Build Muscle Without the B.S. — A Straightforward Guide to Size and Strength
Episode Stats
Summary
Whether you ve never stepped foot in a weight room or you ve been lifting for years without seeing significant results, figuring out how to get big, strong, and jacked can feel overwhelming. There are endless programs, conflicting opinions, and a lot of noise about what actually works. Today on the show, Paul Horn offers a grounded, field tested take on what really helps average guys get stronger and more muscular without burning out.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Whether you've never stepped foot in a weight room or you've been lifting for years without
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seeing significant results, figuring out how to get big, strong, and jacked can feel overwhelming.
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There are endless programs, conflicting opinions, and a lot of noise about what actually works.
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Today on the show, Paul Horn offers a grounded, field-tested take on what really helps average
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guys get stronger and more muscular without burning out.
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Paul is a strength coach and the author of Radically Simple Strength and Radically Simple Muscle.
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We discuss why you need to get strong before you get shredded, how and why Paul modified
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the classic starting strength program, the strength benchmarks men should be able to hit,
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when to shift from powerlifting to bodybuilding-style training, why you should train your lower body
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like a powerlifter and your upper body like a bodybuilder, the physique signal that shows
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you're in shape, the body fat percentage every man should get down to at least once in his life,
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and more. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Simple Muscle.
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So you are a barbell coach. We've met at a starting strength conference a long, long time ago.
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You've actually helped me with some, when I was doing the low bar squat, I was having some issues
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with shoulder tightness, getting under the bar, and you were very kind to give me a tutorial on
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a stretch on how to make that happen for myself. That is my biggest contribution to the literature.
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Yeah, I figured out a shoulder stretch and made a YouTube video, and to this day, it's my most popular
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It's important information. Well, let's talk about your background a bit. You've been training for
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decades, and you've been a coach for a long time, too. How did you get started with barbell training?
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What were you doing before that? When did you decide, I got to pick up the iron?
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Yeah, well, I was wasting a lot of time in the gym, like most young guys are when they start lifting.
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The short version is I was a vegan in college, and I'm 6'1". I weighed about 160 pounds.
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And I was a camp counselor, and some of the other coaches were older and kind of bros and thought,
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you know, we're going to take you to the gym and try and bulk you up a little bit. And I went and
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absolutely loved it. Got hooked on the training, but my muscles were seizing up. I was cramping a lot.
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And my buddy in his bro frat boy wisdom was like, you know, hey, man, I think maybe you need some
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protein. And so it went from, you know, being a vegan to eating tuna fish and then chicken and
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then full, you know, carnivore now. And so that was great. I, you know, towards the end of college,
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I had bulked up quite a bit. And just again, doing bro workouts and things that you find on
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the old bodybuilding.com and T nation and all the websites that we used to go to. And then I got
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hurt. And I ended up having my first shoulder surgery from bench pressing. So I was out for
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three months for the first time since I had started lifting. And I thought, you know, I should try and
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figure out why that happened. And maybe like, if there's a right way to bench press, because you know,
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when you're a college guy and you're just screwing around in the gym, you just look at what the other
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bigger guys are doing and copy them and they don't know what they're doing. So in that hiatus,
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I stumbled across this book called starting strength. And since I couldn't lift, I just read
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about lifting. And it was, as you know, the best book on how to do the basic barbell lifts and why you
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should do them that I've ever read. And it just, you know, it blew me away. I was like, this is,
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I've never heard it explained this clearly. So I went back to my college gym after I recovered from
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surgery and I started doing the starting strength program. And, you know, this was a time when the
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gym had one squat rack and no one was ever in it. No one had seen a pair of weightlifting shoes,
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you know, belts were Velcro and nylon. And, uh, I just started doing this thing where you squat
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three times a week, which was crazy. Cause we'd squatted maybe if we squatted, it was like once
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a week and you did seven other leg exercises. And so I started doing this simple starting strength
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program. And all of my gym buddies were like, dude, what the hell are you doing? You're squatting three
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days a week. And I was like, I don't know. This crazy guy in Texas told me that I should do this.
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And within about three months, I was probably, you know, one of the strongest guys in the gym,
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which wasn't saying much at the time, but then people started asking, okay, what is this program?
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What are you doing? Started asking me questions about, you know, lifting shoes and technique. And,
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and then I got really into it. And my girlfriend at the time as a gift sent me to the starting strength
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seminar in Wichita falls just to, I just wanted to meet rip a toe. And he was like my hero. I had
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been reading all of his books. And so I went to that and back at that in, in those days, uh, they
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just kind of pulled you aside and said, you know, we think that you should take the test for coaching.
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Like we've been watching you and we think you might be a good coach. And do you want to take this
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coaching certification test, which was, you know, a very difficult test, but I thought, yeah, sure.
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You know what the hell? And ended up passing. I was one of two guys from that group that passed
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and came back to LA and thought, well, that was cool. You know, and they, they emailed me and said,
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your name's going on a, a coaching registry. I was like, okay, whatever. And I went back to my,
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at that time I was working a marketing job for a tech company. And then within about a month,
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I started getting emails. The book started gaining more popularity. People were buying it on Amazon,
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seeing how dense and technical it was, and then going to the coaching registry. And I was the only
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starting strength coach in Los Angeles. And so I just would get these emails all day, like, Hey,
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I see you're a coach. Can you help me out? Can you help me out? And I'm like, I mean,
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I'm not really a coach, but you know, I know a little more than you do. And so it just became
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so frequent that I asked my wife then at the time, if I could convert the garage into a personal
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training studio, a little, put two racks in there. And I just started training people before and after
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work. And it just kept growing. And within about a year of that, I quit my job and opened up
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horn strength and conditioning, which was the first starting strength affiliate gym on the West coast.
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And it just blew up from there. I ran that gym for about eight years and then the pandemic happened.
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And the rest of the story is me moving to Idaho and all that stuff. But that's, that's my little
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bio. So yeah, you're starting strength coach. And while you're coaching, of course you continue to
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train. You did some competitions, some amateur stuff, I believe. Yeah. I was a, what we would call
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a recreational power lifter. Recreational power lifter. So you're doing the main lifts. And then
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you talk about in your books, we're talking about today, it's radically simple muscle and radically
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simple strength. You reached a point with your training journey, as people say, where you started
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shifting goals, like for a long time. And I had the same sort of thing. It was just chasing numbers.
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Like how much more can I squat? How much more can I deadlift? And then you reached a point like,
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man, this isn't doing it for me anymore. And you kind of became a bodybuilder. Tell us about that.
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I mean, that is in my experience, the evolution of most lifters. Most guys get into it because they
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want to get laid and they want to, you know, look good with their shirt off and they just want muscles.
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And then, you know, a lot of it had to do with changing trends. CrossFit came out around this time
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at the same time, starting strength came out and there was this push away from, you know, machines
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and bro splits to like, Hey man, like how much can you deadlift? You know? And it became a thing.
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Strength training became real popular. And so like you, a lot of us got into it and realized that
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like, Oh, this is, you know, now I have like a real goal. It's like a tangible concrete number
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and it keeps going up if I keep training and maybe you do a powerlifting competition and you're like,
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you know, who cares about how big my arms are? Like how much can you squat? But then there's this point
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where, you know, when you start strength training, as you know, as a novice, it's fun. Cause every time
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you go to the gym, you put more weight on the bar and the stronger you get, the harder it becomes to
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put more weight on the bar. And so you reach this point where you're like, you know what? I am not
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really enjoying this. Like what it would take for me to put two and a half more pounds on my breasts.
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It might not be worth it. And like, who cares? It's two and a half pounds. Like it's not a motivating
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training goal anymore. On top of that, again, as you may have experienced most of us who were
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pursuing the strength thing got fat and we got hurt. So you get older and you know, the weights
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are heavier. They're beating the crap out of you and it's not fun. And you put on all this body weight
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cause everyone's, you know, rip a toast telling you, you got to weigh two 75 and you just don't feel
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good. You don't feel like you look good. You're hurting. And you're like, what am I doing? And
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we all seem to have the same epiphany around that moment in your training journey, as you said, where
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you look at the machines and the, you know, the hammer strength bench presses and the lat pull
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downs and the, you know, the cable and you're like, you know, those look pretty fun. Like, you know,
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maybe I should mix it up a little bit. And then you sort of move back into bodybuilding. And if you
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look at the history of, you know, the trend in fitness culture, that's how it went. The nineties
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was all about the bodybuilding. And then the two thousands was CrossFit and strength training and
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starting strength. And then everybody started shifting back to a little bit more bodybuilding,
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you know? And now if you go on fitness Twitter, it's just threads of guys posting, you know, like no
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one's doing a squat at all anymore. It's all leg extensions and rows and isolation work. And so I
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like to, you know, I think what, what I landed on with my books and what works for me now as an older
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lifter is a mix of hypertrophy training, bodybuilding stuff. And then, but you still like, there's a part
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of me deep, you know, it's an intrinsic thing of, I still have to squat and deadlift. Like it's not a
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real workout. You're not on a real program unless at least once a week, you're getting under the bar
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and picking something heavy up off the ground. So I assume that your fitness journey was very similar
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to that. Very similar. So I, you know, back in the 2010s got really into barbell training, starting
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strength, did recreational competitions like yourself and just chasing numbers. And it was great.
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It was fun. I was, it gave me direction. I enjoyed it, but then I reached this point. It was like
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probably 2021, 2022, where I just started hurting. It was like tendon stuff. It was just like the
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tendons. It's just really hard in the tendons. And then I was just looking haggard and I was fat
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and my wife, I remember she looked and was like, what do you, like, what's the point of this? You're
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like Sisyphus just pushing up that boulder. Like you just go down to the garage gym and just go up and
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down. That's all you do. You come in and you tell your wife, like, honey, I pulled five,
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five Oh five today. And she's like, okay, is that, is that good? You're fat. Yeah. Right.
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And I was just tired and beat up. And then also I just started not enjoying lifting. Cause as you said,
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once you get really strong, there's diminishing returns on your training. It just takes a lot,
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lot more effort to just add, you know, five pounds to the bar. Yeah. The commitment,
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you know, might is it's just, you have to say, is it worth it? Like, okay. I, I, my last,
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you know, squat PR was, you know, four 65. I've detrained. I went on vacation. I got sick. I'm at
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four Oh five. Now, do I want to do what it takes to get to four 70? You know, is that going to be
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fun? And a lot of times it's not, and you know, and that's okay. Like we hammered people so hard
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back in the day on the only thing that matters is the number on the bar. It doesn't matter how fat
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you are. It doesn't matter if you're having fun. It just matters that you put five more pounds on
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that bar. And I can tell you what changed my mind was owning a gym and having, you know,
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relying on paying clients to keep coming back and paying me. And you lose a lot of clients. If you're
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like, look, I don't care about your goals because my goal for you is that you lift more weight. And
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they're like, great, I'm going to go to someone else. So yeah, it's a, it's a balance and that's okay.
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You know? Yeah. So what I hope we can do this conversation is talk about your philosophy
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towards strength training and then muscle building. It seems like you've landed a nice
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happy medium. That's kind of where I've landed as well with my training. And I think this
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conversation will be useful for people who maybe are, you know, been lifting for a long
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time doing the barbell lifts, but I really hope, I hope we can get these guys who haven't started
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strength training or weightlifting at all and get them into it. Because what you talk about
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in your books, it's all about your goal with your clients is getting a little bit stronger,
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getting a little bit more jacked, more muscle, and then leaning out. And that is possible
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with barbells along with some hypertrophy stuff, some bodybuilding stuff with a few, you know,
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dumbbells and a few machine exercises. And I'm going to talk about that. Let's talk about
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for the rank beginner. When someone comes to you and they're like, I want to get strong.
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I want to start strength training. I've never really done it before. I might've messed around
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with some program that I saw, you know, people don't read muscle magazines anymore,
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like on the, on Instagram. What are the common misconceptions guys have about strength and muscle
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building when they first started working with you? Yeah. Well, there's a couple. One is that,
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I mean, I tell them all the time, you are not going to look like you take steroids unless you take
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steroids. I mean, I don't care how good you are at this. There is a difference between the guys,
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you know, the Instagram influencers, like you said, or back in our day, it was the guys on the
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covers of the magazines and the bodybuilders, like drugs work. And there's a reason that those
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guys are on the cover of that magazine. So one of the misconceptions is like, Oh, I just have to like,
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you know, lift some weights and I'm just going to be, you know, 250 pounds at 4% body fat. It's like,
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it's not, it's not going to happen. So there is that layer of misconception, but I think the big one,
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the practical one that most guys have to accept, and they're going to learn it one way or the other
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is that you can't get big and strong, you know, and lean at the same time. You have to do them
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in order. And if you're not big and strong yet, you got to get big and strong first. You have to
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build a foundation so that when you cut, when you go into a fat loss phase, you actually have something
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to show off. And so many times I'll get a young guy who's, you know, a buck 50. And he's talking
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to me about wanting to cut and wanting at wanting to see his abs. And I was like, and it's just like,
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dude, you're going to look like you're sick. If you cut anything off of your frame right now,
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you don't have any muscle mass. So you have to spend a period of time. You know, I use the word
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bulking cautiously because you can definitely get too fat and you don't have to do that,
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but you do have to get bigger in order to get stronger. And that comes with a little bit of
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body fat, hopefully. And if you do it right, you can skew it. So every, most of every new pound you
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put on is muscle. And so you still look bigger, you know, you don't look fat because you're kind
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of filling out your frame. And then after you've spent, you know, a year, two years, maybe
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working on your form, learning how to lift, adding muscle mass, all that stuff. Then you've sort of
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earned the right to cut. You've earned the right to say, okay, I've hit some benchmarks, you know,
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with barbell training and I've put in my time and now I feel like I'm getting a little chubby
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and I want to spend six months trying to take as much fat off as I can while preserving the muscle
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mass. And that, you know, understanding the order and the importance of the order is like,
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that's the number one thing that most guys who haven't done it think they can do it all at the
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same time and it never works. So they either figure that out or they never make any progress.
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They just kind of don't look really jacked and they don't look really lean and they're not very
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strong. Yeah. And I imagine too, I had to learn this, that stuff takes time. You can't expect this
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stuff to happen in less than a year, like do the putting on mass and then cutting. I mean,
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you can make significant gains if you're first starting out with your strength and your muscle
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mass, but really the secret sauce to getting stronger, getting more jacked, it's just, it takes
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time. Like you're not going to see instant results after you, after your first couple sessions.
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No, it does take time. You're literally building tissue. It's a biological process that it does take
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time. The cool part is, you know, it's persistent. And as you add on those layers and then with
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intelligent bulking and cutting strategies, like the first run in both the bulking phase and the
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cutting phase is the longest because you want to get as much out of your novice phase as you can in
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terms of strength and size. And so if you're a true novice that can take, you know, six months,
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a year just to run out the novice phase, maybe early intermediate phase.
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And then the first time you cut, especially if you're 25, 30% body fat. And if you're going to
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try and cut down to where you can see your abs, which is around 10%, you got a lot of fat to lose.
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So that, that first block, their cycle of bulking and cutting is the longest one. But then once you
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get through that, the cycles get shorter because you don't put on as much fat. So you don't have as
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much fat to take off and the cycles get more fun because, or your training overall gets more fun
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because you see a light at the end of the tunnel for each phase and you know, like, okay, a couple
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more weeks of this, and then I can do something different. But yeah, it's getting people through
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that first phase. And I'll tell you, like in my gym, it was like the end of the novice phase,
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usually around the six month mark where it's, they've been focusing on just driving up the
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numbers on those, on, you know, squats and deadlifts and presses. And at that point it starts to get
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hard. They start laying awake at night, thinking about their next workout. It's a grind. Every
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session is, it scares the hell out of you. And like, if they can make it through that and keep
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coming and not quit and get to the intermediate phase, they're lifters for life. But I've lost a
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lot of clients where they're just like, I don't know, man, like, this is really like, this isn't
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fun anymore. And it's grindy. And then that's it. They go do, they go sign up for jujitsu or
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something and we never see them again. Yeah. Okay. So for someone who's first starting out
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lifting, like they want to get bigger, they want to get jacked. They want to get awesome. You know,
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those death star deltoids. Um, it sounds, it sounds, is that a thing? I think I've, I've heard
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that somewhere. Death star deltoids. I think a lot of guys, that's their goal. They'll immediately go
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to sort of a bodybuilder hypertrophy program where they're doing, you know, four day splits,
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six day splits where they're working one body part a day. You take a different approach. It seems
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like your first priority with someone who's first starting out is just to get generally strong and
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big first. So what is the best programming for that? Yeah. I mean, the idea here is we're going
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to spend some time laying down a foundation. You know, we're going to build a foundation of just
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strength and size. You're going to learn how to lift. You're going to be doing these basic barbell
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lifts for your entire training career. They're always a part of the program. You may add other
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stuff, but, but this is really what's causing the most stress and doing the most work is squats,
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deadlifts, benches, presses, stuff like that. So we need to spend some time getting proficient at
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those lifts. You need to learn how to push yourself. You need to learn how to, you know,
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unrack a weight that scares you and try it anyway, and then learn that, you know, you can do things that
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scare you and all of that. So you need a lot of reps. You need a lot of practice time under the
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bar. And so a basic linear progression where you're just, you know, you come in and you lift
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one day and then you try and beat it the next time. So, you know, it's five pounds is two and a
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half pounds, but the program is very boring and very repetitive. It's just a couple lifts and all
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your, the only variable we're manipulating is how much weights on the bar. So it's a very large,
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this is why software developers love programs like this. Cause they get it. They can wrap their
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head around it. It's like, Oh, I came in, I could bench press 95 pounds. Now I can bench press one
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85. I guess it's working. So, and we want to keep it simple. You don't need all that stuff. You don't
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need six different chest exercises and you don't need to be in the gym six days a week. You just need
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a simple program where you're getting better at the compound lifts and just driving the weight up.
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And so, you know, the starting strength program is a fantastic beginner program, like a novice
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program. My version that I put in my book, a radically simple strength was just a modification
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of that program based on, you know, training real clients in the gym and needing to get them in and
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out in an hour, keep them excited, keep them, you know, interested in training, not to beat up,
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not dreading their workouts. So, I mean, do you want me to get into the details of my novice program?
00:22:24.600
Yeah. Let's talk about, let's talk about, let's talk about the general programming of,
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let's start talking about starting strength first. It's really easy to explain whenever
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someone comes to me like, Hey Brett, I want to get strong and bigger and jacked. I'm like,
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you need to start with starting strength. And I, I, the reason I tell them that cause it's,
00:22:37.740
it's literally, it's the best weightlifting program for a beginner. And I'll tell you why first,
00:22:44.080
cause it's just so simple. There's just four lifts you have to do. That's it. It's just deadlift,
00:22:49.240
it's squat, it's bench press and shoulder press. You're only going to train three times a week.
00:22:54.840
Yep. Anyone can do that. And then the workouts are easy. It's just like, you're going to squat,
00:22:59.320
you know, at the beginning of your workout, the three times a week, and then one workout,
00:23:03.620
you're going to do bench press and then the deadlift. And then the next workout, you're going to do
00:23:08.120
press. And the next work you do, do bench press and deadlift. And then it just kind of alternate,
00:23:12.780
you alternate between the bench and the press and you're getting a full body workout. You're
00:23:17.140
going to get really strong. And it's just so simple. It's like, it's fast, especially when
00:23:21.600
you're first starting out, you're going to be in and out of the gym in like 45 minutes. Even,
00:23:26.760
I mean, I've got my kids doing starting strength. They're like, you know, teenagers for them,
00:23:31.320
like the weights really light. So they can get done in like 30 minutes. Oh yeah. And for a person
00:23:35.280
who's first starting out, I think one thing that keeps people from being consistent is just
00:23:39.400
workouts can be too complex. They're doing too many lifts and it just takes forever because
00:23:44.100
they're doing like seven different exercises with, you know, three sets of 10 with starting
00:23:50.100
strength. You're doing three exercises in your workout and it's three sets of five. So the
00:23:55.300
simplicity of it, I think is one of its virtues. And then also with the linear progressions,
00:23:59.300
we're just adding weight to the bar, incredibly motivating. I remember when I first started my
00:24:03.040
novice linear progression, I was excited. Every workout was like, wow, I'm going to add more
00:24:07.480
weight to the bar. This is exciting. So you get that dopamine rush and that dopamine rush
00:24:11.980
gets you motivated and it just helps build that consistency for training. Like I was not
00:24:17.300
someone who trained consistently before I started starting strength. After that, I am a guy, like I'm a,
00:24:23.780
I'm a guy who trains, even though my training has changed, right? I'm doing different stuff now.
00:24:29.100
Starting strength helped establish that foundation because it's motivating and it's super simple.
00:24:33.620
And I think that's really important for a beginning lifter. As you said, you know, this is something
00:24:37.940
that takes time. And so you need quick wins. If you're not going to be satisfied or excited about
00:24:43.980
your training until you can deadlift 405, like you're going to be miserable, but you know, it's,
00:24:49.960
it is a long journey. And so you need those little victories, those small victories of like, Hey,
00:24:56.140
you know what? Like today I might not be where I want to be eventually, you know, I might not be at my
00:25:01.060
ultimate goal, but I'm better than I was last time and I can see it. And so you're right. You get
00:25:06.100
those little daily workout victories of like lifting five more pounds than you did last time
00:25:11.320
are enough to keep you going. And then by the time for me, the big shift, what got me hooked was you
00:25:17.340
do it long enough. And then you look in the mirror or you look at your training log and you go, damn,
00:25:23.200
like I, you know, I just went into the gym for like an hour, three times a week. And I,
00:25:28.340
I picked up some heavy stuff and like my physical body has changed. Yeah. I mean,
00:25:34.200
it gives people agency. You realize like, look, you know, I might not be where I want to be in life,
00:25:40.180
but I'm not useless. I have a say in how I present myself to the world and it's very motivating. And if
00:25:49.660
you can get the guy to that point where you have this realization that I can actually change my own
00:25:56.340
reality, just with work, just with effort, it's like, it's a part of you. You're in the brotherhood
00:26:02.660
of iron for life. Yeah. You know, it's, it's very powerful. We're going to take a quick break for
00:26:08.160
your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So starting strength, it's three sets
00:26:15.660
of five. You're doing three workouts with these four different lifts you've modified. What is your
00:26:19.620
version of sort of a novice program? So my take on the novice program, the main difference with
00:26:25.220
how starting strength approaches it and how I approach it just again, from, from, it was a
00:26:30.180
more practical strategy for running clients through a commercial gym. And that was starting
00:26:36.160
strength is like the novice phase is your most productive phase. You eke out every little bit
00:26:41.240
of progress that you can for as long as you possibly can, no matter how hard and grueling and grindy it
00:26:46.840
is. If you can press two and a half more pounds, you do it. I look at my novice phase as the way that
00:26:54.180
we're going to get you to the intermediate phase, because if we can get you to the intermediate phase
00:26:58.960
of training, that's when we get more variety. That's when things get more fun. Everything
00:27:02.720
becomes less grueling. You know, you, you space out your workouts. You may maybe have upper and
00:27:07.000
lower workouts. So my novice phase was like, let's just learn how to lift. Let's get a lot of reps in a
00:27:12.920
lot of practice. Let's build a reasonable foundation of size and strength, and then let's move on.
00:27:17.520
So I do ascending sets of five instead of three sets of five. So this is an old bill star thing
00:27:23.940
rather than do all your warmups, take a five minute break, and then do three sets of five at
00:27:29.780
the same weight with the five minute break in between each one. We just do the bar. And then,
00:27:35.680
you know, we do a set of five at 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, 100% done. So your warmups kind of count as sets
00:27:44.480
gotcha. And it's real fast. And is it as productive for as long as the starting strength
00:27:51.760
novice program? Probably not. Cause at some point those ramping sets tax you a little too much. And
00:27:58.140
so you're kind of tired for your heavy set, but it's good enough to keep the workout really short
00:28:03.600
and make a lot of really good progress and build that foundation. And it'll take you, you know,
00:28:10.840
you'll be able to run that for about three to six months before it kind of stops working.
00:28:15.200
You have to make some modifications, but every guy I've switched over to that program after running
00:28:20.640
the starting strength program was like, God, this is so much like faster. It's just like,
00:28:24.320
I like going to the gym just be in. And again, if that keeps you training that little modification,
00:28:29.440
then great. You're going to end up in the same place eventually down the road. So,
00:28:33.120
so that's really the big one is we start out squatting, benching, and deadlifting,
00:28:36.840
but we're just doing sets, ascending sets of five. Gotcha. That makes sense.
00:28:41.520
And then we move on, you know, in the second month of workouts, we start adding in some chin
00:28:47.240
ups and lat pull downs. So we're not deadlifting every time. And, and then in the third phase of
00:28:52.940
the novice program, which is like workout 25 sort of till it stops working, I start adding in some
00:28:59.140
curls and tricep extensions just because, you know, curls are awesome. Guys want to curl.
00:29:04.840
Right. So you've, by that point, you know, you've, I think you've earned the right to curl,
00:29:08.560
to throw a couple of sets of curls in at the end of the workout. And, and again, just like,
00:29:13.120
just to keep it, you know, you give people a lot of what they need and a little of what they want
00:29:17.540
and they're happy. So that's really the difference between my novice program and the starting strength.
00:29:23.120
And again, starting strength is a fantastic program and it works really well. I've used it for decades.
00:29:28.380
Yeah. And so again, the goal here is just getting bigger and stronger, like putting on muscle mass,
00:29:33.100
full body. The focus isn't like hypertrophy per se. There will be hypertrophy. Your muscles will
00:29:38.060
get bigger, but it's not like that's your main focus. Just get bigger and stronger.
00:29:42.260
Learning again and learning the technique, like five sets of five ascending is that you get a lot
00:29:47.240
of reps in there. You get a lot of practice and we need that early on. And, and, and then again,
00:29:52.640
it's also learning how to grind, like learning how to push yourself and you have to learn how to do that.
00:29:57.800
And so you need a lot of time under the bar and exposure to those sets that scare you towards
00:30:03.040
the end of that novice phase. Yeah. For a guy, you know, that first year when they're just starting
00:30:08.200
out, they're doing that novice phase, they're learning the lifts, getting bigger and stronger.
00:30:12.080
Like what are some like good goals a guy could get to? What should they be going after? Like,
00:30:18.220
are there any specific numbers you found? Yeah. I mean the, the first tier of goals in my book are
00:30:23.920
what we call plate goals, you know, a 45 pound plate. So you want to be able to press one 35
00:30:29.540
bench, two 25 squat, three 15 and deadlift four Oh five. So it's one plate, two plate,
00:30:35.700
three plates, four plates. And, and that's for one rep. So that's the first like benchmark that
00:30:40.800
any guy can hit. And if you do that, like you're going to be like stronger than a lot of people.
00:30:46.220
Oh my, I'm yeah. I mean, the bar is so low, you know, and, and especially now with the,
00:30:52.820
you know, influencer trend away from heavy lifting and back to the machines and stuff,
00:30:59.620
like there was a period in, you know, probably like 2010, where if you went to a gym, those numbers
00:31:06.360
weren't that impressive and to competitive lifters, they're not impressive, but to the average
00:31:12.140
gen pop gym goer, especially these days when all the machines are coming back, if you could squat four
00:31:17.640
zero five, like you're like, you know, 1% of people at that gym. So yeah. And they're very
00:31:25.000
reasonable goals. They're not hard to do. And I think it, what it also does is it makes you
00:31:28.980
generally strong for life, like generally strong and healthy for life. Like you're not, if you get
00:31:33.880
those numbers, you're not going to be beat up, you're not going to hurt, but you'll be able to
00:31:38.080
like help move your buddy, you know, on the weekend. And it's like not hard because you're,
00:31:42.820
yeah, it's a solid, respectable foundation of strength and it's attainable to anyone.
00:31:49.780
And the thing is that, as you know, like the numbers don't matter. I don't care if you can
00:31:54.660
squat three 15, you know, I care that you're doing a program and you're trying to get a little better
00:32:00.000
every time and you're pushing yourself, but you do have to have a target guys need to have a goal
00:32:04.720
because you did, you know, if you're just training and you don't have a, a, there's no lighthouse
00:32:11.040
you're sailing towards, like it's hard to stay motivated. So that's the starting point. And then
00:32:16.180
once they hit those, we can either move on to what I, in the book, I call them hundo goals. So
00:32:22.060
200, 300, 400, 500 lately, what I've been doing is just saying, let's take those plate goals, you
00:32:28.200
know, one plate, two plates, three plates. And let's just, instead of your goal being to do them
00:32:33.120
for one rep, let's try and do them for five reps. So you're going to end up, you deadlift four Oh five
00:32:37.460
for five. That's your sort of phase two target. And then, you know, from there, there's more goals,
00:32:44.440
but most people never even get there. And that's okay. Cause that's when they, that's when they,
00:32:49.180
as we talked about, start asking about more bodybuilding stuff.
00:32:53.440
Right. We're going to get to that in a second, but what we do is stick on this like mass phase,
00:32:57.160
getting generally strong, getting bigger. When you're first starting out, nutrition plays an
00:33:01.740
important role. And I think I noticed with a lot of guys that start training is they're,
00:33:05.800
they're doing the program, but they're not eating to fuel the games. And what's interesting,
00:33:11.600
people have a lot of misconception about diet. I think people have more misconception about
00:33:15.740
nutrition when it comes to training than the programming itself. Cause there's just so much
00:33:20.300
stuff out there, but you know, really simply, what is a good diet plan look like when you're
00:33:24.980
in this beginning phase? Well, the high level concepts is it. Protein is the biggest thing.
00:33:31.940
And you're right. The hardest thing to do is not the lifting. It's the eating because you have to eat
00:33:37.560
three or four times a day, every day, even if you don't want to, especially if you're a skinny guy,
00:33:43.600
you got to eat more food than you want to. And when you get into like a cutting phase,
00:33:48.240
you got to eat less food than you want to diet is the hardest part of this whole thing.
00:33:53.860
Um, but the number one mistake guys make is they don't eat enough protein. And it's just,
00:33:59.780
if you're not, I used to tell my guys all the time, if you're not eating enough protein,
00:34:04.600
then you are wasting your time in the gym because the protein literally builds your muscle tissue.
00:34:10.940
So you're doing all the hard work, you're busting your ass in the gym,
00:34:13.740
and then your body's trying to rebuild, repair, and add more contractile tissue. And you're not
00:34:20.660
supplying it with the bricks it needs to build. So under eating protein, and then under eating
00:34:25.840
calories. If we're talking about the novice sort of bulking phase for an underweight male lifter,
00:34:31.420
it's they don't need enough food. And specifically, they don't even eat enough protein. So carbs and
00:34:36.740
fat, I try and keep this as simple as possible. Just hit your protein goal. And at this point in my
00:34:42.620
coaching career, I just tell everybody, your goal is 200 grams of protein a day. More is better.
00:34:47.960
Like if you're a 200-pound guy, fine, 220. If you're a 185-pound guy, 200 is great.
00:34:54.760
So for most guys, just hit 200 grams a day. And then with those meals will come carbs and fat.
00:35:01.180
And then just check your weight. If you get on the scale every morning after you go to the bathroom
00:35:06.200
naked and look at the number. And if we're in the novice phase or we're in a bulking phase,
00:35:11.920
that number needs to be going up every week. So total it up over the course of the week.
00:35:16.800
And if you're a pound heavier than you were last week, you're doing great. If you're not
00:35:21.600
and you go two weeks in a row, you need more food. It's a math problem. You're not eating enough
00:35:27.080
calories. So the mistake that they make is usually it's gaining too much weight too fast. So when you
00:35:35.140
first start training, if you've never lifted, I always tell people in the first like two, three
00:35:39.980
weeks, don't worry about the weight on the scale. Cause a lot of times when a guy starts picking up a
00:35:43.960
barbell, he'll gain like five, 10 pounds within a matter of weeks after the first month, that should
00:35:50.140
start to slow down. And you want to hit an average of about a pound a week. If you're a little fluffy
00:35:56.220
coming into it, maybe you're going to maintain depending on how much body fat you have. But if
00:36:01.020
you're, you know, just your body fat's a little high, maybe shoot for half a pound a week while you're
00:36:06.500
trying to build this foundation of strength. But if guys are, if you're six weeks into the program
00:36:11.800
and you're gaining three pounds a week, you're just getting fat unnecessarily fat. And you're
00:36:17.020
going to end up getting to the end of your novice phase and thinking, well, this strength training
00:36:20.740
just makes me fat. It's like, you don't have to do that. It's a very, very modest amount of weight
00:36:26.340
gain that you need to build that muscle tissue. Cause there's only so much muscle tissue you can
00:36:30.640
build in a month, your body, you know, unless you're taking drugs. So, and it's like two pounds of
00:36:35.980
actual lean tissue. So that comes with other stuff. So at most you're looking at four pounds
00:36:42.620
a month, anything beyond that, besides a rank novice underweight, you know, 17 year old, it's
00:36:51.100
like, if you're gaining more than four pounds a month, like you're getting fat.
00:36:54.880
Yeah. Yeah. The trick is you want to gain weight, but like keep fat gain to a minimum. You have to
00:37:00.140
gain, you're going to gain fat as you put on mass. There's no escaping that. But the goal is like,
00:37:03.920
make sure it leans more towards muscle tissue and less towards body fat. And I think, I know back
00:37:09.700
in the day, starting strength got a lot of flack for the go mad gallon of milk a day. And like all
00:37:15.320
these guys just getting really fat and like eating sheet cake and. Dude, we were so fat. We were so
00:37:21.380
fat. It was like, you don't need to do that. You don't have to get fat to get big and strong. Like you
00:37:26.040
can, you can get slightly bigger week to week. So, so my first, you know, I, I looked around at
00:37:33.640
the starting, I remember being at the starting strength coaches conference and looking around
00:37:37.100
and, and we had some real strong guys there. Like, I mean, real good lifters and Matt was
00:37:43.380
one of them. Jordan was one of them. Um, and I looked around and I thought, you know, I'm
00:37:47.840
trying to make a little niche for myself in this community and I'm not going to be the
00:37:52.300
strongest guy. In fact, someone had totaled up all the training logs on the starting strength
00:37:57.020
forms and ranked all of us coaches. And I was like, my strength was dead center. I was totally,
00:38:03.340
totally like mediocre. And I thought, you know, okay, I'm 252 pounds. I'm fat. I mean,
00:38:10.120
I feel fat. I'm never going to be the strongest coach. So let me see if I can just lose. Let
00:38:15.460
me see if I can get down to 10% body fat. I've never done it. Let me see if I can see my apps.
00:38:20.800
And so I did. And it took, it took, but I think I was the first coach in our community to do that.
00:38:26.700
And I remember, uh, texting Grant Brogy, who, I don't know if you've had him on
00:38:31.340
podcast, but, um, a fellow coach and I, and I had just hit 10% body fat and I took a picture
00:38:37.240
in the bathroom mirror and, and I sent it to him. I was like, I'm thinking about putting this on
00:38:42.360
Instagram and it feels kind of lame, you know, like it's a picture of me shirtless. Like it's,
00:38:48.120
and he just texted me back. He's like, dude, post it. And I did. And, and within a matter of like a
00:38:54.340
year, all these other coaches and lifters started just shedding body fat. Yeah. And that became,
00:39:01.700
you know, starting strength is, as we've said, it's fantastic for lifting. It is a horrible book
00:39:07.500
for nutrition, you know, unless your goal is to be a 275 pound fat lifter power lifter. Yeah. And
00:39:15.620
cause a gallon of milk a day works. I've done it and it works, man. It'll put weight on you real quick.
00:39:20.520
But most guys, like my average client is like, he doesn't want to be a power lifter. He doesn't
00:39:25.000
want to be a bodybuilder. He just like, like I said, he wants to be a little bit bigger,
00:39:28.540
a little bit stronger, not fat and not hurt. And so that first time through of learning how to
00:39:35.520
manipulate my diet to actually get down to 10% body fat was sort of the, what I thought I could
00:39:42.020
contribute aside from the, you know, sort of more abbreviated novice program and stuff to fill the
00:39:48.620
hole in sort of the starting strength community of like, Hey, if you guys want to really talk about
00:39:53.520
strategies for getting lean, like maybe I have something to offer cause I've done it.
00:39:58.400
And then I did it a couple more times and I've gotten a lot better at it, but yeah.
00:40:02.540
Yeah. So yeah. Um, if you're first starting out, put on some mass and if you're underweight,
00:40:07.340
make it your goal to put on one to two pounds a week, maybe. And then if you're already coming into
00:40:11.920
it heavy, there's a lot of guys who they're starting out, but they're overweight. They've got a lot of fat
00:40:15.580
tissue. Like you just reduce your calories. So you're losing about a pound during that strength
00:40:21.460
phase. If you're bigger, you can get away with some recomposition. So you can put on some muscle
00:40:25.200
mass while losing body fat at the same time. So yeah, you can get put on muscle mass while reducing
00:40:30.520
body fat as well, but it's going to be a gradual thing. You don't want to be no severe cuts where
00:40:34.580
you're reducing calories way low. You just want to lose like a pound to a 0.5 pounds a week.
00:40:40.620
Yeah. In my book, I sort of break the, the novice lifter into three categories, the underweight
00:40:46.800
guy, the sort of like fluffy untrained guy, and then the overweight guy. So if you're coming in
00:40:53.600
and you're just a rail, you're, you have a high metabolism, you're a skinny dude, you know, for
00:40:58.800
the novice phase for the first couple months of the program, you should, your goal should be to gain
00:41:03.440
20 pounds. And then if you're kind of in the middle, maybe it's gained 10 pounds, slow it down,
00:41:08.880
go half a pound a week instead of a pound a week. And then if you're coming in, carrying a lot of
00:41:14.340
body fat, what I say is just maintain, don't try and gain weight. And because you will be able to
00:41:21.100
recompose. So the only time you can add muscle and lose fat at the same time, there's three scenarios.
00:41:26.940
You are a brand new lifter. You're already carrying a lot of body fat or you're taking drugs.
00:41:34.620
So outside of those three States, you're doing one or the other, you're building muscle or you're
00:41:41.140
losing body fat. But so yes, for the guys who are coming in, who have a high body fat percentage,
00:41:46.440
just, you know, eat enough to kind of maintain. If the scale goes down a little bit, that's okay.
00:41:50.980
If it stays the same, that's okay. Because if your weight stays the same, but you put, you know,
00:41:57.860
a hundred pounds on your deadlift, you obviously gained muscle and lost fat. Right. And that happens
00:42:03.300
all the time. Every time I have my guys do body scans at the beginning, like body composition
00:42:08.520
scans at the beginning of their training, when we start and maybe at the six month mark.
00:42:12.620
And so many guys are able to just recompose and it's amazing. And then it goes away.
00:42:18.040
Yeah. You gotta do something different. All right. So we've been talking about just getting
00:42:21.120
your, for first guy starting out, you're going to do the basic barbell lifts, squat, bench,
00:42:27.120
deadlift, shoulder press. You're going to work out three times a week. You've got your version
00:42:31.500
of what a linear progression looks like, sending sets of five on the lifts and the goal is to add
00:42:37.020
weight each workout. Let's say you've been doing this for a while. And then you have to kind of
00:42:40.720
modify your programs. You can keep driving weight up the bar. Let's say a client reaches a point.
00:42:45.380
It's like, you know what, Paul, I'm happy with how strong I am. Like I'm generally strong. I can
00:42:50.340
deadlift 405. I can squat 315. I'm not going to do any recreational power lifting meets. I want to start
00:42:57.900
getting jacked. I want to get those death star deltoids. What does your programming look like
00:43:03.800
for these guys? Cause it sounds like you're going to keep doing these barbell lifts, but you're going
00:43:08.120
to add in some other stuff. What does that look like? Yeah. So like I said, the intermediate program
00:43:12.100
is where things get more fun. There's more variety and it's less grueling. You have hard workouts,
00:43:17.720
but they're, you know, you're not squatting heavy, benching heavy and lifting heavy in the same
00:43:22.900
workout. So my go-to intermediate program in the book, it's called the intermediate B program and
00:43:29.320
it's four workouts. And I have my guys run them over a three-day week. So we're staying consistent
00:43:34.540
with the three-day training schedule that they're used to, but we move from full body to upper lower
00:43:41.020
splits, right? So now on Monday, you're going to bench press and then you'll do like a light overhead
00:43:46.600
press. And then you'll do some like arm work, tricep extensions on Wednesday, you're going to squat
00:43:52.360
and deadlift. So I have you squatting heavy and deadlifting light and then some chin-ups or
00:43:57.840
something. And then the Friday you'll flip Monday's workout. So you're going to press heavy
00:44:03.000
and bench light and then do some curls and bro stuff just for fun. And then the following Monday.
00:44:09.060
So the fourth workout would be deadlifting heavy and squatting light. So it's upper, lower,
00:44:13.440
upper. And then the next week is lower, upper, lower. So you have one hard week where you have two
00:44:17.940
lower body workouts. And then you have one easy week where you have two upper body workouts.
00:44:22.340
And one lower body workout. And so we're spreading out the frequency, you know, you're not hammering
00:44:28.080
yourself all the time. And the beauty of that is it's flexible. So with upper lower splits, you can
00:44:33.740
train two days in a row. You don't need a day off in between upper and lower, which is nice.
00:44:38.000
It's a lot more flexible that way. And then the other thing I start incorporating, and this is where I
00:44:43.640
sort of branch off from starting strength, but it's something that I am very passionate about
00:44:48.860
is introducing rep ranges. So before when you were a novice lifter, it was like, no, you get five
00:44:54.900
reps. Your goal is five reps. If you don't get five reps, you failed. Okay. And that's okay. We all
00:44:59.800
fail. You're going to fail, but you know, you have that target and you need to push yourself really
00:45:05.480
hard. If you want to add more weight next time, you got to get that fifth rep. When we get into the
00:45:10.500
intermediate phase, I like to, you know, pump the brakes a little bit on the intensity of the
00:45:15.960
live and die by the fifth rep mentality, because guys are burnt out by that. And it's like, you
00:45:22.820
don't want to hate your workout. Like you work all day. Your boss is yelling at you. Your kids are,
00:45:26.800
you know, running around screaming. You go to the gym and then you get four reps instead of five.
00:45:30.660
And you're like, can I do anything right? You know, it's like, it's, it's demoralizing. And
00:45:35.240
so the rep range, what we'll say is like, for example, you're going to squat. So you're going
00:45:40.320
to go in and you're going to warm up and then you're going to do one set of squats. And the
00:45:44.600
rep range is three to five reps. So you have a minimum and a max. Your goal is five, but Hey,
00:45:50.080
look today, if you only have three or four, that's okay. You're in the range. You still had a good
00:45:55.520
workout. And the next time you just try again, you know, and what you'll find is like, we all have bad
00:46:01.240
days. Doesn't mean your training isn't working. Doesn't mean you did anything wrong.
00:46:05.240
Maybe you didn't get enough sleep, whatever, but you walk out of the gym going, look, at least I got
00:46:11.160
three. So that's okay. And the mental shift of taking that pressure off. It's like one of the
00:46:18.040
things I get emailed about most when guys switch from like the Texas method, where it's like five
00:46:23.160
sets of five rigid to this flexibility. It's a mental, it takes a lot of pressure off and it keeps
00:46:30.440
them really enjoying their training more and pushing. If I tell you like, Hey man, let's see
00:46:35.460
what you got. Maybe you only have three today. That's okay. A lot of times guys will, you know,
00:46:40.620
when they know that that pressure's off, they'll push themselves harder for five.
00:46:45.040
It's a surprising, like psychological thing. So we work up, you do one set of three to five,
00:46:50.160
and then we do a back-off set. So instead of doing, you know, sets across, we're going to do one heavy
00:46:55.080
set. And then we're going to take some weight off about 15%. And then you do another set for me,
00:47:01.320
like if it's the squat, it might be five reps or five to eight reps or something like that.
00:47:05.580
But if it's the upper body stuff, you know, you, maybe you push for as many reps as you can,
00:47:10.580
but that other shift of like, you have one hard set. Okay. You're going to warm up and you have
00:47:15.220
one hard thing to do today, especially on those lower body days where it's like the deadlift. Okay.
00:47:20.560
Look, dude, you got one set of three to five today. And then after that, we're going to pull a little
00:47:25.920
weight off and then you squat like everything gets easier. And so just giving guys that like,
00:47:31.780
everybody can do one hard thing. You know, I don't care how tired you are. I don't care what you,
00:47:36.940
can you just get it together to do this one hard set and then you move on. And those two things,
00:47:43.280
the rep ranges and the one hard set, and then a back-off set is what I've found kept my clients
00:47:49.140
and my current clients training with me because they're not constantly failing, you know?
00:47:54.640
So you're going to shift to a four-day split. So that means you're going to train upper body
00:47:57.920
one day, lower body, upper body, the lower body. So when you said in, in radically simple muscle,
00:48:03.500
if like your goal is hypertrophy, it's like, we're not just working on getting generally big and strong.
00:48:07.340
We're actually going to do some bodybuilder stuff. You talk about your philosophy is train your lower
00:48:12.060
body like a power lifter and train your upper body like a bodybuilder. What does that look like?
00:48:18.100
So we're talking about a trainee who's gotten to the point, like we said, where they've established
00:48:23.800
that foundation of strength. So they're moving heavy weight. So these workouts can be stressful.
00:48:29.720
And a lot of them are like, okay, I did the boring workouts. I built this foundation. I'm strong
00:48:35.960
and I want to mix it up. I'm feeling beat up. I've accumulated some injuries. And so the radically
00:48:42.640
simple muscle program, which was just supposed to be a PDF, but ended up turning into a,
00:48:47.880
my second book, I have guys shift to, especially if their goal is now like aesthetics, you know,
00:48:54.380
I've got this mass that I've built, but now I want to kind of shape it. So training your upper body,
00:49:02.520
like a bodybuilder and your lower body, like a power lifter. There's a number of reasons for that.
00:49:06.300
One of them is exercise variety. So bodybuilding typically uses lots of different exercises,
00:49:11.020
isolation movements. And that's primarily because your upper body muscles can be segmented into
00:49:17.440
basically pushers and pullers. You've got your lats and your pecs and they do opposite things. So
00:49:23.900
if you do a bunch of, you know, seated cable rows, that doesn't build your chest. You have to do
00:49:30.300
some type of pressing variation and those presses don't really build your back. And the upper body
00:49:35.400
demands that there's a reason for it. If we contrast that to the lower body, you can think
00:49:40.360
of hamstrings and quads as pushers or pullers and pushers, but they're both covered by the squat
00:49:47.320
and the deadlift. Both of those functions happen in both of those lifts. So let's just squat and
00:49:53.560
deadlift. Like I don't want to do seven leg exercises when squats and deadlifts work everything
00:49:58.500
all at the same time versus, like I said, I can't just have you curl because it's not going to train
00:50:05.240
your triceps. So that's one part of it. The other part of it is, you know, aesthetics when you size
00:50:13.000
a guy up, right. And we all do it. You see a guy and he's like, you know, like that guy's jacked.
00:50:18.020
You're looking at his upper body, right? You're looking at those landmarks, those desirable aesthetic
00:50:24.660
features, cap shoulders, a vein in the bicep, things like that. Okay. That shaping that is a bodybuilding.
00:50:32.900
If you just focus on overhead presses, I promise you, you will not have shoulders. Would you say
00:50:38.940
death star? Death star deltoids. Yeah. I mean, I, my shoulders never looked worse than when I was just
00:50:44.540
pressing 200 pounds over my head. Like it just didn't fill out the deltoids the way that something
00:50:50.260
like very light lateral raises do. So we need there, there's a bunch of different examples of that
00:50:56.520
with the upper body, you know, you need to do some curls. Like chin-ups are great, but curls,
00:51:02.120
tricep stuff, it makes those muscles pop. And, and that's what we want when we talk about an
00:51:08.180
aesthetic physique versus the lower body. You know, unless you're walking around with your
00:51:12.500
pants off, your lower body just needs to be big, right? You need to have big legs and a big butt.
00:51:18.920
And you could do that with just squats and deadlifts. So again, that will just squat and
00:51:23.620
deadlift for the lower body. And we'll spend some time doing bodybuilding stuff for the upper body.
00:51:28.300
And then finally it comes down to high reps versus low reps. Bodybuilders use high reps
00:51:33.420
traditionally powerlifters use low reps. Your upper body joints are much smaller and much more
00:51:41.140
sensitive. They don't have as much structural integrity as the lower body. If you think about,
00:51:45.920
you know, your, your hip joint, it's like a sturdy ball and socket, your glenohumeral joint in the
00:51:52.280
shoulder. It's like a shallow cup. And I've had three shoulder surgeries. So I can tell you that
00:51:57.000
as a very unstable joint, just banging out, grinding out heavy triples with bench presses
00:52:02.840
and stuff like that. Your wrists are going to hurt it. Your upper body joints are not as tolerant of
00:52:09.300
heavy weights as your lower body, where you have more sturdy joints and a lot more muscle mass
00:52:14.560
helping move the weight. So, you know, when you get into that phase of like, do I really care? Am I a
00:52:21.120
powerlifter or do I just want to kind of look good and feel good? And you know, then maybe you
00:52:26.340
spend some time bumping up the rep range in the upper body, taking the stress off a little bit
00:52:33.080
with loads that are less likely to sort of fall out of the groove and end up, you know, tweaking
00:52:39.500
something. And then the lower body, I don't know about you. I do not want to do high rep deadlifts.
00:52:45.160
Like they're miserable and you don't have to, you could just do, you know, a set of five, a set of
00:52:51.920
three. So squatting sets of eight is just, I mean, it's brutal and I use it sometimes for cardio
00:52:58.760
development, but ultimately like I have a hard time counting past five for lower body stuff.
00:53:04.940
So that's the philosophy is like, we'll do the bodybuilder stuff for the upper body. Cause it
00:53:09.480
works better for the requirements and the demands of that. And the lower body, we just take care of by
00:53:15.060
training like a power lifter, you know? And at that point in my training, one of the biggest
00:53:20.740
shifts that I've made is squatting and deadlifting heavy every other week, which I thought would be
00:53:29.080
counterproductive, but it's actually been, I mean, my, my lifts have never been better
00:53:33.280
with only squatting heavier every 14 days, but you got to get to the point where, you know,
00:53:38.680
you can make that work and we can talk about that another time.
00:53:41.360
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. My, my programming has kind of shifted to that
00:53:44.300
sort of train your lower body, like a power lifter, upper body, like a bodybuilder. So my
00:53:49.480
current split that Matt Reynolds has me on it's Monday is a lower body day. And I start off with
00:53:56.140
a heavy set of deadlifts. And then I do accessory work after that for the quads. So I've got, you know,
00:54:02.740
I got a leg extension machine in my garage gym. So I do some leg extension, like, you know,
00:54:07.340
not high rep, it's like 10 reps, but going heavy, do some calf raises. And then my upper body day
00:54:13.420
on Tuesday, I start off with heavy bench press, just kind of typical bench press workout. And
00:54:18.340
then after that, I'm just doing like bodybuilder stuff. So I'll do some shoulder work. So I do
00:54:22.040
shoulder dumbbell presses, maybe some lateral raises. So the accessory work is more shoulder
00:54:27.180
heavy. And then I'll throw in the curls, tricep extensions, lat pull down. And then Thursday is my
00:54:33.420
next lower body day. I'm squatting. Like my first lifts, the squat. Then after that,
00:54:38.100
I do accessory work for the hamstrings. So I'm doing a RDL and then I'll do some leg curls
00:54:43.780
for the hamstrings. So, and then Friday it's upper body. Start off with the press. So I'm doing
00:54:49.320
like barbell press and I'm not doing a lot of sets. Like I do like one heavy set and then like two
00:54:55.300
back off sets that are like as many reps as possible. And then my bodybuilder stuff, it's like
00:55:00.220
more chest focused. So I'm doing like an incline dumbbell bench press and then some cable flies or
00:55:06.020
maybe some dumbbell flies. And then I'm doing a great exercise, then a curl variation and another
00:55:10.820
tricep exercise variation. And then a row for the back, just get a different, and that's it. And
00:55:16.900
it's, yeah, my lower body days like are fast. Cause really there's not much there. The upper body
00:55:21.740
stays take a little bit longer. Cause like you said, you can do a little bit more variety
00:55:24.760
on the upper body. I'll have to send you my, uh, so at the end of, I added a program after radically
00:55:31.500
simple muscle came out because I did an experiment. I was at a point with my training that I was just,
00:55:37.220
I mean, I've been doing this for a long time. As my buddy says, my training partner, he says,
00:55:42.860
man, I hate training. I just hate not training more. You know, that feeling when you haven't
00:55:47.460
worked. So, but, but it's like training just got after decades, just got, I just hate it. But
00:55:53.740
so I was like, how can I make this fun? Let me, let me try something. And so I decided to see
00:55:58.920
how little I could get away with. So I just picked, you know, a couple bang for your buck
00:56:05.520
exercises. I think I did a, like a bench press, a row, a squat, a deadlift, a pullup, you know,
00:56:13.780
like a overhead press curl lateral. I just one exercise for kind of each thing. And then I just
00:56:20.800
started doing one set and I was like, I'm going to try and hit eight reps. And if I hit eight,
00:56:25.320
that's it, I'm done for the day with that exercise. And, and then my rule was, if I don't
00:56:33.000
hit eight, two workouts in a row, then I'll do a second set. I'll do like a back off set. So I go
00:56:39.300
in thinking one set and it worked for a couple of weeks. It was like, I'm getting eight every time
00:56:45.260
it's going up. This is great. And then I'd stick for two weeks. And so I'll do a back off set.
00:56:49.440
And then the week after that, it would move. And so cut the back off set. And so I'm just
00:56:54.840
literally the workouts for like 30 minutes, it's one set. And man, I'm having a great time in the
00:57:00.940
gym again. Cause again, it's that mental thing of like, look, I'm only doing one set, so I got to
00:57:05.720
make it work. But that type of program. And I always tell guys who email me about the book,
00:57:10.940
the reason that it works is because I've put in the time to figure, you know, to learn how
00:57:19.200
to grind, to learn how to like really push yourself. And that you just takes, it just takes
00:57:27.300
time to, to understand what you're capable of, you know, that you are, you have a lot more in you than
00:57:33.960
you think. But if you're a novice lifter, like you don't know how to push. So one set isn't going to
00:57:39.580
work. Cause that one set isn't going to be very stressful. But if you get to the point that like
00:57:45.040
you're at where you, you know, I've seen your deadlifts and stuff like that. And, and you're
00:57:48.960
like, look, right. You have one set. That's it. Like you will, that will be a very stressful set
00:57:55.920
for your body. And, uh, I was, I was, it was totally an experiment. I put up a YouTube video
00:58:01.020
about my new training experiment and I'm never going back. Like it's so fun. And the programming is so
00:58:07.820
simple. Like programming is people make programming so complicated. It's like, look,
00:58:14.980
here's the weight. Did you get all the reps you were supposed to? Great. Go up next time. You
00:58:19.400
didn't. Okay. Well, you need to add a little bit more stress then do a second set. Did it go up next
00:58:23.920
time? Good. Like if that's it. Yeah, no. Okay. So, um, once you get to that point where you, you know,
00:58:30.620
you're working hypertrophy workouts can become a lot of fun and it can also become really fast.
00:58:36.660
It sounds like you're kind of doing some Mike Metzner, like heavy duty type stuff there
00:58:39.540
with the one rep or one set workouts with the exercises. I'm curious if a guy's with their,
00:58:45.460
if their goal is now physique at this point in their training, when you're lifting for, you know,
00:58:50.020
strength, the goals are pretty easy. It's like, well, if I just get more weight, what are,
00:58:54.280
if you're working on physique, like what are some good physique goals or benchmarks to hit for the
00:58:59.460
average dude? Yeah. So there's, there's two. I mean, I, in my book, I talk about getting your
00:59:06.360
bicep vein, getting arm vein lean, like everybody always talks about abs, but like you're, you're
00:59:12.640
walking around with a shirt on most of the time, but like you see a dude at the coffee shop and he's
00:59:16.840
got like a big snake running down his bicep. You know, that guy's in good shape. Like it's, it's a,
00:59:23.220
it's a good, like, it's cool. So that I much prefer that metric. And that's just reaching a certain
00:59:31.080
level of body fat. So numbers wise, I always tell guys that your first goal, when you cut
00:59:37.940
is 10%, you want to get down to 10% body fat. You should get down to 10% body fat once in your life
00:59:44.520
to figure out how to do it. Right. Cause it's, it's hard. I mean, for some guys, they'd like walk
00:59:50.080
around at 8% body fat, whatever. I hate you. It's not me. It's probably, it's not you. Like most of us
00:59:57.000
are very happy. Our bodies are very happy to not be 10% body fat. So, you know, you cut down to 10%
01:00:03.860
and that's usually where you can see your abs and your lean and, and, but you kind of, you're going
01:00:07.980
to look kind of skinny with your clothes on. You look pretty ripped, you know, at the beach, but the,
01:00:13.760
once you get down there, you know, now when you bulk back up your bodies, you're going to skew more
01:00:20.460
towards muscle gain than fat gain. Cause you've, you've sort of the nutrient partitioning changes once you
01:00:25.340
get that lean. So your body's much, it's much easier to put on muscle and not as much fat once
01:00:30.620
you strip it off. So the first goal is 10% and then you're going to, and then once you get sick of
01:00:37.460
restricting, you know, of being miserable and dieting for that long, cause getting to 15% is not
01:00:45.200
hard from, but as you start getting close to 10, your brain starts messing with you. So that last
01:00:50.420
3% is, can be brutal. Of course, now we have these miracle GLP drugs that just make this whole process
01:00:58.960
like super easy, but, but yeah, you want my, my goal is you get down to 10% body fat. You can see
01:01:04.760
the veins in your arms, you know, that's a good measure and pay attention to when that comes like
01:01:10.140
mine pops up around 13%. So that's kind of my gauge do DEXA scans. So you, you want to get good at,
01:01:16.800
you know, understanding your visual cues, like of, you know, your level of leanness. So, and then
01:01:22.880
you, you're tired of that. You want to go back, start moving weight again, setting PRs, bulking back
01:01:28.520
up. Right. So we're going to bulk back up till we hit 15%. Okay. That's the, that's sort of my cap.
01:01:34.840
Of course, I'm saying that to you right now at like 18% because I have not been taking my own advice,
01:01:41.180
but traditionally you want to just cycle between 10 and 15%. That's my approach to this 15. You
01:01:48.560
still look good. You still look athletic. You know, you can still see maybe your top abs and
01:01:54.300
it's a, it's a healthy athletic physique. You'll look good with a shirt on. You'll look like a big
01:01:59.160
dude. And then every so often, you know, you, you got a vacation coming up or a high school reunion or
01:02:05.760
something. Maybe you use that as motivation to try and cut back down to 10 or 12% or something like
01:02:11.180
that. And then you just keep cycling as you want to, but, but hitting that first 10 is like hitting
01:02:17.260
those, those first barbell goals, you know, those tier one goals. Yeah. That's, that's exactly what
01:02:23.440
I've done. Like I did a pretty big cut in 2023. How lean did you get? I think I don't think I got to
01:02:29.960
10. I probably got down to 11. Okay. And then it was fun, right? Yeah. No, it was awful. It was
01:02:35.540
terrible. And then after that, I've just been bouncing back between, I've been hanging around
01:02:40.940
like 15 to 12 is where I've been hanging out at. That's great. And that's great. It seems to work
01:02:47.260
for me. And then the, the physique part, you got to keep training hard because you want to maintain
01:02:50.960
muscle mass, but a lot of it's just nutrition. It's just learning how to learn to reduce calories
01:02:55.920
and be okay with being hungry and things like that. But again, it's a skill that you develop and
01:03:00.800
once you develop it, it's pretty easy. Yeah. You learn how you learn to, you know,
01:03:06.640
how to deal with the cravings that you, you don't eliminate foods, you replace them. You know,
01:03:11.680
if you, if you have a, I mean, you know, if I have a habit of having a cocktail at the end of the night,
01:03:17.160
it's like, you don't just try and like sit on the couch and stare at the wall, like, you know,
01:03:22.520
get us, get a sparkling water and put lime juice in it and make it, you know, there's little
01:03:27.320
psychological hacks to, uh, for that last part, but man, yeah, it's, uh, it's no fun and you're
01:03:35.040
training, you know, big misconception guys have is like, well, if I'm cutting, then I'm going to get
01:03:40.240
weaker. And that is not true. I find that most guys can hang on to their strength in the gym.
01:03:47.580
I mean, at least maintain, I've had plenty of guys set PRS during a cut, but it's usually once it gets
01:03:54.820
below 15%, you know, 14, 13, then all of a sudden your strength just like falls off a cliff and you
01:04:02.020
feel like you're a hundred years old. Yeah. And then you just got to ride it out and do the best
01:04:06.280
you can to finish the cut and then, and then, and then get back to eating like a normal human.
01:04:12.360
Well, Paul, it's been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the books in
01:04:15.540
your work? Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This is fun. I'm glad we got to reconnect.
01:04:19.160
Connect. Everything is on hornstrength.com. That's my website and you can find links to books and
01:04:24.540
all my stuff there. Fantastic. Well, Paul Horn, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
01:04:28.700
Yeah. Same. Thanks for doing what you do, man. I appreciate it.
01:04:32.040
My guest today is Paul Horn. He's the author of the books,
01:04:34.260
Radically Simple Strength and Radically Simple Muscle, both available on amazon.com.
01:04:38.340
Check out his website at hornstrength.com and also check out our show notes at a1.is
01:04:42.400
slash simple muscle. We can find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
01:04:49.160
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
01:04:57.220
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01:05:00.760
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01:05:15.840
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01:05:19.020
Brett McKay, your mind time to listen to anyone podcast would put what you've heard into action.