes, Yes, when you have

the squat focused month and you put deadlifts and hip thrusts on the back burner, the next month, yes, you're squat, you set a PR on squats on week four, you're feeling good.

You start off the new month now focusing on, say, deadlifts or hip thrusts.

Maybe you lost some strength, but it quickly comes back.

And now by week four, you can PR on that too.

Things come back.

You don't always have to.

And I think that's something that's really hard for people.

You get so tied to the lifts themselves.

You get so tied to the routine and the, I have to be doing every exercise.

If I stop deadlifting, I'm going to shrink.

If I stop squatting, I'm going to shrink.

And the body's pretty resilient.

You maintain your muscle, you maintain your strength.

If you have to do a single leg pattern or, or if you're just training the movement patterns, you will retain those.

If you're training it third in the workout, not setting PRs, but you're just doing it.

Like, I was really focusing on squats and deadlifts for like three, four months.

And I do hip thrust just lightweight, mind-muscle connection focused.

But I'm focusing on the squeeze position.

So I'm maintaining my squeeze strength that way.

I'm focusing on my stretch strength through squats and deadlifts.

So the second I said, I'm going to do hip thrust first today, I haven't done hip thrust first in three months, four months.

I did them first in the workout and I tied three PRs.

I did three sets and all three tied PRs because I had that bottom position strength through the squats and the deadlifts.

I had that top strength by doing the mind-muscle connection stuff.

It was there.

I just was always training in a fatigued state.

I think there's a benefit to mixing it around for that reason.

And I wish more people knew,

especially when you're in pain, if squats are hurting you, don't do it for a while.

Find a suitable alternative.

If deadlifts are hurting you, don't do it for a while.

If hip thrusts are hurting you, don't do it for a while.

And the thing with hip thrusts, people say, you see on the internet, people saying, oh, hip thrusts are bad for your back.

Well, or like, especially the scoop method is bad for your back.

No, the scoop method is better for your back.

But hip thrusts don't hurt your back if you're doing it properly.

You know what the what limits you is the bruising on your hips when you get freakishy strong.

I have clients that are female clients that are hip thrusting in the 700 pounds.

Yeah, they're freaks.

I have like five that have hip thrusted over 600 pounds, maybe six, but yeah, most of them can do 315 for 20, 405 for 10, 495 for 5.

Most of them can do that and they weigh like an average of like 140 pounds.

Because like you go to a powerlifting gym and what do they have?

Squat racks.

You go to a Olympic lifting, a training center, they have platforms with squat stands.

You go to a glute lab, you're going to have 10 hip thrust stations.

You're going to see 10 people hip thrusting.

We get really freakishly good at hip thrusts.

But what limits people is the bruising and the pain at the hips.

So especially if you use like a rotisserie hip thrust,

you can use about 10 to 20% more weight.

They're typically the day after they really crush rotisserie, their hips are beat up, they're bruised, or you can get abrasions or like sores there.

So they're going, coach, my hips hurt.

Okay, what do you do?

Instead of hip thrust, now you do single-leg hip thrusts or you have...

partner hip thrust you have someone sit backwards on your lap because the surface area is spread out and you hip thrust a human for high reps because it doesn't hurt it doesn't it lets those parts heal so we have to mix mix things around.

We have to switch it up.

Also, if, yeah, sometimes hip thrusts can make your knees a little sore if you do pause reps or like bar plus band where you add extra resistance to make the top harder.

So everything requires,

it's a think, the Iron Game is a thinking man's game.

You can get great gains doing the very basics.

What we talked about in the beginning.

The listeners are going to be overwhelmed.

It's going to be like, look, just do two full body workouts a week, two hard sets warm up two hard sets in any rep range because the rep range doesn't matter so much you can gain muscle with lower reps medium reps or higher reps mix it up to keep it interesting do you know you'll get most of your gains doing it that way 85 of your gains doing it that way and you the benefit is you won't be beat up you'll be recovered um and you'll be motivated to lift because you'll be looking forward to go to the gym all this other stuff is for the extra 15

The guys who are really into it, the people who are obsessed with it, like us, we're really...

Guys and gals.

You're talking about men and women.

And with guys, it tends to be full-body hypertrophy.

With women, it tends to be more glute-specific because

that's what's popular, what's in vogue right now.

But yeah, this extra 15%, it's a thinking man's game, thinking woman's game.

And it's, you know, you got to use strategy.

You got to learn somewhat about the biomechanics and the physiology, but that's what makes it so fun.

And like, we're able to learn new things as we're approaching 50.

How cool is that?

Yeah, it's an endless progression.

And

I would say learn to enjoy training hard, which means different things for different people.

People have different schedules, different pain thresholds, different goals, but

there are many, as you were saying yesterday, there are many paths to Rome.

I really appreciate you.

taking so much time to be so thorough about what most people need at the beginning, what everyone needs at some point in terms of specialization and how to specialize because it's something that's not discussed often enough with respect to balancing out aesthetics, strength, and just staying uninjured.

And also it adds the novelty component.

It makes it fun.

We have some questions from the audience, literally.

I solicited on social media for

questions.

I'm going to do something I rarely do during the podcast, which is to bring out my phone because I need to bring out my phone to get the questions that people listed off.

And there are a ton of questions.

So one of the most common questions here is what rep ranges should somebody use in order to bring up a lagging body part?

So let's assume it's glutes or arms.

In this case, it was arms.

Seems to be a male in this case, so not surprisingly arms.

What rep ranges should they use?

So classic Brad Schoenfeld paper, three sets of three versus three sets of 10 on the squat, three sets of 10 grew more muscle.

but in general lightweight and heavyweight grow similar amounts of muscle but you have to reach a certain amount of reps the consensus is about five or six so say it's six you have to do at least six reps but it could be all the way up to 30 they grow the same amount of muscle there is some argument as to whether high reps create more muscle damage there seems to be evidence of that so if you train a muscle frequently the lower side of things might be better.

It also is kind of exercise dependent, like single joint movements tend to be better done with higher reps.

I think that's my opinion.

But generally you could do, if you like doing low reps, you could do sets of six and grow just fine.

If you love higher reps, you could do sets of 20 to 30 and grow just fine.

I think variety is always the best case because it's boring and it's kind of like different stress on the body to spare the joints.

But if you don't like going heavy, you never have to.

If you don't like going super high ups, you never have to.

Lots of questions here about calves.

In the video, we talked a little bit about this or a lot about this.

I have an asymmetry in calves due to an injury on my left calf, but it's coming up the last couple months.

It's really been moving and the tips you gave me yesterday, and again, there's a link to this in the show note captions, were super helpful, in particular around standing calf raises and about emphasizing partials in the stretched position at the end of the set.

Could you reiterate those points and add to those points?

Many people here want to grow their calves.

All right.

Calves are so genetic.

So

you have good calf genetics.

You don't even need to train them.

They're just huge.

You have poor calf genetics.

You might be feeling like, man, I can't do anything to bring them up.

The evidence emerging is that there's not much use for seated calf raises.

or for really focusing on the top squeeze position.

Calves respond good to stretch and you can just straight up full-range standing calves raises.

You could also just do lengthened partials where you just do like the bottom half.

And if you do full-range calf raises, you might benefit from doing extended partials like lengthened supersets where you keep going.

You might be able to do three to five more reps at the end just doing the bottom portion.

Focus on the stretch with calves.

Fantastic.

Many questions about

can a person grow muscle after age 40?

And I'm going to dovetail this with the several questions from the women who asked, can one build more muscle starting resistance training for the first time in perimenopause or menopause, which is essentially a age question as well, but it weaves in additional women-specific issues.

Absolutely, but it just matters when you, like, whenever you start.

If you start training in your 80s, I think there's even evidence in maybe 90-year-olds, they can grow muscle.

Awesome.

But the caveat is that you start, like,

you, Andrew, you and I won't be able to have this much muscle when we're 90, obviously.

I disagree.

I hope you're right.

Well, maybe we will.

Maybe you'll figure out with your protocols.

But my point is, if you...

If you start training when you're 15 and you train optimally throughout your whole life, there will be a point where you peak with your muscle mass and then where there will be a point, but it's the point is it's further than people think.

People used to think, well, you probably start losing muscle mass in your 30s.

No, it's probably more like in your 50s, you can maintain all of it.

But if you haven't started lifting, you will absolutely grow muscle.

Will a 70-year-old who starts training for the first time grow muscle as much as you will when you're in your 20s?

No, but you still will grow.

It's just blunted a little bit.

You know, age tends to dull everything, but you can absolutely grow and you should absolutely start.

A couple of questions about muscle growth and maintenance training for women during pregnancy.

Strength training during pregnancy is very

well researched.

It is absolutely something you should do.

It improves your outcomes with almost everything, you know, pregnancy delivery related.

But there's a caveat that if you don't if you haven't lifted weights

you might not want to start lifting weights while you're pregnant but you can absolutely if you've been if you're an avid lifter and you get pregnant you should absolutely continue training first trimester this is generalizing but first trimester you feel more morning sickness you feel icky it's hard to stay motivated and you feel you get morning sickness and like

then second trimester things return more to normal and you're back to yourself again.

And then third trimester is kind of day by day.

Your belly is getting in the way.

Sub days feel off, but you will find movements that work well for you.

Sumo squats tend to be well tolerated, you know,

but you can even hip thrust while you're pregnant.

You just don't let the bar push into your belly.

You keep it on the upper thighs and you don't go as deep.

Do Smith machine and keep it on your...

upper thighs so it's not pushing against your belly and you'll do just fine.

But you will find, you will be able to go to the gym.

You might be able to do leg press.

You can always stay moving and stay fit.

Several people asked how to grow lower glutes so they don't droop.

I'm assuming they're talking about the region of the glutes right above the hamstrings, and they're talking about presumably excess body fat and lack of muscle hypertrophy underneath.

And it sounds like there's a

growing,

it's like a glute hamstring, like

adipose hinge.

You know, it's like, I think what they're describing, I think I understand this question.

Well, they just don't want saggy glutes and they want to focus more on the, you want that.

What's sagging, though?

Is it the body fat or is it the muscle that's sagging?

It's the body fat.

But if you had big glutes and you had that same amount of fat, it would look better if you had like stretching.

Stretch out over larger muscles.

Yeah, exactly.

So

it's the not having muscle and having more fat and that droopy appearance.

So, yes,

get strong at you know lunges step ups squats rdls and hip thrusts they will all grow your glutes well they will all hit the lower glutes well and uh and don't just do the exercises get stronger at them and then obviously you want to have a an optimal body composition for you some women have what i call like genetic BBL programming.

It's like what does BBL stand for?

BBL stands for the Brazilian Brazilian butt lift.

It's the fat injections into your glutes.

They take,

I think they take fat from your stomach and inject it into your glutes.

And it's really popular now, especially, you know, I'm in Fort Lauderdale in the Miami.

It's very common and it's very common in like South American cultures.

But some of my clients, you know, if they have like Caribbean or South American heritage, it's like they they gain weight.

They keep their they keep like a lean abs and all their weight just goes to their butt.

They're just

aesthetically blessed.

And they're happy that way, right?

Yeah,

they can pull off

30% body fat

looking really aesthetically pleasing for their goals, whereas other people can't.

And so

other people...

you know, put on fat, like men tend to store fat more in their bellies.

We have different fat storage, but just even with women, they tend to store fat differently.

If you store it like around your entire gluten, it just makes it rounder versus kind of going to your saddlebag areas and just making the lower look really saggy.

So you're going to have to figure out your optimal body fat percentage and get there through diet and activity.

But you can improve just through recomping, like gaining strength in your glutes, specifically on those exercises, and it'll just look better and better.

Related to that,

can somebody gain muscle while losing fat

either by training while in a caloric maintenance or deficit phase?

So

I've probably written more on this than anyone.

In fact, Brad and Alan are my two of my best friends, Brad Schoenfeld, Alan, Aragon, I argue with them all the time about this.

And they think that you should bulk and cut.

You see better results that way.

I don't think,

I mean, there's one, this Helms study

by Eric Helms, and it showed that adding like basically basically

the subjects gained just as much muscle in maintenance as they did with surplus and all these studies on big surpluses just show that you gain more fat.

This is a very controversial topic and most people will disagree with me on this, but I will say what is the stimulus for gaining muscle is working hard in the gym and PRing.

Do you have to be in a caloric surplus?

The evidence doesn't appear so.

I will tell you most of my clients recomp.

They come to me, I attract already fit people who come to me, And then

I say, do you get enough protein?

They say, yes, I get around a pound per,

sorry, I get around a gram per pound of body weight per day.

And I say, good, I'm not going to touch your diet.

Let's just get strong.

And they recomp.

I've had clients that train with me for a whole year.

They stay at 135 pounds the whole year.

And at the end of the year, they show me, Brett, look at my jeans.

I have this crazy like five inch gap of the old jeans they used to wear, meaning they stayed the same weight, but they lost all that, their waist because you lose fat from the problem areas.

You gain muscle in the muscle bellies that make you more, look more athletic, and it changes your, your appearance and your body composition a ton, even though the scale weight doesn't change.

But if you do want to bulk and cut, what I will say is just do mini bulks and mini cuts.

Just gain five pounds and lose five pounds.

You don't have to put on 30 pounds.

That's old way of thinking.

And I think it does more harm than good.

Men, we can bulk and we don't mind the way we look a little bit.

We're like, look at, check out Trapzilla.

Women don't like the bulks as much.

They don't, they don't.

I don't like bulking, man.

Yeah.

You don't have to.

I don't, I, I can't, I think I've done it once or twice many years ago.

I don't like feeling weighed down with all that extra, extra food and your digestion.

Like you're constantly eating or going to the bathroom makes you sleepy.

Like, I think maintenance plus a couple hundred extra calories with

many bulks, mini cuts, but no one has to do these huge bulks and cuts.

You get these bodybuilding coaches that push that onto like you know lifestyle clients or like clients that are already obese and or like or like very overweight and you're like why are you they just need to cut they need to cut down permanent until they get down to the healthy body fat level so you know i just want people to be more familiar with recomping i've written about a lot check it out recomping

i'll just add to that because i can't resist

when people bulk their skin gets really bad you can they get acne and all sorts of stuff.

Kyle Gillette, Dr.

Kyle Gillette, he's an MD who's been a guest on this podcast, clarified a lot of things for me and I think a lot of other people when he said, people that are carrying excess body fat, when they reduce the amount of fat they're carrying, their hormone profiles improve.

People who are already really lean, if they go really sub-maintenance calories, their hormones tend to suffer.

This is true for women.

They sometimes will stop having periods, but also for men, their testosterone will drop if they're eating too few calories.

But men who are carrying too much body fat, who lose body fat, their testosterone increases.

So these rules about, you know, if you cut calories, your testosterone drops depends on where you're starting from.

So in women's healthy body fat range, maybe it's like 10 to 20% for men, maybe it's 15 to 25% for women and just recomp.

But if you're not in that range, if you're lower, then you need to bulk to be in an optimal hormonal profile.

If you're overweight, you need to lose weight.

So bulking and cutting is a strategy, but when you're in your healthy range, you don't have to.

There's not much evidence.

And if you do do it, do mini, mini, bulk, mini, cut.

I have a feeling I know the answer to this question, and it probably can be answered in one word.

Lifting or Pilates for strength training?

Lifting.

Thank you.

How to grow glutes without growing legs?

And can, quote, hip dips be induced by lifting?

So those are two important questions.

Okay, question one.

I was the first person to make this a thing because I had so many women come to me back in like 2009, 2010.

I think my first blog post was 2010.

And I've made two YouTube videos on how to grow your glutes without growing your legs.

It's tricky because most of the best glute exercises are leg exercises.

So you have to cut all of them out.

If you want to grow your glutes without growing your legs, the nice thing is the plot can study, and then a couple of subsequent studies, this Bartolome paper, shows you can grow your glutes similarly effectively as like squats and step ups for example

through hip thrusts so you can do hip thrusts you can do kickbacks you could do 45 degree hypers you can do abduction

but you can't do all the squats and lunges and even the you know stiff leg deadlifts and stuff like that you want to minimize those and just focus on most of the isolation lifts and you can probably do more volume for those so here you could just do hip thrusts thrusts and kickbacks and abduction three times a week and do, you know, you might do you might do four sets of each because they don't make you real sore.

But you require a separate strategy if you don't want the leg growth.

But I will say, many women think that they don't want the leg growth because they have fat on their legs.

And once they lean out, they actually like the way their legs look.

So a lot of people improperly throw themselves into that category.

And then the second question is: can you induce hip dips through weight training?

Yes, hip dips, which are, they're the hollow point formed from where the glute medius meets the glute maximus.

They're like you could put a tight golf ball or tennis ball like on your hip and it kind of fits.

No, no, not really it wouldn't stick.

That'd be pretty amazing.

But like it's a hollow area.

And from the front, you'll see like the no, I mean, if are you talking about like if one lies on their side, it's like an area that you could

like ideally that.

But they'd probably have to be flexing, but yeah, like that it would stay put.

Yeah, it would stay put if they're leg on their side.

But I've talked about this for a long time i i will tell you if you get lean you have to have hip dips if you're lean there's no muscle there it's where the glute medius comes down straight down the glute max runs diagonally and there's a hollow point in the middle where there is no muscle there so when people come up with this hip dip workouts they're full of it you can't grow muscle in an imaginary space you get lean enough and you know so like the solution is to get fat put in there or if hopefully you store fat there but once you get lean enough we all have hip dips so learn how to embrace them the funny thing is you think of like Ronnie Coleman from behind flexing his glutes like posing yes you see this butterfly shape the glutes are like a butterfly shape but his hip dips don't look bad because you got these giant vasties the outer quads that but with with women without those outer quads it can look unsightly but that's because we've programmed to be worried about it learn to embrace it and say i like the hip dips it means i'm lean it means i'm strong it means i'm muscular and athletic and it's just something that is hard to avoid if you're training properly and getting lean but can you make them worse through strength training yes in my opinion because you make it more pronounced and you get leaner so if you're worried really worried about it try to maintain a higher body fat percentage and maybe don't train as much glute medius and frontal plane hip abduction do seated hip abduction instead of like what we did yesterday which was more upright because maybe that maybe growing the glutamedus and minimis, especially the middle and anterior divisions.

But I will say all of my clients do plenty of abduction work and they look fine.

There's some really entertaining questions in here that are really specific to the topics that you cover and are expert in.

I understand that there's no such thing as spot reduction, but if somebody wants to lose fat from their abdominal region, is there anything they can do to accelerate loss of fat in that region?

We've known that spot reduction is a myth since like the 90s

research showing that, yeah, you can do all the crunches you want.

It doesn't target fat loss in that area.

You can build muscle.

And so you can have site-specific muscle growth, but not site-specific fat loss.

Fat loss comes off from the entire body, which you do through caloric deficit, through eating less, moving more, or any combination thereof, but also through recomping.

Because if you gain five pounds, if you weigh 200 pounds and you gain 10 10 pounds of muscle, lose 10 pounds of fat, you know, you've just lost 10 pounds of

your 5% less body fat levels.

You're going to have less fat, you know, like, so it's through, you can do it through, like, that's not to say you shouldn't ever train your abs.

It's just to say that your abs tend to look the best when you're leanest, not when you're training your abs the most.

Aesthetically speaking, should people train glutes differently depending on whether or not they have wide versus narrow hips?

And I believe this is a woman asking the question.

Yeah, so theoretically, like it doesn't just depend on the hips.

It depends on like how the femur,

because I wrote about this in my book.

I just think people get like, should you train differently for your glute genetics?

Maybe if you feel like you're kind of like a V-shaped glutes,

then maybe you do more lower glutes and not as much upper.

Maybe you don't do abduction.

But most of my clients train glutes the same way.

A lot of questions about grip strength.

You talked a little bit about training grip strength.

If somebody wanted to add some grip strength, maybe not do a full specialization phase of four weeks, but maybe they just wanted to add some grip strength and they're already hanging from the bar doing pikes for their abs, which I would argue is one of the best exercises for abs.

and grip, what specific grip exercise would you suggest?

So assuming they're already deadlifting, they're doing stuff, they're using their grip for pulling and this kind of thing, hanging from the bar,

if you had to give one grip strength exercise, what would it be?

Well, I would say

if you tend to get beat up with your low back, then hang.

Do static hangs or even hopefully you progress to one-arm hangs, or you can kind of do one-arm hangs where you brace yourself on the, use the non-working arm to hold yourself in position.

But if your low back is, you know, stellar, then you can do shrugs.

You can do farmer's walks.

You know, walking is kind of hard at a gym to do, just walking around with the dumbbells, but you could just stand in place and you could do shrugs.

When you can't do any more shrugs, you just hold it for time.

You could also just hold the last rep of your last set of deadlifts for time.

All those things help out.

They all add up to improving your grip strength.

Last question.

What is the most unusual but effective training tip that you've never heard or seen discussed in social media or out there?

Like, what's maybe something from the past that no one talks about anymore or something that you just feel like people should talk about more in terms of training?

This could be anything you like.

It's like

your choice.

I would say what we talked about yesterday, the one set to failure.

Who does it?

Who does one set to failure, two full body workouts a week, one set to failure?

For each body part.

For yeah, on like six to eight exercises, like six to ten exercises per day.

You get the workout done in

45 minutes.

So you're training an hour and a half a week and you probably get

80% of your gains than you could through training

for three times that much time.

It's very time efficient.

It's just no one ever does it.

I don't know anyone who does one set.

You know, everyone does multiple sets, but it's a very efficient way to train.

It's a very fun way to train because you come in with a goal.

You're like, I need to try to beat my record.

Well, the only thing I would say is shuffle the lifts around, shuffle the odor around, and shuffle the variations around because, as we've mentioned, you can't just keep gaining strength for years on end.

It doesn't work that way.

So train the whole body, one set to failure after sufficient warm-up for each body part.

And do that.

one, two, or three times a week.

If you're going to do it once a week, you got to pour everything you've got into But if you do it two or three times a week, you can go.

We talked about this yesterday.

It gets to a point where you're, I got to a point where I suck at squats, but I was doing 225 for 30.

I was doing

my best stiff leg deadlift.

It was 405 for either 20.

I might have gotten 22.

And then you get to a point where like, what am I going to do?

Go for 25?

Yes, you can go heavier weight, but like, it gets to the point where it's daunting.

It makes you nervous just thinking about the exercise.

So at that point, you kind of got to learn to,

that's your body may be telling you you're about to get injured.

So maybe you, yeah, you switch the exercise or start doing more volume.

But it's a, it's a strategy I wish more people knew about because a lot of people quit lifting because they think they have to do it for

periods of time in your life where you get stressed out or like think times are tough.

I got to work harder or put more hours into work or this responsibility comes in.

You can just, you can do brief workouts and they're very effective just doing 45 minutes a couple times a week.

It'll help more people stick to weight training because they realize I don't have to be in the gym five hours a day.

Love it.

Brett Contreras, Dr.

Brett Contreras, excuse me.

Thank you so much.

You've given us so much knowledge.

It's really a masterclass, not just in glute strengthening and hypertrophy, but how to specialize in lagging body parts, how to prioritize training, periodize training, everything from calves, arms, glutes.

We talked about rep ranges.

You know, it would take another hour to summarize everything you've told us in the preceding hours.

And it's just spectacular.

You're one of the few people out there that is

degreed in this area, continues to read the research, is clearly a practitioner.

You practice what you preach.

And perhaps most importantly,

you train people who make phenomenal progress as a consequence of your training.

And I know that you're very, very proud of your students, your clients, for the hard work they put in and their dedication and the feedback they give you.

And it's so wonderful that you take that and then you transmit it out to the world through your social media, through your course, and here on this and on other podcasts.

So you're just a wealth of knowledge.

And I love the extent to which you share that knowledge and with such clarity and generosity.

It's just really spectacular to have this opportunity to sit down with you.

And I know everyone's learned a ton and the best part is they're going to try this stuff.

They're going to implement it.

And I'm sure you're going to get lots of questions.

And at the same time,

you've opened this treasure trove for us.

So thank you for coming here today.

Thank you for all the work you've done and the work that you continue to do.

One thing that's very clear is that you are a lifelong learner and that you continue to bring in more knowledge and that you'll continue to share that knowledge.

I also want to thank you for the in-person training session yesterday.

We have, again, a link to that in the show note caption so people can see these movements.

You can see how they're supposed to be done correctly.

You can see where I was making mistakes.

You can see where those mistakes were corrected thanks to your instruction.

And listen, I hope you come back again and update us on the latest that you learn and incorporate because you're not just about the peer-reviewed studies, you're about that, but you're really about the real-world knowledge that works.

So thank you ever so much.

Well, let me offer my thanks right back.

You are a pioneer.

You have helped me with your protocols and through your focus on health and neuroscience to just with practical tips to help us all.

I can't tell you how many people that I know follow you.

And when I told them I'm going to come on your podcast, they're like, what?

It's like...

I finally made it in their eyes

being on your podcast.

It's really cool to have you ask me to come on because men tend to invite guests on their show for what they want to learn.

And you have probably 50% female listeners and they're all about the glutes.

Even if you aren't all about the glutes or you don't care if you grow bigger glutes, a lot of your followers do.

So that's where I'm glad to come in because, yeah, we'll read in the comments, most of the men will be like, just do squats and lunges.

And it's like the women can write back, do you do pec deck?

Do you do lateral raises?

Do you do curls?

Then quit being hypocritical.

We can isolate the glutes.

We can add in more volume as long as we can recover from it.

It's only going to make our glutes even bigger.

And I'm glad they got to be exposed to my methods and my materials.

So thank you for inviting me on.

I would always love to come back in the future down the road as we learn more and share the wealth.

So thanks right back at you.

Once again, thank you so much.

We'll have you back again.

Appreciate you.

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr.

Brett Contreras.

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